Sanosuke Sagara Quotes

The character on the back of his jacket is aku, evil, and he wears it because the government wrote it on his dead friends. The Sekihō Army was a real unit who marched ahead of the imperial forces promising tax cuts on the new government's authority; when the treasury could not pay for the promise, the government declared them a false army and executed Sagara Sōzō, captain of its first unit, and members of that unit. Sanosuke was a boy in that unit, and his fight-for-hire career is a decade of looking for someone from the winning side to hit. Kenshin is the first one worth hitting, which is why the introduction is a grudge match with the wrong man. What the scene establishes is that Sanosuke's grievance is Shishio's grievance: both were used by the Meiji government and discarded. The difference is only what each did with it.

Strip the scene away and this is a stock brawler's entrance, the kind of line any street fighter gets before a beating. It is also weaker than Sanosuke's own introduction. His boast in episode 4 carried a grievance, Captain Sagara and the Sekiho army and the evil mark of "aku"; this one carries volume and nothing else. The exchange is worth keeping for the reply. Saito takes the punch without effect, calls it a nice punch, and files it as a punch for the peaceful Meiji era: in Kyoto during the Bakumatsu, he says, it would have got Sanosuke killed. That verdict is the part the series acts on. Ten episodes later the title is Sanosuke's Secret Training: The Challenge of Anji the Destroyer, and episode 47 is named for the Futae no Kiwami. The arc needed Sanosuke outclassed more than it needed him quotable, and his half of this exchange exists to set up Saito's.