“They will not laugh at our own.”

Edo always had a taste for grandeur: great fires, great crowds, great spectacles, and great ambitions in people who, on an ordinary day, lived in houses so narrow that it was as if the entire city were practicing the art of mutually irritating one another. In such a place, even a minor insult did not remain minor for long. All it took was a crowd, a few glances, a careless word, and that particular kind of urban pride which does not allow a man simply to wave his hand dismissively and go back home. Sometimes an inattentive gesture, caught by dozens of eyes, ceases to be a trifle or a private matter. It swiftly swells into the absurd proportions of a public affair, one that must be settled not by individuals, but by entire districts. “Megumi no kenka” — the famous fight between the men of the “me” brigade and the world of sumō — is therefore not merely a tasty anecdote from old Edo. It is a small model of a great city: a city of wood and soot, but also of pride, style, group solidarity, and that peculiar energy by which even a quarrel could rise to the rank of legend.

On one side stand the machi hikeshi (町火消), the urban firefighters, and more precisely the tobi (鳶): specialists in roofs, beams, risk, and action on the edge of catastrophe. They were necessary, admired, and somewhat dangerous — like rock stars, except that instead of guitars they carried hooks for tearing apart burning structures. On the other side we have the rikishi, the men of sumō — an environment equally physical, equally public, and equally sensitive to matters of prestige. The former made their living fighting fire, the latter by fighting in the ring, yet psychologically they were surprisingly alike: celebrities accustomed to the gaze of the crowd, immersed in male hierarchy, nourished by reputation, and very poor at tolerating their own ridiculousness. Sociologically, too, everything fits: here are two powerful milieus of a great city, each with its own ethos and its own style. In such an arrangement, conflict is not an accident. It is rather an explosion waiting for the smallest spark.

And yet precisely this is what is most interesting in this story, and at the same time most human: how easily wounded pride disguises itself as honor, and how an ordinary “I will not be lesser” can set in motion the entire machinery of absurdity. Edo had its streets, shrines, sumō arenas, and tea-house gossip; we have comments, posts, fandoms, algorithms, and quarrels that also begin with something trivial and end in a war of all against all. That is why “Megumi no kenka” is not a dead episode from the year 1805. It is a story about a mechanism that still functions — today sometimes in manga and anime drawing upon old images of hikeshi, and sometimes simply on a phone screen, when someone refuses to let go because the crowd is watching. The costumes, tools, and media have changed, but man has remained painfully similar: he still knows how to turn a trifle into theater, theater into war, and war into a story that he later recounts with great conviction, insisting that it was, after all, about something truly important.

A highly flammable city — literally and metaphorically

Left corner…

Before the men of the “me” group enter the stage, and before wounded pride begins to boil in young hearts with rage, let us first look at Edo itself. For Edo was not an ordinary city. It was a city of wood, paper, soot, gossip, and ambition; a city so dense that every day one rubbed elbows with both people and buildings, and so flammable that it was as though it had been built by a brilliant pyromaniac. And yet it was precisely this city, perpetually threatened by fire, that developed within itself a peculiar kind of brazen self-confidence. It burned regularly, rebuilt itself even more regularly, and in time began to treat its own vulnerability to disaster almost as a character trait. It was not without reason that people later repeated that fires were the “flowers of Edo” — a cruel saying, but one that says a great deal about the psyche of a city that had learned to live among ruins without sinking into permanent mourning.

The Great Fire of Meireki did not turn Edo into a cautious and restrained city. Rather, it made it into a city that began figuring out how to tame fire without renouncing its own energy, commerce, and congestion. Broad strips of empty space were therefore laid out — hiokechi (火除地) — hirokoji (広小路) were established, even fire-prevention embankments were built, residents were relocated, and various regulations were issued concerning roofs and building materials (a full article devoted to hikeshi, the Edo fire brigade, may be found here: 'Our guys are on the roof!' — Hikeshi in the shogunate era, when a firefighter was a hero, a brawler, and an Edo celebrity).

In theory, all of this was meant to create a safer city. In practice, Edo remained Edo: firebreak spaces gradually became developed once more, embankments lost their significance, warehouses and buildings sprang up in open areas, merchants thought of profit, residents protested burdensome solutions, and the city consistently returned to its favorite occupation, namely being a city far too alive ever to be fully disciplined.

