“I never seek to defeat the man I am fighting. I seek to defeat his confidence.”

The expression “I never seek to defeat the man I am fighting. I seek to defeat his confidence” names a strategy of weakening an opponent’s certainty rather than confronting strength directly. In Sayuri’s retrospective account, Admiral Yamamoto Isoroku’s maxim becomes a key to understanding why the quarrel over her journal and the stolen obi brooch, rather than her mizuage alone, marks the turning point in her relationship with Hatsumomo.

The Admiral’s maxim

Sayuri introduces the saying through an evening at the Ichiriki Teahouse, where she had attended parties with Admiral Yamamoto on several occasions but did not claim to know him well. During a drinking game, the Admiral and another man agreed that the loser would have to buy a condom at the nearest pharmacy, for the embarrassment of the errand. Yamamoto won, and the room applauded.

When an aide joked about the pharmacist’s surprise at seeing the Admiral, Yamamoto said he had never doubted that he would win. A geisha objected that everyone loses sometimes; his answer, “But never me,” prompted someone to ask the secret of his success. He explained that victory depended on unsettling the opponent’s confidence: “A mind troubled by doubt cannot focus on the course to victory.” In his formulation, two fighters are true equals only when their confidence is equal.

Sayuri’s retrospective application

Sayuri uses the maxim to revise her own account of when the balance between her and Hatsumomo changed. As a young woman, she would have identified her mizuage as the turning point: it raised her to a position where Hatsumomo could no longer reach her. Looking back, however, she argues that the two might otherwise have continued living alongside each other for years. The decisive rupture came when Hatsumomo read Sayuri’s journal and Sayuri discovered the obi brooch that Hatsumomo had accused her of stealing.

The Admiral’s story gives Sayuri a way to describe what followed as more than a change in status. After the journal quarrel, Hatsumomo began to doubt that she could command the household as she once had. Sayuri identifies Mother’s refusal to take Hatsumomo’s side against her as the concrete source of that uncertainty. In Sayuri’s image, Hatsumomo becomes like fabric removed from a warm closet and left outside to be worn down by harsh weather: confidence has been shaken, and the loss exposes her to gradual deterioration.

A rivalry’s decline

Sayuri’s explanation is explicitly presented as her later interpretation, not as an uncontested account. She acknowledges that Mameha would disagree, seeing Hatsumomo instead as a woman already bent on self-destruction, whom her opponents merely needed to coax along a path she would follow anyway. Sayuri allows that Mameha may have been right, leaving open whether the journal conflict caused Hatsumomo’s decline or made an existing tendency visible.

In the years after Sayuri’s mizuage, Hatsumomo’s drinking and cruelty worsened. Sayuri contrasts this loss of restraint with Hatsumomo’s earlier, purposeful cruelty, which she likens to a samurai drawing a sword against an enemy rather than slashing at random. By this later period, Hatsumomo no longer seemed to know who her enemies were: she sometimes lashed out even at Pumpkin and insulted the men she entertained at parties. Her once-striking beauty also faded; Sayuri describes her skin as waxy-looking and her features as puffy.

Meaning of the expression

The maxim thus gives a tactical shape to Sayuri’s account of a rivalry: the struggle turns when Hatsumomo’s authority and confidence falter, not simply when Sayuri rises in rank. The brooch and journal provide the immediate rupture, while Mother’s changed allegiance marks its household consequence. Read beside Mameha’s competing explanation, the saying also frames Sayuri’s account as an interpretation shaped by hindsight, rather than proof that one confrontation alone determined Hatsumomo’s fate.