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THE BUSHI
The Rise of the Military Class
The military class (buke) began to play a determinant role in the history of Japan during the tenth and eleventh centuries (the late Heian period) as the power of the emperor, the nominal head of the Yamato clan, slowly but irresistibly began to disintegrate in the wake of the nobility’s constant internecine struggles. During this period, the aristocratic clans (kuge) battled one another unendingly—when, that is, they were not warring against the powerful organizations of militant priests and monks near Nara. This phenomenon can be seen as early as the middle of the sixth century, when a comparatively new clan, the Soga, challenged the power of the five original clans: the Otomo, Kume (Kumebe), Imibe, Mononobe, and Nakatomi. The members of the dynamic and extremely capable Soga family, in fact, eventually managed to insinuate themselves into the imperial line of inheritance, using every conceivable means to attain their ends. Two imperial princes were murdered as a result of their “intrigues, which culminated in the assassination of the Emperor Sosun (591 A.D.)—the only crime of its kind openly admitted by Japanese historians” (Brinkley1, 42-43).
At the time, the country was also in the throes of a spiritual upheaval precipitated by the clash between monotheistic Buddhism and the pantheistic animism of the indigenous religion (Shinto). The spreading of the former doctrine and its mystical polarization of images further emphasized the supreme authority of the emperor-priest, thus making him an even more particular target of those powerful and ambitious noblemen who were determined to wield that power themselves. The clan struggles were not always expressed in terms of bloodshed, however. The members of the Soga clan also became famous in Japanese history for their skill as diplomats—managing the kingdom either directly, as regents (sessho) and civil dictators (kampaku), or indirectly, as befitted an emperor’s maternal or paternal relatives and mentors. Their hold was finally broken by Kamatari, head of the ancient Nakatomi clan. As a consequence of his efforts, “the Soga family became extinct—a euphemism signifying that every male bearing the name of Soga, greybeard, youth, or child, was put to the sword. That was the method of dealing with such cases in ancient times, and it continued to be the method throughout medieval and even up to comparatively modern times” (Brinkley1, 43).
In accordance with what had, by that time, become the political custom of the land, Kamatari restored power nominally to the emperor, but reserved those offices through which that power was exercised for himself and the members of his clan (upon which the emperor bestowed the name “wisteria plain,” or Fujiwara). In time, this clan became supreme among all those descended from the ancient kuge.
As a result of the decimation which characterized the Heian period beneath its exterior splendor, a power vacuum was created in the political center of the nation, and a new class of men was drawn into that vortex by the irresistible forces of history. These men formed a military aristocracy of sorts which, at least initially, seemed to have been excluded from the political process of decision making. The function of this class was primarily that of enlarging and protecting the boundaries of the nation. Thus its members inherited the ancient martial tradition which had once been the prerogative of the ancient and expanding noble clans before they had become centralized—first in Nara and then in the permanent capital of Kyoto. Slowly but surely, this centralization had separated the kuge from the real basis of power at that time: land ownership. As Grinnan pointed out, “the history of the land tenure of a country is always closely connected with its political development. This is especially true of ancient times, for then land was the sole or principal source of wealth and power” (Grinnan, 228).
The almost complete concentration of the ancient clans in the capitals and their continual absenteeism from even their nearest estates had considerably weakened their capacity to develop their lands, supervise the management of their properties, and collect the taxes due them. Within the boundaries of both nearby estates and others in provinces far from the capitals, new and vigorous clans began to coalesce.
Provincial territories had customarily been assigned by imperial decree to large landowners who acted, in Nitobe’s estimation, as had the Latin tenantes pro capite or as representatives of the emperor. In addition, other territories, reclaimed from wilderness or taken from enemies, were transformed into productive provinces whose occupants, along with their cohorts, were eventually confirmed in their positions as landowners by imperial decree. These landowners were called daimyo (“great names”) and they also used to sublet their fiefs to particularly favored retainers or vassals (kerai).
These provincial magnates gradually developed into great military chiefs, with large forces of well armed and carefully disciplined retainers under their command. They were called bu-ke, or military houses, to distinguish them from the ku-ge, or Court-houses, whose heads lived in Kyoto, monopolizing the administrative positions, but seeing their emoluments and their influence steadily circumscribed as the provinces passed beyond their sway. (Brinkley1, 47)
The daimyo gradually became more independent and removed from the sway of the emperor, who, as Nitobe expressed it, “lived in the invisible seclusion at the capital, Kyoto.” The contrast between the life of the retainers of the court nobles in Kyoto and that of the provincial lords had always been quite marked. As early as the eighth century, when conscripts “selected by lot” were sent either to serve in the distant provinces or to serve in the “six corps of guards” at the capital, “the provincial troops, constantly exercised in the use of the sword, the spear, and equestrian archery, attained and maintained a high degree of efficiency” (Brinkley 2, 50). On the other hand, “the metropolitan guards soon yielded to the enervating influences that surrounded them, and ceased to be useful except as factors in the pageant of pomp and parade affected by the great nobles, or as instruments in furthering their intrigues” (Brinkley1, 50).
To be sure, there was at least an indirect relationship between the feudal barons of the provinces and the court with its nobles, that is, between the buke and the kuge. Often this relationship was closer than that presupposed by legalistic and traditional bonds of loyalty based on the formal appointment of a feudal baron to rule a province or a district; it was also one of blood ties or affiliation through marriage or adoption.
The most important families among the feudal barons, who were instrumental in raising their class to a position of prominence and in establishing a successful dictatorship, were the Minamoto (Genji) and the Taira (Heike). Both claimed direct or indirect descent from members of the imperial family who, in accordance with ancient custom, had been sent to the provinces when there had been “no place for them at court.” Usually, such exiled royal subjects changed their names after six generations. The fourteen families of the Minamoto clan traced their origins to the emperors Saga (786-842) and Seiwa (850-80), while the four families comprising the Taira clan claimed Emperor Kammu (737-806) as their ancestor. These claims, however, must be studied critically in view of the fact that any new center of power usually tries to link itself to the tradition of the older, supplanted power in order to justify, reinforce, and consolidate its position. The strong reaction of the court to the new leaders, who were often spitefully referred to in imperial decrees as being “people of all ranks,” indicates that in most cases we can presume the claimed relationship to have been nonexistent. This historical probability is further confirmed by the emergence of leaders from the lower social strata in later times—men such as the warlords Nobunaga and Hideyoshi, among others, who prepared the way for the Tokugawa dictatorship, which was to emerge in the seventeenth century. Furthermore, even when extant, such a relationship did not prevent the independent formation of these new and formidable clans, which were led by strong, ambitious men of arms and organized militarily within their own provincial areas.
Their independence during the early part of the Heian period had become so absolute that, according to Sansom, numerous imperial decrees (largely ignored) were issued from 889 to 897, referring to the fact that “people of all ranks” in the provinces were oppressing farmers, defying the officers of the imperial court, and generally running things to suit themselves. The same scholar also states that by the middle of the Heian period the court could no longer keep peace among the provincial clans and that twice it was even threatened directly by their rebellious policies. In 939-40, Taira Masakado, who had been sent as an officer of the crown to supervise the eastern provinces, found them so well organized and militarily prepared that he decided to place himself at their head and turn against the central government. In a short time, he and his forces occupied most of the Kanto plain. He was killed in a battle against hostile clans before an imperial general (hurriedly appointed to quell the revolt) could even arrive on the scene. Then Fujiwara Sumitomo, appointed by the crown to deal with piracy and sedition in the provinces and along the coastline, led local pirate bands against government forces and seized control of large areas along the Inland Sea. In both cases it was clearly shown that provincial forces could challenge the central government and that such challenges could not be met successfully by an imperial response, but only by relying upon similar groups of armed men led by their own local leaders. In this way, ironically enough, the emperor himself, as well as the rest of the nobility and the ancient families of regents, eventually came to rely upon the forces of these feudal barons for their very survival during the dramatically intense struggles which followed. Unfortunately, like the unleashing of ills from Pandora’s box, the military forces released from and within the provinces proved to be largely uncontrollable in spite of various attempts in this direction on the part of the imperial court and other exalted patrons. Moreover, these forces were seemingly not able to come to terms even among themselves, but turned against one another, each usually fighting not for the emperor or an aristocratic family, but for itself alone.
By the early part of the twelfth century, clashes were occurring regularly between the largest and most powerful associations of feudal barons—one led by the Taira and the the other by the Minamoto. The Hogen War of 1156 was still fought in the name of the imperial heirs, Goshirakawa and Konoe (sons of the retired emperor Toba), who were competing for the throne. But the Gempei War of 1180-85 was clearly a direct confrontation in which the forces of the Minamoto were dealt a crushing defeat. The head of the Taira clan, Kiyomori (1118-81), consolidated his power at court through a series of skillful manipulations and marriages which finally put one of his nephews, Antoku, on the throne at the age of two. This feudal baron, who had at last reached the apex of power through force of arms, defended his position ruthlessly against any threat, from any source. One of the major obstacles he encountered was the resistance offered by certain religious communities who had armed forces of their own, which they used to control the vast and productive territories assigned to them over a period of centuries by many different emperors. Without the slightest hesitation, Kiyomori moved against them, putting to the sword the priests and monks of Todai-ji and Kofuku-ji before sacking their monasteries in Nara.
The age of supremacy of the Taira clan is known as the Rokuhara period (1156-85). It came to an end when Minamoto Yoritomo (1148-99), whose life had been spared after the defeat of his clan in 1160, succeeded in rallying and uniting the clans hostile to the Taira. Under his leadership, these forces defeated the Taira at Ichinotani (1184), Yashima (1185), and Dannoura (1185). This interesting military leader, who had been raised in Izu by vassals of the Taira clan (the clever Hojo family), usually employed skilled generals to great advantage on the battlefield—men such as his younger half-brother Yoshitsune and his cousin Yoshinaka. Both of these men and their families, however, were promptly dispatched (either forced to commit suicide or killed outright) after they had won great victories for him. Yoritomo then assumed the title of Seii Tai-shogun. This title appears to have evolved from the ancient imperial commission Seii-shi (“sent against the barbarians”) and the title taisho, denoting the general-in-chief of an army. The latter title appears in the records of the ninth century in relation to the commanders of the imperial guards. It had been assigned by imperial decree to earlier leaders of renown, such as Sakanoue Tamuramaro, who, after scoring impressive victories at the end of the eighth century, promptly returned the title to the emperor. With Yoritomo, however, it became a hereditary right of his house, and it was assumed and retained by a long line of military dictators who ruled Japan in the name of the emperor until the late nineteenth century. In its abbreviated form, such rulers were generally known throughout the land as shogun.
Yoritomo established the center of his military command, characteristically known as camp office or tent headquarters (bakufu), in Kamakura. From his stronghold there, once he had expropriated the Taira’s estates (as well as those of the feudal barons who had unwisely allied themselves with that doomed clan), he placed constables or guards (shugo) in each province and district headmen (jito) in every taxable area, thus establishing the financial basis which made it possible for his clan and the clans of his allies to maintain military forces in a permanent condition of professional readiness. The period during which his clan ruled the country (through a succession of military leaders) is known as the Kamakura period and lasted from 1185 to 1333. The ancient system of landownership, characterized by the myoden and the shoen and based upon a chain of owner-manager-tenant-laborer, became more military in structure and function. The members of the new territorial units controlled by each clan were expected to be familiar with and practice the use of traditional weapons of combat. The leaders of the clans, naturally, either maintained or assumed for themselves a position of privilege, and this, in time, became despotically absolute and practically unassailable.
When Yoritomo died in 1199, the power held by the Minamoto clan was wielded by the Hojo family, whose members, once vassals of the Taira, had sheltered him in Izu. Rewarded munificently by him, they proved to be exceptional statesmen during the troubled Kamakura period, maneuvering skillfully to crush a revolt of the nobility in 1221, reorganizing the selection of emperors and the election of domestic court officials, redistributing confiscated lands to loyal barons, issuing one of the first feudal codes of law (the Joei Shikimoku), reorganizing the administrative and fiscal machinery of the state, rallying the clans against the Mongols in 1274 and 1281, developing the arts and literature (mostly epic and martial), and promoting the Zen school of Buddhism, whose austere simplicity of thought and action was to prove so congenial to the pragmatic soul of the warrior.
The efforts against the Mongols, however, badly depleted the financial resources of the feudal barons, and a new era of rearrangement of existing landownership began: merchants were forbidden to press for repayment of loans made to warriors; new and old lands were forcefully appropriated by state officials who appointed themselves owners of the territories formerly in their charge; and strong military landowners expanded and aggrandized their estates at the expense of their weaker neighbors. In this age of disorder, Emperor Godaigo tried to rally dissatisfied barons against the military government of Kamakura. After several attempts and with the help of Takauji of the Ashikaga clan (orginally sent against him by the Kamakura authorities), Godaigo was successful to a degree in restoring imperial power in 1334.