This does not mean, however, that no attempts were made. As early as 1658, jōbikeshi (定火消), permanent firefighting detachments intended chiefly to protect the samurai districts, were established, and later their number was increased. But the true breakthrough for urban, townsmen’s Edo came in 1720, when the system of machi hikeshi (町火消), later known as the “iroha-gumi,” was officially formed. This was a moment of great importance not merely administratively, but almost civilizationally: here, defense of the city against fire was no longer exclusively a matter for the authorities and warriors, but also a matter for the townspeople themselves. One might say that Edo then acquired a new kind of hero — not a knight in armor, but a man in a short coat, with a tool for ripping off roof tiles in his hand, bold, agile, and ready to climb onto a roof and dismantle it faster than others could manage to mutter a brief prayer.

These men did not extinguish fires in the modern sense, as we imagine it today. Edo was not a city of hydrants, engines, and fire hoses with metal nozzles gleaming in the sun. Here the fundamental art was rather to stop fire by rapidly dismantling buildings, creating gaps in the built-up area, climbing, chopping, bringing things down, risking one’s own body where a few minutes’ delay might mean the destruction of an entire street. That is why the core of these teams was formed by the tobi (鳶) — men of heights, scaffolding, and dangerous labor, experts at moving across roofs and beams as an ordinary person moves through his own room. They were not an addition to the system. They were its muscular, noisy, and very Edo-like heart.

And since they were the heart, they also had to have style. Edo could not abide colorlessness. Thus the machi hikeshi were not an anonymous mass, but a world of recognizable groups, signs, and privileges of ambition. Each team had its own matoi (纏) — a tall, decorative emblem of the group, carried proudly like a banner, yet at the same time something more than a banner: a sign of presence, courage, and the right to glory. Where the matoi appeared, reputation appeared with it. The fire was real, but equally real was the question of who had arrived first, who had not retreated, who had acted most effectively, and whose district could later say, with a touch of exaggeration, that it was its men who had saved the day. In Edo, saving the city and competing for prestige did not exclude one another in the slightest; on the contrary, they very often went hand in hand.

That is precisely why urban firefighters became something more than a service. They became a social type. Heroes of the street. Celebrities like footballers or rock stars three hundred years later. Men who were admired not because they were calm, sober, and reliable in the sense of an official form, but because they were brave, striking, skillful, and a little too quick to take offense in matters of honor.

The authorities needed them, the townspeople admired them, and the city readily made legends out of them. They were not samurai, but they had their own ethos. They were not aristocracy, but they had their own pride. Nor were they saints (oh no!) — and perhaps that is precisely why Edo understood them so well. The city itself, after all, was not saintly either: it was wealthy, sensual, prone to excess, in love with spectacle, and highly sensitive to questions of face, prestige, and who yielded to whom, and who did not yield even half a step.

By the end of the eighteenth century this system was already truly extensive. Tables from the period show that thousands of people operated within the machi hikeshi structure, and the “め” (me) group itself had a considerable number of tobininzoku (鳶人足), that is, specialists in work at height. This is an important detail, because it allows us to understand that “me-gumi” was not a small pack of a few loudmouths from an alley, but part of a large, public urban system. So when a man from such a group entered into conflict, he did not enter it solely as a private individual. He carried with him the name of the group, the prestige of the district, the reputation of the profession, and that specific weight of the social gaze which in Edo could be heavier than a wooden beam brought down upon an opponent’s skull.

All the more so because Edo was a city of short memory, but intense emotions. Fires broke out often and could be immense; even after reforms and the expansion of firefighting organization, it was not possible simply to “remove” them from urban life. Research shows that the creation of the machi hikeshi did not suddenly cause fires to disappear, though in time the system did help limit the scale of losses. This too is very Edo-like: the institution works, but the city still slips from complete control. One might therefore say that the inhabitants of Edo lived in a constant exercise of nerves — they knew that everything could burn, and yet they invested in houses, shops, reputations, clothes, romances, and animosities with the energy of people who had concluded that if the world is fragile, then one must live all the more ostentatiously.

And it is out of just such a city that the story of “Megumi no kenka” (“め組の喧嘩” – “The Brawl of the ‘me’ Group”) grows — not as a random aberration, but as an almost organic product of Edo. For if you have a city of wood, dense, perpetually threatened by fire, yet at the same time overflowing with district pride, professional rivalry, and a public theater of honor, then sooner or later someone must decide that a minor insult is the size of a catastrophe.

And when that someone belongs to men who spend their days running across roofs over flames and are accustomed to believing that retreat is an occupation unworthy of their fame — then very little is needed for great history. A crowd is enough, a glance, a single word spoken the wrong way, and that terribly human conviction that the whole matter is now greater than life.

