Hajime Saito Quotes

Saito's actual creed is three characters long, aku soku zan, and it says something specific: slay evil the instant you see it. The English line that gets quoted in its place is a Western proverb with a Gospel pedigree, and it says something general about people who fight for a living. The two are not the same idea. Aku soku zan is a claim about judgment, that the person holding the sword is entitled to decide who is evil and act on it without process; the proverb is a claim about fate. One is why Saito is dangerous, the other is a line any grizzled swordsman in any series could deliver. Its popularity is easy to explain, since a translator needed a sentence that a Meiji policeman could say to a wanderer and land as a threat, and this one lands. But it sands off exactly the thing that separates Saito from Kenshin. Kenshin also lived by the sword. The difference is that Saito still thinks he gets to be the judge, and the proverb lets him off that hook.

Saito walks into the Kamiya dojo as a police officer named Fujita Gorō, and the fight that follows is the first time in thirty episodes that the show lets Kenshin be genuinely outmatched by someone using nothing but technique. The Gatotsu is a thrust, delivered from a stance the Shinsengumi drilled for close quarters, and Saito's point in this sentence is that Kenshin's whole style of restraint, the reverse blade, the refusal to strike a killing line, is itself a vulnerability and he intends to hit it. He is right, which is what makes the scene uncomfortable. Kenshin only holds his own once the Battousai surfaces, and for a minute the two of them are fighting the Bakumatsu again in a Meiji living room while Kaoru watches a man she does not recognize. The sentence is a fighter's ethic, and the series is not endorsing it. It is showing that the ethic Kenshin adopted in its place has a cost that a competent enemy can collect on, and then it sends him to Kyoto to find out how large the cost is.

Shibumi is a government man who thinks he has bought a Shinsengumi captain to do his dirty work, and Saito runs him through as the answer. Mibu is the village outside Kyoto where the Shinsengumi were quartered, and Wolves of Mibu was what the townspeople called them, not kindly. Saito is claiming that name in a Meiji office, a decade after the Shinsengumi lost the war and most of his comrades died for a shogunate that no longer exists, and the claim is that the loyalty went to the code rather than to the side. That is how a man who fought against the Meiji government can serve as its police officer without, in his own view, changing at all. The line is also the show quietly telling the audience what it is about to do with him. A character who kills his own employer in his second episode is not going to be redeemed, and the series never tries; Saito stays a wolf through Kyoto and beyond, and the friction between him and Kenshin works because neither of them is asked to become the other.