The following year, however, Takauji drove him out of Kyoto, set on the throne a member of a rival branch of the family, and established his own military dictatorship during an era referred to as the Ashikaga period (1336-1568). Throughout this age, internecine warfare was again rampant, clans fighting among themselves, torn between the Southern Court of Godaigo in the region of Yoshino and the Northern Court of Takauji’s puppet emperors. New centers of provincial power began to emerge as the long-established feudal barons (repeating the historical mistake which had cost the emperor and the nobility their territoral empires long before) lost contact with their fiefs while maneuvering for power in the capital. In this age, the cherished ethos of clan loyalty to the immediate superior, which was to be so emphatically reasserted in later centuries, was only a pale shadow of what it claimed to be. The opposing principle of inferiors striking superiors (gekokujo) became the inspiration behind many political and military commitments. The farmers’ revolt near Kyoto in 1485, another revolt by farmers led by militant priests from Hongan-ji Temple in Osaka during the same period, and the Onin War (1467-77) finally threw the country into complete chaos, disrupting any attempts at centralized administration and substantially altering the system of land ownership so laboriously constructed during the previous age. Many Western observers in Japan during this period have left vivid descriptions of Japanese behavior as the vertical system of direct loyalty which had held the clan together began to crumble. In his letters, Alessandro Valignano, S.J., (1539-1606) was appalled at the facility with which Japanese vassals began to turn against their lords, or returned to serve former masters only to betray them once again. Joao Rodriguez (1561-1643) also noted the general proclivity to plunder, betray, blackmail, and exterminate ruthlessly, saying that he understood why the average Japanese of the time was eminently distrustful and “always kept his weapons at hand” (Cooper, 31).
At the height of this national chaos, during an age marked by the arrival of the first Europeans (1543) and the consequent introduction of firearms (tanegashima teppo, or iron rods of Tanegashima), there emerged three men of infinitely broader political vision and determination than their compatriots: Oda Nobunaga, Toyotomi Hideyoshi, and Tokugawa Ieyasu.
Oda Nobunaga was the son of an estate manager for the Shiba family—a clan fulfilling the function of provincial constables in Owari province. From this territory, he launched a series of progressive attacks upon all those provincial barons who were feuding among themselves. Already divided, they did not prove difficult to conquer. He eventually reached Kyoto, where, after a brief encounter with the exhausted leaders of the once powerful Ashikaga clan, he closed the period which had borne their name for almost 170 years (1568). His rise to absolute power was interrupted, however, by the application of a stratagem quite popular at the time: treason. He was surrounded unexpectedly by the troops of his vassal Akechi Mitsuhide, who was supposed to be leading those troops to the front. Father Luis Frois, S. J., (1532-97) relates that Nobunaga, although wounded by an arrow as he was washing his hands, seized a naginata and fought mightily against his many attackers until he was totally exhausted. He then “retreated into his chambers and shut the doors” (Cooper, 103). He was either burned alive or forced to commit formal suicide at his Honno-ji headquarters.
One of his most successful generals, Toyotomi Hideyoshi, was of peasant ancestry. He immediately avenged the death of Nobunaga by defeating Akechi’s forces at Yamazaki. Fleeing, Akechi fell into the hands of looting peasants, who promptly murdered him. Hideyoshi then proceeded to conquer the rest of the country, launching swift campaigns in Shikoku (1585), Kyushu (1587), and Odawara (1590). It was Hideyoshi who, in the seventh month, eighth day of Tensho (1588), instigated what the country derisively called the Taiko’s Sword Hunt when he issued the famous decree which disarmed the nation. This decree stated that “the people of the various provinces are strictly forbidden to have in their possession any swords, short swords, bows, spears, firearms or other types of arms” (Tsunoda et al., 329). Hideyoshi admitted quite frankly that widespread possession of weapons made it extremely difficult to collect taxes and tended to “foment uprisings.”
He was on his way to Korea when he died, and the powerful Tokugawa clan (allies of his and of Nobunaga before him) immediately moved to assume the title and power of the regency. The leader of this clan, the astute Ieyasu, eliminated any possible contenders—including Hideyoshi’s son, Hideyori, whom he had formally promised to protect. With the successful outcome of a series of battles culminating in the Sekigahara slaughter in 1600 and the Osaka siege in 1615, Ieyasu became the Seii Taishogun of Japan. His clan and its military dictatorship were to determine the course of Japanese history for 267 years, until political power was nominally restored to the emperor in 1868 and Japan began its rapid but painful transition from a feudal to a modern state.
At the end of the Momoyama period (1600), however, Ieyasu had inherited an exhausted but still heavily fortified Japan. The landscape was dotted with castles and fortifications of every possible size and style, which the provincial warlords had erected wherever it was feasible to station garrisons of warriors. Every strategic site which afforded a superior defense against armed attack and an optimum position for controlling the movements of people and goods had been well fortified. Castles were erected at the top of a small mountain (yamajiro, sanjo), or on the hill between a mountain and a plain (hirayamajiro, hirasanjo), as well as on the plain itself (hirajiro, hirajo). Military clans had constructed castles and established garrisons in major towns, near important temples and shrines (monzen-machi), at highway intersections (shukuba-machi) and markets (ichiba-machi), near ports and sea inlets (minato-machi), etc., thus forming that typical balance between military protection and exploitation on one side and commercial productivity on the other, which was also the salient characteristic of those medieval Japanese castle-towns (jokamachi) which had actually sprung up around a feudal lord’s manor.
In structure, the castle of feudal times had evolved into a sophisticated and, eventually, practically impregnable fortress. It was generally designed as a series of “concentric compounds isolated from each other by ramparts, moats, or walls” (Kirby, 12), and comprised such an intricate network of courts and passages that if one compound were lost to an invader, it could be recaptured from either side or totally cut off without substantially weakening the defensive strength of the other compounds. The approaches to its fortified perimeter were protected by excavations filled with water, by ditches, by swamps, or by a combination of all three. Water-filled moats (hori), as Kirby relates, were considered “the best guarantee against penetration.” Earthen walls (doi) or stone walls (ishigaki) rose massively from that first defensive line, offering only two major openings—the heavily fortified main gate (otemon) and the equally strong but smaller rear gate (karamete), both usually constructed of large timbers, plated with copper or iron, and densely studded with large nails. The passages within, linking one courtyard to another and each compound to the next, were usually designed in such fashion as to lead through cleverly arranged double gates (masugata) in which one gate was set at right angles to the second, allowing room enough between them to contain (and control from the sides and from above) only a certain number of people—which Hideyoshi had decided should never exceed a maximum of 240 warriors or forty cavalrymen.
The castle compounds (kuruwa) were generally composed of three units: the main section in the center (hommaru), surrounded by the second section (ninomaru), and then the third section (sannomaru) of fortifications, containing respectively the main tower and residences of the warlords, the storerooms, and the living quarters of the garrison. All of these were elongated structures integrated into massive walls, with doors and passageways on the inner side and openings on the outer. The openings (sama) were of different sizes and angles according to the weapons employed to repel an invader at that point. Rectangular openings for arrows (yasama), circular, triangular, or square for guns (tepposama), and, later, large oval openings for cannons (taihosama) were widely distributed among other chute-like ducts (ishiotoshi), trapdoors which opened wide to send huge stones crashing down upon the heads of foes beneath.
Towers (yagura) rose from these compounds. They consisted of structures containing three or more levels, heavily fortified, with the uppermost functioning primarily as an observation post or, in times of peace, as a spot for contemplating the moon or performing ritual suicide, depending upon the circumstances. These towers were located at the most strategic points: on the outer compounds, toward the northern (kitanomaru) and the western (nishinomaru) sides of the horizon; at the corners of the compounds (sumiyagura); in the center, where they were given the poetic name of “guardian of the sky” (tenshu-kaku) or, more prosaically, the “keep” (tsunemaru), because this point represented the final defensive position against invading forces (Yazaki, 105).
Yazaki also tells us that a vast network of supporting fortresses, auxiliary castles (shijo, edashiro), and smaller outposts (hajiro) were constructed to form a wide, defensive line that encircled and protected the boundary line of a provincial domain and its base castle (honjo, nejiro). Military outposts of smaller size and abbreviated function confronted one at the most unexpected places and were generally identified by their primary purpose, such as boundary surveillance (sakameshiro), watchpost (banteshiro), communication (tsutaenoshiro), and attack (mukaishiro). It is recorded that the Lord of Obi, head of the Ito clan, had forty-eight forts grouped around his castle in Hyuga province—but the Uesugi clan topped even this with 120 forts surrounding their three major castles.
Encased in this vast network of fortifications, lorded over by fiercely independent clans of warriors, the larger masses of commoners were, for all intents and purposes, imprisoned. By the time Ieyasu consolidated his power over the country, the warriors had assumed those professional characteristics which he was to acknowledge formally and embody in the law of the land. Their ranks were arranged vertically in strata descending, by order of importance and wealth, from the daimyo, who was often the heir of a former provincial protector or caretaker, to the upper ranks of his warriors (kyunin), who possessed their own estates, to the middle ranks of warriors (gokenin,jikan), subordinated to the kyunin, and then to the lower ranks of foot soldiers (ashigaru), with their cohorts (chugen) and servants. Beneath all of these, in the provincial territories, labored the large masses of farmers, bound to the land and carefully watched. In the larger towns, the civilian population had developed several professional classes which seemed to consist primarily of a number of ruling landlords, wealthy wholesalers, and moneylenders, who lorded it over the various guilds and corporations of merchants, craftsmen, and farmers tied to the productive land around the towns. Below these were apprentices, tenant-farmers, and servants in near-slavery. At the bottom of this social stratification were entertainers, porters, foreigners, the destitute, and, below even these groups and outside society, the unmentionable outcasts (eta). All these classes, with all their categories and ranks, which were to play a part in the evolution of bujutsu, confronted the first shogun of the Tokugawa clan.
The Military Structure of Tokugawa Society: The Shogun
Ieyasu established his central government in Edo, a small hamlet transformed into a prosperous town in 1456 by a son of the provincial governor of Tamba, Ota Dokan (1432-86), and destined one day to become Tokyo, the “Eastern Capital” of the nation. With the first leader of the Tokugawa clan “an age of disorderly splendor and democratic promise” ended (Cole, 46), and the nation saw the major social divisions of the Ashikaga (Muromachi) and Momoyama periods congeal into a rigid system of class separation clearly defined by the new laws of the land and strictly enforced by the new aristocrats on horseback.
In all their laws and regulations, Ieyasu and his direct descendants sought to establish guidelines for the creation and preservation of a stable national structure. These guidelines defined the primary morality of public and private subjects, established the agencies that fostered that morality throughout the entire national body, and punished transgressors. This primary morality was clearly based upon public rapport between master and subordinate, which was then reflected in the private rapport between father and son. The former determined the shape and functionality of the major social organizations of Tokugawa society: the various classes and the clans within each class, in a descending order of hierarchical subordination. The latter determined the composition and function of the basic unit of any society: the family. This morality, inherited from China and reinforced by her scholars throughout the ages, had evolved in Japan into an essential motivation of national purpose and function—nay, of national existence and, in times of crisis, of actual survival. In feudal Japan, there was no more despicable crime than that of rebellion against a master (or father); and no series of punishments, inflicted cumulatively according to the dictates of the penal code (Kujikata Osadamegaki), was considered harsh enough to erase the deed or even atone for it. As Yazaki tells us, “The heaviest penalties were given those who violated the master-subordinate relationship, so essential to maintaining the feudal system.” In the fifty-third section of his Legacy, Ieyasu proclaims:
The guilt of a vassal murdering his suzerain is in principle the same as that of an arch-traitor to the Emperor. His immediate companions, his relations—all even to his most distant connections—shall be cut off, hewn to atoms, root and fibre. The guilt of a vassal only lifting his hand against his master, even though he does not assassinate him, is the same. (Hearn, 347-48)
Upon this base the Tokugawa elevated that social structure which sealed the subjects of the nation into classes according to a vertical order of pragmatic importance, drawing heavily upon the military character and strength of the warriors to whom all other subjects were subordinated.
The previous ages had witnessed the beginning of that process of social selection and specialization which the Tokugawa practically confirmed, once they had positioned their class above all others and their clan at the summit of the social pyramid. A body of laws and regulations emanated from the new government from time to time, defining and clarifying divisions of class, function, and rapport within the national body politic. From 1615 onward, laws specifically determining the legal positions and functions of the imperial court and its aristocratic families (Kuge Sho-hatto), of the military class (Buke Sho-hatto), of the religious orders (Jin-hatto), of the farmers (Goson-hatio), of commoners in Edo and, by analogy, in every other town (Edo-machiju-sadame) were issued by the military government of the Tokugawa shogun. Guidelines covering police administration, the penal codes, and the judicial procedures were published in a series (Kujikata Osadamegaki), and agencies were created to insure that these laws and regulations would be observed—any infractions being swiftly and mercilessly dealt with.
The society which emerged during the Tokugawa period as a result of the reorganization effected by the Edo government was structurally arranged as illustrated in chart 3. There were a series of classes, which, in the order of their importance, included the military class at the apex (buke), with its professional warriors and their families (shi, bushi); followed by the agricultural class (no), with its peasants or farmers (hyakusho); the industrial class (ko), which consisted mainly of artisans (shokunin); and the commercial class (sko), represented by merchants (akindo, chonin).
It is interesting to note the continuation of a fundamental attachment to this feudal division even after the power to rule had been nominally restored to the emperor in 1868 and Japan had officially become a “modern” state. The laws issued in 1869, for example, replaced the feudal system of the buke with a “new” order listing court nobility and feudal barons (daimyo) as aristocrats (kazoku), the warriors or former samurai as gentry (shizoku), and lumping all the other subjects of the nation (such as farmers, artisans, merchants, and even outcast groups) under the single qualification of commoners (heimin).
