Legends of the samurai

705 Pages·1995·2.79 MB·English

by  Hiroaki Sato

DEDICATED TO
Rand Castile

CONTENTS
COPYRIGHT
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS AND NOTES
INTRODUCTION
CHRONOLOGY
GENEALOGY OF THE MINAMOTO CLAN
PART ONE: SAMURAI PROWESS
Yamato Takeru: Loser As Hero (Fourth century A. D.)
Yorozu: “I Wanted To Show My Bravery!”(587)
tomo no Yakamochi: To Die by Our Sovereign’s Side (Poem written in
749)
Minamoto no Mitsuru and Taira no Yoshifumi: The Duel (Mid-10th century)
Minamoto no Mitsunaka: Warrior’s Conversion (Incident ca. 975)
Fujiwara no Yasumasa and Hakamadare: Presence of Mind
Muraoka no Gor and Hakamadare: To Know When to be Alert
Taira no Koremochi, a.k.a. General Yogo: “Did You Bring His Head?”
Kanetada and Koremochi: Meaning of Revenge
Tachibana no Norimitsu: “What Splendid Swordsmanship!” with a
description of the same man as viewed by Sei Sh nagon, author of The
Pillow Book
Sakanoue no Haruzumi: A Warrior’s Shame
Minamoto no Raiko: Alert and Penetrating
Guardian Kings and The Oxcart: a Comic Interlude, with an account of the
origin of Haniwa
Minamoto no Yorinobu: “Let Your Little Kid be Stabbed to Death!”
Raik and Others: Tales of Archery
Taira no Munetsune The Silent One
Taira no Sadatsuna: When Not to Risk Your Life
PART TWO: BATTLES JOINED
Minamoto no Yoshiie: “The Samurai of the Greatest Bravery Under Heaven”
Minamoto no Yoshitsune: A Hero Hounded
Kusunoki Masashige: A Guerrilla of Unflinching Loyalty
K no Moronao: “When a Warrior Falls In Love”
Takeda Shingen and Uesugi Kenshin: Two Warlords
Oda Nobunaga: The Warlord and Poetry
PART THREE: THE WAY OF THE WARRIOR
H j S un: “Lord S un’s Twenty-One Articles”
Miyamoto Musashi: Gorin no Sho (Book Of Five Elements)
Arai Hakuseki: “My Father”
Yamamoto Tsunetomo: Hagakure (Hidden in Leaves)
The Forty-Seven Samurai: An Eyewitness Account, With Arguments
“MEMORANDUM OF OKADO DENPACHIRO”
ARGUMENTS
• Hayashi Nobuatsu
• Sat Naokata
• An Anonymous Samurai
• Asami Yasusada
• Dazai Shundai
• Yokoi Yay
PART FOUR: A MODERN RETELLING
“The Abe Family” by Mori gai
BIBLIOGRAPHY
INDEX OF IMPORTANT FIGURES
Maps:
• Twelfth century
• Seventeenth century
Illustrations:
• Cover: Kusunoki Masashige
• Hakamadare and Yasumasa
• Haniwa
• Yoshiie Exchanging Renga with Sadat
• Oda Nobunaga
• Miyamoto Musashi
• Abe Yaichiemon and his Sons
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
AND NOTES
“The Abe Family” first saw print in the Fall-Winter 1977 issue of St. Andrews
Review. I wish to thank Ron Bayes, founder and editor of SAR, a gallant
magazine which fulfilled its mission and folded in late 1991.
Part of the Introduction and the section on Oda Nobunaga were originally a
speech entitled “The Samurai and Poetry,” given on February 19,1992, at
Cornell University.
For the English translations of official titles I generally followed Ivan Morris
in The Pillow Book of Sei Sh nagon, vol. 2. But where I found his equivalent
unacceptable, as in calling the second-ranking officer in the Imperial Police
“assistant director,” I devised my own. For different translations of certain titles,
see Karl Friday’s book on the early samurai, Hired Swords.
Of many such titles that appear in the accounts, “governor” (kami) must be
viewed with the most caution. At first designating someone appointed to head a
province, governorship was a position of substantial revenues and prestige
perhaps until the early twelfth century. Thereafter the title gradually lost
substance and became nominal until, with sporadic exceptions, it all but lost the
original sense of governance. The reader should not be surprised to see
“governor” attached to some of the men working for warlords.
Many of the stories, accounts, and arguments cited in this book are
accompanied by running commentary, as well as notes. Some historical facts and
other background information, such as the birth and death dates of the people
concerned, are repeated so as to make each context easy to understand.
In most instances brackets indicate that the information given in them–be it
date, name, or note–is supplied by me.
In giving dates before the mid-nineteenth century I have followed the custom
of rendering the lunar calendar in English-for example, “the first month” rather
than “January” as in the solar calendar. I have given Japanese and Chinese
names as they are given in Japan and China, family name first.
In the old days Japanese of rank and status usually had more than one name.
At times any of the personal names and the family name were used
interchangeably, without gaining or losing respectability, as in the case of
Kusunoki Masashige, who is sometimes called by the family name, Kusunoki,
sometimes by his personal name, Masashige.
I wish to thank Kinoshita Tetsuo, Hirata Takako, Fujii Sadakazu, and Fujii
Misako for acquiring necessary texts and books, and Deborah Baker and Jessika
Hegewisch, my earlier editors on this book at The Overlook Press, for reading
initial sections of the manuscript. Nancy Rossiter read the manuscript as it was
