Ninja (13 page)

As in Europe, so in Japan, and in particular in Iga, where the commune showed much greater resilience than the one next door in Yamashiro, probably because it was both more remote from major trade routes and better rooted in the peasant community.

In any event, the strength of the bond remained fixed in the memory of the people of Iga and K
o
ga. Over a century later, well after the destruction of the ninja homelands, the
Shoninki
records how K
o
ga and Iga swore the friendship oath of
Ichi Gun Ichi Mi
(one district and one band), joining the people together. They went out expansively to various provinces to utilize their skills. Thus, being universally recognized as the premier
shinobi
, they exchanged a firm written form of oath, which says, “If I come to where you are, you should show me everything of your province, and if you come to where I am, I will show you everything about my province.”

K
o
ga, too, was an incipient democracy, a “parliament without a prime minister,” as Toshinobu, one of the local historians, put it. Iga's “parliament” seems to have met in several different places, but K
o
ga's fifty-three top families had one shrine as its focal point. Toshinobu explained: “Everyone had to make promises with their lives in a god's hands. That was why the meetings were held in one of three shrines, in succession. Often the contract was written on a special paper which had the god's name on the back. Everybody signed.”

One of the shrines or rather its reconstructed successor, is still there today. On the outskirts of K
o
ka, a strange semicircular structure, like an impractical bridge, straddled a stream. A grand Shinto gate of thatch and many-jointed beams gave on to the gravel courtyard of a shrine, Yagawa. On this hot September afternoon, Yagawa was a place of peace and silence. Springwater flowed through the mouth of a metal dragon into a stone tank, with ladles lying alongside it for dusty pilgrims. Halfway across the yard was what Noriko called a dance hall. This was not for social occasions but for priests and sumo wrestlers to perform for the god. Beyond that again was the shrine itself, guarded by four Chinese-style stone lions. It was locked.

“There's a balcony,” I said. “Maybe I can get a look inside.”

“No!” Noriko was shocked at the idea. “This is the house of the god! No ordinary humans! Only the priest can allow you in, perhaps when you wish to introduce a new baby to the god.”

To one side was a house, which in the old days would have been a storehouse or stable and was now a place for the priest to live. A woman spotted us and vanished. I was ready to leave, eager to catch a train back to Kyoto, when the priest, Somanosho by name, appeared, looking bleary, in his vest. We had woken him from his afternoon nap, but he was happy to talk, because the shrine, and he himself, had interesting histories.

In Edo times, the place had been a Buddhist temple run by the Tendai sect, though as usual with a Shinto element. Then when Shinto was banned after the Meiji Restoration in 1868, it had become totally Tendai. Tendai priests were not allowed to marry—yet the last Tendai priest had been Somanosho's father. How could that be? Because after the war, Shintoism was allowed again, “and my father stopped being a Tendai priest and became a Shinto priest, so he was allowed to marry, and he had a child, and the child inherited his father's role, and that's me!”

I had almost forgotten my reason for being there. What about before all that, before unification in 1600?

“Well, this is an ancient place of worship. There is one sentence in the sources that confirms that this was the place where the K
o
ga families met, when it was both Tendai and Shinto.”

That was what I had hoped to hear. I was standing on the spot where Japan had experimented with a form of democracy that sounded like something the Athenians developed in the fifth century BC: each village represented by a top family, so that only property owners participated; each family represented by its most important male, whose position would have been inherited by his son. Of course, there was no voting system, and no way that every qualifying adult male could have a direct say. But still, since this was being made up from scratch, it was not a bad start.

Unfortunately it came to a bad end before anyone could refine it.

8

THE RISE OF THE CONQUEROR

Though there are so many principles a ninja should learn, the first thing of all is to get close to the enemy.

Ninja instructional poem

BEYOND
THE
HILLS
OF
IGA
AND
K
O
GA
,
EVENTS
WERE
AFOOT
that would aid the rise of the man who would, over three decades, lay the foundations for the unification of Japan: Oda Nobunaga. His rise would bring the world of the ninjas to its peak, and then to a violent end.

