Читать книгу Hagakure - Yamamoto Tsunetomo - Страница 7
ОглавлениеHAGAKURE IN CONTEXT
INTRODUCTION
Bushido1 tends to stir people’s imaginations. The term is synonymous on the one hand with strength, masculinity, fearlessness, honor, and transcendence, and on the other, callousness and cold-hearted brutality. The most visible vestige of samurai culture in the modern age is budo, that is, the Japanese traditional martial arts, and these are indisputably Japan’s most successful cultural exports, with literally tens of millions of enthusiasts around the world. People practice these arts not only as a means of self-defense or as competitive sports, but also in the pursuit of spiritual development.
Another factor that sparked interest in bushido—although by no means a driving force now—was Japan’s remarkable postwar economic success. In the days of the bubble economy in the late 1980s, the belief that Japan’s economic and business accomplishments could be attributed to management practices deriving from “samurai strategy” was widely held. The Japanese culture boom of the 1980s and 1990s encouraged many people to take up martial arts, and to study translations of famous warrior books, such as Miyamoto Musashi’s The Book of Five Rings, Daidōji Yūzan’s Budō Shoshinshū, and of course, Yamamoto Jōchō’s (Tsunetomo)2 Hagakure. Nowadays, Japanese culture has been embraced by a new generation of “anime otaku,” or diehard devotees of Japanese animation and pop culture.
There have been many popular movies over the years promoting samurai ideals, including The Last Samurai, starring Tom Cruise and Watanabe Ken. This film sparked a resurgence of interest in samurai ethics. Also of note was the critically acclaimed 1999 film, Ghost Dog, starring Forest Whitaker, which used Hagakure aphorisms as reference points throughout the story about an African-American hit man. He worked for a Mafia mobster, seeing himself as a devoted “retainer,” unflinching in his loyalty to the man who saved his life years ago.
Despite the noble depictions in modern pop culture and literature, some scholars have described samurai as nothing more than “valorous butchers.” Indeed, there is no denying that throughout Hagakure death sentences are violently dished out for the most trivial of offenses. From the standpoint of contemporary morality, the apparent cheapness of life in samurai society seems truly obscene. Texts such as Hagakure, which advance death so matter-of-factly, shock our sensibilities, especially in an age when people have a propensity to avoid contemplating their own mortality.
For example, our society denounces suicide, and capital punishment for murder is a highly contentious issue. To the samurai, however, death was celebrated as being integral to their honor and way of life. Attachment to life hindered a warrior during a catastrophe, and so it was deemed virtuous to train one’s mind and spirit to be able to choose death with firm resolve if the situation called for ‘decisive action.’ As such, while the extremist attitudes and scenes portrayed so vividly in Hagakure may repulse the modern reader, the aphorisms provide a window on an age and a society that, although foreign to our own lifestyle, will serve to stimulate readers into contemplating challenging questions regarding the human experience. In order to appreciate the content, it is important to first put things into context.
THE HAGAKURE PHENOMENON
Properly titled Hagakure-kikigaki (literally “Dictations given hidden by leaves”), Hagakure is now one of the most famous treatises on bushido. Completed in 1716, the content consists of approximately 1,300 vignettes and contemplations of varying lengths, divided into 11 books. It covers the people, history, and traditions of the Saga domain3 in the southern Japanese island of Kyushu, and also records anecdotes about warriors from other provinces. Although some of the content is abstract in nature, the pages are filled with engaging stories about the feats of individual samurai and the maelstrom of retainership, premised by a balance of insanity and equanimity, rather than a convoluted philosophical discourse.
The first two books of Hagakure are believed to have been dictated by Yamamoto Jōchō (1659–1719), a middle-ranking retainer of Nabeshima Mitsushige (1632–1700), daimyo of the Hizen (Saga) province, to fellow clansman Tashiro Tsuramoto (1678–1748). Books 3 to 6 are about the Nabeshima lords and episodes that occurred in the Saga domain; Books 7 to 9 delve into the “meritorious feats” of Saga warriors; Book 10 is a critique of samurai from other provinces; and Book 11 provides supplementary information about miscellaneous events and various aspects of warrior culture.
Although Jōchō undoubtedly provided a fair proportion of the information contained in Book 3 onwards, given that some of the entries relate to people and happenings after his death, Tashiro Tsuramoto clearly pieced together much of the content from other sources. Thus, although the book is commonly attributed to Jōchō, it was ultimately Tsuramoto’s abiding efforts that brought it to fruition.
The content is censorious of the Tokugawa shogunate (the warrior government based in Edo) in some sections as a reaction to restrictive decrees that reduced samurai to a “mechanical cog in the bureaucratic wheel of state.”4 It was also critical of the actions of certain eminent warriors of the Saga domain. Because of its somewhat guileless critiques of local dignitaries, and the effete ways of metropolitan “Kamigata” warriors of Edo and Kyoto, Hagakure was treated cautiously as a “forbidden text,” and secretly circulated only among members of the Saga domain until it was thrust into the limelight and popularized in the militaristic atmosphere of the 1930s and 1940s. The content was considered too inflammatory for Hagakure to be openly endorsed within the Saga domain, and it was not even used as a text in the domain school, Kōdōkan, where young Saga warriors were educated. Given the book’s far-reaching recognition today, however, it has become a source of great pride for the people of modern-day Saga Prefecture.
