>>539721189
What Satsuma and Choushu you ask? Well, it turns out not EVERYONE against the Bakufu was a retarded broke kid. The Shogunate had plenty of unhappy vassals for a plethora of reasons. One of them was the Fudai/Tozama distinction.

When, Ieyasu won by crushing the armies of Ishida Mitsunari (this twink) at Sekigahara, he solidified his rule by dividing all the leftover Daimyos into two groups: the ones that had allied with him BEFORE the battle became the Fudai Daimyo, and those who submitted afterwards became Tozama Daimyo. Only Fudai Daimyo had access to a number of perks and possibility of attaining various prestigious appointments, whereas the Tozama Daimyos were rewarded with the privilege of not being ground into a fine paste for having bet on the wrong horse.

The thing is, two and a half centuries later, this distinction was still solidly in place and kneecapping the ambitions of Daimyos who had grown up as loyal servants of the Tokugawa and whose grandparents’ grandparents hadn’t been alive at the time of Sekigahara, which felt a bit unfair. You can probably guess which camp the Choushu and Satsuma Daimyo belonged to.

Also, a basic bitch Samurai’s income was calculated in koku, a measure of rice. Cultivation techniques had improved a lot over the centuries, leading to much higher yields, and thus lower rice prices. Yet, the koku stipend had literally never been updated since they were set by Hideyoshi nearly three hundred years earlier. Meaning that a lot of Samurai (who legally could not hold another job) were dead broke, with no chance in hell of improving their stature on account of the whole “no wars to fight anymore” thing.