But if Kojiro’s spirit honored Musashi, there were those still living who did not. The surviving Yoshioka had slandered him, some declaring that Musashi had actually been beaten by Seijuro and then run away from a fight with Denshichiro. Others circulated a story that the fight with Seijuro had been a draw, or that both had cut each other’s hachimaki but that the blood simply did not show on Musashi’s persimmon-colored hachimaki and did on Seijuro’s white one. How they accounted for the complete disappearance of the Yoshioka brothers and their school from the swordsmanship scene is unknown.
In the case of the fight at Ganryu Island, there were partisans in favor of Kojiro, or disciples of his, who claimed that Kojiro had only been knocked temporarily unconscious by Musashi’s blow, and that Musashi’s disciples, who had hidden themselves on the island, had rushed forward and finished Kojiro off when he started to regain consciousness. How Musashi’s disciples might have managed to get onto the tiny island, evade detection by the Hosokawa verifying officials, and escape is not explained.
Some people may have stopped and listened to these stories,19 but Musashi was not one of them. After returning directly to Shimonoseki, he wrote a letter to Nagaoka Sado Okinaga, thanking him for his graciousness and help, then left again for ports unknown.
CHAPTER
TWO
The Way of the Sword and the Way of the Brush: Osaka Castle to Kokura
THE FIRE OF BATTLE
The fight with Sasaki Kojiro on Ganryu Island was a watershed for Musashi. Until then, he had focused his attention on matches of one swordsman against another, and had come to a preliminary understanding of his art. With his defeat of the Demon of the Western Provinces, he must have felt an intense confidence in his own innate abilities and in his readiness to turn to deeper and broader ground. In the opening chapter of The Book of Five Rings, after noting his sixty matches between the ages of thirteen and twenty-eight or twenty-nine, he writes:
When I had passed the age of thirty and thought back over my life, I understood that I had not been a victor because of extraordinary skill in the martial arts. Perhaps I had some natural talent or had not departed from natural principles. Or again, was it that the martial arts of the other styles were lacking somewhere?
After that, determined all the more to reach a clearer understanding of the deep principles, I practiced day and night.
Hereafter there would be far fewer personal matches, and much more of the deeper discipline that would refine his art and clarify it to the point of articulation. Musashi’s interests in the area of the martial arts were also expanding, and he began to look beyond one-on-one bouts to conflicts of a larger scale.
Although his tracks are by no means clear at this point, it would seem that he now made his way slowly up the San’yo area, along the Inland Sea, perhaps stopping off at Akashi and Himeji to visit the fiefs of the Ogasawara and the Honda clans on the way. Musashi was now famous, and any number of people—private sword practitioners and provincial lords alike—wanted to meet him and ask for instruction. His fame also gave him entry to observe other arts that he had found interesting, such as india ink painting, sculpture, and even formal gardening, and he may have met the famous artist Kaiho Yusho at about this time. At any rate, he slowly traveled on to Kyoto and eventually to Osaka, where the preparations for a large-scale battle were being made. There is little reason to assume that Musashi arrived at this location strictly by chance.
Although the Tokugawa forces had won a decisive victory at Sekigahara, the Toyotomi family had remained wealthy, was firmly settled in Osaka Castle, and was not without allies. Slowly, however, the family’s allies began to die off. Of the powerful men who had intervened between the two clans, Asano Nagamasa died in 1610, followed by Kato Kiyomasa in 1611, and Maeda Toshinaga in 1614. Other former supporters, like the Ukita, had been dispossessed and banished. These men and their armies were replaced, however, by thousands of the ronin who owed their masterless status to the destruction of their masters’ clans by the Tokugawa regime. By the late fall and early winter of 1614, there were over ninety thousand warriors inside Osaka Castle who felt nothing but rancor for Tokugawa Ieyasu and his son Hidetada. The Tokugawa knew that they would have to act soon to eradicate their only rivals to complete hegemony.
Strengthened by the troops of their feudatories and now considerably outnumbering the forces inside Osaka Castle, the Tokugawa attacked the fortification in mid-December, only to be repulsed and eventually stalemated. The fighting back and forth would last two months, but at last a truce was called, and the so-called Winter Campaign ended on 21 January 1615.
The Tokugawa then immediately set about filling in the castle’s moats and destroying the outer ramparts, so that by mid-February the castle walls were directly exposed to attack. With this advantage established, however, they withdrew.
Despite the weakened state of the castle, ronin continued to pour in from the provinces and, by the spring of 1615, they numbered over a hundred thousand. This was, in a sense, a great boon to Ieyasu and his successors, as it gathered the most virulent of their opponents in one concentrated location that, regardless of its being a castle of great size, was also exposed on all sides. That so many men were willing to make a stand inside the castle speaks eloquently both about how they viewed the Tokugawa and about the selfless principles of the samurai code, now well known as Bushido.