Under the Tokugawa, the titular emperor and his court nobles were forced to live in virtual seclusion in Kyoto. There they were kept under continual, direct surveillance by appointed officials of the Edo government, and their financial affairs were strictly regulated in such a fashion as to deprive them of the necessary means of rallying dissenting clans to their banner or of subsidizing independent forces of their own. Their political relevance thus became almost nil, although their excellence in the cultural achievements of the age continued to be encouraged and widely admired. As related by Webb, the main outline of Tokugawa policy in regard to the emperor was that of, on the one hand, rescuing him from the depths of utter destitution into which he had fallen during the previous age of continuous warfare, while, on the other hand, simultaneously isolating him to insure his continuing political irrelevance. As this author so aptly expressed it: “Though Ieyasu may be said to have constructed a prison and housed emperors there, it was a prison that had all the dignity and splendor of a cathedral” (Webb, 58).
Kept under equally strict surveillance after their ranks had been decimated during the Ashikaga (Muromachi) and Momoyama periods, forbidden to gather together ever again to form those large communities which had proved so uncontrollable in the past, the priests and monks of the various religious sects of feudal Japan formed another class, relegated almost exclusively to spiritual and educational dimensions.
As for the commoners (heimin) who formed by far the largest and the most productive segments of the nation,
however rich they were or however wise and intelligent they were, whether they wished or not, [they] had almost no political right whatsoever. Their condition is summed up by Mr. Dickins in his “Life of Sir Henry Parkes,” in the following words: “The people were scarcely items, politically speaking, in old Japan. Their business was to grow, make, carry, multiply and—above all—pay taxes.” (Hayashi, 70)
During the reign of the Tokugawa clan, the military class formed “an immense standing army” numbering “over 400,000 families.” In Brinkley’s words: “It was an exceptionally costly army, for the families of the samurai had to be maintained as well as the samurai themselves; and the officers, that is to say, the feudal nobles and their chief vassals, enjoyed revenues far in excess of any emoluments ever accounted elsewhere on account of military service” (Brinkley1, 116). The country was divided officially into provinces and districts, over which the Tokugawa exercised the powers of military government and fiscal control, either directly through special agencies or indirectly through the provincial lords (daimyo) of certain powerful military clans who had been appointed or reconfirmed as regional governors by the Tokugawa after 1600. These provinces irradiated like spokes from the political center of the nation, Edo, where the shogun resided with his government and the cohorts of warriors under his direct command. The size and location of each province depended upon the political importance of the governor appointed by the Tokugawa to rule there: governors belonging to clans unswervingly loyal to the Tokugawa were positioned closer to the center, while those considered less trustworthy were relegated to provinces further away, at the periphery of the kingdom.
The central part of Japan, including the Kanto Plain on the East and the old capital in the West, was held directly by the Tokugawa themselves, by various branches of the family, and by the feudal lords and warriors who had backed Ieyasu in the great battle for supremacy in 1600. This central area was strategically the heart of the country. It contained most of the larger plains and most of the best agricultural land of Japan, and also a large proportion of the commercial towns and cities. (Reischauer1, 81)
The shogun ruled supreme from Edo over all these territories. His government, in accordance with the military traditions of the class he represented, was called bakufu—a denomination which, as previously noted, was the ancient name for the generalissimo’s headquarters or tent on the battlefield during the Kamakura period. This term was used until the Restoration to designate the headquarters of successive dynasties of Tokugawa leaders.
The shogun resided in a mighty castle in Edo—a vivid contrast to the dwelling place of the emperor in Kyoto. As described by Brinkley, the shogun’s immense fortress was surrounded by a triple barrier of huge moats, “the outermost measuring nine and a half miles in length, the innermost one and a half, their scarps built up with colossal blocks of granite” (Brinkley1, 10).
Even the gardens inside these walls, with their sophisticated grace intended to be reminiscent of Heian culture, could not conceal the military nature of the roads and paths leading to the central buildings. They constituted a veritable labyrinth whose pattern was a heavily guarded secret, and they passed beneath bridges or were lined with bastions in such a way as to expose any unwelcome guests, regardless of their number, to a concentrated attack with bows and arrows, cross-bows, or firearms. Rodrigo de Vivero y Velasco (1564-1636), who visited this castle in 1609, remarked upon its huge moats with their openings for guns, its massive drawbridge and ramparts. At the first gate he passed through two thousand warriors armed with harquebuses (guns with hooks) and muskets, divided into two ranks. At the second gate stood four hundred warriors armed with pikes and lances; three hundred more, armed with the curved spear (naginata), stood at the third gate. The same author relates that the armories of this enormous military compound contained enough armors, spears, swords, and muskets “to equip one hundred thousand men” (Cooper, 141).
According to Yazaki, the construction of this elaborate stronghold began before 1607 and was completed in 1639 under Iemitsu, third shogun of the Tokugawa clan. Lavishly furnished, its central sector covered 181.4 acres. Moreover, it could easily accommodate, in the splendor to which they had become accustomed, “over 260 daimyo, together with 50,000 standard-bearers if necessary” (Yazaki, 177).
Oda Nobunaga had realized that the numerous fortifications scattered all over Japan represented a basic challenge to the attempt of any lord or clan to attain national supremacy. Each castle, in fact, formed a base of operations not only for defensive purposes but, more importantly, for launching invasions or revolts. Nobunaga, therefore, issued directives (ikkoku-ichijorei) ordering all provincial lords who had sworn allegiance to him to see to it that there should be “but one central castle in each province” (Yazaki, 129); all other fortresses and outposts were to be dismantled promptly. Ieyasu implemented the edict during the Genna era (1615-24) with a thoroughness that left most provincial lords without any defensive castle (shiro-kengo), leaving them only “provincial strongholds” (tokoro-kengo). In relation to himself and his most loyal warlords, however, as the records would seem to indicate, the edict was not applicable.
Of all the warriors concentrated in Edo, almost one-half were kept in a state of constant readiness under the direct command of the shogun. They were called “direct retainers” of the bakufu (bakushin) and were divided into two major categories: the hatamoto and the gokenin. The other half (baishiri) included warriors from all the provincial clans who served their lords in the capital, or waited upon the shogun after having been delegated to him by their lords for specific duties or a certain period of time.
The title of hatamoto is generally translated as “banner knight” or “standard-bearer,” and it was traditionally assigned to personal bodyguards of the military commander who rode with him and protected him in battle. The Tokugawa assigned this title to retainers (okunishu) who had served Ieyasu when he was still Lord of Mikawa, as well as to retainers who had pledged their loyalty to him after he had left that province (kingokushu) or after he had settled in Edo (kantoshu). It was also bestowed by the Tokugawa upon descendants of families of illustrious lineage or “men of exceptional learning and skill” (Yazaki, 202). These hatamoto constituted a “petty nobility” of a sort, whose members served as officials (yakukata) in the deliberative and executive agencies of government or as castle guards (bankata).
In the former capacity, they occupied such important positions as commissioners of finance (kanjobugyo), town magistrates (machi-bugyo), grand censors (o-metsuke) in charge of surveillance of the various daimyo, censors (metsuke) supervising their own ranks, and officers (hyojosho-tomariyaku) carrying out the decisions of higher commissioners of the bakufu. They had the privilege of maintaining watch over the grounds and gates of the shogun’s castle, which they patrolled regularly in five groups of hatamoto and subalterns (banshi). Organized into professional groups (yoriai-gumi), they lived in or around the central Edo compound, supporting themselves on incomes geared to the rank each occupied within the category—ranging from five hundred to ten thousand koku yearly, paid to them directly from the shogun’s warehouses. In 1722, according to Tsukahira, they numbered 5,205. Regardless of the difference in their ranks and functions, they soon became an elite devoted ferociously to the shogun, extremely jealous of their prerogatives and enormously powerful.
The title gokenin is variously translated as “honorable member of the household,” “inferior vassal,” or “household member.” In the Kamakura period, it was assigned to warrior leaders who had pledged their loyalty to a warlord. The title was used in Muromachi times to identify vassals of warrior leaders of kyunin rank and, finally, was applied to Tokugawa retainers who were granted fiefs of less than a hundred koku. Unlike the hatamoto, the gokenin did not enjoy the privilege of direct audience with the shogun but could be promoted, for excellent service and exceptional merit, to hatamoto. They also resided in and around the Edo castle and constituted another, larger category of armed men ready to be moved into battle at any time. In 1722, there were over seventeen thousand registered gokenin.
The medieval chronicles of Japan are filled with the exploits of these special “guards,” who came to consider themselves the new military aristocracy of Edo. They were envied by all the warriors affiliated with provincial clans, and their privileged position as retainers linked to the most powerful clan in feudal Japan (which gave them easier access to offices of control throughout the land) made them generally insufferable. In particular, their familiarity with the offices of censorship and positions as secret inspectors (metsuke) caused them to be feared by all. Proud and always suspicious of people’s motives, they were quick to take offense; the chronicles relate many cases of armed clashes in Edo between the hatamoto and the warriors of provincial clans, between the latter and the gokenin, and even between the hatamoto and the gokenin.
It is interesting to note that, when the restoration of power to the emperor in Kyoto was formally declared by edict in 1867, cohorts of “banner knights,” large numbers of “house vassals,” and warriors of clans loyal to the Tokugawa began immediately to move from Osaka toward Kyoto with the intention of suppressing that which, to their eyes, was a treacherous revolt against the shogunate, which had ruled the land and guaranteed their exalted titles for over two hundred years. They were crushed in battle at Toba and Fushimi by the imperial forces, formally declared enemies of the emperor, and forced to retreat to Edo. Finally, in 1868, by order of the shogun himself (who had fled the besieged city), they surrendered. Eventually, most of these once proud representatives of martial prowess and power had to abandon their mansions in Edo, release their own retainers, and either return to their regional country fiefs (if these had not been confiscated) or engage in commercial enterprises.
In Tokugawa times, at the height of their privileged careers, both the hatamoto and the gokenin lived in mansions to the west and north of the shogun’s castle in Edo. This castle, with all its magnificent splendor, was actually a huge military enclave whose inner moats surrounded the mansions of the more powerful warlords of those clans faithful to the shogun. Chieftains of lower category and rank had establishments closer to the periphery of this enormous site, but still within an area protected by the outer moats. Those direct vassals who had been allowed or ordered to establish residences and observation posts outside Edo were generally within a day’s traveling distance from the castle and thus able to answer promptly any summons from the shogun, whatever the time or season.
The deliberative structure of the Tokugawa government, as illustrated in Chart 4, consisted of the following major agencies: often presided over by a Grand Elder (tairo), a council of four or five Elders (roju), who were selected from among the most powerful daimyo of the fudai category who owned their own castles; a council of Younger Elders (waka-doshiyori), also selected from the fudai daimyo, but who did not possess castles of their own; the commissioners of temples and shrines (jisha-bugyo); the commissioners of finances (kanjo-bugyo); the town magistrates (machi-bugyo), who formed the supreme court of justice (hyojosho); and the powerful censors (metsuke), presided over by the Grand Censor (o-metsuke). Under these agencies were positioned a vast and differentiated body of executives embracing the previously mentioned hatamoto and gokenin, the tax collectors (daikan), and the police forces. The latter were in charge of the Edo districts and consisted of guards (yoriki), policemen (doshin), patrollers (okappiki), and official supervisors who controlled points of major and minor passage within the city. Supervisors of military residences (tsujiban) were further divided according to their area of surveillance: supervisors of hatamoto districts (kumiai-tsujiban), supervisors of daimyo districts (daimyo-tsujiban), and direct supervisors of the government (kogi-tsujiban). The civilian districts had their own supervisors (jishimban) and gate-watchmen (bantaro) who closed the gates at the end of each street in the town at 10 P.M., after which no one was allowed to pass in or out without official permission.
In 1600, Ieyasu had begun to grant sites in and around Edo to his most trusted vassals and to the provincial governors, who consequently found themselves with two or more official residences. The size of these sites was determined on the basis of the tsubo, a measurement equivalent to approximately 36 square feet, and the sites could range from 90,000 square feet for lower-ranking feudal lords to 252,000 square feet for the highest ranking and most powerful among them.
Leaders of the loyal military cohorts of the shogun lived in splendid, fortified mansions within the city proper and scattered throughout the countryside surrounding it. All daimyo had to maintain mansions in Edo, where they were required to remain in residence in alternate years and where the members of their immediate families (wives, sons, etc.) had to remain whenever the governors visited their fiefs. These mansions (yashiki) were generally built in accordance with the ancient military design of the encampment—with the general’s tent in the middle, surrounded by those of his officers and, at the outer limits, those of the warriors. The provincial castles of feudal Japan also followed this basic blueprint, with the stronghold in the middle and the warriors’ barracks surrounding it placed near the outer walls.