completed chapter by chapter. She also prepared the maps on the basis of one of
the maps in Hired Swords, with permission of Stanford University Press. Kyoko
Selden read the finished manuscript and gave me helpful comments; so did my
meticulous editor friend, Eleanor Wolff.
I thank Murakami Tamotsu for preparing the picture depicting Kusunoki
Masashige for the cover and six illustrations.
Above all, Robert Fagan spent many days and nights on the manuscript for a
period stretching over eight years. I am grateful that he never gave up.
INTRODUCTION
A samurai with a deep, wide-brimmed hat is walking through an apparently
deserted field. Suddenly, more than a dozen bandits with drawn swords spring
out of the surrounding grass, encircle him, and demand prompt surrender of his
swords and other valuables, or else. The samurai indicates compliance and starts
to take off his haori, the outer jacket, and the bandits relax a little. That instant
he draws his sword and cuts down ten or so of them with lightning speed. The
remaining few run away, screaming for their lives. The samurai takes out a
tissue from his breast, wipes the blood off his sword, puts the sword back into its
sheath, and resumes his walk as if nothing has happened.
Or–
A famous swordsman visits a daimyo at his mansion. A r nin, a master-less
samurai, who happens to be staying there, is confident of his own
swordsmanship; upon learning who the visitor is, he asks him to “teach” him
some fighting techniques. “Teaching” is a euphemism for a serious match. The
swordsman declines. But the daimyo shows interest, and at his urging the
swordsman finally agrees to fight with wooden swords. Out in the garden the
two men face each other and a moment later strike – with their wooden swords
hitting each other’s body, apparently simultaneously.
The swordsman says, “Did you get that?”
The r nin says, “It was a draw,” looking exceedingly pleased that he’s had a
draw with a famous swordsman.
But the swordsman calmly says, “No, I won.”
Upset and angered, the r nin asks for a rematch. He gets it, and exactly the
same thing happens. The two men’s blows appear simultaneous.
Exactly the same exchange occurs again: The r nin says it was a draw, and
the swordsman says he won.
The r nin becomes outraged. And the daimyo shows greater interest, half
disbelieving what the swordsman has said. The r nin now insists on another
match – this time with real, steel swords. The swordsman declines but is again
overruled by the daimyo. But as soon as the two men face each other, the fight is
over–with the r nin keeling over, his head split in two. The swordsman walks up
to the daimyo and shows that part of his body which the r nin’s sword seemed to
have struck. Part of his outer jacket is slightly cut, but not the clothes
underneath, let alone his flesh.
Such may be your images of the samurai: a fantastic killing machine or a
preternatural user of the sword. They are, indeed, typical of the stories of
samurai endlessly spun in modern Japan as well, albeit of a particular period. I
cite them at the outset, however, to make two things clear.
First, this book, Legends of the Samurai, aims to show the changing ethos of
the Japanese warrior from a variety of angles, so it does more than assemble
tales of samurai demonstrating their martial skills. Such tales, in fact, make up a
minor portion of the volume, mostly collected in Part One.
Second, for such stories and some of the others, I have tried to select those
versions given in the times as close to the actual incidents as possible, rather
than modern retellings. Still, difficulties remain. Even if we are to lay aside the
case of one mythical hero, Yamato Takeru,†1 the time gap is often great. For
example, in recounting the story of Yorozu, † a would-be “shield of the
emperor,” the compilers of the Nihon Shoki (History of Japan) were recalling, in
720, an incident of nearly 140 years earlier. There is also the urge, which seems
to exist in every age, to turn a man or his actions into a legend, either to fulfill
narrative convention or out of the weakness to yield to fantasy. This may at
times obscure what really happened and how contemporaries viewed it.
The two vignettes cited above, both concerning the swordsman Yagy J b
Mitsuyoshi (1607-1650), may illustrate the point. Mitsuyoshi’s reputation as a
swashbuckler probably began to stir imaginations of the popular storytelling
variety not long after his death, yet the stories are already clearly exaggerated.
The modern fiction writer Kaionji Ch gor , while retelling the second anecdote
in an essay entitled Heih sha (Martial-Arts Experts),2 makes an interesting case
about swordsmen as killers. A swordsman during the Tokugawa Period (1603-
1868), he says, had only four compelling reasons to be engaged in killing: when
ordered by his lord, the shogun in particular, to kill a criminal or someone
marked as a danger; for revenge; in a quarrel; and when he ran into a robber or