Ninja (12 page)

Besides the bandits, several other elements contributed to the radical nature of Iga and K
o
ga:

•  Since they were only two or three days' walk from the old capitals of Kyoto and Nara, if there was a sudden need for additional troops, they could quickly be summoned. We are talking individuals, not armies. The result was that in both areas, fighting was in the blood.

•  Though largely peasant communities, they contained a strand of sophisticates (relatively speaking), which derived from the Chinese and Korean immigrants to Yamato, centuries before: monks, military families, potters, merchants, craftsmen. Their intellectual and artistic abilities had worked their way into the villages and temples.

•  The forested ranges, with their fast-flowing streams and steep valleys, were favorite haunts of the
yamabushi
, who needed to know about living in the wilderness and surviving on nuts, berries, fish, and game, and treating themselves with medicines made from plants.

•  The same landscapes were ideal for anyone wishing to escape being swept up by civil war—high-ranking families who had lost their positions and property, ordinary folk who had seen their land ruined by rampaging soldiers, others wishing to escape being drafted into the ramshackle army of some upstart lord, or the survivors of yet another inconclusive skirmish.

•  Lacking a centralized authority, both Iga and K
o
ga were open to those who loved the open road—monks, entertainers, and craftsmen. And the inhabitants were, of course, farmers, with easy access to dozens of tools that were easily adapted to become weapons.

It was (at a guess, because there are no sources from the earliest days) all the challenges and threats from outside combined with their own advantages that inspired the people of Iga and K
o
ga to build on their centuries of independence, to continue to look after their own interests, and to defend themselves by turning themselves into ninjas.

While much of the country was at war with itself, K
o
ga and Iga had kept themselves relatively isolated behind their mountain bulwarks. Traditionally, both were dominated by families that were forever feuding. K
o
ga had a mere fifty-three, and Iga, being a much larger place, some three hundred to five hundred, at a rough estimate (“I heard there were five hundred and thirty,” a monk in one of Iga's temples told me). Neither had any powerful, ambitious lords, so the fighting was small-scale, low-level, more like the jousting between rival stags than the all-out destruction suffered elsewhere at the hands of predatory armies. The skills they developed were as much life skills as military ones, evolving to preserve, not destroy, to conserve secrets rather than proclaim status.

The first mention of the ninjas by that name came in 1488, in the official government annals.
³
A local governor, Rokkaku Takayori, appointed by the shogun, had started taking over the estates of local landowners, clearly aiming to make himself a lord, a daimy
o
. The landowners protested to the shogun, Yoshihisa. It was Yoshihisa's unexpected birth in 1465 that had snatched the shogunate from his father's adopted heir, thus starting the
O
nin War. In 1488, after eleven years of peace, he was still only twenty-three, and keen to prove himself by slapping down his upstart governor. He laid siege to Rokkaku's castle, with an Iga family, the Kawai, “earning considerable merit as
shinobi
(ninja). . . . Since then successive generations of Iga men have been admired. This is the origin of the fame of the men of Iga.” Unluckily for Yoshihisa, he fell ill and died. It was his successor who managed to take the castle, using ninja in some unspecified way. Recording the campaign, the annals say: “Concerning ninja, they were said to be from Iga and K
o
ga and went freely into enemy castles in secret. They observed hidden things, and were taken as being friends.”

By then the villages of Iga and K
o
ga had decided that cooperation offered a better way of life than constant low-level feuding. No one knows exactly when this was first formalized, but it seems there was a precedent nearby, from an estate named Oyamato, marked today by a small temple thirteen kilometers south of Nara. In the summer of 1494, right at the beginning of the Warring States period, the men of Oyamato recorded two contracts—sworn, legally binding declarations—witnessed by a monk named Shinsei. The first, signed by 350 land workers, was a sort of local constitution or code of conduct, made up of five articles, designed to preserve the peace. According to one of the articles: “The common people shall not fight over paddy fields, mountains or forests. They shall not seize cultivation rights or steal.” In the second contract, dated a month later, 46 wealthy locals—
jizamurai
, “samurai of the soil,” as they were known—promised not to fight over taxes on peasants, and to control both troublesome subordinates and themselves: “If anyone acts badly, inside or outside Oyamato, he will be judged and sentenced.” Since both contracts were witnessed by the same monk, it seems clear that the two groups, landowners and farmworkers, were cooperating to impose peace. On whom, we may ask? There was no war, no center of warrior monks. Nor were the signatories being told what to do by a local princeling, baron, or warlord. This was a community, a network of otherwise unremarkable people, united in their determination to sort out their problems—mostly administering land and water rights—peacefully, eradicate bandits, use taxes locally, and build a strong community on their own terms.

There is a subtext to this little piece of evidence. It suggests a sort of idyll: cheerful and friendly villagers trooping off from their fields to link up for mutual support. But almost certainly the pre-contract life of these farmworkers, and of those who lay outside the contract, was very unidyllic: a life made nasty, brutish, and short by intervillage feuding and by immigrants fleeing the effects of the
O
nin War.

Not that communes were all that charming. They worked because they were tough, even barbaric in the way they imposed justice, with zero tolerance of any deviation from their own laws and no appeal to any other court. An imperial dignitary, Kuj
o
Masamoto, described an incident that occurred when he visited his estate around 1500.