In Edo, the private mansions consisted of a modified version of that design, with a long, uninterrupted building (nagaya) so constructed as to enclose the garden and the central palace of the feudal lord. That building, with strong walls on the side facing the street and rows of fortified windows, contained the retainers’ barracks and their armories. Facing the main street was the central gate (o-mon, omote-mon), whose huge, armored portals opened wide only on great occasions. Normal traffic was handled through smaller side-doors (the front gate [tsuyo-mon], the back gate [ura-mon], and the smaller posterns called hijo-mon, yojinguchi and kuguri), all of which opened into a yard lined with guard-rooms, which were
ornamented with bows and arrows, lances, firearms, and staves with iron-heads studded with spikes, serving as grappling irons wherewith to seize and disarm any unwelcome intruder. Whenever a retainer passed out, he hung up in the guard-room the wooden ticket, inscribed with his name, which he always carried at his girdle; on his return to the yaskiki this ticket was restored to him. By this means the porters could tell at a glance how many retainers were absent on leave at any time. (Mc-Clatchie1, 171)
The nagaya surrounded the inner barracks (naka-nagaya) which sheltered other troops and included storehouses, as well as buildings assigned to those higher officials who managed the clan’s affairs for their lord. These inner-houses, both in Edo and in the provinces, contained the
residences for the councillors (karo), the commercial agent (yonin), the representative of the lord during his absence (rusui), the financial officer (kanjo bugiyo), the building officer (sakuji bugiyo), and the doctor (isha). In the great clans, the number of these officers was considerable, but in the yashiki of the lower daimyo and of the hatamoto there were frequently fewer officers. (McClatchie 1, 172)
A paved way led from the main gate to the entrance of the main building, the residence (go-den) of the lord, which selected retainers kept under strict surveillance day and night. These retainers “were the only vassals (with the exception of a few pages to attend on the lord) who were permitted to pass the night in the go-den. All others, including even the cooks and the scullions, had quarters allotted to them in the nagaya, and came over early in the morning to resume their duties” (McClatchie1, 173).
At the beginning of the Tokugawa period, a site for a single mansion in Edo was granted to each daimyo, in addition to the one he had in the provinces. With the passing of time, however, as ostentatious display and parasitic inactivity began to erode the stern military virtues of the past, many lords began to acquire three or more “chief mansions” (kami-yashiki), in addition to their urban and suburban middle (nakayashiki) and lower (shimo-yashiki) mansions, and a variety of summer residences both large (besso) and small (kakae-yashiki).
Until 1868, according to Brinkley, so many of these “ominous” yashiki, with their extensive nagaya, lined the streets of Edo and
such a multitude of their inmates were to be met striding along, a pair of razor-edged swords in their girdles and the pride of arms in their mien, that for all the pretty parks and dainty mansions of the nobles, for all the disguise of soft sward and tender-sprayed pines that overlay the grimness of the central castle’s battlements, Edo could never be mistaken for [other than] what it was, the citadel of a military system embracing all the warlike resources of a battle-loving nation. (Brinkley1, 13)
The basic problem confronting the Tokugawa rulers of feudal Japan was that of controlling the whole in order to control its parts, and vice-versa. As early as 1636, Japanese subjects were expressly forbidden by law to leave the country or, once having left, ever to return to its shores—the penalty being death in either case. Having thus effectively sealed off Japan from the international community, its rulers enforced a system of rigid separation of each province from all the others, insisting that even within the individual provinces the movement of various subjects in and around their villages and towns be severely limited or, if necessary and authorized, strictly controlled. The main land routes, known as the “Five Roads” (gokaido), and the roads linking the provinces were kept under constant surveillance. Garrisons with special inspectors were placed at barriers (sekisho) strategically located along these routes. At each barrier, every traveler was required to present a pass (sekisho-fuda), issued by his or her territorial superiors, before being allowed to continue his or her journey. This pass was known as the sekisho-tegata for men and the onna-tegata for women. At these barriers, women were subject to particular scrutiny, as Statler points out in his Japanese Inn. Their value to the shogun as hostages was incalculable, and each woman’s onna-tegata minutely specified her position in society (widow, wife, prostitute, etc.) and her physical appearance so as to prevent misrepresentation through disguise, of which the Japanese of the period were masters. Each woman was given a physical examination by officials of her own sex, and the results were closely compared to the description inscribed on her onna-tegata. If any discrepancy was noted, she might be detained for days until the case could be decided in Edo.
The history of Japan contains descriptions of several famous incidents that took place at the Hakone barrier on the Eastern Sea Route (Tokaido) between Kyoto and Edo, as well as at the Fukushima barrier on the Middle Route (Nakasendo). The essential objective of this system was obviously to control the daimyo, their women, and their weapons, since both “outgoing women and incoming guns” (de-onna ni iri-deppo), as we read in Tsukahira, “were seen as the necessary first steps in any attack upon the shogunate” (51). The daimyo were, in fact, subject to the most stringent system of control imaginable. It was, moreover, so effective a system that the decentralizing and separatistic tendencies of certain daimyo (especially those ruling clans positioned far from Edo) were repressed for over two hundred years and had to wait for a fortuitous convergence of favorable circumstances—the “coming of the barbarians” in 1853 and the weakening of the Tokugawa government from within—before they could reassert themselves.
The methods devised to achieve full control over these important upper echelons of the buke are illustrated in the following section. The shogun exercised the full power of a military dictator over the masses inhabiting the provinces under his direct supervision and also, through the daimyo, over the masses in the other provinces of the country. Farmers were registered in their villages and forbidden to leave their assigned places. Merchants and artisans in the towns and large provincial centers had to be duly registered with appropriate guilds or corporations (za), whose officials had the duty and the responsibility of maintaining tight control over their members and keeping the higher authorities informed concerning any developments of an “uncommon” nature among their membership. The warriors themselves were tightly supervised through a chain of direct superiors linked to one another vertically by the legal institution of vassalage established through an oath of allegiance and loyalty to a clan, house, or individual, and duly registered by the official keepers of records. As in Edo, control over the movement of commoners in metropolitan centers all over Japan was maintained through the installation of special gates across the intersections of every two streets. These gates were supervised by special officers of the daimyo who checked the passes of anyone trying to move from one ward to another at night when the gates were closed, or during the day, for that matter, if the individual in question was not known to the ward officials.
The penalties for unauthorized movement and other crimes were exceptionally harsh and (much to the surprise of Western observers, but quite in keeping with the principle of collective responsibility typical of the clan culture) involved not only the guilty party but his entire family.
Penalties were of two types: the heavier penalties ranged from public admonition to confinement, public flogging, expatriation, and execution; the lighter ones included penalties such as public exposure, tattooing, confiscation of property, and reduction in class or rank. In accordance with the primary division in classes, punishment was inflicted with differing rituals and in varying measures according to the rank of the criminal, with the warriors bearing the heaviest brunt of the penal code for any infractions, which were seen as a direct insult to the system they represented and were expected to uphold.
In examining the primary morality of feudal Japan, we saw that the rapport upon which the whole conception of the state rested was that of master-subordinate. The particular interpretation of Confucianism which the Tokugawa government adopted as its inspirational theory of state was that of Chu Hsi (in Japanese, Shu Ki, 1130-1200), who had stressed the unquestioning and loyal attitude of inferior toward superior. His presentation of Confucian ideas (shushi-gaku or sogaku) became “the theoretical foundation for feudal society” (Goedertier, 273), to the point of forcing the exclusion, by edict (kansei igaku no kin), of heterodox learning from the state schools.
Shushi-gaku emphasized the concepts of vertical hierarchy and stern pragmatism in discharging the duties assigned by one’s superior within the hierarchy. There was no mention of social preeminence based upon personal merit rather than heredity, nor was the conception of social justice impartially and broadly applied (to everyone, including the emperor and shogun) a part of this interpretation. This version of Confucian theory concerning government and society was to spark a revival of interest in Chinese studies and give birth to a school of thought which was not necessarily favorable to the military dictators. In the main, however, and for quite an extended period of time, this interpretation confirmed the shoguns’ position and justified their consolidation of power. It also provided material for the clearer formulation of the warrior’s “creed” (bukyo) and the samurai’s “way” (shido)—both of which were to blend harmoniously in that particular code of honor known as “The Way of the Warrior” (bushido).
All these legalistic, philosophical, military, and social devices made it extremely unlikely that anything “unexpected” could happen within the country, in practice as well as in theory, without the Tokugawa being immediately informed. They are said to have acquired “the dubious distinction of being one of the first governments in the world to develop an extensive and efficient secret police system and to make of it an important organ of state. With the centuries of experience in such practices, it is not surprising that the secret police should have loomed so large in the political make-up of Japan in recent years” (Reischauer1, 83-84).
In such a martial culture, there was no place for new ideas or even for ancient but contradictory theories that might have forced a man to confront the problem of personal responsibility, of individual values different from, if not actually contrary to, those of his society. As in every military dictatorship the world has ever known, knowledge was considered a dangerous commodity and its wide dissemination strictly forbidden. Although limited “Dutch studies” (rangaku) were allowed under close official supervision, any breach of the regulations was punishable by death. Not only the members of other classes, but “intrepid samurai, such as Sakuma Shozan, Watanabe Kazan, and Yoshida Shoin, paid with their lives for their desire for wider horizons in knowledge” (Blacker, 305). And even during the declining years of the Tokugawa rule, when the country and its entire social structure groaned and shuddered within the confines of its military bonds, and afterward, when the restoration of political power to the emperor had activated an intense process of adaptation to a frighteningly new international reality, “almost any conceivable obstacle was placed in the way of the aspiring student of Western learning. There were no grammars and few dictionaries; the weight of feudal and Confucian disapproval and even the assassin’s sword was directed against him” (Blacker, 305).
The Daimyo
Immediately beneath the Tokugawa clan in order of importance were the clans headed by the daimyo—“the territorial rulers of self-contained political units called han which were at once minor states and fiefs” (Tsukahira, 18). The word daimyo may be translated as “great names” and seems to have been derived from a combination of dai (great) with myo or myoden (used to identify a rice-producing fief). Notoriously belligerent and generally rapacious, the lords of such estates capable of sustaining them and their military retainers had fought ceaselessly among themselves throughout the early and middle periods of Japan’s feudal era. Only leaders such as Nobunaga, Hideyoshi, and, ultimately, Ieyasu had been able to coerce them into a sort of uneasy alliance wherein their individualistic and expansionistic tendencies were controlled by a severely repressive system of checks and balances. Ieyasu and his descendants were (and remained throughout the succession of Tokugawa dynasties) aware that the downfall of the emperor and his court nobles had, to a large extent, been due to lack of control over the provincial centers of military power, which, however necessary for peacekeeping purposes throughout the realm (as well as that of maintaining the other classes of the nation in a state of subjugation), had become increasingly self-sufficient and, in the end, alienated from the emperor and his nobles.
Due to this lack of centralized control, the feudal “barons” had been able to apply and tighten their stranglehold upon the crown and upon all the other classes of Japanese subjects who stood in their way, thus effectively displacing them all. Eventually, the only obstacle revealed itself to be themselves and their individual ambitions. For the Tokugawa, the feudal governors (from whose ranks they had emerged) were, and always remained, the chief source of trouble since they owned and ruled over independent fiefs, maintained their own cohorts of warriors, and had the necessary wealth to finance armed adventures. It was not only conceivable but, in an age of still rampant political instability and military turbulence, a relevant possibility that these daimyo might, if left to their own devices, increase and organize their own military forces beyond the limits considered advisable by the central government in Edo. Those forces, in turn, might be used to unseat the Tokugawa in accordance with the ancient and famous principle of displacing the superior in order to make room for the inferior (gekokujo)—a principle of political gamesmanship which had become almost commonplace during pre-Tokugawa times and which the Tokugawa themselves had successfully applied on several occasions.
Accordingly, if on one side these daimyo were not only the powerful leaders of military clans, but also the main instruments of indirect control over the country at large, on the other side, as Tsukahira wrote, “it became the chief preoccupation of the early Tokugawa to weaken and divide” them in order to maintain that control. The measures adopted by the Edo bakufu for this purpose were many and thorough. Differences in fief size, income, and rank at the court of the shogun in Edo were established to create artificial barriers among the daimyo, and, naturally, “mutual jealousies and rivalries were kept alive and fostered” (Tsukahira, 27). Continuous and intense surveillance by the shogun’s sinister censors (metsuke) of the various daimyo (when in Edo in periodical attendance, at home in their own territories, or even in transit from one to the other) insured that their activities would be properly assessed by the shogun on a regular and continuing basis. Finally, their obligatory attendance at the shogun’s court every other year, with the concomitant obligation to leave their wives and children in Edo when they returned home, reduced their freedom of action substantially.
The number of daimyo during the Tokugawa period seems to have been about 260. Their status was qualified according to several interconnecting criteria. The first criterion was based upon and determined by the feudal relationship between a daimyo and the shogun himself. Daimyo who were collateral members of the Tokugawa house, for example, were qualified as “related feudatories” (shimpan) or “family daimyo” (kamon). They included the “three exalted families” (sanke), occupied provinces closer to Edo, and held important offices in the central government.
The shimpan daimyo were followed by the “hereditary daimyo” (fudai), who had been vassals of the Tokugawa since before the great and decisive battle of Sekigahara. They also occupied important positions in the bakufu, and their fiefs protectively surrounded the central contiguous territories which were under direct Tokugawa supervision.
The “outside” daimyo (tozama) were those important clan leaders, once peers of Ieyasu, who had acknowledged his title of shogun after the battle of Sekigahara. Their fiefs were generally located beyond those of the fudai.
These major categories were further classified according to other criteria based on the type of territory assigned to each daimyo, his holdings, and the productivity at his disposal. Lords of a province (kunimochi or kokushu), for example, ranked above other lords of less definite territorial stature (jun-kokushu or kunimochi-nami), who were followed, in their turn, by the lords of a castle (josku), by those whose titles were equivalent to that of a lord of a castle (joshu-nami), those without castles (mujo), and the possessors of residences (jinya-mochi, ryoshu). Finally, daimyo were classified according to the seats they were authorized to occupy in an audience with the shogun. These seats, the assembly halls containing them, and the seating arrangement for each category of daimyo are illustrated in Chart 5.
