Saitō Hajime

Who They Were

Saitō Hajime (斎藤一) was a Japanese samurai of the late Edo period, born February 18, 1844, in Edo. He served as captain of the third unit of the Shinsengumi, the special police force loyal to the Tokugawa shogunate. He was one of the few core members of that organization to survive the wars of the Bakumatsu period, the turbulent final years of the shogunate.

He was born Hajime Yamaguchi (山口一), but later took the Saitō surname. After the Meiji Restoration, he adopted the name Fujita Gorō (藤田五郎) and lived out his remaining decades as a police officer in Tokyo. He died on September 28, 1915, in Tokyo.

Life and Career

Saitō’s early life is poorly documented, but by the 1860s he had joined the Shinsengumi in Kyoto. The force was formed to suppress anti-shogunate activists, and Saitō rose to the rank of captain of the third unit. He participated in the Ikedaya Incident, a raid on a Kyoto inn in 1864 in which the Shinsengumi killed or captured several pro-imperial plotters. He also took part in the Kinmon Incident later that same year, a clash between the shogunate forces and the Chōshū domain at the gates of the Imperial Palace.

During the Boshin War (1868–1869), the civil war between the shogunate and the imperial loyalists, Saitō fought on the losing side. He was present at the Tenmaya incident, a skirmish in which Shinsengumi members clashed with enemy forces. After the shogunate’s defeat, many of his comrades were killed or executed, but Saitō survived.

Following the war, Saitō reinvented himself. He took the name Fujita Gorō and joined the Tokyo Metropolitan Police Department, where he served as a captain. His duties largely involved undercover work for the police and for the Japanese government, tracking former shogunate loyalists and other potential threats to the new imperial order. In 1877, during the Satsuma Rebellion, a major uprising of disaffected samurai led by Saigō Takamori, Saitō was deployed to the front as part of the government forces. He fought against the rebels, completing a trajectory from shogunate enforcer to imperial policeman.

Why They Matter

Saitō Hajime matters because he embodies the survival and adaptation of the samurai class into the modern Japanese state. Most of the Shinsengumi’s leadership died violently in the 1860s; Saitō did not. He crossed the political divide, served the new government, and lived to 1915, long enough to see Japan become an industrial empire.

His career also matters for the study of the Bakumatsu period itself. As a captain of the third unit, he was a mid-ranking officer in an organization whose internal politics were notoriously bloody. His survival, and his later silence about his past, left many gaps in the historical record. Those gaps have made him a favourite subject for fiction, but the documented facts of his life—the Ikedaya raid, the Boshin War, the police work, the Satsuma Rebellion—anchor him firmly in real history.

The Name in Japanese

The name is written 斎藤一.

• Kana reading: さいとう はじめ
• Romaji: Saitō Hajime

The surname 斎藤 (Saitō) breaks down as:

• 斎 — read sai in this word. It means purification, abstinence, or a fasting hall. In a religious or ritual context, it refers to a state of cleanliness before worship.
• 藤 — read tō in this word. It means wisteria, the climbing plant. The character is also the tō of the great Fujiwara clan, and many surnames containing 藤 trace their origin to that lineage.

The given name 一 (Hajime) is a single character:

• 一 — read hajime in this name. It means one, the numeral. As a personal name, it carries the sense of "first" or "beginning," which is exactly what hajime means as a common noun.

The original surname, Yamaguchi (山口), is worth noting because Saitō was born with it:

• 山 — read yama. Mountain.
• 口 — read guchi (from kuchi). Mouth, or entrance. Together, 山口 means "mountain pass" or "mountain entrance."

His later alias, Fujita Gorō (藤田五郎), also uses the wisteria character:

• 藤 — read fuji here. Wisteria.
• 田 — read ta. Rice paddy. So Fujita means "wisteria paddy."
• 五 — read go. Five.
• 郎 — read rō. Son, or young man. Gorō literally means "fifth son," a common style of given name in the Edo period.

Legacy

Saitō Hajime’s legacy is split between documented history and popular imagination. In the historical record, he is remembered as a capable swordsman and a survivor—one of the only Shinsengumi captains to live into the twentieth century. His later career in the Tokyo police, and his undercover work for the Meiji government, made him a rare figure who served both the shogunate and the empire that replaced it.

In Japanese popular culture, Saitō is a fixture of Bakumatsu fiction. He appears in novels, manga, and film, often portrayed as a quiet, deadly fighter with a mysterious past. The historical Saitō left few personal writings, so much of his personality and motivation remains unknown. What is certain is the arc of his life: born in Edo in 1844, a captain in the Shinsengumi by his early twenties, a police captain in Tokyo by his forties, and dead in 1915 at the age of seventy-one. That arc—from shogunate loyalist to imperial officer—makes him one of the most instructive figures of the Meiji transition.