岡田以蔵異聞

+ About

Okada Izo Ibun (Untold Stories of Okada Izo) helps me keep my sanity by allowing me to sort historical notes, stories, and other pieces of Izo into something approaching actual organization.

It also (and this cannot be overstated) stops me from being weird about Izo on main, which is Tales of Edo, ostensibly my writing blog, though it has turned into art page slash history repository over time.

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+ Navigation

Izo Himself Learn more about Izo, especially if you only know him from J-drama, anime, or manga. Includes a timeline, historical information, and the headcanons that form the basis of my writing.

Art Assorted images of Izo, mostly reposted from my main, so there's not just massive walls of text on this page. The link goes to the art tag.

Stories This one may be self-explanatory: navigate through the fictional short stories about Izo's life, which are sorted into general categories.

It was the middle of the third month, and Iwamura village smelled of plum blossoms.

Izo had been awake since well before dawn, sitting with his back against the outside wall of the house and watching the stars go out one by one while he listened to the sounds coming from inside.

Earlier in the night, he'd woken up to find his grandmother in the entryway, putting on her sandals by the light of a small lantern, and she'd pressed a finger to her lips without looking at him, then disappeared outside to fetch the midwife from two streets over.

He had not gone back to sleep after that.

The men from the neighborhood had come and gone throughout the long hours of the night, as they did when there was a birth in a household: his father's friends and neighbors come to congratulate him, the old man from up the road who always brought a jar of homemade umeshu and drank most of it himself.

They'd sat under the eaves of the entryway or in the yard, talking quietly among themselves, and Izo had watched from the shadows while they talked and drank, too wound up with anticipation to even think about crawling back into his futon. His father had come out twice to check on him. The second time, he'd brought a hanten and draped it over Izo's shoulders without comment, wearing an expression somewhere between excitement and nerves that Izo had never seen on him before. He'd ruffled Izo's already untidy hair with one large hand and gone back inside.

By the time the sky started to lighten and turn soft purple at the horizon, one by one the neighbors had gone home and Izo was alone in the yard with the plum tree and the sound of wind chimes.

Then he heard it: a thin wail from inside the house.

Izo scrambled to his feet so fast the coat fell into the dirt. He made for the door at a flat run, bare feet hitting the packed earth of the entryway, and took the step up into the house at a stumble. He caught himself on the doorframe, rushed across the front room, and stared into the sleeping room through the open sliding doors.

His grandmother, whose back was turned, glanced around at the noise, and his mother, who was sitting up in her futon looking exhausted and bright-eyed at once, said his name with a tired laugh. "Izo. Come in, come in."

His father was kneeling beside her, and in the curve of his mother's arm was a very small, very red, very wrinkled thing that was still crying with tremendous determination.

"Is that it?" Izo asked from the doorway. He realized belatedly he probably could have said that better, but his mother only laughed again.

"That's him," she said. "Come look."

Izo crossed stepped into the room, sinking to his knees on the tatami, leaning in so close that his grandmother put a firm hand on his shoulder to keep him from toppling forward.

He studied his new brother with the focused intensity he usually reserved for watching his father practice sword forms in the yard: the small, clenched fists, the scrunched-up red face, the shockingly black hair plastered to a round, damp head.

The baby had, at some point in the last few seconds, stopped crying. He was making small, indignant sounds instead, as if he had more complaints to register but couldn't decide which one to start with.

"He's very small," Izo said.

"You were very small once," his father pointed out from across the futon.

Izo considered this seriously for a moment, doubtful. "Can I hold him?"

"Later," his grandmother said, and steered him away by the shoulder.

"Why later?" Izo asked, craning his neck to see over her arm. "I'll be careful."

"Because your mother needs to rest, and so does your brother, and you need to sit somewhere else for a few minutes and calm down before you knock something over."

Izo sat cross-legged in the corner of the room, vibrating with impatience, and tried very hard to calm down. He watched his parents in the grey early-morning light, his father with his hand over his mother's, both of them looking at the baby in the way he supposed adults looked at things they couldn't quite believe were real. The baby made another small sound and his father immediately leaned in, and Izo watched the expression that spread across his father's face: something gentle and helpless and so unguarded that it was almost embarrassing to witness, like he'd walked in on something private. He had never seen his father look like that before.

He studied his own hands in his lap and a warm, uncomfortable feeling spread through his chest that he didn't have a name for yet. He thought about it for a while and came to the tentative conclusion that it was probably what being happy for someone else felt like.

When his grandmother finally said he could come back, Izo shuffled across the tatami on his knees and his mother carefully transferred the baby into his arms, with so many instructions about supporting the head and keeping still and don't jostle him that by the time Keikichi was actually settled in the crook of Izo's arm, he was rigid with the effort of doing everything right all at once.

The baby looked up at him with dark, unfocused eyes.

"Hello," Izo said, because it seemed like the right thing to say. Keikichi made a sound like a small, wet hiccup.

"See, he likes me already," Izo told his mother, who covered her mouth and said nothing.

He sat very still and looked down at his brother's face, at the tiny fist that had found its way out of the blanket and was pressed against one round cheek, at the impossibly small fingers. He felt, rather than heard, his grandmother leave the room, and the morning birds start up outside, and the wind stir through the plum blossoms in the yard. His father said something quietly to his mother and she murmured a reply. Somewhere far down the road, someone's rooster crowed.

Izo looked at the top of his brother's damp, dark-haired head and thought, with an uncomplicated certainty that was unusual for him, that he would not let anything bad happen to him. He didn't know how, exactly. He was six years old and had no particular means of preventing bad things from happening to anyone. But the feeling was there all the same, solid and sure, lodged in his chest somewhere just below his ribs.

He looked up to find his father watching him.

His father smiled, the same helpless, unguarded smile as before, and Izo felt heat rush to his cheeks.

"What?" he said.

