Ninja (6 page)

Seven years after his victory in the Gempei War, Yoritomo took a step that would define Japanese administration for the next seven hundred years. With the approval of the emperor (who was in no position to disapprove), he appointed his own officials in every province and estate so that he could hold power throughout the land. Yoritomo also had himself awarded the highest military rank,
sei i tai sh
o
gun
(barbarian-quelling great general). This title once referred to the general empowered to wage war against the wild indigenous tribes of the north. Its holder, known simply as the shogun, ruled the whole country as top samurai—in effect, military dictator—in the name of the revered but impotent emperor.

In
theory
, at least—though for centuries, the system broke down in practice, the principle remained as an ideal toward which all would-be rulers aimed. Basing his military government, the
bakufu
(shogunate), at his headquarters in Kamakura, the shogun did his best to rule a patchwork of sixty provinces and six hundred estates, all scrapping with their neighbors. To cram four centuries into a sentence, rule from Kamakura lasted just over a century, collapsing in 1333, ushering in a new line of shoguns, the Ashikaga, who, after a sixty-year interval of civil war with two rival emperors, reestablished rule from Kyoto, where they ruled and misruled for another two hundred increasingly anarchic years.

From about 1200 onward, therefore, the main focus for any local leader was war, war, and more war, with all its trappings. No lord or commander could survive without an investment in armor, horses, bows, swords, daggers, and fighting men. There arose an elite of landowning warriors—
bushi
—fighting for their masters, the two being bound by mutual need: the lord providing land, war booty, and protection in exchange for the skills of the specialist warriors, the samurai (originally
saburai
, meaning “one who serves,” in particular, one who provides military service for the nobility).

But there was an inherent instability in this relationship. If a vassal prospered, the status, power, and wealth he won was enough for him to claim his freedom. Why, as a boastful, independent, thuggish warrior, would he continue to devote himself to a lord? How could a master ensure his loyalty? How, in brief, could the feudal system be made stable?

The answer was to raise loyalty—to one's lord, not to the far-off emperor—ever higher, turning it into an ideal more loved than life itself, guaranteeing status and glory in both life and death, with a father's position and emotional commitment being inherited by his sons. Loyalty to a lord, or daimy
o
(great name), was like a gene, written into a samurai's DNA. Against provincial armies welded together by such bonds, no emperor or shogun had much chance of wielding local influence.

As an elite separate from the aristocrats, intellectuals, peasants, and brigands, the samurai were fiercely proud of their skills, status, and valor. For survival in this tough world, image and self-image were vital. Every man had to strut and preen like a cockerel or seem a loser. In battle, a warrior equated his very being with extreme acts of bravery and self-sacrifice, especially in the face of overwhelming odds, for this was the way to gain reputation and rewards. Crucially, his action had to be public—witnessed, remembered, talked about. One early-thirteenth-century warrior determined to be noticed dyed some of his horses purple, crimson, chartreuse, and sky blue, and covered others with stripes and spots. Another wrote, “If I were to advance alone, in midst of the enemy, and die in a place where none could witness my deeds, then my death would be as pointless as a dog's death.”
²
Reputation was all, as another thirteenth-century commentary concludes: “To go forth to the field of battle and miss death by an inch; to leave behind one's name for a myriad generations; all in all, this is the way.” Honor, or shame, would be passed down the generations, to be upheld or redeemed by descendants. So honor was above life itself. The samurai's whole being was dominated by their extreme sensitivity to any threat or insult to their honor, and their near-instantaneous readiness to take violent action in its defense. Only in this way could honor be asserted, protected, or restored.

