Today I finally completed the long and complex chapter about the Shinsengumi’s attack on the Ikedaya inn in Kyoto on Genji 1/6/5 (July 8, 1864). It was a turning point in the revolution. Over a year before that, on the 10thday of the Third Month of Bunkyu (April 27, 1863), sixteen men, nine of whom studied the Tennen Rishin style of kenjutsu, “art of the sword,” under future Shinsengumi Commander Kondo Isami, signed a petition to Matsudaira Katamori, daimyo of Aizu and the Bakufu’s protector of Kyoto, for permission to guard the shogun in Kyoto. They were joined by five men led by another highly skilled swordsman named Serizawa Kamo, and three others, for a total of seventeen. Fourteen of them, comprising the respective groups of Kondo and Serizawa, were the founding members of the Shinsengumi.