Episode 464 – The Wolves of Mibu

This week: a long-requested dive into the ronin police force known as the Shinsengumi. Who were the members of this group, and how, despite their rather marginal role in the history of the 1860s, have they become one of the most famous organizations in Japanese history?

Sources

Keene, Donald. Emperor of Japan: Meiji and His World, 1852-1912. 

Wert, Michael. Meiji Restoration Losers: Memory and Tokugawa Supporters in Modern Japan’

Shiba, Ryotaro and Tadashi Hori. “Japanese History: From a Personal Viewpoint.” Review of Japanese Culture and Society, Vol 1, No 1 (October, 1986).

Beasley, W.G. The Meiji Restoration. 

Images

Transcript

Just based on the name, I imagine that a few of you are quite excited right now. Because for about as long as this podcast has existed–and that’s creeping up on 10 years now, so quite a while–I have had people asking me to talk about the Shinsengumi. And they’re an interesting topic, for sure, but one I’ve always hesitated to weigh in on for a simple reason.

You see, there’s a tricky thing at play when we’re talking about the Shinsengumi, because in reality we’re talking about two separate things. There’s the actual history of the Shinsengumi, which I do feel like I have a solid handle on.

But then, and really far more importantly, there’s what the Shinsengumi has become–not just a historical organization, but (for lack of a better term) a fandom: a thing with its own fan subculture.

How could that happen? How does a rather odd political artifact of a complex moment in Japanese history become a subject of fan culture? It’s a fascinating question: but first, of course, there’s some actual context to go through. Because we should make clear first: what even was the Shinsengumi?

So: once again, we must return to that fateful time and place: Kyoto, 1863. The Tokugawa shogunate, once secure in its dominance of Japan’s political life, is now reeling from the loss of the shogun Tokugawa Iesada in 1858 and of the brilliant (if ruthless) politician Ii Naosuke in 1860. Now, the shogunate was listless and without strong leadership–the shogun himself was a 17 year old boy, so not exactly one to inspire confidence–and there was no clear plan to deal with the pressing issue of the time: the foreign crisis and the unequal treaties imposed by Western powers.

Meanwhile, the emperor and imperial court, long a politically marginal force at best, had begun to re-emerge into the nation’s political life. Driven on the one hand by a growing movement of imperial loyalism among lower-ranking samurai and Kyoto aristocrats.

This loyalist movement is hard to sum up in simple terms, but is probably best encapsulated by means of its vague slogan: sonnou joui, or “reverence for the emperor, expulsion of the barbarians.” The meaning of the latter was always pretty clear–the removal of the foreigners who had begun coming to Japan in the aftermath of the unequal treaties. The former was far more amorphous, but broadly loyalists did want to see the imperial court take a more central role in politics.

On the other hand, there was the emperor Komei himself–who was filled with a burning desire to expel the foreigners–the Kyoto court was suddenly far more relevant to politics than it had been in years.

Kyoto had long been a sleepy town of artists and poets: in the early 1860s, that changed dramatically. Every day low-ranking samurai who believed in the loyalist cause made their way to the city, often having fled their original feudal domains to do so (a crime under the laws of the shogunate). There, they would pledge themselves to one or another band of fellow loyalists–often led by members of the Kyoto aristocracy, which had been politically irrelevant for centuries but some of whose members saw a chance to regain some actual authority after centuries of samurai rule.

Those loyalists who could not find an aristocrat to pledge themselves to simply wandered the streets of Kyoto, wanting to be present in the emperor’s city for whatever came to pass.

Much has been made of the appeal of loyalism specifically to the lower levels of the samurai class–arguably, a lot of what drove those lower samurai to loyalism was a chance to actually distinguish themselves through action. Remember, this was an age of rigid social hierarchies both between and within classes; if you were a lower samurai, your chances for advancement by distinguishing yourself were, to put it mildly, not very good. However, the disordered political situation meant that these lower samurai could now dream of rising on their own merits via their loyal service to the emperor–what that meant in practice was a bit abstract, but certainly there was an appeal there.

Which is not to say that these lower-level loyalist samurai were totally self-serving in their political views. Many were also true believers–after all, most were criminals by virtue of having departed their home domains without permission.

Regardless: the important thing for us here is that, as a result of this influx of young, extremely political, and very eager samurai, Kyoto got a lot more violent during these years. The political views of the loyalists, after all, were pretty extreme–they believed that loyalty to the throne was a core value for all, and thus anyone who did not share their particular interpretation of loyalty to the throne was an enemy of the state, the emperor, and of Japanese identity itself.

