Ninja (23 page)

I can believe it, because there was one other piece of circumstantial evidence. At the bottom of that wooden post was another sign, broken off, with a grim statement. When Ieyasu became shogun in 1603, it read, he appointed police chiefs everywhere, and
IN
THIS
REGION
,
THE
POLICE
FORCE
'
S
EXECUTION
AREA
WAS
HERE
. It is still there today. A grassy sidetrack led downhill through cedars, whose tall, smooth trunks and high canopies created (in my Eurocentric mind) a Gothic gloom, like that of a medieval abbey. Branches brought down by the recent typhoon littered the forest floor, and the still air was damp from moldering foliage. The cedars opened onto a small clearing, where, in a glow of light from above, two small stone memorials turned the place into an open-air chapel. They were flanked by vases of fresh flowers. Each stone bore an engraving.

“Buddhist chants,” said Noriko. “To make sure the souls of those executed here rest in peace.”

“What do they say?”

“
Nam yo horen
. . . ,” she said, peering at the first. “It's Sanskrit. I don't know. Don't ask a priest. His answer will last for hours.”

How many died here? Were they criminals, or perhaps local ninjas who continued the fight against Ieyasu, twenty years after the defeat of Iga? Anyway, this mournful place suggested a narrative: Ieyasu's placeman imposes his master's will by condemning locals to death, and then faces a problem: where to hold the executions. Ieyasu himself sends a message—go up the road to the top of the rise, and you will find a suitable spot. Kill them there, privately, far from any unruly warrior farmers.

He could suggest the spot because he came this way himself, if the sign is to be believed. Perhaps. No one can ever be certain, as Ieyasu himself intended. He would not have risked anyone but his closest and most trusted advisers knowing his whereabouts. How could he have done this? By copying the measures adopted by countless rulers from the first emperor of China to Saddam Hussein. Not that there is a mention of this in the sources, but local historians have no doubt. Yoshihisa Yoshinori, as driver for the K
o
ka Tourist Board, knew what was said. “There is no document telling us his route, but there could have been two or three different ones, because his look-alikes would have had a choice.”

“He had a
double
?”

“Yes. All lords had look-alikes, to avoid assassins. Perhaps his look-alikes had more guards than he did himself, so that villagers here and there would all claim to have seen his procession.”

“How would they know, or think they knew?”

“They would not show their faces. They would all be wearing his armor and helmet and colors. They would all look the same, with no way to tell which was the real one. So he could come along this road in safety.”

It worked. Hattori Hanz
o
and his three hundred or so warriors guided Ieyasu along Iga's northern borders into Ise. How dangerous the journey was emerged when Ieyasu's ninja escorts caught and beheaded a notorious bandit, Ikkihara Genda, and his gang, while one of Ieyasu's retainers, taking a different route, was murdered by a different gang.

So, after a further week's travel, they came to the coast at a little place called Shiroko, a port on Ise Bay now little more than a railway station on the line running north to Nagoya. Here they hired a merchant willing to take their charge across the bay and home (though Sadler adds an unsourced and unlikely tale about Akechi's men searching the boat and Ieyasu being hastily hidden under cargo and the searchers poking about with spears, one of them wounding Ieyasu, who had the presence of mind to wipe the blood off the spear as it was withdrawn to avoid giving himself away).

The success of this mission made a terrific impression on Ieyasu. He showed his gratitude by rewarding top ninja aides with gifts of swords and commendations. And the ninjas, never previously known for their loyalty to an outsider, stuck by him. Ieyasu's initial generosity, the ninjas' guidance, Ieyasu's rewards, the ninjas' declaration of loyalty—all worked together to create a powerful bond, with many ramifications. Ieyasu would, 20 years later, emerge as the leader of the nation and impose a peace that would define its destiny for the next 250 years. But the peace would also mean that the ninjas, the products of centuries of war, would be barred from their traditional roles as spies and specialists in covert warfare. It was Ieyasu who would provide them with a new if diminished role in the emerging, peaceful Japan.

12

THE FINAL BATTLES

Fighting among yourselves can always happen, [
so
]
always decide on a sign for your warriors beforehand.

