Samurai

by John Man

  But when Perry returned in early 1854 he was in no mood for delay and determined to get his way by any peaceful and diplomatic means. Other vessels had arrived to augment his force: the steamship Powhattan and two other sailing ships. This time he did not stop at the mouth of the bay but sailed straight up it as if to threaten the great castle of Edo itself, to the consternation of the Japanese. After days of negotiation, the squadron moored off what was then a fishing village, now the city of Yokohama. Here, in a hall of unpainted pinewood specially built for the purpose, Perry and the Japanese met. They professed undying friendship—which put both sides on steep learning curves, with many a surprise along the way—and exchanged presents. The Americans’ gifts, which filled several boats, included rifles and pistols galore, a set of Audubon’s Birds of America, champagne, telegraph equipment and a miniature steam train, complete with tender, passenger car and rails. The Japanese gave, among other things, richly decorated writing instruments, tableware and three hundred chickens. They also put on a show of twenty-five sumo wrestlers, the first recorded by westerners in terms now familiar to all from seeing the sport on television: “their scant costume, which was merely a colored cloth about the loins . . . revealed their gigantic proportions in all the bloated fullness of fat and breadth of muscle.” The largest wrestler was introduced to Perry, who “passed his hand over the monstrous neck, which fell in folds of massive flesh, like the dewlap of a prize ox.” When they were asked to clear a space by moving fifty-five-kilo sacks of rice, one of the wrestlers carried a sack in his teeth; another, “taking one in his arms, turned repeated somersaults . . . with as much ease as if his tons of flesh had been so much gossamer.”

  Everything about the one side fascinated the other. The Americans were astonished by the way married Japanese women blackened their teeth,

  which is done with a mixture of vile ingredients, including filings of iron and sake . . . This compound, as might be naturally inferred from its composition, is neither pleasantly perfumed nor very wholesome. It is so corrosive, that in applying it to the teeth, it is necessary to protect the more delicate structures of the gums and lips, for the mere touch of the odious stuff to the flesh burns it at once into a gangrenous spot . . . The effects of this disgusting habit are more apparent from another practice which prevails with the Japanese as with our would-be civilized ladies, that of painting the lips with rouge. The ruddy glow of the mouth brings out in greater contrast the blackness of the gums and teeth.

  It did not apparently occur to the Americans to wonder why such a “disgusting” habit should also be such an ancient one (answer: it protected the teeth from decay). The Japanese, many of whom recognized their ignorance of the wider world and their need for its products, were intensely curious, asking, looking, drawing and taking notes on guns, small arms, ropes, engines and clothes, with a “peculiar passion for buttons.” There were many feasts, the Japanese surprising the Americans with what Americans would later call doggy bags, sweeping scraps together into long pieces of paper which they kept folded under their kimonos and hiding the “unsavory parcels” in their sleeves. This was not from “gluttony or a deficiency in breeding; it was the fashion,” which they insisted the Americans also adopt.

  After such effusive displays of friendship, the signing of the treaty on March 31, in English, Japanese, Dutch and Chinese, was a formality. Japan opened two remote ports, promised supplies when needed and agreed to the appointment of an American consul. It was, in Mitford’s words, “the thinnest ghost of a treaty,” soon to be superseded; but it was a start.

  Two days later, Nariakira’s slow-moving entourage came by on its way to Edo, traveling along the Tokaido, the southern route from Kyoto along the coast, staying at the fifty-three official way stations and having documents checked at the barrier eighty kilometers short of the capital. From the way station at Kanagawa, where the road dropped down to the coast, Saigo had a view of little Yokohama, the wooden treaty hall and the seven American ships lying at anchor out in the bay. In all likelihood, the historian Mark Ravina suggests, they were “the first large-scale foreign objects Saigo had ever seen.” Nothing could have been a clearer statement that the times were changing, and that Japan was way behind them.

