Pagoda, Skull & Samurai

by Rohan Kōda

  Although Rohan never makes an outright mention of homosexual attachment between Tadatsugu and Kotarō in his story, one cannot overlook the deliberation with which Rohan creates the impression that Tadatsugu lives alone with an old manservant, omitting the pertinent information that Tadatsugu was married to Ieyasu's aunt in real life. Dairoku, who also admires Kotarō's beauty, is presented as a bachelor who chuckles, "No sophisticated prince of the Heike clan, I wouldn't know what to do if I met the fairest of women on the night before my death." Rohan's additional subtle touch can be detected in his supplying Dairoku with a background that placed him under General Kōsaka's command in the northern region over the years.

  Sexual connotation per se is irrelevant in "The Bearded Samurai," but a feeling akin to the emotion of love free from a mercenary or pragmatic motive—a universal, noble, selfless sense of wonder that affirms humanity and aesthetic sensitivity in man—is absolutely essential in this story. Without it, the enemies could never transcend or sublimate animosity and grudge. The scene between Kotarō and Dairoku deliberately echoes one of the most popular episodes in The Tale of the Heike, a thirteenth-century war narrative. In "The Death of Atsumori"* the Heike nobleman Atsumori (1169-84) engages in mortal combat with the older Genji warrior Kumagai Naozane (d. 1208). Finding himself overpowered, Atsumori offers up his head, but Kumagai hesitates to kill a young man "about the age of his own son and with features of great beauty." An approaching swarm of his own comrades forces Kumagai to cut off Atsumori's head, rather than leaving the inevitable to a callous hand, before which Kumagai tearfully promises to have prayers said for the boy's rebirth into the Pure Land.

  If the confrontation in "The Bearded Samurai" is reminiscent of this moving narrative classic, the religious and psychological implications of the fictional encounter between Kotarō and Dairoku are closer to the more profound and poetic Noh play Atsumori.* In this version, the former antagonists realize that "Once enemies, but now in truth may we be named Friends in Buddha's Law" and that they are but two souls bound by some mysterious karma to lead one another toward salvation. Association with the Atsumori legend is unmistakable in "The Bearded Samurai," moreover, not only in Dairoku's abrupt reference to the Heike prince but also in his reflection on the nature of friend and foe, which recalls a passage from Atsumori: "Put away from you a wicked friend; summon to your side a virtuous enemy."

  Footnotes

  * Found in Donald Keene, Anthology of Japanese Literature, New York: Grove Press, 1955, pp. 179-81.

  * Keene, pp, 286-93.

  HISTORICAL NOTES

  on "The Bearded Samurai"

  TAKEDA KATSUYORI (1546-82), the defeated commander in "The Bearded Samurai," is a rather tragic figure, to whom history seems unduly unkind. The popular image of Katsuyori is that of an exceptionally handsome, tall, aristocratic young man favored most by his father, Takeda Shingen, because of his beautiful mother. Known in history only as the Lady from Suwa, she had been forced to become a secondary wife of Shingen, who was an elder brother of her own mother. Marriage between blood uncle and niece was not unusual or considered immoral in itself, but her circumstances were tragic: the fourteen-year-old beauty was taken by Shingen in 1544 after he had defeated her father, Suwa Yorishige, and murdered him at the treaty conference. Shingen's exceeding love for his niece-wife, widely rumored at the time to be an incarnation of the sacred white fox serving the god of Suwa Shrine, is usually cited as a primary reason why, of his seven sons (by his other wives as well), Katsuyori is the only one lacking the character shin in his name. Instead, yori in Katsuyori is taken from the name of his Suwa grandfather, indicating Shingen's attempt to reassure his favorite wife and the conquered people of Suwa that her family line continued through their son. This pale mysterious beauty died when Katsuyori was nine years old, but the boy grew into a fine warrior-general and vindicated his father's favoritism by winning a decisive victory at the battle of Mikata-ga-hara in December 1572, at which he led a daring cavalry charge into the Tokugawa wing, putting the combined Oda-Tokugawa forces to rout. On his way to storm through the Tokugawa domain of Mikawa with his eyes set on Kyoto, the capital, Shingen succumbed to chronic tuberculosis in April of the following year, leaving instructions that his death be kept secret for two years. While Nobunaga waited with bated breath, the Takeda reduced their military activities in secret mourning as well as in succession dispute. But only two months after Shin-gen's death was at last made public through a formal funeral service in April 1575, Tokugawa Ieyasu installed Okudaira Sadamasa, a former Takeda vassal who had recently defected to the Tokugawa, as the commander of the five-hundred-man Nagashino garrison, to Katsuyori's great chagrin.

