By the Sword

by Richard Cohen

  The Satsuma Rebellion of 1877 also played its part, for it convinced many policemen that they should train in the martial arts, especially in fencing: too many skirmishes during the rebellion had been won by sword-wielding soldiers—on both sides. The head of the Tokyo Metropolitan Police, the former samurai Kawaji Toshiyoshi, urged that kendo be added to his men’s basic training. “Fencing is practiced assiduously in the various Western nations,” he wrote. “If Japan abolishes fencing, then some day we will have to learn it from them. Now, the saber is nowhere as sharp as the Japanese sword; so if we abolish Japanese swordsmanship and learn to use the Western saber that would be equivalent to throwing away gold and picking up broken roof-tiles.… Although this may be the age of the gun, the success [of police use of swords against the rebellion] is more proof of the worth of fencing than all other arguments. Moreover, fencing is of great value in training character and instilling diligence.”34 Kawaji’s arguments prevailed, and several Tokugawa masters were recruited. When it became obvious that each had his own school and way of fencing, the police set about creating a unified teaching system—something never before attempted in Japan. From this emerged modern kendo.

  Police officers in Tokyo supervising a practice kendo session before a display for the 64th Imperial Diet during the 1930s. (illustration credit 7.2)

  Throughout the last half of the nineteenth century it was bitterly debated whether to teach the martial arts in schools. In 1884 a commission concluded that, despite their physical and spiritual values, such arts were “dangerous, violent, and detrimental to health and growth.” Nevertheless, the advocates of kendo did not give up, and in 1911 fencing became an option in the curriculum and six years later a regular school subject. Before long, it became a means of inculcating a nationalistic spirit, and fencing suddenly found itself given an unwelcome political dimension.

  It was no surprise when, after the Second World War, the Allies did their best to outlaw kendo, singling it out as dangerously militaristic. The very terms “bushi” (“warrior”) and “budo” (“Way of the Warrior”) were forbidden to be used. In November 1945 martial arts training was once again struck from the curriculum. However, kendo enthusiasts continued to train in secret. They devised a transitional form of fencing, using bamboo swords with Western jackets and masks—and played down the spiritual aspects.

  TODAY JAPANESE FENCERS COMPETE IN WORLD AND OLYMPIC CHAMPIONSHIPS, but since they first participated none had reached a final, until Yuki Ota won silver in the individual foil at the 2008 Olympics in Beijing. It may be that the search for perfection that characterized Japan’s swordplay for so long cannot be twisted into sheer sporting endeavor; or perhaps modern fencers, Eastern and Western alike, have yet to rediscover that tradition.

  * These include katana, tachi, ko-bizen, kabatsuchi, no tachi, ka radachi, shinai, kyo-mono, kunihiro, kozuka (a side knife), koshigatana, mamori-gatana, mino-mono, arami meizu-kushi, tsurugi, daisho, bokuto, soshu-mono, metezashi, tosu (a knife), tanto (a short sword), wakizashi (a side sword), tsubokiri no tsurugi, aikuchi (a dagger), osatune kaji, chokuto, agari-tachi, umabari, nodachi (a field sword), and mikusa no kan-dakara. Kendo is the way of the sword; kenjutsu the art of the sword.

  † Chinese swordplay has an even more imaginative range of names for its movements. Among them are: Tiger Crouches at the Front Door; Boatman Rows a Skull; Paint a Red Dot Between the Eyebrows; Brush Dust in the Breeze; Dragonfly Skims the Water; Turn Around and Hang a Golden Bell; Pick Up Stars with an Unerring Hand; Black Dragon Stirs Its Tail; Wasp Flies Through a Hole; Capture a Legendary Turtle in the Ocean Depths; White Snake Flicks Its Tongue; and Hold the Moon in Your Arms.