Modern interest in Hagakure transpired through a resurgent fascination in the traditions of bushido, ironically after the samurai class had been dismantled as Japan embarked on its quest to modernize. Although the samurai class was brought to an end during the Meiji period (1868–1912), it did not mean the end of bushido as a gripping, emotive force. Many samurai traditions, including the martial arts, were briefly suspended in the early Meiji surge of modernization, only to be revived from the mid-1880s. At this time, the cultural pendulum began to swing in a more blatantly nationalist direction, where Western technology was complemented by “Japanese spirit” (wakon-yōsai).
By the later 1880s, as Garon observes, “intellectuals, local elites, and officials broadly agreed on the need to foster ‘a sense of nation’ in the masses if Japan were to modernize and compete with Western rivals.”5 It is precisely in this period that questions of “Japaneseness,” that is, the essence of what it meant to be Japanese, became a prominent matter of debate. In many ways, the Japanese were feeling their way as they attempted to form a national identity, and according to Doak, this epoch signified the “first important moment in Japanese nationalism when culture, as a code for conceptualizing the collective identity of the Japanese as a single people, was mobilized in agendas that spanned the political spectrum.”6
Prominent scholars such as Inoue Tetsujirō sought to bind bushido to the service of the state by associating it with patriotism and devotion to the emperor. His contemporary, the passionate Christian Uchimura Kanzō, reinterpreted the meaning of bushido, equating it with loyalty to Jesus Christ. The most influential bushido commentator of modern times is undoubtedly Nitobe Inazō. He published Bushido: The Soul of Japan in English, in which he portrayed a Christianized account of bushido for Western readers as the backbone of Japanese morality, and suggested it was a perfect base upon which Christianity could be grafted and evangelized in Japan. He stressed such virtues as honesty, justice, courtesy, courage, compassion, sincerity, honor, duty, loyalty, and self-control. He argued that bushido had evolved among the feudal warriors, but its values had been inherited by all echelons of Japanese society.
With momentous popular and symbolic appeal, bushido and other vestiges of warrior culture, such as the traditional martial arts, seemed an increasingly irresistible, albeit highly romanticized, feature of the cultural makeup of the Japanese nation. Harumi Befu referred to this phenomenon as the “samuraization” of the Japanese people, in which “characteristics such as loyalty, perseverance, and diligence that were said to be held by a small (but elite) segment of the population—the samurai—were gradually extended through propaganda, education, and regulation to cover the whole of the population.”7
In particular, Hagakure’s underlying theme of absolute loyalty to one’s lord to the extent that a warrior must be prepared to die in the course of duty, a notion symbolized by the legendary phrase, “The Way of the warrior is to be found in dying” (Bushidō to iu wa shinu koto to mitsuketari) fitted well with Japan’s burgeoning militarism because, as Ikegami points out, of the “combination of the cult of death with the ideal of faithful and efficacious devotion to the public good.”8
The first time Hagakure was published in print and became known outside the province of Saga was in March 1906. Elementary school teacher Nakamura Ikuichi compiled a selection of aphorisms and published them in book form. It was not until 1935 that the entire text was published in Kurihara Arano’s Hagakure Shinzui (“Essence of Hagakure”), followed by the carefully annotated Hagakure Kōchū (“Hagakure collation”) in 1940. It was from this juncture that Hagakure finally emerged from the mists of obscurity. Its popularity was further facilitated by prominent Japanese philosopher Watsuji Tetsurō and ethics historian Furukawa Tetsushi’s combined work, Hagakure, which was also published in 1940 by the major publishing house Iwanami Bunko. This pocket-sized, three volume set made Hagakure available to the masses. Although there was no major Hagakure boom per se, it was still a popular read among soldiers mobilized by the Japanese war machine.9
Following the phenomenon of the suicidal kamikaze pilots, and the actions of Japanese soldiers in World War II who were feared for their fanaticism in the face of death, books such as Hagakure were later subject to intense criticism as being tools for militaristic propaganda that sought to instil Japanese youth with an indomitable sense of patriotism, and prepare them to sacrifice their own lives for the emperor and the mother country. Hagakure provided a powerful and emotive creed for wartime ultranationalists, in no small part due to its one-dimensional affirmation of loyalty to the point of sacrificing one’s life by entering a ‘death frenzy’ (shini-gurui) of deadly fury. Was this, however, an accurate interpretation of Hagakure’s true intent?
Foreign and Japanese critics in the postwar period blamed bushido as representing all that was most detestable in Japanese wartime behavior. Many Japanese renounced bushido as part of the misguided militaristic ideology that resulted in Japan’s ensuing defeat and shame, and also as unsuited to a new post-war democratic society.
