a ghost but with an x

In contrast with Inoue Genzaburo — who’s portrayed in Ishin and other media as a serious, level-headed sort of guy — Serizawa Kamo was a heavy drinker with an infamously short temper. He was born in Mito and, like Sakamoto Ryoma, he was a member of the goshi class, though it should be noted that the extreme discrimination that we see Ryoma experiencing in-game is pretty specific to Tosa’s goshi; Serizawa wasn’t particularly poorly off. Also like Ryoma, Serizawa was involved in shishi activities: he was a member of the Tengu Party, an anti-foreigner political group whose members committed various acts of violent rebellion, including the 1860 assassination of Ii Naosuke (a high-ranking official in the Tokugawa shogunate whose death comes up in letters that you can find in Ishin Kiwami). Serizawa didn’t participate in the assassination, but between his ties to the Tengu Party and an incident in which he executed several of his subordinates for no good reason, he ended up in prison, where he assumed he’d be executed in turn. While there, Serizawa was said to have written a poem with his own blood on a piece of scrap cloth: “In the snow and frost, the plum blossom is the first to bloom in brilliant colours; its fragrance lingers even after the petals have scattered.”

In late 1862, Serizawa was released from prison. By early 1863 (and here I’m skimming over a lot of historical context) Serizawa had joined up with Kondo Isami as a member of the Mibu Roshigumi: the precursor to the Shinsengumi, so called because they were a bunch of ronin whose headquarters were originally in Mibu. They worked under the patronage of the Aizu clan; one of Serizawa’s brothers may have had connections to the clan, which Serizawa and Kondo might have leveraged to gain support for their organization. As a commander, Serizawa was kind of a disgrace by most accounts: among other offenses, he was responsible for wrecking a restaurant in a drunken rage and destroying a silk merchant’s shop with a cannon. Most importantly for my purposes, he was allegedly the man who picked a fight with a bunch of sumo wrestlers in the streets of Osaka.*

Serizawa was murdered in 1863, and there are various theories as to why. It’s popularly assumed that the guy was just a huge bastard who was too out-of-control to hold down his job, and that Hijikata and several other members of the organization killed him accordingly. Another theory that you’ll see sometimes is that while his familial connections were useful, Serizawa himself was a liability whom his companions discarded as soon as they felt secure in doing so. Under this theory, the issue wasn’t so much that he was badly behaved (though this probably didn’t help); it was more that he had his own little faction of men who went around looking down on the others and calling Serizawa “sensei,” and that Serizawa had ties to Mito, which remained a hotbed of seditious activity. (In fact, in 1864, civil war would break out in Mito as the Tengu Party staged an armed rebellion against the shogunate.)

I understand why Ishin’s writers dropped most of Serizawa’s history. It’s complicated, it’s not directly relevant to Ryoma’s story, and Inoue is a secondary character who’s meant (like his mainline counterpart) to come across as a superlatively loyal mentor figure and not as a belligerent asshole. But it’s interesting, in that context, that the writers went out of their way to allude to Serizawa’s history in weird ways. In-game, Serizawa is described as “a living shadow from the Mito domain” — which, okay, you could indeed describe the historical Serizawa that way, given that he narrowly escaped execution and then left Mito to join the Roshigumi. But he’s also described as a wandering bandit who took Hirayama and Hirama under his wing before meeting Kondo in Kyoto, which doesn’t particularly fit with history. Okita — our Okita, the fake one, lol — also says that the three of them committed dappan and were promised a pardon by the Mito domain if Serizawa assassinated Yoshida Toyo, which also has no basis in historical reality but which does make him an accessory to the big players’ nasty schemes for a comprehensible reason. Finally, Serizawa’s school of swordsmanship is referred to as “Mito Tengu” despite the fact that, historically, Serizawa trained in the Shindo Munen school. Conveniently, Ishin’s writers managed to skip over Serizawa’s awfulness on a personal level and to avoid depicting the character in the game as a prominent (and very willing) member of a violently xenophobic political group. I’m listing all of these oddities not to make a judgement about the whitewashing of history, but because it's interesting to me that what did end up in the game is there at all: the writers didn’t need to, but they established a connection between Serizawa, the Tengu Party, and the shishi more broadly anyhow.

Of course, I have the brain disease that makes me latch onto minor characters for no good reason and will therefore take whatever little crumbs of Ishin Kashiwagi I can get. Still, typing all of this up made me think about the missed opportunities here. I would have loved to see the writers do more with some version of Serizawa who was a little less of a bastard but who still committed himself to the shishi’s cause in his Mito days and then grew disillusioned with that cause during his stay in prison and his time with the Mibu Roshigumi. It’s a neat point of sympathy between Inoue and Ryoma, who finds himself similarly chewed up and spat out by the Tosa Loyalist Party in the game. That connection lends gravity to Inoue’s decision to tattle on Ryoma to Kondo but also to keep covering for the guy every time he says or does something transparently suspicious. They might be, in a sense, kindred spirits.

It felt too tangential to delve too much into all of this stuff in my Ishin fics, but you can imagine this sense of sympathy lying behind Inoue’s actions throughout Chapter 4 of Secret History &c. (as well as in his little sequence in Chapter 2 of Glorious and Bloody Deeds &c.). You can also imagine that some of the big shishi conspirators in this story would have known about Serizawa’s origins in Mito with the Tengu Party — it was no big secret — and that they would have been appalled by his new allegiances but also suspicious that he had died because of his old ones. It’s also pretty reasonable to assume that the big Choshu players would have some sense of Saito’s identity, given that Hanpeita and Katsura are allies in Ishin’s version of events. Of course, I also think that our Ryoma wouldn’t know shit about any of this and would absolutely respond like, huhh? whaaaa??? to any/all allusions to the complicated politics behind all these stories. If you’re in a state of perpetual confusion about people and politics while playing Ishin, you’re just doing a great job of role-playing Bakumatsu Kiryu.

Anyway, nearly everything I write is turbo horny and my Ishin fics are no exception, so please don’t read them at work, but they’re very much about the stories men tell about themselves and others, and I think if all this stuff interests you, you might find the yarns I’ve spun interesting as well.