Kondo Isami
“Not one of the paper screens was left intact, all of them having been smashed to pieces. The wooden boards of the ceiling were also torn apart where men who had been hiding under the floorboards were stabbed with spears from below. The tatami mats in a number of the rooms, both upstairs and downstairs, were spotted with fresh blood. Particularly pitiful were arms and feet, and pieces of facial skin with the hair still attached scattered about.”
—Nagakura Shinpachi, assistant vice commander of the Shinsengumi
(Hi all, I spent fifteen hours researching and writing an article this week and I’m really not happy with the way it came out. So, instead, here’s an all-time favorite of mine from Badass: Ultimate Deathmatch).
The Shinsengumi of the late Tokugawa Shogunate were kind of like the S.W.A.T. team in American police departments, if instead of just being called in to deal with bank robberies and drug dealers they had absolutely no oversight and were allowed to run wild around the city killing criminals and traitors at their discretion with swords and bad language whenever the hell they felt like it. Personally commissioned by the shogun at a time when allies of the Tokugawa Shogunate were being decapitated by renegade ronin and having their severed heads spiked on bamboo stakes on the daily, this last-ditch special police force consisted of one hundred of the most high-octane badass swordsmen in all of Japan, all of whom were equipped with a decent salary and a license to kill and set loose on the streets of Kyoto with one simple order: hunt down and kill traitors without mercy or annoying paperwork to fill out afterwards. The shogun named this elite special police kill team Shinengumi, meaning “Newly Selected Corps,” which is a pretty tame moniker considering that these guys ended up being the most feared paramilitary organization in Japanese history. My guess is that it was just to throw off the enemy, kind of like how SEAL Team Six officially goes by “Special Warfare Development Group” rather than “United States Navy Overseas Human Mutilation Factory.”
The Shinsengumi were commanded by an unflinching hardass named Kondo Isami—a peerless swordsman so scorchingly hardcore that Toshiro Mifune played him in a movie once. Kondo wore an awesome-looking black robe with a white skull emblazoned on it, making him basically the Meiji Restoration’s equivalent of Frank Castle, the Punisher, and just like the borderline-psychotic comic book vigilante he shares his apparel with, Kondo was a battering ram of street justice who responded to criminal infractions not with a courtroom full of due process, but by simply grabbing the heaviest weapon he could find and using it to batter the wrongdoers into a bloody mess in the most violent and disgusting manner humanly possible. This penchant for wantonly massacring the enemies of the shogun rightly earned Kondo a reputation as a man you didn’t want to screw with, and you can be damn sure that any time he walked into a bar he got his drinks for free and everyone in the joint that didn't want to be murdered just dropped their sake bowls and ran out of there crying.
The son of a peasant, Kondo had been training in martial arts since he was fourteen, and by 1864 he was believed to have killed at least sixty men in sword fights. Kondo was completely fearless, unfazed by even the most comical fountains of gore (he once claimed that he decapitated a dude so hard the guy’s arterial blood spray splashed onto the roof of the house behind him and that it was totally hilarious), and under his able tutelage the Shinsengumi had become the toughest organization of face-wrecking scrotum kickers the city of Kyoto would ever see. One hundred of the most amazing swordsmen in the country, handpicked by Kondo and hardened by incessant training, constant battle against the enemies of the shogun, and a disciplinary code that basically stated that any kind of boneheaded screw-up was punishable by seppuku. Hell, one time the friggin’ Shinsengumi accountant screwed up on his tax returns or something, so Kondo ordered him to commit ritualistic sword-related suicide for “the crime of miscalculation.” So yeah, it was that kind of party.