  5

  THE WAY OF THE WARRIOR: CUTTING THE BELLY

  IN MEDIEVAL TIMES, THE SAMURAI’S MAIN PURPOSE IN LIFE was to prove to his lord his courage and élan, which would win him status, power and wealth. But having gained these, he became a potential threat to his lord: how could a master ensure the loyalty of a bold, wealthy, powerful warrior? In the early days, he couldn’t; turncoats were as common as loyalists.

  The answer to this conundrum lay in making loyalty the ultimate virtue, guaranteeing status and glory both in life and in death. An eleventh-century tale captures the spirit of the warrior’s ideal: “I stand ready to give my life in your service, pledged Takenori. I look on it as nothing more than a feather. Though I may die facing the rebels, never shall I turn my back on an enemy in order to live.”

  But death-defying bravery and an overriding ideal did not guarantee victory. What should the loser do, if he happened to survive? The answer lay in the concept of loyalty unto death. This was first taken to its logical conclusion by Minamoto no Yorimasa, whose revolt against the ruling Taira clan was crushed in 1180 (revenge and final victory came five years later). When he saw all was lost, he was determined to die while his sons held off the enemy. He ordered an aide to strike off his head, but the aide refused, weeping, saying he could not do it while his master lived. “I understand,” said Yorimasa, and retired into a temple. In one version of the story, he joined his palms, performed a Buddhist chant and wrote a poem on his war fan:

  Like a fossil tree

  Which has borne not one blossom,

  Sad has been my life.

  Leaving no fruit behind me.

  Finally, he released his spirit, which traditionally resided in the abdomen, by thrusting his short sword into his belly. This was the first recorded instance of the painful and messy act usually known to outsiders as hara-kiri, which Japanese more commonly call seppuku.

  “Cutting the belly” became an established way to avoid the disgrace of defeat. One of the best-known and most dramatic examples occurred in 1333, after a rebellion brought the Kamakura shogunate to an end. The rebels forced the shogun’s troops to flee from Kyoto for fifty kilometers along the shoreline of Lake Biwa to a temple in the little post town of Banba (now part of Maibara). The story is told in the collection of war stories known as the Taiheiki (Chronicle of Grand Pacification), which, like the tales on which Homeric epics were based, were sung by blind bards before being collected together. In this tale, five hundred warriors gathered in the courtyard before the single-room temple. The general, Hojo Nakatoki, saw that the end was near, and addressed his men in a moving speech:

  “I have no words to speak of your loyal hearts . . . Profound indeed is my gratitude! How may I reward you, now that adversity overwhelms my house? I shall kill myself for your sakes, requiting in death the favors received in life . . .” He stripped off his armor, laid bare his body to the waist, slashed his belly and fell down dead.

  There was no expectation that anyone else would copy him. But at once, one of his vassals responded: “How bitter it is that you have gone before me! I thought to take my life first, to prepare the way for you in the nether regions . . . Wait a bit! I shall go with you.” Seizing the dead man’s dagger from his stomach, “he stabbed his own belly and fell on his face, embracing Nakatoki’s knees. And thereafter four hundred and thirty-two men ripped their bellies all at once. As the flowing of the Yellow River was the blood soaking their bodies; as meats in a slaughterhouse were the corpses filling the compound.”

  The description is, of course, highly poetic, capturing the elements—commitment, failure, intense emotion, formality—thought essential by those who listened to it. But there was no exaggeration in the numbers: a priest recorded the names of 189 of those wh
o killed themselves that day; the same priest had gravestones made for all 432, which still stand, running in five lines up a gentle slope.

  Since relationships between lord and vassal varied in strength, vassals were free to make their own decisions. A member of a household might feel his lord’s death as his own, and choose death; a mercenary who would be able to offer his services to another lord could well choose life, as would a landowner with a workforce to look after. In this case, several dozen chose to live. Either way, living or dying, the samurai was asserting his control over his destiny and pride in his elitism.

  After 1600, if the samurai could not live with dignity and pride, they could at least die with both. Seppuku remained the ultimate way for the samurai to preserve honor when faced with ignominy. With defeat on the battlefield removed from the equation, it became a crucial part of the samurai’s sense of identity, undertaken either by choice to escape disgrace, or as a form of self-imposed execution ordered by the lord. For high-level samurai, it became the only acceptable form of capital punishment, avoiding the ignominy of a trial or enforced beheading.

