Sagara Souzou & the Sekihoutai

Searching for reality behind the myth...

The story behind this fan is one very strong reason for why it takes me so long to get things related to Sagara done.  I can take only so much of this man's story at a time before I have to distance myself from the emotions it evokes.

This is one of two fans Sagara had with him when he was arrested.  The handwriting is his and appears to be a poem.  After his execution, the fans and his bloody top-knot were taken to the family (probably by a friend) and given to his son, Kawajirou.  The fans and the hair were hidden in the family altar and many years later, his grandson found the hair and asked about it.  Thus began a grandson's personal vow to restore his grandfather's honor.

(From Sagara Souzou to sono doushi by Hasegawa Shin, 1943, used without permission)

On one hand, this has been a nightmare... attempting to learn about an obscure, 19th Century, Japanese idealist and warrior without benefit of knowing Japanese is like Don Quixote tilting at windmills.  To do it while unemployed and trying to recover from an illness makes it even more difficult.  I am indebted to a lot of people, who I can never repay for their time and generosity.

On the other hand, it has been (and continues to be) an amazing journey.  In this case, it's more like having to deal with construction zones on a road to someplace I very much want to go to.

Even the Japanese are somewhat clueless about Sagara.  Honestly, I think he was close to being on his way to oblivion until Watsuki Nobuhiro brought him back to life in Rurouni Kenshin.  He deserves to be remembered, not just because he was a man who fought valiantly for his country and met with betrayal, but because he was the product of a unique time with connections to many things that have been lost in time.  He fought for the preservation of his culture and I feel some obligation to help.

More than anything, Sagara Souzou deserves to be known for who and what he was and not just fictional characterizations that create assumptions posing as facts, and sources of information need to be documented, stored, and made available.  He was a fascinating man in his own right.  He doesn't need storytellers to make him anything more.

This website is an eternal work in progress, but it has met with a complete standstill.  Not only did I need to take the time to organize information that has been collected, but I was also running into major gaps of information, some of which we may never locate or fully understand.  Other sites and sources (usually with no documentation to back information up) hint at so much and it's very easy to find yourself extrapolating instead of getting to what really happened.  Good sources of information are in Japanese and that takes people to translate... a very long and often painful process.  At the same time, with the wealth of erroneous information on English-language websites, I do not want to hang onto information indefinitely.

Information is currently being collected and organized on public journals.  The information on these journals is very raw and, at first glance, appears haphazard.  It is.  Click on Memories on the pages linked here to find a basic index.  I encourage you, however, to peruse the entries.  There's a wealth of information there and you can get a sense of what one goes through to get at information (including how confusing  computer software-generated translations are).  They are active, working journals, so they are continually being updated as new information is found (and I catch up).

There are two journals I work from and each is mirrored to protect against losing the information it took a lot of people to find and to maximize participation in locating information.  If you are a registered GreatestJournal and/or LiveJournal user, please feel free to contribute or comment.  I will also provide a link to the site guestbook, which gives you the option to post a comment publicly or privately.  The journal links will take you to the User Info pages; to get to the entries, click on the hyperlinked User Name on the User Info page.

Sagara Souzou Historical Information

mirror (LiveJournal)

Sekihoutai Historical Information

mirror (LiveJournal)

Sagara Souzou & the Sekihoutai site guestbook

Biographical data on Sagara Souzou

NOTE ON THE TRANSLATION ENTRIES: Do not take the text of the computer-generated translations as fact.  Very often, the way the translation software translates things is very literal and not quite what is being said.  The most mechanical translations can do is give an idea of what the text is about and sometimes provide additional keywords for searching.

Became a fan of Sagara Souzou because of Rurouni Kenshin?  Why not add your name to the list of those who are a fan of the intrepid Sagara Taichou, too?

See?  I'm on the list!

You might be amazed at how many actual and potential connections Sagara Souzou had to the Shinsengumi.  Without the people at SHQ, none of this would've been possible.  I strongly encourage you to visit and join us.  We don't bite.