otaku central
The Origin of
Hitokiri Battousai
Rurouni Kenshin creator, Nobuhiro Watsuki wrote in the making of the characters section of his epic manga that he originally used one of the four great Hitokiri of the Bakumatsu (end of the shogunate), Gensai Kawakami, as his model for our hero, Kenshin. It was said that Kawakami could be mistaken for a girl at first glances, but -- as with Kenshin -- appearances can be deceiving. Kawakami was said to be cold, calculating, and deadly.
Gensei Kawakami was also known as Genbe Takada and Genjiro Komori. He was a short man with a sharp chin and jutting cheekbones. He was said to be always calm, completely unyielding, and paradoxically gentle. These attributes were likely due to his short time as a Buddhist priest. Though he killed many people, no clear record of his assassinations exists.
He is most famous for the midday assassination of Shouzan Sakuma, who was one of the great thinkers of his time. Sakuma, a samurai of the Matsuhiro Clan from central Japan, had studied Western (Dutch) ideas and served his daimyo as an advisor on military science. After the British defeat of China during the Opium War, Sakuma turned to the West for its technology. Through a series of essays written in the 1850s, he popularized the idea of "Eastern ethics and Western science."
It was for his embracing of the ideal of Western technology that Sakuma was killed. He was perhaps one of the most notable on the list of those to be assassinated by the young shishi extremists. Between the autumns of 1862 and 1864, the Ishin shishi assassinated more than seventy Shogunate loyalists.
Most of these extreme acts were committed by young men from Choushuu, Satsuma, Tosa, and Hizen. The daimyo of these domains and their samurai were considered as outsiders, tozama lords, because they fought against Ieyasu Tokugawa at Sekigahara in 1600. It's no surprise then that the four great hitokiri were of those domains.
Gensei was an Imperialist from Higo. His kenjutsu school was Shiranui Ryu. Of the strongest hitokiri -- Izou Okada of Tosa, Kyoushin Meichi Ryu; Shinpe Tanaka of Satsuma, Jigen Ryu; Hanjiro Nakamura of Satsuma, Jigen style -- he was the strongest.
One of the young intellectuals most critical of the shogunate was Shouin Yoshida, a low-ranking samurai in Choushuu. Like Sakuma, he studied military science and held a frank curiousity about the West. This man who preached "Revere the Heavenly Sovereign, Expel the Barbarians" once attempted to stowaway aboard Commodore Perry's flagship in order to see America and study Western science and technology firsthand.
He believed that the treaties made with the West violated Japan's cultural and territorial integrity. He called on young men of "pure intentions" to take action against the corrupt.