In this context, Hagakure became by association a book at the root of intense controversy. Depending on one’s point of view, Hagakure represents a mystical beauty intrinsic to the Japanese aesthetic experience, and a stoic but profound appreciation of the meaning of life and death. Conversely, it may be regarded as a text that epitomizes all that is abhorrent in terms of mindless sacrifice, as well as a loathsome depreciation of the value of life and blind obedience to authority.
It is fair to say that Hagakure is a vastly misunderstood book both inside and outside of Japan. Perhaps this is why Yamamoto Jōchō implored Tashiro Tsuramoto to burn the text upon completion to prevent it from getting into the hands of those who could never appreciate it for the spirit in which it was written. This directive seems almost prophetic in light of the conflicting appraisals it has been subjected to in the modern era.
In Japan, a wide range of pundits, ranging from distinguished scholars to jingoistic right-wing ultranationalists, lazily quote from Hagakure to both highlight Japan’s supposed “uniqueness,” as well as attempting to draw a tenuous connection between the noble culture of the samurai and the spirit of modern Japanese people. Likewise, judging from the various steadily-selling foreign language translations available outside Japan, there are many non-Japanese who are captivated with the romanticism of Japan’s feudal past and notions of bushido, maybe as a curio, or perhaps hoping to find some useful tenet of wisdom. There are also people who totally disregard Hagakure as nefarious nonsense used as a medium for malevolent brainwashing by the Japanese military.
Foreign scholars of Japanese history and culture tend to take a sceptical view of the modern cultural nationalistic constructs of bushido as “invented tradition.” The historical value of Hagakure—as a window into the complex, sometimes incredibly violent, but generally peaceful world of Tokugawa period warriors—is often dismissed as being the radical, seditious ramblings of a disgruntled old curmudgeon, grumpy at the degeneration of the age. All of these attitudes, positive or negative, are understandable. But if read with a sympathetic understanding of the man and his times, the content of Hagakure makes much more sense.
CONTEXTUALIZING THE HISTORICAL SETTING AND SOCIAL MILIEU
As professional warriors, samurai were distinctive from peasant or civilian conscript soldiers of the ancient (kodai) and modern (kindai) periods. Their existence differed greatly to the officials who were merely assigned military duty in ancient times, and also to the modern career soldier.10 The gradual rise of the samurai to political prominence on a national scale was activated by the on-going dismantling of military obligations forced upon the general populace under the ritsuryō system. The system encouraged a rigid hierarchy in court, where certain offices became hereditary among a select but small group of nobles.
These families, determined to maintain their privileges and monopoly on government posts, increasingly sought affiliation with burgeoning warrior groups, or created private armies of their own. This, in turn, provided useful opportunities for career advancement among the middle- to lower-ranked nobles. They were quick to realize that martial ability was their ticket to a successful career in a mutually beneficial arrangement with the powerful aristocratic families that controlled the seat of government in Kyoto. “The greater such opportunities became, the more enthusiastically and the more seriously such young men committed themselves to the profession of arms.”11
Men from powerful local families in the eastern frontier lands entrusted with governmental titles formed bands and took up arms to defend their own estates, and helped quell other local disputes with the impending threat of violence. Provincial bands of samurai eventually formed feudal ties bound by a strong sense of identity as warriors. They maintained intense bonds of loyalty born of their shared experience in combat, as well as the promise of financial reward for services rendered. By the time Minamoto-no-Yoritomo set up the first bakufu, or warrior government, in Kamakura in 1192, warriors had already developed their own unique culture based on a ferocious appetite for fame, glory, and honor. Although it was not codified at this early stage, warrior culture was referred to by an array of terms, such as bandō musha no narai (“customs of the Eastern warriors”), yumiya no michi (“the way of the bow and arrow”), kyūba no michi (“the way of the bow and horse”), and so on. The term bushido was not coined until much later, in the 1600s.
To the samurai, martial ability was an expression of individual strength and valor, and symbolic of their distinctive subculture as specialist combatants. From the ninth century (or arguably, perhaps, even earlier), Japanese warriors developed and cultivated an idiosyncratic culture based largely on the ability to utilize violence. Warrior ideals evolved over many centuries. They abided by idioms of honor and upheld bonds of fealty forged between the retainer and lord, for whom—the classic war tales (gunki monogatari) frequently inform us—the warrior would gladly forfeit his life.
Generally speaking, by the Kamakura period (1185‒1333) samurai had developed a distinct ethical code to the extent that they would, ideally, risk or sacrifice their lives to maintain honor. Other members of society were not nearly as enthusiastic about the idea of demonstrating valor to the point of death. They created unique rules of interaction utilizing honorific expressions that directed the relationships between samurai individuals of all rank. It was the adhesive for the political and social life of the samurai. Warriors also developed an unquenchable desire to enhance the name of their families, or ie, and were fiercely competitive in ensuring that their name, or na, would last into posterity. In this sense, the quest to seek honor and avoid shame became inextricably linked to prowess and unremitting courage, and an eventual monopoly of the right to wield violence.
