Assassination of Kiyokawa Hachiro — The Birth of the Shinsengumi

The assassination of Kiyokawa Hachiro on May 30, 1863 (the thirteenth day of the fourth month of Bunkyū 3) near Azabu Ichinohashi in Edo was carried out by shogunate agents. Kiyokawa, a charismatic swordsman and sonnō jōi (revere the emperor, expel the barbarians) activist, had engineered the recruitment of roughly 240 rōnin — ostensibly as a shogunal bodyguard unit — and immediately upon their arrival in Kyoto declared that their true mission was to enforce imperial expulsion of foreigners. This audacious reversal infuriated the shogunate and led directly to Kiyokawa's death at the hands of the swordsman Sasaki Tadasaburō and other government agents. He was 34.

The rōnin Kiyokawa had assembled were the seed of two subsequent organizations: those who remained in Kyoto became the Shinsengumi; those who returned east with Kiyokawa were incorporated into the Shinchōgumi. Kiyokawa's murder is emblematic of the political assassination culture that pervaded the final decade of the Tokugawa shogunate, when the Japanese sword was still an active instrument of political violence rather than a ceremonial artifact. The swords used by late Edo and Bakumatsu swordsmen belonged to the shin-shintō tradition (new-new swords, ca. 1764–1868), blades that combined stylistic reverence for ancient forms with the practical cutting performance demanded by an era of genuine street combat.