This reply was both honest and accurate, but it was not likely to
satisfy any domain preparing to defend itself against foreign invaders.
Nor were the bakufu's various interdictions - its attempt to keep
Takashima Shuhan from teaching his gunnery techniques to samurai
from the daimyo domains, for example, or its warning to the Astronomical
Bureau (where Western works were translated) that translations
of "calendars, medical books, works of astronomy, and all books
on practical matters . . . are not to be circulated indiscriminately."6*
Many domains reacted, therefore, with mistrust, deception, and evasion
- experimenting with three-masted ships, importing foreign arms
and manuals in secret through Nagasaki gunrunners, and offering
shelter to fugitives with particular skills (as Uwajima did for Takano
Choei after his escape from prison, and Satsuma for Torii Heishichi, a
Nagasaki-trained gunner). It was an atmosphere in which the former
tairo, Ii Naoaki, placing a translation of a Dutch work in his library in
the autumn of 1843, could write on the box, in his own hand, instructions
that it "be kept secret for a long period."66 It was also one in
which rumors flourished, particularly rumors involving those already
viewed with official mistrust, "the daimyo of the west country."
Satsuma, for example, was rumored in 1837 to have spirited Oshio
Heihachiro away from Osaka and into hiding aboard one of its ships;
six years later it was rumored to have engineered Mizuno's dismissal.
The roots of the bakumatsu arms race, which pitted the bakufu and the
domains against each other so disastrously, can be found in this climate
of mutual suspicion.