Naturally, as expressions of honor were demonstrated through martial skill and violence, the question of death has always been central to the samurai’s way of life. As is the case with Western medieval knights, the job of killing was certainly not condoned as a moral act in itself, although it was both justified and vindicated in a number of ways. A yearning for posthumous recognition, and an obsession for personal and familial glory, was all the motivation and justification the samurai needed to kill and die for. This provided the emotional impetus to fight bravely for one’s lord (along with the promise of financial reward), and the stigma of cowardice would be too much shame to bear, for both a samurai personally and his descendants.
Despite the honorable depictions of samurai in the popular medieval genre of literature known as “war tales,” greed for land, power, and self-advancement was always prevalent in the larger picture. This peaked at one of the most turbulent times in Japanese history, the Warring States period (1467–1568) where rival warlords, or daimyo, vied to conquer and eventually rule over a united Japan. This was a period where loyalty to one’s overlord was often conveniently flouted in favor of personal advancement, and alliances and promises of fealty were broken as often as they were made.
It was a volatile era in which the rise or demise of a great daimyo, his ie (“house”) and its members was only a treacherous back-stab away. The precariousness of the times led to a proliferation of “house rules” (kakun), laws (hatto), and prescripts defining consummate samurai deportment—obviously an indication that model behavior was far from the norm. Nevertheless, the perilous lifestyle of Sengoku warriors and their exploits were looked upon nostalgically by future generations as “the good old days” where samurai were real men, and those who dared won, or died in the process.
When Japan was finally ushered into an era of peace under the Tokugawa shogunate (1603–1867), samurai were faced with a dilemma. How could the warrior class, constituting just five or six per cent of the total population, justify their existence at the top of the newly-established social order, or shi-nō-kō-shō,12 when there were no more wars to speak of?
A number of military and Confucian scholars started formulating and refining protocols to guide warriors in their peacetime role, which became referred to as “shidō” or “bushidō.” The groundwork for a new system of political thought and awareness emerged over time, and arguments were circulated among the upper echelons of government advocating the centrality of warriors in affairs of state, offering validation for the existence of the privileged warrior class even though peace prevailed.
For example, in his famous military treatise Heihō Kadensho (1632), Yagyū Munenori (1571–1646) clarified how a virtuous ruler maintains the capacity to use military force to protect the masses. Thus, he argued, maintenance of a benevolent military government was vital for the wellbeing of the realm. “At times because of one man’s evil, ten thousand people suffer. So you kill that one man to let the tens of thousands live. Here, truly, the blade that deals death becomes the sword that saves lives.” In other words, the way of war was also seen as the way of peace.
This justification works on a governmental level, but by the time Hagakure was written in the middle of the Tokugawa period, it was the lower and middle tiers of samurai, now fully transformed into non-combatant salaried bureaucrats, who sought meaning to their existence. Prominent scholars such as Yamaga Sokō (1622–1685) and Daidōji Yūzan (1639–1730) provided samurai with standards for achievement in lieu of battlefield feats. Yamaga Sokō asked rhetorically: “The samurai eats food without growing it, uses utensils without manufacturing them, and profits without selling. What is the justification for this?” His solution was that the function of peacetime samurai was to serve his lord loyally, and be a moral exemplar to the commoners by demonstrating dedication to duty—by living in strict observance of protocols of etiquette, maintaining military preparedness through ascetic training in the military arts, while also nurturing aesthetic sensibilities in scholarly and cultural pursuits.
The quest for perfection in daily life and dedication to duty provided samurai with an alternative paradigm for accruing honor other than fighting bravely in battle. It was a far safer and less exciting substitute for war, but the shogunate was content for samurai to be tamed in this way, fearing that the intrinsic volatility of warrior culture could threaten its hegemony if not kept in check.
Interestingly, although the prospect of being killed honorably in battle was no longer a reality, the concept of death was idealized, and manifested in the attitude of self-sacrificing commitment to service and unequivocal loyalty to one’s lord. This could take the form of a self-willed death for some transgression, or suicide through fidelity.
Celebrated episodes during the Tokugawa period demonstrate just how ‘faithful’ a samurai could be to this extent. The most obvious example is the revenge of the 47 Rōnin (master-less samurai). In 1701, Asano Naganori, daimyo of the Akō domain, drew his sword and assaulted Kira Yoshinaka in the Edo Castle while in attendance because of a slight on his honor. Asano was immediately ordered to commit seppuku (ritual suicide by disembowelment) for this serious breach of etiquette. His retainers plotted for two years and enacted a vendetta culminating in the successful assassination of Kira at his mansion. This in turn led to their own termination by ritual suicide. They remain celebrated heroes in Japan to this day as paragons of loyalty.