---

The Case Ledger of Mori Gentan Specialist in disorders of the heart-mind

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Entry the first Eighth month, third day Okada from Tosa. Approximately 24 years. Low-ranking samurai.

Brought by an acquaintance. Would not have come himself. Pulse: heart position rapid and thin. Liver wiry. Lung po unsettled. Constitution sound; the disorder is of the spirit, not the flesh.

Three days prior, a man died by his hand and the hands of others. He will not say more than this. He has not slept. He has not eaten properly. He held up his hands while speaking of it and turned them over, checking. The shen has not fully returned to its dwelling following the fright. This resolves with time if the conditions allow. The conditions may not allow.

He said he will not do it again. He did not mean the consultation.

Suan zao ren tang prescribed. Reduce sake.

He asked at the door whether it gets easier. Told him: it depends on what a person does with the experience, and what they are required to go on doing. He nodded as though he had expected this. Left.

Return recommended.

---

Entry the second Some weeks following

He came back. Did not expect it. Left arm bandaged, wound several days old, not properly dressed since. A narrow cut on the right cheek, healing. Did not mention either.

Pulse: liver fire developing. Kidney weakening. Sake on his breath.

A second man is dead. This one fought. The arm is from this incident, his blade caught on a roof beam and left him open, a comrade intervened before worse occurred. He turned his wrist over while describing the moment. Mid-sentence he said maybe that would have been — and stopped. Did not finish. Noted. The teacher, informed of the injury, threw a cup. The cheek is from this. Following the incident he laughed uncontrollably and could not stop. He believes this is evidence of something wrong in his character. It is liver fire finding the only channel available. His comrades have already decided what it means.

Wound dressed. Chai hu shu gan san added to the prescription.

Return as soon as possible.

---

Entry the third Days following the second entry

Arrived without notice. Feverish. The arm is infected. Someone dressed it poorly some days ago and has not touched it since. Cleaned and redressed here. The smell when the bandage came off was explanation enough.

Pulse throughout all positions: rapid, flooded with heat. Liver fire combined now with heat-toxin from the wound. He will survive this if it is managed. His body is managing it without assistance.

A third incident. He was stationed alone outside a building, feverish, while others went inside. When the target fled, patient was waiting. He described it in three sentences. When asked whether the teacher had known of the arm, he said he had mentioned it hurt. The teacher said the timing was not good. The unfinished sentence from the second entry was not raised. He has nothing left today for that work.

Huang lian jie du tang prescribed. Return in two days.

He left without stopping. If he does not return in two days, this practitioner will go to him.

---

Entry the fourth Four days following the third entry

He did not return in two. Returned in four. The delay accounts for itself: he was too ill to come. The fever has broken. He will carry a worse scar for the absence of care. His constitution held what his circumstances did not.

Pulse: heat resolving. Heart position thin and empty. He has spent more than he has taken in. The body now presents the account.

He was alone for the four days. Rice left outside the door once. He had not been drinking, which he mentioned with mild surprise, as though he had only just noticed. He spoke more today than across all three previous consultations. The fever had forced involuntary thinking. He said he had worked out what he was thinking in the alley: that he was tired, and that he wanted to go home. He said he no longer knows what home means. The unfinished sentence was raised. This time he answered. If the arm had been lost, he said, there would have been a reason to stop. All of it. A few hours during the worst of the fever: if it keeps going, that would also be fine. He said this quietly and from some distance. It passed. He was thirsty. There was water. Thirst held him.

Ba zhen tang prescribed. Told him to eat.

At the door he stopped. "My brother's name is Keikichi." Did not explain why he said it. Left. The heart reaches for what it needs even when the mind has stopped asking. Return in two days.

---

Entry the fifth Eight weeks following the fourth entry

He came four more times in these weeks. Brief visits. Nothing to record formally. The arm healed. He ate. The sake continued at its level and did not worsen. Today he arrived in the late afternoon with a traveling pack. "I am going to Edo," he said.

Pulse: heart quieted to a lower level, not restored, depleted. Liver still wiry. Kidney thin. The constitution of a man in provisional stability.

His name has been removed from the teacher's organization. A new man arrived weeks ago from one of the southern domains. Within four weeks, the teacher made him his sworn brother. Patient said this once, looking at his hands. Did not return to it. He has no plan beyond the first lodging. He did not tell his brother he was leaving. He wrote a letter and did not send it because writing it required him to see things clearly. He said: "I have done things I cannot undo for a man who threw a cup at my face." He said it in the manner of a man who has arrived at a true thing slowly, and is testing whether it sounds as true aloud. It does. He said he cannot stop feeling he did something wrong, even though he does not believe he did. This is what is left when a person has spent long enough being measured by another man's judgment: the judgment remains after the man is gone.

Ba zhen tang for the journey. Told him to eat. He received this with familiar exasperation. He bowed at the door. "Thank you. For the arm." He meant the arm. Possibly more than the arm.

---

A note appended here, outside the formal record: what this patient carries will travel as well as he does. Distance is a beginning, not a treatment. This practitioner hopes he finds in Edo someone who does not require him to earn the ground he stands on.

An Edo period doctor would not have any of the materials I've applied to Okada Izo in the Anachronisms section of this tumblr: he would lack the trauma and attachment theories, the DSM-V diagnostic criteria, and the ICD-10 codes for billing. He wouldn't know about Myers-Briggs types, boundaries, and social-cognitive learning theory. He wouldn't do a biopsychosocial assessment.

But, within the framework of his own time, the Edo doctor of traditional kampo (Japanese / Chinese medicine) would have a coherent medical system that would consider the relationship between emotional experience and physical illness, as well as a philosophical tradition drawn from Buddhism, Confucianism, and Taoist-influenced Chinese medicine, that takes the suffering of the heart-mind seriously as a medical problem.