  Historical assessment of Katsuyori's true caliber becomes divided only after the battle of Nagashino, for there is no denying that Nobunaga had been so afraid of Katsuyori's cavalry that he erected triple fences girded by a forward ditch to keep mounted Takeda warriors at bay. Another undisputed fact is that during the eight-hour engagement, Takeda's able generals, such as Yamagata and Baba, died along with great many of their men. It is generally believed that the Takeda fell victim to Nobunaga's plan to hold them at a distance and fusillade them with three thousand guns from behind secure fortifications. This view is advanced by the Kōyō Gunk an, originally compiled by the Takeda general Kosaka Masanobu, then augmented and edited by a number of Tokugawa military specialists in the early seventeenth century. From this twenty-volume record of the accomplishments of Shingen and Katsuyori, military and legal codes of Koshu, and presumably eye-witness account of battles (more in the tradition of war tales than history), Rohan borrowed several episodes, including the opposing opinions exchanged at the war council and the farewell toast with the well water.

  Nagashino Jissenki (The true account of the battle of Nagashino), written by a member of the Tokugawa clan, provides more insight. It indicates that contrary to common belief only one Takeda general was killed at the Oda fence line; the other commanders died elsewhere during the chaotic rout, which reduced the Takeda strength from fifteen thousand to three thousand. This source also makes two additional revelations that throw new light on Katsuyori's behavior: Nobunaga had ordered Sakuma Nobumori, one of his commanders, to promise a Takeda agent that he, Sakuma, would turn his unit against Nobunaga as soon as the Takeda charge reached the fences; and Katsuyori's hope that the matchlock muskets would be rendered virtually useless by the continuous precipitation of the rainy season was foiled by the abrupt clearing of the sky around eight o'clock on the morning of the battle. Rohan makes use of both points in "The Bearded Samurai."

  Katsuyori's heroic end is also known. Not surprisingly, the Kōyō Gunkan condemns Atobe and Chokan as insidious sycophants responsible for Katsuyori's downfall, but it is interesting to note that Nobunagaki (Chronicle of Nobunaga, 1622, by Ose Hōan) more sympathetically labels them loyal vassals who stayed with Katsuyori to the end to die beside him. In any case, disloyal, or pragmatic, vassals seem to have abounded within the clan in its twilight period: Katsuyori's cousin (married to his sister) defected to Ieyasu; another brother-in-law pledged his fealty to Nobunaga; and disheartened vassals deserted en masse. In the spring of 1576 (about the time that Dairoku escaped in the story), Katsuyori led a supply convoy to reinforce the defenses of Takatenjin Castle, taken from Ieyasu three years earlier. When Ieyasu mounted an assault on this castle in 1581, however, Katsuyori was no longer in a position to dispatch a relief force to prevent its recapture. Katsuyori was compelled to evacuate his own castle in Koshu under an Oda-Tokugawa onslaught in 1582. With his sixteen-year-old heir and about fifty relatives and hereditary vassals, he made his last stand in Tano at the foot of Mt. Temmoku, erected fences, and fought off overwhelming enemy forces. After his wife and women attendants committed suicide, the thirty-seven-year-old Katsuyori killed six enemy warriors and died an honorable death by seppuku.

  The credibility gap that developed between Katsuyori and his elders may be attributable to an oedipal son's desire
to best his father, but it also illustrates his failure to comprehend the enormity of his father's shoes, much less fill them. Both before and after Katsuyori's fall, Ieyasu actively recruited Takeda vassals in an effort to consolidate the Tokugawa strength. The military reputation of the Koshu legions was not Ieyasu's sole consideration, either. Takeda Shingen had been a uniquely versatile warlord who proved himself to be an excellent civil engineer, an inventive agriculturist, and a progressive mining engineer as well. To accomplish the ambitious feat of increasing the rice yield of his mountainous domain, he harnessed swift-running rivers with water-control projects, encouraged land reclamation, and undertook forestry. And nowhere was his technical genius more evident or more remarkable than in gold mining. It was not until Shin-gen's days that lode gold, as opposed to placer gold, was being mined in Japan, and it was under Shingen and his samurai engineers that a lead-catalyst method (the Koshu method) of extracting gold began to be used, predating the importation of the same idea by Western missionaries later in the century. It was thus by no means a matter of coincidence or a mere whim that Ieyasu mounted earnest campaigns to recruit Takeda vassals—they were superior technical specialists as well as stalwart warriors. In contrast to Katsuyori's distrust of his father's counselors, Ieyasu's faith in the Koshu technology was lavishly repaid by one former Takeda retainer alone: in Ieyasu's employ he discovered and developed the Sado gold mine, which was to continue producing until after World War II.

