Rurouni Kenshin: Politics & Philosophy

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Politics

At this juncture I should, perhaps, note that my field is Colonial and US literature to 1900. That means I wind up teaching the accounts of both the Revolutionary and Civil wars in the US. If anything my attitude toward this nation’s history is more cynical and caustic than the opinions expressed below. It’s awfully hard to read things like the Federalist Papers, John Adams’ letters or Reconstruction writers without getting cynical. Among other things, this means that I’m familiar with the whitewashing that happens in any national consciousness after an internal war–the stories we tell ourselves to try and make the whole thing less nasty, bloody, vicious, harsh, utilitarian and above all confused than it was. If you’re disturbed by dour attitudes toward politics, you should probably skip ahead to the Philosophy section.

When I speak of the political sophistication of this show, I am not speaking in a particular sense but rather in a generic one. As far as particulars go, RK strives not to go there at all. The backstory of our older characters is really remarkably vague. A resounding silence surrounds Ishin Shishi politics, in particular–a silence of downright derridian proportions. Nowhere in the RK storyline does it mention that the revolutionary party was also the nationalist/isolationist party (and given how many misconceptions I find floating around about US civil war politics, I hesitate to assume that it’s common knowledge); all we get are some fairly vague references to dignity (ishin; this one also means intrigue/treachery and restoration; I kind of wonder when that first definition came along). Nothing about how they were pissed off at the Tokugawa shogunate, at least in part, for caving in to Admiral Perry and Co. We certainly don’t have the aftermath of their success spelled out–that the victorious party did a spectacular 180 and more or less threw the country open to Western trade in the name of the new “civilization and enlightenment” agenda. This was not, necessarily, out of keeping with a general agenda of restoring/promoting Japan’s “dignity.” But it was certainly a radical change in immediate goals. Clearly, there were some politically pragmatic souls high up in the Ishin Shishi infrastructure at the time of victory. (Well, victory enough to start setting national policy, at any rate.)

What we get instead is a sort of undercurrent of institutional criticism. Saitou is probably the best example. His agenda is stability, for all that he’s, personally, immensely flexible in an odd sort of way. He supported the Shogunate, but when that was thrown down he cheerfully (well, sort of) accepted a rather highly placed position in the new government. By his own admission, however, he did so in order to root out the inevitable corruptions of the Meiji system. He seems to serve, less any particular government, than an ideal of Japan as a nation and people. Everyone, including Kenshin, seems to feel that Saitou is an anachronism in the Meiji era, that he doesn’t belong, that he is part of Edo. But the fact that he supported the Shogun while apparently harboring ideals much closer to the stated ideals of the Ishin Shishi makes me think he’s much more than a simple hold-over. Rather, he seems to be the constant; just as constant as the corruption he resists. Saitou is not really ideologically bound to either Edo or Meiji. His ideals stand on their own, apart from any particular government. This says to me that one subtext in this show is that any particular government will be inescapably corrupt, and what a given person needs to do is decide exactly what her own position is and then act on it.

From the other direction, Himura shows up some of the same thing. His ideals never falter; it’s just that his experiences after placing himself under the command of a particular government were so disillusioning that he refused to ever have anything to do with government as such again. Instead, he went out among the people, seeking to put his ideals back into practice on an individual level. Hiko, upon hearing about this, tells Kenshin that he’s finally gotten the purpose of Hiten Misturugi Ryu right, after a significant detour. This nicely echoes what he yells at the fouteen year old Kenshin–that he must remain a free agent in order to genuinely protect the people.

Governments in general come out pretty smeared in this story. Possessing ideals and sticking by them, however, seems to be applauded. Talk about the personal being political. That’s what I mean by a sophisticated message.

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Philosophy

I hate to break things into dualisms; threesomes are so much more fun. But dualism is a major pattern of thought in both Asian and Western culture, and it seems to have been one of the primary structuring tropes of RK… I’m sorry, I’ve been reading literary criticism for my candidacy exams, let me try that again. Dualisms are a big thing in RK. Hm. Maybe that was too far in the other direction. I’ll work on it.

At any rate, one of the major patterns I espy in this show is the need to balance what I’ve started to call desire with an ethical code. Desire, in this particular instance, encompasses that adrenaline rush I mentioned earlier–a taste for living on the edge, the desire to test oneself, one’s skill, on the edge of death. The hunger for extreme stimuli that leads people into competition with deadly weapons, understanding that, at the historical point in question, after a long period of increasing stylization, “martial arts” wasn’t a simple matter of skill or form any more. It was death. Desire includes the thrill, the endorphins, the pride of survival, as well as the love of the form itself. It’s the sort of thing that people who don’t have it tend to label as crazy.

RK offers us lots of really bad examples of what happens to characters who don’t manage to balance their desire with a code that provides both motivation and limits. Jin’e, for instance. I would argue that one of the main reasons he falls to Kenshin is that he is operating on nothing but his desire. And desire necessarily involves a certain enchantment with death. In fact, Jin’e seems to view death with downright erotic fascination–recall that when he knows he’s defeated by Battousai he actually asks to “feel the sword” of his opponent. Recall also his refrain that killing, fighting and eventually death are “good feelings”. Jin’e graphically demonstrates the problems of not having a code to supply counterbalancing pressure to live; once defeated, and denied his… release… by Himura’s blade, there’s nothing left to keep him alive. No “try, try again,” no “live to fight another day.” None of that. So the idiot kills himself. Gee, how productive.