We shall soon see how the fate of a certain street battle unfolded — but first let us take a look into the second “camp”…

Right corner…

If, however, on one side of this story stand the urban firefighters, men of roofs, ropes, hooks, and honor heated more fiercely than roof tiles in August, then on the other side we do not find a world of quiet ceremony, noble silence, and harmonious bows, such as today is so eagerly displayed in albums about traditional sumō. Yes, in the twenty-first century we see in sumō ritual: carefully established gestures, solemnity, salt, belt, referee, hierarchy. But in Edo everything was still less polished, less calmed, and much more human, and therefore also noisier, more interested, and more quarrelsome. Sumō was already a grand spectacle, but it was not yet fully that dignified “national treasure” that sits upright for the photograph. It was still working intensely on its own dignity.

It is worth saying this plainly: Edo loved sumō. It loved it not in an abstract way, as the lofty heritage of the ancestors, but very concretely — in crowds, loudly, with emotions, with money wagered, with opinions, and with a readiness to quarrel. Matches attracted spectators, and spectators, as spectators in any great city, did not come only for contemplation of technique. They came for tension, for entertainment, for a side to cheer, for an opportunity to bet, for something to discuss the rest of the day. Disputes over the result, suspicions about whether a match had been fair, prolonged positioning before the bout, ambiguities in judging — all this could heat a crowd more than the shogunal office responsible for public order would have liked. Sources say outright that quarrels and fights among spectators during tournaments were by no means rare, and suspicions of arrangements were not mere fantasy either.

This too is very Edo-like. A city that could turn fire into spectacle had no great problem turning a sporting spectacle into a small fire of emotions. Sumō, after all, was held not in some sterile world cut off from life, but in the very middle of urban reality — literally in the street — where business, noise, reputation, and violence constantly brushed sleeves with one another. The mere fact that the authorities intervened from time to time, issued prohibitions, and tried to discipline the milieu clearly shows that this was not innocent folklore, but a space that could very quickly get out of control. Prohibitions are not issued where everyone sits calmly and speaks of the transience of the moon.

Added to this, professional sumō in the Edo period was a world still in the process of being properly institutionalized. This is very important. We usually look back at sumō as though from the beginning it had possessed the same compact form, the same unified hierarchy, and the same iron sense of its own tradition. Meanwhile, that tradition was also being constructed, ordered, and strengthened. In the eighteenth century and later, an increasingly important role was played by the effort to give this environment form, rules, genealogy, and ceremony. On the one hand there were old associations with ritual and “antiquity” (Heian); on the other, there was the thoroughly practical need to give a collective of professional strongmen, organizers, and intermediaries such a structure as would make it something more trustworthy than the mere clamor of a commercial spectacle. In other words: sumō was becoming increasingly “serious” also because it very much needed to.

This was not merely ornament. Giving the environment form, rank, and ritual was at once political, social, and practical. When it became necessary to show that sumō was not just a gathering of large men falling over to amuse the crowd, but something possessing tradition, rules, and sanction, it was precisely then that efforts appeared to dress the whole world in an appropriately ancient, respectable, and orderly narrative. One might say that sumō in Edo not only fought in the ring, but also fought for its own face.

And where did the rikishi (力士 – wrestlers, literally “men of strength”) themselves come from? Here things become even more interesting, because the great city of Edo was a magnet not only for ambitious people, but also for “homeless” people — those pushed out of former arrangements, seeking occupation, protection, and a way to survive. From the early Edo period onward, rōnin also flowed into the cities, people without stable support, people living by odd jobs, by the strength of their own bodies, by connections, sometimes by activities in the underworld. Some entered the milieu of sumō, some the world of assistants, guards, men who “get things done,” and some drifted even further, toward life on the edge of the law. Professional sumō did not function in a vacuum. It grew from the same metropolitan soil from which there also sprang rowdies, laborers, mercenaries, men of hard work, and men of hard temper.

This in turn explains why the authorities viewed this world with a mixture of interest and anxiety. On the one hand, sumō was popular, drew crowds, and had the potential to be beautifully narrated as heritage, ritual, and socially useful spectacle. On the other hand, it was only too visible that this milieu lacked neither impulsive men, disputes, conflicts, nor even ordinary urban dissipation. Numerous sources from the period, after all, contain calls to restrain quarrels, drunken excesses, and improper conduct. The very fact that such things had to be written down is eloquent: no one warns a quiet monastery not to start brawls.

This does not mean, of course, that sumō was nothing but a nest of chaos. Its power came precisely from the tension between impulse and form. Between the brutal reality of the great city and the attempt to impose ceremonial order upon that reality. Between the crowd, which wanted emotions, and the institution, which wanted dignity.