Ninja instructional poem

IEYASU
,
JAPAN
'
S
THIRD
UNIFIER
,
WOULD
HAVE
TO
WAIT
twenty years before assuming dictatorial rule of all Japan. Under him, the ninjas would enter a long decline, debilitated by peace, killed by kindness.

Meanwhile, under Japan's second unifier, Hideyoshi, the ninjas could pretend for a while that the world had not changed, and play a traditional role, not in Japan, but overseas. Hideyoshi, “the Napoleon of Japan,” completed unification and dreamed of regaining Japan's old empire in Korea, a first step in a much grander vision: to conquer all China. The invasion in 1592 included a one-hundred-strong unit of Iga ninjas, who saw action in the assault on the castle guarding Seoul. But it all came to nothing. The Japanese army was cut from its roots by the Korean navy, and at home Hideyoshi bogged himself down with lavish entertainments. In the summer of 1598, Hideyoshi, sixty-three, became ill and, in the words of common metaphors, took the dark road to the Yellow Spring and became a guest in the White Jade Pavilion. His heir was a five-year-old, watched over by a council of regents. Factions formed, tensions grew, war threatened.

Ieyasu, the most powerful of the regents, had been awarded the Kant
o
region (the central eastern provinces of Japan's main island, Honsh
u
). Having never been part of the Korean campaign, he had been busy building his base in the little fishing village of Edo (which eventually grew into today's Tokyo). It was he and his implacable foe Ishida Mitsunari who now held the fate of Japan in their hands.

There followed a campaign, which, like a game of chess on a massive scale, involved the taking of many castles vital for the control of the great roads, the coastal T
o
kaid
o
and the inland Nakasend
o
. The campaign ended in the biggest battle ever fought on Japanese soil: Sekigahara, on the Nakasend
o
road about one hundred kilometers northeast of Kyoto.

By the time it occurred, on October 21, the time and place were so obvious that people gathered to watch, setting up with teapots and luncheon boxes on a nearby hilltop. They would have a good view, because the battleground was hemmed by hills, except that the morning started foggy. Some 160,000 men fought that day, in an action too complex to describe here.

For ninjaphiles, there are two points of interest.

First, Ieyasu won, largely because he managed to persuade several commanders to switch sides.

Second, one of the losing commanders introduced a novel ninja-like tactic. The commander was one of the Shimazu clan from Satsuma, on the southern tip of the southerly island of Ky
u
sh
u
. Satsuma was famous for the fertility of its volcanic soils, or hence the oranges named after it. It was also notoriously independent, first because it was isolated by ranges of mountains and second because it possessed the superb harbor of Kagoshima, a natural window to the world beyond Japan, to the Pacific, China, and all points south. The Shimazus were among the first to appreciate the advantages of the firearms introduced by the Portuguese. Recently, they had developed the use of guns by snipers, whose job was to lie low—playing dead, perhaps, or hiding—if their army retreated, and pick off enemy combatants. This they did at Sekigahara when their main contingent came up against the “Red Devils” of one of Ieyasu's top commanders, Ii Naomasa. Like all samurai, Ii's men were easy to spot, because they wore brilliantly colored armor and carried silk banners and flags and ribbons identifying them by rank, affiliation, and name. “All armour, harness, saddles and stirrups to be red” ran one of their regulations. Ii himself was on horseback, turned into a bull's-eye by his standard, 5
shaku
(about 1.5 meters) long, four widths of silk wide, bearing the first character of his name in gold. A Satsuma sniper shot at him, close up, not very accurately, because the bullet passed through his horse's belly and shattered Ii's right elbow. The horse collapsed, Ii was carried from the field, and a ninja officer in his service gave some medicine—evidence that ninjas did indeed acquire medical skills when they did their Shugend
o
training. After victory was declared, Ieyasu personally bound Ii's wound, but some say he never fully recovered. He died two years later.

That left Ieyasu as Japan's virtual dictator, confirmed when he had the emperor proclaim him shogun in 1603, the start of the Tokugawa government that would last for the next 265 years. He moved fast to consolidate his power, executing some of his main opponents,
¹
forgiving others, confiscating fiefs here, dispensing them there, controlling enemies, securing allies, and starting the immense task of making Edo into the capital.

