Takéchi Hanpeita is the focus of Part II of Samurai Assassins. Following is a slightly edited excerpt, without footnotes:

During the summer of 1864, Takéchi painted self-portraits, the bearded face haggard, cheeks hollow, body emaciated after nearly ten months in his squalid jail cell. In one portrait he is seated cross-legged, his chest exposed beneath an open kimono, a fan in his right hand, his left hand placed on his knee. Another depicts a similar pose, with an open book in hand instead of the fan. Pronounced in both is a stoic composure in face of impending doom, founded on an inner-strength developed through years of martial training and study, and manifested through his eyes. Above the image in the first painting he included a poem, beginning with the metaphor of a fragrant flower and rejecting any notion of shame in his imprisonment as long as he lived up to his bushidō-based values. In a letter to his wife and sister probably composed around the same time, he wrote with humor that when drawing his self-portrait he was struck by his own “excessive good looks”—then he suddenly turned serious: “when I look in the mirror [I see that] I am thinner and that my moustache has grown out and my cheeks are hollow.” But, he assured them, they need not worry because “my mind is strong.”

[Takéchi Hanpeita’s self-portrait appears in Samurai Assassins, courtesy of Kochi Prefectural Museum of History.]

For more on Takéchi Hanpeita:

Samurai Assassins Part II: Takéchi Hanpeita

Takechi Hanpeita: Samurai

---

 

“Ryoma fans” at the annual gathering held in Tokyo last October visited Sakamoto Ryoma-related sites. Shinagawa was one of the destinations. Located there was Tosa’s residence at Samezu, where the retired daimyo of Tosa, Yamauchi Yodo, had lived for a number of years; and where Ryoma and other Tosa samurai had been stationed.

Kiyoharu Omino, the distinguished writer and scholar of Bakumatsu history, gave talks at Yodo’s nearby gravesite and at the reconstructed Hamakawa Battery of Tosa Han – whose eight guns would not have been able to hit Perry’s ships in Edo Bay in the summer of 19854 even if they had been fired. Ryoma, at age twenty at the time, received gunnery training at the Hamakawa Battery as a student of Sakuma Shozan, Mr. Omino wrote in the explanatory panel at the site.