The Elemental Forge: An Equalizer that Redeems History

A fictional story persists from the Bakumatsu period, built around two historical figures. Akizuki Teijirou—a high-ranking Aizu officer, aide to Lord of Aizu Matsudaira Katamori, who had relocated to Kyoto with his army — at great expense to his homeland — to fulfill his duty as the Shugoshoku, the officer responsible for keeping peace among rival clans and ideologies in Kyoto, in a time of unrest. A refined nature and an open mind made Akizuki the liaison who negotiated directly with the opposing clan of Choshu.

Kusaka Genzui was a leading voice among the samurai of Choshu and one of the most prominent young minds his domain had produced. He died at 24, by his own hand, after the failed Kinmon incident. In the aforementioned story, Winter Cicada (冬の蝉, Fuyu no Semi), these two men meet across enemy lines. Both are curious about the West. Both want Japan to change. Their clans go to war in the end, and they are forced to choose between what they found in each other and the loyalty they were born into.

The question that lags behind: What if, beyond fiction, the men on both sides had had the opportunity to know each other beyond politics? Friendships could easily have been forged instead of history’s account.

This question stands relevant today because the Boshin Senso didn't just pick a winner. With it Japan wiped out its own civilization. There has been nothing comparable before or after in terms of speed and totality — not the fall of Rome or the gradual modernizations of other nations. It was destruction dressed as modernization. Maybe that's why there's so much sensitivity today about foreigners "ruining" Japanese culture. Preserving what, exactly — the culture was already gutted from the inside by 1876: Shinbutsu Bunri (1868), Haihan-chiken (1871), the abolition of the Tōdōza (1871), Haitōrei (1876), to name a few!

Men of compatible grit and intellect, who might have recognized each other, were instead sorted by birth into opposing sides of the political-military landscape. The enmity was arbitrary. What it produced was not.

Popular culture rarely sits with that scale of loss. Instead, what it returns to is the bonds the era produced — sworn brotherhoods, retainers who die for their lords, and loyalty between men which, to an isolated modern mind, may seem like love. Bakumatsu fiction runs on this. The audience follows the surface question — will these two men choose each other or their clans — instead of the deeper one: a civilization destroyed itself in a decade, largely over conflicts that could have been mediated.

The architects of each side's special army units trace back to the same lineage. Sato Hikogoro, sponsor of the Shinsengumi, and Yoshida Shoin, the engine behind Choshu's Kiheitai, both owed their concept of a farmer's army to Egawa Eiryu Daikan — Yoshida through his teacher Sakuma Shozan, himself a student at Egawa's school since 1842.

Hijikata Toshizo was the last man to die for the old order. He was also the first traditionalist to gun-arm his unit and study western military organization. Prior to his death he posed for a photo wearing a western watch. The "tradition versus the West" framing sold to the public was never quite true, even for the man who has come to symbolize tradition itself.

Who benefits from that shallow, popular focus today? Not the dead lords, but the living industries and institutions that profit from the Bakumatsu as a source of comfortable, apolitical nostalgia:

• Tourism boards sell Kyoto and Aizu as scenic backdrops to a "romantic" era, not as sites of tragedy and self-destruction — not as the last bastion of feudal loyalty the world will never know again. That loyalty died with Aizu.
• Post-feudal Japanese administrations have told the entire Japanese population that they are all heirs to the samurai culture — first codified by the Kyōiku Chokugo (1890) and its shūshin curriculum, still taught today as dōtoku. Deference to a lord whose face you knew became obedience to a state that doesn't know you exist — thus wiping out both samurai pride and peasant common sense in one fell swoop!
• Publishers and studios who know a doomed love story sells more than a story that asks why the country’s own founding myth is built on a war it started against itself.
• A national education system that still frames the Meiji Restoration as a triumphant modernization story, not as what it also was: samurai killing samurai until nothing of the old order remained. Until the recent 2022, it tracked Japan's children early on into either Western or Japanese history, leaving Japan fragmented in mind, under the pretext of keeping tradition "pure" — keep it pure, but not as an excuse to regulate the mind!

Each of these has more to gain from Japanese readers and consumers today feeling wistful than from feeling implicated. Internal self-destruction is faster and more total than any outside threat. The same mechanism is running now, quieter. Keep people absorbed in the surface — the doomed romance, the sworn brotherhood, the tragic aesthetic, the foreign enemy — and they stop asking who is still profiting from division today. The country doesn’t need another Boshin Sensou to destroy itself again. It just needs enough people looking at the wrong layer of the story.

Author's note: This piece was written after a true connection with a swordsmith who wields more than the skill of the Bizen swordmaking tradition. His work and mind move with the powers of nature, which leave their unnamed grace in the steel he purifies into being. His home province once counted among the domains that fought on the other side of Aizu in the Boshin war. I follow Aizu and the Shinsengumi as a devoted outsider, not by blood. We found each other through his craft and his spiritual practice, not through the lines of ancestors. This connection has proven the point of this essay and melted away some anguish in my heart, personal and historical alike. This is the job of setting history right — not by argument, but by the small, patient acts that make a connection real. A leap in the heart follows, just as the building blocks of Nature - fire, water, earth, air and space - purify, strengthen, connect, hold and grant protective power to a sword crafted with respect for the elements of nature.

© Wabino

8/15/26