feeling: RK - Character Profile

Seta Soujirou

Soujiro was the youngest yet the strongest and also the most loyal swordman out of the Ten Swords hence he have a personal page. Please click here to go to Soujirou's Profile.

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Uonuma Usui

Name: Uonuma Usui

Nicknames: The Blind Swordman

Weapon: Rouchin (a spear-like weapon) and Tinbei (a shield)

Technique: Shin-gan (Eyes of the Heart)

Appearance: A blind man wearing clothes with eyes all over.

Personality: The second best in the Ten Swords. He have no hatred for the Meiji government but he join the Ten Swords with the condition that he could assassin Shishio at any time and also to reach his goal of killing a thousand people.

Background: He used to be Hitokiri for the Edo Bakufu group and he battle against Shishio during war. He was blinded as the result and his group members abandon him, leaving his waiting for his own death. He developed Shin-gan as he tried to save his life.

Making of Uonuma Usui: The idea for this character came from conversations I had with my assistants. A lot of the Ten Swords start with my assistants saying "What about this?" and then I add this or that and finish them up, but with Usui, my then-assistant was really pushing for a blind swordsman. At first, I wasn't very enthusiastic about it, but after the idea of listening to your opponent's heartbeat to judge his mental state was developed, he became one of the Ten Swords.

At first, I meant to draw Usui as a strong, Terminator-like character who would follow Kenshin relentlessly throughout the city after his fight with Chou. To my complete surprise, by the time I finished working out the story, he had fought with Saitou and met his death . . . He unexpectedly had a lot of fans, so in that respect he was helped more than Raijuuta. Since I didn't use it with Usui, I'm thinking of using the Terminator idea after the Kyoto story. Coming soon!

As for the design, a lot of people thought it was Ura from Virtua Fighter, but it was actally Tao Pai Pai from Toriyama-sensei's Dragon Ball. (The first bad guy to defeat Goku, the one that really leaves an impression.) About the eyeball design, at first I imagined him wearing some kind of traditional costume, but after I saw the angel that looked like a cloud covered with eyes in Evangelion, I quickly changed it. (Up until about the twentieth episode I was really caught up in Evangelion, so major or minor those characters had a big effect on me. Man, I can't keep any of my secrets.) To reveal even more, at first I was thinking of Usui as a handsome man with long hair. But when I tried it out, he looked like Ukyou from Samurai Spirits. "This won't work, I'll get hit again," I thought, got a fresh sheet of white paper, and drew the Usui you see now. There were a lot of different influences on his design, but I think he ended up being an original and not too bad, either. I guess being really good and completely original would be too much to ask for . . .

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Yuukyujan Anzi

Name: Yuukyujan Anzi

Nicknames: The Meioh

Weapon: Ceremonial Sword

Technique: Futae no Kiwami (Double Limit)

Appearance: A tall and muscular monk.

Personality: Unlike the others Ten Swords, he do not kill people without a good reason. He fight for a better world as he believes that the corrupt Meiji government is destroying the country. He allied with Shishio to oppose them with the condition that he have the right not to kill his victim even if he is order to do so.

Background: Used to be a monk but he betrayed his religion due to the sudden death of all the orphans he had being taking care of. The blow of theirs death made him went against the Meji government. Hence, he spent 10 years to master the technique of the "Double Limit".

Making of Yuukyujan Anzi: After I finished writing the Anzi story and revising it, I realized I'm still pretty inexperienced at this. Reader response has been pretty much positive, but this is only three-quarters of the original . . . I got carried away drawing it, and by the time I realized, I'd already spent five weeks on it. Drawing any further could have got in the way of the flow of the story, so I couldn't help but cut it . . . (In the original plot, there was a whole other chapter about the Sanjuu no Kiwami stopping Anzi's heart for an instant.) Like I said in the previous "Makings of", planning the stories is fun, but when it comes to drawing the manuscripts it's just so much work . . . If you read closely, I think you'll understand that from just what I've written here, Anzi's heart is not yet saved. He has only stopped spinning out of control when the story ends.

I read somewhere that "Man, in the end, can save only one other at the cost of a lifetime of toil". (I think this was an essay about religion after the Aum sarin gas attack.) I felt strongly, drawing this story, that it's true for the manga world as much of the real one. I want to do something, but . . . What happens to Anzi next is still vague, but I've got some ideas, so if I get the chance, I'll draw another story about him. It'll probably be sad, though . . .