The seven emotions framework would be an Edo doctor's primary diagnostic lens: fright, grief, anger, worry, pensiveness, joy, and fear are each associated with organ system, specific presentations, and recognized treatment approaches. Therefore, the Edo doctor looking at Izo would not think about post-traumatic stress disorder, but he might think about

驚 (kyō), fright that has damaged the kidney and disturbed the heart-spirit, which cannot settle at night and cannot find its proper orientation during the day,

気鬱 (ki utsu), the stagnation of vital energy, which is concentrated in the liver and presents as the particular flatness of a man who has stopped allowing himself to feel, and

虚 (kyo), a general deficiency that is spreading across multiple organ systems as the stagnation and fright drain what is stored: heart blood insufficient to nourish the spirit, kidney essence depleted by fright, and ki weakened by grief, which is the lung's specific emotional domain.

The Edo doctor would diagnose using the pulse, face, and quality of the patient's voice and movement. He wouldn't understand the relational architecture, the attachment trauma, or the long history of Izo's delf being damaged by criticism, but he could articulate that Izo's ki is not moving freely and his shen is not properly housed and that the cause has not been removed.

That last observation is the most significant because the Edo period framework doesn't assume treatment will work while the cause of the illness is still in place. To the Edo doctor, treating fright while the patient continues to be frightened is a bit like trying to bail out water from a boat that still has a massive hole in its hull. Our Edo doctor would consider the continuing exposure to violence (being asked to commit more murders) as a fundamental obstacle to treatment even without the modern concept of ongoing trauma.

Treatment: Herbs, Acupuncture, Moxibustion, Diet

Medical interventions for Izo's condition would most likely take the form of herbal preparations in the Edo period and many classical formulas exist that map onto specific parts of Izo's presentation.

Suan zao ren tang nourishes heart-blood and calms the spirit. Its primary indications are insomnia, palpitations, and night sweats in a patient who is deficient, the thin, restless, undernourished quality of someone running on empty. (Modern day use is still treatment of insomnia.)

Chai hu shu gan san moves liver ki stagnation and relieves constraint. For a man carrying suppressed anger, rigid with the effort of managing what he cannot express, this addresses the mechanism rather than just the symptom. (Modern day use is for anxiety and depression.)

Ba zhen tang, the eight-treasure decoction, replenishes both ki and blood following significant depletion. After Izo's injury and fever and certainly after his time in jail, this is the formula for a body that has spent everything it had and needs the most fundamental kind of rebuilding.

The Edo doctor would also consider acupuncture and moxibustion to treat the physical injury and the body following Izo's time in jail. The management of chronic pain through acupuncture has a reasonably strong modern evidence base, and a skilled period practitioner would be working with the same points and principles that evidence base has validated.

Diet would be taken seriously as treatment rather than adjunct. Specific foods for specific deficiencies. The instruction to eat, which the physician gives repeatedly, is not merely common sense but grounded in a detailed theory of how particular foods nourish particular organ systems and how the depletion of those systems manifests in precisely the symptoms Izo presents with.

What's Helpful about the Period Framework?

In an Edo period setting, the mind-body integration would be a fundamental premise of the entire system while modern approaches open still divide the psychological from the physical in practice, even when holistic approaches are considered. The trauma specialist, pain management physician, and addiction counselor are three different people with different notes in different charts, while the Edo doctor would be all three simultaneously and his integrating framework is arguably more appropriate for Izo's treatment than the fragmented modern approach would be.

Another benefit of the Edo period approach would be that the doctor's consultation is not an hour followed by a bill, regardless of how much or little progress has been made. An Edo physician who is genuinely attending a patient with a disorder of the heart-mind would be less bound by billing requirements and clincial structures and therefore more responsive to the patient. If Izo stopped talking, the Edo doctor would not consider therapeutic silence and countertransference. He would just wait because that's what a doctor sitting with a patient would do. This absence of structure could actually create a lot more space for the kind of gradual, unhurried opening that Izo's treatment would need.

The Buddhist philosophical framework, which is available to the Edo doctor as cultural context even if not as clinical tool, offers something the modern framework struggles to provide: a way of thinking about suffering that does not require its elimination as the treatment goal. Modern therapy is fundamentally oriented toward symptom reduction, toward the construction of a life that hurts less, toward functional improvement. These are not wrong goals, but can create the message that the suffering itself is the problem, that the patient will be fixed when the suffering is reduced, which can generate shame about the pace of recovery and the persistence of pain.

The Buddhist framework that saturates the period says something different: suffering is the fundamental condition of existence and arises from attachment. The task is not to eliminate suffering but to change one's relationship to it. That's potentially a much more realistic and compassionate frame than the modern therapeutic promise of recovery. The Edo physician who has absorbed this framework does not need to promise that the pain will go away. He only needs to be present with it, to treat what the body offers for treatment, and demonstrate through his own continued presence that suffering can be witnessed without the one witnessing it being destroyed by it.

What's Missing?

The architecture of Izo's relationship with Takechi Hanpeita would not be seen as a medical problem by our Edo doctor. He might observe that his patient seems distressed in connection with his teacher and could note the particular quality of the pulse when the teacher is mentioned. He might even realize, through clinical experience, that his patient's suffering is organized around this relationship in some unusual way, but he would have no framework to understand what the relationship is doing to the patient's sense of self, no concept of attachment trauma, and no theory of how early relational experiences have shaped adult Izo's capacity for self-regard.

The Edo doctor would also absolutely miss the difficulties Izo has with reading and writing as dyslexia or some other learning difference. He would consider it to either be insufficient effort or insufficient intelligence, which is exactly what has been doing damage to Izo for years.

Izo's drinking would be understood as a problem but not as a strategy for self-soothing. The Edo period framework would consider alcohol as something that generates damp-heat in the body, harms the liver and stomach, and clouds the spirit. Which is all correct in its way. But it does not capture the drinking having become the patient's primary tool to regulate his nervous system enough to sleep, and therefore lacks any specific approaches to reducing alcohol use.

