Mori Yoshiki
Mori Yoshiki was a prominent middle-ranking retainer of the Yamauchi clan, lords of Tosa han.
His father, Mori Hirosada, a member of the Yamauchi clan's mounted guard, died when Yoshiki was five years old. Yoshiki's cousin Mori Hirotake then became head of the Mori family. Two years later, Hirotake adopted Yoshiki as heir. Whether this was out of a desire on Hirotake's part to restore the family to Hirosada's direct lineage, or as the result of pressure from Yoshiki's mother is unclear. In either case, seven-year-old Yoshiki, who had just begun to get used to Hirotake as his brother, now had to re-accustom himself to a relationship with Hirotake as his adoptive father.
Yoshiki had his first formal audience with the daimyô, Yamauchi Toyochika, at that time; now that he was heir to a prominent retainer family, this audience was a part of the standard procedures for him being formally introduced to, and officially acknowledged by, the authorities. Hirotake, meanwhile, was appointed to the companion guard; he traveled to Edo to take up his post, where he died suddenly in 1778. Yoshiki thus became family head at age ten. At age 15, he was appointed to the companion guard himself, and began accompanying the lord on sankin kôtai journeys to and from Edo. While in Edo, he spent time at private academies, exchanging and copying rare manuscripts with others, and through this gaining social connections with samurai from other domains.
He was granted his first government/administrative post in Tosa in 1788 (at age 20). This came after a series of years of considerable financial difficulty for the domain government, and famine for the peasantry, and on the heels of significant peasant uprisings the previous year (in 1787). Among his first duties, Yoshiki was to make a tour of the western portions of the province, to survey conditions and local concerns and desires, and in doing so, to demonstrate to the local people that the lord was concerned with their wellbeing. The following year, Toyochika died. His successor, Yamauchi Toyokazu, appointed his own clique of retainers to his companion guard, sending Yoshiki back home.
Four years later, in 1793, Yoshiki was offered an official appointment again, this time as magistrate in charge of overseeing the domain's ports. According to his office diary, the job involved very little work. He spent five or six days a month at the central government offices, approving requests and reports from his subordinates, and for the remainder of the month was simply "on call." This was a high enough post that much of the actual work was handled by his subordinates, and at the same time a low-ranking enough post that big decisions were made chiefly by his superiors.
References
- Luke Roberts, "Mori Yoshiki: Samurai Government Officer," in Anne Walthall (ed.), The Human Tradition in Modern Japan, Scholarly Resources, Inc. (2002), 25-42.