And that is exactly why the world of the rikishi was an ideal partner in conflict with the world of the machi hikeshi. Both groups lived by the body, strength, reputation, and public fame. Both belonged to a city that adored vivid types. Both gathered men accustomed to rivalry, display, and very quick reactions to insult. And if one adds to this a crowd, the emotions of spectacle, and that classic Edo conviction that any little trifle may swell into a matter of honor — one gets the perfect ground. In short: on one side were men who professionally threw themselves onto burning roofs. On the other, men who threw themselves at one another. The city could only sit back more comfortably and wait for things to become interesting…

Before the blow fell, a word was spoken

Everything began as many things in Edo did: not with a grand idea, but with a trifle that in a calmer city would probably have died after three short breaths, while here it suddenly acquired its own rhythm and its own force. There was a crowd, there was a spectacle, there was temple ground, and there was that particular atmosphere of days when religiosity, fairground, entertainment, and urban vanity blend into one substance.

In the Edo period the surroundings of great temples and shrines were, after all, not exclusively places of devout silence. They were spaces of movement, meeting, trade, watching others, displaying one’s clothing, commenting on faces, figures, behavior, gossiping, cheering, and being seen. When sumō tournaments were held there, things became even denser: not only with people, but with glances. And in Edo the gaze of others could at times be sharper than the blade of a wakizashi.

It was precisely in such a landscape that the spark appeared: in the clamor, the jostling, among hawkers, gawkers, people who had come to watch something, and people who had come above all in order, on the occasion, to watch one another. In a world so saturated with an audience, there was in truth no private insult. One word spoken too loudly, one gesture read as contemptuous, one laugh at the wrong moment, and a man no longer stood alone against another man — he stood against the whole city, or at least against that fragment of it which happened to have a free afternoon and a great desire to see whether this would turn into a quarrel.

And usually it did.

In later accounts, especially in kabuki, this beginning takes on almost scenic elegance. In one of the dramatic versions that later grew from the soil of this story, before the clash itself takes place, we are given an entire small world of Edo in miniature: a pugnacious hero, banter, provocative remarks, intermediaries, guards, entertainment, and above all — pride. This is important, because the culture of the period understood perfectly well that great quarrels do not arise from great ideas. They arise from an ego offended by a trifle that happened to fall upon sufficiently fertile ground.

And the ground here was excellent. On one side stood men of fire, the kind who do not like yielding, because yielding looks bad both in a fire and in life. On the other side stood men of the world of sumō, a milieu equally bodily, equally public, and equally charged with pride. Nor was there anyone here capable of saying: “it is nothing, let us drop it.”

In the soberest accounts, the real course of events, moreover, looks quite characteristic: first not a great battle, but an argument, a quarrel, verbal friction — something that still might have been stopped had all the participants been dull and reasonable men. Fortunately for later storytellers, they were not. In the “real version” (and there are many versions), the brawl had at least a two-stage character: it began with a verbal skirmish between two small groups — one from “me,” the other from sumo — and only afterward did the matter pass to a higher level.

And here begins something very characteristic of Edo: the event has scarcely happened, and already it exists in several versions at once. In documents and reports closer to the matter we still see a conflict rather rough, concrete, intelligible in the logic of urban resentment. In jitsuroku and kōdan, however, it begins to expand, because two acts of a quarrel are, to put it without malice, a little too few for a city that loves a story with a proper number of turns.

That is precisely why later narratives multiply the stages, lengthen the conflict, add successive episodes, as if Edo itself were saying: yes, yes, but do not end it so quickly, now that everyone is seated. Literature and theater were able to stretch the thing to three, even four stages, because the audience likes a quarrel with a solid dramatic construction.

This stratification of memory is in itself fascinating. According to one line of transmission, the first clash should not be understood as a “great fight in the ring” in the sense later loved by the theater. Scholars point out that certain elements of later tales — especially the spectacular entry onto the arena itself and the elaborated dramaturgy of the clash “before everyone’s eyes” — are already a clear effect of culture refining the story. Tamura Nariyoshi (a kabuki theater manager of Meiji times) explicitly reproaches later tales for placing this quarrel directly on the dohyō (土俵), calling it a serious distortion. And yet it was precisely there, on the dohyō, that people so gladly set it afterward, for what could be more theatrically tempting than the collision of two worlds exactly in the middle of a place that is already a stage in itself?

The theater, being theater, immediately understood the potential of the situation. In one kabuki version, the hero bursts into the sumō grounds when, amid noise and spectacle, a humiliating incident takes place: a piece of broken vessel wounds him in the forehead, words are exchanged, the opponent apologizes, but the crowd has already done its work. And the crowd in Edo could be a separate protagonist of the drama: someone shouts, someone sneers, someone cries, “what kind of man are you?”, someone else snorts with laughter — and suddenly a man who only a moment ago might have closed the matter feels that he is no longer fighting for his own forehead, but for the honor of his homeland (here understood as a concrete district of the city). In this stage version it is precisely the shouts of the spectators that set the situation alight a second time: the apology is not enough, because the audience has already suggested to the hero the worst thought of all — that he looks ridiculous. And in Edo, ridiculousness could be harder to bear than pain.

