A friend of mine who is not the target audience for MoB at all agreed to be introduced to it for purposes of intellectual study, and that inspired me to write a lot of text about it. I thought I'd share some here:
Character Profile: Kagetora
My sensei has mentioned that the root cause of our anger is feeling our sense of self-worth/identity attacked. From this perspective, Kagetora exemplifies this universal human problem of an insecure sense of self-worth. His problem can be described in terms of Maslow's hierarchy. Though he is a highly developed person in many ways, he is fundamentally insecure. His security need has never been met. (As with Kuukai's stages of enlightenment, Kagetora is in several places in Maslow's hierarchy simultaneously: very conscientious and high achieving, but much like a young child in his security needs.)
Kagetora's problems stem from disrupted attachment to father and older brother figures. His biological father gave him away to the Takeda as a hostage when he was seven. He stayed with the Takeda seven years and then was given back to his birth family, but his father did not take him back. Instead, he was adopted by his great-uncle. Shortly thereafter, his family gave him as a hostage to Kenshin. Kenshin adopted him and made him his heir. But after Kenshin's death, a rumor surfaced that Kenshin changed his mind and named Kagekatsu his heir, hence the civil war. Being reunited with Kenshin after death, he asked him which son Kenshin chose, and Kenshin never answered. His oldest brother, Ujimasa, never liked him and regarded him as an evil omen because his birth closely attended the original oldest son's death. His trusted tutor raped him. Basically, throughout his formative years, he felt abandoned or betrayed (mostly abandoned) by the men who were supposed to protect and guide him.
Kagetora seems to have been treated well, by and large, by mothers; he doesn't seem to have particular "issues" about mothers. His compassion and decency probably speak to his having been well mothered. However, I think he regards mothers as fairly powerless and unable to protect, which accords with his Sengoku experience. It may also explain why Takaya is so phenomenally forgiving of his own mother abandoning him and his sister. Despite his having decent mother figures (bar Takaya's), a mother cannot fill his security needs.
Kagetora's insecurity takes the form of an overriding fear that he keeps being abandoned because he is not "good enough" to please his father figures. Thus, he has to perform to near perfection to stave off abandonment. This leads to his overextending his spirit's capacity to serve Kenshin, but more crucially it underlies his dynamic with Naoe.
After an entire childhood and young adulthood marked by abandonment, Kagetora (semi-unconsciously) attaches to Naoe as the father-protector figure he feels he needs. Naoe fits the bill: he is older; he is in the role of bodyguard; he is required as a vassal to be loyal and early on shows great commitment to that role. As time goes on, and it becomes clear that his devotion is not just good Confucian values but genuine loyalty and even adoration, Kagetora feels validated by his presence, craves his approval (worship), begins to trust him, and becomes terrified of losing him. He, therefore, falls into a pattern very common in people with Complex Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder (CPTSD), from which he certainly suffers: he tests Naoe's loyalty. He repeatedly subjects him to a series of "Will you still love me if's?" "Will you still love me if I am cold and distant?" "Will you still love me if I set you arduous tasks and show no appreciation for your work?" "Will you still love me if I profess I couldn't care less?" And so on.
Naoe's answer to these tests is invariably yes… but they take an enormous toll on him, leaving him understandably angry, belligerent, indignant, and continually claiming that one day he will leave, one day he won't take it anymore, which is, of course, exactly what Kagetora fears, which stokes his insecurities, which leads him to test Naoe harder.
It should be said this is not a linear progression across 400 years. Much of their relationship is probably pretty stable. And it's interesting to catch up with them after 30 fairly quiet years apart in the Meiji Era and to hear Kagetora say, with a decent sense of self-awareness, "We should stay apart, because I am steadier when I don't have you to lean on." True enough, but also without Naoe, his deepest security needs continue to go unmet, as the childhood groundwork for emotional self-sufficiency has not been laid.
The fact of the matter is that as crazy and obsessive as Naoe's adoration for him becomes, it is arguably what Kagetora needs to finally convince him that Naoe's love is unconditional, which is the kind of avowal of love he needs to fill the security need left from his childhood. And once he can internalize that, he can rapidly begin to heal under a normal developmental trajectory.