When being invested with the title of daimyo, a subject of this, the highest rank in the buke class under the shogun, had to submit written oaths and swear personal fealty to the shogun. This ritual, and the registration of the oath in the records of the bakufu in Edo, was repeated by each daimyo every time a new Tokugawa leader assumed the title of shogun. With this oath, the daimyo obligated himself to perform a series of duties. Primary among these were his military obligations, such as maintaining his quota of warriors in active service and ready to move into battle at the shogun’s command, whenever needed; he also had to provide troops for guard duty at any station specified by Edo, such as the thirty-six gates of the shogun’s castle, the imperial court at Kyoto, various coastal sites, the barriers and checking points along the highways, and as shogun’s envoys on official missions. Duties of a more administrative nature were those of keeping peace within the territories under their direct control and providing funds, materials, and workers for public projects devised and assigned by the shogun (tetsudai).
In relation to their fiefs, each of these feudal lords “was a paternalistic but absolute monarch. . . . Aiding him in his rule over the soldiers, peasants, and merchants of the principality was a class of officials and military officers, who formed the little court at the central castle of the daimyo and lived on the hereditary salaries he assigned them and their families” (Reischauer1, 77).
He exercised judicial and administrative control over his subjects and supervised them through the use of cohorts of warriors that, while belonging to one or more military clans, were pledged to him as the uji-no-osa and as the rightful representative of the shogun. Very seldom, however, was a military governor sent to rule over military clans not related to him, either directly or indirectly, by ties of blood, territory, or sworn oath.
The warriors who served under the daimyo in his fief were also organized into a vertical system of categories and ranks which varied from clan to clan, from region to region. Some of his retainers, called tachikaeri, followed him anywhere he went or resided, whether in his fief or in Edo; others (jofu) remained permanently in Edo with their lord’s and their own families, as guards of his mansion in the capital; and still others (kimmuban) were rotated periodically to fill the various clan offices in the provinces and in Edo.
One example of a large and complex clan ruling in the provinces after the Tokugawa’s rise to power is provided by the clan of Yamanouchi Kazutoyo, who was sent by Ieyasu to rule as daimyo over Tosa in the Shikoku Islands. This province had formerly belonged to the Chosokabe clan, whose members (unfortunately for them) had opposed the Tokugawa and had subsequently been dispossessed of the estates they had taken from the Ichijo clan. Following the classic pattern of vertical hierarchy, the Yamanouchi clan was structured like a pyramid (see Chart 6). At the top was the daimyo, with his advisory and administrative cabinet of superintendents (bugyo). He owned the best and most productive land (kura) in the province. This land was divided into large classes of territories such as honden, prime, original land which had been cultivated for ages, and shinden, land cleared for cultivation after his appointment as governor of the province. He also supervised and granted tenure to new but secondary lands, such as the yaguchi, cleared by retainers of samurai rank, and the ryochi, cleared by retainers of goshi rank. All these lands were variously classified as central lands of the clan or “house-lands” (yashiki); as rice-fields (ta); as up-lands (hata), usually reserved for the cultivation of wheat, barley, vegetables, etc.; as pasture or grasslands (hara); as virgin-lands, forests, woods; and so on.
Under the provincial governor of Tosa were two classes of retainers. The first was the class of the karo or Elder Councillors. These retainers were semi-independent, owned their own lands, ruled over their own villages and farmers who paid taxes directly to them, and commanded their own warriors. The karo, whom Grinnan rightly qualified as “under-lords,” were very powerful and usually paid no taxes to the daimyo. Although they were required to provide the governor with troops when he needed them, this was done only after they had cleared the daimyo’s request with the central government (bakufu) in Edo. Naturally, they were “the subject of jealous concern to the daimyo,” but their effectiveness in checking his political ambition and power within the boundaries of his assigned province proved itself again and again during the Tokugawa period.
The second class of retainers consisted of warriors who owed allegiance directly to the provincial governor. They were called shihaku or samurai, and their cohorts were also divided into several ranks, each with its own prerogatives, privileges, duties, and income. In the first category of direct retainers were the churo, who had the right to wear the two swords (daisho) and to ride on horseback “in time of peace and of war.” They were not paid in rice but in prime land from the honden or shinden of the daimyo—land which was capable of producing the quantity of rice their position entitled them to. These lands, known as chigyo, gave to their owners the title of jikata-tori. In the second category of direct retainers were the uma-mawari warriors, some of whom were paid in land and some in rice, while in the third and largest category we find the koshogumi, who were paid in rice produced on the daimyo’s kura, according to the rice system of income (kokuso). All these warriors had the right to wear the two swords, but only some of them were permitted to ride horses. In the third category were also those retainers who were paid in rice but not according to the rice system of income; their emoluments were usually referred to as fuchi-kippu.
The provincial governor of Tosa also commanded the loyalty of two other classes of warriors, known as goshi and keikaku. The goshi, or “country-warriors,” were ancient retainers (kerai) of the defeated Chosokabe clan who were left “in undisputed possession of the lands they had received from their former masters” because they had submitted “gracefully” to the new masters appointed by the Tokugawa. Grin-nan qualified the position of these goshi as being “unique in the annals of Japanese feudalism,” and their number, naturally, was quite limited. They also owned lands and horses (which they had the right to ride), wore the daisho, or two swords, fought in wars, could dispose of their own property—although if they sold all their lands they lost their titles, and in any case could transmit their titles only to a firstborn heir. It is interesting to note that after the Meiji Restoration, while most of the daimyo appointed by the Tokugawa had to return their estates to the new central government of the emperor, the goshi were allowed to retain their holdings because their titles had not been granted them by the Tokugawa. Below these country warriors, finally, was a class of retainers known as keikaku, or “country gentry,” who were paid in rice, wore two swords but possessed no horses, and generally lived far from the provincial castle at the outskirts of cities or country towns, “within a day’s call” of the daimyo’s main residence.
Describing the Okudaira clan of Nakatsu, Fukuzawa gives us an idea of stratification of functions and denominations in an average-size clan (see Chart 7). The Okudaira clan, in fact, consisted of about 1,500 men entitled to wear the daisho, or two swords. They were divided into two categories, upper and lower—the former being “about one third the size of the latter.” In the upper category of warriors (kyunin) were included the chief minister, chamberlain, steward, Confucian scholars, physicians, and retainers of first rank (koshogumi), as well as “a body of attendants on the daimyo consisting especially of boys who had not yet come of age.” The lower category of warriors (kachi) included the calligraphers and accountants who discharged the duties of administrators and bookkeepers for the clan; the daimyo’s attendants who always escorted him, bearing his swords (tomokosho); and others such as the armorers, stable boys, grooms (nakakosho), the large cohorts of palace guards (koyakunin), and the foot soldiers (ashigaru). Beneath these we find lightly armed troops, such as the kogashira, led by chugen.
Finally, the daimyo owed the shogun the service of attendance, which was officially described as “the duty of attendance upon the shogun by turns,” or “reporting for attendance alternately”—the institution of sankin-kotai, which obliged each daimyo to leave his province every other year and spend several months in Edo at the shogun’s court. When the daimyo returned to his fief, he was required to leave his wife and children in Edo as “guests of state”—actually as hostages. This practice was strictly enforced and minutely regulated, as was the restriction on the number of warriors the daimyo could take with him from his fief, since the natural tendency (often more for reasons of prestige and appearance than for fomenting a revolt) was to travel with as imposing a contingent of warriors as a daimyo’s wealth would permit. Frequent congestion in Edo and upon the highways was a common occurrence, as were the incidents caused by concern for precedence at crossings or barriers. In 1721, new regulations from Edo established that the rulers of fiefs yielding 200,000 koku of rice or more were not to travel with or station in Edo more than 20 cavalrymen (bajo), 130 foot soldiers (ashigaru), and 300 petty attendants (chugen, ninsoku). And yet, it was not uncommon for powerful daimyo to disregard these injunctions. As Tsukahira notes, the lord of Mori in Choshu kept over two thousand warriors in his mansion in Edo. It is not difficult to imagine the effect produced by this and other bands of mounted knights, warriors of high rank, foot soldiers, and assorted troops as a long procession, containing the palanquin of the lord and those of his most important vassals in the middle of the column, moved at a majestic pace through towns and along the roads of the nation, their standards floating high and their weapons glinting in the sun. These periodical journeys became one of the most salient events of the Tokugawa period and its most stirring form of military pageantry. Only time and the progressive impoverishment of the buke gradually reduced these processions in size and pomp. After 1747, “the average size of a daimyo’s procession ranged between 150 and 300 persons” (Tsukahira, 80).
The daimyo, as the highest representative of the military class after the shogun, had to adhere strictly to the Thirteen Laws of the Military Houses (Buke Sho-hatto) promulgated by Ieyasu. These laws imposed upon each daimyo, among other obligations, that of capturing and surrendering immediately to the shogun’s representatives any rebels who were to be found within the boundaries of his domain, since anyone acting against the state acted against the law and social order (Articles 3 and 4). It is interesting to note that the authorities recognized a distinction between that morality which was based upon reason and that which was accepted a priori as the basis of social law. In these articles, for example, it is actually specified that since the law is the essence of social order, reason could be violated in favor of the law, but the law must never be violated in favor of reason. Each daimyo had to prevent unauthorized outsiders from entering or remaining in his fief (Article 5). He could not even make any substantial repairs to his castle nor to those of his vassals without the shogun’s express authorization, and he was absolutely forbidden to build a new castle or fortifications of any kind (Article 6). He had to send a report to Edo concerning conspiracies being hatched in neighboring domains (Article 7), and he could not enter into any alliance by marriage without the shogun’s permission (Article 8)—such an unauthorized act being considered the “root of treason.” He could not surround himself with large numbers of retainers when traveling to Edo, unless such an escort was composed of the shogun’s own troops. If he were a daimyo of high rank, he might be permitted an escort of about twenty horsemen (Article 9). As an honorary consideration, all daimyo were entitled to wear special types and qualities of official attire (which insured that they would be readily identifiable) and ride in special palanquins (Article 11).
The Military Retainer: The Samurai
All these retainers in the service of the shogun, or stationed in the provinces under the command of the various daimyo, formed an “immense standing army” (Brinkley1, 116). From the humblest foot soldier entitled to wear the daisho to the highest among the warriors of the upper ranks who were permitted to ride horses, they all belonged to the same warrior class, the buke, and were known as men of war (bushi) or, more commonly, as retainers (mononofu, wasarau). After 1869, they were qualified as former military subjects (shizoku), but the world at large continued to refer to them by that Chinese name which has become famous in many languages and is generally translated as “vassal” (samurahi, samurai). In its ancient form, the title of “samurai” had once been assigned (according to Frederic) to the leaders of armed clans in the North and, in a slightly modified form (goshozamurai), to warriors of aristocratic clans attached to the imperial court during the Muromachi period. Contracted phonetically into “samurai,” the term was extended to denote all warriors who were permitted to wear the long and short swords (daisho) in the service of a lord, and was more specifically and correctly translated as “one who serves.”
Emerging from the mists of the eleventh century, these samurai had witnessed (and often helped to bring about) many portentous changes in the social climate and structure of their land. As we have noted in surveying the major wielders of power in ancient Japan and the instruments through which that power was effectively exercised, the warriors organized under the feudal lords were, by the time Ieyasu elevated them to a position of primary prestige, structured and positioned within categories and ranks whose number and importance varied according to their master’s position in the central or provincial hierarchy of the buke, the size and wealth of the clan to which they belonged, and the function they were called upon to perform within their clan. The complexity of their professional composition during the Tokugawa period reflected the enormous increase in their number and the enlarged range of their professional sophistication, which had spilled over from the guard-posts and the battlefields into the administrative precincts of the social and political life of Japan. That complexity bore only a faint resemblance to the original simplicity of those military clans which had once been so closely related to, and dependent upon, the productive land of the myo as to have been barely distinguishable from the clans of farmers. The prototypes of that early composition were, admittedly, still a factor in the social mix, although submerged beneath the accretions of rank divisions and subdivisions, prestige, wealth, and so forth.
Warriors had once appeared in small, armed groups composed primarily of a leader, a number of mounted horsemen, and additional warriors on foot (zusa). The latter, in particular, had been the vital substratum of the class and had become increasingly numerous as the political unrest of the 1500s and 1600s began to offer many farmers and—although to a lesser degree—townsmen, a chance to move up socially and economically (as did Europe’s soldiers of fortune) by gaining a position in a clearly ascending class, or by enriching themselves on the spoils of a troubled era. These warriors on foot became known as the fighters with “agile legs” (ashigaru), and this category of lower warriors, being directly exposed to the ethics of the upper warriors whom they faithfully obeyed in times of peace or whom they followed unhesitatingly into the thick of battle, gradually acquired the same attachment to and identification with the buke as their masters. From their ranks was to emerge Hideyoshi, one of Japan’s greatest feudal leaders, who preceded Ieyasu as supreme military dictator (kampaku) over the entire country.
The ashigaru were followed, in turn, by numerous “small assistants” (chugen, komono, arashiko) who performed all the menial and undignified tasks which the categories of warriors above them refused to perform—with increasing regularity.
These cohorts of warriors and their leaders could all look back, then, upon those ancient days gone by when the appellations of “barbarians” and “rebels” had been hurled at them by an increasingly effete and impotent aristocracy in Kyoto. They had all been denounced at that time as “enemies of the state” who “made illegal use of power and authority; formed federations; practiced military skills daily; gathered and trained men and horses under pretext of hunting; threatened the governors of the districts; looted the population; violated young girls and brides; stole cattle and used them for their own purposes, thus disrupting work in the field” (Leonard, 55). As such, if captured alone or in “gangs armed with bows and arrows,” the authorities at one time had even been instructed to “throw them in jail” like common “highway bandits.”
