THE STORY OF TOSHIZO HIJIKAZA - CHAPTER FOUR: BOYS IN BLUE UNIFORMS
Katamori Matsudaira’s brilliant plan on getting extra manpower ended up with a most spectacular plot twist, one that feels as if ripped from a totally insane spy movie. You cannot make shit like this up – real history always finds ways to astonish you with how crazy things can get.
Namely, Matsudaira appointed one certain Hachiro Kiyokawa, a respectable samurai, to train and manage the new recruits, forming a group named Roshigumi – roughly translated as “warrior group”, quite an original name indeed. What poor Matsudaira did not now – and here we enter the crazy spy movie territory – was that said Kiyokawa was actually a Sonno Joi supporter in disguise. The guy had hatched this amazing plan to use Matsudaira’s money and resources to gather enough recruits, and then switch sides and go against the Shogun when the time struck.
Enter Isami Kondo and Toshizo Hijikata.
When Kiyokawa’s plan came to light, the two were appalled. No one knew better than them that true samurai always stayed loyal to their master, no matter the cost. Along with eleven more men – most of whom came from the Shieikan – they opposed Kiyokawa and alarmed Matsudaira that things were going south. Stuff happened, and Kiyokawa was prevented from causing any real damage, but Matsudaira’s ego was in shatters – not only that he was made a fool of, but his Roshigumi project fell apart, and the Shogun’s visit was mere days away. He did learn one valuable lesson, though: the samurai were not to be trusted, as the clans were too deeply seeped in politics and ancient grudges to be reliable.
So, along came Katamori Matsudaira’s brilliant plan number two. He summoned Isami Kondo and gleefully informed him that, starting from that day, he was to be the Commander of a new paramilitary group – the Shinsengumi, its name meaning, well, “the new group” – which will be in charge of not only protecting the Shogun while he was in Kyoto, but also of patrolling the streets, making sure that the Shogunate’s peace and order were upheld.
And that’s how the Shinsengumi were born.
Kondo was the appointed Commander, and Toshizo Hijikata was given the position of the Vice-Commander. Aside from their friends from the Shieikan, the rest of the Shinsengumi’s members were recruits who came from all four corners of Japan, answering Matsudaira’s call.
There was Heisuke Todo, a showy young man from Edo who claimed to be the illegitimate son of Izuminokami, the Lord of Tsu, and a daughter of a flower shop owner. There was the kind-hearted, bespectacled Keisuke Yamanami – or Sannan, as historians cannot seem to agree on the kanji reading of his last name – who was a devout Buddhist fearing the western influences. There was Hajime Saito, a tall, hefty man with sharp intelligence and a budding drinking problem, who went by many names, as the group’s spy tasks were often confided to him. There was Sanosuke Harada, who had a large scar across his belly – a nobleman once called him a coward, saying he’d never become a true samurai, and to prove him wrong, Harada gutted himself then and there in a botched seppuku attempt. There was Shinpachi Nagakura, the short-tempered second son of a low-ranked samurai, who quit his family to make a name for himself. And there was Souji Okita, a fellow student of the Shieikan, descendant of an impoverished samurai family, who killed his first man at an inappropriately young age, and desperately tried to hide from his comrades that his lungs were rotting away from tuberculosis.
There were many more, of course, their numbers growing as the group’s reputation spread. They were city boys, peasants, sailors, workers, craftsmen, merchants and minor samurai – some would call them salt of the earth, others scum. And even though Isami Kondo was their leader, Toshizo Hijikata was their idol – and ideologist.
Rumor has it that the pretty Vice-Commander himself – who harbored a soft spot for stylish clothes and was known to blow obscene amounts of money on kimonos specially dyed to make his black, black hair stand out – personally designed the famous Shinsengumi uniforms, with white triangles on sky blue fabric symbolizing the snow-covered top of Mount Fuji. In a world where proper warriors dressed in browns and greys, the Shinsengumi uniforms were screamingly conspicuous – no wonder they became legendary. Yet even though his exact contribution to the history of military fashion cannot be proved, one thing that Toshizo did was rather well documented. Namely, he was the one who wrote the Shinsengumi Code.
The Code was based on bushido, obviously, but it was harsher, stricter. It demanded even more discipline from its followers. It was not allowed to deviate from the “path of a proper man”, upon penalty of death. It was not allowed to leave the Shinsengumi, upon penalty of death. It was not allowed to raise money privately, upon penalty of death. It was not allowed to engage in private fights, upon penalty of death. If the leader of a unit was mortally wounded, all the members of the unit had to fight and die on the spot. And the most dreaded rule was this one: if a Shinsengumi member engaged in a fight, be it on duty or not, and he allowed the enemy to escape, seppuku was ordered.
