by John Man
The key to their survival was the way they renewed their sense of identity, not by abandoning the past but by cherry-picking aspects of it to suit new circumstances. Luckily for them, they had many rich centuries and much folklore from which to pick their cherries.
Emerging from a thousand years rich in legend and poor in historical record, Japan first came together under an emperor in the seventh century. All emperors thereafter were related, making Japan’s the oldest hereditary ruling house in the world. Imperial unity lasted for some five hundred years, the seedbed of the earliest samurai traditions.
When you hear the word “samurai,” you probably think “sword.” But samurai swords—the proper curved ones, not the heavy-duty, straight iron type that was imported from China—came later, because it took a while to create a tradition of sword making. The first heyday of the samurai was the age of the bow: so the first samurai were mounted bowmen, not swordsmen. Their bow was something very different from the short semicircle of wood and bone used all across mainland Eurasia. By comparison, the Japanese bow (yumi), made of laminated bamboo, looks lanky and unwieldy, an unlikely weapon for mounted archers.
There had been similar bows on the mainland. They were used by the Xiongnu, who had ruled an empire centered on Mongolia and today’s northern China from the third century BC to about AD 200. The Huns (perhaps descendants of the Xiongnu) had had something similar when they invaded Europe in the fourth and fifth centuries AD. These bows—Xiongnu, Hun and early Japanese—had one thing in common: they were all “asymmetrical,” the grip being placed about one-third of the way along the shaft, the shorter section being the bottom bit. Why? It’s a mystery. Some claim it allowed a horseman to lift the bow across the horse’s neck (surely not: when you shoot from horseback you do so on one side only, the left if you are right-handed; you can’t shoot to the right if you are holding the bow in your left hand). Or perhaps hunters liked their bows to have a short lower limb so they could shoot while kneeling. A third theory claims that asymmetry originally derived from the nature of bamboo: it tapers, which meant that for a bow to draw evenly, it had to be asymmetrical, thicker and shorter at the bottom, thinner and longer at the top (but any good bowyer can get over that). A leading member of Britain’s kyudo community—those who practice Japanese archery—shook his head when I asked about this: “Personally, I think they liked their bows to have a long upper limb because it made them look taller. It’s good to have something tall to threaten opponents with.” As I said, a mystery. No one has a clue. If there was a reason for the asymmetry, it had vanished from consciousness before the gangly bamboo bow became traditional. In Japan, that was the way you made a bow. End of story.
There’s nothing very samurai about Japanese archery today. Kyudo practitioners are the very opposite of samurai, being dedicated to archery as a ritual art rather than a war-fighting skill. Since all things martial were banned by the Americans after the Second World War, kyudo is a post-1945 invention, with dress and actions that proclaim its purely cultural significance. You wear a sort of white kimono top, with a sweeping black skirt and white slipper-socks. You take your turn; you approach your mark with reverence; you stand edge on, legs akimbo; you set the shoulders just so; you nock the arrow with the correct gestures, the arrow resting to the right of the bow on thumb and forefinger (which looks wrong to me, because with the English longbow, the arrow is on the left, resting on the knuckle); you hold the bow lightly; you raise it and the nocked arrow above your head; you solemnly lower the bow and at the same time draw the string right back beyond the ear; you hold, straining Zen-like not to struggle to attain the proper level of calm; you feel the balance between the forces—the drawn bow, your quivering muscles, your attention on the little circles of black and white fifty paces away—and you release, allowing your arm to swing back so that your two arms make the right aesthetic balance. It’s like a cross between Noh theater and ballet, and almost as demanding. Beauty and inner peace: those are the aims. Hitting the target is incidental. Not exactly the sort of activity for a warrior in single combat.
In two ways, though, modern kyudo archers connect with their samurai forebears. The bow is the traditional design, asymmetrical, with many laminations of bamboo. Also, it is built ever so slightly out of true, so that the two limbs lean a little to the right to place the string off center. Why? With an English longbow—with most types of bow, actually—the arrow is nocked centrally but is directed minutely off course by the width of the bow. In the Japanese bow, it flies straight and true. And second, in Japan itself, there are once more horseback archers, riding and shooting with the skills developed by their ancestors over one thousand years ago. Hun-style mounted archery is a growing sport internationally, but no one outside Japan does it Japanese style. Not yet.
By the early twelfth century, horseback archery had developed a complex set of fighting rituals. Opposing sides would line up and fire whistling arrows to call upon the gods as witnesses. Then top warriors, boxed into their leather-and-iron armor, would call out challenges to single combat, each boasting his achievements, virtues and pedigree. They would then discharge arrows, either at a distance or galloping past each other. Then, if there was no winner, came a rather unseemly grapple, like sumo wrestling on horseback (or in my mind’s eye more like a tussle between two rather old-fashioned sci-fi robots), with each trying to unseat the other. And then came a final bout with daggers. Since both warriors were totally enclosed in armor, the rounds of horseback archery were usually more show than substance, designed to give the individual samurai a chance to display himself and his skills. In one sea battle (Yashima, 1184) between the two great rival families of the day, the Taira and the Minamoto, the Taira hung a fan on the mast of one of their ships and, to induce their opponents to waste arrows, challenged them to shoot it down. A bowman named Nasu nu Yoichi, on horseback in shallow water, hit it with his first shot, guaranteeing himself immortality for doing what the samurai admired most: winning glory for oneself in battle.