The (passive) suicidal ideation is probably the most serious gap between the Edo doctor and our modern framework. He might recognize that the patient seems to not be trying to live, but he would have no systematic way to assess or address it.

An Example Visit

Izo's visit with a skilled kampo doctor might look something like this:

The doctor would take his pulse at each visit and adjust the herbal prescriptions accordingly, which means each visit involves laying hands on the patient, which is both medical and relational. Physical contact, in a person who has had his body treated as a tool and an obstacle, as something to be used and punished and sent back out regardless of its condition, is not a neutral clinical act. The doctor taking his pulse carefully, attending to it, adjusting treatment based on what the body is reporting, communicates something about the value of the body that the patient has not been receiving.

The doctor would give concrete, practical instructions: eat this, avoid that, take this decoction at this time, rest when possible, reduce the sake. The concreteness is important for Izo specifically: he functions best when he has something to do, something to follow, or a structure to orient within. The herbal prescription is not just medicine but a daily practice that encodes the physician's continued attention and gives the patient a tangible action that constitutes taking care of himself.

The doctor would also be a consistent, predictable presence who returns when he says he will return and treats the patient the same way each time regardless of whether the patient has improved or worsened or relapsed or failed to follow instructions. Consistency of this kind is treatment for a nervous system that has been shaped by inconsistency.

The doctor likely would find ways to talk with the patient about his teacher. Not as a therapeutic intervention consciously designed to address the attachment trauma, but because a doctor who is paying attention will notice that when the teacher is mentioned, something happens in the pulse and something happens in the face, and because a physician who cares about his patient will eventually, gently, find ways to sit with him in that particular pain.

He would, in the context of Buddhism available to him, be able to say something true about attachment and suffering that is not equivalent to the modern therapeutic frame but would be helpful regardless. That the suffering of losing a person one has loved (even a person who proved unworthy of that love) is real suffering, and that real suffering is not something to be ashamed of or managed away, but something to be sat with until it changes shape.

What is Lost in the Period Treatment

+ Passive suicidal ideation would go unrecognized as a specific clinical risk. The doctor might sense that the patient seems not to be trying to live, might increase specific herbs,or might spend more time with him. But he would not have a systematic assessment tool and he would not have language for the specific risk.

+ The mechanism of the adrenaline response would never be explained to the patient. Izo would carry the belief that the involuntary laughter is something wrong with him indefinitely, because the period framework has no account of adrenal flooding that would constitute a corrective explanation. The shame around it would persist.

+ The dyslexia would never be named. He would remain, in his own accounting, a man who is stupid, because no one in his period had the framework to tell him otherwise.

+ The schema-level self-concept damage would be addressed only incidentally, through the accumulation of corrective relational experience with the physician rather than through targeted intervention. This is slower and less complete than schema therapy but would likely produce some change over time.

---

It was summer, and Izo had been outside since after breakfast.

His mother had watched him go, small legs at a dead run toward the back fence, cotton kimono twisted half-sideways before he'd even cleared the engawa. She had not seen him since, which wasn't unusual. What was unusual was when he came back carrying something.

She heard him before she saw him. The hard, too-fast slap of bare feet outside, then the particular bright noise he made only when he had accomplished something that mattered very much to him. Rie set down the bowl she was holding. Four years had taught her that this noise required both hands free.

He appeared in the doorway with his cheeks red from the sun, his hair a mess, both hands cupped in front of him like he was carrying water. He was breathing hard from running.

"Okasan," he said, with great gravity.

"Yes."

"I brought you something."

He crossed the room at a trot, stopped directly in front of her knees, and opened his hands.

Rie looked at the frog. The frog looked at Rie. Then it jumped.

Izo spun after it, overbalanced, and sat down hard. Somewhere near the corner, the frog made a low, offended sound. Izo scrambled up, breathless with purpose.

"Izo."

He already had it again. He turned to show her, hugely pleased with himself, reading nothing in her face that struck him as requiring a response.

"He was by the stream," he explained. "He can live in a bucket. He'll eat the flies."

His father came in then, plainly dressed in a blue cotton kimono, drawn by the commotion from working on repairing their bamboo fence. He took in the scene with the mild look of a man who had not yet understood what he was looking at. Then he understood. The pleasant look did not change, which Rie had always supposed was a deliberate survival strategy.

"Izo," he said. "Come here a moment."

He crouched until they were eye to eye, which made Izo stand a little straighter out of instinct. Boy, frog, hair sticking up on the left side: his father considered all of it with the seriousness it was apparently owed.

"Is he a good frog?"

Izo gave the question real thought. "Very good. He jumped very far."

"Mm." His father nodded. "What do frogs eat?"

"Flies." Immediate. He had prepared for this.

"Flies," his father agreed. "Also small fish. Water beetles. Things from the stream." He tilted his head. "How many flies do we have in a bucket?"

Izo's eyes slid sideways. He did not answer.

"That's what I thought." There was no judgment in it. "A bucket frog gets thin and sad. A stream frog catches his own dinner." A pause, letting the arithmetic settle. "Which do you think is better for him?"

Izo looked down at his cupped hands. The frog's throat moved against his fingers, patient, damp, very much alive.

"The stream," he said at last, in the tone of a boy conceding a fair argument he had badly wanted to win.

"I think so too."

His father patted him once on the head, which made the hair worse, then rose to get back to working on the fence.

Izo carried the frog back to the stream himself. He walked the whole way with the careful, flat-footed gait of someone transporting something precious, hands cupped, elbows out, tongue pressed into his cheek with concentration. At the bank he knelt, lowered his hands to the water, and opened them.

The frog sat in his palms a moment longer, as if out of politeness. Then it was gone, one clean kick, a ring spreading on the water where it landed.

