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Chapter 3

SWORD AND SPEAR

So far in this book, the samurai swordsman has proved to be a somewhat elusive character who greatly prefers his role as a mounted archer and delivers death from a distance, rather than close at hand. When forced by circumstances both to dismount and to discard his bow, he wields the world’s finest edged weapon and is very proficient in its use, but accounts of its employment are tantalizingly few. Even the Mongol invasions provide no overall change to this pattern. Sword use against the invaders is decisive and dramatic, but the employment of swords rather than bows is dictated totally by circumstances and runs contrary to the prevailing mood. For a major change in weaponry to occur, we must wait for a social change, and the first stirrings of one are discernible during the fifteenth century.

We noted earlier how the greatest of the Ashikaga shoguns, Ashikaga Yoshimitsu (1358 – 1408), had ended the Nambokuchō Wars and restored relations with Ming China, but his descendants were not to enjoy such glory, and the last century of the Ashikaga dynasty witnessed the total collapse of their authority. The Ashikaga shoguns had followed a policy of decentralization, so that military governors, or shugo, ruled the provinces of Japan on their behalf. Many shugo were samurai aristocrats who had ruled their provinces for centuries and had submitted to the Ashikaga. The system worked well until the mid-fifteenth century, when a dispute over the succession to the shogunate led to a number of prominent shugo taking opposing sides and resorting to violence. The incumbent shogun was powerless to control them, and suffered the indignity of witnessing fighting in the streets of Kyoto, Japan’s capital. The disturbances in Kyoto proved to be the beginning of a civil war known as the Onin War, which lasted from 1467 to 1477. Kyoto was devastated and the fighting spread to the provinces.

The Age of Warring States

The tragic Onin War ushered in a century and a half of conflict that is known as the Sengoku Jidai —the Age of Warring States, by analogy with the most warlike period in ancient Chinese history. As the shogunate had been exposed as a powerless entity, erstwhile shugo took the opportunity to create petty kingdoms for themselves in the provinces they had formerly administered. These men were the daimyō (feudal lords), a title with the literal meaning “great name.” Their ancestors were as likely to have been farmers or umbrella makers as glorious samurai, and the present head of a family might well have risen to that height by murdering his former master. Alliances between daimyō were regularly made and as easily broken. New family names were created by opportunistic warriors, while old established ones disappeared forever.

A good example is provided by one of the most successful daimyō dynasties of the Age of Warring States: the Hōjō family of Odawara. Their founder, a samurai who bore the Buddhist name of Sōun and was formerly known as Ise Nagauji, was skilled in war but of modest background; he appropriated his new surname from the long-extinct samurai lineage of the Hōjō because it sounded impressive. Another new warlord called Uesugi Kenshin (1530 – 1578) saved his former daimyō’s life, on condition that the daimyō adopt him as his heir and give him the glorious name of Uesugi. From about 1530 onwards, the Hōjō and Uesugi were engaged in sporadic armed rivalry with each other and with their neighbors, the Takeda and Imagawa, to name but two opponents. Scores of smaller samurai families were alternately crushed, courted, and absorbed by these growing giants. The southern Japanese island of Kyūshū witnessed a similar rivalry among the samurai who fought under the flags of Shimazu, Itō, Otomo, and Ryūzōji, while the Mōri family steadily increased its influence along the Inland Sea at the expense of the Amako. The Age of Warring States was a time of large-scale strategy, huge battles, and tremendous developments in weaponry and tactics. From the mid-1540s onwards, we read of firearms being used for the first time in Japanese history, although their full potential was not to be realized for three decades.

Suzuki the sharpshooter. Suzuki Shigehide was a follower of the Ikko-ikki, and tried unsuccessfully to shoot Oda Nobunaga.

The quarrel between Oda Nobunaga and Akechi Mitsuhide.

This situation of chaos persisted until a succession of “super-daimyō” managed to reunify the country. The first important name is that of Oda Nobunaga (1534–1582). Nobunaga inherited a comparatively minor territory from his father and appeared to be heading for quick extinction when his lands were invaded by the hosts of Imagawa Yoshimoto in 1560. Nobunaga, however, took advantage of a lull in Yoshimoto’s advance while the latter was enjoying the traditional head-viewing ceremony in a narrow gorge called Okehazama. A fortuitous thunderstorm cloaked Nobunaga’s final movements and allowed him to take the Imagawa samurai completely by surprise. The victory at Okehazama thrust Nobunaga to the forefront of Japanese politics and samurai glory. Using a combination of superb generalship, utter ruthlessness, and a willingness to embrace new military technology such as European firearms, Nobunaga began the process of reunification of Japan.

Oda Nobunaga was killed when Akechi Mitsuhide, one of his subordinate generals, launched a surprise night attack on him in the temple of Honnōji, in Kyoto, in 1582. Mitsuhide had taken advantage of the absence from the scene of nearly all his fellow generals—but one of them, Toyotomi Hideyoshi (1536–1598), hurried back from a distant campaign to vanquish Mitsuhide at the battle of Yamazaki. Basking in the honor of being the loyal avenger of his dead master, Hideyoshi hurried to establish himself in the power vacuum that Nobunaga’s death had created. In a series of brilliant campaigns, Hideyoshi either eliminated or thoroughly neutralized any potential rivals, including Nobunaga’s surviving sons and brothers. Over the next five years, Hideyoshi conducted campaigns that gave him the islands of Shikoku and Kyūshū, and when the daimyō of northern Japan pledged allegiance to him in 1591, Japan was finally reunified.

Unfortunately for Hideyoshi, his ambitions did not stop at Japan, and in 1592 he sent tens of thousands of samurai across the sea in an invasion of Korea. This was to be the first stage of a process that would make Hideyoshi Emperor of China, but the expedition was a disaster. A second attempt was made in 1597, but when Hideyoshi died in 1598 the samurai were recalled, and Japan looked as though it was going to slip back into the chaos from which Hideyoshi had rescued it. His son and heir, Hideyori, was only five years old, but when war broke out the matter was quickly resolved at the decisive battle of Sekigahara in 1600. The victor, Tokugawa Ieyasu (1542–1616), could trace his ancestry back to the Minamoto, and was therefore proclaimed shogun in 1603. The final remnants of the supporters of Toyotomi Hideyori were defeated at the siege of Osaka Castle in 1614–1615. Apart from the short-lived Shimabara Rebellion of 1637–1638, the Age of Warring States was over. The triumph of the Tokugawa family finally provided a period of stability. They ruled Japan with a rod of iron until the mid-nineteenth century, when the arrival of foreign voyagers and traders forced Japan to enter the modern world.

Akechi Mitsuhide reviews his troops.

Changes in Warfare