But if Kondo Isami and the Shinsengumi were willing to disembowel one of their own members just because the poor incompetent joker forgot to round up the remainder on the long division he was doing by hand without a calculator, you can only imagine how they reacted in early July 1864 when they started hearing rumors that there was a cabal of heavily armed anti-shogun ronin warriors plotting a violent coup against not just the shogun, but the emperor himself. Not exactly willing to sit around while a group of seditious assclowns plotted to kidnap Emperor Komei, burn down the city of Kyoto, and massacre a few dozen of the shogun’s best friends, these guys started scouring the city looking for the jerkburgers who would dare even think about committing such a treasonous act of heinous douchebaggery.
Kondo and the Shinengumi eventually found some suspicious-looking dude wandering around on the street, grabbed him by the balls, and tortured the information they needed out of him—first by whipping him a few dozen times, and then by hanging him upside down from a chandelier, driving spikes into the soles of his feet, putting candles on the spikes, and then letting the hot wax drip down on the guy’s feet while he hung there. Nobody with a central nervous system would put up with that crap for long, and eventually this shady bastard spilled the beans about how there were a dickload of conspirators holed up in some local teahouse plotting dastardly deeds of kung fu treachery and curling their molester mustaches sinisterly. The dude wasn’t sure where the rebels were hiding, so the Shinsengumi decided to split up and started canvassing the entire city.
At 10:00 p.m. on the evening of July 8, 1864, Kondo Isami and nine of the most badass swordsmen in Japan quietly walked up to the front door of the Ikedaya Inn—a charming, peaceful little teahouse that was about to become the scene of a katana-swinging deathmatch worthy of even the most obscenely badass Kurosawa and Tarantino flicks out there. Kondo knocked twice on the door, his face locked in an expression of icy, Clint Eastwood–style pissedness. When the inn’s proprietor slid the door open, Kondo authoritatively stepped onto the soft tatami mats in the Ikedaya’s entryway, pushing his way past the small old man in front of him. This was one of many inns he’d inspected this evening, but he refused to let his guard down ever for any reason, no matter how much of a wussbag the innkeeper seemed to be. He alertly looked side to side, scanning for signs of anything out of the ordinary, his hand lightly resting on the grip of his sword, his eye pulsating with badass fury. Satisfied that everything was kosher in his immediate vicinity (or whatever the Japanese version of kosher is), he took one step toward the stairs leading up to the second floor.
The inn’s proprietor barely had a chance to scream a warning to the men upstairs that they were about to get their asses filleted like a blowfish before Kondo flipped the old man to the mat with a badass jujitsu throw, drew his blade, and charged up the stairs. Three of his best men followed close behind, eager for some awesome samurai beatdown action. Kondo raced up the steps, sword at the ready, sprinted to the paper screen door at the top of the stairs, flung it open in an incredibly dramatic fashion, and commandingly shouted that anyone who moved was going to get shanked in the balls with a katana until they died from massive blood loss from the scrotum.
Kondo and his three men froze when they saw what was waiting for them on the other side of the screen: thirty-five ronin warriors, all armed with katanas, and all just drunk enough on sake to consider putting up a fight.
The tense standoff only lasted a few moments. One of Kondo’s men pulled himself together and approached the nearest traitor, preparing to arrest him, but right as the Shinsengumi officer extended his arm to grab the conspirator, the dude whipped out his sword and cut Kondo’s man down with one swing.
It was on.
Without flinching, Kondo and the two surviving men with him readied their blades and took on all thirty-five ronin by themselves in one of the most epic sword battles you can possibly imagine. Thirty-eight men, mostly unarmored, wailing on each other with samurai swords, nobody holding anything back, nobody asking for mercy, and damn sure nobody receiving it. Guys on both sides were leaping, flying, and being thrown through the paper walls of the inn, tables were smashed into splinters by swords and bodies, blood was spraying everywhere, warriors were screaming with anger and agony, and sparks were flickering in the night as katanas clashed into each other with enough force to break the blades apart or cut a man in half with one blow. A couple of the Shinsengumi from downstairs ran up to see what was going on and joined the swirling melee, which soon started to spill over to the downstairs and outside.