In other accounts, probably closer to the harder memory of the event, the matter has a more brutal, less elegantly arranged character. Not so much a beautiful theatrical duel as an escalation, in which the men of “me” enter the game armed with tobiguchi, while on the sumō side there appears not only strength, but also a weapon. In the jitsuroku version, four tobi entered the dohyo with tobiguchi, while an opponent from the sumō circle carried a sword — a gift from the daimyō of Unshū — and there was a clash of “blade against blade,” not merely an effective scuffle for the public’s entertainment. This is no longer a comic quarrel. It is the moment when urban touchiness begins to brush against real danger.

And it is precisely here that the tension of this story becomes truly interesting. For the first clash, however we reconstruct it, does not end the matter — it only defines it. It establishes the sides. On one side: someone who has been insulted, or considers himself publicly insulted. On the other: someone who has no intention of showing weakness by apologizing. Between them: a crowd that sees everything and will gladly add its own commentary. Above them: a city that on the one hand loves order, and on the other is irresistibly drawn to spectacle. And beside them already waits the memory of culture, ready in a few years to improve reality where reality proves too little theatrical.

Out of control

According to the accounts closest to the event itself, after the first quarrel everything proceeded quickly, without a moment to cool down. First there was an argument — sharp, loud, public — but still within the bounds of what Edo knew all too well: wounded pride, a raised voice, a few words too many. But then the man from “me-gumi” did not go home, did not go drink sake, and did not decide the day was not worth wasting. He returned to his own people. And in Edo that meant the matter had just ceased to be private. The firefighters set out in greater numbers toward the place associated with the sumō matches.

And it is precisely here that this very Edo-like logic begins, which cannot be understood if one looks at it as an ordinary street fight. For the tobi of the machi hikeshi, the insult of one man could easily become the insult of the whole group. They worked together on roofs, risked their lives together in fires, carried together the pride of their team. In such a world there was no need to explain for long what had happened. A few sentences were enough, a couple of violent gestures, perhaps the showing of a cut or a mark from the first clash, and it was already clear that the question was no longer “whether to go,” but “how many will go.” The city of fires also had lightning-fast logistics of anger.

So the men of “me” moved together. Not in ceremonial formation, nor like a detachment from an official report, but like men who had decided the matter was theirs. Someone took what he had at hand. And what men of fire had at hand were not ornamental fans, but tobiguchi (鳶口) — iron hooks, tools of the trade, with which on an ordinary day beams were pulled, elements of construction torn away, and whatever needed tearing apart before the fire devoured everything. It was a tool, but in a moment of anger it was simply something heavy, long, and very persuasive. In one jitsuroku account there appears a mention that four tobi entered the confrontation with tobiguchi in their hands.

The closer they came to the tournament grounds, the denser the crowd grew. Edo had an exceptional gift for sensing when “something was in the air.” Vendors, boys running small errands, idlers with a surplus of time, people who had come ostensibly to watch sumō but just as gladly watched people watching sumō — all such people existed in every larger space of spectacle. And suddenly they felt that something better than the scheduled program of the day was about to happen. Nothing drew glances so much as the moment when an insult ceased to be a word and began to take shape in heavy objects.

So the firefighters are no longer coming to talk. They push forward. On the sumō side too there is no place for polite helplessness. There too it is a matter of the prestige of the milieu. One cannot simply yield to a noisy group of firemen and pretend nothing happened, because the crowd is watching. On the sumō side there appears a man carrying Samonji (左文字) — a sword given by the lord of Unshū. So this is no longer a “dust-up” with bare fists for the amusement of bystanders. It is the moment when one suddenly feels that things may go very badly indeed.

And they do.

Someone presses forward first. Someone answers. A hook goes up, steel comes out of the scabbard. In a single instant the sound of the crowd changes color. It is no longer the ordinary “oho!” heard during an impressive rikishi bout, but that shorter, sharper sound of the collective stepping back half a pace. Four tobi with tobiguchi against a man with a sword and the sumō men around him — that is how starkly and inelegantly the climax appears in the versions closer to the event. The source puts it lapidarily, but strongly: it was a fight “刃物と刃物”, blade against blade. On the sumō side a sword was drawn; on the firefighters’ side they answered with hooks.