What counted as ‘loyalty’, meanwhile, was a pretty amorphous concept. Interpreters who worked for the Westerners and thus enabled their presence in Japan; businessmen who traded with the foreigners; even members of the Kyoto nobility who were perceived as insufficiently zealous in their defense of the throne, all were fair game for assassination.

Then, of course, there were other loyalists who proved insufficiently zealous in defense of the loyalist cause. Witness, for example, the note left beside the body of the physician Ikeuchi Daigaku when his corpse was discovered on March 11, 1863: “This individual always enjoyed the favor of exalted personages. In the period around 1858 he allied himself with samurai of just principles and exercised himself on their behalf in various ways but in the end betrayed them, entering into communication with corrupt officials and causing the deaths of many loyal samurai from different domains, in this way himself escaping punishment. His crimes are such that heaven and earth cannot hold him. For this reason, divine punishment has been administered, and his head is exposed.”

Ikeuchi’s guilt, by the way, was a matter of conjecture; he had been an active loyalist in the early 1850s, was captured by shogunate forces, and eventually released–and the assumption was that he was released because he had cooperated with his captors. There was no actual proof that he had done so, however.

Even high ranking nobles were not spared; Ikeuchi’s severed nose was delivered to the compound of Nakayama Tadayasu, an aristocrat and biological grandfather of the future Meiji emperor, along with a note accusing Nakayama of being insufficiently zealous in defending the emperor’s cause and threatening him with a similar fate.

Donald Keene counted 70 incidents of outright assassination or crimes of a similar level (like arson) within the span of spring 1862 to spring, 1863, and I suspect there were many more undetected killings or lesser crimes–say, roughing someone up for their supposed “lack of loyalty.”

Kyoto, simply put, was a city in disarray, and an announcement early in 1863 made the potential powder keg quite a bit worse. It was announced shortly into the new lunar year that the shogun, Tokugawa Iemochi, would make his way to the city to consult directly with the emperor about the political situation: a shocking break of 200 years of precedent, since the shogun coming to attend on the emperor in person was a clear symbol of subordination to imperial authority.

The visit did, of course, have potential upsides: the young Iemochi might be able to win support from the emperor for the shogunate and shore up his position. But it would also certainly embolden loyalists who felt it represented a sign that their goal–a “restoration of power to the emperor”, though what that meant was pretty vague–was at hand.

What would that mean? Well, it was hard to say–but likely in the short term a massive explosion of loyalist violence in Kyoto, further destabilizing the emperor’s city at a time when the shogunate could not afford such problems.

Enter Matsudaira Katamori, the youthful 26 year old daimyo, or feudal lord, of Aizu domain in what’s now Fukushima prefecture in northern Honshu. Katamori was young, energetic, and–as his last name might clue some of you on to–deeply loyal to the Tokugawa shogunate.

Matsudaira was the original surname of the Tokugawa family of shoguns, and several branches of the extended Tokugawa family still used it. Matsudaira Katamori’s branch was one such, descended from an illegitimate son of the second Tokugawa shogun Hidetada.

And that’s why, in the fall of 1862, the shogun’s senior councilors had seen fit to name Katamori to the newly created position of Kyoto Shugoshoku, roughly translating as “military governor of Kyoto.” Previously, the shogunate’s presence in the city had been limited to the shoshidai, a sort of ambassador from the shogun to the emperor–Kyoto was too sleepy a town to warrant much of an actual military presence, after all. But this new shugoshoku role was a decidedly military one; Katamori, as office holder, was tasked with restoring order in the city.

But how to do that? Katamori certainly had resources he could call on; Aizu domain had a substantial income of 230,000 koku and a large military force to back that up. However, the domain had other military responsibilities as well in terms of both Aizu domain itself and the domain’s mansion in Edo. It wasn’t like the entire Aizu military could just up and go to Kyoto and occupy the city.

But Matsudaira Katamori was a strategically minded man, and realized that he did have one additional resource he could call on to bolster his forces and restore order to the city. The imperial loyalists were drawing their support from groups of lower ranking samurai who had chosen to leave their domains–becoming ronin, samurai without masters, in the process.

Wouldn’t it be possible, he wondered, to recruit from this same pool of disaffected young samurai for the cause of the shogunate?

