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Foreword

The Raid of the Forty-seven Ronin holds a unique place in Japanese history. There is nothing quite like it, and John Allyn’s masterful retelling of the tale captures for modern readers much of the excitement with which the Japanese populace of the mid-eighteenth century would have responded to what for them was the equivalent of a newspaper sensation.

Yet modern readers have more in common with them than mere excitement, because, like the Japanese of contemporary Edo, we are forced to look at the story through a very large distorting lens. This lens is provided by a play from the Japanese kabuki theater that was based on the raid and is called Kanadehon Chushingura, of which the title is usually shortened to Chushingura (The Treasure House of the Loyal Retainers). The play was first produced in Edo (modern Tokyo) in 1748 and has never left the repertoire since. This unashamedly fictionalized version of the story, involving changes of names, dates and locations, is universally recognized for what it really is: a classic drama based on a fictionalized account of an actual historical event; yet somehow the overall impression of the nature and circumstances of the raid provided by Chushingura has completely eclipsed the sober historical reality.

In Chushingura Kira Kozuke-no-suke Yoshihisa is an out-and-out villain, an attribution that is essential if his murder in very suspicious circumstances is to be transformed into an uplifting account of samurai virtue. Lord Kira was the Shogun’s Master of Ceremony, who oversaw every detail of the shogun’s diary, court protocol, the organization of audiences and the like. In the environment of the Shogun’s court, where Confucian ideals of hierarchy, precedent and ritual met, notions of divination and good or bad omens, correct protocol and ritual were absolutely essential. By 1701 the sixty-year-old Kira Yoshihisa had served successive Shoguns as a loyal and utterly reliable master of court ceremonial for about forty years. It was a role that required minute attention to detail and clockwork precision. A man in that position, one can safely assume, did not suffer fools gladly, and when faced with having to instruct in etiquette a young daimyo to whom court ceremonial was much less interesting than court ladies, who appeared ignorant of the most basic learning and yet enjoyed an income eleven times greater than his stuffy old teacher, Yoshihisa’s self-control was to be tested to the limit.

This young daimyo, of course, was Asana Naganori, the hero in Chushingura. In reality he was a self-indulgent libertine of 34, the descendant of great warriors but now found to be dissolute and pleasure seeking, content to leave his domain in the hands of others. In the fictionalized version of the Forty-seven Ronin story, of course, the characters and personalities of Asano Naganori and Kira Yoshihisa bear no resemblance to the brief details set out above. Here the difference in income between Asano and Kira is used to justify a caricature of the latter as a greedy and scheming petty official, ever eager to squeeze money out of the wealthy young daimyo. That any additional financial rewards likely to come Kira’s way in the course of his dealings with Asano would arise from the ceremonial giving of gifts is a fact used to compound his alleged felony. The long-established Japanese tradition of gift-giving is conveniently forgotten. Graft, bribery and corruption instead become the order of the day, until the noble young lord’s patience snaps and the miserly figure of Kira Yoshihisa gets what is coming to him.

Assumptions such as these, however, whereby Kira is exasperated by the younger man and makes derogatory comments about him or otherwise belittles him beyond endurance until Asano hits back, are simply that: assumptions, fed by speculation on the one hand and the theater on the other. An alternative theory states that Asano had failed to present Kira with a gift of sufficient worth in return for being trained in court etiquette, at which Kira mocked and scorned him for his lack of breeding, but again there is no proof.

The reality is that no records or personal letters exist that could shed any light on the nature of the grievance about which Asano had protested and which had driven him to his impasse, and the simple reason why we will never know the truth behind Asano’s motivation lies in the fact that he never had a chance to defend himself in a court of law or even to make a statement to the authorities who had rushed to condemn him. The palace records reveal the incredible speed of the events. Asano attacked Kira sometime before midday; the order placing him in custody was issued at 1 p.m.; the order for his execution was delivered at 4 p.m. and he committed seppuku (ritual suicide) at 6 p.m.

To those who were shortly to become masterless ronin their dead Lord Asano was clearly the victim and Kira was definitely the villain. Yet even if a sixty-year-old court official could have been expected to draw his sword and fight a young and vigorous assailant, Kira Yoshihisa was undoubtedly the true victim of an assault to which he responded with restraint. In fact Kira was praised for his orderly conduct, which probably riled the Ako retainers still further. Supporters of Asano also argued that by not retaliating Kira showed himself to be no true samurai and therefore deserving of punishment; a viewpoint that could be paralleled by arguing that Asano was not a true samurai because he failed to kill Kira, let alone that he attacked his man from behind!

As months went by this debate continued along with a very sober consideration of the personal future of the Ako estate and its retainers. The possibility that the domain could be restored to the incarcerated Asano Nagahiro (Naganori’s heir) had been the straw to which the Ronin clung after both a mass suicide and a siege of Ako Castle had been ruled out. When all hope faded their bleak future must have been a factor in the Forty-seven Ronin’s deliberations, because when all else failed the only other course open to them was to take the honorable road of samurai revenge.