At this moment one can discern in the incident the entire cross-section of Edo. Not only because there is a crowd. Also because every participant carries his own world with him. The firefighters bring into the clash their tools, their inclination to act as a group, their reflex to move forward, not back. The men of sumō bring into it strength, the pride of their milieu, and a sense that they must not allow themselves to be publicly humiliated. Above them hangs something third: the urban passion for spectacle. Someone is probably shouting, someone cursing, someone already running off to spread the news further. In Edo violence very quickly became a story even before it had time to end.

So the climax does not consist merely in blows being struck. It consists in everything that in this story had until now been dispersed suddenly compacting into one hard core: honor, group, tool, weapon, crowd, noise, unwillingness to yield. Only a moment ago it was a provocation. Now it is already a quarrel of which people will not say, “those two argued,” but “the men of me-gumi clashed with the men of sumō.”

And it is precisely at this sharp point that one must hold one’s breath. For from this moment on the fight lives a double life: once as a real incident, very dangerous and very concrete, and a second time as ideal material for storytellers, actors, and spectators, who will in a moment begin enlarging it, seasoning it, and remaking it in their own fashion.

After the fight begins the second fight — the one over memory

If we adhere to the version closest to the incident itself, the picture is fairly simple. First there was a sharp verbal dispute. Then the men of Megumi returned in greater numbers to the grounds associated with the sumō tournament, and there the actual clash broke out.

One can also point to a few hard details. In one jitsuroku account — that is, a record already literary, but still referring to the concrete event — four tobi armed with firefighters’ hooks entered the dohyo together with numerous supporters. On the sumō side, meanwhile, there appears a sekitori who had with him the sword Samonji, a gift from the lord of Unshū, as well as his own backing. The account therefore emphasizes that this was not an ordinary shoving match, but a fight “blade against blade” — on one side a sword, on the other metal hooks.

With this, however, ends the part that can be counted with greater certainty. The surviving accounts do not provide a reliable full number of all the participants on both sides, nor do they state with certainty the number of bystanders. It is known only that the clash took place in a public space, during an event that drew a crowd, so the witnesses must have been many. Historically, the most likely place may have been the grounds of a 勧進相撲 (kanjin-zumō) tournament within 両国回向院 (Ryōgoku Ekōin), because that is where the sources locate the ring operating at that time and the world of sumō toward which the men of “me-gumi” moved after the quarrel. Nor is there in these accounts any clear, consistent information about the number of wounded or about fatalities. In other words: we know the mechanics of the incident and a few very concrete details, but we do not possess anything like a modern police report with a table of losses. These gaps were, of course, conscientiously filled by urban gossip, and later by theater and literature.

In kōshaku stories — that is, tales and oral narratives developed for an audience — the two-stage arrangement soon proved too modest. Storytellers therefore added further episodes. Two stages became three, sometimes even four. The logic was simple: if a story is to be delivered over several days and keep listeners attentive, it needs new twists. Therefore later memory did not so much preserve the incident as begin arranging it according to the rules of good spectacle.

The kabuki stage moved in the same direction. There people were no longer interested in exactly how many stood to one side, but in how best to show humiliation, anger, and revenge. In one of the best-known stage versions, the first part of the incident unfolds on the dohyō. First the victorious sekitori finishes his bout; then an incident with a broken bowl takes place on stage. A shard wounds the hero in the forehead. The sekitori apologizes, but the matter does not die down, because the audience reacts. Taunting cries are heard, the hero rushes onto the dohyō, throws himself at his opponent, is grabbed by the back of the neck and hurled away. He tries once more, but again is thrown down, and in the end is simply carried out. In this version one can point to one clearly shown injured person — the hero with the cut forehead.

Kabuki also added a second stage that in this form is absent from the basic skeleton of the real incident. After losing on the dohyō, the hero lures the sekitori onto a boat and there tries to reverse the situation. On the water the advantage belongs no longer to the rikishi, but to a man accustomed to balancing — whether on roofs or on rocking boats. The sekitori loses his footing, sits down heavily, the boat sways, the tension rises. In later stage adaptations this arrangement is developed even further, because it offers authors a very clear contrast: on the dohyō the rikishi is stronger, on the boat — the hikeshi.

In practice this means that after the fight itself there began to function in parallel at least three orders of memory. The first is the order closest to the event: two stages, the collective incursion of the firefighters, four tobi with tobiguchi, a sekitori with a sword. The second is the order of the storytellers: ever more episodes, ever more dramaturgy, ever less concern for numbers. The third is the stage order: a distinct hero, one injury shown to the audience, one defeat, then a second attempt to recover face elsewhere. All these versions tell of the same incident, but each does so for a different purpose.

That is exactly why it is so difficult to answer in one sentence the question, “what actually happened?” At least two things happened at once. First there was a real clash between the men of Megumi and the men of the world of sumō. Then the work of memory began. Some arranged the facts, others stretched the narrative, still others sought the best scenic composition. From that moment on the brawl belonged no longer only to the participants. It belonged to the city.

