Yasuke: In Search of the African Samurai

by Thomas Lockley

  Yasuke had been around cannon often in India and on ships, and worked with the smaller ones during his time in Nagasaki. He’d been taking kunizukushi-type weapons out for test runs during his year there. There was no one for a hundred miles who knew more about these weapons.

  * * *

  The Jesuit expedition headed inland through the mountains forming the backdrop to the port of Nagasaki. Yasuke traveled with this force of Christian samurai, porters, carpenters, smiths, camp followers and packhorses with the cannon strapped fast to their backs. The company of several hundred strode gladly together through the rough mountain passes and along the Arima domain’s coast, before traversing the savagely beautiful Unzen volcanic mountains which would lead them to the battlefield on the other side of the peninsula. Here, they passed bubbling volcanic pools hissing steam, and endured the hellish stench of the acidic sulfurous waters for hours before emerging again on the mountains behind the normally small, sleepy fishing town of Shimabara, to support Arima and his Satsuma allies. The town, located in a wide bay and enclosed by two forested promontories, did not look particularly well defended. Some rough stone walls and a flimsy-looking wall of bamboo stood atop earthworks.

  The allied army was camped in the narrow space between the green mountains and a sea of deep blue, a short distance from the town’s wall. Sandy spits twisted out from the beach around which numerous small sampan boats bobbed. Men who’d stripped down to their loincloths continuously unloaded supplies, and now waded through the shimmering shallows bent under the weight of bamboo frames filled with stores on their backs. As the boats were relieved of their supplies, they cruised again across the narrow Ariake Sea to the Kyushu mainland or headed south to Kuchinotsu to pick up more ordinance and provisions.

  As the Jesuit reinforcements first arrived, they were welcomed with cheers of banzai by the Arima-Shimazu troops. Earlier, when the Christian Arima men first mixed with the more numerous Buddhist Satsuma troops, they’d endured a fair share of mostly good-natured anti-Catholic baiting. Although they were now allies, Satsuma forces had fought Catholic armies many times before and old habits die hard.

  Middle-ranking samurai commanders led the way to the ground that had been prepared for them. Yasuke was looking forward to this action, an exciting change from garrison duty which had become rather monotonous; he could finally be useful again. He was also keen to see what these new guns could do against a real army.

  Yasuke had, as his second in command, a Japanese Christian samurai with the baptismal name of Martinho. Martinho had fled Ryūzōji’s anti-Catholic purges in Ōmura and escaped to fight against his persecutor in any way he could, a typical member of the Nagasaki militia. Martinho also had some experience of these breech-loading guns, from the walls of Nagasaki where he’d been stationed with Yasuke.

  They arrived at the Arima camp during Easter week, in early April of 1584. A mere three years before, another Easter week had forever changed Yasuke’s life. One way or another, it seemed it was to be again.

  * * *

  Additional reinforcements from Nagasaki arrived a few days later by sea on the Jesuits’ war galley, a sixty-oared and double lateen–sailed craft called a fusta, which dwarfed the tiny sampan boats. The ship was captained by the former-soldier-turned-Jesuit-brother Ambrosio Fernandes, the very man who’d met Valignano and Yasuke at sea prior to their arrival in Japan. The Jesuit fusta was probably the fastest ship in Japan, and crewed by Japanese-Christian members of the Nagasaki militia. For armament, the warship had two small cannon at the front and stored huge numbers of muskets for the entire crew, which could run to three hundred men when full. After offloading their supplies at Arima’s camp, Brother Fernandes rowed the fusta galley to rendezvous with Arima’s own naval forces, the many sampan which were still gliding in and out of the bay, farther down the coast at Kuchinotsu.

  The arrival of Ryūzōji’s force was imminent, although nobody was sure how large it would be.

  The joint Arima-Satsuma allied forces of around nine thousand samurai were under the command of Arima Harunobu (now seventeen) and Shimazu Iehisa, the third son of the Satsuma clan lord, Shimazu Yoshihisa.

