The generals crowded into Osaka Castle and told him the restoration was a fraud.

They were not entirely wrong. The Meiji Restoration of January 3, 1868 had been engineered by Satsuma and Chōshū — two domains that had spent a decade maneuvering to destroy Tokugawa power. The coup that seized the imperial palace and issued the declaration stripping Yoshinobu of his title and lands was, at least in part, a political operation dressed in imperial robes. Saigō Takamori, the great Satsuma commander, had reportedly used physical intimidation to force votes in the new government's assembling councils. The hardline samurai advisors from Aizu and Kuwana who surrounded Yoshinobu at Osaka Castle had a point.

But Tokugawa Yoshinobu was a man who understood history. He had read Western political theory. He had watched the Western powers humiliate the Tokugawa shogunate for fifteen years. He had proposed the 大政奉還 (Taisei Hōkan) — the formal return of political authority to the emperor — himself, on November 9, 1867, because he believed it was the only path that preserved any role for the Tokugawa in a modern Japan. Surrendering gracefully was the move.

Then he let his generals talk him out of it.

On January 17, 1868, he issued a public declaration rejecting the imperial restoration proclamation and calling on the court to rescind it. He was essentially arguing that the Meiji Restoration was illegitimate — that the 265-year Tokugawa order could be un-surrendered by decree. The declaration made civil war unavoidable.

Ten days later, approximately 13,000 Tokugawa-aligned troops marched north from Osaka toward Kyoto. They met roughly 5,000 imperial forces at Toba-Fushimi on January 27. The numbers favored the shogunate. The equipment did not: the imperial forces were armed with rifles and modern artillery; the Tokugawa side relied heavily on older weapons and traditional tactics. The battle lasted four days. The shogunate's forces were routed.

When the imperial standard — the brocade 錦の御旗 (nishiki no mihata) — was raised over the imperial positions, something broke in Yoshinobu. To continue fighting against an army flying the emperor's banner was, by any definition of the political and moral code he had lived by, treason. It didn't matter that the banner's presence had been engineered by Satsuma and Chōshū. The symbol had power he could not argue away.

That night, while his generals were still assembled in the castle's war rooms planning the next day's operations, Yoshinobu slipped out of Osaka Castle. He was accompanied only by the daimyo (daimyo) of Aizu and Kuwana — the very men who had pushed him into the war. He had, reportedly, just promised his assembled officers that he would personally lead them. When his forces woke the next morning, the commander was gone.

At the docks, the shogunate's flagship, the 開陽丸 (Kaiyō Maru), had not yet arrived. Yoshinobu, the last shogun of the dynasty that had ruled Japan since 1603, stood on a dock in Osaka Bay waiting for his ship — and took refuge, according to accounts, aboard the USS Iroquois, an American Navy steam sloop anchored nearby, until his own vessel appeared. He then sailed to Edo.

The 10,000 men he left behind fought on without him, with varying degrees of discipline and despair. The Boshin War continued for more than a year. The Aizu campaign in autumn 1868 was brutal; the 白虎隊 (Byakkotai) — the 'White Tiger Force,' a unit of teenage samurai — committed mass suicide after mistakenly believing their castle had fallen. The war ended in May 1869 with the fall of Hakodate in Hokkaido.

Yoshinobu himself did not fight on. He surrendered peacefully in Edo, was placed under house arrest, and was eventually pardoned. He lived to age 77. He became one of the first members of the Meiji peerage. He took up photography and cycling. He died in 1913, outliving the entire generation that had fought to destroy him — and the entire samurai class whose cause he had briefly, disastrously, tried to defend.

The 大政奉還 (Taisei Hōkan) remains the official story: the Tokugawa gracefully returned power to the emperor of their own free will. What happened on January 17, 1868 complicates that story considerably. The last shogun surrendered, took it back, lost, and ran. The shogunate that had defined Japan for two and a half centuries ended not with a dignified exit but with a midnight flight and a foreign warship.