As to the justification for a murder raid, even though the reality of Asano Naganori’s grievance with Kira was not known, the position that the Forty-seven Ronin were to take was that even if the nature of the slight remained unknown, the fact that Asano had been driven to such desperate measures proved that it must have been very a serious matter. They were therefore justified in taking the ultimate revenge on Lord Kira.

The plotting soon began, and one of the earliest conclusions drawn by the Forty-seven Ronin was that secrecy was essential if they were to succeed against Kira, because he was expecting retaliation and had the backing of his kinsmen in the Uesugi family who lived nearby. The Forty-seven also anticipated (undoubtedly correctly) that permission for their vendetta would never be granted if they had gone through the proper channels.

One other stipulation under the law posed an even more serious problem, because the Ronin wished to avenge the death of their lord, not a relative, and the death of one’s master was specifically excluded from the legal provisions. The Forty-seven Ronin were aware of this and tried to justify their actions by appealing to ancient tradition rather than modern legalities, so their subsequent conduct meant that they had set themselves outside the law on two counts, and there was a third. It is now customary to regard the raid of the Forty-seven Ronin as the classic act of revenge—the supreme vendetta—of Old Japan, yet this reveals another complication for them, because to respond to the Ako Incident by killing Kira stretched the definition of a vendetta to its breaking point. Katakiuchi, on whatever grounds, had the literal reading of “cutting down an enemy” and meant that someone, either the victim or his close representative, would take revenge on the killer. But in the Corridor of Pines Kira had not been the assailant. Asano was. He may have claimed to be the victim of a grievance, but while no one knew for certain what that grievance was, everyone knew which of them had been the victim of the assault.

There was one final complication. The death of Asano had also come about so rapidly that Kira could have played no part in the decision to order his execution, which in any case was carried out according to the law and in conformity with every recent precedent. So if a vendetta should be carried out against anyone, then surely the target of the Forty-seven Ronin should have been the Shogun himself. As this was both unthinkable and impossible, the raid of the Forty-seven Ronin becomes less a vendetta and more an attempt by Asano’s surviving retainers to follow where he had led in his response to the unknown grievance. Put quite simply, their lord had failed to kill Kira. They would finish the job in his memory.

Thus began the period of covert contact by the now dispersed Ronin. All the legends and plays tell us that they attempted to put Kira off his guard by living lives that suggested to the outside world that they had abandoned any ideas of revenge or of ever becoming respectable samurai again. So the famous raid took place, and John Allyn tells it well, but one must always remember that in the process of achieving their supposedly honorable objective the Forty-seven Ronin slaughtered seventeen of Lord Kira’s own samurai, who died bravely and innocently in his defense. It is a statistic usually forgotten in accounts of the raid. Eighteen men were killed by them, not just one.

Soon after the blood-stained snow was washed away from the defiled mansion, leading scholars of the day rushed to add their own interpretation of the events. These comments were far from being universally positive, because accusations of cowardice were levelled against the Forty-seven Ronin right from the start. Why had they not challenged Kira to a fair fight, or even attempted to cut him down out in the open? Had they chosen the latter course they would almost certainly have been killed themselves immediately afterwards with no chance of a pardon, but that was seen by many as being the noble course. Instead they carried out an underhand and cowardly raid in which seventeen other innocent men needlessly lost their lives. They were therefore nothing but a gang of murderers. Later generations, of course, took a very different view and came to idolize the Forty-seven Ronin, so that by the year 1900 more than fifty full-length dramas of varying quality had been produced, and forty films have appeared since 1910.

It could have all been so different, and it is just possible that we could now be reading an exciting retelling of the bravery of Lord Kira’s samurai who died after a cowardly night raid. But could this self-indulgent master of etiquette ever be portrayed as the tragic protagonist? Kira Yoshihisa remained passive during Asano’s unexpected assault, and during the raid he revealed himself only after nearly all of his defenders had been murdered. There was no gallantry on display here, and certainly no kabuki play would ever commemorate his deeds—the populace of gaudy Edo Japan sought the more tangible heroism of a bygone era. Kira Yoshihisa represented the ordered, dispassionate, bureaucratic and very boring world of the Shogun’s administrative staff, not the adrenaline-fueled province of the samurai swordsmen. To experience this world the public had to overlook deception and cold-blooded murder. In promulgating the myth of the Forty-seven Ronin, overlook it they did.

So enjoy this thrilling story, a tale that is usually regarded as the classic example of a Japanese vendetta, remembering that in reality it was nothing of the kind, its illegality and the questionable motivation making it an anomaly among the scores of other revenge killings that took place during the Edo Period. Militarily, the Ronin achieved their objective: to place the severed head of Kira Yoshihisa before the tomb of Asano Naganori. Vengeance was indeed taken, but not to avenge Asano’s death—rather for Kira’s unknown insult that he’d suffered and had failed to repay. Asano’s two errant strokes within the Corridor of Pines preceded a deluge of cuts that would settle the score for good. Lord Kira and his men were sent to their almost unknown graves; the Forty-seven Ronin were sent to glory.

Stephen Turnbull

University of Leeds