By May of that year, the Tokugawa arrived with nearly twice as many men as were holed up within the garrison. The fighting was bloody, intense, and protracted, but by early June it was clear that the forces in the castle could no longer hold out. Hideyori, commander of the castle and heir to the Toyotomi, committed suicide when it was understood that his life would not be spared. His mother, Yodogimi, was dispatched by a loyal samurai to spare her any further humiliation at the hands of the enemy. In this way, Hideyoshi’s only son, his favorite concubine, and all the hopes he had entertained in his rise to power vanished together under the early summer sun, and the blood of the clan washed away in the monsoon rains. The Summer Campaign was over—and the Toyotomi, as realistic rivals, were gone forever.
Musashi actively participated in these events, possibly in the position of a unit commander, and surely wearing armor and wielding his weapons. Years later, Musashi wrote Hosokawa Tadatoshi:
Since I was young, I have gone out on the battlefield six times. On four of these occasions, there was no one on the field before me. This fact is widely known, and there is also proof.
I have set my mind on the make-up of arms and how they are appropriately used on the battlefield since my youth.
One of these six battles was clearly the Campaign at Osaka. In the Nitenki, we find this: “There was proof of his military abilities at the Osaka Campaign in 1614. He was thirty-one years old. The castle fell the following year.”
The “proof,” unfortunately, has not been handed down, but the Musashi kenseki kensho ehon notes: “Musashi participated in both the Winter and Summer campaigns at Osaka. Though he despised the Tokugawa side no little bit, we know none of the details.”
Although he “despised the Tokugawa no little bit,” it is likely that Musashi fought on the side of those investing the castle.1 At the age of thirty-one, he was still a ronin, an independent without sworn allegiance to anyone. His former commanding clan, the Ukita, was gone, its great commander, Ukita Hideie, now a priest on a lonely island off the Izu Peninsula; and the remnant of the Shinmen clan, led by the old lord, Shinmen Iga no kami, now served in Kyushu under the powerful Kuroda, also originally from Banshu and allies of the Tokugawa.
While there is no proof, it is most likely that Musashi “borrowed the battlefield” from the Ogasawara clan and fought alongside its troops. His actions in combat must have impressed the clan heir, Ogasawara Tadazane, for two years later, when the latter was moved from his fief in Shinano Matsumoto to Akashi, the man he put in charge of designing the town around his new castle overhanging the coastline—according to the records of th
e Ogasawara clan—was Miyamoto Musashi.2 During the Summer Campaign at Osaka, Tadazane, his father, Hidemasa, and his eldest brother, Tadanaka, had left together for the action at Tennoji and opened the fierce attack on the forces of Mori Katsunaga of the Toyotomi side. His father and brother were both killed in action, and Tadazane was badly wounded. It seems unlikely that a man who had suffered losses this great would hire one of the enemy for such important work.
ARTS OF PEACE, ARTS OF WAR
Tadazane had recognized a variety of Musashi’s talents. Not only was Musashi an extraordinarily talented swordsman and strategist, but his years as a wandering shugyosha had given him the opportunity to visit a number of the castle towns now growing under the Tokugawa regime. In addition, his astute powers of observation provided him with a deep understanding of how a town might best be organized for both everyday functioning and for defense in an emergency. It would not be laid out in a simple grid as had the capital, Heian-kyo, in the late eight century. That city, now Kyoto, had been fashioned on a Chinese model, and its designers had not been overly concerned with attack from the outside. The castle towns, on the other hand, and especially the samurai sections within them, were designed with narrow winding streets that the inhabitants would know well enough to maneuver through, but which any invading troops would find hopelessly confusing. In this light, it is not difficult to imagine Musashi in the middle of the bloody action of the Winter and Summer Campaigns, observing a scene that was much larger than any question of simply his own survival. Much later, in The Book of Five Rings, he would discuss the difference between broad “observation” and just “seeing.”
It is interesting to note also that Musashi did not just work on the design of the castle town during his stay in Akashi, but also had a hand in designing the temple gardens at Enkakuin and Honshoji. Garden design is generally associated with Zen monks like Muso Kokushi and Kobori Enshu, but for Musashi to have been similarly engaged in this art is not as strange as it may first seem.
The first garden designer in Japan’s recorded history was a Korean immigrant, Michiko no Takumi, a man with such mottled pigmentation that some people thought him a leper, or at the least, an unlucky figure. When it was suggested that he be taken to an uninhabited island and left to himself, Takumi responded that if people were offended by spotted skin, they should not raise horses and cattle with white spots. He also noted that he possessed a talent for depicting mountains and hills in landscapes, and that this talent would be a blessing to his adopted country. Those in charge decided to put Takumi to work, and not long thereafter he created a Chinese-style garden for Empress Suiko (r. 593–628). The empress must have enjoyed the artistic reshaping of nature, for it was her relative, Ono no Imoko, who went to China with Japan’s first delegation there and brought back the art of flower arrangement—an art that had developed from floral displays on Buddhist altars.
From these modest beginnings, the art of garden design flourished among the Japanese aristocracy, so much so that, by the eleventh century, books were being written on the subject. All who could afford it had gardens with lakes, tiny mountains, and even waterfalls installed within the precincts of their mansions. These were gardens intended primarily for pleasure—viewing the seasonal change of foliage, watching the various birds attracted to the grounds, and even boating on the small lakes while accompanied by musicians.