For rich samurai, the supreme item of self-advertisement was his armor, which underwent its own evolution in response to the growing sophistication of weapons and tactics—from bows and arrows to swords, from infantry to cavalry, from warrior gangs to field armies. In Europe, knightly armor made to be worn by horsemen eventually turned them into the military equivalent of crabs, so unwieldy that a fallen knight could hardly stand up without help. In Japan, the style of combat with bow and sword meant that armor had to be kept flexible, which was done by using scores of little plates or scales sewn together to make so-called lamellar armor (in Latin, a
lamina
is a layer, from which comes
laminate
, and its diminutive
lamella
is a “little layer” or small piece of something, usually metal). Designs evolved. Lamellar armor could be a misery in extreme heat or cold, and the bindings became heavy in rain and tended to rot, all of which forced experimental variations in scales and single-piece elements. By the sixteenth century, armor had become so rich and varied that a battle array looked like a confrontation between many species of exotic beetle.

A rich samurai's
o
-yoroi
, or “great armor,” had plates and scales bound into skirts and aprons and shoulder pads and shin pads and earflaps, all designed to stop arrows and deflect swords but also to proclaim wealth and status and, at the same time, allow the wearer to shoot, swing, ride, and walk. His helmet alone was a work of art. Some were made of dozens of semicircular plates, others of a single piece of metal in a conical shape, like a witch's hat, with a visor and up to six sideflaps to protect both ears and neck. Some helmets sported vast horns, wave shapes, mountains, crabs (to suggest crab-like powers of self-protection), or rabbit's ears (to suggest longevity). The samurai might also have a mask covering the whole lower face, with a detachable nosepiece, a bristling moustache, a little hole in the chin for the sweat to run through, and a built-in grimace to terrify the opposition. Since the outfit covered the whole body, it was impossible to recognize who was inside, so—since the whole purpose was to advertise himself—our hero would be a walking, riding flag, gaudy with colored scales and flapping banners.

The ultimate weapon was, of course, the sword, or rather the two swords, the long
katana
blade and the shorter blade, the
tant
o
, used in hand-to-hand fighting. Vast collections and worlds of expertise are devoted to the accoutrements of both: mountings, belts, suspension braids, scabbards, scabbard knobs, hilts, handles, handle covers (ray skin gives a particularly good grip), sword collars, guards—all are subspecialties with their own arcane vocabularies and schools and histories.

The samurai's sword was his greatest treasure, one that occupied—occupies still—a multidimensional world of magic, spirituality, chemistry, artistry, and skill, each aspect with its own arcane vocabulary and traditions, and all focused by the mind and body of the swordsman into a lightning blow. Armor, however exotic and all-encompassing, was no guarantee of protection—and anyway, it slowed you down. The ultimate samurai swordsman wore nothing but his kimono. There was no shield but the sword itself, which was strong enough to deflect a blade that was its equal in resilience and suppleness. Japanese smiths, many of a renown reserved in the West for the greatest artists, created several major schools or traditions, each with several subgroups, all of which developed their own variations of the basic sword styles. The result, refined over four hundred years, was a glorious combination of practicality and beauty. The best blades—sharp as razors, heavy as hand axes, fast as whips in the right hands—could sever iron helmets and cut through skin and bone like a kitchen knife through asparagus.

I once had the good fortune to wield a
katana
, under the eye of masterswordsman Colin Young, one of the few English senseis. It was at the end of a lecture, under the gaze of an audience. My task was to cut through a roll of tatami matting soaked in water, which has the consistency of human flesh and the thickness of an arm. We played to the crowd, instructor and pupil. The sword, swung from overhead, went through as easily as an axe through sponge cake—no discernible resistance. I had half expected that result, having seen Colin do it. What I had not expected was the surge of emotion—the elation inspired by an act of power. For a few seconds, I was Rambo, a dealer in death, power incarnate. The feeling came partly from the sword and the blow, but also because I was on display, in public. What would have been the point of performing in private?

Death-defying bravery and an overriding ideal did not guarantee victory. What should the loser do, if he happened to survive? The answer lay in the concept of loyalty unto death. This was first taken to its logical conclusion by Minamoto no Yorimasa, whose revolt against the ruling Taira clan was crushed in 1180 (revenge and final victory came five years later). When he saw that all was lost, he determined to die while his sons held off the enemy. He ordered an aide to strike off his head, but the aide refused, weeping, saying he could not do it while his master lived. “I understand,” said Yorimasa, and retired into a temple. In one version of the story, he joined his palms, performed a Buddhist chant, and wrote a poem on his war fan:

Like a fossil tree

Which has borne not one blossom,

Sad has been my life.