  ‡ During the sixteenth century these training swords took on another role, being used by deserted wives who wished to avenge themselves on their successors. Depending on their social position, three, five, or more women would assemble on each side, headed respectively by the aggrieved lady and her successful rival, all carrying bamboo swords. No man could be admitted, except an elderly servant on each side, who transmitted the challenge and the acceptance. As one nineteenth-century traveler commented, “This contest was as interesting and harmless as it was emphatic and noisy; it relieved the pent-up hatred on the one side, and gave, perhaps, the coup de grâce to the honeymoon on the other.”9

  § To give some context to such figures, the greatest body count credited to any one man was to George Kastrioti (1403–68), Prince of Epirus and Albania and commonly known as Iskander Bey, “the Dragon of Albania,” or simply as Skanderbeg. He is said to have slain three thousand Turks with his own hand during a guerrilla campaign that lasted twenty-five years. Among the stories told about him was that he never slept for more than five hours a night and could cut two men asunder with a single stroke of his scimitar, cut through iron helmets, kill a wild boar with a single stroke, and cleave the head off a buffalo with another.

  ‖ In his far-reaching study of fencing in Japan, G. Cameron Hurst cites what may be the primary source “for this commonly quoted Western aphorism about the sword”—that it is synonymous with a warrior’s soul: an early-seventeenth-century work, Tokugawa nariaki hyakkajo, whose thirty-sixth article reads, “the sword is the soul of the bushi; those who lose theirs shall not be forgiven.”15

  a A famous story is told of two officers belonging to the emperor’s staff who met on the imperial staircase. Their swords became entangled—not a minor matter, as it suggested that one did not care what happened to the other man’s sword—and words arose. “It is only an accident,” said one, “and at best it is only a quarrel between our two swords.” “We shall see about that,” said the other, drawing his weapon and plunging it into his own breast. The other hurried away on an errand but soon returned, to find his antagonist on the point of death. He immediately drew his own sword and plunged it into his body, exclaiming, “You should not have had the start of me if you had not found me engaged in the service of the prince. I die contented, however, since I have had the glory of convincing you that my sword is as good as yours.”23

  b The Japanese word for “guts” has a far wider and more dignified sense than the English. It appears in various idioms such as haraga okii (“large-stomached”—hence generous or magnanimous), hara wo tateru (“to raise one’s stomach,” thus to become indignant or take offense), and hara wo kimeru (“to fix one’s stomach,” meaning to be settled in one’s resolution).

  A sketch by Aleksandr Pushkin, one of several—a number humorous—on his favorite obsession. He died dueling in 1837, on his thirty-eighth birthday. (illustration credit p3)

  1807. Mr Alcock killed Mr Colclough, and lost his reason, 8 June

  1808. M. de Granpre & M. Le Pique, in balloons, near Paris; latter killed, 3 May

  1808. Major Campbell & Captain Boyd; latter killed, 23 June; (former hanged, 2 October)

  1809. Lord Castlereagh wounded George Canning, 21 September

  —Haydn’s Dictionary of Dates: Memorable Duels

  Duels: Thunder against. No proof of courage. Great prestige of the man who has fought one.

  —GUSTAVE FLAUBERT, Dictionary of Received Ideas, 1881

  ON APRIL 10, 1772, SAMUEL JOHNSON AND JAMES BOSWELL were dining out with a small group of friends when the conversation turned to dueling. Boswell asked the table whether they thought the practice was consistent with moral duty. Their host, a retired general, said confidently, “Undoubtedly a man has a right to defend his honor.” Boswell was asked what he would do if challenged. “I should think it necessary to fight.” Johnson weighed in: “It does not follow, that what a man would do is therefore right.” Boswell wondered aloud if dueling was contrary to the laws of Christianity, to which Johnson replied:

  Sir, as men become in a high degree refined, various causes of offence arise; which are considered to be of such importance, that life must be staked to atone for them, though in reality they are not so.… But in a state of highly polished society, an affront is held to be a serious injury. It must, ther
efore, be resented, or rather, a duel must be fought upon it; as men have agreed to banish from their society one who puts up with an affront without fighting a duel. Now, sir, it is never unlawful to fight in self-defense. He, then, who fights a duel, does not fight from passion against his antagonist, but out of self-defense; to avert the stigma of the world, and to prevent himself from being driven out of society. I could wish there was not that superfluity of refinement; but while such notions prevail, no doubt a man may lawfully fight a duel.