To be fair, Katamori did not come up with the idea himself; it’s often credited to another Tokugawa relative, Matsudaira Chikaranosuke, who was a swordsmanship instructor at a school in Edo for training the shogun’s retainers–and who, in the fall of 1862, submitted a petition to the shogunate arguing that ronin could be recruited to bolster the shogunate’s forces.

Katamori, however, saw the wisdom in the proposal, and immediately set about putting it into practice, with the goal being to have this new ronin force ready to go early in 1863 when the shogun Iemochi had planned his trip to Kyoto.

Initially, the whole thing was, well, a bit of a disaster. Initial leadership of this recruited group of ronin–called the Roushigumi, essentially just “masterless samurai squad”–was handed to one Kiyokawa Hachiro, a samurai of Shonai domain in what’s now Yamagata Prefecture in northern Honshu. Kiyokawa was a ronin himself in need of gainful employment–he’d become one after killing another samurai over a personal quarrel without, and this is true, filling out the required paperwork needed to take that sort of revenge. Unfortunately, Kiyokawa was also an ardent supporter of imperial loyalism and the sonnou joui movement; after becoming a ronin, he’d sustained himself as a swordsmanship instructor, and his school had become a hotbed of loyalism–several of his former students had been involved in the 1861 assassination of the Dutch-American Henry Heusken, who had served as an interpreter on the negotiation of the unequal treaties.

Now Kiyokawa was being placed in charge of the new Roshigumi–so, uh, I guess that goes to show the importance of background checks before you hire people.

Kiyokawa spent the winter training his new Roshigumi-planning to use it not to protect the shogunate’s position in Kyoto but to undermine it further by joining the loyalist cause once he was there. In early February, the roshigumi were at the vanguard of the shogun’s procession down to Kyoto, arriving in the city a few weeks later.

Fortunately for the shogunate, at this point Kiyokawa’s true loyalties came to light, and he was ordered to return to Edo under a pretext–in April of 1863, he was ambushed and killed by forces loyal to the shogunate.

Which probably would have been the end of the damn thing, except that a small core of the now-former Roshigumi–officially disbanded given the justifiable concerns about the loyalty of Kiyokawa’s recruits–petitioned Matsudaira Katamori to be allowed to stay in Kyoto and fulfill their original mission: to serve as guards for the shogun during his trip to Kyoto and help maintain order in the city while he was there.

Katamori was apparently convinced that this core group of less than 20 who decided to stay behind could be trusted, and set them up in the village of Mibu on the outskirts of Kyoto.

Eventually, he reorganized this remainder, bolstered them with some fresh recruits, and renamed the group the Shinsengumi–the newly-selected force, roughly translated.

Now, I’m just going to get this out of the way right now: there’s a bunch of pretty famous names associated with the Shinsengumi that those of you with a passionate interest in the subject–Shinsengumi-heads, I suppose is the term–will recognize. I am not going to go through all of them, because while the full and unabridged history of the group is really interesting, there are other things I want to leave room to talk about here.

That said, there are–of course–a few names I simply have to mention, chief among them Kondou Isami.

Kondou actually was not a samurai by birth; he was born in 1834 into a farming family in northern Honshu. However, his family was well-to-do enough to provide their son with an education, which included training in swordsmanship–something that, by the 1800s, was not uncommon for wealthy non-samurai. After all, while only samurai were supposed to have weapons in public, there were no laws against non-samurai having training weapons or learning how to use them.

And besides, given the desperate economic straits of many samurai families at the time, few instructors were willing to turn away anyone who could pay tuition even if they weren’t of the right social status.

Besides, regardless of background, Kondo was apparently a pretty impressive student. The school he began studying at was called the Shieikan, and its master, Kondo Shunsuke, was so impressed by the boy that he eventually adopted him as his heir and made him the new master of the style.

Swordsmanship schools like the Shieikan, by the by, were often hotbeds of political activity at this time–home to large numbers of samurai, generally of lower social status (because higher level ones had no reason to bother working on their skills; they would just inherit cushy gigs), who were often very invested in politics. Thus, swordsmanship schools were fertile recruiting grounds both for imperial loyalists and for the anti-loyalist cause, which is how Kondo ended up falling in with the Roshigumi. He was not the only one to do so, by the way–a good chunk of the eventual Shinsengumi were his fellow students from the Shieikan, so much so that they became the dominant faction of the group’s leadership.

