by John Man
Peace also froze the samurai. “Regarding quarrels and fights,” ran an edict in one provincial code, “those who fight with other masters’ samurai, even with good reason to do so, will be executed . . . Forbearance is the best policy in all situations.” With battles and fights banned, the samurai and their Spartan ways might have died out, as outmoded as a cavalry charge against tanks. They were, after all, a small percentage of the population, probably around 6 to 7 percent, numbering about 750,000 in 1600.3 They were bound to their provincial lords, cut off from their lands, forced to live in special quarters in towns, required to ask permission to inherit or marry, and made dependent on “stipends” of rice, in effect handouts. What a comedown for free-spirited warriors! In one sense, Rousseau’s description of all mankind fits the post-1600 samurai class remarkably well: born free, but everywhere in chains. In another sense, they became parasites, in the words of the historian John Roberts: “There was nothing for them to do except to cluster in the castle-towns of their lords, consumers without employment, a social and economic problem.”4 They lived in paradox. Since the rulers themselves were samurai, and local lords still needed strong men as peacekeepers, the samurai as a whole were allowed to keep their weapons. They had a monopoly on violence, and the poorer ones roaming and drinking in back streets exercised it; yet the times, if not the back streets, were peaceful. “It is a historical irony,” writes Eiko Ikegami, “that one of the most peaceful eras in Japanese history was obliged to celebrate . . . the role of military power.”
The plain truth was that the old days of the violent samurai were over. Ah, the old days! One of the greatest seventeenth-century writers, Ihara Saikaku, put it clearly: “In the old days, the most important thing for the samurai was courage and unconcern for one’s life . . . exalting his name through killing or wounding others on the spot and leaving the scene triumphantly. But nowadays such behaviour is not at all the real way of the samurai.”5 The master, he said, provides an appropriate stipend in order that the samurai should be useful to the lord. To throw one’s life away for a private grudge is to ignore the debt to one’s master: “Devoting one’s life to giri [duty, obligation or responsibility] is the way of the samurai.” It all sounds rather boring by comparison with “the old days.” One eighty-year-old wrote in an essay in 1717: “In the old days at parties, both upper and lower samurai talked only about warfare . . . now on social occasions, they discuss good food, games and profit and loss.”
How to live with the change from warrior to bureaucrat (or ex-soldier on the dole) and still be a samurai? How to fight for privilege and honor without armed combat? How to avoid demoralization and preserve dignity? How to be a parasite, yet live a useful and fulfilling life? To find answers, the samurai had to reinvent themselves.
This is what human beings often do to preserve a threatened sense of identity. From tedious tasks and fears of uselessness they spin noble causes, and link themselves to ideals greater than life itself. “To want honour and dignity,” said the philosopher Thomas Hobbes, “is a disease of the mind.” Yet, he went on, all men naturally strive for it. They also strive to avoid shame. Few groups have been so dedicated to the preservation of honor and avoidance of shame as the samurai, and few so successful.
To preserve their power, wealth and identity, the samurai found in their old violent lifestyle a spurious chivalric glamor, and spun their simple fighters’ code into a complex, artificial ideology, which claimed that they alone were allowed to be violent, they alone had “honor.” Yet because this was an age of peace, and they were the upholders of peace, violence could only be expressed, if at all, in a rigidly controlled way—by word, by attitude, by clothing, by intellectual rigor and by training. This was the paradox at the heart of seventeenth-century Bushido, the bedrock on which Saigo built his life.
Paradox, inauthenticity: those are two words that come to mind. Another, rather more forceful word came to the mind of an expert in Japanese history who is a friend, so I won’t mention his name. I had just started researching this book, and needed guidance. We were having a light lunch, smoked salmon and a salad, in Carluccio’s, just off Russell Square. I mentioned the “paradoxes” that defined Saigo’s life. How odd to adore the emperor yet lead a rebellion against him; to claim nobility of spirit yet be a traitor; to be a failure and yet one of Japan’s greatest heroes.
“I suppose it was all down to Bushido,” I said, pretending to knowledge I did not have.
“Bushido—,” he said, then after a meaningful pause: “Bushido is bullshit.”
I gave him a startled look, having taken the Way of the Warrior at face value until that moment.
