Published in the Mekong Review December 2022
Noted Japanologist and translator Ivan Morris believed that an admiration for doomed heroes ran deep in Japanese culture. In his book The Nobility of Failure, he wrote about ten tragically unsuccessful figures, ranging from a teenage prince falsely accused of treason and strangled by his cousin to Morris’s friend, Yukio Mishima, who committed ritual suicide in spectacular fashion in 1970.
An eleventh example could have been Isami Kondo, the leader of the Shinsengumi (Newly Selected Corps), the paramilitary force charged with cleaning up the mean streets of Kyoto in the 1860s. Certainly, he matches Morris’s description of “those eager, outrageous, uncalculating men whose purity of purpose doomed them to a hard journey leading ultimately to disaster.”
Indeed, so devoted was Kondo and his number two, Toshizo Hijikata, to the cause of the Shogun that they carried on fighting against impossible odds after the Shogun himself had surrendered and given up his office.
Hijikata (centre, in grey) and Kondo (in white)
Many Japanese films have told the story of the Shinsengumi. One of the best is Band of Assassins, originally released in 1969 and now available with English subtitles from samurai movie specialists on the internet. The Japanese title is the more neutral Shinsengumi, though there is no getting away from the fact that spying, torturing and killing was their stock in trade.
Mifune gives a bravura performance as Kondo, the farmer-turned-master-swordsman who became the leader of the Shinsengumi. His ruthless but loyal right-hand man, Hijikata, is played by Keiju Kobayashi. Rentaro Mikuni is scarily realistic as the out-of-control Kamo Serizawa, the original leader of the group.
Produced by Mifune’s troubled production company and directed by the little-known Tadashi Sawashima, the film is notable for its historical accuracy. The moving depiction of Kondo’s final moments before his execution conform with the recollections of those who were there. He asked to be shaved because he knew exactly what was going to happen to his head.
In his magisterial double biography of Mifune and Akira Kurosawa, The Emperor and the Wolf, Stuart Galbraith is rather critical of the film. To be sure, some acquaintance with the background would definitely enhance the viewing experience. The twists and turns of the story may be confusing at times, but that is understandable. It was a period of great confusion. Neither the man destined to be the last Shogun nor the youngster destined to become the European-style monarch known as Emperor Meiji had a clue what lay a few brief years ahead.
When the Shinsengumi was formed in 1863, Kyoto was a hotbed of revolutionary activity. Radical intellectuals and swordsmen – often the same thing in the era – thronged the ancient capital spreading the ideology of ‘Sonno Joi’, meaning ‘respect the Emperor and expel the barbarians’, and cutting down anyone who opposed them.
The barbarians in question were the Westerners who had forced the Shogunate to open up treaty ports, such as Yokohama, where they could reside and conduct trade. The radicals, known as shishi (men of high purpose) were appalled by the Shogunate’s weak-kneed approach and dreamed of toppling the current 250-year-old political structure and slaughtering enough foreigners to make them go away for good. They were to succeed in the first project but not in the second.
The Shinsengumi was set up as a semi-official police force that would answer violence with even greater violence, rather as Wyatt Earp did in Dodge City. Under Kondo’s famous ‘Sincerity’ banner, they would eliminate the shishi, restore peace to Kyoto and respect for the Shogun.
Kondo as played by Mifune is a charismatic figure, a brilliant swordsman and born leader who knows no fear. We first see him at home, a doting father dangling a baby daughter on his knee. He decides to enlist in the Shinsengumi out of gratitude for the favours that his forefathers received from the Shogunate. Arriving in Kyoto, he saves some townspeople from the wanton destructiveness of the Shinsengumi’s then-leader, Serizawa.
We want to like Kondo and do — but that doesn’t mean he’s a nice guy. Like Michael Corleone in The Godfather, he quickly becomes inured to the killing. As one of his oldest comrades tells him after attempting to leave the group — an offence punishable by death — he has become a puppet devoid of feelings.
Getting rid of the booze-crazed Serizawa was necessary, but the means chosen are sneaky. Having made sure that Serizawa was too drunk to stand up, Kondo and three other comrades steal into his sleeping quarters where he is lying in a courtesan’s arms and slash them both to death.
Serizawa glares at Kondo at a geisha party
Kondo himself starts to spend more time in the Shimabara pleasure quarters. Presumably that does not violate the Shinsengumi code, created by Kondo himself, which demands the highest moral standards.
Worse is to come. A substantial sum of money goes missing from the group’s safe and the naïve young man who takes care of the group’s accounts is accused of embezzlement. In an agonizing scene, he is forced to commit ritual suicide while the others watch. We learn later that the money was taken by Kondo’s pal Hijikata and used to buy out Kondo’s favourite courtesan from her geisha-house contract.
A serious ideological split opens up in the Shinsengumi and is resolved in the only way Kondo knows — by maximum violence. What never changes are his devotion to the Shogun, his courage and his fearsome skill with a sword.
The men of the Shinsengumi, like their enemy the shishi, were mostly ronin (masterless samurai), but there were also skilled fighters from non-samurai backgrounds, like Kondo and Hijikata.
The class difference is crucial. Several of Kondo’s friends sign up because they see the opportunity of rising up in the world. Nobody dares restrain Serizawa’s drunken rampages because he is a bona fide samurai, entitled to kill lesser mortals on whim. But when he taunts Kondo and Hijikata for their peasant origins at a banquet, he seals his own fate.
Kondo did rise in the world. His political opinions were sought by high-ranking officials. In the last days of the Shogunate, he was even made a member of the Shogun’s junior council, placing him among the feudal lords. Yet Japanese feudalism had one last trick to play on him.
When he was captured by Imperial loyalist troops, many of whose shishi comrades had died at the hands of the Shinsengumi, he was denied the right to commit ritual suicide because he was not a samurai by birth. Instead, he was beheaded by an executioner like a common criminal.
Ironically, it was only after the revolutionaries that Kondo fought against had triumphed that such hereditary castes were abolished. The Meiji Restoration of 1868 put an end to the Shogunate, but the winners no longer held to the creed of expelling the foreigners. Instead, the former radical patriots had pivoted to a full-scale embrace of Westernisation, symbolised by railways, steak dinners and modern weaponry.
Kondo’s death poem read as follows –
Submitting to the will of another
I have nothing to say on this day
I value honour over life
Ah, the long flashing sword
To which I readily surrender
And repay my lord’s kindness with my life
Kondo’s family had to pay a bribe to have his decapitated body disinterred and reburied with the honour appropriate to a hometown hero. As he would have expected, his head was sent to Kyoto, set on a spike and exposed to public derision on Sanjo Bridge.
According to Ivan Morris, noble failure is found in a man “whose career usually belongs to a period of unrest and warfare and represents the very antithesis of an ethos of accomplishment. He is the man whose single-minded sincerity will not allow him to make the manoeuvres and compromises that are so often needed for mundane success.
During the early years, courage and verve may propel him rapidly upward, but he is wedded to the losing side and will be ineluctably cast down. Flinging himself after his painful destiny, he defies the dictates of convention and common sense, until he is eventually worsted by his enemy, the successful survivor.”
There could be no better description of Isami Kondo as portrayed by Toshiro Mifune in Band of Assassins.