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Originally Posted by strawberryshinya
ooo oh i see! so Harada might have lived too?
oh and i never completly understood what their goals where/what they hoped to accomplish...who did they work under? and were they truly an unofficial group? and what kinda things did Hijikata write about in his haiku book can i find excerts online or published elsewhere? did he write the code? how many years did the shinsengumi last? O.O
srry for all the questions....
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The group was in fact official, some manga made it official to add that "bad boy" touch to them. They were "marked" unofficial by the emperor to abolish some of their rights and to disband their operation
They initially started out by a bunch of samurai who has no master. Known as the Roushigumi, you can think of Roushigumi as an organization, while the Shinsengumi is a division of it. The shinsengumi itself was referred as the "Miburou", Miburou is the term widely used in TV shows animate and manga. They work under the Tokugawa shogunate, and funded but them as well.
They act as secret police to the shogunate, while they are loyal to the shogunate, they also don't want to dishonor the Emperor, who was in conflict over Japan's open policy (the history with Commodore Perry's visit in 1853) with the shogunate. Most historians think of the shinsengumi as a crowd against the emperor, however this is not 100% accurate, their tasks is to maintain peace and justice in the current Kyoto/Nara/Osaka area, some of their action was driven purely from a patriotic heart, but it is true that a lot of missions they committed were in conflict with the emperor's interest.
They were formed around 1863, 1869 marked the end of the Shinsengumi.
Try looking up the history on the Ikedaya Incident in 1864, this is a major event in the Shinsengumi.
The translation of Hijikata's Haiku basically said "My spirit lives on after death".
Not sure what code you are referring to, but if you are asking if his Haiku was a secret code, I don't think anyone has figured that out yet, BUT the spirit that Hijikata is referring to, is basically "The Way Of the Ryounin", which is somewhat related to some code and ethics in the current Yakuza