The propriety of their actions attracted both praise and criticism from all quarters. The reaction shows the complex nature of the Tokugawa warrior’s “community of honor.” Should Asano have showed more restraint when goaded by Kira? To what extent can the sacred line of one’s personal honor be crossed before retaliation is acceptable? Given the inviolability of personal honor for a samurai, should the shogun Tsunayoshi have been more judicious before immediately meting out punishment to Asano for breaking castle protocol which prohibited the drawing of weapons? Should he not have punished Kira as well for being the other party in the altercation? Should the 47 Asano retainers have abided by the strict law preventing retribution, or were they justified in their actions? Was their vendetta motivated out of loyalty to their wronged lord, or for maintaining the reputation of their clan, or were they driven by egocentric desires to uphold their personal pride and names in their community of honor? Should they have been executed as criminals instead of given the chance to die honorably by their own hands? All of these questions were important considerations of the day.
Jōchō’s opinion on the incident is representative of his no-nonsense stance with regards to appropriate warrior conduct.
The rōnin of the Asano clan were culpable for not immediately committing seppuku at the Sengakuji Temple [after the night raid on Lord Kira’s mansion]. Moreover, it took too long to exact revenge after their master was killed by the enemy. What if [their intended victim] Lord Kira had died of illness in the interim? It would have been a disgrace. Warriors of the Kamigata region are clever and shrewd in finding ways of being showered in praise. (1-55)
Indeed, Hagakure provides a frank commentary on the multifarious issues that samurai had to contend with as they navigated their way through Pax Tokugawa. The life philosophy of Yamamoto Jōchō highlights the tension and contradictions endured by a warrior subculture that had primed itself for war over many centuries, but was stuck in the limbo of peace.
CONTEXTUALIZING THE CONTENT
The subject matter of Hagakure was dictated by Yamamoto Jōchō. He was born on the eleventh day of the sixth month in 1659 to Yamamoto Jin’uemon Shigezumi, a retainer of the Saga domain. Jōchō talks of his childhood days in Book 2. He mentions that his father was 70 years old when he was born, and given the encumbrance of rearing a child at his age, Jin’uemon quipped that he should like to off-load his new child to a salt merchant. His unit captain, Taku Zusho, advised against such rash disposal of the lad, as his illustrious lineage guaranteed usefulness as a retainer in the future.
Jōchō was first named Matsukame, and when he was nine years of age, he was renamed Fukei when called into service as an errand boy by Nabeshima Mitsushige (1632–1700), second lord of the Saga domain. His father was strict and gave him all manner of laborious chores to build his strength and stamina. Evidently the boy was of weak constitution, and it was said that he would probably not live past the age of 12. Showing the dogged qualities that pepper the text of Hagakure, he spent his youth in personal training to prove his doubters wrong.
Jōchō’s father died when he was 11. Following his father’s passing, he was cared for and austerely educated by his nephew, Yamamoto Tsuneharu, who was actually 20 years his senior. He was made a pageboy of Nabeshima Mitsushige and given the name Ichijūrō at the age of 14. In 1678, he underwent the coming-of-age ceremony (genpuku), taking the name Gon’nojō, and was promoted to the position of close attendant and scribe’s assistant.
Unfortunately, his lord Mitsushige showed displeasure at Gon’nojō’s complicity in his son Tsunashige’s fixation with poetry, and he was temporarily discharged from duty. During this time, he visited his father’s old friend Tannen Oshō, a Zen monk at the Kezōan, and there he was taught the teachings of Buddhist Law. When he was 21, he was administered the kechimyaku, a document that signifies the “bloodline” or succession of various masters in a particular Zen school. He was given the Buddhist name Kyokuzan Jōchō (which can also be read as Tsunetomo). Around this time, he also frequented the abode of Saga’s renowned scholar of Confucianism and thought, Ishida Ittei. The teachings of both these men had a profound effect on Jōchō, and this is evident by the numerous times their wisdom is quoted in Hagakure.
Jōchō married at the age of 24 and was reappointed as an officer of document writing. He was dispatched to Edo in this capacity when he was 28, and then deployed to Kyoto later on. He took his father’s name, Jin’uemon, upon returning to Saga at the age of 33. Five years later, he was sent to Kyoto again by Mitsushige on a special mission to acquire a copy of Kokin-denju, a rare corpus of teachings which illuminated the inner meaning of the poems contained in the tenth century anthology of poetry known as the Kokin Waka-shū (commonly called Kokin-shū). For this purpose, he visited an authority on waka poetry, the nobleman Sanjō-nishi Sanenori, and finally managed to acquire copies of valuable documents for his lord in 1700. Through some premonition, he realized he had to return to Saga quickly, and did so just in time to present the bed-ridden Mitsushige with the prized teachings.
With Mitsushige dying that year, this turned out to be the culmination of Jōchō’s service to his lord, and his greatest exploit. One gets the impression that he strongly regretted that his career was bound by a forced association with the arts. This ultimately prevented him from achieving his goal of reaching the lofty heights of chief retainer, where he dreamt of occupying an influential position to counsel his lord for the good of the domain.