His relationship with Minako also somewhat slots into this paradigm. Minako, as a woman, is more a mother figure to him. (There is at least as much mother as lover in their dynamic, right down to her being coded as "Mary" and Kagetora as "Jesus.") As a woman, she cannot fill the role of protector; instead, she is someone who needs protection. But she does fill the role of "refuge," an important Buddhist concept, in giving him a space where he can let his emotional guard down. It is worth noting that Minako is an astoundingly compassionate and giving person, identified with Kannon Bodhisattva, which is like saying that in order to be Kagetora's girlfriend, you pretty much have to be the Goddess of Compassion, which says something about the scale of his emotional insecurity.
Kagetora's relationships with the other Yashashuu are indicative of his security needs. They all love each other; they've faced life and death together for 400 years. By normal standards, they should all have very emotionally secure relationships. Yet no one but Naoe is consistently willing to put Kagetora first. Irobe will choose Kenshin over Kagetora. Nagahide will sometimes choose Nagahide. Haruie… is not consistent. Therefore, Kagetora truly trusts no one but Naoe.
His relationship with Haruie is telling here. Haruie was his ally in war of succession, the only one of the Yashashuu who was. Naoe and Nagahide sided with Kagekatsu, and Irobe died before the war. Generally, Kagetora and Haruie have a friendly relationship, yet Haruie has a tendency to desert his/her duty to Kagetora. Very early on, he deserts the Yashashuu to side with his brother in seeking vengeance on Kagekastu. Two hundred years later, Haruie asks to be released from service so that she can live with her lover, Shintarou (who dies shortly thereafter). In the Meiji Era, Haruie quits to take up political activism. By this point, Kagetora's wits are so frayed that he threatens to kill her if she doesn't get in line. In the Shouwa Era, she makes noises about choosing her singing career at least partly over the Yashashuu. In the 1990s timeline, she briefly thinks she's found Shintarou again, leaving Kagetora to again doubt her commitment to the mission. He and Haruie do love each other, but he doesn't fully trust her, cannot be fully open with her, and even with this self-protection in force, her fickle streak hurts him quite a lot. (There is a moving scene late in the series where Haruie takes herself to task for deserting Kagetora and placing her hopes of reuniting with Shintarou above her real life with him.)
A few words about Kagetora's sexuality: Kagetora's "natural" sexual orientation is hard to assess because his sexual development has been so skewed by his unresolved rape trauma. I would loosely identify him as demisexual, in that he is only significantly sexually attracted to people he first has a very intimate interpersonal relationship with (Naoe, Minako). The intimacy seems to matter more than whether the person is male or female. That said, Kagetora is reluctant in his sexual relationships with women and does have a particular need to be the receptive partner with another man, both of which tendencies seem to me connected to a need to work through his rape trauma. His general emotional need to connect with an older man is also, I think, sometimes expressed sexually. Because Kagetora is strongly invested in his façade of being calm, in control, and not in need, expressing sexual feelings (which are none of those things) profoundly exposes his vulnerabilities and punctures his fragile self-esteem, which is likely why he tends to think of his sexual self as "the beast," with a great deal of shame. Once he begins to heal his sense of self-worth, all of these negative dimensions rapidly lessen: he feels less shame, less vulnerability, less anxiety, and in the long haul, probably less sexual need overall.
It is worth emphasizing that for all his failings, Kagetora is consistently impressive in his instinctive and immediate compassion and care for others. He is in his comfort zone when he can protect, guide, and comfort those he views as subordinate to him, either as people under his command or people with less power. Such situations allow him to show his good side without showing his weakness. Thus, despite an often gruff exterior, he is generally very tender with children and animals, a solicitous husband, caring father, nurturing older brother, and dedicated leader, quick to jump into the fray to save strangers (which is how he meets Minako). These traits are his signal strengths and propel him rapidly into "Present Kuukai" status once he turns the corner in working through his security issues.