I understand that the shishi were anti-foreign and anti-Tokugawa militants that arose in the wake of the assassination of Ii Naosuke, but I am unclear on how exactly the term was applied. Did people and groups apply it to themselves, if so, how did the term become current? Was it a term that Tokugawa or provincial authorities applied to heterogeneous groups? Or is it a term created by historians?
To put this in another words, what exactly made somebody a shishi specifically, as opposed to simply somebody who didn't care for the Tokugawa?
Shishi, or zhìshì in modern Chinese, is originally a Confucian word for an ideal officer (shì) who has high aim (zhì) of something. In the Analects, Confucius says:
The earnest officer [zhìshì] with a truly humane mind (ren) will not save his life if it requires him to sacrifice of his humaneness. He will even sacrifice himself to consummate his humaneness.
A shì who is set [zhì] on the way [tao], but is ashamed of old clothes and coarse food, is not worth consulting.
Mencius says:
Confucius said, "The determined officer [zhìshì] never forgets that his end may be in a ditch or a stream; the brave officer never forgets that he may lose his head."
These are two of the four compulsory books in Neo-Confucianism, so all the educated people in Tokugawa Japan were supposed to be familiar with the sentences. Yoshida Shōin, who taught Confucianism to dozens of Chōshū students who would later be known as shishi, explains the sentence of the Analects in Bukyō Zensho (1854):
The zhìshì is “a shì who is set [zhì] on the way”, that is, a junzi. The samurai who trains martial arts and is ready to serve the nation and make his parents’ names known is a zhìshì. If a shì is this devoted to his zhì, how would he be “ashamed of old clothes and coarse food” ?.
He also explains the sentence of Mencius in [Kōmō Yowa] (http://dl.ndl.go.jp/info:ndljp/pid/1051540/172) (1855):
The zhìshì is a shì who has an aim [zhì] to achieve and maintains the principles. The shì who maintains the principles is ready for poverty, and never forgets that he may soon starve and fall into “a ditch”.
Previously in 1854, when Matthew Perry visited Japan, Shōin ventured on board the American ship to travel around the world and learn Western military technology, but was refused and put in jail. In jail, he wrote his long-term aim in Yūshūroku (Prison Records) (1854):
We must equip war ships, we must increase the number of our guns… no time should be lost in conquering Kamchatka and Okhotsk, and in winning the Ryukyu Islands. All the lords should assemble at the imperial court, launch an attack on Korea, acquire booty and present it to the court… We should carve up Manchuria for ourselves in the north and take hold of Taiwan in the south. We should … take possession of the Philippines.
After the Meiji restoration, those who contributed to it were honored both by the government and the people with various words of praise, including shishi. At the same time, the word was also applied for foreign activists who serve their own nations. In a fictional novel (1885) based on the enactment of Magna Carta, fictional barons and commoners who fought for the reform are described as “patriotic shishi”. In the controversial editorial Datsu-A Ron (Good-bye Asia, 1885), the journalist Fukuzawa Yukichi states:
In my view, these two countries [China and Korea] cannot survive as independent nations with the onslaught of Western civilization to the East. Their concerned citizens [shishi] might yet find a way to engage in a massive reform, on the scale of our Meiji Restoration, and they could change their governments and bring about a renewal of spirit among their peoples… However, it is more likely that would never happen...