They had already lost. The Emperor Meiji had been restored to the Chrysanthemum Throne, the Tokugawa shogunate that had ruled Japan for 265 years was dissolved, and the military forces that had fought to defend it were broken one by one across the country in the battles of the Boshin War (Boshin Senso). By late 1868, resistance was collapsing everywhere.

Except in the north.

A flotilla of eight Tokugawa warships — the Kaiyo Maru, the Kaiten Maru, and six others — had refused to surrender and sailed into the waters beyond Honshu, the main island of Japan. Their destination was Ezo, the cold northern frontier that is now called Hokkaido: a land of indigenous Ainu people, volcanic winters, and vast forests largely unmapped by any Japanese domain. At the southern tip of the island, the port of Hakodate sat beneath the shadow of Mount Hakodate (Hakodate-yama), and at its edge stood Goryokaku — a perfectly star-shaped fortress built in the Western style, the first of its kind in Japan, completed just two years earlier in 1866. Its earthen ramparts were designed to absorb cannon fire. Its five-pointed bastions allowed defenders to cover every approach. The fleeing Tokugawa forces seized it and made it their headquarters.

Then they did something that no one in Japan had ever done before. They held an election.

The vote took place on December 15, 1868, among the assembled samurai officers and retainers who had made the crossing north — somewhere between 200 and 300 men in all. Ballots were cast for the position of sosai (Sosai), the republic's president or director-general, and for ministers of the army and navy. When the votes were counted, Enomoto Takeaki had received 156 votes. Matsudaira Taro took 120 votes for vice-president. Naoyuki Nagai received 116, Otori Keisuke 86, and Hijikata Toshizo 73.

These numbers are known precisely. They are the first election returns in Japanese history.

Enomoto was an unusual figure in the samurai world — perhaps the most cosmopolitan military officer Japan had yet produced. Born in 1836 in Edo to a Tokugawa vassal family, he had studied Dutch from a young age, then been sent to the Netherlands from 1862 to 1867 to study Western naval warfare. He returned aboard the Kaiyo Maru, a Dutch-built steam warship, fluent in European languages and trained in the most advanced maritime technology of the era. He was thirty-two years old when his fellow samurai elected him president of their republic.

The government they established was explicitly modeled on the United States of America — a federal republic with elected officials and a separation of military and civilian authority. The name Ezo Kyowakoku used a newly coined Japanese term: 共和国 (Kyowakoku), which translated the Western concept of "republic" as "shared-harmony-nation." It was the first time the word had been used in Japan for a real government.

On December 25, 1868, the Republic of Ezo was formally proclaimed at Goryokaku.

The Meiji government did not recognize it. They called the breakaway territory an illegal rebellion, and they were already preparing a military response. The republic had established itself at the far edge of the Japanese world, on an island the central government barely controlled, with a small fleet and a few hundred fighting men.

What followed was five months of a kind of borrowed time. The winter of 1868-1869 was harsh, and the Meiji forces were not yet ready to mount an operation to Hokkaido in force. The republic administered its small territory, trained its troops, and waited. Enomoto reportedly brought with him a collection of European maritime law books he had acquired during his years in the Netherlands — books he believed Japan would need as it negotiated with foreign powers.

The end came in the spring. In May and June of 1869, Meiji naval and land forces attacked in coordinated operations around Hakodate Bay. The Kaiyo Maru, the flagship Enomoto had brought from Europe, had already been lost in a storm before the final battles. The republic's navy was outgunned. Its land forces, outnumbered, were pushed back.

Hijikata Toshizo — the man who had received 73 votes for vice-minister of the army, who had been the fearsome vice-commander of the Shinsengumi, the shogunate's elite police force in the 1860s — died in the last fighting near Ippongi on June 20, 1869. He was struck by a rifle bullet and killed on horseback. He was thirty-three years old.

Goryokaku fortress surrendered to Meiji forces on June 27, 1869. Enomoto was captured and imprisoned.

He was pardoned in 1872, largely at the insistence of Kuroda Kiyotaka, a senior Meiji official who had fought against Enomoto and respected his talent too much to waste it. In the decades that followed, Enomoto Takeaki served as Navy Minister, as Japan's first Minister of Communications, and held several other cabinet posts. He served the Meiji government he had fought against, and served it well, dying in 1908 at age 71.

At the moment of surrender, according to some accounts, Enomoto asked only one thing of his Meiji captors: that his collection of European maritime law books be preserved. He believed Japan would need them. He was right.

The Republic of Ezo lasted 131 days. It was a small thing — a few hundred samurai on a cold northern island, governing a territory they had no long-term hope of holding, proclaiming a democratic republic in the name of a feudal order they were trying to save. The contradiction at its center was perfect: the men most committed to preserving the old world of shogun and sword had created something entirely new.

Goryokaku is a famous tourist site today. Cherry blossoms bloom inside its star-shaped earthwork walls every spring.