As a samurai youth, he fought in the Boshin War to overthrow the Tokugawa shogunate, participating in combat in the northern Tohoku campaign.

Under the new Meiji government, he served in the Ministry of War, and transferred to the fledgling Imperial Japanese Navy in 1873 with the rank of lieutenant commander.

It is not certain why he made this choice, but some historians theorize it was part of a strategy by the Chōshū clan leaders to ensure that the navy did not become a Satsuma monopoly.

Subsequently, Tsukuba was used as the basis of a successful experiment by naval doctor Takaki Kanehiro into the sailors' diet, which later eliminated beriberi as an issue within the Japanese navy.

During this campaign, the captain of the cruiser Yaeyama provoked a diplomatic incident with the United Kingdom when he stopped and boarded the British-flagged merchant ship SS Thales in international waters off of Amoy on the morning of 21 October 1895 in search of Liu Yongfu, the fugitive president of the Republic of Formosa.