* Image is for illustrative purposes only.Kirino Toshiaki (Nakamura Hanjirō)
桐野利秋（中村半次郎）
One of the "Four Great Assassins" of the Bakumatsu Era, Imperial Army Major General
Description
Life
Born in 1838 in Kagoshima, Satsuma Province, as the third son of Nakamura Yoemon (also known as Kirino Kaneaki), a low-ranking castle-town samurai. He was originally known as Nakamura Hanjirō. Born into a poor family, he reportedly had no formal teacher in scholarship or martial arts, but is said to have mastered swordsmanship on his own to the level of an expert.
Jigen-ryū Swordsmanship
Some accounts hold that he trained under Yakumaru Kaneyoshi of the Yakumaru Jigen-ryū school, or under the Ijūin family's Ko-Jigen-ryū line, though his exact lineage of instruction is not firmly established. He is generally described as having perfected, largely through self-study, the Jigen-ryū-derived swordsmanship widely practiced among Satsuma retainers.
From the Bakumatsu Era to the Satsuma Rebellion
During the Bakumatsu era he took part in the Sonnō Jōi and anti-shogunate movements in Kyoto, acting as a close attendant of Saigō Takamori. In the Boshin War he served as a staff officer of the Imperial expeditionary headquarters and oversaw the surrender of Aizuwakamatsu Castle. Under the new Meiji government he rose to army major general and commander of the Kumamoto garrison, but resigned along with Saigō in the political crisis of 1873 and returned to Kagoshima. In the 1877 Satsuma Rebellion he commanded the 4th battalion as one of Saigō's field commanders; on September 24 of that year, in the final battle at Shiroyama, he was shot through the forehead and died at the age of 40.
An Anecdote Involving Swords
It is said that when Aizuwakamatsu Castle surrendered during the Boshin War, the former domain lord Matsudaira Katamori presented him with a matched pair of long and short swords mounted in gold and silver fittings. This episode, in which a defeated commander gave swords to a victorious officer, is remembered as an illustration both of Kirino's renown and of the weight that swords carried in the samurai society of the time.
Later Reputation
Feared under his original name Nakamura Hanjirō as "Hanjirō the Man-Slayer," he later served at Saigō Takamori's side through the turmoil of the Meiji Restoration and ultimately died alongside him in the Satsuma Rebellion. His life is still widely recounted today as emblematic of the Bakumatsu-Restoration era.