Shinsengumi. Romulus Hillsborough

defied description,” wrote Shimosawa. While Kondō and Hijikata had joined the Rōshi Corps as mere rank and filers, Serizawa, a samurai by birth, demanded special treatment from the start. He had been recruited as one of twenty-three officers overseeing the corps. Meanwhile, Kondō had been assigned the indecorous duty of traveling just ahead of the others to arrange lodgings for the officers and men at stations along the way. On one occasion he forgot to procure a room for Serizawa, for which he apologized profusely. But Serizawa did not take the offense lightly, nor did he accept the apology. He nevertheless assured his fellow officers, in a tone of irony laden with malcontent, that he would make do without lodgings for the night. He would light a fire to keep himself warm, he told them. “But,” he added glibly, “don’t be too surprised if the fire is a trifle large.” He gathered firewood and stacked it near the center of the town, where he lit a huge bonfire after the sun went down. The flames rose high into the night sky, raining sparks upon the surrounding wooden buildings. People bearing buckets of water climbed to the rooftops to put out the fire, but the burning resentment that engulfed Serizawa’s soul would not so easily be extinguished.

      At Kyōto, Serizawa gloried in his newfound power. When it was rumored that a tiger at a local circus was actually a man dressed in a tiger skin, Serizawa thought he would expose the imposter. The swordsman proceeded to the building where the tiger was kept. He swaggered directly up to the cage, drew his short sword, and thrust the blade between the bars. As the crowd around him held their breath, the supposed imposter released an earsplitting roar, glaring sharply into the dark eyes of the Shinsengumi commander. Serizawa now resheathed his sword and with a sardonic smile announced, “It’s a real tiger.”

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      The corps split into two factions, rallying around Serizawa and Kondō, respectively. Of the thirteen original members, eight belonged to Kondō’s faction, the others to Serizawa’s. They recruited more men. Soon their membership exceeded one hundred. The leaders initiated a system of command to facilitate control over the rank and file. Beneath Commanders Serizawa Kamo and Kondō Isami, nominal Commander Shinmi Nishiki, and Vice Commanders Hijikata Toshizō and Yamanami Keisuké were fourteen assistant vice commanders. These included Okita Sōji, Nagakura Shinpachi, Harada Sanosuké, Tōdō Heisuké, Saitō Hajimé, and a new recruit named Yamazaki Susumu. (Yamazaki, a rōnin from Ōsaka, was an expert with a hard wooden staff.) These six assistants, with Hijikata and Yamanami, formed a tight-knit group around Commander Kondō. Other assistant vice commanders included Hirayama Gorō and Hirama Jūsuké, both loyal to Commander Serizawa. Beneath these officers were three “observers,” including the giant Shimada Kai. Shimada was a rōnin from the pro-Tokugawa Ōgaki Han in the province of Mino. He had practiced the Shinkeitō style of kenjutsu at Edo, where he befriended Nagakura. At 330 pounds and nearly six feet tall, Shimada was by far the largest man in the Shinsengumi.

      Most of the officers lived at the Yagi residence, one of numerous houses along the narrow roads and byways of Mibu Village. The master of the Yagi residence, Yagi Gennojō, a petty samurai, was the tenth generational patriarch of his family and a leader of Mibu Village. The imposing black-tiled roofs of the dark wooden front gate and two-storied main house, the quaint latticed windows, the sliding doors of the wide entranceway, the interior tatami-matted rooms overlooking the rear garden through a long wooden corridor—this house, and these rooms and this garden, so immaculately and meticulously kept, were now occupied by the leaders of the most notorious band of killers in Japanese history. Across the narrow street was the single-storied house of the Maekawa family, where the corps set up headquarters. Both houses, scenes of bloodshed to come, would serve the Shinsengumi well.

      From his Mibu headquarters, Kondō Isami wrote letters to Satō and Kojima in Tama, requesting them to forward training equipment, for himself and the other men from the Shieikan. Both Kondō and Hijikata expected to see bloodshed soon. In separate letters they asked their friends to send along shirts of chain mail, in preparation for battle.