At this time, in the late twelfth century, the Taira and the Minamoto were vying for dominance, each seeking to sideline the cloistered emperor. Their war ended in 1185, when the Minamoto, under their great general Yoshitsune, crushed their rivals in a monumental sea battle. Yoshitsune—a brilliant military leader, but headstrong—was then hounded to death by his equally brilliant and far more devious elder brother, Yoritomo. It was Yoritomo who took a step that would define Japanese administration for the next seven hundred years. With the approval of the emperor (who was in no position to disapprove), he appointed his own officials in every province and estate so that he could wield power across the land. Had this been China, he would have seized absolute power, made himself emperor and established a new dynasty. But that was not the Japanese way. For centuries the emperor had been sacrosanct. Instead, Yoritomo had himself awarded the highest military rank, sei i tai shogun, “barbarian-quelling great general.” This ancient title had once referred to the general empowered to wage war against the wild indigenous tribe of northern Honshu, the Ainu. Now its holder, known simply as the shogun, ruled the whole country as top samurai—in effect, military dictator—in the name of the revered but impotent emperor, basing his military government, the bakufu, at his HQ in Kamakura.
Under the remote and ineffectual emperor and his notional servant the shogun, Japan became a patchwork of sixty provinces and six hundred estates, all scrapping with their neighbors. Warlord battled warlord, temples raised their own militias, armed bands plagued the countryside.
Warfare was an expensive business even then. No lord or commander could survive without an investment in armor, horses, bows, swords, daggers and fighting men. There arose an élite of landowning warriors—bushi—fighting for their masters, to whom they were bound by mutual need, the lord providing land, war booty and protection in exchange for the skills of the specialist warriors, the samurai (originally saburai, meaning “one who serves,” in particular one who provides military service for t
he nobility). That was the deal, the Japanese version of the system that scholars call feudalism.
But there was an inherent instability in this relationship. If a samurai prospered, he would win status, power and wealth enough to claim his freedom. Why, as a boastful, independent warrior, would he continue to devote himself to a lord? How could a master ensure his loyalty? How, in brief, could the feudal system be made stable?
The answer was to invest loyalty—to one’s lord, not to the far-off emperor—with ever greater significance and mystique, turning it into an ideal more loved than life itself, guaranteeing status and glory in both life and death. An eleventh-century history tells of the Minamoto, future military overlords, and in particular of a warrior called Minamoto no Yoriyoshi and his loyal vassal Tsunenori. In one battle,
though Tsunenori had broken through the victorious enemies around him, he had barely managed to escape, and knew nothing about what had happened to Yoriyoshi. He questioned a soldier, who said, “The general is surrounded by rebels. Only five or six men are with him; it is hard to see how he can get away.”
“For thirty years now I have been in Yoriyoshi’s service,” said Tsunenori. “I am sixty and he is almost seventy. If he must die, I intend to share his fate and go with him to the underworld.”
He wheeled and entered the enemy cordon.
Two or three of Tsunenori’s retainers were present. “Now that our lord is about to die honorably by sharing Yoriyoshi’s fate,” they said, “how can we stay alive? Although we are merely subvassals, we are honorable men too.” They penetrated the enemy ranks together and fought savagely. They killed a dozen rebels—and all fell in front of the enemy.
Holding themselves apart from the aristocrats, intellectuals, peasants and brigands, the samurai became fiercely proud of their toughness and valor, quick to perceive an insult and as quick to avenge it. In war, a warrior equated his very being with extreme acts of bravery and self-sacrifice, especially in the face of overwhelming odds, for this was the way to gain reputation and rewards. In peace, quickness to see an insult was a virtue. At the lowest level, samurai were like the “foot soldiers” of inner-city street gangs; at the highest, like paramilitaries in the government of an old-style South American dictatorship or the well-off enforcers of top Mafia “families,” with estates and armies of their own. To survive in this anarchic world, in which power and life could be snatched away in an instant, self-image was vital. Every man had to strut and preen like a cockerel, or seem a loser. The samurai’s whole way of life was dominated by their extreme sensitivity to any threat or insult to their honor, and their near-instantaneous readiness to take violent action in its defense. Only in this way could “honor” be asserted, protected or restored.
Honor cultures are popular subjects with sociologists, who discern certain features in common. Most, for instance, are outside the mainstream of ordinary life: their members do not produce anything, but rather fight each other to control some crucial resource—usually territory—which cannot be created, only seized or defended. Ordinary foot soldiers—young, sexually mature males who dream of power and wealth but have neither—fight for their boss, their territory and their “name,” because that, in the end, is all they have. Honor systems involve young men on the lookout for anything that appears to demean them and are eager to make a violent, often fatal response.
