before fleeing to Kyōto and joining his friends.
Serizawa Kamo was born in the first year of Tenpō—1830—four years before his rival Kondō Isami. He was the pampered youngest son of a wealthy, low-ranking samurai family of Mito Han. An expert swordsman of the Shintō Munen style, he stood tall and erect—an excessively proud man, well built and endowed with extraordinary physical strength. As if to flaunt his strength, he carried a heavy iron-ribbed fan, with which he threatened to pummel men who got in his way. Engraved on his weapon-fan were eight Chinese characters which read, “Serizawa Kamo, loyal and patriotic samurai.”
The “loyal and patriotic samurai” was a handsome man, with a light complexion and small dark eyes that penetrated the defenses of his many adversaries. He was as gallant as he was brutal, as courageous as cruel. He was a reckless man of fine breeding, a pathological drinker who, when in his cups, was known to draw his sword upon the slightest provocation. Before joining the Rōshi Corps, he had served as a captain in the rabidly xenophobic and pro-imperial Tengu Party in Mito Han, the birthplace of Sonnō-Jōi. Serizawa was in command of some three hundred men of the Tengu Party. It was rumored that he had punished several wrongdoers among them by severing their fingers, hands, noses, or ears. He was eventually imprisoned and sentenced to death in Edo for the cold-blooded murder of three subordinates who had aroused his ire over some petty offense. In jail he refused food. The leaden winter sky, barely visible through the small window of his cold, dank cell, recalled to him the snowy landscape outside. He likened his lot to that of the snow-laden plum blossom. He bit open his small finger, and with the blood composed his intended death poem.
Amidst the desolation of snow and frost,
the plum is the first to bloom in brilliant color.
The blossoms keep their fragrance,
even after they have scattered.
Before his execution could be carried out, he was released in the general amnesty proclaimed by the Bakufu to recruit men for the Rōshi Corps. Now, in the spring of 1863, he was in command of not a rebel group but a legitimate corps of swordsmen in the service of the shōgun.
Serizawa’s notoriety preceded him to the Imperial Capital. When the Rōshi Corps reached Kyōto in February, it is said that the townspeople shook with fear of the “demon Serizawa.” A dominating personality with a voracious sexual appetite, the “demon” was reputed to have his way with other men’s wives. In his youth he had reportedly raped and impregnated three maids at his family’s home. As commander of the Shinsengumi, it was his duty to protect the Imperial Court. But this did not deter him from making advances upon the lover of Anénokoji Kintomo, a court noble and leader of the Sonnō-Jōi faction surrounding the emperor. When the matter was brought to the attention of the protector of Kyōto, he ordered Serizawa, in no uncertain terms, to cease his transgressions among the court nobles.
Serizawa had allegedly raped the wife of a wealthy merchant in his native Mito. The wife was subsequently enraptured and begged Serizawa to keep her with him. It has been suggested that Serizawa’s pathological behavior was a result of syphilis, and that he had contracted the dread disease from this woman, a former geisha. Perhaps it was a combination of the disease and his anger at having been infected that incited a fit of violence toward the woman, during which he cut her body in two and hurled it into a nearby river.
“Officer Serizawa Kamo’s egoism along the way [to Kyōto from Edo] 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.”
* * * * *
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
