Shinsengumi

Watching Kyoto from beyond the flow of human time, the Phoenix asks a troubling question: why do people repeatedly choose war when conflict can only multiply suffering? Its gaze settles on the final years of the Tokugawa shogunate, when political tension turns the old capital into a place where ideals are increasingly defended with blades.

At the center of the reflection lies the Shinsengumi and the violent Ikedaya incident, one of the defining clashes of that turbulent age. Rather than celebrating the bloodshed, the Phoenix looks back on the people and convictions caught within it, confronting the contradiction between the desire to shape a better future and the destruction used to reach it.