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Sawagejou Chou

Name: Sawagejou Chou

Nicknames: The Sword Collector

Weapon: Genbatou (twin bladed sword broken by Kenshin), Hakujinnotachi (white thin bladed whip-sword)

Technique: Garyuorochi

Appearance: A tall and thin man with a broom-like hair.

Personality: A crazy swords collector. Once he eye on a particular sword, he would use any dirty method to get it. He is the weakest among the Ten Swords.

Making of Sawagejou Chou: I didn’t really have any model besides his character, but if you pressed me, I’d have to say I used the common stereotype of Kansai people. My assistant and some of the people at work are from Kansai, and they’re really great, and I think in my next life I’m coming back as someone from Kansai ... Real Kansai people aren’t like Chou. Just so there’s no misunderstanding ...

While Chou was a bad guy, he was also pretty popular. (Although when a character speaks Osaka dialect, he automatically has a strong personality, so maybe that’s why.) I myself thought he was fun to draw and was kind of sad when it was time to finish him, so I’m going to reintroduce him at some point. But it would be weird to make him one of Kenshin's friends, so he'll have to be some kind of neutral character.

As for the design, my assistant said it was Garufoodo and my readers said it was Benimaru from KOF. But they’re completely wrong. Chou’s design is actually one that I made when I was twenty, one I meant to be an alien. ( ... hey ...) In the end, while it was rejected, it was hard to throw away that long horse-face so I ended up using it here. At first I was going to give him disheveled swept-back black hair, but to give him more impact as the first of the Ten Swords to appear, he ended up looking kind of like a punk rocker. Well, I can see why you’d call him Benimaru ...

By the way, the Kansai dialect that Chou uses was checked by my assistant from Kansai, but then I dared to destroy it so that it could be understood by people all over the country. It's not really true western Kansai dialect. I think my readers in Kansai will find it really annoying, but Ruroken is a manga aimed at the entire country, so please be forgiving.

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Sadoshima Houji

Name: Sadoshima Houji

Nicknames: The Know All

Appearance: A shoulder length hair man who always wear a coat.

Personality: The chief adviser among the Ten Swords. He was in charge of building warship "Inferno" and also planned for most of the fights. He believed that Japan can become powerful only through militarisation. He is also very loyal to Shishio.

Background: Houji was an officer of the Meiji government after the restoration, but found no one worth to serve. It was after three years that he found Shishio was the only one worth serving to hence he followed him.

Making of Sadoshima Houji: I got the idea from the character Forge from my favorite American comic X-Men. (Houji’s name is kind of a pun on this.) It’s not so much his personality, but this position in the organization.

The character Forge doesn't fight directly, but he invents all kinds of machines and is a support character for his friends. I thought it would be interesting to have a character in the Ten Swords who wasn’t a fighter but supported the organization in other ways, and eventually came up with Houji. At first he was just a stupid guy who was always surprised, and I thought "Maybe this didn't work . . . " But actually, he ended up being the number two in the organization (like Hijikata Toshizou or Shokatsu Ryoukoumetsu) which I've always liked, so ideas started flowing and he ended up being one of my favorite characters.

This is giving it away, but Houji has a cool part at the end of the Kyoto story. Don't miss it! (or so I say, even though he probably doesn't have any fans.) As for the design, people say he's from Giant Robot, but he's not. Houji is 100% Watsuki Nobuhiro and I'm proud of him. There have been a lot in the earlier books, and my readers like good-looking characters (men or women) but as for me, I don't think it's enough. I think it's important to draw monsters and evil-looking characters as well, and that's why I put a lot of effort into them. (First of all, if all the characters were good-looking, the idea of beauty would be lost and we wouldn't be able to tell which ones are supposed to be beautiful.) My only regrets are about his costume. I wanted to draw Western clothes from that era, but when the time came I had to work with the information I had . . .

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Honjou Kamatari

Name: Honjou Kamatari

Nicknames: The Giant Sickle

Weapon: Daikusarigama

Appearance: He looks like a pretty girl.

Personality: He loves Shishio and is always competing with Yumi over Shishio's love. He is also very loyal to Shishio. He even tried to commit suicide after Shishio's death.