He invited peasants from one of the local villages for a New Year's Day banquet in honor of the village chiefs. During the banquet, a villager announced that his dagger had been stolen. To catch the thief, Masamoto told the chiefs to meet at the local shrine, where they would hold a trial by the ordeal of boiling water. Trials by ordeal were for much of history a common, indeed virtually universal, way of finding criminals, the idea being that if a person was innocent, they would show no ill effects, or simply survive—the grounds for judgment varied—but in any event the trial would reveal the guilty because God or the spirits would look after the innocent. (In Europe, language itself preserves a memory of this process: The German for “judgment” is
Urteil
, which has the same root as the English
ordeal.
) In this form of ordeal, everyone was required to retrieve a stone from a kettle of boiling water. The scalded hands would be bound and examined after a few days to see whether they were healing (innocent) or festering (guilty). In this case, the mere threat of an ordeal worked, and the guilty man stepped forward. Masamoto deprived the man of his rights, but that was not good enough for the villagers. The theft had, after all, occurred on a special occasion when they were their lord's guests. They felt humiliated, and applied their own form of justice. A few days later they went to the thief's house, killed him, his wife, and his three sons, and burned his house down.

Oyamato's peasant commune worked, and the neighbors took note. Next door, in Iga, the villagers adopted a similar if somewhat more ambitious scheme, the “Iga Commune,” as scholars call it. The written evidence for when it started has not survived, but it seems to have begun around 1500. Iga called itself an
ikki
, a “league,” though it was a good deal bigger than other
ikkis
, perhaps following the example of the Yamashiro “provincial commune” as it might have been if it had had more peasants and fewer warriors. Iga's
ikki
was a province-size confederation of villages under the control of sixty-six warrior families, who had their own fortresses and came together as a council in the Buddhist temple that once stood on the site of today's castle in the local capital, Iga Ueno. So the council was prepared to fight against more than just a few bandits.

Despite the lack of a foundation document, a constitution—probably a refined version of something that had been in effect for decades—was written around 1560, which included the following (see box below):

•  All foreign troops to be repelled.

•  Upon receiving alerts from watchmen at the fortified passes, villagers to spread the alarm and provide food, arms, and reinforcements along all defended routes.

•  All men between 17 and 50 to be mobilized; captains to be designated; monks to pray.

•  Peasants giving exceptional service in action to be raised to samurai status.

•  Traitors to be beheaded and their heads to be displayed.

But this is a document with rather vague provenance. It has no year date. It lacks signatures, which suggests it is a draft. And it was preserved by a family living in K
o
ga, not Iga. Ishida Yoshihito, a specialist in medieval Japan at Okayama University until his death in 1996, suggested that it was written in Iga because it refers to a “self-governing league” (
Sokoku ikki
), which was what Iga called itself. He also concluded that it was written in the sixteen-year period between 1552 and 1568, because (a) the document mentions a clan, the Miyoshi, who seized power in central Japan in 1549, but only after 1552 were they powerful enough to rate a mention; and (b) only before 1568 was Oda Nobunaga, the great unifier of Japan,
not
powerful enough to rate a mention.

K
o
ga, too, followed the examples of Oyamato and Iga, forming a commune of villages. Iga and K
o
ga warrior families had agreed to recognize one another as allies. Indeed Iga's constitution contained a clause stating that “we now see fit to unite our forces with K
o
ga” and hold common assemblies at the border, so-called “field meetings.”

So by the second half of the sixteenth century, this whole area was a collection of communes, each overseeing irrigation, land clearance, and the collection of cash to fund self-defense against warlords and their forces from outside. At the entrance to one village stood a notice: “It is forbidden for local warlords to enter this place, which is under autonomous judicial administration.” Other places demanded that warlords could only enter if they signed a contract restricting their authority to named vassals.

(It is no coincidence that at the same time similar conditions in Europe—lack of central authority and a drive to assert it in the teeth of local resentment—produced similar results. As towns started to grow after the year 1000, townspeople sought protection from nobles, bandits, and churchmen hungry for loot and taxes. To establish and preserve their liberties, they formed self-governing communes, promising mutual defense and vengeance for assaults on their members, and winning charters guaranteed by a local lord, or king, or emperor. The commune movement grew in the eleventh century in northern Italy, then spread across most of western Europe in the early twelfth century. In northern and central Italy, dozens of communes—Milan, Genoa, Padua, Ferrara, and many more—were able to create stable city-states. Some German communes—Frankfurt, Nuremberg, Hamburg—survived for centuries. Rural communes formed, notably in France and England, and other groups fulfilled similar and more specialized roles: parishes, craftsmen's and merchants' guilds, monasteries. The Swiss were particularly successful: In 1291, three cantons signed up to an “Everlasting League” in order to break free of their local rulers, the Habsburgs; one of them was Schwyz, which would go on to give its name to the whole nation [Switzerland]; and together, like Iga, they produced warriors whose skills were valued far beyond their own borders. All well and good for the communes themselves; not so good from the point of view of a central administration ambitious to enforce peace nationwide.)