Hiko Seijuurou

Name: Seijuurou Hiko

Nicknames: Hitenmitsurugiryu Keishousha Dai Juusandaime, Niitsu Kakunoshin, Shishou

Month Of Birth: October

Age: 43 years old

Height: 189cm

Weight: 87kg

Blood Type: O

School: Hiten Mitsurugi Ryuu

Weapon: Nihontou

Technique: Hitenmitsurugiryu

Appearance: He is a very muscular man whose long hair are gathered in a ponytail. He often wear the coat which is the symbol of the successor of Hiten Mitsurugi Ryuu.

Personality: A very powerful person & is proud of himself. Like to say to Kenshin that it is his fortune to have him as his master. He always call Kenshin "my stupid student" & like to tease Kenshin with his childhood incidents. In order to let Kenshin master the last secret strike of Hiten Mitsurugi Ryuu, he almost died battling with Kenshin. This scared the hell out of Kenshin. When Kenshin asked him to protect those people in Aoiya while he battle Shishio, although he refused, but he did appeared at the last moment and helped saving lifes of all of them. After the battles in Kyoto, he continued his plain life as an artist. Overall, he is indeed a wonderful master, a great guy and is a cute character too.

Background: He is Kenshin's teacher and is also the successor of the 13th generation of Hiten Mitsurugi Ryuu. He lived as a hermit in the country near Kyoto and changed his name to "Kakunoshi Nitu", working as a ceramics artist. Kenshin visited him after 14 years they parted for the last secret strike of Hiten Mitsurugi Ryuu which he did not want to learn 14 years ago. Seijiuurou refused to teach him at first but after learning what he had done for the past 14 years from Misao, Kaoru and Yahiko, Seijiuurou feels that it is Kenshin's responsibility that he defeated Shishio hence taught him the secret strike.

Making of Seijiuurou Hiko: There was no real model for the character. When I go to draw what I associate with the word "master," I come up with someone warped with arrogance. He is a character I like and I keep wanting to bring him in more, but since he is actually stronger than Kenshin, my boss said "Compare him to the joker in cards" and that he was too all-mighty, so bringing him in causes problems.

This is a digression, but lately I've been worrying about machismo, and Hiko is a forerunner of that. There are a lot of drinking scenes and from the reasons for thinking someone would be the kind of man to drink alone, there was definitely no need to make Hiko a hard drinker. Also, I got a lot of letters from readers asking if he was a blood relation of Seijuurou Hiko from the short story "Crescent Moon Over a War-Torn Country." According to the story, the Hiten Mitsurugi school secrets are handed down according to ability, so they're not related by blood.

The design is of course the same as Seijuurou Hiko from "Crescent Moon Over a War-Torn Country", but that design is actually from Mr. Obata's "Arabian Lamp Lamp," Hiten Majin Hamel. From the short story to Ruroken, I made the overall design simpler, and made the hairstyle easier to draw. Again, though they're both men of the sword, he was planned to be completely different from Kenshin. To direct the above-mentioned "machismo", I gave him a macho body under the cloak. To those female fans who were in love with his face but disillusioned by his body, I'm sorry. (But if they were all beauties, how interesting would that be? I hate drawing like that . . .)

The cloak, by the way, came from the recently popular American comic Spawn.

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