Samurai

by John Man

  “This is [Adachi’s] boat! Only members of his forces can board it! Stay off this boat!”

  Suenaga is in no mood to be docile. “In this vital matter I want to aid my lord. Since I just got on the boat, I am not going to get off and wait for another that may never arrive.”

  But the captain is adamant. “It is an outrage for you not to leave a boat when you have been ordered to disembark.”

  No doubt muttering furiously, Suenaga gives way, climbs back into his skiff, and rows on with his two companions. After a while they come across another war boat, this one belonging to an official called Takamasa. Again Suenaga brings his skiff alongside, losing his helmet in the muddle. This time Suenaga doesn’t waste time arguing but simply lies:

  “I am acting on secret orders. Let me on the boat.”

  Shouts come from Takamasa’s boat: “You have no orders! Get out of here! There’s no room for all of you!”

  Shamelessly, Suenaga refines his demand. “Since I am a warrior of considerable stature,” he boasts, “let me alone get on your boat.”

  That does the trick. “We are heading off for battle,” comes the exasperated reply. “Why must you make such a fuss? Get on!”

  He doesn’t need to be asked twice. Not only does he leave his two companions behind, as he abandons them he grabs the shin guards of one of them as a makeshift helmet. He ignores their shouts of indignation. “The Way of the Bow and Arrow is to do what is worthy of reward,” he says in his commentary. Not the Way of the Sword, please note. His attitude was still governed by the bow and the tanto, the dagger. “Without even a single follower I set off to engage the enemy.”

  Now he starts to offer advice to Takamasa, urging him to use grappling hooks to get to close grips with the enemy. They won’t give up until we board them, he argues. “Once we have them hooked, stab them by impaling them where there is a joint in their armor.” Takamasa’s crew are not properly armed. Nor is Suenaga, in his makeshift headgear; but this doesn’t stop him for a second. With five new companions he finds another puntlike skiff and attacks one of the smaller Mongol ships, about ten meters long, carrying seven Mongol crew and a couple of Chinese officers. A picture shows Suenaga first onboard, in the bow, as his companions storm over the stern. One officer lies dead, his throat cut. Our hero is dealing with the other, about to cut his head off, gripping him by his pigtail and wielding his tanto.

  Clearly they took the boat, because a later illustration shows Suenaga with his two heads. Returning to shore somehow bearing his gruesome trophies, he reports his deeds to his commander, Gota Goro, who (in Suenaga’s account, at least) admires his subordinate’s enterprise more than he censures Suenaga’s willfulness. “Without your own boat, you repeatedly lied in order to join the fray. You really are the baddest man around!”

  Suenaga didn’t need to do anything else, because the rest was very effectively achieved by nature, in the form of the first typhoon of the season, which churned the whole fleet to mush—some 4,400 vessels, a number unequaled until the Allied invasion of Europe in 1944—and buried it in mud on the seabed. Suenaga came out of his part of the fray arrogantly convinced of his own bravery, while the Japanese saw the typhoon as the Divine Wind, the kamikaze, proving that Japan was under the protection of heaven and would never, ever fall to a barbarian power (hence the name given to the suicide pilots of the Second World War, who would deal with the Americans as the original had dealt with the Mongols). In fact, it is quite possible that the samurai’s improved collaboration, their fighting spirit and the wall would have been enough to halt even this massive invasion, as the title of Thomas Conlan’s book suggests. Quite possibly the samurai were, after all, In Little Need of Divine Intervention.

  But after 1281 the Mongols were not enough of a threat to unite the Japanese against a common foe. The country remained a patchwork of squabbling warlords and samurai eager to display their bravery, kill their enemies and die a glorious death in battle. Emperors and shoguns jockeyed for power, top families fought top families, shoguns retained authority only by empowering rival warlords (daimyos, “great names” as they were called). It got worse. The century from 1470 is known as the “Period of the Country at War.” An eleven-year civil war in and around the capital Kyoto reduced the city to ruins and the imperial court to poverty. The emperors had to abandon ceremonies they could not afford, selling their own calligraphy to make money. With no central authority, local daimyos fended for themselves, wringing taxes from their rice farmers, building castles and setting up their own armies with their samurai retainers and their peasant soldiers, developing ever more exotic ways of fighting. Major battles would end with dozens, sometimes hundreds of severed heads being collected for inspection, skin cleaned, hair combed and often teeth reblackened as fashion dictated: the better the head of the fallen, the greater the victor’s glory.