Kondo’s well-trained, battle-hardened Shinsengumi samurai warriors seemed completely unfazed by the fact that they were outnumbered roughly ten to one in a close-quarters combat scenario surrounded by guys with two-foot-long blades sharp enough to rip a man apart with one hit, and they battled with the mad-dog ferocity you’d expect from a detachment of the emperor’s most balls-out warriors. The Shinsengumi tore into the traitors, hacking the would-be nineteenth-century terrorists into tiny pieces any time they made the slightest tactical mistake, constantly keeping their defenses up against attacks from every direction. Kondo’s family sword, a +5 Ancestral Masterwork weapon named Kotetsu, sliced through some of his foes’ blades like Hanzo steel, and on one occasion one of his men was even documented as cutting a man’s sword arm off at the wrist and then cleaving the poor disarmed sucker shoulder-to-hip, leaving half of him unceremoniously slumping down to the tatami floor mat.
It wasn’t long before the traitors started to realize they were getting the worst of this teahouse beatdown, and the more weak-spirited and drunk among them decided they weren’t in the mood to have their heads bifurcated by immensely pissed samurai, and hey, maybe that “Let’s kidnap the emperor” idea wasn’t so smart after all. So they started to make a break for it. Some of the fleeing ronin pushed their way down the stairs, charging for the exit, while others simply leapt out the second-story windows to the courtyard below, figuring that the possibility of breaking an ankle was a hell of a lot better than the certainty of having an insane madman cut your arm off and rack you in the balls with your own dismembered fist. Even some of the traitors who stood their ground somehow accidentally ended up on the first floor, as there were a couple accounts of guys getting bodyslammed down, breaking through the floorboards, and crashing down through the ceiling into the room below only to hop up and continue fighting.
But Kondo and his team were ready for anything—this guy wasn’t about to let a single traitor walk away intact on his watch, and before going into the teahouse he’d already positioned the rest of his squad around the building with the express purpose of dismembering anyone who tried to escape. When these eager Shinsengumi officers saw the ronin rushing toward them trying to run like cowards, they gleefully drew their weapons and started screaming their battle cries. The next thing you know the arterial blood spatter had spilled out into the street, the courtyard, and both floors of the teahouse.
When the dust and blood mist finally cleared, there were eleven rebels dead, twenty-three captured, and one (the leader) who stabbed himself in the aorta seppuku style after being mortally wounded. The Shinsengumi calmly walked out from the main doors of the teahouse, covered in the out-of-control blood spray of their enemies, clutching swords that in some cases were so shredded they “looked like bamboo whisks” and in other cases were so bent out of shape that they wouldn’t fit back into their scabbards. Kondo’s troops reassembled into parade ranks, and without a word they marched in file back through the streets of Kyoto toward their headquarters while the citizens of Kyoto gaped at them in stunned silence with serious WTF looks on their faces. During the battle one of the Shinsengumi was killed (the guy at the very beginning), two were wounded, and one guy collapsed from an attack of tuberculosis that came on after he’d gotten a little excited while lacerating a couple traitors in half and went into an uncontrollable crazy coughing fit so intense/awesome he spit blood and almost barfed.
After the massacre at the Ikedaya teahouse the rest of the traitors hastily mounted a half-assed attack on Kyoto, assaulting the imperial capital head-on with two thousand disorganized men who were immediately eviscerated by the Shinsengumi and fifty thousand of their closest Tokugawa Shogunate buddies in a fight that took place just outside the Forbidden Gates of the Imperial Palace. For their actions at Ikedaya, the one hundred men of the Shinsengumi were made hatamoto, official samurai retainers of the Tokugawa, and were given lavish rewards, increased salaries, and the sort of prestige that you can only get by cutting down thirty-five traitors in fifteen minutes during a badass close-quarters room-to-room sword fight. They continued to be the most feared organization roaming the streets of Kyoto right up until the unit was dissolved by the shogun in 1868.