  But the act—the motivation, the decision, the consequences—involved many paradoxes. A famous example, perhaps the most famous of all, took place in 1701. By then, every daimyo had to maintain a residence in Edo and come to court twice a year, a system that demanded much time and money—the vast retinues, the weeks of travel, the displays of wealth, the endless rituals—and made the daimyos in effect hostages to the shogun.

  That year, 1701, Lord Asano Takumi no Kami from Aki (present-day Hiroshima prefecture) was due to attend the shogun, having been chosen to entertain envoys from the imperial family. Head of protocol was a certain Kira Kozuke no Suke, a man who expected to be paid for instructing the lords in exactly how to behave in the court rituals. Asano, arguing that no man should be paid extra to do his job, did not pay, and Kira treated him with contempt during the lessons on protocol, until Asano, driven beyond endurance, drew his sword and tried to kill Kira, who escaped with slight wounds. Drawing a sword in anger was against the law, and doing so in the imperial palace a double crime. After an investigation by the inspector general, the shogun ordered Asano to commit seppuku, and his clan’s assets were seized. His forty-seven followers were devastated: their master dead, they saw a future as lordless samurai, ronin, destined to wander, seeking whatever work they could find, perhaps eventually falling into destitution.1 They swore revenge. For a year they waited, taking odd jobs, their leader adopting a dissolute life to allay suspicion. One snowy December night, the band attacked Kira’s mansion (losing one of their number in the fight), found him, killed him, took his head to where their master was buried, and gave themselves up to the authorities.

  The shogun was in a tricky position: Asano had been popular, his suicide a scandal, his followers admired and Kira widely loathed. But in the end he decided that the law demanded the death sentence and ordered the surviving forty-six to commit seppuku. This they did, winning instant fame for their loyalty to the spirit of Bushido, the samurai’s code of honor. They became known as the League of Loyal Hearts (Chushingura), and have since become the subject of countless stories, plays and films, their motives and actions analyzed ad nauseam: Should the shogun have acted against Kira? Should the ronin have acted sooner? Should they have committed seppuku at once, on the grave of their master? Given the popularity of the subject and the shrine, there seems little chance that the story will ever lose its appeal.

  By the day of the forty-seven ronin, the act of seppuku had acquired all the ritual of a religious ceremony: a bath, the proper dress and hairstyle, towels to absorb the blood, two tatami mats covered by a white sheet, the careful presentation and consumption of two cups of sake and some food, a poem, a close friend or servant standing by with a long sword, a small group of onlookers to verify the act, a kneeling posture to ensure a fall forward rather than backward: then the dagger in the belly and finally, to ensure a speedy death, decapitation by a single sword stroke delivered by the aide. All samurai knew the ritual, in the unlikely event they would have to do it and the rather greater possibility that they might have to act as witnesses. In fact, as time went on, the event became less an evisceration and more a decapitation: at the moment the accused reached for his sword—which occasionally was either a dummy or simply a symbolic fan—his aide, the kaishaku, beheaded him.

  This final swift action supposedly had a specialty of its own. As Yamamoto records, “In the practice of past times, there were instances when the head flew off. It was said that it is best to cut leaving a little skin remaining so that it does not fly off in the direction of the verifying officials.”

  Was this true? Was there ever a kaishaku who could cut with such accuracy? Well, possibly, because aspiring swordsmen were allowed to practice on the bodies of newly executed criminals. Here is Katsu Kokichi, the young samurai we met in chapter 2: “One day I went to the shogunate prison in Senju and tested my sword on the corpses of criminals who had been executed. After that I became a student of Asauemon [the official executioner] and learned how to lop off the heads of corpses with a single stroke.”2 It is conceivable—just—that the perfect aide would practice enough to be able to end his strike a few millimeters short of complete severance, but I still don’t know if anyone ever actually did it.

