[Wanted: International media professionals with vision to make a miniseries based on Romulus Hillsborough’s Samurai Revolution]

[Samurai] working under [Imperial Loyalist leader] Takéchi [Hanpeita] in the name of . . . “divine punishment”—went after . . . just about anyone who opposed or even seemed to challenge [them]. The . . . assassins terrorized the city. The murders they committed in the name of “divine punishment,” write Takéchi’s early biographers, were “a vengeful reaction” against [the shogun’s government], which turned Kyoto into so many scenes of carnage, that “even the dancing girls . . ., frightened by the sound of the carp jumping from the ponds at night, would go together every morning, in their long-sleeved muslin kimonos, to see the freshly severed heads [exposed] at the river bed.” [From Romulus Hillsborough’s Samurai Assassins, companion volume to his Samurai Revolution]

Takéchi ordered his first “divine punishment” assassination in Kyoto in the late summer of 1862. The target was Honma Seiichirō, a fellow Imperial Loyalist activist whom he believed had crossed him.

Honma’s “freshly severed head” was found exposed the next morning, skewered atop a bamboo stake stuck in the mud on the riverbed at a place called Shijōkawara. His body had been dumped into the nearby Takaségawa canal; but in the early morning rain it was washed downstream so that it had to be retrieved by men from the local town office, who found it still fully clothed in a hakama(pleated trousers) of striped Kokura weave, hakata-obi(sash), black haori(jacket), and dark blue tabi(socks). The wooden signboard hanging from the stake below the head announced the reason for Honma’s “divine punishment,” including his having “slandered” [Takéchi’s political allies]; setting the Loyalists against one another; “wicked scheming”; and “other unreasonable wickedness difficult to express in writing”—or in other words, vying for power with Takéchi Hanpeita. [From Samurai Assassins]

Samurai Revolution Miniseries Project