The Republic of Ezo: The First Japanese Democracy(also an alt history discussion)

The Stage is set, the year is 1868 and the forces of the Tokugawa Shogunate had been defeated by the forces of emperor Meiji, the few forces of the shogunate that survived rallied behind the navy and fled to the northernmost island of Japan, Ezo(Today known as the Island of Hokkaido) these forces where lead by Enomoto Takeaki.

He was a fierce samurai, loyal to the shogun and most important he was an admiral in the Tokugawa navy, along the samurai that fled to Ezo with him, where a few French military advisers.

After the arrival at Ezo and before the founding of the republic he made many request to the imperial court to allow him to develop the island for japan and keep it as a bastion of the old way of the samurai, but his requests were denied.

So after many struggles, the republic of Ezo was established on January 27, 1869, the government of the new republic was inspired by the government of the United States. They held their first elections and Enomoto was elected as the first president of this new republic. Elections were based on the principles of universal suffrage but only among the the samurai class, this makes the election of Enomoto the first election ever held in japan, a land that for centuries was under the control of feudal lords, military warlords and the shogun.

The money to finance the new country came from the treasury that was retrieved from Osaka Castle after the shogun abandoned it at the end of the Boshin war in 1868. The treasury consisted of 180,000 gold ryo coins( 1 ryo coin was about 187 grams of gold, 187 grams of gold are around 6.6 ounces so, if you were to value the coins in today $ the value of the 180,000 ryo is around 2.166.703.261,81$ so you could say they had a lot of money with them)

During the winter they enhanced the defenses on the southern peninsula of the island with the construction of the fortress of Goryōkaku at the center of the effort. In the middle of this fortress was also the main government building of the country, you can see its still standing to this day on the picture!

The military forces of the nation were run and organized under a joint Franco-Japanese command, The commander in chief was Otori Keisuke and the 2nd in command was the French captain Jules Brunet.

Brunet demanded a pledge of loyalty from all the officers and forced them to assimilate to french military ideas in order to organize the army.

Most of this effort was wasted because by april, the empire of japan deployed the navy fleet and a force of 7,000 men to Ezo and they managed to swiftly surround the fortress and caused Enomoto to surrender on june 26, Enomoto was sentenced to be executed but on the word of Kuroda Kiyotaka was spared because he was impressed by enomoto's dedication to combat(Enomoto would then continue on to serve the empire of japan and by the main founder and pioneer of the imperial navy, but thats a story for another day) after the imperial forces took control of the whole island, on September 20th, the island was renamed to its current day name, Hokkaido.

The perspective of these events are interesting indeed, the emperor and his advisers saw this as a rebellion and an attempt to perpetuate the samurai rule over japan while Enomoto and his men saw it as a service to the empire, he explained that his desire was to consolidate japan's control on the island to increase its defense against the expansionist Russia, which had recently annexed a huge amount of land from the Qing Empire a few years before and where setting their sights on the island of Sakhalin and if unopposed they would have probably continued down to the island of Ezo next and Japan after that.

So what do you think about this nation and the events surrounding it? Obviously i didn't cover every single detail, i just laid out the story a bit, what do you think would have happened if they managed to defend against the imperial forces? would the republic prevail? would they still be a country in 2017? would they have eventually been annexed into japan anyways? peacefully or tru war? Some people claim that the creation of the republic was just the first of many other Japanese expansionist projects. I personally believe that to even defend themselves from the imperial forces they would have needed huge amounts of external intervention, they had some support from the french but the french were not really committed to the cause because they where busy at the time with their interventionist war in Mexico.

So what do you guys think?