“Well, I wouldn’t express it quite in those terms in writing. But it’s true. All this business about honor and ideals was retrospective, invented after the samurai lost their role as warriors in the seventeenth century. It was all about preserving their authority, finding a sense of identity by cherry-picking the past.”
Not that passion died. Quarrels, though rarer and more constrained by law, provided a chance to flaunt the old virtues: aggression, spirit, courage, strength. Samurai sensitivity served their masters, who officially discouraged it but at a deeper level expected and accepted it. It was legally acceptable for a samurai to kill in three circumstances: if insulted by a commoner; if a wife and her lover were caught in the act; and if authorized to undertake a revenge killing. The last of these made it possible for samurai to act as private police, hunting down their targets—typically murderers—in any town or province, with the proviso that the vendetta stopped there. In this way the rulers were able to allow, even praise, the old samurai desire for violent resolution, while still controlling it. But a samurai—like a back-street gang member in any number of western cities—had to wrestle constantly with contradictions. If a man retaliated to an insult with a death blow, he could be executed; if he obeyed the law, he would be dishonored.
A samurai from Choshu displays a double-handed sword, “smoothstyle” armor and broad hakama trousers.
(Takasugi Shinsaku, a samurai from Chosu, photo from Vues et moeurs d’Indonésie et Japon, c. 1860: Bibliothèque nationale de France, Of 34Pet.Fol.G139256)
The samurai preserved their prestigious position in society by clinging to their rituals of dress and their outmoded beliefs, like drowning men to life preservers. If they could not fight, they could at least go on carrying their swords, serving a lord, disdaining lower orders, and committing suicide when things went wrong. Exotic armor and deadly weaponry became the symbols of their inner virtues. They were expected to be forever vigilant, never fukaku, “negligent” or “unprepared,” as alert to insult as a Puritan to sin. They claimed the moral high ground, not so much in deed, because they could no longer act as warriors, but in word—literally. The ideal now became not that of the reckless warrior who despised learning, but of the Confucian warrior-scholar, seeking truth, delighting in scholarship, pursuing respect and self-respect in high-minded service, austere, self-disciplined and ruthless in defense of his superior status—all symbolized by the sword, as the symbol of all a samurai’s ideals.
Though this drew heavily on the samurai ethos of the previous four hundred years, it was also something different. It may have been artificial, inauthentic, paradoxical (even bullshit), but it retained its power and influence. For post-1600 Japan, it was an everyday reality, and—since the samurai were to remain for another three hundred years—very much part of the emergence of the modern nation.
Yamamoto Tsunetomo’s famous book of 1716, Hagakure (Hidden Leaves), expresses the essence of the new code. It is an eleven-volume collection of anecdotes and homilies, from the profound to the trivial, occasionally straying into the weird. At its heart lies a preoccupation—a psychologist might say an obsession—with death. “The way of the samurai means death. Whenever you confront a choice between two options, simply choose the one that takes you more directly to death.” When faced with a quarrel, best not to think—just rush into the fray and e
ither win or get killed; that way you can be sure to avoid shame. When Yamamoto was writing there had been no major battle in Japan for over a century and he himself was never in combat, yet he advised every samurai to cultivate a mustache, so that when his head was cut off in battle it would not be mistaken for that of a woman and be thrown away. Since this was not a real threat, it had to be recast in terms of a theoretical brawl: never refuse a quarrel, he advised, because that way you were killed, either by your opponent if you lost, or—if you won—by the state, which had banned fights on pain of capital punishment. This, too, was unrealistic. Yamamoto’s book is full of stories about people being “cut down” and heads being severed, but by the time it was written fights were so few that death had to be summoned up in the imagination:
Meditation on inevitable death should be performed daily. Every day when one’s body and mind are at peace, one should meditate upon being ripped apart by arrows, rifles, spears and swords, being carried away by surging waves, being thrown into the midst of a great fire, being struck by lightning, being shaken to death in a great earthquake, falling from thousand-foot cliffs, dying from disease or committing seppuku at the death of one’s master.
That way, you could be free to devote yourself to your master, and “there will be no shame in one’s service to the lord and in the martial way.” It is hard for an outsider to feel at ease with such an ideology, but an insider like Saigo had no hesitation in taking it on board.