  All of which suited the samurai just fine, since their whole ethos centered on loyalty to their lords, their daimyos. For four hundred years, the samurai and their descendants—for sons succeeded fathers as vassals—were well served by the system. They became Asia’s most successful warrior class, some rich in land, power and wealth, some poor, but all proudly independent, their role accepted by and admired by their society, until 1600, when the final victory of the new top family, the Tokugawa, at last brought the heyday of the real fighting samurai to an end.

  2

  A YOUNG LIFE TRANSFORMED

  AS A SAMURAI’S SON AND AS THE ELDEST, SAIGO’S FIRST DUTY was to be educated, and a pretty grim prospect it was for an eight-year-old.

  Once, in the old days of war and anarchy, schooling had been for the few who could afford Buddhist temple schools. In the eyes of a medieval samurai, book learning was for wimps. But after 1600 well-educated scholars and officials were needed to help with administration, drafting laws and writing official histories. Shogun and daimyos wanted people with knowledge of precedents, and established schools to produce them. They found their sources not at home but abroad, in China and in the ideals of Confucianism. Students flocked to great teachers who argued about the best forms of Confucianism and whether its purpose was moral improvement or an aid to practical government, or both. Learning was fashionable, literacy the norm for everyone who was not a peasant and increasingly common even among the peasantry, many of whose children learned to read in one of the fifteen thousand village schools. “There is nothing more shameful than being illiterate,” wrote Ihara Saikaku, one of the most prolific and influential writers of the period, indeed the first to make a living from his profession. By 1710 there were six hundred publishers and booksellers in Japan, dealing increasingly with Confucian classics in translation.

  The new breed of samurai, with the old ways of war barred to them, seized on education as one of the main purposes in life, the real purpose of education in turn being to teach morality (which was after all the justification of many educationalists, from Aristotle in ancient Greece to Dr. Thomas Arnold, headmaster of Rugby School). Through learning one could build a sort of great chain of virtue linking the individual to the body politic and the true purposes of existence: study—knowledge—sincerity—purity—civilized behavior—harmonious families—right government—universal tranquillity. According to Confucian theory, a triumph of hope over experience, human beings were essentially good, and once everyone understood the nature of virtue, everyone would behave well and society would be stable and people would live happily ever after.

  What happened to the girls, we may ask, with all the benefits of our twenty-first-century viewpoint? Not much. Few women engaged in the hard business of reading Chinese classics. “Girls were not expected to master a large number of Chinese characters,” recalled one woman of her childhood around 1870.1 “It was regarded as sufficient if they could read the Japanese syllabary, and when they reached the age of twelve or thirteen the main focus of their education became learning how to sew.” About one in four girls learned to read Japanese poetry and novels, mostly at home,
the main purpose of this limited education being to strengthen their acceptance of self-denying obedience to parents, husband and (in widowhood) eldest son. It would be a long, long time before women won economic, social or political power. “When women are learned and clever in their speech,” said the late nineteenth-century chief minister and regent Matsudaira Sadanobu, “it is a sign that civil disturbance is not far off.”

  For boys, it was a hard struggle. One had to go back to those with true understanding who lived in the golden age of ancient China: the sages, including Confucius and Mencius, authors of the Four Books and the Five Classics, as defined and expounded by the Song philosopher Zhu Xi (Chu Hsi). Rulers and teachers agreed that if only everyone, in particular the samurai, would study these books and Zhu Xi’s commentaries properly, all disputes would vanish. Sadanobu complained of “scholars who argue and abuse one another . . . like the bubbling of boiling water or the twisting of strands of thread.” The answer, he said, was “to put one’s trust in the Song teachings.” What was good for ancient China was good for modern Japan.