By the Tokugawa period, however, these same samurai were said to have displayed all those features which were to make them, according to the observation point selected by a chronicler, either the object of undiluted admiration (often transformed into a formal cult) or the object of total contempt and hatred only mitigated in a few instances by pity for their condition. Between these two extreme approaches to an historical evaluation of their role—one of which saw them as brute instruments of power cleverly manipulated by ambitious masters, while the other praised them as the embodiment of all those virtues a man could ever hope to attain—it has been left for a few observers to view the samurai as the sadly uncomfortable example of that rigid conditioning to which historical circumstances can subject man if and when he slides into an unreserved commitment to any dogma or creed, especially one which future historians, with the broad irony of hindsight, will reveal to have been less noble than it had once appeared.
It is, in fact, the unreserved quality of the retainers’ commitment which makes them appear as much the victims of history as its protagonists, since they usually honored their bond to the bitter end—even to the extent of laying down their lives whenever the occasion demanded. This observation seeks to embrace the positive and negative characteristics of the samurai equally, within a comparatively balanced vision of their position in history. It does not, however, absolve their leaders from a large measure of responsibility for the conditioning and use made of the samurai and his skills down through the centuries. These leaders must bear a greater part of the burden of responsibility for the excesses of the buke, because they were in positions of great power where the options for good or evil on a large scale were often substantial and because, in positions of eminence, there were more opportunities to study, to observe, and thus to draw conclusions whose ethical imperative must have been insistent—even if widely ignored.
As the specific translation of the term “samurai” clearly denotes, such warriors were men who served a master; therefore, the primary function they were professionally called upon to perform was that of carrying out any and all orders issued by those superiors to whom they had pledged their loyalty and that of their families. This obligation bound each retainer directly to the leader he had chosen or inherited as his lord and who had accepted his oath of loyalty and service. The relationship between the retainer and his lord in feudal times was so binding and exclusivistic that it actually proved a serious obstacle to the further development of the military class, for when the various leaders fought among themselves (as they did for centuries), their cohorts of warriors, for the most part, followed them unquestioningly into one decimating battle after another—until at last the Tokugawa, through cunning, astute alliances, and the effective application of military might, succeeded in uniting all the clans under their suzerainty. This tie between retainer and master also constituted a serious obstacle to national unity after the restoration in 1868, when it was necessary to transfer the bond of loyalty from the clan leader to the head of the Japanese national family, the emperor. Such a transferral of loyalty necessitated an intense phase of reeducation which was, understandably, a turbulent one marked by armed clashes between the conservative retainers of the traditional clans and those of the progressive forces of the emperor, who represented the “new” Japan.
The warrior of feudal times pledged his loyalty in a ceremony whose rites were drawn from the indigenous religion of Japan, Shinto, with its emphasis on the cult of ancestors. Gaspar Vilela, S.J., (1525-72) wrote that the pledge was inscribed on a scroll (kishomon) with a brush dipped in the warrior’s own blood (keppan), then burned before the deities venerated by that particular clan, the ashes being dissolved in liquid and subsequently swallowed. The pledge, naturally, was duly inscribed in the clan’s records, and the retainer, his family, and his dependents became totally identified with their master, whose desires and wishes became, from that moment on, their own. So all-encompassing was the bond thus established that when a master died (even of natural causes) many of his retainers took their own lives in order to follow him in death as they had followed him in life. This type of self-immolation was called junshi, and it often left a clan decimated by the loss of many of its most valiant vassals. In fact, this practice became so common that it had to be forbidden by law and the proscription enforced by the inflicting of harsh penalties upon the retainer’s family if he defied the law. And many a master, in order to safeguard his own family, had to explicitly forbid his retainers to commit mass suicide if and when he should die.
This custom, although it became less common, never disappeared entirely, however. One of the most famous episodes in Japanese literature dealing with the feudal period is that of the mass suicide of the forty-seven ronin after they had avenged their lord. The most notable modern case may well be that of Count Maresuke Nogi (1849-1912), the great general who took Port Arthur from Russia in 1905, losing two sons unflinchingly in the Russo-Japanese War: he committed ritual suicide upon the death of Emperor Meiji, and his wife followed her lord as he had followed his.
In battle, the retainer fought under his direct superior’s command, carried out his orders, and protected any attempted retreat; if his superior decided to escape capture by committing ritual suicide, the retainer acted as his second (kaishaku), who had the duty of shortening the agony of a self-inflicted, mortal wound by severing the dying man’s head with a single sword cut. Usually the retainer would flee with his master’s head to prevent enemies from making a war trophy of it, in accordance with the martial customs of the age. Often, however, a retainer would enable his master to escape capture by donning his lord’s armor and riding off, drawing the enemy away from his master; or a retainer disguised as his master would allow his own head to be cut off and dragged away by another retainer whom the enemy was certain to pursue, while their master made good his escape.
If ordered to fight to the bitter end by his master, a retainer would do so; or, if permitted, he might choose to follow the ancient custom of those martial tribes whose members never willingly allowed themselves to be captured. Since time immemorial, Japanese warriors have always displayed a marked preference for death over capture. In his studies of Japanese culture, Joao Rodriguez, S. J., (1561-1634) noted how the warriors of a besieged lord, when they were on the verge of being overwhelmed by the enemy, would slay their women and children, set fire to their last stronghold, and then take their own lives. Exceptions to this practice were generally due to a special pledge to save the progeny of their doomed master for the purpose of future revenge. The custom has been explained by historians as being a direct result of the traditional concept of mass responsibility which exempted no one in the clan from the consequences of its leader’s decisions or actions. It is conceivable that the widespread practice of exterminating not only individuals, but their entire clan as well, might have helped to stimulate the custom of anticipating such an end by taking one’s own life, thus making it a privilege generally extended to every member of the warrior class. It was common practice, for example, when a warrior on the battlefield realized the futility of his efforts, for him to retreat to a nearby grove or some other isolated spot and take his own life while his enemies stood by—often assisting in the ritual.
In feudal Europe, the problem of dealing with prisoners had evolved into an institution of the art of war which successive ages endeavored to refine even further under the civilizing influence of reciprocal laws and customs regulating armed conflict among nations. International law, for example, may be said to embody the highest expression of this interpretation of conflict which had been shared by the Greeks and the Romans during the classic ages of both Mediterranean cultures and which even Islam, centuries later, had come to accept. Provisions were eventually made, and recognized as binding, concerning the status and the treatment of prisoners of war, who were thus protected, to a certain extent, from the dangers intrinsic in the position of a military man whom the fortunes of war, and not necessarily cowardice, had placed at the mercy of his foes. According to certain scholars with whom the authors tend to agree, such a development in the art of war was possible in Europe because of the large-scale, mutual involvement which forced almost all nations to adopt supranational concepts of warfare.
Japan, on the other hand, with its persistent and prolonged isolation from the international community, had neither been exposed to such ideas nor developed them independently. Clannish feudal customs and notions about the collective responsibility of the social unit were thus retained in modern Japan to a far greater extent than in Europe or even in Asia. The preservation of military tradition was also responsible, in large measure, for the continuing aversion to capture and the concomitant contempt for prisoners which was such a notable factor in Japanese behavior during the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. It was also remarked that while the Japanese attitude toward alien prisoners of war was singularly contemptuous, their own reactions when captured ranged from extremes of sheer desperation (usually a prelude to self-immolation) to an eerie form of fatalistic relief often transformed into full cooperation with their captors, which, if not authorized by an immediate superior, was explained by scholars as being the result of resignation to disgrace and, therefore, to any degradation. Modern episodes drawn from the archives of World War II provide startling examples of the reactions of the Japanese military man (as well as those of great numbers of Japanese civilians) when faced with the possibility of capture. From the centuries-old performance of hara-kiri by numerous commanders who used their swords to make the traditional first cut before being shot in the head or beheaded by their lieutenants, to the less ritualized suicides of lower-ranking officers after they had beheaded their own soldiers; from the individual suicides of soldiers who pressed grenades against their bodies or balanced them on top of their heads, carefully replacing their caps before the explosion, to the mass suicides of Japanese soldiers and civilians—an orgy of self-destruction was the salient characteristic of Japanese behavior when confronted with defeat and the prospect of capture.
This orgy, sickening to Western troops, “who were powerless to halt it,” reached tragic proportions at Marpi Point on Saipan, where it was said to have expressed “the horror of Bushido” (Leckie, 354), but it was in evidence everywhere, from the islands of the Pacific to China, Korea, and even the Japanese mainland itself, where it continued for months after the defeat of Japan had been formally acknowledged by the emperor. In contrast to Western directives concerning honorable surrender, Japanese “battle ethics” commanded every soldier to “never suffer the disgrace of being taken alive” (Leckie, 348). In fact, any surrender terms offered by an enemy, even though intended to prevent useless bloodshed, were considered by most Japanese commanders as an insult, when not simply a hilarious notion. “How could a samurai surrender? A samurai can only kill himself” was the usual answer (Leckie, 518).
The entire body of Japanese military ethics, in fact, had been inherited from feudal Japan, where the bond of service and loyalty between a retainer and his master was so absolute that any attack on the latter was, in effect, an attack on the former, who was honor-bound to redress the wrong. All clan cultures contain the concept of institutionalized revenge, the official vendetta which, in the military culture of the Tokugawa, became a ritual with minutely organized norms and procedures. The warrior whose master had been, or considered himself, the victim of any type of offense, ranging from a procedural slight to a verbal insult, from an attempted assassination to an actual murder, assumed the obligation of avenging his master even if this took years to accomplish. Such a duty was particularly binding when a retainer’s master had either been killed or forced to take his own life. The ancient Confucian precept that no one should be willing to live under the same heaven with the slayer of his father was interpreted by Japanese law and custom in favor of one’s master, who, as head of the clan, was the father of all. Failure in this context could mean utter disgrace, “for not only was the man who revenged himself regarded as a man of honor, but further, the man who was weak enough not to try to put to death the murderer of his father or his lord, was obliged to flee into hiding; from that day, he was despised by his own companions” (Dautremer, 83). Vengeance (kataki-uchi) was considered complete according to ritual when the head of the enemy was placed at the master’s feet or, if he had died, upon his tomb.
As a man of war (bushi), the retainer usually had to be prepared to serve his master primarily in his capacity as a warrior. This obligation could be discharged in an absolute manner only if he had no reservation whatsoever about confronting the dangers intrinsic in the professional use of arms. His entire philosophy, accordingly, revolved around the concept of complete disregard for his own safety, even his own life, which, by oath, he had placed unreservedly at his master’s disposal.
His code of honor (Bushido) and all the classics related to it stressed the point of never pausing to ponder the nature, significance, and effects of a superior’s command. The Hagakure, a record (written at the beginning of the eighteenth century) of the words of Yamamoto Tsunetomo, a military retainer of the Nabeshima clan, was very specific in this respect and warned the warrior to carry out every order immediately, lest reasoning about it should make a coward of him or inhibit action in any way. The commentaries attached to this military classic were also explicit concerning the elimination of thought and mental discrimination from the process of reacting to and obeying a command. When the third shogun of the Tokugawa clan, Iemitsu, consulted military retainers in charge of the warriors’ formation in the Kii clan concerning the essence of successful strategy, their answer was one of pragmatic simplicity un-surpassed in any other military culture: “One should never ponder!” The decision, after all, had already been made elsewhere, by others. Their task was to obey. This reply, understandably, “pleased Iemitsu” (Norman, 111).
In order to enable the warrior to overcome any mental impasse precipitated by man’s natural fear of death, he had to be trained to think of himself as a man whose life was not his own—a constant theme in Japanese lore and literature where the samurai is often portrayed as a tragic figure caught in the web of a blind cult of death to which he adheres faithfully, whatever the consequences. The Hagakure itself stated quite clearly that the code of the warrior, the famous Bushido, was indeed a code of death. Hence, the warrior had to be always prepared for a sudden and violent end. His whole life as a warrior in the service of a military leader, in fact, was a constant reminder of this. “There is no nation in the world,” wrote Francesco Carletti in the sixteenth century, “which fears death less” (Cooper, 42). This conditioning, which made the Japanese warrior’s contempt for death renowned the world over, began in infancy. The child of a military household was exposed to cold in winter and expected to endure the heat of summer without complaining; he was often sent on difficult errands which were purposely prolonged. His fear of death and of the supernatural (to which all classes in Japan were prone during the feudal era) was substantially reduced, Nitobe tells us, by sending him to such uncanny places as cemeteries and places of execution at night, even while quite young, in order to familiarize him with and, in time, inure him to that chilling sensation which the presence of death usually elicits. Physical pain had to be endured without betraying the slightest emotion, and the young warrior’s conditioning reached its apotheosis in careful training intended to prepare him for the ceremony of self-destruction, that ritualistic form of suicide known generally as hara-kiri (“abdomen cutting”) or seppuku (a more refined rendition of the Chinese character expressing the same idea).