  The news from the scouts came in, Ryūzōji’s army was estimated to number more than twenty-five thousand, three times the size of the Arima-Satsuma alliance and far beyond what anyone could have predicted.

  Iehisa, by virtue of commanding the most men, held the higher command and immediately decided upon a strategically advantageous frontline, extending from the coast to the foothills of the massive Unzen Mountains that lay above Shimabara at a place slightly up the coast called Okitanawate. There, they made their camp and dug in to prepare for the assault. They couldn’t match the enemy numbers and a battlefield of their own choosing was their only real hope.

  To Yasuke’s eyes, this was an amateur affair compared with the professional armies of the Oda, more akin to the eager, excited chaos of an Indian army than the well-drilled, armored and disciplined troops of Nobunaga. Apart from a core of leading samurai, the lower Satsuma ranks were decidedly part-timers, farmers mainly, and only lightly armored, though clearly more than handy with their weapons. All had spears, and most also carried the two swords of a samurai and considered themselves, rightly or wrongly, the best swordsmen in the land. They stood proud under their white banners with the distinctive black cross within a circle, the marujuji, which signified their southern clan. The Satsuma men—despite nearly four decades before having been the first clan to ever use guns in battle in Japan—had relatively few muskets and still relied heavily, instead, on the longbow, spears and their famed swords.

  Arima’s men, meanwhile, had Jesuit supplied European-made guns, less precise than the Japanese ones as each weapon had a unique bore and could only use ammunition made specially for that one gun in a tool that the gunner carried at his waist. The Japanese ones were made to standard bore sizes and hence ammunition could also be mass produced and shared. This made them more effective because they ran out of projectiles less often. The European weapons were also slightly more unwieldy than the Japanese guns as they generally had to be placed on rods (firing sticks) before firing. The Japanese firearms had been especially modified with shorter butts to fire without the rod, although aim improved when they were mounted.

  The majority of the Arima forces were not dug in on the hillside but remained on ships in Kuchinotsu awaiting the call, their guns ready mounted on the sides of their vessels. When it came, they’d have a special surprise for Ryūzōji.

  Yasuke and Martinho busied themselves with readying the two large guns. These formed the bulk of the firepower available to the land-based Arima-Satsuma forces and would need to perform if they were to stand any hope of repelling the coming attack. Yasuke and Martinho had been assigned a team to help, and quickly went about the task of preparing positions which allowed both swivel guns to have maximized clear ranges of fire and some protection against enemy bullets and arrows.

  The troops didn’t seem to even blink at Yasuke’s presence. They knew he was a professional, knew he was there to help them save their homeland from destruction. Besides, they were relatively familiar with black men from the docks and their lord Arima now had at least one in his entourage whom he used as a messenger and interpreter when dealing with the Portuguese. The Jesuits’ close involvement in the area meant these otherwise-rural peasant samurai were far more cosmopolitan in some areas than the sophisticates of the capital city who’d mobbed Yasuke three years previously, almost to the day.

  When all was in readiness, Yasuke inspected his two beauties slowly, knowing how many watched his every move. Any chance they had of holding off the impending invasion, everyone understood, rested within these two cannon. He pronounced himself satisfied with the positions and then he and his team got to work.

  Throughout the next few days, they set about getting to know their new weapons better and molding lead ammunition. Yasuke assigned men to
the jobs required to run a cannon: aimers, loaders, mallet men to ram in the chocks and an ordnance-preparation team. He taught them how to prepare the charge and keep a production line going so the rate of fire was uninterrupted. But there is never any substitute for actual experience, and with Lord Arima’s permission, Yasuke directed his team in limited live-fire practices. Thanks to the Jesuits, there was a vast stock of powder and shot, and the ground below their bastion soon became churned and pocked with small craters. Under Yasuke’s direction—trying a method he’d seen used to devastating effect—they lowered the cannon barrels so the lethal shot grazed the ground, bouncing on a murderous path for hundreds of feet before stopping.

  Each display of deadly firepower was watched by Lord Arima himself, and accompanied by loud cheers from the defenders on the mountainside. As the rate of fire grew quicker, the sound of the guns gave them a newfound strength and confidence.