Eventually, Kondo would end up as the one in charge of the Shinsengumi, though his path to leadership was a bit fraught. With the help of his second in command Hijikata Toshizo, he would enact a purge over the summer of 1863 of remaining old Roshigumi members who would not follow his lead, most notably Serizawa Kamo (who was not an old Shieikan student and thus had no loyalty to Kondo). But once Kondo had the group under his control, he turned it into a highly effective force for Matsudaira Katamori to use to restore order in Kyoto.

For example, in August of 1863, Emperor Komei was incensed to find that a faction of his aristocrats who had sided with the imperial loyalists had begun to spread a rumor that Komei was going to take direct command of Japan’s samurai in a war against the West. Komei had no love for Westerners, but he was an ardent believer in the shogunate as an institution and wanted to leave military affairs to his loyal samurai (as had been the way of things for generations). So he orchestrated a political purge of the loyalist aristocrats with Matsudaira Katamori’s help–and the Shinsengumi were tasked with guarding the gates of the imperial palace while the purge was going on, to make sure no armed loyalists attempted to intervene.

Obviously, a task that important is an indicator of the faith Matsudaira had in the group. And that faith was continuously repaid, most famously in the so called Ikedaya incident of the following year.

The Ikeda inn, or Ikedaya in Japanese, was, well, an inn along the Kamo river in Kyoto–and a hotbed of loyalist activity. This in and of itself was far from unusual; after all, most of the loyalist samurai in Kyoto were not locals, and needed a place to stay. However, the particular group of loyalists staying at the inn in the summer of 1864–composed of a mixture of ronin from Choshu, Tosa, Higo, Harima, Omi, Yamato, and Mimasaka domains–were implicated in a plot to kidnap Emperor Komei and set fire to Kyoto to cover their escape back to Choshu domain.

The idea, in the time honored tradition of Japanese politics, was to remove the emperor from the “bad advisors” who were causing him not to listen to the loyalists, because obviously that was the issue and not the fundamentally unrealistic nature of the loyalist platform.

One of the ronin involved in the plot was captured and gave up his comrades, and so on the fifth day of the sixth lunar month of 1864, bakufu forces marched through the city looking for the ronin. The Shinsengumi were the ones to find them holed up in the Ikedaya, and after two hours of hard fighting brought the loyalist group down. The final result was three Shinsengumi killed compared to 7 loyalist ronin and 23 more who were captured by the Shinsengumi.

The victory was a massive political coup for Kondo and the Shinsengumi; in the aftermath, Matsudaira Katamori hugely expanded the group to over 200 members, making it a sizable presence in Kyoto. The Ikedaya Raid–and another defeat for the loyalists a few weeks later when radical loyalist ronin attempted a coup against the Tokugawa leadership in the city–also served to break the back of the loyalist cause in Kyoto.

Thus, by 1865, Kondo and the Shinsengumi were riding high–two years later, they were even granted full status as hatamoto, official retainers of the shogun.

But of course, the good times did not last; starting in 1866 the shogunate, which had looked like it was starting to stabilize, began to implode instead. By late 1867 the Shinsengumi were told that the last Tokugawa shogun had abdicated and returned his powers to the emperor.

However, most of the Shinsengumi–somewhat justifiably, I think–believed they were in too deep at this point to just let things go. After all, the group had been founded to fight the loyalist cause, and many of those loyalists were now a part of the new imperial government that had claimed the shogun’s political power.

So realistically, few of them could expect much in the way of clemency from any new regime dominated by former loyalists.

So large numbers of the Shinsengumi joined with Tokugawa hardliners who, even after the shogun abdicated in late 1867, made a fight of things in defense of the shogunate. In the subsequent Boshin war of 1868, most of the Shinsengumi were killed.

Kondo Isami, for example, attempted to make a fight of things at Kofu Castle along the road to Edo–his force was defeated, and he himself was beheaded on the 25th day of the 4th lunar month of 1868.

Hijikata Toshizo, meanwhile, was one of the small band of Tokugawa retainers who attempted to make a last stand at the far northern outpost of Hakodate, the main Japanese settlement on the remote island of Hokkaido. He was killed during the siege of Hakodate while attempting to reinforce a weakness in his defensive line.

His force of the Shinsengumi, meanwhile, were the last holdouts of the group left; the remaining members either died fighting or surrendered to the forces of the newly proclaimed Imperial Japanese Army.

