Samurai: A History

340 Pages·2014·5.75 MB·English

by  John Man

CONTENTS
List of Maps
Preface
A Note on Transliteration and Dating
Prologue: Out of the Volcano
1 The Way of the Warrior: Beginnings
2 A Young Life Transformed
3 The Way of the Warrior: A Short History of Swords
4 The Coming of the Americans
5 The Way of the Warrior: Cutting the Belly
6 New World, New Life
7 The Way of the Warrior: Bushido
8 A Death in Kinko Bay
9 Exile, and a New Life
10 A Brief Taste of Power
11 The Prisoner
12 Into the Maelstrom
Photographic Insert
13 The Unhappy Revolutionary
14 The Accidental Rebel
15 Failure at Kumamoto
16 Retreat
17 The Long Road to Death
18 Saigo’s Last Stand
19 Transfiguration
Acknowledgments
Bibliography
Index
Also by John Man
Credits
P.S.
About the author
Read on
Copyright
About the Publisher
LIST OF MAPS
Saigo’s Japan, showing Kyushu and the way to Edo
The Satsuma rebellion, 1877
PREFACE
This is three stories intertwined.
One tells of the fast-flowing and dramatic events by which Japan, for 250
years a feudal patchwork almost entirely isolated from the rest of the world,
became a unified, outward-looking and fast-developing nation. In 1850 the
country was much as it had been in 1600: a self-contained world of thirty million
serfs dominated by three hundred lords who owed their authority to the nation’s
military dictator, the shogun, yet locally were absolute rulers. At the top of this
pyramid was the emperor, a semidivinity, pampered as a lapdog, remote from
everyday affairs.
The second story is that of the samurai, a military élite of some two million
who underpinned the whole system with attitudes, behavior and equipment that
all reached as far back into the past as the history of their local lords and the
shogun they served.
By 1880 the lords and the samurai were gone, and with them the whole edifice
of feudalism. Japan had leaped from the Middle Ages into the modern world. It
was not a popular revolution, because the peasants had no say in it, but it
produced a society familiar to Europeans: a sovereign at the top, a governing
élite, an emerging middle class, and a restless but subdued mass of peasants.
The third story is that of the man who helped drive this revolution, and at the
same time became its victim.
A NOTE ON TRANSLITERATION AND
DATING
Except for Japanese names and words common in English (e.g., Tokyo),
Japanese has been romanized according to the “revised Hepburn” system, with a
macron to indicate long vowels, mainly the o. Unfortunately, because most e-
book formats cannot accommodate macron symbols, these marks are absent
from all electronic editions.
Traditionally, Japan used the lunar calendar, which divided the year into
twelve months, each with 29 or 30 days. This gave 354 days in each year, so a
thirteenth month had to be added every three years (approximately, because one
year is about, 365.25 days, not an exact number of whole days). On January 1,
1873, the Japanese government adopted the Gregorian calendar. Some sources
use both systems, but to avoid confusion I use only the Gregorian.
PROLOGUE
OUT OF THE VOLCANO
LONG AGO IN A GALAXY FAR, FAR AWAY, AND ALSO NOT LONG ago right here on
earth, two warriors prepare for action. Though inhabiting separate worlds,
Digital and Reality, the two have much in common. They are expert in the use of
swords, despite the fact that they can call on the most fearsome and destructive
of long-distance weapons. The real warrior carries a supremely strong yet
flexible steel sword known as a katana, with edges that make flesh and bone
seem as soft as new bread; the digital one wields a “light saber,” a blade of
energy that emits a rather annoying hum when switched on and deflects other
light sabers and almost anything else with a sharp crackle. Both say they are
willing to fight to the death, though only one means it. Both could wear armor
that would make them look like rather exotic insects, but prefer loose tunics.
Yes, the samurai, though long gone, are with us still in the Jedi knights of Star
Wars, exemplified by the young hero, Luke Skywalker. Luke is not only the son
of Darth Vader; he is also the spiritual heir of our real-life hero, Saigo Takamori,
“the last samurai.” They are linked by more than their equipment. Both have an
epic task ahead of them: to restore to power a vanished but virtuous world. Both
adhere to austere chivalric rules supposedly based on ancient principles. Both
have their spiritual masters, whose voices echo down through the ages.
Yamamoto Tsunetomo, in his early eighteenth-century classic Hagakure
[Hidden Leaves]: The Book of the Samurai, dispenses wisdom “that has been
passed down by the elders,” like “Stamp quickly and pass through a wall of
iron,” for the wisest counsel is often obscure. Yoda expounds precepts in
Hollywoodese: “Named must your fear be before banish it you can,” he tells
Luke. Wise he is, so backward he talks.
An inspiration for Star Wars: that’s just one example among many of the
