This article was inspired by an important friend of mine and I just admire the way he loves.

Love is not possession. Or it depends on how we choose to love. Silent love reminds me of the era of samurai, when they were willingy to sacrifice their lives, their youth to something bigger than themselves: their ideal.
For a samurai, love mirrored the relationship between a lord and a retainer. It was a form of royalty. You did not “own” the person you loved, you pledged your life to the preservation of their spirit.

Love was expressed by ensuring the other had the freedom and strength to fulfill their destiny, even if you were never mentioned in their final poems or victory. The love that remains by distance, physical distance. The term of romance doens’t exist in samurai love. In fact, it was considered as a betrayal of their soul.

Samurai love means hidden love, to love in silent, to keep the love hidden until the very end, even forever. There is a profound dignity in being the silent foundation upon which another person stands. By staying in the background, the lover becomes the “silent witness” to the beloved’s greatness. To “silently witness” was to watch your loved one navigate the treacherous politics of the Bakumatsu era without burdening them with your own fears.

The part which I adore Shinsengumi is that every single one of them lived by the sword and died by the sword. For their wives, lovers, or comrades, love was the act of watching them walk toward the battlefield at Hakodate or the executioner’s block. When they fell, those who loved them didn’t just mourn, they became the keepers of the Sei legacy, ensuring that the “Sincerity” of the fallen lived on in the stories told to the next generation. It is the ultimate “Royalty” to love someone so much that you accept their death as a necessary fulfillment of their sincerity and intergrity. Self doesn’t exist in the world of Samurai. Only selflessness does.

Samurai love was never about the “happily ever after.” It was about the “nobly ever after.” It was a love that existed in the spaces between words, in the sharpening of a blade, and in the steady gaze of someone watching from the doorway as a warrior walked into history. To love under the Sei flag was to say: “I do not need you to stay, I only need you to be true.”