So that is a brief history of the Shinsengumi–and yes, I did leave a lot out, but that’s because what really interests me the most is what comes next. Because so far, what we’ve covered, if we’re honest, is a fairly marginal group in a fairly complicated political struggle–and to boot, a group that was on the eventual losing side. Put another way, you can tell a complete history of the fall of the Tokugawa shogunate without mentioning the Shinsengumi by name once, and their side didn’t even win.

And yet, they’re famous–honestly, it’s kind of amazing to me how many people have heard of the Shinsengumi even if they’re not particularly interested in this specific period in Japanese history. So that raises the natural and very interesting question: how the hell did that even happen?

If you listened last week, it probably will not surprise you to hear that to an extent, the process by which the Shinsengumi became famous parallels the interesting ups and downs of Oguri Tadamasa’s legend. The group was, of course, officially on the “wrong side” of the war, and as such given the full villain treatment in government-sponsored accounts of the conflict as a gang of bloodthirsty assassins targeting loyal imperial patriots.

For example, the historian Nishimura Kenbun published an account of the restoration in 1894 that essentially painted the Shinsengumi as pure villains– “marauding assassins” is how I’ve seen their role described.

However, a ‘counter-narrative’ of the Shinsengumi was very much kept alive by the survivors of pro-shogunate partisans in imperial Japan and their descendants–much like Oguri himself.

That counter-narrative began to seriously emerge in the late 1920s, thanks primarily to the local historian and novelist Shimozawa Kan.

Shimozawa was born in Atsuta on Hokkaido–his grandfather, Umetani Jujiro, was among the many former retainers of the Tokugawa shogunate who, after being captured during the wars of 1868, was shipped off to Hokkaido to help with the colonization effort (also coincidentally keeping these dubiously loyal ex-followers of the shogunate far away from the halls of power or anywhere important).

Naturally, this gave Shimozawa something of a sympathetic view of the old shogunate; in the 20s, he relocated to Tokyo to become a reporter, and along the way was able to score interviews with some of the surviving retainers of the shogunate still around to give them. After all, he was a sympathetic ear, and one who was more than happy to put narratives out there that were sympathetic to the Tokugawa cause and critical of the eventual victorious oligarchs who had led the early imperial government.

These interviews, plus his substantial archival research, formed the core of his novels–three of his early works , published from 1928 to 1931, dealt directly with the Shinsengumi and portrayed them as heroes–the series is collectively called Shinsengumi Shimatsuki, if you’re curious. Essentially, Shimozawa positioned the Shinsengumi as loyal national policemen, concerned with maintaining order for the good of the country during a disordered time.

The success of this series kickstarted Shimozawa’s career, making him a popular writer until his death in the 1960s–he’s probably most famous as the originator of one of the great fictional samurai of Japanese history, the blind swordsman Zatoichi.

Shimozawa’s writings were a part of this counter-current of more positive portrayal, but they were not what really set the Shinsengumi on the path to fame in the postwar period. As popular as his works were, it was really a postwar writer who catapulted the Shinsengumi to popularity.

I refer to none other than Shiba Ryotaro, a name with which you are probably familiar if you have any interest in Japanese historical fiction.

He’s not as well known in the West as guys like Yoshikawa Eiji (who were of a slightly earlier generation than him), but in Japan he was a huge deal as an author.

Shiba was born in Osaka in 1923, and after a brief career as a journalist he became a novelist after the Second World War. Shiba, by the way, is actually a pen name; it’s the same characters as “Sima”, as in Sima Qian, the author of one of China’s oldest and greatest written histories. Fukuda Teiichi was his actual name, but literally nobody uses it so I’m going to stick to the pen name.

And Shiba was HUGELY influential. The 1960s were his era of peak production, so to speak, and to quote Michael Wort’s academic work on this subject, “no novelist has had a greater impact on the public’s imagination of the Meiji Restoration than Shiba Ryōtarō.”

He was one of the central figures responsible for resurrecting interest in Sakamoto Ryoma (see episode 433) in the postwar era, and wrote an incredible and thoughtful portrayal of the last shogun Tokugawa Yoshinobu–in Shiba’s telling, Yoshinobu is a sort of tragic figure who knew what to do in order to save the shogunate, but who lacked the influence necessary to do it until it was too late.

And, starting with “Moeyo Ken” (Roughly, “Burn, Sword!”), Shiba turned his interest to the Shinsengumi.