Shishio manages a little better. He has motivation to keep going all right–revenge. Now, he does have a code of his own, as well. Survival of the strongest–social darwinism. But this code, taken alone, doesn’t look beyond simple survival. My opinion is that Shishio’s drive to dominate his nation (world, universe, etc.) doesn’t primarily stem from his code, as he claims, but rather from his desire to destroy the government that only ever acknowledged his skill/power by attempting to kill him. After all, if he really believes that only the strong survive, all he would have to do in order for his ideal to take over is wait. He isn’t willing to do so, which says to me that the more significant motive here is revenge.

In fact, the implication we’re left with seems to be that revenge just might be strong enough to defeat everyone else except that he shoots his own foot off with his illusions of omnipotence. For all the melodramatic declamations that “time” and “the new era” reject Shishio and so produce his demise, in the final analysis it was his arrogance in ignoring his time constraints that did him in. So, perhaps revenge minus megalomania would be successful. Even Sano mentions at some point, speaking to some villain or other, that Shishio is one of the strongest men he’d ever met. I get the feeling that Watsuki might have been a bit uncomfortable with the conclusions we come out of the Kyoto arc with, since he offers another revenge driven character who is not prey to megalomania in Enishi. And Kenshin does a Kenshin on him, which, you note, he does not succeed in doing to Shishio, and redeems the poor boy. This second round tells us that revenge, as a motivation, will always sabotage the one who relies on it. A much sweeter moral than Shishio presents.

That gets us to the character who is probably better balanced than anyone but Hiko. Saitou. I didn’t say he was sane, mind, just that he’s balanced. If you’re getting the idea that I think Saitou is a pivotal character in this story, you’re right. Between them, he and Kenshin crystallize just about all the major issues in RK. At any rate, Saitou obviously has the desire. In spades. His fixation on fighting Battousai demonstrates that nice and clearly. He also, however, has an ironclad code of ethics that gives him something more than the thrill of death’s closeness to live for. “Aku, Soku, Zan” seems to provide all the motivation Saitou needs to keep going right through the kind of defeat that would lead a lot of other people to despair and apathy, right through the alterations that knock the world he’s known ass over teakettle. This does not, note, mean that he’s nice. He’s not. He has to have reasonably sharp perceptions to be such a good fighter, but he appears totally uninterested in using those perceptions to engender or guide much in the way of sympathy. But nice doesn’t seem to be a major issue here (curiously enough, given our title character). Saitou has great integrity; that’s enough.

Of course, we do have the counter example of Kenshin always before our eyes, saying that integrity alone isn’t enough; that empathy and sympathy are also necessary in order for life to have real meaning. All Kenshin’s pals back this message up, Kaoru most especially with the sword that protects life. Kenshin’s gloss on that issue (quoting Hiko) is a particularly sophisticated twist, in my opinion. “A sword is a weapon. The art of the sword is the art of killing. Whatever pretty words you use to speak of it, this is its true nature. What Kaoru-dono says are the words of one who has never dirtied her hands. An idealistic joke…. But, I like Kaoru-dono’s idealism better than the truth. If one can ask so much, I would have the world to accept this joke as its true nature” (manga, Vol. 1, Maigo-chan’s translation). Kenshin understands that reality is what we make it; that the world around us is only the story we tell each other. That truth can change. This is what Saitou would never accept; I doubt that Hiko would either, though there is some possibility there I think. So we get Kenshin as the figure for willingness to change–and, above that, willingness to recognize that knowing our world is the story we tell of it entails the responsibility for changing the story. Responsibly. No wonder the poor man is so wound up all the time. In Kenshin’s case, though, it is his very belief in the potential of change, and his willingness to be a locus of change, that get him through the war, the blood on his hands, and the transmutation of his world into something no one anticipated.

What Kenshin doesn’t have, I would say, is the desire. And that is what almost destroys him. A code alone isn’t enough to get a person through a life lived by the sword. An effort to live so without the support of desire will only result in madness. That’s really my own explanation for Battousai. Battousai exists as the most extreme expression of Himura’s wish to protect, but, because the sword and the edge of death hold no true attraction for Himura, Battousai has no care for his own survival. There’s no incentive for him to survive, no pleasure in what he does and therefore no motiveation on his own behalf to keep going. Remember that it wasn’t Kenshin who made the initial choice to learn the sword; Hiko did it for him. My reading is that, while Kenshin might enjoy the form itself, he’s not especially keen on killing. Left alone, if he didn’t just get erased, I think his determination would have flowed into a different channel. Perhaps even into the priesthood somewhere. Since he was trained to weapons, his convictions drove him into the war. And because Kenshin didn’t have the desire that would have given him some sort of consolation for how he was bringing a new era about, he concentrated all his drive and passion for the cause, if not the blade, into Battousai. And abstracts aren’t enough to keep a person alive.

In the end, I think, Watsuki broke away from the ideal of balance, at least for Kenshin. Himura does not balance Kenshin and Battousai. Rather, he abandons the sword and lets Battousai fade. This is in line with Kenshin’s character, if not with the philosophical underpinnings of the rest of the show. Kenshin changed his own story.

So, there’s the serious stuff. If you want the puzzles, that’s on the Yumi and Tomoe page. If you want the silly stuff, it’s on the Art and Language page. If you have a taste for this sort of speculation, you used to be able find another philosophical peroration at the site Why Shishio Won, whose author is even more cynical than I am. I will re-link this page if the author resurfaces. Cheers!