  Nine days later, Boswell—still not satisfied—prompted the doctor to say more. “He this day again defended dueling,” Boswell recorded,

  and put his argument upon what I have ever thought as the most solid basis; that if publick war be allowed to be consistent with morality, private war must be equally so. Indeed we may observe what strained arguments are used to reconcile war with the Christian religion. But, in my opinion, it is exceedingly clear that dueling, having better reasons for its barbarous violence, is more justifiable than war in which thousands go forth without any cause of personal quarrel, and massacre each other.1

  The great moralist may have sanctioned the “point of honor,” but other men of standing condemned it. One early critic, Blaise Pascal (1623–62), labeled dueling a folly, a prejudice without rational justification.2 Jean-Jacques Rousseau ridiculed the practice in Julie ou la Nouvelle Héloïse, in which the heroine, writing to her lover on the cusp of a duel to defend her good name, offers a detailed critique of dueling as a “savage prejudice” based on a false interpretation of honor. Boswell had written to Rousseau as early as 1764, but neither Rousseau’s attacks nor Johnson’s defense put Boswell’s mind at rest, and to the end of his life he remained characteristically uncertain what to think.*

  AS THE NINETEENTH CENTURY—KNOWN EVEN TO CONTEMPORARIES as “the bourgeois century”—got under way, formalized codes appeared—in England in the 1820s, in France in the 1830s, in Germany in the late nineteenth century, and even in Russia by the century’s end. Some minor points aside, the dueling codes of central Europe were much alike, being largely based on the comprehensive codification made by the Comte de Chateauvillard of the Paris Jockey Club in 1836, Essai sur le duel, that quickly became accepted in the Western world. By now philosophers and writers were pressing their opinions. The moralist William Paley argued that the whole rationale of the duel as a means of achieving justice made no sense: “dueling, as a punishment, is absurd, because it is an equal chance whether the punishment falls on the offender or the person offended; nor is it much better as a reparation—it being difficult to explain in what the reparation consists, or how it tends to undo the injury or afford a compensation for the injury sustained.”

  One would have thought that running one’s enemy through might have afforded some people considerable satisfaction, but other writers agreed overall with Paley: William Hazlitt wrote against the practice, as did Leigh Hunt, who charmingly placed his essay opposite one on “Suicides of Butlers.”4 Anne Brontë condemns the duel between Lord Lowborough and Huntingdon in her The Tenant of Wildfell Hall as “one of the symptoms of a depraved heart”;5 while Tobias Smollett wrote of the “trade of assassinations,” the idiocy of friends murdering each other, and the tragedy of a worthy man having to die because he was unlucky enough to be “insulted by a brute, a bully, a drunkard or a madman.” Byron often threatened duels but never actually fought one (although while in Malta in 1809 he had to be dragged away from an officer who had insulted him). He disliked “seeing men play the fool for nothing,” and thought that nine times out of ten a second could resolve a quarrel so long as he was not “a bully or a butcher.” Elizabeth Barrett Browning hated all dueling; her husband, Robert, predictably loved the idea and has at least a hundred references to swordplay in his poetry.†

  In Germany, Arthur Schopenhauer, an inveterate pessimist, devoted more than twenty-seven pages in “What a Man Represents” to tracing the origins of knightly codes and inveighing against the silliness of duels. “[This] species of honor,” he wrote, “is perfectly unknown amongst Chinese, Hindus or Mohammedans … knightly honor depends, not upon what people think, but upon what they say, as shown by the fact that insults can be withdrawn, or, if necessary, form the subject of an apology, which makes them as though they had never been uttered.… The truth is that conduct of this kind aims, not at earning respect, but at extorting it.”

  Schopenhauer had attended university in Berlin, where he must have come across student duelists, but he remained steadfastly unsympathetic. “The whole thing manifestly rests upon an excessive degree of arrogant pride,” he went on. “This pride must not be put down to religion, but, rather, to the feudal system, which made every nobleman a petty sovereign who recognized no human judge, and learned to regard his person as sacred and inviolable.… The theory that might is right … has still in this nineteenth century a good deal of life left in it—more shame to us.”7

  The penalties for dueling were so draconian that they undermined their own purpose: people resisted a code that did not distinguish between willful murder and consensual combat. English juries in particular would often acquit rather than send a duelist to his death. They could see that the code duello was a highly ritualized affair, one main purpose of which was to eliminate random inequalities. The ceremony of the duel could mediate aggression and prevent the quarrelsome from succumbing to violent impulses. Most duels were far from barbarous acts.

