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[koukai_kirai]

OOC INFORMATION
Name: Ket
Contact: cognitiveleague ; cognitiveleague
Other Characters:None.

CHARACTER INFORMATION
Character Name: Toshizou Hijikata
Age: 29 at canon point (32 at latest point in canon)
Canon: Peacemaker Kurogane
Canon Point: After the Ikedaya Incident (manga timeline, not anime)
Character Information: Fandom wiki page here.

Since that page is a litte threadbare, I’ll elaborate a bit. Peacemaker Kurogane is a historical fiction manga, following (however loosely) the historical events surrounding a group of soldiers in the service of the Tokugawa Shogunate called the Shinsengumi. It’s set in the mid-1860s, a time at which Japan is rapidly plunging into civil war.

Hijikata is one of the Vice Commanders of the Shinsengumi; while technically outranked by both Kondou and Yamanami, he’s got a more dominant personality than either, and is often the de facto leader in a number of regards. He’s responsible for coordinating the group’s strategies, including by organizing the spies gathering information, drawing up battle plans, and giving direct orders to the captains; he also plays the role of disciplinarian, when it’s necessary.

He was born and raised in Tama, near Edo (now Tokyo). Brought up by an older brother after his mother and sister’s death from tuberculosis, he was something of a troublemaker as a teenager. He got into all sorts of ill-advised situations, from quarreling with his boss to running around with an unspecified number of (often married) women. It was there, though, at one of the dojos he studied at, that he met the people who would shape his future -- Isami Kondou, the dojo’s heir, an idealistic and earnest young man who became his best friend; Keisuke Yamanami, a quiet and thoughtful boy their age; and Souji Okita, a younger boy who joined the dojo at the age of 9, for whom (after a rocky start) he became a mentor.

In early 1864, they and a few other core members of the group came to Kyoto, where the government gave them the name of “Shinsengumi” and a mission to hunt down the rebels hiding in the city. Some months later, the government also tasked them with assassinating the group’s original leader, Kamo Serizawa, who had begun to abuse his power. Hijikata did, one rainy night, along with Kondou, Souji, and Yamanami.

The series begins after this, when a young boy, Tetsunosuke Ichimura, joins the group and becomes Hijikata’s page. There’s a huge fuss about whether or not to give him a sword and a full soldier’s duties; Hijikata is opposed, having seen the result of encouraging Souji to fight too young and not wanting to make the same mistake again.

After one of their spies is captured and killed, the raid on the place she was investigating succeeds in capturing the man responsible. Hijikata personally tortures the man until he confesses (approximately) where his allies are hiding and their plan to put fire to Kyoto; armed with that information, the Shinsengumi splits up to search the inns of the city. They meet at the Ikedaya, and a bloody battle ensues.

Hijikata, in a different search party, misses the battle, but arrives soon after to find Souji in the back room, coughing. Souji claims the blood on his face and hands is someone else’s, from the battle. Ignoring these protests, Hijikata takes him into his arms, calls for tea, and makes him take his medicine. I’ll be taking him from a few days after this point.

The incident gains them notoriety, and greater recognition from the Shogunate. However, external threats and internal conflict take their toll. His friendship with Yamanami turns sour and comes to a tragic head, several central figures defect with a new leader, and all the while, Souji’s condition deteriorates and the government’s position grows more and more unstable…

Personality:

Hijikata has a fierce reputation, and a nickname to match -- “The Demon Vice Commander” of the Shinsengumi, a group of men who are themselves somewhat infamous as the “Wolves of Mibu”.

It’s certainly not an unjustified impression. Hijikata is a no-nonsense sort of person, especially where his people’s safety is concerned. He holds the people around him to high expectations (according to the code written by his hand, his men are prohibited from raising money privately, engaging in personal quarrels or others’ litigation, deviating from bushido ideals, or leaving the group, on pain of seppuku), and is unhesitating in his criticisms and admonishments. He has little patience for wastes of his time, for failure, and especially for laziness and half-heartedness, and strikes many as cold and critical. By his own admission, he can be too focused on his goals, and that focus can lead him to take extreme actions.

Despite his insistence on his subordinates deferring appropriately to authority, there doesn’t seem to be much of an authority that can hold him in check -- even his superiors can be overwhelmed by the force of his naturally dominant personality. His falling out with Yamanami is predicated largely on Yamanami feeling trapped, manipulated, and outright bullied by Hijikata’s pressure to fight again; Kondou, when directly and publicly contradicted by him, responds not by pulling rank, but by sulking and asking why. He’s very much a force to be reckoned with, possessed of great drive, will, energy, and intelligence.

As demanding as he can be towards others, it’s clear to those who know him well that he isn’t nearly as hard on anyone else as he is on himself. He’s often seen working long after his subordinates have gone to bed, and never complains about it when he’s exhausted in the morning. His habit of training in solitude can be traced back to an intense proud streak, a compulsion to keep his weaknesses and imperfections to himself whenever he can. He feels a need to be strong for the people under his care, to take as much as he can bear onto his own shoulders and protect them. Much of his apparent cold-heartedness is actually out of concern -- he refuses to let Tetsunosuke join as a regular soldier (and tries to scare him out of joining at all) out of a desire to spare him from having to take life, and harshly punishes the weaknesses that he fears will get his men killed in the field. On one occasion, he declines to punish Souji or Tetsunosuke for an incident in which an enemy combatant was killed and their surveillance of an important target was nearly compromised. He briefly opens up to Yamazaki about his concerns over his own decision: “Am I being too soft?”

Softness is a risk, and his people deserve better than that from him.