  The battle of Nagashino suggests many a possibility for the "what ifs" of history. Would the unification of Japan initiated by Nobunaga, completed by Hideyoshi, and solidified by Ieyasu have been possible if Katsuyori had not been laboring under the awesome shadow of his late father, the burly, overpowering, invincible Shingen? If his elder generals had wholeheartedly accepted Katsuyori as the legitimate heir over his brothers and as an able leader in his own right? Or if the famous Takeda gold mines had not been drying up, depriving Katsuyori of much-needed funds for purchasing a massive supply of guns and ammunition? If Katsuyori had not declined Nobunaga's invitation to join forces with him on a campaign against Uesugi Kenshin in 1577?

  The very existence of firearms in Japan at that time provides for interesting speculation. A scant thirty-two years earlief, in 1543, the first two guns had been purchased from Portuguese voyagers by a lord of Tanegashima Island, southwest of Kyushu. The manufacture and use of the Tanegashima gun rapidly spread northeastward, and many warlords, including the Takeda, organized musketeer regiments to bolster their military capabilities. Nobunaga was the first to make full use of his firepower in combat, in the battle of Anekawa in 1570. But it was the battle of Nagashino that was Japan's first test of modern warfare tactics in which firearms and plebeian musketeer regiments proved more than a match for the traditional weapons and samurai cavalry in actual combat situations.

  While "The Bearded Samurai" focuses on the valorous but tragic story of the Takeda clansmen, the defenders of Nagashino Castle have also been honored by an unusual tribute. The heroic stand of the besieged garrison has been memorialized at, of all the unlikely places, the Alamo in San Antonio, Texas, by a Japanese who was born in Okazaki, Mikawa Province (present-day Aichi Prefecture). Shiga Shigetaka (1863-1927), a nationalist publisher, political theorist, geographer, and statesman, on a trip to attend the U.S. International Conference in 1914, stopped at the Alamo and donated a monument engraved with a poem, which still stands today in the courtyard of the mission. A prose poem in his Complete Works explains how the comparable valor of the defenders of the Alamo (1836) and Nagashino (1575)—the young commanders (William Travis, twenty-six, and Okudaira Sadamasa, twenty-one), each confronting a hostile force twenty-seven times his own, and the intrepid messengers (James Bonham, Torii Sune'emon), who reported back at the cost of their lives —had inspired him to erect the memorial. Shiga's poem summarizes the Battle of the Alamo, extols the universality of heroism Eastern and Western, and pays particular homage to the dauntless action of Colonel Bonham, who, returning from a mission, galloped his beautiful cream-colored steed through Santa Anna's horde to report back and then died beside his commander and life-long friend Colonel Travis. Shiga compares Bonham with Torii, who was captured on his way back and crucified in full view of Nagashino Castle. Before he was speared to death, Torii managed to shout his report across that the Oda-Tokugawa reinforcements were on their way, thereby uplifting the morale of the besieged garrison immeasurably. Shiga's Chinese poem, thirty-two lines of seven characters each, is fittingly carved on a large granite from Torii's grave site in Shiga's native province.

  Durable public fascination with the legend of the invincible Shingen and the unexpected, tragic fall of the House of Takeda has inspired a number of monumental historical novels by contemporary writers, and equally dramatic movies. Available to the English-speaking audience, for example, is the 1980 film Kagemusha (The shadow warrior) by the internationally known director Kurosawa Akira. The film focuses on a fictional protagonist who is forced to impersonate Takeda Shingen during the two critical years of secret mourning after his untimely death. Kagemusha achieves a bloody yet poetic climax in the annihilation scene at Nagashino. Kurosawa departs from historical records in his interpretation (e.g., Shingen dies of a gunshot wound; Katsuyori's role is reduced to near nothing; the time element is compressed), but the desperate efforts of the loyal Takeda elders are well represented. If Kurosawa exercises poetic license in his narrative and plot, his characteristically meticulous research of historical costume and settings culminates in a spectacular visual feast and an authentic reminder of a vibrant era when traditional ways confronted and blended with Western imports.