Ritualistic suicide, considered the highest manifestation of command over one’s own destiny and unflinching courage in the face of death, represented a privilege in the eyes of the Japanese warrior. It had begun as a simple act of lonely self-annihilation on the battlefield, performed to escape capture or destruction at the hands of the enemy. In time, it grew into a ceremony which could rightfully be performed only by members of the buke and in accordance with minutely described rules of etiquette, including the presence of an assistant and witnesses who evidenced the social rather than individual or private nature of the ceremony. The reasons for committing ritual suicide, once so directly related to the desire to maintain full command over one’s own destiny to the very last or the desire to follow one’s master in death, became somewhat diluted during the ages of comparative peace following the rise of the Tokugawa to power. Among the main voluntary forms of ritual suicide, for example, the military classics of that age mention those resulting from a feeling of guilt because of one’s own inadequacy, from imprudent or reckless behavior, or from failing to fulfill one’s duty to a superior. This form of suicide was known as sokotsu-shi. Another reason for committing suicide sprang from rage or enmity (munen-bara, funshi) which could not be discharged against its cause. The warrior could also choose to kill himself as a form of protest or outrage at a master’s unfair treatment of him or to make his lord reconsider a certain decision. This was called kanshi. Among the main involuntary or imposed forms of ritual suicide, the same classics list those resulting from the commission of a crime for which the warrior could atone by taking an active part in his own punishment, in accordance with the laws regulating his special status in society. Also listed are forms which resulted from a master’s command when a retainer’s actions might have caused his lord embarrassment or when the master wished to absolve his retainer (or himself) from a certain responsibility.
In practice, ritual suicide in the military dimension was performed by using a special blade to cut into the part of the body which was considered the seat of a man’s life and the source of his power: his lower abdomen (hara). Using his short sword (wakizashi) on the battlefield during earlier periods and then, in later centuries, a special knife whose size, shape, and decoration would vary according to procedural circumstances, he would draw a horizontal cut from the left to the right side of his abdomen and then, if his strength permitted, follow this with another cut upward, either prolonging the first cut or starting a new one from the middle of the first and driving it upward in the direction of his throat. Originally, the aim of the first horizontal cut with a long blade was to sever the spinal nerve centers. The second cut implemented the first, being directed toward the aorta.
Since it was not always possible to insure a quick death by such complicated cutting, the assistance of another party in this act became the custom. Such a man was generally either a comrade in arms, a friend of equal rank, or a retainer of a lower rank (when not a functionary appointed by the authorities). His duty, as explained previously, was to decapitate the would-be suicide once the latter had completed the ritual cuts and offered his neck. As the ages of turmoil receded and the martial simplicity and primitive strength of ancient customs gave way to sterile sophistication and emphasis upon procedural appearances, the role of this assistant became increasingly pivotal, until he actually came to resemble a formal executioner—many times not even waiting for the voluntary first cut before cleaving the unfortunate man’s head from his body.
Any man as thoroughly familiarized with and reconciled to the idea of his own destruction as was the bushi would obviously develop into an extremely dangerous fighter who often needed to be restrained lest he throw his life away heedlessly in combat. Upon the issuing of a command by his direct superior, any bushi worthy of the name would respond without a moment’s hesitation. Since his absolute and concentrated commitment was usually matched by that of his opponent, combat encounters often resulted in mutual slaying. In large-scale battles, then, a master was often forced to rely heavily not so much upon the valor of his individual retainers as upon their number or, in exceptional cases, upon his own strategic acumen—an area in which, as we have seen earlier, few of these leaders are said to have excelled.
The eagerness with which the thoroughly conditioned warrior of the early feudal period engaged in combat was proverbial. In times of peace, and particularly during the long Tokugawa period, that eagerness betrayed itself in gratuitous, picayune manifestations of contempt and disdain for all other classes, as well as in an hysterical tendency to overreact to even imagined indications of “lack of respect”—if not to turn just plain murderous. These degenerative qualities were clearly linked to the futility and general pointlessness of a samurai’s existence as it became increasingly parasitical during those periods of prolonged peace when he was resented and despised by the “downtrodden masses” (i.e., all other classes) behind their masks of forced servility. “Priests and warriors: dogs and animals!” (shukke, samurai: inuchikusho), as Norman tells us, was a “popular saying,” applied quite often to “these idle and gluttonous fellows” during the Tokugawa period. A retainer’s obsequiousness and servility toward his immediate superiors within the clan hierarchy was a vivid contrast to his arrogance and undisguised contempt for those commoners whom, according to Article 71 of the criminal code (Osadamegaki), he had the freedom and even the duty to cut down on the spot (kirisutegomen) should any unfortunate person, regardless of sex or age, behave toward him in a manner the samurai considered disrespectful or even “unexpected.” His privileged status in society as a whole, however, could not completely disguise the fact that he too was trapped in a system which weighed almost as heavily upon him as it did upon others. For warriors “were subjected to an elaborate, unwritten code of ceremonies and therefore their freedom of thought and liberty of action were extremely limited. They were not allowed to think freely, nor to act according to their own will” (Hayashi, 70).
The status of a warrior within the clan of his birth or the clan to which he had been assigned by a lawful superior was generally immutable. Only exceptional circumstances might release him from the bond of loyalty and turn him into a masterless warrior (ronin). The ancient ordinances issued by Hideyoshi restricting any changes in a retainer’s status and residence were further reinforced by Ieyasu. Any warrior who severed ties with his clan without permission could not be accepted into the ranks of any other clan. Moreover, the leaders of all other clans were obliged by law to return such a retainer to his former master or answer to the military authorities for lack of compliance with the law. Should a retainer attempt to conceal himself among the peasants, the system of collective responsibility (gonin-gumi) would bring disaster upon the entire town or village if the subterfuge were to be discovered.
Thus, no matter where he turned, the retainer found the way barred against him, insuring that, for the most part, he would cling ferociously to the position assigned to him within the social order.
Education and Status of the Buke
The education and status of the buke may be viewed as developing different characteristics and institutions throughout three major phases of Japanese history: during the Heian period (794-1156), during the period preceding the rise of the Tokugawa (1157-1600), and finally, during the Tokugawa period (1600-1867). In each phase there was a clear distinction between the education and status of the buke leaders—that is, the upper category and ranks of the military class—and the education and status of their retainers and vassals, the samurai of the lower category and ranks. It appears obvious, in fact, that the second category did not enjoy the privileges and status considered an inherent right by the first category, and that even the privileged status of the second category (privileged, that is, in comparison to the subordinated remainder of the nation) was still markedly inferior to the status enjoyed by the military leaders of the nation. Furthermore, the concept of education discussed in these pages in relation to the buke was clearly limited and quite strictly defined.
Many definitions of the word “education” have been advanced by scholars, both past and present. All of these definitions may be reduced for easier exposition to two major types or, more correctly, attitudes. The first is active and embraces all those definitions which refer to the role of education as an intellectual search for and within new or expanding fields of knowledge. The second is passive and embraces all those definitions which consider education as training in the mastery of various skills. The former type of education (therefore, of knowledge) embraces the entire range or as many aspects as possible of man’s reality, thus becoming an independent inquiry into the unanswered dilemma his reality proposes at almost every turn. The latter type of education concentrates mainly upon a few, supposedly “known” and established aspects of that existence which it reiterates and reconfirms. One reaches out into the unknown and in every possible direction, while the other revolves around the familiar and, therefore, moves in one direction alone. In this context, it will be seen that the military class, by its very nature and emphasis upon professional qualifications, tended to concentrate upon the second type of education, which it defined, quite conservatively, as the repetition of orderly and expected patterns of thought and behavior, according to a precise sequence leaving little or no room for improvisation.
Although the military class had many illustrious precedents to draw upon—expecially from the latter part of the Heian period—its undeniable admiration for that culture still could not induce the leaders of the buke to accept the best which the Heian experience had to offer. Instead, their selections were highly restricted, and this narrowness eventually wreaked havoc upon the military class itself, dooming to failure the repeated attempts made by its leaders to freeze time and custom forever at the high point of feudalism. In fact, the leaders of the warrior class were actually forced to swiftly retrench their position in the national system, in order to ride the political waves generated by the restoration of power to the emperor.
When the bushi began to develop their professional traits and coalesce as a class during the eleventh century, they were confronted by the highly sophisticated culture of the Heian court and its aristocracy. Members of this culture had reached pinnacles of scholarship in their studies of classic literature, were exploring the complexities of religious ideas imported from India and laden with Chinese accretions, had developed a theocratic theory of state and nationhood, and were beginning to reach out into unexplored dimensions of pure speculation. By the time the warriors had turned their sights from the provinces to the capital and ultimate power, Heian culture had left far behind the ancient emphasis placed by the original clans in the age of kabane upon arts (waza) considered generally as esoteric manifestations of the divine, upon invocations (norito) insuring their correct manifestations, and upon liturgy (matsuri). Instead, the Heians had shifted to a thorough absorption of the complexities of Chinese culture and, with this, to a correlated emphasis upon quality, as well as an increase in the quantity of schools, libraries, and scholars. Steps had already been taken to institutionalize the function of scholars who had lectured or tutored in the mansions of aristocratic clan heads or at court, by forming a national school system tracing its legal roots to the eighth century, to the Taiho Code (A.D. 702). Centers of instruction had been established at the imperial court under a director of public education (fumiya-zukasa-no-kami), and in each provincial area (kokugaku). The imperial college (daigaku) and its college-house (daigakuryo) had mushroomed into a proper establishment in its own educational right, with a rector (daigaku-no-kami), vice-rector (suke), upper and lower heads (tai-jo and sho-jo), as well as upper and lower subofficials (tai-shakan and jo-shakan). Under these officials had operated many professors and assistants who provided introductory and advanced instruction in the following major subjects:
Chinese Classics (myokyo)
Law (myoho)
Calligraphy (sho, shodo)
Mathematics (san)
Composition and rhetoric (monjo, mongaku)
Chinese poetry (shigaku)
Japanese poetry (kagaku)
Planning and strategy (shusai)
Political theory (shinshi)
Divination (in-yo)
Calendar (koyomi)
Astrology (temmon)
Music (gagaku)
Medicine and pharmacy (tenyaku)
Each of these major subjects or academic disciplines had become highly complex and, at its superior levels, often downright esoteric, merging as it customarily did with metaphysics and the intuitive. As illustrated in Chart 9, the Chinese Classics alone, for example, consisted of thirteen texts, each accompanied by its own specific commentaries and appendices drawn from Chinese and Japanese sources. And mastery of them all was expected by the examiners who tested the preparation of their aristocratic students. Scholars had had to specialize in the study of those texts either one by one or, as a requirement for higher office, in major groups of texts, e.g., the collections known as the Small Classics (shokyo), the Great Classics (daikyo), or the Middle Classics (chukyo). Rare indeed, even then, was the man who could claim a thorough knowledge of them all.
The aim of education during the major part of the Heian era had thus obviously been less that of enlarging and deepening the realms of knowledge for the sake of understanding and appreciating the unfolding of life’s innumerable possibilities, than that of forming proper functionaries of a state which had already chosen one of those possibilities (an imitation of a Chinese model) and strove continually to maintain and perfect its essentially theocratic and aristocratic structure. Appearance (katachi) had traditionally been one of the most important aims of education, since it visually represented prestige and power. Intellect (zae) had had to be more specialized, since the functions the nobles were called upon to perform in the service of the system were many and administratively varied. In fact, the nobles had concentrated mainly upon the study of imperial liturgies and court ceremonials (yusoku kojitsu), the installation rituals (jimoku), law and theories of government, and so forth. Provincial aristocrats had been directed more toward studies in law, mathematics, divination, astrology, planning, and strategy.
As a collateral extension of the interesting fervor surrounding education during the Heian period (as reported by Tokiomi), private schools had also been established for the education of “the greatest number of people.” Schools such as the Nikyoin of Kibi-no-Makibi, the Untein of Iso-no-kami Yakatsugu, and the priest Kukai’s own institute, the Shugeishoin, had been established and operated outside the national system of education, valiantly attempting to do for the other classes of the nation that which the system had done for the nobles. Their existence was often threatened, and eventually they all had to close. However, the attempt had demonstrated the centrifugal and expansionistic effects of a broad approach to education and constituted a precedent for intermittent attempts to establish centers of popular learning whenever and wherever possible. Deep within this culture and at its outer limits, therefore, there seethed an irresistible impulse to expand and experiment which defied constrictions and was, perhaps, at the root of that period of trouble and glory which followed hard upon the heels of the Heian period.
The warriors of the eleventh century had been dazzled by the cultural splendor of the late Heian period, and, even when its luster had dimmed considerably with the passing of time, the buke evidenced the lingering effect of this initial fascination either by scorning the trappings of that culture a trifle too heatedly, or by endeavoring to recreate its aura (although obviously on a different basis and with a different content) whenever and wherever they could. At the beginning of their history as a separate class in search of its own character and destiny, those clans drawn into the spinning center of the nation during the late Heian period had endeavored to send their leaders’ children to aristocratic colleges and academies in order to prepare them for their new and expanded responsibilities. There, these “new” men, who—although of the buke’s upper ranks—had been bred in provincial towns to bear arms and to live simply, almost rustically, stood out in uncomfortably sharp contrast to the “effete” offspring of the nobility who despised and instinctively feared them. The nobles, in fact, were obscurely aware that, although these rustic members of the “family of archery and horsemanship” were indispensable instruments of power, they were also potentially dangerous contenders for that power. The resentment of the upper categories of warriors who were only reluctantly admitted to aristocratic centers of learning is abundantly recorded, and it found concrete expression in many of their policies during the succeeding centuries, when they repaid the kuge in full (as well as the clergy, who had held a large number of the highest teaching positions) for every slight inflicted by the aristocrats and priests—insults which the buke bore with the cold determination of military men whose time was manifestly to come.