Izo stayed crouched at the edge for a long time, watching that spot. Not sad, exactly, just making sure the frog knew where to find him, in case it reconsidered.

It didn't. But a second frog surfaced near a rock a little way downstream, fat and golden-eyed, and Izo went perfectly still on the bank to watch it, which was a reasonable consolation.

I've had a chance the other day to sit down with a few of my colleagues (psychology technicians and clinical social workers) to take a closer look at what Izo might be like in a relationship, which was an interesting exercise in trying to apply the prior information we have, both from historical sources and the materials already on this tumblr, to practice.

---

The Problem

Okada Izo has no idea what a healthy, reciprocal relationship looks like outside of his earliest childhood home experiences. Every significant relationship in his adult life has been organized around a clear power differential in which his role was to be useful, earn his place, and ask for nothing in return. This is not a pattern he chose, it's the only template available to him, built from years of observational learning and direct experience, and it will activate automatically in any relationship that triggers the attachment system. (See thoughts on Attachment and Social-Cognitive Learning.)

The specific risk in a romantic relationship is that the attachment stakes are higher than in most other relational contexts, which means the template activates more strongly. The closer someone gets, the more the nervous system recognizes the situation as one in which approval can be withdrawn and belonging can be lost, and the more strongly it reaches for the only strategies it knows: make yourself useful, ask for nothing, absorb what is given without complaint, disappear before you cause damage.

A romantic partner would not necessarily see the template operating. They would see someone who is attentive, remembers small details, shows up when he says he will, and is quietly and consistently present. These look like the qualities of a good partner. But underneath them is a person who is performing adequacy, who is working hard to be worth keeping rather than trusting that he is, and who is waiting, with the patience of someone who has been waiting his whole life, for the moment the relationship ends.

He expects it to end and always expects it to end. Not consciously, but as the quiet operational assumption of a nervous system that has learned belonging is temporary and conditional. He will be working against that assumption every day without knowing he's doing it.

New Relationships

The early period of a romantic relationship with Izo would be genuinely confusing for any partner, because the signals would be mixed in ways that are difficult to interpret without the clinical context.

He would be present and attentive in ways that feel meaningful. His memory for small details would register to a partner as a form of care, (because it is), but it's also the vigilant attention of someone whose nervous system has been tracking the preferences and moods of authority figures as a survival strategy for most of his life, repurposed into something that resembles attentiveness.

He would be physically present in a way that has its own quality. He is comfortable in his body in specific ways and physical closeness is probably one of the domains where he is less defended than in verbal emotional expression.

He would be funny, occasionally, in the understated way that surfaces when he is comfortable: dry observation, timing that suggests he has been paying attention to something longer than he let on. This would be surprising to a partner who had read his seriousness as the only thing about him.

He would be entirely impossible to read on the subject of what he actually wants or needs because he doesn't know. He has genuinely not developed reliable access to his own preferences in relational contexts because having preferences was not safe. A partner who asks him directly what he wants would receive a pause that goes on too long and then an answer oriented around what he thinks they want to hear. That's not because he is dishonest but because he genuinely doesn't know how to answer that question in any other way.

Likely Patterns

Izo doesn't ask for things, at least not directly or clearly. He might arrange circumstances so that the thing he needs becomes available without requiring him to name it, which is a form of asking that allows him to deny if he were questioned. But a straightforward I need this from you is not in his repertoire, and any partner who waits for it will wait indefinitely.

The problem is that unmet needs don't disappear, they accumulate. They either eventually become resentment or the quiet exhaustion of someone who is perpetually giving from a reserve that is never replenished because the mechanism for replenishing it is broken. He would never blame a partner for this, he would blame himself. He would decide he was asking too much even without having asked anything.

He interprets silence as judgment. This is the Katsu Kaishu problem replicated in intimate context: when a partner is quiet, distracted, tired, or preoccupied with something entirely unrelated, his nervous system reads it as withdrawal of approval. He won't ask what is wrong, nor will he check his interpretation against reality. He will assume the worst available interpretation and begin the internal preparation for loss since that is the only template he knows.

He disappears rather than repairs. When something goes wrong in the relationship (conflict, misunderstanding, a moment where he feels he has failed to be adequate) his first response is to remove himself from the situation before he causes further damage. This is the pattern we also see with Katsu Kaishu: the middle of the night departure, a preemptive disappearance that prevents his rejection rejection by making the exit his own.

In a romantic relationship, this would look like shutting down, going quiet, and being emotionally absent. Not coldness exactly, more like retreating inside himself. A partner's natural response would be to reach toward him, which may or may not work, depending on how far in he has gone and how much evidence the relationship has accumulated to feel safe. At the beginning of the relationship it's unlikely to work.

He cannot receive care in a straightforward way. This may be the most consistent difficulty. Every time care is offered, Izo manages it at a slight distance: he says sorry for flinching when his arm is treated, he receives practical instructions with mild exasperation that functions as a deflection from the emotional content of being tended to. He says thank you for the arm at the door, which is simultaneously genuine gratitude and the most minimizing possible framing of what the sessions actually provided.

In a romantic relationship this would create a specific and frustrating pattern: a partner offers care and Izo receives it in a way that somehow transforms the offer into something practical and bounded, something that doesn't require him to be vulnerable in the way genuine receiving requires. He will do things for a partner with consistency and attention and accept a specific practical help. He will not, without significant time, trust, and a relationship that has demonstrated its safety through sustained repetition, allow himself to be cared for in a fuller sense. Any partner who tries to hold him emotionally in the early period will find someone who is simultaneously reaching for it and managing it away, and will not understand why both things are happening at once. Izo won't be able to explain it. Not only does he not have the language to do so, but he also doesn't fully know it is happening.