It was Jōchō’s stated desire to martyr himself and commit the act of junshi, or self-immolation, to follow his lord in death. Such a self-willed death was considered to be the highest expression of loyalty to one’s deceased lord, and thought to be an honorable end to the life of a dedicated retainer. To the disappointment of Jōchō however, junshi (or oibara as it was also known) had been prohibited in the Nabeshima domain by decree in 1661, and indeed by the Tokugawa government in 1663. His only recourse to demonstrate his integrity and devotion as a loyal warrior of the Nabeshima clan was to commit a form of “social junshi.” He took the tonsure, shaved his head, and retired to a hermitage in the hills in Kurotsuchibaru.
It was here, ten years later, that Tashiro Tsuramoto visited him to seek his counsel. Jōchō’s wife had already died, and he had no children. Jōchō’s adopted son Tsunetoshi (also named Gon’nojō) died while on duty in Edo aged 38, so it is understandable that Jōchō took a liking to his Nabeshima domain junior, and the relationship they forged was one of deep, almost paternal, respect.
Tsuramoto was born in 1678, and his scholastic talents were recognized from a young age. He was appointed as a copyist for Nabeshima Tsunashige when he was 19, and continued in this role with the fourth lord of the Nabeshima clan, Yoshishige. He was relieved of duty for some unknown transgression in 1709. Despairing, Tsuramoto visited Jōchō at his hermitage in Kurotsuchibaru in the third month of the following year. Deciding to live close to Jōchō, Tsuramoto visited often, and wrote down the stories relayed to him over a period of seven years. The first copy of Hagakure was completed on the tenth day of the ninth month, 1716.
The original manuscript of Hagakure has long since been lost, but important handwritten copies made during the Tokugawa period include the “Kōhaku-bon,” transcribed by Kamohara Kōhaku, who was five years Tsuramoto’s junior, as well as the “Kashima-bon,” and “Koyama-bon” (“Yamamoto-bon” and “Gojō-bon”)—in addition to subsequent copies of these copies, which total around 40. Each copy contains slight differences, and exist in varying degrees of completeness. This translation is based on the Kōhaku version, as this is generally considered to be the closest to the original.
UNRAVELING THE ESSENCE OF HAGAKURE
The content of Hagakure is complicated, and unashamedly contradictory and ambiguous in places. Even the origin of the book’s name is open for conjecture. One theory cites a poem by the famous Buddhist bard Saigyō Hōshi (1118–1190) in the Sanka-shū. “Hagakure ni chiri-todomareru hana nomi zo, shinobishi hito ni au kokochi suru” (“Hidden away under leaves, a blossom still left over makes me yearn to chance upon my secret love this way.”)13 Another hypothesis suggests that “hidden by leaves” was a reference to the secluded environment in which Tsuramoto interviewed Jōchō. Other scholars allude to the fact that Jōchō often makes reference to stalwart service from behind the scenes, or “service from the shadows,” with no desire for recognition. It has even been postulated that the fifth Nabeshima lord, Muneshige, visited Tsuramoto and conferred the title himself.
It would seem that the most plausible of all these theories is the Saigyō one. Nevertheless, it has been discounted by distinguished Hagakure expert, Furukawa Tetsushi, due to a passage that indicates Jōchō’s contempt of Saigyō. “Kenkō and Saigyō were no more than lily-livered cowards. They masqueraded as writers because they were afraid to serve as samurai.” Still, Jōchō concludes this vignette with the observation: “A man who has renounced the world to become a monk, or old men retired from duty, may become absorbed in such books. But to be a useful vassal to his lord, a warrior must be completely devoted to him amidst his pursuit of glory, or even after falling into the chasms of hell” (2-140) Thus, it seems logical that Saigyō’s poem is the most conceivable derivation of the book’s title, especially with the added allusion to “secret love,” an important theme in Hagakure analogous with devotion and loyalty. “At a recent gathering I declared that the highest form of devotion is ‘secret love’ (shinobu-koi).” (2-2)
The premise for writing Hagakure stems from a vexation at the disintegration of warrior norms over previous decades, anti-shogunate sentiment, and nostalgic longing for the previous regimes of Lord Nabeshima Naoshige, first daimyo of the Nabeshima fiefdom, and his son and heir Katsushige (1580–1657).14 Jōchō laments how young samurai “talk of money, about profit and loss, their household financial problems, taste in fashion, and idle chatter of sex.” (1-63) Preoccupation with frivolities and consumerism was symptomatic of new generations of warriors who had never experienced battle, and therefore lacked discipline and the purity of intent reminiscent of earlier generations.
Jōchō’s discourse is multifaceted and ostensibly chaotic, but the spirit of Hagakure can best be summed up by the four simple oaths he alludes to throughout the text:
I will never fall behind others in pursuing the Way of the warrior.
I will always be ready to serve my lord.
I will honor my parents.
I will serve compassionately for the benefit of others.