It is a strange freedom that is bound to service. It raises loyalty to an ideal of religious intensity, like the Christian prayer to God, “the author of peace and lover of concord . . . whose service is perfect freedom.” This is something different from medieval feudalism, for it lacks the notion of reciprocity and is rooted in a choice freely made, not an accident of birth. But that is the way it has to be for a man of honor, for how honorable would he be if his loyalty could be undermined by a random change of mind? The lord owes nothing, though in practice he needed his samurai to run his government or his estates; the samurai gives loyalty unto death, a devotion so intense and so internalized that Yamamoto calls it “secret love.” To achieve this state, he says, one must “be dead to oneself.” He could not have known it, but his ideals parallel those of St. Ignatius Loyola, founder of the Jesuits, who stressed absolute self-abnegation and obedience to superiors, “in the manner of a corpse.” His famous “Prayer for Generosity”could be Yamamoto addressing his own lord in his mind, asking to be taught
To give and not to count the cost;
To fight and not to heed the wounds;
To toil and not to seek for rest;
To labour and not to ask for any reward,
Save that of knowing that we do Thy will.
The devotion is not without responsibility, nor does it deny individuality or ambition. The samurai’s duty is to something higher than the lord as an individual; it is to the ideal lord. Therefore it may be part of his duty to save the lord from errors of judgment. “It is an act of great loyalty to correct the mindset of one’s master, and thus to confirm the foundation of the country.” To do this, the samurai must speak with authority, which he cannot do if he is of low rank. He should work to advance himself and cultivate a spirit of independence if he is to give of his best.
Yamamoto’s world view—which was also Saigo’s—yearned for simplicity, as if the samurai were no more than old soldiers doing their duty. In fact, they had the impossible task of trying to live up simultaneously to the often conflicting imperatives of their own ideals, their lord’s will and the demands of the new state. If the worst samurai were mere thugs, the best were sincere men who desperately wanted to live with dignity and pride. Most of them succeeded.
8
A DEATH IN KINKO BAY
IN THAT SINGLE INSTANT IN SEPTEMBER 1858, SAIGO’S WORLD turned upside down. Three months earlier, he had been a major figure in national politics, looking forward to more influence and success in the shadow of the lord who had raised him from insignificance. Now he was in opposition, and in danger, someone who had schemed against both the shogun and Satsuma’s new daimyo, whoever that might be. Moreover, Gessho was equally at risk. Saigo was bereft, without a protector; his allies were under house arrest, their careers in ruins, in fear of execution or enforced suicide.
What now? Tradition dictated that the truly loyal retainer should commit suicide on the grave of his lord. It is said, without evidence, that Saigo considered doing just this, and that he was dissuaded by Gessho, who argued that true loyalty lay in living, because he understood Nariakira’s policies and was the best man to promote them. Whatever the truth, Saigo was, as he wrote to Gessho, “like a man who has lost his ship and is stranded on an island.” He spoke with friends of planning a military response, which was foolish, because the new power in the land, Ii, took brutal action, initiating what is known as the Ansei Purge, after the name given to the six-year period from 1854 to 1860.
A “wanted” poster put out by the shogun includes Saigo (left).
In the year following October 1858, some one hundred officials lost their jobs and several leading pro-emperor loyalists—that is, those considered to be opposed to the power-behind-the-shogun, Ii—were imprisoned; two were later executed. Saigo’s main contact, Prince Konoe, though himself shielded by his position at court, knew that Gessho was on the list of those to be arrested and asked Saigo to take his friend to safety. Two weeks later, Saigo and Gessho, accompanied by a servant, fled Kyoto for Kagoshima, just in time to avoid the shogunate’s officials.
From the narrow isthmus of Shimonoseki, Saigo went on ahead through Kyushu to make sure Gessho would be safe. To his dismay, he found first that Satsuma was now being ruled by Nariakira’s rival, Hisamitsu (though technically his son was daimyo), and second that the shogun had issued warrants to arrest not only Gessho but also Saigo as his accomplice. Hisamitsu had no love for Saigo, but knew that to have him arrested would provoke a riot. Gessho was another matter. Hisamitsu had no need to court trouble with the shogun by protecting a refugee monk who came from elsewhere. So Saigo was told he could walk free, as long as he changed his name and went incognito.