The authorities watch

From the point of view of the bakufu, such a story was not picturesque. It was troublesome. In a public space two groups had clashed which the state both needed and could not leave entirely to themselves. Urban firefighters were essential in a city constantly struggling with fires. The world of sumō attracted crowds and money, and was therefore a durable part of Edo life. The problem was that both of these milieus had strong internal solidarity, their own hierarchy, and a tendency to settle disputes independently.

The authorities, moreover, knew the temperament of the world of sumō very well. Surviving regulations for that milieu contain a clear injunction: “喧嘩・口論・酔狂を慎め” — “one must refrain from fights, quarrels, and drunken excesses.” Such a provision did not arise without reason. It means that the authorities were dealing with a real problem of discipline. Further, sources indicate that against the background of this milieu there were broader growing problems of public order in large cities, especially from the mid-eighteenth century to the Bunka-Bunsei era. For the administration, then, sumō was not merely ritual or entertainment. It was also a milieu that had to be controlled.

In this context, the incident we are discussing today looked exceptionally bad to the authorities. First, because the dispute was not stopped at the level of a private quarrel. Second, because it turned into a collective action by one group against another. Third, because this happened before the eyes of a crowd, and thus immediately acquired a demonstrative dimension. In a city such as Edo, it was precisely the public nature of the incident that was particularly dangerous. When one group shows that it can itself administer an honorable revenge, other milieus receive a ready model of behavior.

The bakufu could not allow such models to become fixed. From the point of view of the office, it did not matter who had come off better in the eyes of the street. What mattered was that men of fire had come with tools, and men of sumō had answered with weapons, and that the whole incident had quickly become an affair of the city. Authority could tolerate the colorfulness of Edo, but it could not accept a situation in which professional groups conducted their own politics of prestige beyond the control of the office.

At the same time, it is precisely here that the Tokugawa paradox becomes visible. The state needed these milieus. It needed firefighters, because without them the city would have burned even more frequently and even more severely. It needed sumō as a spectacle that structured the calendar of urban amusements and brought revenue. But the stronger and more visible these groups became, the greater the risk that they would begin to live according to their own ethos. The incident of “Megumi no kenka” was precisely such a moment, when that ethos came out into the street in the form of open conflict.

That is why after the incident it became important not only to punish the participants or calm the situation. It became equally important to regain control over the meaning of the event itself. The authorities wanted to see in it a violation of order. The city saw in it a story about honor, pride, professional dignity, and public humiliation. Out of this tension grew the later life of the brawl — in stories, in theater, and in popular culture. And it was there that its true career began.

A brawl whose echo can still be heard two hundred years later

“Megumi no kenka” did not pass into the twenty-first century primarily as a faithfully reconstructed episode from March 1805. Far more important proved to be the figures that this story condensed: the firefighter as an urban hero of difficult character, local pride more important than peace and quiet, loyalty to one’s own crew, an insult to honor which from the outside looks ridiculous, but for the participants is mortally serious. It was precisely these elements that proved exceptionally durable. In modern Japanese culture they live on not so much as a “reconstruction of the me-gumi brawl” as a ready code of character: the edokko — impetuous, loud, loyal to his own, prone to excess, yet at the same time endearing.

The most direct path to the present remains, of course, kabuki itself. “神明恵和合取組” (“The Shinmei and Megumi Match Ending in Reconciliation”), that is, the stage version commonly known as “Megumi no kenka,” was not locked away in a museum; on the contrary, in the twenty-first century it returned to broad circulation through “Cinema Kabuki.” In 2017 Shochiku brought to the screen a filmed recording of this play from “Heisei Nakamuraza,” with Nakamura Kanzaburō in the role of Tatsugorō. This is an important moment, because it shows that the subject still works for contemporary audiences not as a dead relic, but as a living spectacle of Edo energy — of people “iki and inase,” of the clash between tobi and rikishi, of pride, honor, and spectacle. In other words: between 1805 and 2017, the medium changed, but the pleasure of watching Edo turn a quarrel into art did not disappear.

(For those interested and able to access it — there exists a version with English subtitles for both “Kabuki on Demand” and “Cinema Kabuki.”)

Even more interesting, however, is the indirect path — the one on which the old brawl no longer returns under its own name, but leaves behind an inherited temperament. A good example is “め組の大吾” (the manga “Megumi no Daigo”), and later “め組の大吾 救国のオレンジ” (the manga and anime “Megumi no Daigo Kyūkoku no Orenji”). The contemporary series itself does not tell of Edo and does not reconstruct the events of “Megumi no kenka”; it is the story of modern firefighters and rescuers. But the title alone already shows how durable the brand “Me-Gumi” has proved to be as a shorthand for heroism, professional audacity, and the firefighter ethos.

