Yamakawa Hiroshi’s Kyoto Shugoshoku Shimatsu, a history of the office of the protector of Kyoto, was published in 1911. The office of the protector of Kyoto, which lasted for more than five years, was held by Matsudaira Katamori, daimyo of Aizu. As the protector of Kyoto, he was the master of the Shinsengumi.

Aizu Boshinsenshi, a history of Aizu’s role in the Boshin War, was published in 1933 and compiled and edited by a group of Aizu scholars under the general supervision of Yamakawa Kenjirō, Hiroshi’s younger brother.

Hiroshi was a minister to Katamori. Kenjirō, just 14 years old at the time of the Meiji Restoration, was a president of Tokyo Imperial University. Both brothers served the Meiji government in the House of Peers.

Around the time I went to Rome in June 2017, shortly after publishing Samurai Assassins, I had decided that I would not write anymore about this history because the research was too demanding. But the Colosseum changed my mind. The next month, shortly after returning home, I started a book about the Shinsengumi. I’m almost finished.

This memorial stone monument was erected by former Shinsengumi officer Nagakura Shinpachi and others at Takinogawa in Kita-ku, Tokyo in 1876, around nine years after the fall of the Tokugawa Bakufu, to memorialize 106 former Shinsengumi corpsmen. Engraved on the front of the monument are the names of the late commander, Kondo Isami, and the late vice-commander, Hijikata Toshizo, set apart from the other 104 men, whose names appear on either side of the stone. After Kondo was executed by the army of the new Imperial government in the spring of 1868, his headless corpse is believed to have been buried at this site.

Kondo and Hijikata are the focus of The Shogun’s Last Samurai Corps: The Bloody Battles and Intrigues of the Shinsengumi, the new and expanded edition of my previous book on the Shinsengumi, due to be released in March 2021.

[The oil painting of Kondo Isami, based on the more famous photograph, belongs to the KojimaMuseum in Machida, Tokyo.]

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Shinsengumi Commander Kondo Isami and Vice-commander Hijikata Toshizo were glorified as heroes upon their return to their native Tama in early 1868, shortly after the fall of the Bakufu. In death, not long thereafter, they were apotheosized. On the grounds of Takahata Fudo temple in Hino (in Tama), the stone Monument of the Two Heroes was completed in 1888, twenty years after Kondo’s execution, nineteen years after Hijikata fell in battle. Over a century later a bronze statue of Hijikata was erected near the monument. As I wrote in the closing of Shinsengumi: The Shogun’s Last Samurai Corps, “[t]he right hand grips a sword. The left fist is clenched. The eyes… the eyes battle-ready, are ever prepared for death, to meet Kondo underground.”

[I took this photo in October 2003 while researching Shinsengumi: The Shogun’s Last Samurai Corps (Tuttle, 2005). A new edition with a new Introduction and revised title, The Shogun’s Last Samurai Corps, will be published in March 2021.