Leaving no fruit behind me.

Finally, he released his spirit, which traditionally resided in the abdomen, by thrusting his short sword into his belly. This was the first recorded instance of the painful and messy act known to outsiders as hara-kiri, which Japanese more commonly call
seppuku
(because that is the higher-status word deriving from the Chinese).

“Cutting the belly” became an established way to avoid the disgrace of defeat. One of the best-known and most dramatic examples occurred in 1333, after rebellion brought the Kamakura shogunate to an end. The rebels—bandits and armed peasants—forced the shogun's troops to flee from Kyoto for fifty kilometers along the shoreline of Lake Biwa to a temple in the little post town of Banba (now part of Maibara). The story is told in the collection of war stories known as the
Taiheiki
, which we shall be returning to later. In this tale, five hundred warriors gathered in the courtyard before the single-room temple. The general, H
o
j
o
Nakatoki, saw that the end was near and addressed his men in a moving speech
³
:

“I have no words to speak of your loyal hearts. . . . Profound indeed is my gratitude! How may I reward you, now that adversity overwhelms my house? I shall kill myself for your sakes, requiting in death the favours received in life . . .” He stripped off his armour, laid bare his body to the waist, slashed his belly and fell down dead.

There was no expectation that anyone else would copy him. But at once, one of his vassals responded: “How bitter it is that you have gone before me! I thought to take my life first, to prepare the way for you in the nether regions. . . . Wait a bit! I shall go with you.” Seizing the dead man's dagger from his stomach, “he stabbed his own belly and fell on his face, embracing Nakatoki's knees. And thereafter four hundred and thirty-two men ripped their bellies all at once. As the flowing of the Yellow River was the blood soaking their bodies; as meats in a slaughterhouse were the corpses filling the compound.”

The description is, of course, highly poetic, capturing the elements—commitment, failure, intense emotion, formality, public display—thought essential by those who listened to it. But there was no exaggeration in the numbers: A priest recorded the names of 189 of those who killed themselves that day; the same priest had gravestones made for all 432, which still stand, running in five lines up a gentle slope.

Since relationships between lord and vassal varied in strength, vassals were free to make their own decisions. A member of a household might feel his lord's death as his own, and choose death; a mercenary who would be able to offer his services to another lord could well choose life, as would a landowner with a workforce to look after. Either way, living or dying, the samurai was asserting his control over his destiny and pride in his elitism.

All this—the equipment, the actions, the theatricality—were the outward, visible, and very public means by which a samurai proclaimed his status. No samurai would for a moment accept the idea of doing anything secretive or underhand. It would be a denial of everything he stood for.

Yet—here's the paradox—everyone knew his Sun Zi, every commander knew that it would have been courting disaster not to have spies acting in secret, gathering intelligence and undertaking other covert operations. Hence the ninja, with an ethos that was the mirror image of the samurai's, and hence also a difficulty for historians, for if operations were secret, well, no one would record them.

So the formal bravado of the samurai is only a part of the story. Surprise attacks, artifice, betrayal, and deception played equally significant roles in warfare. Witness several incidents in medieval sources: A Taira warrior named Sadamichi, ordered to kill another warrior, befriends the man, then rides out of sight, puts on his armor and returns to shoot his unarmored victim; a samurai avenging his father's murder disguises himself as a servant, sneaks into the man's room while he is sleeping, and slits his throat; Minamoto Yoritomo, wishing to execute one of his men, orders him to be entertained at a feast, during which he is beheaded. These incidents hardly rank as honorable, yet there is no suggestion that they are actually
dis
honorable or in any way improper. Indeed, a warrior was supposed to be on guard at all times, so who is to blame if he is taken off-guard by an assassin or successfully spied upon?
He
is, of course, all being fair in war. Ends justified means. Warriors and bards alike may have tacitly agreed not to mention it, but deception was as much part of Japanese culture as public glory.