  To outsiders, seppuku sounds like a form of insanity. Far from it; or at least far from any common definition of insanity. It only seems mad to outsiders because ritual suicide in public in any form is rare, and in this form unique to Japan. In fact, seppuku was undertaken by men in full possession of their reason and well practiced in the control of their emotions. Suicide is not necessarily an act of irrational despair; indeed, it can be seen as one of supreme rationality. In his essay Bushido: The Soul of Japan, written in 1900, Inazo Nitobe pointed out that in seppuku men could, at a stroke—literally—“expiate their crimes, apologize for errors, escape from disgrace, redeem their friends, or prove their sincerity.” But it could not be done when in the grip of passion. “None could perform it without the utmost coolness and composure.”

  Is there any equivalent in any other culture? It shares elements of other forms of suicide: killing oneself to save others, or in response to social pressure, or as a means of non-violent protest, or at the behest of some religious master. But seppuku is unique in that it was not done solely for any of these reasons, but because suicide was the only way for the disgraced individual to remain, in his eyes and the eyes of others, part of his group. Perhaps the closest in spirit was the Hindu act of suttee (sati), in which a widow voluntarily immolated herself on her dead husband’s funeral pyre. The practice was banned by the British in 1829, mainly because it was often done under duress. But, if freely chosen, sati shared with seppuku an acceptance by the protagonist that identity was above life itself. The loss of identity, in life, would be a form of death; conversely its preservation, even in death, was a form of life.

  Perhaps the oddest form of seppuku was the suicide performed upon the death of one’s lord (a form of seppuku called junshi). In medieval Japan this had been rare, but it became quite common after 1600, perhaps reflecting the internal conflicts that samurai suffered in these peaceful times. When Tokugawa Tadakichi died in 1607, five of his followers committed suicide. On his deathbed in 1634, Sake Yoshinobu expressed the wish that no vassal should follow him in death even though “it is the fashion in contemporary society.” Two did so anyway, and the fashion intensified. After one lord’s death in 1636, fifteen committed suicide; in 1657, twenty-six. Eventually, in 1663, the practice was officially banned, though it still occurred occasionally.

  As the rituals lost purpose, they gained in dramatic form. The result was recorded by the eminent diplomat and writer Algernon Mitford, who deserves a proper introduction. In the 1860s he served in the British embassy in Tokyo. An extremely handsome man, he supposedly had two children with a geisha, then nine legitimate children. According to rumor, he also had an affair with h
is wife’s sister, Lady Blanche Ogilvy, which produced another illegitimate daughter, Clementine, who was to become the wife of Winston Churchill. Blanche dismissed the rumor: Clementine, she said, was fathered by another of her many lovers. Back home, Mitford was involved in the restoration of the Tower of London and the landscaping of Hyde Park, and inherited an estate, a new name and a title, becoming a Freeman-Mitford and Baron Redesdale. He was also a noted historian, linguist and ethnologist, which is why he comes to our attention. In Japan, having picked up Japanese in a year, he collected a mass of material that he turned into two volumes of memoirs and a third entitled Tales of Old Japan. In this he recorded the first of the few foreign eyewitness accounts of a samurai committing seppuku, and surely the most vivid.

  It occurred in early 1868, in Hyogo (today’s Kobe), shortly after its port had been opened to foreigners, to the fury of those locals opposed to all foreign links. Troops set upon a Frenchman, and were then ordered by their commander to open fire at a crowd of foreigners, including some ministers. The Japanese soldiers had only recently received their rifles, so by chance the shots went high, inflicting only slight wounds on two men. Even so, the officer who gave the order to open fire was condemned by the emperor and ordered to commit seppuku, in the presence of seven foreign representatives who would witness that justice, if you can call it that, had been done. The foreigners discussed interceding for the officer’s life, but finally agreed that mercy could be mistaken for weakness.

  The seven, together with a matching number of Japanese, were ushered into the temple where the ceremony was to be performed. Mitford recorded not only the shocking details, but also the formality and reverence of the scene—and “scene” is the word. This was a drama, played out with powerful yet restrained emotions, rising to a sudden and horrifying climax. Like tragedy, it inspired awe, and sympathy, and also a sense of completion.