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as hungry as his exiled family.
    It wasn’t just the defeated people of Aizu who found life a struggle in the early years of Meiji. The name of the new era signified the intent of the new leadership: Meiji means “enlightened rule.” A circle of energetic, reform-minded, and startlingly young men emerged to lead a new and improved Japan, packaging their agenda as the divine word of the “restored” emperor. With his endorsement, they rapidly began to dismantle the status quo.
    The wave of change that had swept the shogun from power left behind an uneasy coalition of men whose loyalties were ancient and fundamentallyprovincial. “Japan” was an abstract concept; each domain was a country unto itself. With the common enemy defeated, old rivalries threatened to reemerge. The “potato samurai” from Satsuma and Choshu had ousted the Tokugawas and confiscated their base, but they and all the other domains remained intact, each with its own army.
    In August of 1871, the emperor summoned the lord of every domain to Tokyo for an announcement that, while predictable, was no less stunning: the domains were henceforth abolished, their age-old boundaries erased, replaced by a system of prefectures administered by Tokyo-appointed governors. The former daimyo, generously compensated with money and titles, their debts now assumed by the new central government, put up little resistance. Lower-ranking samurai, on the other hand—even those who had backed the winning side in the recent conflict—lost their stipends, their rank, their accustomed place in the social hierarchy. The forward-thinking ones found their way into business or government service. The rest opened their ancestral storehouses and sold what they could, sinking into genteel poverty. Foreign visitors to Japan were delighted with the buyer’s market in souvenirs. “The curio-shops displayed heaps of swords which, a few months before, the owners would less willingly have parted with than with life itself,” declared one popular guidebook.
    The Yamakawa men—capable Hiroshi and his clever younger brother Kenjiro—would be among the forward-thinking ones. Their family might have lost the security and prestige that their affiliation with the shogun had once provided, but with their Aizu pride intact, they were determined to reclaim it. Neither could have imagined the part their little sister would play in the fulfillment of that vow.

3    “A LITTLE LEAVEN”
    T HE FATES OF TWO of the Yamakawas would be determined in part by a broad-faced, bull-necked man named Kiyotaka Kuroda, whose Satsuma origins would once have marked him decisively as their enemy. A man of intense enthusiasms—for liquor as well as for national development—Kuroda embodied the quantum leap of Meiji leadership. Less than a decade earlier, traveling in the retinue of the lord of Satsuma on the road to Edo, Kuroda had been appalled to see a party of British day-trippers on horseback—including a woman —gawking at his lord’s elaborate palanquin as it passed, flanked by retainers and servants all wearing the cross-within-a-circle crest of xenophobic Satsuma. Oblivious to the townspeople prostrating themselves in the dust, the barbarians had lingered, chatting, by the side of the road—until the horsemen closest to them charged with drawn swords, killing one man, wounding two others, and separating the lady’s hat from her head, along with some of her hair. The Richardson Incident of 1862, named for the dead man, provoked Britain to bombard the Satsuma seat of Kagoshima within a year. It was this demonstration of Britain’s military might that hastened the realization in Satsuma that “expelling the barbarians” might not be a particularly practical course.
    Several years later, the two-sworded, silk-robed samurai Kuroda, attacker of foreigners, had become a mustachioed Meiji bureaucrat in a well-tailored Western-style military uniform.Turning to the West for guidance, he traveled to