The shogunate was finished. The Tokugawa (徳川, Tokugawa) banners had been hauled down, the new Meiji government was consolidating its grip on the country, and every former vassal was being presented with the same invitation: submit, surrender your weapons, enter the new order. Enomoto Takeaki (榎本武揚, Enomoto Takeaki) found he could not do it.

He was thirty-two years old, Dutch-trained, and in command of eight warships representing the largest naval force Japan had ever assembled. He had spent five years in the Netherlands studying Western naval science — fluent in Dutch and English, comfortable in European courts — and had personally sailed the 開陽丸 (Kaiyō Maru), a modern steam-and-sail frigate, from the Netherlands across the globe to Japan. She was one of the most advanced warships in Asia. The Meiji government demanded he hand her over. He had a different plan.

Shortly before midnight on October 4, 1868, Enomoto's fleet slipped out of Shinagawa Bay in Tokyo carrying roughly 3,000 men — soldiers, former Shinsengumi (新撰組, Shinsengumi) fighters, samurai retainers, and a handful of French military advisers including Jules Brunet, who had formally resigned his commission to join them. They sailed north.

On October 20, the fleet landed at Washinoki Bay on the southern coast of Hokkaido. Six days later, they seized 五稜郭 (Goryōkaku) — the five-pointed star fortress outside the port city of Hakodate. Built between 1857 and 1864 at enormous expense, modeled on European military engineering, Goryōkaku was the most modern fortification in Japan. Its builders had not imagined it would one day shelter the last defenders of the system that built it. The rebels made it their capital.

More victories followed. On approximately November 5, Hijikata Toshizō (土方歳三, Hijikata Toshizō) — the feared vice-commander of the Shinsengumi, a man who had policed the streets of Kyoto with a reputation for absolute ruthlessness — led 800 troops to take Matsumae Castle. The towns of Esashi and others fell in turn. For a moment, it seemed possible that a Tokugawa remnant state in Hokkaido might actually survive.

Then, on November 15, the flagship Kaiyō Maru was caught in a storm off Esashi and wrecked. She went to the bottom of the sea. Enomoto had sailed her from Europe with his own hands. By every account, it broke something in him.

Still, he did not submit. The Meiji government dispatched envoys with deadlines. Enomoto rejected each one. He was not mounting a suicidal banzai charge. He was building something.

With all of southern Hokkaido under their control, the rebels drafted a constitution and organized elections. They called the new state the 蝦夷共和国 (Ezo Kyōwakoku), the Republic of Ezo — named for the old word for Hokkaido. The governing model was borrowed from the United States of America. On January 27, 1869, approximately 200 to 300 armed samurai assembled and cast open ballots. Enomoto was elected 総裁 (sōsai), the republic's president. Matsudaira Tarō (松平太郎, Matsudaira Tarō) was elected vice president. No precedent existed anywhere in Japanese history for a popular vote. Men who had served the shogunate their entire lives — men trained in absolute loyalty to a hereditary lord — invented representative democracy because there was no lord left to be loyal to.

The Meiji government mobilized in spring 1869. A combined naval and land force sailed north and reduced the republic piece by piece. Hijikata Toshizō was shot and killed in battle on June 20, 1869. Goryōkaku surrendered on June 27. Enomoto, captured and imprisoned, was eventually pardoned and absorbed into the Meiji government he had spent the previous year fighting. He became an admiral. Then a cabinet minister. The samurai republic lasted six months. The man who built it outlived it by decades — and ended up helping build the Japan that replaced everything he had tried to save.