#201「河上彦斎」

The Four Great Hitokiri of the Bakumatsu and Kawakami Gensai

The final years of the Tokugawa shogunate were marked by a wave of political assassinations targeting shogunate officials and foreigners. The men who carried out these killings were known as *hitokiri*—"man-slayers"—and four names stand above the rest: Okada Izō of Tosa, Nakamura Hanjirō and Tanaka Shinbei of Satsuma, and Kawakami Gensai (河上彦斎) of Higo, Kumamoto. This episode focuses on Gensai.

A Man Whose Love of Country Burned Too Hot

Gensai was born the second son of a low-ranking samurai family in Higo, Kumamoto. As the younger son he had no claim to the family headship, and he was adopted into the equally humble Kawakami household. At sixteen he took a position as a *chabōzu*—a personal attendant handling minor chores for the domain lord—and worked his way up from sweeper to a role close to the lord himself.

He pursued scholarship with equal determination, studying under several teachers who held radical anti-shogunate views, including Miyabe Teizō, who would later die in the Ikedaya Incident. The decisive turning point came when Gensai was twenty. Accompanying the domain lord to Edo, he arrived just as Commodore Perry's black ships appeared and the Convention of Kanagawa was concluded. Watching Western powers extend their reach firsthand, he became convinced Japan would be colonized unless drastic action was taken, and his ideology grew sharply more extreme.

The common image of a *hitokiri* is of an assassination machine—lethal with a blade but operating on someone else's instructions rather than genuine conviction. What set Gensai apart was that he developed his own firm ideological framework and ultimately began killing not because anyone ordered him to, but because he had decided for himself that a given target stood against everything he believed in.

The Swordsmanship and Persona That Inspired Himura Kenshin in *Rurouni Kenshin*

Gensai stood roughly 150 centimeters tall and was said to look almost feminine. To make the most of his slight build, he devised a self-taught technique called *sakakesa-giri*—a reverse diagonal cut. He would sink into a deep crouch, sword still sheathed, like an athlete in a sprinter's starting stance, then explode upward, drawing in the same motion and slashing from his opponent's flank diagonally upward. Because the blade seemed to travel along the ground, the attack was nearly impossible to read on first encounter. The technique was entirely his own invention.

This combination—short stature, feminine appearance, and a ground-skimming draw-and-slash—became the inspiration for Himura Kenshin (緋村剣心), the protagonist of the manga and anime *Rurouni Kenshin* (るろうに剣心). Like the fictional Kenshin, Gensai was reportedly courteous and considerate in everyday life, devoted to family and comrades.

Yet he also possessed a terrifying coldness. One well-known anecdote describes him rising wordlessly from a drinking session with friends when a shogunate official's name came up in conversation, leaving the room without a word, and returning with the man's severed head, which he placed on the table and invited everyone to drink around. When Katsu Kaishū once reproached him for killing too many people and asked whether he felt any pity, Gensai reportedly replied: "When eggplants and cucumbers in a field are ripe, you harvest them. It is exactly the same."

The Assassination of Sakuma Shōzan and the End of His Killing Days

Gensai's only documented killing was that of Sakuma Shōzan (佐久間象山), the era's leading voice for opening Japan to the West and the mentor of both Katsu Kaishū and Yoshida Shōin. To Gensai, Shōzan was the direct enemy of the *sonnō jōi* cause, and he struck him down in broad daylight.

After that killing, Gensai never drew blood again. He later said he had felt every hair on his body stand on end the moment the blade landed. It is worth noting that Shōzan's actual position was more nuanced than simple pro-Western advocacy: his argument was that Japan should open up, absorb Western technology, build national power, and then repel Western encroachment—making him, at the deepest level, a fellow believer in national independence. Perhaps Gensai's accumulated experience as a killer gave him the sensitivity to sense, in that one instant, that this man was fundamentally different.

The Final Days of a Loyalist Swallowed by a Changed World

With his killing days behind him, Gensai joined forces with Chōshū domain and took part in the armed struggle against the shogunate. When his home domain of Kumamoto sided with the shogunate, however, he returned rather than risk harm to family and allies. He was arrested almost immediately—he had, after all, abandoned his domain and committed acts of political violence—and imprisoned. When he was released a year and a half later, the world he walked out into was unrecognizable. The shogunate had fallen and the Meiji Restoration was complete, but the Japan that emerged was the precise opposite of what he had fought for: a country embracing the West rather than expelling it. He raised his voice in protest; no one in the new government listened.

Around this time an old comrade, Dairaku Gentarō, came to his door. Dairaku was a fugitive wanted for the assassination of the Chōshū statesman Ōmura Masujirō. Out of loyalty to an old friendship, Gensai sheltered him. When this came to light, he was arrested again. For the new government's leadership, Gensai's continued preaching of *sonnō jōi* was an inconvenience, and they assembled charges against him and handed down a death sentence.

The judge who presided was a former comrade. He urged Gensai to renounce his ideology and spare his own life. Gensai refused. He could not abandon a pledge sworn before the gods and made to his fellow loyalists simply to preserve himself, he said—he could not face the comrades who had already died for *sonnō jōi*. He was beheaded at thirty-eight.