As time went on, however, garden design came under the heavy influence of Buddhist and Taoist nature scrolls, and the garden itself became an object of contemplation. Natural phenomena were beginning to be seen as replete with deeper meanings of the universe. Garden design now tended to concern itself with displaying the essence of nature, rather than nature in its fullest array. By Musashi’s time, the aristocracy had been experiencing a long decline, and gardens had tended—both because of the increasing population in limited urban space and the aristocracy’s impoverishment—to become smaller and more appropriate to temples and relatively more modest residences. Thus, the best gardens were located at Buddhist temples and the homes of the daimyo. By this time, garden design had shifted almost completely into the hands of the Zen Buddhist priests (and, in some cases, their workers), with the result that the purpose of the garden—broadly speaking—was as a catalyst to meditation and contemplation. Gardens had become strictly understatements and suggestions of the larger natural world. Emphasis was often placed on space, or Emptiness, rather than on a multitude of foliage. The Buddhist concept of mujo, or transience, was suggested by the artistically arranged elements of the garden, manifesting the world in its state of eternal change.
The garden designer, then, had to be a man who both understood the Buddhist concepts involved and was well acquainted with the intricacies of nature. He must know what plants flourished where, how they would grow in sun or shade, and how they would react to the presence of water, whether flowing or still. What was more, he needed to be an artist who could distill the elements of nature to their most essential and abstract.
Thus, Musashi applied his hand with great interest in this work.3 He was artistic by nature and had an intimate knowledge of the mountains and rivers, crags and springs, flowers and animals. His extended travel and keen sense of observation provided him with a familiarity with nature that very few people would ever gain. For as much as the Japanese love nature, most have been happy to observe it at a distance, or from within the confines of their residences or urban areas. Some of the most moving nature poems in traditional Japanese literature, for example, have been inspired not by the natural world itself but by depictions of nature on scrolls and screens.
Musashi, however, was in the tradition of the great Japanese traveler-artists—Saigyo, Enku, Basho, and Hiroshige, among others—and his artistic inspirations came from the heart of nature itself. As for his education on the restrictions of garden design, he would have had no trouble visiting the great gardens already established in Kyoto and elsewhere. As Musashi contemplated the small areas set aside for his garden projects in Akashi and later Himeji, he would have had no trouble reflecting on his memories of nature free from human restraints and then paring those memories down to their most abstract and aesthetic fundamentals.
But there is something more here.
At the end of the first chapter of The Book of Five Rings, Musashi encourages his students to meditate on certain rules for putting his martial art into practice. Two of these nine rules would seem to have little to do with the study of swordsmanship:
—Touch upon all of the arts.
—Develop a discerning eye in all matters.
Musashi’s writing, however, is famous for its spareness and directness of expression. He was very careful about each sentence he wrote, and included nothing that we might currently consider “filler.” When we consider his life, we see that he wrote nothing that had not been an integral part of his own experience.
Musashi constantly emphasized that the student must develop himself in the Way. The sword was his main vehicle, but he did not study it to the exclusion of all the other arts, or even “all matters.” Each art was a discipline for Musashi, and each art informed the other. Another perspective of this same principle is a Zen Buddhist phrase with which Musashi would have been familiar: “Toss this away, and everything will be as it is” (hoshin shizen).
The “this” of this phrase is one’s prejudice or preference for a single practice or article of that practice, or really anything at all. “Everything will be as it is” refers to the vision of the interior eye that grasps the essence of things.
Musashi had that interior eye, and so it is not surprising that the man who survived over sixty individual matches and the Winter and Summer campaigns at Osaka would be equally at home supervising the placement of rocks, sand, and plants in Akashi.
Musashi’s work for the Ogasawara in the fields of defense planning and gardening did not go unnoticed—and, some years later, he would be employed by the Honda clan, who were related to the Ogasawara by marriage, in ne
arby Himeji. Once again he worked on the delineation of the castle town and designed the gardens of some of its temples, while continually developing his own sword style. Musashi was respected and much sought after by both the Ogasawara and the Honda, and it seems that he spent at least some of the years of his mid- and late thirties living alternately in the two new castle towns of Akashi and Himeji. One imagines that his fame and prestige must have been considerable, and that he was able to preserve the freedom he so loved by managing to maintain the status of “guest” rather than of “samurai.”4
Both Akashi and Himeji had been the locations of castle towns for centuries. Akashi had been occupied by the Takayama, Hachisuka, Bessho, and Kuroda before the castle was rebuilt by the Ogasawara around 1617. Located near the northeastern end of the Inland Sea, with a mild and even relatively sunny climate, it is still famous today for the sea bream caught in the Akashi Straits between the main Japanese island of Honshu and the small island of Awaji just to the north. This location also gave Akashi a strategic importance as a port near the entrance to both Kobe and Osaka.
The Lone Samurai Page 6