The battle between Kenshin and Shishio-sama was not just a battle between the two most fearsome hitokiri of the bakumatsu, it was a struggle between two personalities somewhat similar yet very different. Shishio-sama fought to prove the superiority of his idea that the weak exist as food for the strong. Shishio-sama believed that this maxim applied to both men and nations alike, and that Japan should take its rightful place as first among nations with himself as its leader. Kenshin fought so that the Meiji era would be spared from Shishio-sama's vision. Kenshin believed in the idea that the next era of history should be one in which men no longer needed to take up the killing sword.
Kenshin overcame Shishio-sama and my master was consumed by his own furious power, but if the battle was really about ideas, not the fates of the men involved, then it is clear that Shishio-sama was the true winner.
By the time Kenshin's precious Meiji era had run its course, Japan had fought 2 major wars. First, Japan preyed on the weakness of China. In 1895 the Meiji government that Kenshin fought so hard to protect seized the island of Formosa, also called Taiwan, from the Chinese. They also extorted a massive cash indemnity from their humbled opponent. Japan then went to war with Russia for control of Korea. The Japanese proved that they were stronger, making food of the weaker Russians and Koreans alike and launching the Meiji government to great power status. Korea was annexed in 1910 and it was ruled with an iron fist for the next 35 years.
In 1915 Japan became even stronger, using the climate of global war as an excuse to seize Germany's Pacific colonies. Not willing to stop there, the Japanese state also used its newfound might to intimidate the weak Chinese government into granting even more concessions. It was as if Shishio-sama himself was Japan's leader at this time. Shishio-sama's ideas were certainly the same as those of the Japanese government and military.
Shishio-sama's philosophy did not fade as Meiji and Taisho gave way to the Showa era. In 1931, Japan seized Manchuria, a mineral rich region to the north of China. In 1937, the "China Incident" took place. The Japanese armies relied on their strength to seize territory all over China. This move was filled with all of the ruthlessness and daring of Shishio-sama's kuni-tori.
The fury of the armies of the Rising Sun did not abate, and they marched into Indochina, Thailand, Malaya, Singapore, the Dutch East Indies, Burma, and the Philippines. The navy burned and destroyed as far as Oahu and the Western coast of the United States itself. It can be said that Japan formed an empire devoted to Shishio-sama's high ideals, one in which the weak were food for the strong and one in which countless Asians died or were forced to work as slaves for the glory of the Great Japanese Empire.
However, Japan's leaders were not like Shishio-sama. The leaders and their strategy made the country weak, and thus its ambitions ended as food for an even stronger power. The people of Hiroshima and Nagasaki were America's ultimate banquet. Their lives were served up so that the United States could demonstrate their new weapon and intimidate the communists into accepting the kind of post-war world that America desired.
America was not the only entity that was pleased with what the second half of the Twentieth Century was to bring. In the bowels of hell, Shishio-sama is smiling. I, at his side, cannot help but laugh at the irony of the situation. Kenshin won the physical struggle but Shishio-sama's ideas have come to rule the world.
Most swords have been sheathed under the ever present and watchful nuclear eye but the struggle has been taken to a new arena. Japan has become the world's strongest per-capita economic powe, and this is just the type of future that Shishio-sama had envisioned for his homeland.
Both Japan and the United States have built their economic might on the backs of the weak. The working class and the poor labourers who work as virtual slaves in developing countries are the food that gives Japan and the West their tremendous wealth.
Even in Japan itself, children compete to enter the best universities, slaving for years to pass the entrance exams which will guarantee them social and economic success. The strong prosper while the weak are trampled beneath their feet.
Kenshin's body defeated Shishio-sama but his ideas were crushed by a reality in which only men like Shishio-sama are strong enough to rule. In the end, life was a survival of the fittest; Shishio-sama was victorious after all.


well  I know Shishio only lost and its honest only cause he burnt up.He could have beaten kenshin cause they were equal and he also had so much ppl fighting him.