I’m going to quote at length from Michael Wort here because I think he does an incredible job of describing what clicked with people about Shiba’s writing: “Narita Ryilichi calls Shiba the most popular writer of postwar Japan because of the range of his work, the variety of topics he addressed in journals of different genres, and his wide readership. For Narita, Shiba was a “writer of the people” because he dealt with the “nature of Japan”…many of Shiba’s historical works on Japan cover chaotic times, either the period leading up to the founding of the shogunate or its final years.“ Shiba’s writing on the Restoration years typically features heroes from marginal backgrounds:…The marginality of these individuals also characterizes their attitude toward their times; they ap­proach the chaos in a rational way, avoiding the fanatical and mystical, and sometimes avoiding war…”

Wort particularly suggests that Moeyo, Ken! And its portrayal of the Shinsengumi were inspired by the chaos of the 1960s, when–starting with the security treaty protests of 1960 itself (see episode 244), the forces of the government and the political left did battle in the streets for a good chunk of the 1960s. This experience, in turn, gave Shiba an interest in the question of how a person should live in chaotic and uncertain times–and that, in turn, led him to the shinsengumi.

Well, indirectly; he very much credited an interest in the Shinsengumi to Shimosawa Kan’s prewar novels about them, which he’d read as a younger man.

Interestingly, Shiba’s protagonist was not Kondo Isami, the leader of the Shinsengumi, but his second Hijikata Toshizo. Given what he wanted to accomplish with the text, that was probably a fair choice–Kondo, after all, had purged Shinsengumi leaders who would not follow his lead and had a reputation as a fairly violent man to boot. So he was a hard man to paint in a sympathetic light.

Hijikata was far easier; Shiba has him obsessed with his own self-image as a brawler, good for nothing but fighting, but also engaged in the type of reflection on his time that clearly marks him as more than that. And that certainly fits with the whole idea of the story as a reaction to the 1960s: a figure trapped in chaotic circumstances and feeling pulled along by them even as they attempt to understand them would be, well, not unfamiliar based on the time period.

And Shiba apparently struck something of a cord. First, of course, Moeyo Ken! Was an incredible success, and not just as a book. That I know of, there have been five distinct adaptations of it: a TV show in 1966, a film (also in 1966), another TV show in 1970), a TV miniseries in 1990, and a new film from 2021.

The popularity of the first of Shiba’s novels was even such that before they were done, a film studio dusted off Shimozawa Kan’s older Shinsengumi novels to do a film adaptation of those in 1963.

I could honestly finish off the rest of this episode listing the various film and TV adaptations of the Shinsengumi story that have come since Shiba put the group on the map and probably still wouldn’t get them all. There have been even more movies, even more TV shows, several anime series (probably the best known outside of Japan would be Ruroni Kenshin, which has some Shinsengumi cameos in it even though it’s not “about” them per se), and a host of video games.

I am even told there are several Shinsengumi otome games–-essentially, video games about dating members of the group. No, I have not played these or evaluated them for historical accuracy. Maybe that could be a patreon goal one day.

But anyway: I don’t think listing off every Shinsengumi adaptation out there is really worth our time, because you can find them on your own. What’s really interesting about all this–in my opinion at least–is what it reveals about why the Shinsengumi have become this cultural phenomenon.

Like most moments of interest in the historical past, interest in the Shinsengumi is, in a certain sense, less about the age of the Shinsengumi and much, much more about the modern context of the fans themselves.

Shiba himself hit this nail on the head when he talked about the Shinsengumi being reflective of the difficulties of living in turbulent times. Certainly, the 1860s were turbulent times–and so were the 1960s, which is perhaps why his novels resonated the way they did. For that matter, so were the 1990s, when there’s a noticeable uptick of Shinsengumi-related films, TV, and the like in the aftermath of the bubble collapse: another period of social insecurity and instability.

Realistically, the images that people interested in the Shinsengumi have in their heads of who these people were are at best only loosely based on the people themselves–derived from the personal readings of people like Shimozawa or Shiba based on incomplete and fragmentary sources. But that doesn’t really matter, because it’s the reading itself that is resonant with people.

If I’m right about all this–and there’s no guarantee I am, since this too is simply my interpretation–then what drives interest in the Shinsengumi is the same thing that always drives interest in the past: the present, and our need to make sense of it and fit it into a wider historical story.