  All this meant that no one in Japan knew much of what was going on in the rest of the world. It was only around the time of Saigo’s birth that educated Japanese heard about the French Revolution and the American War of Independence over forty years before. Of the wars unleashed by Napoleon’s campaigns—not a hint. Few knew of the rise of the British empire, of the colonization of Australia, of British rule in India, of the all-conquering wealth produced by the industrial revolution. Even when European powers started to push their way into China, few hints of any threat filtered through. When they did, it was a shock, as we shall see.

  For scholars and teachers, it was China’s past that defined Japan’s present. The Chinese and Japanese languages are not related, yet the Japanese (like several other Asian cultures) had adopted thousands of Chinese signs to write their own language. They still use them, in a system known as kanji, alongside two other semialphabetical scripts. It seems terribly inefficient to outsiders, but it has worked perfectly well in Japan for centuries. The signs have their own pronunciation in the two languages, which is less odd than it may seem: think of how signs for numbers are rendered in words. For example, the sign “5” is pronounced “five,” cinq, fünf, wu, go and in as many other ways as there are languages. So the Chinese sign for “mountain” () is the same in Japanese; but in Chinese it is shan, in Japanese yama.

  However, Japanese reverence for all things Chinese had a peculiar consequence. Children had to read the Chinese aloud as a weird bastardized form of Japanese, having learned many rules about changing the word order and adding particles.2 So there was Saigo, at the age of ten, parroting Filial Piety and Greater Learning (the two shortest of the Four Books) without understanding a word. Everything had to be repeated ad nauseam, learned at the rate of half a dozen characters a day, and only after years of study—possibly, with luck, if you were bright—would you understand any of the text well enough to have a conversation about it. This was tough, earnest, serious, hard work. “When reading, sit squarely upright, maintain an expression of gravity and concentrate,” wrote one eighteenth-century educationalist, Kaibara Ekken. “Never glance around or fiddle with your fingers.” No one argued that children should have fun, or that curiosity was to be encouraged. For most kids, it was tedious beyond belief. Tsurumine Shigenobu, a nineteenth-century scholar, remembered what it had been like when he started:

  I hated it. My father taught me reading himself and at the mere sound of his summons, “Bring me your Greater Learning,” I would scuttle off to hide in the storehouse or spend the whole day in the guards’ quarters. When I was forced into it I would sometimes get the idea that if I memorized the passage quickly it would be over that much sooner and tried as hard as I could. Then my father would say, “Yes, you’ve learned it very well. Let’s go on to another bit.” At which I would burst into tears . . . and my father would dismiss me saying I was a hopeless child.

  For the young Saigo, education involved a lot more than the Chinese classics, for Kagoshima’s system had traits of its own. Over two hundred years previously, all the adult men had gone off on an abortive invasion of Korea, leaving the boys unsupervised, so the town had set up a system by which older boys supervised the younger ones. Eighteen districts, called goju, were set up, each one with its own school, in which older boys taught and often terrorized their juniors. School hours were from 6:00 A.M. to 6:00 P.M., with the other twelve hours spent under curfew at home. The regime was strict and highly competitive. Goju education emphasized honor, courage, honesty, solidarity and pride in your own school as the best of the best. It sounds like the British private school system from the days of Dr. Arnold in the mid-nineteenth century up to, say, 1960, based on the classics, sport, the monitoring and ritual humiliation of younger boys, military training, a uniform, homosexuality and physical punishment. It was a system designed to break down and then rebuild, injecting self-sufficiency, stiff-upper-lip endurance and a firm awareness of right and wrong, without asking too many questions about which was which and why. The comparison works only up to a point, as you will see, because the goju system prepared boys for a world in which violent death was rather closer than it was on the playing fields of Eton.