He blushes and finds it mortifying. This is documented and worth including because it relevant: his affect leaks through the face before he can manage it. A partner would see things in his face he has not given them permission to see, which is both the thing that makes him readable when he is trying not to be and the thing that produces the blushing, which is the body's protest against the unintended disclosure.

What He Offers

While all of the above is real and valid, it's not the whole picture. Reducing Izo to his deficits in relationships is the same error people around him have always made: seeing what's missing rather than what is there.

He is loyal beyond what is reasonable. This is the quality that has been most consistently documented and exploited. In a relationship with someone who is not Takechi Hanpeita (someone who does not require it as a mechanism of control), this would be something else entirely. He does not give his loyalty provisionally or strategically. He gives it completely, and he holds it through conditions that would exhaust most people.

He remembers everything. Not in the anxious way of someone cataloguing evidence against themselves (though he does that, too), but in the way of someone who pays genuine attention. He would remember what a partner said about their childhood, the name of a friend they mentioned once, what they looked like on a specific evening, the small preferences and aversions that most people forget because they are too busy managing their own experience to track anyone else's.

He is physically present in a way that is uncomplicated. The body is his most functional language. In the domain of physical closeness (not necessarily sexual, but in the simple physical presence of another person) he is less defended. A partner who understands this would know that when words are not available, which is often, the body is still speaking. Izo is not absent in those moments, he is saying something. It requires a partner fluent in that language to receive it.

He has a capacity for joy that is almost entirely undocumented. The ghost stories he told his friends and his brother. The boy who was good at Go, climbed trees, and caught fish. The person who has dimples when he smiles and finds it embarrassing and does it anyway when something is genuinely funny. This person does not disappear in the adult. He is there, accessible in specific conditions: when he is comfortable, when he is not being evaluated, when he has momentarily stopped waiting for the verdict. A partner who finds the conditions that make him feel that safe would be given something almost nobody has ever been given: the version of him that existed before the world told him what he was worth.

As he walks down the hall to meet the others by the entrance, he catches sight of Takechi-sensei in the garden. Sensei’s back is turned, he’s in conversation with another man, but Izo would know the silhouette anywhere. He wishes sensei would turn around and wish him good luck or offer words of apology for the other night, but he knows it’s pointless to hope.

It’s only been two days since he was injured during Honma Seiichiro’s assassination, but now he’s leaving the inn again, this time with three others, to murder a man named Ugo Shigekuni, who’s said to be hiding in a home on Kawaramachi street.

“The fuck is he going to do with his arm in a sling?” Murata Chuzaburo’s voice carries across the yard as Izo approaches, but it’s clear he meant for Izo to hear him.

Like a Moth to a Flame

There’s a large moth flying into the paper of the floor lamp beside him, a solid thunk accompanying each attempt to get at the flame, and the sound echoes in Izo’s head as he tries to block out another sound, that of Takechi Hanpeita shouting at him. But in the back of his mind he still registers some words that stand out: Idiot. Useless. Stupid. Worthless.

They’re familiar, having been thrown at him by his teachers, his comrades, even himself sometimes over the years. That describes me perfectly, he thinks.

Above his left shoulder expensive sake soaks into the painted mulberry paper of the sliding doors where the cup sensei threw at him smashed into pieces. He smells the bitter tang of the alcohol and the blood on his cheek where one of the shards cut him. He can almost taste it.

I deserved that, he thinks, though some part of him hopes for Takechi-sensei to care about the cut on his arm instead.

Izo almost bungled Honma Seiichiro’s murder, the task he and five others were assigned earlier that night. Honma’s speed and strength with the sword came as a surprise and Izo (for the first time in years) found himself on the defense against an opponent who was simply better than him.

I could have lost my arm, he thinks for the umpteenth time as the wound throbs against the bandages again.

For a short time, he’d been convinced his arm was gone when he saw the blade flash toward himself and felt the pain. But then he realized that even though he was bleeding a lot and it hurt, his hand was still attached and his fingers were still working. Well, truthfully, it’s not so much that he’d realized, but that one of his comrades told him to stop sniveling about that little scratch, you fucking idiot, and get the fuck up before you get us caught.

He made it back to the inn somehow, light-headed, his sleeve soaked in blood, and his comrades walking ahead of him without concern, while he tried to let go of the panic that was tightening around his heart. I could have died.

Izo doesn’t know what he expected Takechi-sensei to do when he was informed about the injury. He’d assumed sensei would be upset that he was injured. He didn’t expect that sensei would be upset with him for getting hurt.

“… absolutely useless to me with that arm as it is right now…” Izo hears in the background. Sensei’s voice is hard, unforgiving. It’s nothing at all like the voice that used to praise him and coax him into things he didn’t really want to do.

“Get out of my sight, you idiot, until this heals up.”

Manju, soba, and watermelon: three simple foods he enjoys, but manju is his favorite. He doesn't like any foods with a strong smell, such as green onions.

Albert Bandura's social cognitive learning theory may be one of the more interesting frameworks with which to evaluate Okada Izo because it shifts the analytical focus away from what's wrong with him to how did he learn to be who he is. Bandura's theory is fundamentally about the acquisition of behavior, self-concept, and expectations through observation, experience, and the environment.

(Learn more about Bandura's theory here.)

The Framework

Bandura argues that behavior is neither just the product of internal drives nor just of external conditioning: it emerges from the continuous interaction of three things: the person, their behavior, and their environment. None of these three is fixed. Each shapes the other two, and together they determine who someone becomes as a person.

Izo's life is a good example of that loop because it has been running his whole life, as it does with every one of us. Who he was born (his temperament, his physical and mental abilities) met an environment that responded to him in specific ways. Those responses shaped how he behaved, which affected the environment, which affected its responses, changing and shaping him even further.

By the time Izo is 24 and resolving to leave Kyoto for Edo after being removed from the Kinnoto's membership roster, every element of that triad has been in continuous reciprocal motion for two and a half decades.