ways Japan’s warrior class lives on in the present. Novels, cartoons, DVDs,
games, TV series without number and followers of martial arts the world over all
show the enduring popularity of the subject. In Japan, samurai movies have been
so popular—twenty-six films have been made about one character alone, the
blind swordsman Zatoichi, who fights by hearing—that their influence on the
West was virtually inevitable. They come down to us indirectly through the
films of Kurosawa Akira (Akira being his given name, which comes second in
Japanese). Without Seven Samurai—seven ronin (masterless samurai) hired by
villagers to protect them from bandits—there would be no Magnificent Seven
(1960), its Wild West remake; without Yojimbo, no Fistful of Dollars (1964) or
Last Man Standing (1996).
You would think from most portrayals of samurai that they were solely a
medieval phenomenon. They should have been. The Middle Ages were their
heyday. Yet they survived not only as anachronisms but as a vital part of
Japanese society until their destruction in the rebellion of 1877, as anyone who
has seen Tom Cruise in The Last Samurai knows. That’s about the only
historical fact you should take from the film, which is hardly more about samurai
than Star Wars is. It is a beautifully made, well-acted hall of mirrors, splicing
together bits of fact and fiction to make a story appealing to Western tastes.
There were a few Westerners—Cruise-like figures—who fought in the Japanese
ranks down through the years, and a couple who fought as samurai, but none on
either side in this war. The samurai in the film are portrayed as a tribe apart,
living like America’s Amish in noble isolation; in fact, they were interfused with
the rest of society, many playing crucial roles as administrators. In the film, their
leader Katsumoto (Ken Watanabe) is a traditionalist—one who, wonderful to
relate, speaks English—steeped in the Way of the Warrior; in fact, the real-life
samurai leader, Saigo Takamori, was a complex and contradictory mixture of
past and future, revolutionary and reactionary, top government minister and
rebel; a man who despised foreigners yet reluctantly accepted the need for
change, a warrior who never actually fought, a man of action who loved to
compose Chinese poetry, a man with a zest for life who spent much of it
determined to die well, a leader who did not choose to lead the rebellion that
ended in his death.
This is Saigo’s story. It is also the story of the formation of modern Japan. To
understand him and his crucial role you have to start with the region from which
he sprang.
The southern tip of Japan’s most southerly island has one particularly famous
feature. I knew it was there, of course, yet missed seeing it for hours. From the
airport expressway it was hidden by steep green hills. If you come by bullet
train, you will miss it too, for you glide into Kagoshima’s heart through tunnels
and cuttings. Away from the coast, views are blocked by new buildings. There
are clues: the coarse, gray dust that gathers on footpaths, roads, parked cars and
collars; perhaps a column of smoke darkening a blue sky. Soon, though, you will
glance down an avenue leading to the sea, and stare astonished at the thing that
defines the city, and the whole region: the great, gray, fuming volcano.
After that first revelation, Sakurajima was never out of mind, and hardly ever
out of sight. From the eighty kilometers of curving coast, from the bulky green
hill at the city’s heart; from hotel rooms and balconies and trams—you see it at
every turn, half hidden by its own smoke or pale in dissipating mist or in crystal
clarity under a blue sky. No wonder they sell Kagoshima to Europe as the
Naples of the Orient. Sakurajima looms as large as Vesuvius over a bay that is as
glorious as the Gulf of Naples, and safer for shipping too: Kinko Bay, protected
by a fifty-kilometer inlet, is an inland lake, almost totally enclosed. The volcano
is as erratic as Vesuvius, though less destructive, because Sakura is a jima, an
island, with a handy three-kilometer stretch of water between volcano and city.
Actually, it’s not quite an island anymore, because an eruption in 1914 pumped
out enough lava to make a causeway to the mainland, but that is on the far side
of the bay, and no one has suggested changing the name.
Sakurajima defines this place: its history, the city and the character of its
people. Its explosive outbursts thousands of years ago cut this part of Kyushu,
formerly known as Satsuma, from the rest of Japan (by pumping out ejecta that
makes wonderful soil for the oranges named after the province—and cherries:
Sakurajima means “Cherry Island”). Historically, Satsuma was hard to get to
from the north, and hard to leave. But southward lay the open sea, and the
outside world. It was this interplay of accessibility and isolation that made
Satsuma what it was—and today’s Kyushu what it is: a province that was in