By 1869, Japan had become a veritable era of the Three Kingdoms, with the Meiji government centered on the four powerful feudal clans in the southwest, the Tokugawa shogunate in most of Honshu, and the newly established Hokkaido in Ezo.

One of the more interesting points in these three kingdoms is that the two emperors supported by the Restorationists and the shogunate both claimed to be the real emperors, but there is no doubt that one of them must be fake, but now it is difficult to distinguish between truth and falsehood, and no one knows whether it is true or not.

The sudden establishment of the Hokkai Kingdom was undoubtedly a major blow to the Tokugawa shogunate, and the Matsumae Domain, which had been trusted by the Tokugawa shogunate in the past, rebelled, and even openly became independent and established a state, although this did not cause much practical damage to the strength of the Tokugawa shogunate.

After all, the Ezo land at this time was still a very barren area, and there was not much population in that ghost place, and most of this small population were still Ezo people, and there were not many real people in the day.

However, this would be a major blow to the prestige of the Tokugawa shogunate, and even cause more daimyo to leave the Tokugawa shogunate, which was not a good thing for the Tokugawa shogunate.

However, when the Meiji government learned that the Matsumae Domain had betrayed the Tokugawa Shogunate and even openly established the country, although they openly criticized the Matsumae Domain's splittist behavior, they actually snickered in their hearts.

The enemy of this enemy is a friend, and the officials of the Meiji government will not know such a simple truth, so not long after the establishment of the Hokkai, the Meiji government sent a secret envoy over, and outsiders don't know what to talk about. But it was nothing more than cooperation against the Tokugawa shogunate and the like.

In the civil war of the past few years, it was the Tokugawa shogunate that was at a disadvantage in the early days. However, in recent years, tens of thousands of new troops trained by the Tokugawa shogunate have been formed, and they have been supported by the empire for a long time. Therefore, the situation has been reversed and the reform faction has been suppressed, and the year before last, if there was no empire behind the scenes, the Tokugawa shogunate would have been able to completely destroy the Meiji government.

Although the Tokugawa shogunate has sold a lot of money in recent years, and has been in the civil war for a long time, the Tokugawa family is not willing to be defeated like this, although it did not directly raise the banner of the restoration like those reformers, but in fact, the Tokugawa shogunate also carried out many practical reforms.

New schools were established and foreign students were sent to the empire. The political system has also been improved to a certain extent, the most important of which is the promotion of the system of public and military cooperation.

Since the outbreak of the Civil War, the Tokugawa shogunate's army began to form an army according to a new model of modern army, and with the help of the imperial military advisers, a modern army with line warfare as the core tactic was established.

This series of reforms is actually somewhat similar to the Manchu reforms in the fifties, when it was faced with the goal of life and death. The Manchu Qing Dynasty also carried out a large number of reforms, and in education, they opened a special economic department, economically. They popularized the Li Jin system, and later generations may think that this is the oppression of the people by the Manchu Qing Dynasty when they hear about it, but in fact they cannot simply comment on it. Centigold is actually a commercial tax.

The main reason why the Qing Dynasty's gold system was criticized was that the Qing court was not strong enough. Unable to directly control the centigold, the local governor was given the power to open the centijin. Then it evolved into the financial power being controlled by the local governors, and those local governors began to pay the gold checkpoint in the province without restraint in order to collect more centigold.

If the central government collects the centigold, then the centigold is just a very formal commercial tax, which is not much different from the various industrial and commercial taxes now implemented by the empire.

In addition to politics and economics, the most important reform of the Qing court was military reform, from the earliest training of the army, to Li Hongzhang's new army, and then to the Qing army, to the fall of the Qing Dynasty, the Qing court can be said to have completed the most basic new military reform, from the traditional cold weapon army to the modern line army.

It's a pity that they met the Chinese army at that time, which had been reloaded with rifles, so they were still defeated, and finally were ruthlessly swept into the garbage heap of history.

Compared with the Manchu Qing Dynasty, the Tokugawa Shogunate's luck was much better, their reforms were very similar to the Manchu reforms, they were all focused on military reforms, and the others were mainly for show, but because of the influence of the Chinese Empire, their half-baked reforms allowed them to go through the most difficult period.

Even the Meiji government was suppressed.

Under such circumstances, the Meiji government, which was in a weak position, would not give up this opportunity when it saw that the Matsumae Domain had betrayed the Tokugawa shogunate and established itself independently.

On the one hand, they sent envoys to the Hokkai Province to liaise, and on the other hand, when they learned that the Tokugawa Shogunate was preparing to draw troops from the front line to attack the Hokkaido.

This was a godsend for the Meiji government.

Soon, more than 20,000 Meiji government troops were ready for war, waiting for the Tokugawa shogunate to withdraw troops from the front line to attack the Hokkai, and then they would kill Osaka and even Edo in one fell swoop.

Naturally, it was difficult to hide the movements of the Meiji government army, and the Tokugawa shogunate, which was planning to deploy troops to conquer the Hokkai, soon discovered the movements of the Meiji government army.

And then there dared to send the main force to crusade against the Beihai Kingdom, and it was too late to prepare for the Meiji government army!

The mutual hostility between the Meiji government and the Tokugawa shogunate also gave the Hokkaido an extremely valuable respite, the Hokkaido was weak, if the Tokugawa shogunate really sent the main force to crusade, it didn't take much, even if there were three or five thousand people, the Hokkaiguo would collapse immediately, but now the main force of the Tokugawa shogunate was dragged by the Meiji government army. Then the whole country of Beihai breathed a sigh of relief.

In the later period, although the Tokugawa shogunate co-opted several other daimyo lords in the northeastern region of Honshu, and once again gathered more than 1,000 troops to try to cross the sea to attack, the army here did not have the new army directly under the Tokugawa shogunate, and they were all ordinary feudal soldiers of those daimyos.

In contemporary Japan, those old-style ordinary feudal soldiers have no combat effectiveness at all, and they are not comparable to those regular armies.

Therefore, the Hokkai Kingdom also blocked this second crusade, and in order to resist the third crusade of the Tokugawa shogunate, the Hokkai Kingdom also urgently asked the empire for help.

Of course, this kind of request for help does not mean that the empire will send troops directly, but to come and purchase warships!

The reason why the Tokugawa shogunate was able to successfully send troops across the sea to land in the Hokkai country twice was because the Tokugawa shogunate had a navy, although the size of this navy was nothing in the eyes of those naval powers, and the main force was only two small iron gunboats.

But in this place of Japan, it is an invincible existence.

Now, if the Hokkai Kingdom wants to fight against the Tokugawa shogunate, although the army is important, the navy is more important. (To be continued.) )