  Another great German philosopher, Friedrich Niezsche, weighed in: “If a canon of honor exists that allows blood to take the place of death, so that the heart is relieved after a duel accordingly to the rules, then this is a great blessing.” He added, “Such an institution, by the way, educates men to be cautious in their remarks, and makes associating with them possible.”

  Immanuel Kant was also of the opinion that a distinction should be made between duelists and murderers. He classed “killing a fellow-soldier in a duel” alongside maternal infanticide in his Philosophy of Law, arguing that bringing about death in such cases “must be called Homicide, and not Murder, which involves evil intent.”8 Some legal systems followed Kant’s advice; others did not. For most of the century to take life in a duel was manslaughter in France, the Italian states, and Austria but murder in England and elsewhere. In the German states legislation was betwixt and between, extending tacit recognition to the duel, but then unsuccessfully seeking to secure sufficient penalties to discourage its practitioners. It was a hard line to draw—making the penalties strong enough to deter but not so harsh as to be ignored—and few European governments were willing to acknowledge that the duel had anything in its favor. Hence the difficulties in which they found themselves.

  Jeremy Bentham went even further, asserting that dueling, however rudely and imperfectly, corrected a real social evil. “It entirely effaces a blot which an insult imprints upon the honor. Vulgar moralists, by condemning public opinion upon this point, only confirm the fact.”9 He proposed that offenses against honor receive the same legal protection as offenses against the person—and argued that the punishment should be commensurate with the injury.

  Bentham’s views notwithstanding, in 1823 an association was formed in London for the sole purpose of suppressing dueling. It included leading members of both Houses of Parliament as well as senior officers of the services. Their influence was minimal, however, and in 1829 an enterprising Irishman, Joseph Hamilton, published The Only Approved Guide Through All the Stages of a Quarrel, explaining in his preface how he had “held directly opposing sentiments upon the subject,” first believing the duel to be a necessary evil, then viewing the practice as intolerable. However, when he appealed to leading figures—including the Duke of Wellington, who that same year would become the only British prime minister to fight a duel while in office—he got no support. When he approached Sir Walter Scott, the eminent author replied, “Doing the fullest justice to the philanthropy of your motives, I am still afraid that the practice of dueling is so deeply eng
rafted on the forms of society, that, for a length of time at least, until mankind may entertain much clearer views upon most moral subjects, it will hardly fall into disuse.” If the duel could not be done away with, Hamilton decided, nothing daunted, it could at least be regulated. “Should any individual attempt to deviate from rules which have been so very highly sanctioned by the chief commander of the British army and others whose letters we have inserted in the Introduction,” he warned, “his adversary will be justified in refusing to recognize him as a gentleman.”10 He made care to print Scott’s letter in full.

  Article 11 of the new code called for the duelist “to abstain from nicknames, mimicry, offensive jokes, and what is usually termed horseplay,” and Article 26 stated that “an apology, with its usual accompaniment—the offer of a whip or a switch—should always be accepted for a blow.” In choosing a site, one should avoid “the necessity for carrying wounded gentlemen over walls, ditches, gates, stiles or hedges”; the solemn act of tossing up for choice of weapons should be performed with “three, five or seven coins, after they have been carefully shaken in a hat”; and no duel should be fought on a Sunday, at a church festival, or near a place of public worship.

  This formalizing of rules, even on a necessarily unofficial basis, helped define the duel as an affair of honor, an ethical passage of arms, as Dr. Johnson had described it. As the American historian Joanne Freeman writes, “A fair duel was a game of chance that displayed the willingness of both principals to die for their honor, not their skill at inflicting pain or death.” The “polite” duelist, in certain places and times, fought “without any desire to hurt his adversary.” Duels motivated by “the thirst for blood or the malignant purpose of destroying the life of another” were “ferocious, barbarous and savage.”11