(See “Idle Talk in the Dead of Night”)
At face value, the morals Jōchō is purporting here seem universal in nature, and not particularly burdensome. Underlying these outwardly serene pledges are powerful, emotive sentiments that penetrate to the very core of the samurai culture, in which life can be forfeited in an explosive instant of insanity for the sake of honor and loyalty. From the outset, Jōchō’s sermon is pragmatic and affirms what could be described as a cult of death.
Indisputably the most famous phrase in Hagakure is “The Way of the warrior (bushido) is to be found in dying.” Despite its seeming straightforwardness, this sentence is completely open to interpretation. Did Jōchō really mean that warriors should gleefully seize any opportunity to make the ultimate sacrifice? “If one is faced with two options of life or death, simply settle for death. It is not an especially difficult choice; just go forth and meet it confidently.” (1-2) This would suggest that this was, indeed, the case. Conversely, the very next sentence in the text provides a literal and figurative juxtaposition: “Only when you constantly live as though already a corpse (jōjū shinimi) will you be able to find freedom in the martial Way, and fulfill your duties without fault throughout your life.” (1-2) In other words, adherents of bushido should seek to nurture an indomitable fighting spirit free from concerns of life and death.
Within the context of yeomanly service (hōkō) and daily duties, bushido also implies commitment, perseverance, and devotedness. In this sense, the ideal of death can also be interpreted as a selfless application to service in the leader-follower relationship of vassalage, and the correct mind-set required. Consequently, as well as being a declaration of “death over life” in the literal sense, it also implies the nuance of “live as if dead,” where each and every second of one’s life is a precious, unrepeatable moment, and should never be used in vain.
The following passage confirms this. “With regards to the way of death, if you are prepared to die at any time, you will be able to meet your release from life with equanimity. As calamities are usually not as bad as anticipated beforehand, it is foolhardy to feel anxiety about tribulations not yet endured. Just accept that the worst possible fate for a man in service is to become a rōnin, or death by seppuku. Then nothing will faze you.” (1-92) That is to say, as long as one knows that the most appalling thing that can happen is disassociation from one’s raison d’être or death, then one should be able to live an uninhibited and productive life before meeting death in a dignified manner. Hagakure professes that life is a set that is completed by death; they are inextricably linked, and the nobler the death, the better the life it was. Furthermore, a noble death is the result of living life as if one were already dead.
This is an almost existential attitude, and Jōchō advocates not becoming confused in the face of a meaningless or absurd world. “Are men not like masterfully controlled puppets? It is magnificent craftsmanship that allows us to walk, jump, prance, and speak even though there are no strings attached. We may be guests at next year’s Bon festival. We forget it is an ephemeral world in which we live.” (2-45) For this reason, living with single-minded resolve (ichinen) and becoming a heroic warrior, the all-reliable supreme samurai referred to as kusemono, is the only way to liberate one’s self and add meaning in this fleeting existence.
But still, Hagakure is fraught with contradictory messages about death and service which cause confusion. Although the Tokugawa period was an epoch of relative stability, and warriors would rarely if ever smell the stench of death in their nostrils on the battlefield, there was always an undercurrent of honor-fuelled tension ready to erupt into fatal clashes of violence in the course of daily life. Hagakure abounds with stories of fights which generally extol the actions of warriors who unflinchingly despatch their foe in spite of the impending dire consequences of seppuku, or even the disgrace of execution as punishment for breaking the law.
For example, a story in Book 10 relays an incident in Kyoto in which a samurai hears from a passer-by that one of his peers is involved in a brawl. He rushes to the scene to find he is about to be finished off, so he charges in with suicidal intent, and kills the two attackers. He is arrested and tried by the Kyoto magistrate. In his defense he says, “I was told ‘your colleague is in a fight,’ and thought it would dishonor the military way if I ignored the situation. That is why I dashed to the scene. What’s more, it would have been unforgivable had I done nothing after witnessing the murder of a fellow clansman. I would extend the duration of my own life, but the spirit of bushido would perish in me. Thus, I dispensed with my cherished life to preserve the Way of the samurai. By forfeiting my life, I have observed the law of the samurai and upheld the warrior spirit. I have already laid down my life, and therefore humbly request that my punishment be meted out swiftly.” (10-63) Following this statement, the magistrate released him, and sent notice to his lord: “Your retainer is a praiseworthy fellow and should be treasured.”
