His abrupt dismissal from Court was calculated to arouse the keenest antagonism to the Shogunate on the part of his followers, who carried the news to Hagi, his castle town in the west of Choshiu, and there was from that time war between the clan and the adherents of the Tokugawa house. Thus arose the anomaly that while the Choshiu clan had at that time in its ranks those very men by whose endeavours Japan was ultimately to be induced to abandon a policy of seclusion and to enter the comity of nations, their influence was insufficient to prevent, until a considerably later period, the adoption of an attitude by their feudal chief which was distinctly reactionary. And the reformers, finding themselves in a minority, were compelled to wait their time. The Choshiu men gathered in their strength and marched upon Kioto, resolved to wipe out the disgrace which they conceived attached to them through the unavenged insult to their lord, and as at that date the Choshiu troops were by far the better armed, victory would have rested with them in the battle which ensued within sound, and, indeed, within rifle shot, of the Imperial residence, but for the inadequacy of their numbers. Yamagata, Takasato, and many others who were presently to achieve distinction in their country’s cause, were engaged in this contest, and were ranged under the Jo-I banner, though their presence there as supporters of the principle of expulsion was due to their loyalty to their feudal lord, and in defence of his rights as opposed to the Shogun, rather than to any unwillingness that the country should be opened to international trade and the introduction of Western arts and sciences. In writing of the pre-Restoration days himself, in 1887, Count Yamagata, as he was then, described the time of the Tokugawa Shogunate as that when, all foreign intercourse being limited to China and Holland, people in Japan knew little of the civilisation of other nations. “Peace,” he said, “universally reigned. The swords were kept in their sheaths, and the arrows lay untouched in their quivers. Luxury and effeminacy followed in the wake of peace. The sudden appearance of the problem of foreign intercourse in the sixth year of Ka-yei [1853] resulted in the universal cry for exclusion. The power of the Shogunate was gradually undermined by this event. It is not to be wondered at that this cry was raised on every side, for people were kept in ignorance of things outside of their own country. Their condition was that of the proverbial frog in the well. I no naka no kawadzu Dai Kai wo shiradzu. (The frog in the well Knows naught of the ocean.)