  The end of April approached, and the scouts’ updates on the proximity of Ryūzōji’s massive army became more frequent. Lord Ryūzōji Takanobu himself was so fat he could not walk, nor could any single horse bear his weight, so he traveled in a palanquin borne by six men. This rigmarole slowed down their progress considerably, and also provided a degree of mirth for the defenders, increasing their confidence even further.

  On May 1, the enemy army’s advance units finally came into view and settled around the town of Shimabara. As Yasuke and his team watched, troop after troop arrived, spread out and made camp, never sparing more than a glance for their heavily outnumbered foe dug in above. And they kept coming: the twenty-five thousand warriors, and thousands of support personnel, porters for the most part, but also men and women to carry out every other service the samurai needed. The vast host was still arriving the next day as the enemy swarmed around the plain like angry hornets, in preparation for their impending assault.

  From Yasuke’s position, it was clear there would be three fronts: one along the beach, one along the main road leading directly to his guns and the last which would attempt to outflank them on the steep and densely wooded hillside. The third front, through the steep forest, would have the hardest going and take the longest to arrive, but might also be the most dangerous to Yasuke’s side if Ryūzōji’s men succeeded in making their attack from the flanking position and managed to cut off the defenders.

  That night, Yasuke and his team prayed together.

  His men were fervent Catholics and desperately believed that God was on their side. As their leader, he gladly led them in the Lord’s Prayer time and again. When a Jesuit brother came on his prebattle rounds, the men said their confessions and received his blessings.

  * * *

  Two days later, in the morning, the attack came.

  As the first men formed their battle lines, Ryūzōji’s taiko drums roared their challenge, and the conch shells sounded the age-old Japanese signal to advance. The African soldier found a grim smile. Whatever the numbers against them, it was remarkably better odds than the last battle he’d fought. And he was a lot better prepared this time. Ryūzōji’s men advanced from all three positions steadily under their banner of two apricot leaves. Ryūzōji himself was in the middle-road column, his palanquin curtain opened so that he could direct the battle personally, wielding his war fan with gusto, urging his men onward. Ryūzōji was accompanied by his young lover, a boy of no more than sixteen, gloriously dressed in the finest armor by his lord and mounted on a sleek black horse beside the lacquered palanquin.

  The gigantic columns of soldiers ran over a mile long, but the gunners had been concentrated at the front. As they got within range, the five hundred large caliber muskets fired at once in a massive crack of thunder that hovered as one long hedge of thick smoke in the tree line. The dug-in defenders braced themselves and kept their heads down beneath the defenses as the hot balls of lead buzzed past them. Men fell as round shot from the more powerful guns pierced the thin wooden walls or ricocheted off stones in the earthen ramparts; others spun about wounded and screaming. Hundreds fell.

  Yasuke expected there to be a near immediate second volley of fire, as Nobunaga’s troops had always kept the bombardments coming continuously, but it never came. All the guns, instead, had fired at once, forming a fierce and deadly hail of fire, but then they’d all paused to reload at the same time. It took several minutes, and he knew that when the next shots came, they would be ragged, the more inexperienced gunners taking longer to reload, aim and fire. The devastation of that first massive salvo would not be repeated. Nobunaga’s trick for rapid continuous fire had not been learned by Ryūzōji, it seemed.

  It was their chance. Yasuke jumped up, ordering his men to start their own bombardment in the momentary lull. Their well-practiced routine went smoothly into action: load, hit chocks into place, aim, take cover and pray and then Yasuke himself placed the match. As the team saw to the loading, Yasuke was left free to aim and fire both guns himself; he just needed to cover the few paces between them. Arima’s two cannon roared, one at the Ryūzōji men on the hill and one at the enemy troops advancing up the road. A light sea breeze wind wafted the cannon smoke away and Yasuke could see clear gaps in Ryūzōji’s ranks. A massive cheer went up from the defenders on the hill. Could they get another shot in before the enemy gunners had reloaded? They did, but soon the surviving musketeers in the attacking ranks had managed to reload and they let off their weak and untimed volley, still defenders fell all around, including some of the men in Yasuke’s team, who’d been concentrating so hard upon their job that they had forgotten to take cover.

  Thus went war. Yasuke shouted encouragement and reminders in Japanese against wasting powder and the remaining men (and the new replacements) went back to their deadly work. Already, hundreds of Ryūzōji’s men lay scattered in heaps of splintered bone, entrails and shattered weapons.

  Below, Shimazu—feigning retreat, a ruse his clan had mastered over the years—had successfully lured the bulk of Takanobu’s road-column troops into a marshland directly between the river and Yasuke’s hilltop. Here, their numbers meant little, thousands of men trapped in sluggish terrain.

  Meanwhile, approaching the beach column was the flotilla of Arima ships bristling with muskets and bows, led by the massive Jesuit fusta galley spitting lead and man-mauling grapeshot from the two small bow-mounted cannon similar, in all but size, to the two giants Yasuke was operating. With seeming impunity, the Arima seamen and the Jesuits’ Nagasaki men blasted away at the beach column. With each volley, blood soaked the sand. Screams of terror and rage filled the air, but Fróis tells us above it all could be heard an unlikely sound. The gunners were “piously kneeling down with their hands turned toward heaven, they began reciting ‘Our Father, which art in Heaven, hallowed be they name...’ The first phase of the strategy having thus been accomplished, turning impatiently to load cannon with balls, they fired with such force against the enemy that with one sole shot the whole sky could be seen to be filled with limbs.”

  The beach was littered with fallen warriors, bodies bobbed beside the boats, but the Nagasaki gunners continued their deadly fire, and the waves that lapped the shoreline were edged pink with bloody froth.

  Atop the hill, sweat and smoke stung Yasuke’s eyes and he cuffed it away. The beach column may have been near collapse by now, but the other two were coming ever closer. Yasuke’s team kept at their grim task knowing their lives depended on it. Ryūzōji’s men were so close now, it was a massacre, but they kept on coming.

  Suddenly the beach column disappeared, they’d had enough. The Ryūzōji men at the back turned and fled inland, anywhere to escape the deadly fire from the sea. The remains of the front of the column ran to the road and joined that attack, now even more men were bogged down in the marshland as the Satsuma charged from their positions and down the hillside. One flying column of samurai headed straight to the palanquin from which Ryūzōji himself was directing the sluggish assault. It was a gloriou
s sight, the lacquered black armor shone in the spring sunshine as they charged forward, cutting down the weakened enemy with their drawn swords and leveled spears. This was the break Yasuke had waited for, and he silenced his guns; his men slumped down around the bastion and took deep drafts of water from their bamboo drinking flasks.

  Directly below, Ryūzōji, atop his palanquin was run through with a spear by one of the Satsuma soldiers. He’d been so confident of his own safety, that he had assumed the approaching soldiers must be his own men. Moments before he was killed, he even chastised “his men” with threats, berating them for their indiscipline. Then, his litter’s carriers were cut down and the Satsuma soldiers surrounded the enemy lord. As Ryūzōji felt the steel, he heard his killer say, “It is you we all came to get.” The warlord fell from the palanquin to the ground and, as the Satsuma warrior took his head, Ryūzōji prayed, “namu amida butsu” (“I take refuge in the Amida Buddha”) which he fervently believed would ensure his entry into Buddhist Nirvana. His young lover embracing the fallen lord, also lost his head, the two united in death as they’d been in life.

  And suddenly all of Ryūzōji’s men were running, the diminished host fleeing over the fields, some back into the ships’ field of fire and others up the mountain and through the fields that surrounded Shimabara. The force that had so confidently advanced until only minutes before was now gone, replaced by chaos and killing.

  Yasuke ordered his men back to their work. Aiming long, they felled as many of the swiftly retreating Ryūzōji soldiers as they could, before once again the guns of Okitanawate fell silent. Ryūzōji’s dead lay in skewed piles of bodies; it was impossible to know the butcher’s bill but it must have run to over ten thousand.