“The essence of combat is to strike at the vulnerabilities of one's opponent. There is no "fair" or "unfair".”
Hajime Saito Quotes
3 quotes from Rurouni Kenshin, each with commentary on what it means and why it stuck.
Read the character analysis and its source limits
Third squad captain of the Shinsengumi, serving the government he fought against as a police officer under another name. He calls Kenshin's vow a weakness to his face, and the series never makes him take it back. Saito’s principle is consistent enough to make his methods uncomfortable. In the original television series’ episode 30, he dismisses fairness in combat and says that exploiting vulnerability is its essence. In the same recorded episode, he tells Kenshin that a wanderer’s approach is weakness and expresses no satisfaction in settling their rivalry with someone who no longer kills. His preference therefore contains a personal demand as well as a public judgment about evil. Our reading is that a fixed creed does not explain every desire of the man who repeats it. He can consider himself faithful to a duty while wanting an opponent returned to the form he remembers. Episode 28’s exchange with Sanosuke supplies a related distinction: Saito judges a strong punch inadequate by the standard of the earlier battlefield, rather than the relative peace around them. Experience gives that criticism force, but does not automatically make an old wartime standard appropriate to every present relationship. These claims are bounded to Wikiquote’s secondary transcription of the 1996 anime’s episodes 28 and 30, listed as season 2 episodes 1 and 3. They are not firsthand viewing or evidence about the newer adaptation’s wording.
“One may train a dog with food, or a man with money. But taming a Wolf of Mibu...that, none may do.”
Shibumi is a government man who thinks he has bought a Shinsengumi captain to do his dirty work, and Saito kills him as the answer. Mibu is the village outside Kyoto where the Shinsengumi were stationed. Saito is claiming that name in Meiji Japan, 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 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.
“Shinsengumi is Shinsengumi. A wolf is a wolf. And a hitokiri is a hitokiri. Right... Battousai?”
Elsewhere in the episode, Saito says that settling his score with a Kenshin who no longer kills would give him no pleasure. That admission damages his claim that a killer's identity cannot change. He recognizes a difference between his old opponent and the man before him; he simply refuses to accept the difference as legitimate. The sequence of fixed identities makes his position sound like disciplined consistency. It also conceals a demand: Kenshin must become the opponent Saito wants. The old name at the end is bait, addressed to a particular man with a particular history. This is less a diagnosis of Kenshin than an attempt to recruit him back into their rivalry. Saito's certainty depends on the person he challenges agreeing to perform the role assigned to him.
About Hajime Saito
Guides
- Rurouni Kenshin Watch Order: 1996, the OVAs, or 2023?
- The Best Rurouni Kenshin Quotes, Every Line Sourced
- Rurouni Kenshin and the Real History: Gensai, Saito and the Sword Ban
- Rurouni Kenshin's Ending, Explained: the Manga, Reflection and the Films
- Rurouni Kenshin Manga Buying Guide: Singles, VIZBIG or 3-in-1
- Vash and Kenshin: Armed Nonviolence
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Saito walks into the Kamiya dojo as a police officer named Fujita Gorō, and in the fight that follows Kenshin is stabbed. 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 dojo 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.