Katsura Kogorou's second in command and founder of the Kiheitai. He didn't give a damn as to what others think if they're contrary to his own opinion. He's been known to dress sloppily when he's forced to attend some meetings he didn't want to attend, thus embarrasing both parties. On another occasion, he shaved off all his hair to protest against something some other person did. He played on the samisen a lot, a skilled one at that, and was sort of a poet, too. Frequents the teahouses and brothels quite a bit.
Like most other Imperial loyalists, Takasugi originally was strongly antiforeign, but he finally concluded that the expulsion of all Westerners from Japan was impossible, and he became an advocate of Western military.
His about-face almost resulted in his assassination, but he was vindicated in 1863, when attempts to expel foreigners from the Shimonoseki Strait resulted in the Shimonoseki Incident (1864) - the demolition of all Choshu forts along the straight by warships from Britain, France, the Netherlands, and the US. The loyalist faction in Choshu then chose Takasugi to help construct a new Western-style army.
Takasugi's reforms completely transformed Japanese fighting techniques. Although commoners were theoretically forbidden to carry weapons, he formed a series of peasant militia units led by extremist young samurai and trained in Western-style military discipline. The most famous of these units, the Kiheitai, remained under Takasugi's personal control.
Alarmed at the growing radical tendencies in Choshu, the Shogun in 1864 sent a punitive expedition to the fief. The Choshu forces were defeated and a conservative government installed. As soon as the Shogun's army left, Takasugi's irregular units attacked and defeated the main Choshu force and reinstalled a radical group in power. In August 1865 the Shogun sent another expedition, this time with orders to level the fief. But Takasugi had brought his militia units, equipped with Western arms, under strict central control; the Shogun's army was routed, and the balance of power in Japan was drastically altered.
After the Meiji Restoration, one of the first acts of the new government was to develop an army along the lines already begun by Takasugi, whose untimely death from tuberculosis (yes, yet another TB victim) occurred before he could assume an important role in the new administration. His last words were, 'Do something meaningful in this meaningless world.'