Making of Honjou Kamatari: A gay character who fights with a scythe -- my assistant started it all with these few words. As I said in the section about Usui in the fourteenth book, most of the Ten Swords started as my assistant's ideas that I developed, and Kamatari was the first we decided on. Well, it’s all very well to decide this, but when I actually thought about it, I couldn’t settle on what to do with him. At first I thought I’d do a character who looked completely masculine but whose personality was all woman, then I thought about one who looked like a totally sexy, sultry woman on the outside but who acted like a guy, and finally a macho, bearded gay; I just kept thinking of things and rejecting them, thinking them up and turning them down, until a friend of mine said "How about a cute girl type?" It’s pretty conventional, but I drew it, and he ended up being tenth in the polls . . . So I tasted another secret at the depths of the art of manga--overthinking an idea.

I meant his personality to be more thoroughly light and sunny, but in the end his serious side came out and I changed my mind. (Serious is the next thing to being dark. Soon, I’ll have a bad habit of tending that way, proof that I’m still inexperienced at writing.)

Thoroughly sunny plus the character’s thoughts -- that’s my task for the next time we meet Kamatari. As for the design, to put it simply, his face is based on Ikari Yui from Evangelion. His body was drawn completely ad-lib, so there was no design. My analysis is that the overall triangular silhouette was influenced by Reirei in Vampire Hunter. Also, the great scythe is a real weapon. But, to get the force you saw, I exaggerated the scythe part quite a bit, and you can’t really wield it like Kamatari does. (Well, you shouldn’t be able to.) The real great scythe is a chain scythe with a long handle and is used like a mix of the usual chain scythe and a chigirigi. It’s an interesting weapon, so I think it would have been more fun to show a more realistic way of fighting with it, so I’m a little disappointed.

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Kariwa Henya

Name: Kariwa Henya

Nicknames: Flying Henya

Weapon: Blade strapped on arm, dynamite.

Appearance: He looks like a bat with his face mask.

Personality: A very narrowed minded guy.

Making of Kariwa Henya: Henya is based on an actual swordsman from the early Tokugawa period, Mappayashi Henyasai. Henyasai was an expert at the jumping movements that would be called acrobatics today. In this respect, he formed a part of Kenshin as well. Henya was originally meant to be introduced in the Megumi story, as one of the Oniwabanshuu, named Tengu. But in my typically haphazard way of finishing a story I missed my chance, so I made him one of the Ten Swords. I thought about a battle in midair with Kenshin, but then I thought "Kenshin’s already got the succession techniques, this is no enemy for him," so I gave him to the one following in his footsteps, namely Yahiko. By the way, a lot of readers wrote me about this chapter, saying Yahiko was too good. Hm . . . I thought this was about right for the potential Yahiko has at this point, but . . . Well, Yahiko is going to be growing up from this point on, so maybe it’s better people think he’s weak now . . . I like the idea of the Hikuu Happa, but there are a lot of other things I wish I’d done with it.

For the design, I started out with a bat, and added an aerodynamic head, a little like Cyborg 0002 of 0009. One of my original concepts for the Ten Swords was that other than Soujirou, they shouldn’t be handsome. (Well, Kamatari and Fuji kind of are.) I meant Henya to look like a demon, but when he started to look a little handsome anyway, I thought "This is no good" and tried making him all skin and bone. For this, I referred to the threefold character The Freak from the American comic Spawn, using the madman.

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Iwanbo

Name: Iwanbo

Nicknames: The Marutama

Weapon: His layers of fat to resist enemies' attack, Finger Blades .

Appearance: Looking like an idiot with a stupid smile.

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Roujin Saizuchi

Name: Roujin Saizuchi

Nicknames: Saiduchi and Fuji were partners. Together, they are called as "The Army Breakers".

Weapon: Fuji

Appearance: An old man with a big brain.

Personality: Saiduchi analysis opponent's every move and give orders to Fuji. Fuji is the "weapon" in the sense that he is the one who attacks the enemies.

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Fuji

Name: Fuji

Nicknames: Saiduchi and Fuji were partners. Together, they are called as "The Army Breakers".

Weapon: Giant Scimitar

Appearance: He is a giant.

Personality: He only follows the orders of Saiduchi.

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