But all honor systems also have unique features of their own. To take two examples:
In rural Greece, even as recently as the late 1960s, a man was dishonored if a female relative had sex outside an acceptable relationship. The woman, too, was dishonored. Honor was partly restored by the woman committing suicide, but only fully restored by the man killing either the lover or the woman or both. “Dishonor could be ‘washed away’ only with blood, and only the men in the family carry the responsibility for the restoration of family name and honor.”1 This was not considered a crime, but was expected and approved behavior. (Similar attitudes still govern “honor killings” in Islamic communities today.)
American street gangs have been subjects of particular interest. Though often now identified by their ethnic origins, they are first and foremost defenders of territory, usually naming themselves after streets, blocks or neighborhoods. Gang members are young men who perceive each other as equals, for whom any small breach of etiquette can be interpreted as an insult to the gang, which has to respond with physical violence. Sometimes the rules are so arcane that gang members themselves cannot tell the difference between interest, sympathy and an intended slight. In London these days, best beware of staring at hoodies, in case your gaze sparks a belligerent, “Are you dissing [disrespecting] me?” In ganglands, many a stare has precipitated a drive-by shooting. Yet gang members can operate in—and often graduate into—the real world of jobs and marriage, and “quite often follow the spirit as well as the letter of the laws of proper decorum.” Only within the tight little world of gang culture do they feel compelled to defend their honor. As a central figure of one Chicago gang, the Lions, put it: “You got your pride, don’t you. You can’t let anyone step on you. We know when we do wrong, we really do, but . . . there’s some things we have to do.” Several researchers have compared the gangs of Chicago, New York, St. Louis and Cleveland to warrior societies. “Just as feudal barons sized up each other’s armies, adolescents in street-corner gangs collected information on the heights, weights, fighting skills and weaponry of their rivals.”2
In the first of these two examples, male honor was defined by women’s behavior; in the second, by relationships between equal males as gang members. But samurai honor was not dependent on the actions of women or on territory or on a need to defend others of their kind. It was defined by respect for superiors and from inferiors. They were at heart prickly dealers in death on behalf of their masters, from whom they received status, power and wealth. This was the original Way of the Warrior: that of the street fighter, the enforcer, the racketeer, the hired gun, with no moral code but to respond to insults, fight for his master and gain glory on the field of battle.
A fine example of the way a samurai would “lift his name” with displays of death-defying valor occurred during the two Mongol invasions of 1274 and 1281—two events that seared the Japanese soul like no others, for several reasons. The Mongols fought dirty, deploying explosive shells delivered by catapult and taking no notice of samurai who expected proper enemies to engage in single combat. These dreadful opponents would have swept away the samurai, but for two strokes of luck, two storms that the Japanese quickly came to see as divine intervention.
Opposing both landings by the vast Mongol-Chinese fleet on Hakata Bay in southwest Japan was a young warrior from Higo province (today’s Kumamoto prefecture, immediately north of Satsuma, and not far from Hakata Bay). Later in life he used some of the wealth he had amassed to commission a series of paintings recording his heroic exploits. These were then pasted together, along with a collection of letters, prayers, edicts and battle reports that act as a commentary on the pictures, to make up what have become known as the “Invasion Scrolls.”3 Both fleets were scattered by storms, the second attempt being perhaps the worst naval disaster ever, but in both cases not before this resourceful warrior threw himself into the fray. His name was Takezaki Suenaga, and this is his boastful story.
Age twenty-nine at the time of the 1274 invasion, Suenaga survived several skirmishes when the Mongols managed to break away from the beachhead and advance a few miles inland before the approaching storm forced them to retreat to their ships. Seven years later he’s back, and can’t wait to prove himself again. This time the Japanese are better prepared, having built a wall the length of Hakata Bay that might just be enough to pin the Mongols to the beaches. Suenaga arrives at the beach on his horse in full regalia—but the enemy are still all out at sea. He’s desperate to get at them. With absolutely no interest in acting as a team member and a sublime disregard for orders, he focuses totally on self-serving acts of derring-do.
/> “I cannot fight them during this crisis without a ship!” he yells.
His commander, Gota Goro, appears indifferent to his frustration. “If you don’t have a ship there’s nothing to be done.”
However, Suenaga isn’t the only one chafing at the bit, and another equally gung-ho warrior says: “Let’s find a good ship among the damaged craft in the harbor and drive off the pirates!”
“That’s right,” Suenaga replies. “Those troops would be infantry and their boats would be seaworthy craft. I want to cut down at least one of the enemy!”
So Suenaga, with two companions, searches for a boat to take them out to the invaders. But they can’t find one, and are on the point of giving up the search when a Japanese war boat comes by. It’s not very big, only about eight meters long, and with ten or eleven people already aboard it’s riding low in the water; so while it’s handy for getting around the bay, it won’t be much good on the open sea. Gota Goro recognizes it as belonging to Adachi Yasumori, a senior official, and sends Suenaga and his friends off as messengers. They row out in a skiff, and when they get within earshot Suenaga, standing precariously at the bow, yells that he has orders to get on board the next boat and fight. Then, without waiting for permission, he jumps onto the war boat, to the outrage of the captain, Kotabe, who orders him off again: