Samurai

by John Man

  Knowing he has no chance of getting close to Zheng without a good excuse, he approaches the renegade Qin general, Fan, with an extraordinary suggestion: If he could have the general’s own head, he will go to Zheng offering Yan’s surrender, with Fan’s head as a sign of good faith. He will also have a map of Yan territory. These two items will gain him access. Inside the rolled-up map he plans to conceal a poisoned dagger, with which he will stab Zheng. The general finds this an excellent idea—“Day and night I gnash my teeth and eat out my heart trying to think of some plan. Now you have shown me the way!” So saying, he obligingly cuts his own throat.

  Head and map gain Jing Ke and an accomplice entry into the court and an audience with the king. At this moment the accomplice has an attack of nerves, leaving Jing Ke to go on alone. Watched by a crowd of courtiers, Jing Ke unrolls his map, seizes the dagger, grabs the king by the sleeve, and strikes. The king leaps back, tearing off his sleeve, and Jing Ke’s lunge misses its mark. Zheng flees with the assassin in pursuit, while the unarmed courtiers stand back, appalled, watching their lord and master dodging around a pillar, trying in vain to untangle his long ceremonial sword from his robes. A doctor has the presence of mind to hit Jing Ke with his medicine bag, which gives the king a moment’s grace.

  Even as Jing Ke comes at him again, the king manages to untangle his sword, draw it, and wound Jing Ke in the leg. Jing Ke hurls the poisoned dagger, misses, and falls back as the king strikes at him, wounding him again. Jing Ke, seeing he has failed, leans against the pillar, then squats down, alternately laughing hysterically and cursing the king. The crowd moves in and finishes him off.

  Would it be fair to call Jing Ke a forerunner of the ninjas? Hardly. True, he gained entry to the emperor by means of a trick. But the plot demanded that he operate in public and be prepared to die. Ninjas moved in secret and planned for survival. If there are lessons in this story, they are that rulers should be more careful and that secret agents should up their game. There’s no point in half a ninja.

  The incident, along with much of China’s recorded history, became familiar to the Japanese from their embassies. Scholars knew about the first emperor and were familiar with the “Five Classics,” among them Sun Zi’s Art of War, known in Japan as Shonshi, a Japanese version of “Sun Zi.” In theory, therefore, they knew about Sun Zi’s admiration for the dark, covert arts of deception and spying. In addition, a number of wealthy Chinese fled the war-torn mainland in the early Middle Ages (tenth through twelfth centuries), many traveling through the Japanese heartland to the court and some settling along the way, emphasizing to their Japanese hosts the importance of Chinese culture, including the techniques of covert warfare. The famous Takeda family, which rose to prominence in the sixteenth century, owned at least six of the Chinese classics, including those by Sun Zi, Confucius, and Sima Qian (the grand historian who told the story of Jing Ke), suggesting that key ingredients of ninjutsu, the “art of invisibility,” are Chinese in origin.

  In fact, the idea of deception also has well-established Japanese roots, as two stories reveal. They appear in Japan’s most ancient surviving book, the Kojiki (Record of Ancient Things). The Kojiki was one of two works produced for Emperor Temmu, who in AD 682 commanded his princes and nobles to “commit to writing a chronicle of the emperors and also of matters of high antiquity.” Produced for the court thirty years later, the Kojiki’s amalgam of written and oral tales purports to explain the origin of the nation, from the beginning of heaven and earth, “when the land was young, resembling floating oil and drifting like a jellyfish.” From three gods sprang the islands of Japan and eight million—“eight hundred myriad”—other gods, among them Amaterasu, the sun goddess, ancestor of the royal family. In a slurry of myth, song, legend, pseudo-history, and history, the 149 brief chapters reveal how, over twelve hundred years, thirty-four emperors imposed their wills on rival clans as Japan’s divinely ordained ruling family.

  Two stories tell of a young hero called Wo-usu, later renamed Prince Yamato the Brave, who still wore his hair up on his forehead in the style of a teenager. He was (supposedly) the younger son of the twelfth emperor, Keiko of Yamato, which in the second century AD was one of the five provinces of central Honshu, the heartland of the almost unified nation. The words in quotes are from the original as translated by Donald Philippi.

  The Wiles of Prince Yamato

  Emperor Keiko tells the elder of his two sons, whose name is Opo-usu, to bring him two beautiful sisters to marry. Instead Opo-usu marries the sisters himself. Then, in embarrassment, he avoids coming to eat morning and evening meals with his father.

  The emperor tells the younger son, Wo-usu, to summon his brother.

  Five days later, Opo-usu has not appeared.

  “Why has your elder brother not come for such a long time?” says the emperor. “Is it perhaps that you have not yet admonished him?”

  “I have already entreated him,” replies Wo-usu.

  “In what manner did you entreat him?”

  “Early in the morning when he went into the privy, I waited and captured him, grasped him and crushed him, then pulled off his limbs and, wrapping them in a straw mat, threw them away.”

  Wo-usu’s ruthlessness strikes the emperor as a pretty rough punishment for skipping a few meals. He instantly finds a mission that will suit his son’s “fearless, wild disposition.”

  “Toward the west,” he says, meaning the southern part of Japan’s southern island, Kyushu, “there are two Kumaso-takeru”—kumaso being a word for the aboriginals of that part of untamed Kyushu and takeru meaning “brave.” If this were an English fairy tale, these aboriginal chieftains would be ogres, and Wo-usu a Japanese Jack of the beanstalk. Anyway, says the emperor, “they are unsubmissive, disrespectful people. Therefore, go and kill them.”

  Before departure, Wo-usu’s aunt, who in other versions of the story is a high priestess of the sun goddess, gives him two items of clothing suitable for a woman, an “upper garment” and a skirt. Why? Because very soon they will become vital to the story, and he has to get them from somewhere. Armed with a small sword, which he tucks into his shirt, he sets off.

  When Wo-usu arrives at his destination, he finds the ogre brothers inside a newly built pit house, for in olden days aboriginals often lived in houses hollowed out of the ground. There is much noise, for the ogres are preparing a feast to celebrate the completion of the house. Wo-usu waits, walking around until the feast day. Then he dons a ninja-like disguise. He combs his hair down in the style of a young girl, puts on the robe and skirt given him by his aunt, hides his sword under his costume, mingles with the women, and enters.

  The two ogres take one look at this vision of loveliness and command the “maiden” to sit between them.

  When the feast is at its height, Wo-usu draws his sword, seizes the elder ogre by the collar, and plunges the sword into his chest.

  The younger ogre, seeing this, takes fright and flees, with Wo-usu in pursuit. At the foot of the stairs leading out of the pit house, Wo-usu catches up with his victim, seizes him by the shoulder, and stabs him in the rectum.

  “Do not move the sword,” says the ogre. “I have something to say.” At this the action, as if in a dream, comes to a dead halt, giving the ogre, to whom it has now occurred that the “maiden” is no maiden, time to ask, “Who are you, my lord?”

  Wo-usu launches into a long explanation of his origins, naming his father the emperor. Hearing that “you [ogres] were unsubmissive and disrespectful,” he says, “he dispatched me to kill you.”

  Then the ogre, still ignoring the sword up his backside, says politely, “Indeed, this must be true. For in the west there are no brave mighty men besides us. But in the land of Yamato there is a man exceeding the two of us in bravery. Because of this I will present you with a name. May you be known from now on as Yamato the Brave.”

  Then, at last, Wo-usu, now Yamato-takeru, Yamato the Brave, killed his long-suffering victim, “slicing him up like a rip
e melon.”

  In the next chapter, Yamato the Brave comes to an old province in southwestern Honshu, intending to kill the ruler, Idumo the Brave, otherwise known as Many-Clouds-Rising. To do this, he uses two deceptions. First, he pretends to be Idumo’s friend, then he makes an imitation wooden sword.

  The two “friends” go to a river to bathe.

  Yamato comes out first, and says, as a friend might, “Let us exchange swords!” Idumo agrees, and straps on Yamato’s wooden sword.

  At this Yamato issues a challenge, but of course Idumo can do nothing with the imitation sword and falls an easy victim to Yamato, who exults in his unsporting victory with a song:

  The Many-Clouds-Rising

  Idumo the BraveWears a sword

  With many vines wrapped round it

  But no blade inside, alas!

  Ninja: The Word Explained

  English-speakers are often puzzled that the word ninja is sometimes rendered shinobi. How can two such different words in English be the same in Japanese? Here’s how:

  From the seventh century, Japanese took on Chinese culture as the foundation of their own. This included writing with Chinese signs, despite the fact that there is no connection between the two languages. This script, kanji, is used in combination with two other scripts, both of which are syllabic. The two syllabic scripts are relatively easy to learn, but in practice they are not much use without knowing several hundred kanji signs as well. It’s a struggle and, frankly, for non-Japanese, a nightmare.

  The kanji signs have two pronunciations: mock Chinese, which, being more scholarly, has high status, and real Japanese. For example, a “mountain” in Chinese is written and pronounced shan, the line over the a representing a level tone of voice, as opposed to a rising [á], falling [à] or falling-rising tone. In the Japanese version of the Chinese, that becomes san. But in proper Japanese, “mountain” is yama. The Japanese use both, with san as the higher status—hence Fuji-san for their most famous mountain, rather than Fuji-yama, which is favored by foreigners. One sign, two utterly different pronunciations.

  The same system applies to the signs and words usually transcribed in English and many other languages as ninja. In Chinese, the signs / ren zhe mean “one who endures or hides.” Japanese uses the same signs. But in the Japanese pronunciation, the term is distorted into nin sha, usually transliterated as ninja. In spoken Japanese, the word for “one who endures or hides” is shinobi mono (“enduring or hiding person”), usually shortened to shinobi. The “nin” part of ninja consists of two elements, “blade” () placed above “heart” () in the wide sense of intelligence, soul, life. By tradition, the two suggest a hidden meaning. Perhaps a ninja is someone who has a sword blade hanging over him, ready to end his life if anything goes wrong; perhaps he is someone who knows how to make his intelligence as sharp as a blade.

  Until quite recently, Japanese were happy to use both terms indiscriminately, because they have the same signs and mean the same thing, except that the mock-Chinese version is higher status. Since early contacts between foreigners and Japanese were at a high social level, ninja became the preferred version in both foreign languages and Japan.

  Have You Read?

  More by John Man

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