  After morning classes, there was drill and sports, which often exposed some unfortunate to a mock assault by the class. (“Come on, boy, pull yourself together. It’s only a bit of fun.”) In the early afternoon the younger kids were taught local “history,” in the form of odes and epics praising the feats of Kyushu’s lords, the Shimazu family, back to their twelfth-century origins, and presenting Kyushu more as an independent nation than as part of Japan (“Remember, lads, this is the finest school in the land and these are the happiest days of your life.”)

  In the midafternoon came martial arts training, which sometimes meant going to the martial arts school, where the boys could witness men practicing their archery by shooting dogs (I heard several references to shooting dogs as part of martial arts training, but have not found any further details). The key skill was swordsmanship, of a particularly aggressive style known as Jigen-ryu. Most sword schools used bamboo staves, but Jigen-ryu fighters used real swords sheathed in cloth or bamboo to practice their defining skill, which emphasized the need to kill with a single stroke.

  In Saigo’s day, the closest young samurai got to the feel of steel on flesh involved the bloodthirsty practice described by Katsu Kokichi, an impoverished young samurai struggling to survive in Kyoto at about the time of Saigo’s birth. Boys would be assembled in the local jail to witness an execution. When the head of the condemned man fell, they rushed forward to seize the head and the corpse, and competed to bite off a body part. The first to show a chewed-off ear or finger was allowed to make the first practice sword stroke into the body. It is at this point that the goju–private school comparison breaks down. My school rugby coach was all for killing the opponents, but he never advocated chewing off bits of them.

  They still take Jigen-ryu fighting seriously. The man in charge of it for the Education Board in Kagoshima is Mr. Ebera, a small, intense fast talker who was happy to explain that Jigen-ryu involves two techniques, both intended to kill with one stroke. The first is when you draw your sword, with a deft one-handed upward slice. Then, if that fails, you grab the sword with two hands, raise it high, and go into the two-handed downward chop, which cuts your opponent diagonally from neck to rib cage. He was playacting this in his office, with hands for a sword.

  There was something about Jigen-ryu I could not really take seriously. For one thing, it sounded like two strokes. And what happened if you did not kill with either stroke? And how, in today’s world, do you practice? Indeed, what had it to do with death at all?

  “When was the last time someone was actually killed?”

  “Oh, that was . . . sometime perhaps in early Meiji times,” which sounded to me like well over a century ago.

  “So . . . do they fight each other?”r />
  “No, it’s not like Kendo [“The Way of the Sword,” still supposedly training for real sword fighting], it’s just training.”

  “And the purpose?”

  “It develops physical and mental strength. And patience. It’s a preparation for life.”

  “Do any of the kids have their own swords?”

  “Oh, no. No one has used real swords since early Meiji. This is just a piece of wood. But it’s part of their training that they have to go into the mountains to cut their own.”

  How could you train without fighting? This and other questions, he said, could be answered if I saw the boys at practice the following Sunday morning. So my guide, Michiko, and I found ourselves on a square of dark volcanic gravel right by the cemetery devoted to the samurai who died with Saigo. It was an idyllic setting, overlooking the bay, with the volcano, Sakurajima, wearing a cap of cloud. A score of barefoot boys, from seven upward, loosened up under the gaze of two teachers, all of them in black floppy trousers and loose white shirts. Along one side of the square were four supports like sawhorses, each pair bearing a bundle of canes, and along another side staves lying on mats. Warm-up over, the boys seized their staves with two hands and in turn attacked the bundles of canes with tremendous zest, one foot forward with knees bent, each delivering twenty or thirty whacks to the springy bundle while yelling an extended, bloodcurdling “a-a-a-a-ah!” It didn’t at all fit the image of the ice-cool samurai warrior killing with a single blow. What it fit best was my very westernized image of an extreme form of anger therapy.

  What was the purpose? I asked Mr. Higashi, the senior instructor—not the master, he hastened to say, because the master was away touring with pupils in the U.S.

  “We try to educate young people so they can be responsible for the future of Japan.”

  I did not see how beating bundles of canes with mock swords would help, but clearly, given the energy and commitment of these kids, that was my problem. It was certainly an aim with which Saigo would have been in sympathy.