Observational Learning

Bandura's key insight was that people learn not only from direct experience but also from watching others, evaluating their behavior, its consequences, and the standards it implies. He identified four processes that govern whether observed behavior is copied: attention, retention, reproduction, and motivation.

Izo's observational learning runs on two parallel tracks with entirely different outcomes.

In swordsmanship, all four processes work at their best. He attends to technique with the focused precision of someone who found the one context where attention comes naturally. His memory retains what he observes. His physical capability and speed allow him to accurately reproduce it. And he is motivated by the one reliable source of positive reinforcement available to him: the instructors' praise. He demonstrates that his capacity for observational learning is not impaired but is exceptional in this particular domain.

The second track is his observational learning about himself, his relationships, and what he can reasonably expect from the world.

What he focuses his attention on here is how authority figures respond to him. This attention isn't chosen, it's the scanning of a nervous system that has learned that approval and disapproval are the primary variables determining safety. He notices everything: the quality of the tone when his name is said, whether a look moves toward or past him, whether praise or criticism is directed at him or spoken about him to someone else in the room.

What he retains is a consistent data set: authority figures find him deficient. He is called stupid, vulgar, without dignity. Takechi's wife calls him the stray puppy. His swordsmanship is mocked in front of everyone at Shigakukan. His excellent memory accumulates this material with full fidelity, noting all the negatives.

What he reproduces is a set of behaviors adapted to the environment that produced them: make yourself small, absorb criticism without response, work harder, don't require anything, be useful enough that the authority figure doesn't leave you. These patterns were learned by watching what happened when he behaved otherwise, when enthusiasm was read as bragging, when excitement was read as arrogance, when need turned out to be costly.

The motivation for reproducing these patterns comes from what Bandura calls vicarious reinforcement: he has observed what happens to people who behave differently, who make demands, who express needs openly. The observations have not been encouraging.

Modeling

Bandura identified modeling as the core of observational learning, and noted that a model's influence is stronger when they are high-status, competent, warm, or hold power over the observer.

By those criteria, Takechi is almost perfectly engineered to maximize his influence on Izo. He is nine years older, an authority figure rather than a peer. He embodies everything Edo samurai culture values: he is educated, articulate, politically sophisticated, accomplished, and charismatic. He ran the dojo where Izo first received consistent praise from an adult outside his family. He helped fund the travel that made Izo's training possible. He is, in a real sense, the reason Izo became the swordsman he is.

What Izo learned from watching him is not only swordsmanship. It is a template for what a person of worth looks like, and the gap between them gets absorbed into the template as evidence that one of them is a person of inherent value and the other is valuable only if he is useful.

The modeling of what a relationship looks like is equally damaging. What Izo observes across the years is that the person with power defines the terms. The person without power either earns their place within those terms or loses it. Approval is conditional and variable, and its withdrawal is not a rupture requiring repair but a verdict on the less powerful person's performance. The correct response is more effort and fewer demands.

He learns this both by watching it modeled and by living it as the less powerful person in the most important relationship of his adult life. He then reproduces it in every relationship that follows, because it is the only template he has.

Self-Efficacy

Bandura defines self-efficacy as the belief in one's capacity to execute the behaviors required to produce specific outcomes. He identified four sources from which those beliefs are built: mastery experiences, vicarious experiences, social persuasion, and physiological states.

In swordsmanship, Izo's self-efficacy is high and was built legitimately through all four sources. He has genuine mastery, which he repeatedly demonstrated. He has learned from watching skilled practitioners. He has received real recognition from teachers and peers. His physiological state in the dojo is one of ease rather than anxiety. This was the foundation of his functioning for most of his adult life, something to stand on when everything else was uncertain.

Bandura's theory also predicts what happens when domain-specific self-efficacy is attacked by an authoritative source, which is exactly what Momonoi did at Shigakukan, delivering a public verdict of Izo's incompetence in the one domain where he felt capable. A single high-credibility source can significantly damage self-efficacy even when it contradicts extensive prior mastery. Izo's subsequent pattern of working hard at any dojo that would have him is the behavior of someone compensating through effort because certainty has been lost.

In academic and intellectual domains, his self-efficacy was destroyed before it could even form. Every one of Bandura's four sources worked against him: no mastery experience, because his reading difficulties made the standard tasks (reading and writing) genuinely harder; no vicarious experience he could identify with, because watching peers handle written language easily taught him only that he was deficient by comparison; social persuasion actively and persistently negative; and a physiological state in academic settings of chronic anxiety and shame. The result was a self-efficacy so low it stopped being a belief about capacity and became a belief about identity: not I cannot do this but I am someone who cannot do this kind of thing, which means I am less than those who can.

In relational and social domains, the picture is more complicated. He is socially capable in many respects: outgoing about things he knows, a good storyteller, well-liked at the dojo, functional in Katsu Kaishu's household. But his self-efficacy in the domain of being worth knowing, worth caring for, worth another person's attention without something concrete offered in return, is essentially zero.

This last, specific deficit is the one that drives most of the clinical picture. A person who believes they are not worth knowing without providing value in return cannot ask for care, express needs, stay when they feel they have failed to deliver, or interpret another person's silence as anything other than confirmation of their own inner verdict.

Outcome Expectations

Bandura distinguished between self-efficacy (the belief in capacity to perform a behavior) and outcome expectations (the belief about what that behavior will produce).

Izo's outcome expectation for expressing a need is punishment or withdrawal. This was built from early experience and has been consistently reinforced: his needs are ignored, or the expression of them is used as evidence of deficiency. The teacher who admonished him for his reading. Takechi's silence about the infected arm. The comrades who walked ahead while he managed the panic tightening in his chest. The evidence is sustained and consistent, and it governs his behavior more reliably than any conscious decision.