The biggest exception to this rule is Souji, who gets away with absolutely everything from murder to poetry theft to teasing him about oversleeping. Their behavior together, while not shown explicitly as such, is very strongly coded as romantic. They share umbrellas regularly, and Souji is often seen in Hijikata’s quarters, giving him backrubs and draping over his shoulders, or waking him up with a “darling~ It’s time to get up!” In one notable incident, Souji drags Hijikata around a candy shop by his hair with no protest; the innocent bystanders look a little scandalized. He’s still willing to chastise him and keep him in line if it’s really necessary (and indeed, he’s just about the only one capable of doing so), but he’s more open with his care and affection towards Souji than towards anyone else. Their friends notice, to various degrees -- Heisuke assumes that Hijikata saying someone ‘reminds him of Souji’ implies attraction to them, Kondou clearly acknowledges the importance of letting Hijikata be at Souji’s side in times of trouble, and Saitou says that it’s better to hide Souji’s tuberculosis diagnosis from Hijikata as an act of mercy.

His protective streak can reach extremes, especially when he fails to protect someone, or there’s simply no way to. When one of their spies, acting on his orders, is captured and brutally killed, his initial reaction appears harsh and unfeeling -- he arrives late to her funeral, only to interrupt it with battle orders and storm right back out. Souji follows, and Hijikata launches into a tirade about how they’re going to find the people responsible and bring them down, talking over Souji’s attempts to reach out to him. He’s finally silenced by Souji raising his voice to cut directly to the heart of the matter: “Hijikata-san, it’s not your fault!”

“It’s not your fault” is a concept he has a little bit of trouble with. Whether it’s Ayumu’s death, the rapid decline of the Shogunate, or Souji’s illness, it's difficult for him not to over-invest, run himself ragged trying to change the outcome, and beat himself up over things that, in the end, perhaps he couldn’t have done a single thing about in the first place.

(In fairness, his feelings about Souji’s illness are really just a complicated mess in general. As mentioned in his history, his mother and sister both died of tuberculosis while he was very young -- something which he remembers very little of consciously, but which he continues to have nightmares about, even as an adult. The closeness of his relationship with Souji only makes matters worse. Even before he has any reason to truly suspect what’s wrong with him, Souji’s “cold” clearly puts him on edge, and he can be seen going out of his way to try and get him to rest and take medicine. Later in the series, the sight of Souji coughing up blood is enough to induce an open breakdown.)

His ruthlessness is often in conflict with that strong guilty conscience -- as a young man, he tells Yamanami that he’s the sort of person who can justify any means for his ends, but also that when he does, he always looks back and regrets what he’s done to get there. Saying that there’s nothing he hates so much as having regrets, he asks his friend to “hold his ties” -- to be his conscience, to rein him in from being blinded by his ambitious side and doing things he’ll hate himself for later. Even when justifying his actions against enemies with every outward sign of self-righteousness, there’s a hint of that regret, as Kondou notes that he talks too much when he knows he’s in the wrong.

In many respects, he has settled down since his teenage years, when his disrespect for authority was more blatant and unfocused. His frustrated ambition and resentment towards authority figures made it difficult for him to hold down normal work, and he ended up making a living as a medicine peddler. He also had an intense envy towards the samurai class, which manifested both as contempt and as a near-worship of certain samurai ideals. Part of the reason for his remarkable promiscuity as a teenager seems to have been his idealization of the “samurai woman”, beautiful and traditional and loyal -- it turns out that seducing married women, while it may briefly satisfy your class-based envy of their husbands, is perhaps not the best way to find your perfect ideal of refinement and loyalty. As a result he moved on rather quickly from most of the women he was involved with. In adulthood, he’s much more clearly focused on his goals, and has learned to control his vices more sensibly.

Even after all the growing up he did, he has a tendency to say and do what seems the most sensible and results-oriented in the moment, and it often ends up coming back to bite him. As a teenager, he told a terrified Souji not to ‘cry in front of us again’ and that he’d always have a place at his side ‘if [he was] strong’ -- it seemed like a way to calm Souji down and make him stop being so afraid of his own strength, and it won him Souji’s loyalty for life, but it also enabled Souji to completely embrace his own violent nature. Similarly, trying to soothe Yamanami’s guilty conscience after the Kamo assassination by saying that they “used him when he was of use, and disposed of him when he wasn’t” ended up with one of his closest friends wondering when he would be the one disposed of. There's no way to take back those words or their effect now, but there are a number of times when he wishes there were.

Though noted for his harsh pragmatism and somewhat uncontrollable nature, he’s also incredibly loyal. This is especially evident with regards to Kondou -- he doesn’t always listen to him, but the mutual affection and trust is clear in their relationship. When one enemy demands Kondou’s head, Hijikata “kneeling at his feet”, and a number of men to join his own group, Hijikata outright laughs in his face, asking him if he thinks his men’s loyalty is something that can be bought. Even when the shogunate is clearly fighting a losing battle and most of his friends are dead, Hijikata will stick with them until the end, for the sake of being there to go down with the ship.

In summary, Hijikata is an extremely pragmatic and capable person, but one often blinded by guilt or ambition. He’s dedicated, and driven by loyalty and the desire to protect people, but can come off as harsh, cold, and unapproachable, which can at times end up backfiring on him. In spite of his myriad flaws, he’s ultimately a caring person, and works hard to try and do right by his friends and subordinates.

Also, he writes downright terrible haiku.

5-10 Key Character Traits:
Strict
Protective
Manipulative
Guilt-prone
Loyal
Dominant
Physical
Pragmatic
Courageous
Determined

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