Pragmatists by nature and function, the military leaders of the emerging buke had had to decide early whether they would be absorbed by the Heian culture or would instead select and adapt from it those features which best served their distinct purposes without allowing their own sharply differentiated individuality to be diluted. The example of many military clans, whose members had been lured into accepting the Heian culture unreservedly and had subsequently been swallowed up by the general process of decadence, induced many leaders to strongly favor the second option. The general tendency of the buke, consequently, was that of continuing to emphasize, as the primary justification for their own existence, the military arts (bu), while at the same time mastering those administrative skills (bun) by which the nation was run. Their choice was further limited as to the subject and content of possible studies, since operative and functional knowledge was largely restricted to the upper category and ranks of the buke. In addition, their curriculum ignored large areas of knowledge whose speculative and expanding nature, capable of leading the mind of man into unknown and unexplored domains (as had been the case with so many scholars and priests of the Heian period), was a disturbing factor to warriors who based their very existence upon the regularity and rigid discipline of military life.
A definite cultural selection of subject matter was evident, therefore, as the upper bushi began to attend aristocratic academies during the late Heian period. Public administration, mathematics, law and the administration of justice (as well as military planning and strategy, of course) seem to have been the major subjects of academic interest for this “new” breed of men, backed by so many strong and brooding warrior clans. The executive positions of magistrates, court supervisors, and generals began to be filled, with increasing regularity, by members of the buke who submitted themselves to the system of career advancement run by the imperial court. From within and from without, those leaders pressed on and began to close in upon Kyoto. But while the upper category and ranks of warriors were thereby exposed to learning (although on an increasingly selective basis), the interest of their retainers seems to have been concentrated almost exclusively upon perfecting those military skills which had opened so many doors for the leaders of the buke. Expertise in handling the bow and arrow, the spear, and the sword was of paramount importance to the samurai then, and became even more so as the center of imperial power was slowly and irresistibly eroded. Those weapons became the ultimate instruments for devising and executing the policy of the buke. The lower samurai, therefore, was trained at home or in the clan centers of military instruction—his education in the literary sense being neglected to the point of almost completely eliminating its influence upon his life. The continuing condition of rampant illiteracy among the lower samurai is reported upon at length in many chronicles dealing not only with the late Heian period, but also with the advanced stages of the pre-Tokugawa period, deep into the Ashikaga (Muromachi) period.
With the establishment of the Kamakura shogunate (1192), the displacement of the kuge by the buke began in earnest. Large military clans established centers of superior education where their leaders concentrated upon the study of the disciplines and functions of government. The Hojo clan, which provided outstanding leadership throughout the dangerous Kamakura period (1185-1333), is reputed to have been the motivating force behind the Kanazawa Bunko, an institution of eclectic learning within the grounds of Shomyo-ji Temple, housing large libraries filled with Chinese and Japanese classics. The Ashikaga clan is also known to have established its own school during the age which followed (Muromachi, 1336-1568), although the cultural tradition of this particular family is said to have reached as far back as the eleventh century, when one of its leaders, Yoshikane (?—1199), founded a study-center (gakumonjo) in the family’s Banna-ji Temple. The increased importance of expertise in administrative skills (bun) is evidenced by the repeated admonitions, directed to military leaders by their elders and advisors, “that there should be training in both cultural and military arts” (Kaigo, 20). These admonitions were clearly well received by the highest category and ranks of the buke, for there is ample historical evidence that the military leadership of the Rokuhara, Ashikaga (Muromachi), and Momoyama periods, from 1156 to 1600, became well versed in the finer points of power manipulation at which their aristocratic predecessors, the kuge, had excelled. The latter had slowly begun to lose ground as the military centers of power turned into semi-imperial courts, attracting scholars and artists of various denominations.
The same cannot be said for the lower category and rank of samurai, however. As indicated earlier, they seem to have been and to have remained, for the most part, functionally illiterate. Frederic relates that in the Kamakura period (1185-1333) the incidence of warriors unable to read Sino-Japanese written characters was not a rare one. Their constant involvement with warfare, as their leaders jostled for power and prestige, made even the lowest level of scholarship not only irrelevant to their condition but often downright detrimental, since it took time (of which they, as retainers in the service of a lord, had very little to call their own) and, furthermore, might have encouraged them to develop insights into other dimensions and possibilities which those same leaders had clearly marked as being above and beyond the status of the lower ranks. At this point, still very close to the emergence of the professional warrior, we see the development of an interesting phenomenon, often qualified by scholars of Japanese history as “anti-intellectualism,” to identify a peculiarly Japanese aversion for uncontrolled knowledge—that is, knowledge left unfettered so that one might explore, in an active sense, the entire range and all the aspects of human existence. A note here is particularly intriguing: the Japanese language in feudal times contained no term which would be the equivalent of the English word “curiosity”—nor does it contain such a term today (Dore1, 51).
With the singular intuition of military leaders the world over, the high-ranking members of the buke (that is, the lords and masters of the various military clans) had understood from the first that a wide range of knowledge was a prerequisite for successful choice, evaluation, and decision in any field of human endeavor. This, in turn, implied the admission of a certain individuality of opinion as the basis for independent action—even though the rigid stratification of clan culture was a direct practical as well as theoretical negation of any such freedom of thought or action. The comparatively equalitarian condition enjoyed by the court nobles (kuge) during the Heian period and, to a certain extent, by the leaders of the military knights (buke) during successive periods was not easier to assimilate in Japan than it had been in Greece during that country’s classical age. The court nobles of Nara and Kyoto had been notoriously factious and belligerent in their dealings with one another, as were the feudal barons of the military clans in the provinces, who plunged the country into their own version of chaos before finally being forced to adhere to the uneasy truce inaugurated by Ieyasu in the seventeenth century (which they promptly abrogated after 1868, once the hold of the Tokugawa clan and their allies upon the nation had been broken).
Fully aware of the centrifugal effects of unrestricted knowledge, each lord and master usually endeavored to limit the intellectual development of his retainers to those levels which would insure the retainers’ efficiency in carrying out the functions and duties assigned to them, but no others. The intellectual preparation of each clan’s warriors, accordingly, was increasingly restricted as they descended in rank from the higher to the lower levels. Beyond that knowledge and skill in the use of specific weapons which the retainers of each clan were expected to pursue, they received specialized instruction in various administrative functions which, being largely hereditary, did not usually provide any scope for creative innovations. By the beginning of 1600, each provincial lord had conditioned his military retainers in such a specialized way that, in place of the ancient spontaneous and creative clansmen with their many skills, who had survived the “ages of troubles” (from the tenth to the sixteenth century), there emerged a compact mass of fighting “technicians,” conditioned by and committed to a cult of absolute loyalty to their warlords and masters.
There were, of course, warriors of the lower category and ranks who did not agree wholeheartedly with such an extreme specialization of their existence. Whenever and wherever they could, such men would send their children to temples and monasteries, where they joined the “long-haired novices” (chigo-suihatsu), learning to read and write. That education, in a few adventurous and often unfortunate cases, gave a number of lower samurai the basis for independent thinking, thereby leading to clashes against a system which was slowly congealing into a social rigidity to which Tokugawa Ieyasu was to give the final touches.
With the advent to power of the Tokugawa, in fact, the process of military specialization and conditioning reached its apotheosis. The leaders of this clan carried to their extreme and ultimate consequences the implications of their predecessors’ restrictive policies concerning the education of both the upper and lower categories and ranks of the buke. They began with the leaders themselves, the provincial lords of the military clans—the daimyo. Centers of instruction for children of military lineage and especially for the offspring of provincial governors were opened in the provinces, thus removing the buke from the direct influence of those schools and universities in and around Kyoto where the intellectual and exclusivistic influence of the kuge still predominated. In these new, provincial centers, although the principle of absolute loyalty to one’s direct superior (in the case of the provincial lords, to the shogun) was stressed in accordance with strict Confucian patterns governing social relationships, the scope of instruction was enlarged beyond the narrow confines of clan affairs to embrace provincial problems and those of the nation as a whole in order to prepare these lords to comprehend and carry out successfully the directives emanating from the bakufu in Edo. This preparation, however, was still carefully restricted in an effort to reduce the chances of producing an overlord who might develop an enlarged and potentially threatening vision of his own function; but it was clearly broader in scope than the narrow vision of life which the retainers of these lords were allowed to entertain.
Among the centers of instruction frequented by the buke were the renowned Yokendo in Sendai, the Kojokan in Yonezawa, the Kodokan in Mito, the Chidokan in Kago-shima, and the Meirinkan in Hagi, to mention only a few. The central institution which supervised them all, naturally, was the Seido located in the military capital, Edo. A scholar, Koike Kenji, has described the history, organization, and training program of one of these centers, the Nisshinkan in Wakamatsu, which was primarily concerned with the literary and physical education of the provincial lords, higher retainers, and leading administrators of the ancient Aizu clan. The training of high-ranking children of this clan began systematically and officially when they were eight or nine years old. Before that, as was customary, these children had already been prepared through preliminary indoctrination in martial etiquette, and at the age of five, boys had already received their first samurai costumes and swords (which they would never again be without).
After receiving his first swords, a boy would join other children in groups divided according to various sections of the town and follow one or more leaders who would be responsible for him to a teacher in a temple or at the institute. Under the strict surveillance of these teachers, the children memorized the literary texts of instruction (without explanation), beginning at about their tenth or eleventh years. From the ages of ten to fourteen, they were taught and expected to practice official etiquette. At thirteen they began to study archery, swordsmanship, and spearfighting, which they would henceforth practice regularly throughout their lives. At fifteen they approached the Chinese Classics, and individual inclinations in the various branches of military administration were encouraged and cultivated by a personal tutor. At sixteen, the group dissolved, and each youth was indoctrinated by a series of teachers in their specialties (listed in Chart 10). This program continued until the boy’s twenty-second year. Then, if he had satisfactorily absorbed and completed the program, he could either stay on at the Nisshinkan Institute or further his education by visiting other institutions throughout the country. In general, he was encouraged to embark upon a specialized career, in accordance with the rank held by the head of his family, whom he was expected to succeed when the latter retired or passed away. Allowances were made for less talented students, who were given more time and extra care in order to help them catch up with the others. Failure, of course, meant utter disgrace, because it often entailed (in characteristically Japanese fashion) the demotion of the entire family to a lower rank in the military hierarchy, due to the son’s inability to follow in his father’s footsteps.
The Tsu clan boasted of four sheds for the study of jujutsu, three sheds for gunnery, one shed for archery, three sheds for riding, one shed for strategy, three sheds for spearmanship, three sheds for swordsmanship, and one shed for the halberd—all within the same compound, according to Dore. In most central and provincial schools, mornings were devoted to the literary disciplines and afternoons to the military skills, thus combining both bun and bu. The proportion of teachers assigned to different disciplines may be gathered by the list of salaries included in the budget of the Choshu school in 1797. As reported by Dore, this school availed itself of the services of five teachers of Chinese Classics, fifteen teachers of military arts, one teacher of calligraphy, one of mathematics, two tutors, two librarians, and one clerk, as well as two shrine attendants. Concerning the status of these teachers in particular, more is said later in this part.
The plan of the Nisshinkan Institute included here shows an almost inordinate amount of space allocated for the practice of the listed specializations of bujutsu. Most of the institutions (and sometimes even private houses of warriors of high rank) followed more or less the same design. In almost every one we find shooting ranges, indoor and outdoor, for archery and firearms; various ponds for swimming in armor or without, or on horseback; open squares for horseback riding and all sorts of equestrian maneuvers; long halls for spear-fighting and fencing practice; and smaller halls for man-to-man combat, armed and unarmed, at close quarters.
The Tokugawa encouraged the establishment of schools for lower samurai, both in the provinces under their direct supervision and in the provinces under the supervision of military governors (the daimyo). These schools (hangaku, hanko) were generally established in castle-towns and were subsidized by the clans, usually through the appropriation of revenues from a certain tract of rice-producing land. The quality of instruction, however, seems not to have compared favorably with that available to the upper category and ranks of the buke, and its content was strictly defined and limited. In some clans, for example, the ranks at the bottom of the lower category of warriors were even excluded (Dore1, 226). In general, this division between the upper and lower warrior was sharp and unbridgeable, although the lower samurai were clearly in the majority.
As Fukuzawa tells us, the warriors of the upper ranks of the Okudaira clan of Nakatsu, for example,
were well-fed and clothed and thus had plenty of leisure time to devote to the arts, literary and military. They would read the Confucian classics and the Books of History, study military strategy, practice horsemanship, spearmanship, and swordsmanship, and generally indulge in all the branches of art and learning which were considered at the time to be cultured and noble. Thus their manners were naturally elegant and aristocratic and many of them could be considered most cultured and refined gentlemen. (Fukuzawa, 313)
By contrast, warriors of the lower ranks “practiced the military arts in such little time as they could spare from their sidework, but in literature they would get no further than the Four Books and the Five Classics and, at a little more advanced stage, one or two books of Meng Ch’Iu and the Tso Chuang. What they studied most was writing and arithmetic, and in this they were certainly far superior to the upper samurai” (Fukuzawa, 313). In fact, because of such recording and computing abilities, the calligrapher’s rank was considered highest among the lower ranks, and the warriors who attained it were expected to carry out the fundamental duties of administering the clan’s affairs, collecting taxes, and keeping the records of the clan current.