But Gessho, following in Saigo’s footsteps with the servant Jusuke and a friend, Hirano, who had joined him en route, almost walked into a trap. An attempt to find sanctuary in a temple ended when the chief monk reported them, forcing a hasty exit into a safe house, where they stayed for a week, shut away from all visitors.
Clearly, Hisamitsu could not allow a wanted man to remain in hiding when any shogunal spy would have known where he was. He came up with a devious solution. Saigo would take Gessho across Kinko Bay to the next-door province, then onward to an enclave, Hyuga, which was ruled by a Shimazu relative and was outside the domain’s border checkpoints. In this way Gessho—who had after all been helping the cause of Satsuma’s previous lord—would not be handed over to the shogun’s men; on the other hand, he was not exactly on Satsuma territory, so if they came to get him, Hisamitsu could truthfully say he had left Satsuma and deny all knowledge of him.
For Saigo, this looked like the end of all his hopes. He had no influence in Edo, or Kyoto, or Satsuma; he was a nonperson; and now his closest friend was to be hurried off into, at best, insecure hiding, and perhaps something worse, for Satsuma had a tradition of judicial murder at border posts, referred to as “getting sent off to the east.” In Ravina’s words, “Saigo saw only failure, isolation and loss.” Gessho felt the same. There was nothing for him in this life; better, he said, to go to “another place.”
But Saigo had no intention of abandoning him. Shamed by his inability to protect his friend, he determined to share his fate, and to do it on his own terms. Had he been on his own, he would have committed seppuku; but nothing in Japanese tradition dictated how to kill yourself and a friend who, as a monk, did not carry a sword of his own. To get to Hyuga, he would have to cross Kinko Bay. Once there, he and Gessho could find themselves under new guards. If he was to act, therefor
e, it would have to be out in the bay.
The next evening (December 19) the two friends, accompanied still by Gessho’s servant, Jusuke, his friend Hirano, and an official escort, made their way to the shore, where the escort guided them onto a small, single-sailed boat. They had with them some basic equipment: a little food, sake, fuel, tinder. It was a clear, cold winter’s night, with a full moon, and they had 15 kilometers to cover.
They slid quickly away northward, following the coast as it swung around to the east, with the great shadow of Sakurajima a few kilometers away to the right, the bare rock of its higher slopes glistening in the moonlight.
Something like half an hour into the trip, well away from populated areas, Saigo called Gessho forward to look ahead, toward the shore where there was a famous temple named Shingakuji.1 He told a story about a Satsuma prince who had objected to a deal made with invaders by his elder brother in the sixteenth century. The prince had committed seppuku on the site of the temple, followed in death by many of his retainers. Shimazu retainers still went there to pray for the prince’s soul. Would Gessho also like to pray now, in the direction of the temple? Gessho said he would. The two stood in the bows, facing the temple, and prayed. Surely they were also saying mutual farewells, for what followed could only have happened with Gessho’s agreement.
Then Saigo took Gessho in his huge arms, held him tightly, and threw the two of them together into the chilly waters.
If the three others onboard did not see them jump, they heard the splash, saw the deck empty in the moonlight and rushed to help. Their official escort, Sakaguchi, drew his sword, slashed the sail down and swung the tiller, while the other two grabbed oars and rowed back the way they had come. There were the two men underwater, held just beneath the surface by their waterlogged clothing. They had been there perhaps five or ten minutes. They were drowning and, as drowning people grasp at straws, had locked arms around each other in instinctive desperation. They could be saved: the cold water had probably triggered the “diving reflex,” which focuses the blood supply to the brain. All three crew members dived in, prised the two men apart, and somehow lifted them into the boat. Then they rowed them ashore, which must have taken another fifteen minutes. Once the boat was beached, one built a fire with the tinder and fuel onboard while the other two tried resuscitation, pressing on the prostrate bodies. Gessho—older, slighter, more susceptible to cold—showed no sign of life. But Saigo coughed up water, and then, amazingly, began to breathe, though he remained semiconscious from lack of oxygen. Nearby was a small house; here they took Saigo to make sure he really was going to live.