Sanosuke Sagara Quotes

Sanosuke's record does not support this. He loses to Kenshin in his introduction, is put on the floor by Saito in a single exchange in the dojo, and only beats Anji in Kyoto because Anji taught him the punch he wins with. Remaining standing is what he does after fights, not during them, and the series is fond enough of him to let the distinction pass without comment. The line is popular for the same reason it is weak: it converts a character's actual quality, which is that he will not stay down, into a general theory of combat that the show's own fights refute, since the better swordsman wins nearly every duel in it. Kenshin beats Jin-e, Aoshi, Saito to a draw, Sōjirō and Shishio on skill, not on stubbornness. Sanosuke's stubbornness is a virtue and a real one, and it is a better subject than the philosophy he hangs on it. The show's own view is closer to Saito's, that a fool who relies on toughness and learns nothing of defense has nothing to rely on, and the series gives that line to Saito.

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 of commoners 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 their leaders, Sagara Sōzō among them. 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, and Kenshin's too: all three were used by the Meiji government and discarded. The difference is only what each did with it, and the series builds Sanosuke's friendship with Kenshin on the fact that the man he most wanted to fight turned out to have been thrown away by the same people.