In his background, as in his rise, Nobunaga almost matched Genghis Khan, starting from nothing much and, over twenty years, fighting his way up toward nationwide rule, though not quite achieving it before his death (unity took another eighteen years of warfare). He did it, in the words of his biographer Jeroen Lamers, by using “rational cruelty in the service of government.” The story interweaves two themes—Nobunaga's brilliant, ruthless leadership, and new technology in the form of handguns. We must follow them both to understand why and how the ninjas fell.

The story of how firearms came to Japan is usually told in simple terms: The Portuguese arrive with guns, the Japanese see how effective they are, and presto, the world changes. In fact, it's not that simple. Guns had been made in China from the late thirteenth century. They were primitive, but leaders recognized their potential. Firearms took longer to load than bows, and they were not as accurate, but they had one supreme advantage: To use a bow, you had to train for years and then keep in practice to build and preserve shoulder, arm, and finger muscles; but any weakling could use a gun. A century later Korea was making handguns. Yet the technology did not instantly spread to Japan. In 1510 a priest in Odawara (halfway along Honsh
u
's southern coast) acquired a Chinese matchlock and showed it to his lord, who apparently was not impressed, because he did absolutely nothing with it. Others were more ambitious. Chinese guns were used in a battle in 1548, but only as a stopgap alternative to bows and swords. Why? No one knows, because no examples or designs have survived. Possibly, the barrels were not cast in one piece but as two bits welded together, which made them liable to explode.

It took a slightly more advanced design to convince the Japanese. In the early 1540s Portuguese merchant adventurers approached northward from Okinawa, hopping along the Ry
u
ky
u
Islands as if they were stepping-stones across a river. Among their weapons were some handheld, muzzle-loading matchlock guns known as arquebuses. Two Portuguese adventurers, both armed with arquebuses, joined the one hundred-strong crew of a Chinese junk, which was bringing merchandise to Japan, aiming to dock on Tanega-shima, the island off the south coast where all trading vessels had to register (and which is now famous for Japan's space center). Damaged by a storm, the junk limped to shelter in a bay on the southern coast of the island.
¹

It was September 23, 1543, as we know from a local monk, who sixty-three years later wrote a meticulous account, because no one had seen a ship of this size or such strange-looking, long-nosed, bearded foreigners; and by then it had become clear that the incident had changed the course of Japanese history. The chief of the nearby village, Nishimura, could read kanji—Chinese script used to write Japanese. Since he knew only the Japanese pronunciation of the signs, he could not talk to the crew. But he “spoke” with them by drawing characters in the sand with a stick, asking where the foreigners came from. “They are traders from among the southwest barbarians,” came the sandy reply.

Nishimura then galloped the fifty kilometers to the capital with the astounding news. The island's lord, Tokitaka, a curious fifteen-year-old, demanded to see the ship and the foreigners. Back went Nishimura to organize a dozen rowing boats, which towed the damaged junk around the coast to the main harbor. An astonished crowd gathered, among them young Tokitaka, who invited the two foreigners to his house. There he asked about the long stick that each carried, “an object which could not be compared with anything known. Its use was both strange and wondrous.” They gave him a demonstration, hitting a target one hundred meters away, and he, of course, bought the two muskets on the spot, eager to get them copied. He had reason to think this would not be hard. His island was iron rich, with a tradition of sword making.

In four months his blacksmith, Yaita, made Japan's first effective musket, receiving instruction from a Portuguese, in exchange—according to tradition—for his sixteen-year-old daughter, Wakasa. Folklore claims that she had a miserable time in this, the first Japanese-European marriage. Yaita, however, prospered. His creation was instantly used to help retake the neighboring island. After a few lessons in how to make gunpowder (local sulfur, saltpeter from China), word spread. That same year, 1544, homemade muskets were taken to the main island of Honsh
u
, and leaders soon saw the potential; five years later, Portuguese-style arquebuses were first used in battle, though not with the discipline that would make them truly revolutionary.

Soon Oda Nobunaga, warlord and future shogun, heard of the new weapon and ordered five hundred of them. When he finally realized how to make the best use of them, he would change the course of Japanese history, tackling other warlords, communes, warrior monks, ninjas—all of Japan's divisive, vested interests. But right then the guns were of less importance than the most powerful weapon of all—Nobunaga himself, the cause of much destruction and much novelty, and the survivor of several ninja-style assassination attempts.