This is very characteristic: the old Megumi, rooted in the world of tobi and machi hikeshi, still sounds in Japanese culture after more than two hundred years like a name that immediately carries a certain type of masculinity and self-sacrifice.

This can be seen even more clearly in the newest turn toward Edo firefighters as full-fledged heroes of pop culture. The series “羽州ぼろ鳶組” (“Ushū Boro Tobigumi”), which began as a cycle of novels in 2017, later received audio dramas, a manga, and from January 2026 also an anime. This is no longer merely a loose allusion to the old world of fires. It is a full return to fascination with the hikeshi of Edo times — their ethos, risk, group solidarity, and the character of men who professionally entered the very places from which others fled. One might say that the twenty-first century did not so much “remember” the single brawl of me-gumi as rediscover that the world of machi hikeshi itself is excellent narrative material: dynamic, communal, and highly cinematic.

In anime it is also very interesting how the old edokko energy passes into wholly fantastical works. Let us look, for instance, at the official description of the character Shinmon Benimaru from “Fire Force” — it speaks of the commander of the 7th Special Fire Force, who “does not submit to the organization” and “keeps the rowdy Asakusa in line.” This is no longer a story about “Megumi no kenka” sensu stricto, but the echo is clear: a firefighter bound to Asakusa, independent, local, more loyal to his district than to the discipline of central authority, is almost a modern fantasy of the old machi hikeshi. When contemporary anime wants to draw a character who is charismatic, rebellious, and firefighter-like all at once, it very gladly reaches for precisely this old code.

A similar mechanism works in games. In “Rise of the Ronin” there appears Shinmon Tatsugorō, described as a man gathering around himself the firefighters and urban toughs of Edo. This is not a direct adaptation of our tale of the brawl, but another example of the same phenomenon: the game needs the figure of a late-Edo macho with local authority, so it reaches for a type derived from firefighter culture and from the memory of the edokko. In the game what matters is the whole package of associations: Asakusa, pugnacity, loyalty, the strength of the milieu, urban honor. That is precisely how old patterns survive in an interactive medium — not as a footnote, but as a playable character.

True, there are few direct, famous adaptations of the incident from 1805; much more often its ingredients return. The firefighter-rowdy returns, district patriotism returns, the group of men ready to go together “because they are ours” returns, honor heated to a temperature dangerously close to absurdity returns. So too returns the very image of “old Edo” as a world noisy, somewhat disorderly, but for that very reason extraordinarily alive. And perhaps that is precisely why this theme does not age at all (so far): it is not confined within a single plot, but constantly produces new variants of the same energy.

What is perhaps most interesting in this story is that nothing here is fully pure. The firefighters are not simply heroes, the rikishi are not simply villains, the crowd is not merely a witness, and authority is not exclusively a cold arbiter. Each carries his own reason and his own excess. Each has his own interest, his own shame, and his own need not to come off worse than others. That is precisely why an incident from before the age of modern media survived so well in cultural memory: because it is not merely a local anecdote from the Bunka period, but a profoundly human model of collective behavior. One need only change the costume, and the mechanism remains the same.

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"Strong Japanese Women"

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    未開    ソビエライ

 An enthusiast of Asian culture with a deep appreciation for the diverse philosophies of the world. By education, a psychologist and philologist specializing in Korean studies. At heart, a programmer (primarily for Android) and a passionate technology enthusiast, as well as a practitioner of Zen and mono no aware. In moments of tranquility, adheres to a disciplined lifestyle, firmly believing that perseverance, continuous personal growth, and dedication to one's passions are the wisest paths in life. Author of the book "Strong Women of Japan" (>>see more)

Personal motto:

"The most powerful force in the universe is compound interest." - Albert Einstein (probably)

  Mike Soray

   (aka Michał Sobieraj)

未開    ソビエライ

 An enthusiast of Asian culture with a deep appreciation for the diverse philosophies of the world. By education, a psychologist and philologist specializing in Korean studies. At heart, a programmer (primarily for Android) and a passionate technology enthusiast, as well as a practitioner of Zen and mono no aware. In moments of tranquility, adheres to a disciplined lifestyle, firmly believing that perseverance, continuous personal growth, and dedication to one's passions are the wisest paths in life. Author of the book "Strong Women of Japan" (>>see more)

Personal motto:

"The most powerful force in the universe is compound interest." - Albert Einstein (probably)

Mike Soray

(aka Michał Sobieraj)

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