      A uniform was adopted—a flashy light blue linen jacket with pointed white stripes at the base of the sleeves. The corps took as their symbol the Chinese character for “sincerity”—for their loyalty to the Tokugawa. Pronounced makoto, the Shinsengumi symbol was emblazoned on the corps’ banner, white against a red background. According to Shimosawa, the banner was approximately five feet long, nearly four feet wide. The corpsmen carried their distinguishing banner and wore their distinguishing uniforms on their daily patrols of the city. They questioned or arrested wayward rōnin, vagrants, and otherwise suspicious men in and around the Imperial Capital. Their fearsome spectacle on the streets of Kyōto became an everyday phenomenon. According to the reminiscences of a ranking retainer of the Lord of Aizu, “the men of the Shinsengumi tied their topknots into great clumps of hair. When they walked against the wind the bushy ends would flare out wider, evoking an even more imposing spectacle.” Before long there were few, if any, in Kyōto, the nearby mercantile center of Ōsaka, or the surrounding areas who did not readily recognize them as the Tokugawa’s select and terrible band of swordsmen.

      * * * * *

There had always been rōnin throughout the Tokugawa era. Formerly rōnin were men of the samurai class who had, for one reason or another, intentionally or not, become separated from liege lord and clan. In short, they were “lordless samurai.” But the rōnin of the turbulent final years of Tokugawa rule—the biggest turning point in Japanese history—were a different breed altogether. They were far greater in number than their predecessors. And they did not necessarily derive from the samurai class. Many came from peasant households. Kondō Isami and Hijikata Toshizō are two of history’s most celebrated examples of peasants-turned-rōnin. The great majority of these latter-day rōnin, however, hailed from the lowest samurai ranks of their respective clans—most notably Mito in the east, Chōshū and Tosa in the west, and Satsuma and Kumamoto in the south. During an age when the entire nation faced unprecedented dangerous straits, most of these lower samurai were prohibited from participating in government or even voicing their opinions in official matters. Depending on their han, they were nominal samurai—permitted to wear the two swords and take family crests and names, but otherwise treated as commoners. Serizawa Kamo is a famous example of a nominal samurai who became a rōnin. Another is Sakamoto Ryōma, who came from a wealthy merchant-samurai family in Tosa.† These rōnin, in essence, quit the service of their daimyō, forfeiting the financial security and physical protection provided by their feudal lords for the freedom to participate in the dangerous national movement, often at the cost of their own lives. Like the leaders of the Rōshi Corps, most, if not all, of them were ardent xenophobes, raring to fight the foreigners.

      The rōnin phenomenon of this era has been likened to a movement for social equality in a suppressive society. Many rōnin had been motivated more by a desire to wear the two swords and look like samurai than by lofty political aspirations. They fulfilled this desire by becoming rōnin under the false pretext of “loyalty.”

      * * * * *

      As swordsmen, Kondō Isami and Hijikata Toshizō were perhaps technically inferior to certain of their subordinates in the corps—most notably the fencing genius Okita Sōji. But what they lacked in technical finesse they compensated for with strength of mind, courage, and an unyielding will to power. Their will to power, certainly their most formidable weapon, would time and again prove indomitable on the bloody streets of Kyōto.

      For all its worth, however, when the will to power is combined with the germ of self-importance—the conviction that one is of greater worth than his fellow human beings—it tends to transform into the stuff of tragedy, often lethal to the host. Although not a pathogen in the biological sense, self-importance is a germ nonetheless; throughout the history of mankind it has been commonly carried by unscrupulous men, more often than not possessed of an unyielding will to power. Among them have been dictators, despots, conquerors, gang bosses, mass murderers, cult leaders—tyrants, criminals, and thugs, one and all—with a propensity to kill unrivaled by the mass majority whose unfortunate lot it has been to share with them the same time and space of their brief existence on this earth. What distinguishes Kondō, Hijikata, and certain other of their countrymen, friends and foes alike, and even including