“Cutting down a man who's done nothing wrong; is that what you spent all those years honing your skills for?”
Jin Quotes
3 quotes from Samurai Champloo, each with commentary on what it means and why it stuck.
A trained swordsman from a real school, in a story with no use for schools. Killed his master for good reason and still files it under what he did rather than what was done to him.
Spoiler — from the ending. Tap to reveal.
“I'm not the one who did the betraying. But I won't make excuses. Regardless, it's true that I killed my master.”
Three sentences that decline the defence available to him. Jin killed the man who ordered his own students murdered for money, which is as close to justified as a killing gets in this series, and he still files it under what he did rather than what was done to him. The refusal to plead is the character: he is the only one of the three who never argues about what he is owed.
Spoiler — from the ending. Tap to reveal.
“I think I've found what I was looking for all this time. I, who was always alone, found friends for the first time. You two were my first friends.”
Read against the man introduced in episode one, correcting a stranger's swordsmanship in the tone of a disappointed instructor, this is an enormous distance travelled with almost no dialogue in between. The series gives Jin perhaps a dozen lines an episode and lets the change happen in what he does not say, which is why the admission works when it finally arrives instead of sounding like a summary.
Read Jin's story from the start
Every line above is a fragment. The manga is where the fragments come from, and the print edition is the one this site checks its quotes against.
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The question that makes Jin possible as a character. He is a trained swordsman from a real school in a story that has no use for schools, and the series introduces him by having him apply the training's own stated ethics to the men who taught it. What follows from that question is the reason he is a fugitive, and he asks it before the audience knows any of it.