One of his acts was to reward the ninjas who had come to his aid with such spectacular success twenty years before. Iga was at peace under its new lord, T
o
d
o
Takatora, with the local ninjas returning to their lives as farmers. K
o
ga, his ally during the Iga Revolt, was allowed to continue its self-governing traditions, on the understanding that there would be no challenge to his authority. But he knew better than to allow any resentment to fester, and to this end gave two hundred ninjas positions, and a significant income, as security guards in Edo.

To secure peace in this way demanded a rare combination of ruthlessness, vision, and generosity. If Oda Nobunaga was like Genghis Khan in rising from nowhere to become a national leader, Ieyasu was like him in that both did what autocrats are notoriously bad at: looking after the succession in good time. In 1605, Ieyasu made his third son, Hidetada, shogun, ensuring continuity and stability, while retaining power behind the scenes for the next eleven years.

There remained Hideyoshi's heir, Hideyori, now a grown man of twenty-one, living in his great fortress of
O
saka, and eager to make a comeback. Tens—possibly hundreds—of thousands of samurai, resentful of Ieyasu's seizure of power, were willing to join him. The potential revolt was centered on
O
saka Castle, Japan's most impressive castle after Edo itself. Built by Hideyoshi in 1586, it stood on the site of the Ishiyama Hongan-ji temple destroyed by Oda Nobunaga. Its base was a platform of immense stones, the provision of which had been a matter of intense competition between rival lords. They are still there today, some of them weighing up to seventy-five tons. This, combined with some fifteen acres of walls and palisades and three moats and arrays of guns, should have made it very hard to take. For that reason, the ninja officer who had attended to Ii during the battle of Sekigahara, Miura Yoemon, went to Iga—to the Nabari area, not far from the Forty-Eight Waterfalls—to hire ninjas, who were still keen to make use of their skills after a decade of peace.

In the winter of 1614, Ieyasu arrived with his army to begin the siege. On one occasion, the ninjas used unorthodox tactics that saved lives. A force led by Ii's son, Ii Natada, attacked across a dry outer moat, using a fog bank to hide their approach, when a hail of bullets from the walls ahead drove them back. Such was the confusion of fog and fighting that Ii could not make himself heard to order a retreat. On the bank, Miura, busy removing arrowheads from wounded soldiers, ordered his ninjas to lob arrows
at their own men.
That got their attention. They turned to face this apparent new threat, and “advanced” away from danger, to safety.

The winter siege proved too much for both sides. Ieyasu's guns—seventeen European cannons and three hundred homemade ones—undermined morale: A cannonball smashed a tea cabinet while Lady Yodo, Hideyoshi's ageing consort, was entertaining, and another felled a pillar on top of two of her ladies. Sleep was impossible. For the besiegers, so was the cold. Neither side, though, was ready to give up. The result was a peace treaty that neither intended to take seriously. Hideyori promised never to rebel again. Ieyasu promised to back off but got the better deal, because the treaty allowed him to fill in the two outer moats. He then departed, proclaiming eternal peace, leaving the ladies in
O
saka to return to their beds and tea ceremonies.

Peace after war is either imposed by the victor or based on trust. In this case, there was no victor and no trust. Both sides prepared for another round. Osaka repaired its defenses; Ieyasu regathered his forces. Miura returned to Iga to persuade the ninjas to rejoin. It could not have been easy. They had only just gotten home, and now it was spring—time to start preparing the rice fields. But they were, after all, mercenaries, and they responded when the price was right. In the two months of fighting that followed, the only ninja action recorded was when they were ordered to fire on an unruly crowd of camp followers and locals who were impeding operations. The crowd quickly dispersed, leaving two or three dead who were under the command of T
o
d
o
Takatora, Iga's new lord and owner of the newly built castle that still crowns Iga Ueno's central hill. He would not have been a popular figure among the sturdily independent inhabitants of Iga. It sounds as much like a by-mistake-on-purpose act as a piece of crowd control, but it was soon forgiven and forgotten amid the many other actions that involved uncounted deaths, suicides, heads taken and displayed on poles, and eventually, in early June, the surrender of the castle.