His outcome expectation for extraordinary effort in service of an authority figure is continued conditional approval. This is what kept him in Takechi's orbit for years. It was not irrational (the approval did come, sometimes) and the memory was enough to keep the expectation alive despite mounting evidence to the contrary. Bandura's theory predicts exactly this: intermittent reinforcement produces the most persistent behavioral patterns, because variable reward keeps the expectation from being extinguished by periods of nothing.

His outcome expectation for disappearing (leaving in the night, walking away without explanation) is temporary relief from managing the gap between what he hoped for and what he received. This is the one expectation in his repertoire that is reliably fulfilled, because disappearing reliably ends the acute discomfort of the situation, even while creating different problems. It persists because it works in the short term, and Bandura is clear about why short-term fulfilled expectations outweigh long-term ones.

Self-Regulation

Bandura's account of self-regulation involves three processes: self-observation, judgment against a standard, and self-response. People monitor their own behavior, compare it to internalized standards, and respond with self-reward or self-punishment.

Izo's self-regulation system is severely dysregulated, but perhaps not in the most obvious way. His self-observation is actually quite acute. He notices his own behavior with considerable precision (the nail-chewing, the blush he can't control, the adrenaline laughter, the hands that don't feel like his hands). He is not unaware of himself.

The problem is the standard against which he measures himself.

The standards he has internalized are not his own. They were provided by the environment that shaped him, and they belong to people who found him deficient: the teacher, Tosa's class structure, Takechi. He measures himself against these standards with the same excellent memory that served him in the dojo, and the measurement produces the same result every time: deficient.

The self-punishment that follows is not dramatic. It is quiet, persistent, habitual, the self-punishment of someone who has internalized the verdict so thoroughly that he administers it himself. I deserved that. That describes me perfectly. These are the routine operation of a self-regulation system whose standards were written by people who thought nothing of him.

The self-reward side of the system is nearly absent. He has no internalized standard of this was good enough, because the only standards available came from external authorities, and those standards never included a category for adequate.

The one partial exception is the dojo, where consistent external praise and genuine mastery experience made something close to self-reward occasionally possible. He finally found something he was good at. That sentence describes the only domain where his self-regulation system could produce a positive self-response, and it took until he was twelve or thirteen, and required the specific environment of a fencing hall with a teacher who recognized his ability.

Reciprocal Determinism in Action

The most powerful application of Bandura's framework is tracing how the three elements interacted across Izo's development.

The child who entered the environment had natural physical capability, an exceptional memory, a learning difference with written language, and a temperament that was outgoing when he felt capable and withdrawn when he did not. The environment labeled the learning difference as stupidity, which produced shame, withdrawal, and further negative feedback. Simultaneously, it recognized his physical capability in the dojo, which produced confidence, hard work, more skill, more recognition. His behavior adapted appropriately to both, but the withdrawal that served him in the classroom was generalized to any context where he might be evaluated and found deficient.

When Takechi entered the picture, the dynamics shifted fundamentally. His environment valued Izo for swordsmanship, usefulness, and loyalty and found him deficient in everything else. Izo's behavior adapted accordingly: maximize the valued thing, minimize the deficient things, ask for nothing. The environment rewarded this with intermittent approval, which reinforced the adaptation. Izo then became progressively more organized around the single relationship that provided the only meaningful positive self-evaluation available to him.

By the time of the first assassination, the three elements are locked in a configuration that reinforces itself. He cannot refuse the relationship that provides his reliable sense of worth. He is being sent to do things that will damage him further, because the behavior reinforced across years is compliance and usefulness. And the environment will keep requiring exactly that behavior, regardless of its cost to Izo.

Person, behavior, environment, each maintaining the other two in exactly the arrangement that is destroying him.

The Katsu Kaishu Period

This period is a genuine environmental shift that allows observation of how the other two elements respond.

Katsu's environment was one where Izo's worth was not conditional on usefulness. He explained things, included him in conversations, and treated his attention and intelligence as worth engaging. The behavioral response was immediate: Izo stopped drinking, functioned, and was present. These changes are evidence that the patterns produced by Takechi's environment were simply adaptations and not Izo's character, that a different environment could produce different adaptations.

Bandura predicts exactly this: reciprocal determinism is not fixed. If you change one element sufficiently, the others have the conditions to shift.

What Bandura also predicts, and the history confirms, is that outcome expectations built over years do not update quickly enough to prevent old expectations from governing behavior when the new environment produces an ambiguous signal. When Katsu said you should not enjoy killing people, the new environment suddenly produced something that matched the old template: evaluation, finding deficiency, and silence. The outcome expectation that approval is conditional and can be withdrawn did not need much evidence to reactivate; one misread moment was enough. He left in the middle of the night.

The new environment did not have long enough to update what the old one had spent years building. Bandura's theory does not promise that a better environment works quickly. It suggests a better environment is necessary for change, not that it is sufficient for change to happen immediately.

What Bandura's Framework Offers Treatment

Treatment needs to target the learning history that produced the symptoms, the outcome expectations and self-efficacy beliefs that govern his behavior regardless of conscious intention.

Mastery experiences are primary treatment. Genuine competence recognized in any domain rebuilds the foundation the school teacher, Momonoi, and Takechi dismantled. The dojo was doing this work before the assassinations destroyed its meaning. Something needs to do it again.

The therapeutic relationship itself is treatment in this case. A therapist who engages Izo's attention and intelligence without asking for any kind of performance is not just building an alliance but a corrective observational learning experience for someone whose primary model for relationships was Takechi Hanpeita.

Outcome expectations update through repetition, not insight. Izo cannot decide to ask for things. He can only accumulate enough experiences of asking and receiving something other than punishment that the expectation shifts.

And the standard against which he measures himself, built entirely from other people's verdicts, needs to be examined piece by piece, until he can construct one he generated himself.