Nobunaga, one of the greatest—as well as the most ruthless—leaders in Japanese history, was not marked out for leadership. The Oda family, rising from obscure origins, had become the shogun's deputies in their home province, Owari, which was Iga's near neighbor to the northeast, a small province centered on today's Nagoya and edging Ise Bay. Nobunaga inherited his father's rank as an assistant deputy to the shogun's representative, not a great start for the future unifier of the nation. But he was ambitious and merciless. At twenty, he had enough loyal followers to crush opposition from his own family, which included killing one of his brothers (as Genghis did). At twenty-five, he chased out the shogun's representative and ruled the province, with the shogun's support.

The following year (1560), a neighboring provincial ruler, Imagawa Yoshimoto, led 25,000 men into Owari on his way to Kyoto. One of Imagawa's generals seized a fort and sent seven heads to his boss. Nobunaga ordered a counterattack, despite being outnumbered four to one. Luckily, the invaders were camped on the coast, near a little village called Okehazama, in a wooded defile (a
hazama
) that Nobunaga knew well. Leaving a few men with many banners to give the impression of a large force, he took most of his little army, some three thousand strong, through forest behind Imagawa's position. Suddenly, around midday, stifling summer heat gave way to a violent thunderstorm. Nobunaga attacked and Imagawa's army fled, mired in mud, their guns soaked and useless. Imagawa's tent was left unprotected, and he lost his head, literally, to one of Nobunaga's men. It was all over in minutes. By chance, one of Imagawa's allies, a man who would later name himself Tokugawa Ieyasu, was away from headquarters at the time, and survived. Soon he would switch his allegiance to Nobunaga and complete his new master's revolution. The battle of Okehazama made history: If Imagawa had been less arrogant and more circumspect; if Nobunaga had been less bold; if there had been no rainstorm; if Ieyasu had been near Imagawa—why, then Nobunaga would be a mere footnote and Ieyasu even less, rather than the founders of postmedieval Japan.

Meanwhile, Ieyasu had a problem. His family was held as hostages in the castle of the son of Imagawa, who had just lost his head to Nobunaga. How to remain true to his former master's family, thus ensuring his family's survival, while coming to some accommodation with Nobunaga, thus ensuring his own survival? As it happened, the gods were with him. His plan was to declare himself for Nobunaga, then, to prove his loyalty, seize one of Imagawa's castles and take hostages of his own, which he would then exchange for his family. This was a high-risk strategy, which would work only if he could take the castle fast enough to forestall the execution of his family. Failure would undoubtedly result in the death of his wife and children, an end to his ambitions, and probably his own death.

The castle he had in mind that spring of 1562 was Kamino, southeast of Nagoya in Mikawa (today's Aichi Prefecture), near his birthplace of Okazaki. Kamino was a tough nut, “built upon a formidable precipice,” according to the main source,
²
so “we will be condemning many of our allies to suffer great losses.” There was only one way to guarantee a quick victory—by using ninjas. “By chance, there are [among our allies] men having relations with K
o
ga”—i.e. that is, ninjas—so “let us convene K
o
ga's leaders through their compatriots and then they can sneak into the castle.” Clearly, then, K
o
ga's ninjas had a reputation that reached far beyond its border, and were available for hire as mercenaries. Some eighty (or more—another source says two hundred) responded to the call. In mid-March this group, having dressed up so that they would be mistaken for defenders, “were ordered to lie down and hide in several places, and . . . sneaked inside the castle.” Once inside, they made their way around in silence, killing as they went, communicating with one another by using a password. The defenders were totally bemused by what was happening, thinking that the shadowy figures were traitors from within their own ranks. “Before long they were setting fire to towers inside . . . the garrison was utterly defeated, and fled.” The commander hid beside the Hall of Prayers, where the ninjas' leader found him, speared him, and took his head. Some two hundred defenders perished in the flames, and many others were taken hostage, among them the two sons of the slain commander, exactly as Ieyasu had planned.