It’s as if Toshizo wanted his ragtag gang to become more samurai than the real samurai.
The Vice-Commander himself enforced these rules and mercilessly pursued every poor sod who dared to break them. His biographers claim that he had good reasons for this – with such liberal recruitment policies, the Shinsengumi did indeed attract a hell lot of trash, so the only way to keep the group under control was to impose ridiculously strict discipline. But it seems that Toshizo’s cruelty only contributed to the worshiping of his troops – even if they called him “the Demon-eyed Vice-Commander”.
The Shinsengumi were diligent in their duty: they patrolled the streets of Kyoto with the power to arrest anyone they deemed suspicious, or to kill them on the spot if they resisted arrest. Of course, the people of the imperial city were not very happy that a bunch of countryside lowlifes suddenly policed their lives. They called them “the Wolves of Mibu” – Mibu being the Kyoto suburb where the Shinsengumi headquarters were located – and hoped they were nothing but Matsudaira’s silly pet project that would again finish by blowing up in his face. Just give it time.
But then, the Ikedaya Inn affair made them change their minds.
The story goes like this: in early July 1864, the Shinsengumi arrested a dude named Shuntaro Furutaka. It seemed they hit the jackpot with this one – as it happened, Furutaka was a known follower of the Sonno Joi and a supporter of the Choshu side of the Satsuma-Choshu Alliance. His presence in Kyoto meant that something sinister was about to take place. At first, Furutaka held himself strong – no matter how persistently they interrogated him, the poor sod kept his mouth shut. But then, fed up with the lack of results and worried that there was no time to waste, Toshizo Hijikata decided to take the matter into his own hands.
They say the torture was so brutal that Keisuke Yamanami left the building and sat for three hours in the street under heavy rain, because he couldn’t put up with Furutaka’s screams. Toshizo suspended Furutaka by the ankles and hammered 5-inch iron nails into his heels, and then placed candles on top of the wounds, so that melted wax could drip onto open flesh, while the iron was slowly getting white-hot. Furutaka broke down completely, and boy, did he talk. They were to set Kyoto on fire, he said. They were to capture Katamori Matsudaira and execute him publicly. They were to kidnap the Emperor and control his ascent to power. And they were to do all that after they met in the Ikedaya Inn, a small tavern in Northeast Kyoto best known for its pork noodle soup.
On the night of July 8th 1864, exactly eleven years since Commodore Matthew Perry came to Japan with his black ships, the Shinsengumi raided the Ikedaya Inn. The Choshu samurai were there all right, and quite a big bunch of them – legend says that the Shinsengumi were outnumbered five to one. But the boys in blue fought like war gods: they slayed the Choshu and lost only one of their men in return. This defeat was a huge blow to the Satsuma-Choshu Alliance – historians assess that it postponed the beginning of the Boshin War for at least a year, and maybe even directly impacted its outcome, as the weakened Alliance was forced to make some dramatic, unexpected moves. The Ikedaya Inn burned to the ground as collateral damage, but at least the streets of Kyoto were safe. The Shinsengumi successfully saved the day, the city, and the Emperor.
They became heroes.
(There’s an alternative account of this event, however. The Choshu sources claim there were never any plans to burn down Kyoto or, god forbid, kidnap the Emperor. Furutaka gave in under pressure and started spinning fantasies he thought his torturer wanted to hear, while the only reason the large group of samurai was at the Ikedaya on that faithful night was to discuss how to rescue their comrade from his Shinsengumi captors. But we’ll never know the truth.)
At the age of 29, Toshizo Hijikata, the former medicine peddler and failure in life whose family rolled their eyes at him, became one of the most important figures in the imperial city – respected, admired, feared. When he patrolled the streets, oh so beautiful in his sky blue uniform, people would bow to greet him. Geishas entertained him for free, and rumor has it that soon he had as many as six mistresses, one in every district of the city. He was the king of Kyoto.
Yet with the Boshin War around the corner, his reign did not last long.
~to be continued~
Next chapter: We Live a Dying Dream (If You Know What I Mean)
THE STORY OF TOSHIZO HIJIKATA - CHAPTER FIVE: We live a dying dream (If you know what I mean)