On the other hand though, in another story contained in Hagakure, seeking a peaceful resolution is the recommended course of action for a samurai to take. It tells of two warriors meeting on a one-lane bridge, both refusing to give way to the other and threatening to resolve the situation with sword diplomacy. Then, a lowly radish seller comes between the two warriors and, “catching each one on either end of his shoulder carrying pole, picks them up and spins them around to the opposite ends of the bridge.” It is concluded that “There are many ways of solving problems, and this counts as constructive service to one’s lord. It is most unfortunate to see precious retainers die needlessly, or create needless discord.” (2-124)
Some passages advise that the warrior should be reserved and discreet when offering counsel to his lord. “If admonishment and opinions are not communicated carefully with a spirit of accord, it will amount to nothing. Insensitive protests will cause umbrage, and even simple problems will not be resolved.” (1-152) At the same time, Jōchō encourages samurai to actively seek recognition in the quest for honor and glory. “A samurai who does not care much for his reputation tends to be contrary, is conceited, and good-for-nothing. He is inferior to a samurai who craves glory, and is thus completely unusable.” (1-154) Or, “In matters of military prowess, train with all of your might to never be surpassed by others, and think to yourself, ‘My valor is beyond compare.’ ” (1-161)
Similarly, warriors are encouraged to vicariously support others to benefit the clan as a whole. For example: “It is an act of loyalty to educate others to become better retainers. Therefore, those with the will to learn should be given instruction. Nothing is more joyous than passing on knowledge to be vicariously useful in service through others.” (1-124) Nevertheless, another passage shows Jōchō’s defiance of orders so that he could accompany his lord in battle. “I cannot comply with this order when it will keep me away from His Lordship in battle. Please bear witness as I swear an oath to the god of war (Yumiya Hachiman) that I cannot possibly attach my seal of acceptance to this order… If it is determined that I should commit seppuku, then I will willingly comply.”
He then finishes with a comment urging warriors to surpass colleagues and prevail amid the rivalry that characterized warrior life. “A young warrior should be strong headed.” (1-106) Furthermore, “A samurai should be excessively obstinate. Anything done in moderation will fall short of your goals. If you feel that you are doing more than is needed, it will be just right.” (1-188)
Jōchō also advises prudence. “The best course of action is to first take a step back, understand the depths and shallows of various matters, and avoid provoking indignation in your master.” (2-8) Then again, he advises against judiciousness. “A calculating man is a coward. This is because he considers everything from the perspective of loss and gain, and his mind never deviates from this track. To him, death is a loss, and life is a gain.” (1-111) Often he sponsors rash acts, completely disregarding the outcome. “To retaliate entails just frenetically throwing yourself at your adversary with the intention of being cut down. Being killed this way brings no shame. Thinking about how to win may result in missing the best opportunity to act.” (1-55) This action is represented by another couple of keywords in Hagakure—kichigai and shini-gurui, or the “mad death frenzy.” “In any case, just give yourself over to insanity and sacrifice yourself to the task. That’s all you need to do. If you attempt to solve problems through careful manoeuvring, doubts will creep in and paralyze your mind, and you will fail miserably.” (1-193)
If all these incongruities were not confusing enough, the conflict that arises between “secret love” in loyalty and in the man-love relationships called shudō adds to the complexity of the dynamics of human relations depicted in the book. “The essential point in shudō is preparation to forfeit your life for the sake of your lover. Otherwise you risk humiliation. On the other hand, though, this means that you would be unable to surrender your life in the service of your lord. Through this contradiction, I came to realize that in shudō, you should love your partner, but not love him at the same time.” (1-181) Shudō is depicted as the purest form of reverential bonding between two males, based on ineffaceable trust and appreciation of each other’s inner qualities.
These are just a few examples of the multifarious nature of the content and contradictory tenets of advice that create a degree of abstruseness that leaves the message of Hagakure open for interpretation. This is precisely why reading Hagakure without a basic understanding of the complexities of the Tokugawa warrior community of honor, the samurai ethno-mentality, and, to a degree, local knowledge of Saga and its personalities, leaves one with the impression that the content is just the mad ramblings of a disgruntled old man. To be sure, the text undeniably contains a degree of this, too, and like any human being, Yamamoto Jōchō certainly had good and bad days when reminiscing to Tsuramoto. In fact, some sections of Hagakure were probably relayed with a grin, and even an element of humor can be detected, if one looks for it.
Many of the apparent inconsistencies in Hagakure can be assuaged by simply being aware of who—or what—level of samurai each vignette is directed toward. It is a common mistake to lump all samurai together, but there were many ranks within their world, and the responsibilities and expectations of each were markedly different. Therefore, the ideal deportment and style of loyalty differed as well. For instance, Olivier Ansart makes a distinction between two broad types of loyalty: middle-ranked samurai and below personified “symbolic service,” whereas “loyalty of counsel” was required of high-ranked warriors.15
Middle- to lower-ranked samurai were encouraged to engage in unconditional service and blind obedience, being prepared to frenetically sacrifice their own lives by entering a “frenzy of death” with purity of intention. The low-ranked warrior had no influence on how the domain was governed, or what his lord thought. The only realistic homage they could pay to their lord was expressed using their martial skill and spirit in violent or self-sacrificial acts. This included frenzied fights to the death that reflected on the lord’s reputation of having valorous, decisive warriors in his domain. The samurai were essentially expendable pawns who could only dream of upward social mobility premised on selfless service from a young age. If he was noticed by his lord for acts of gallantry, or for is outstanding attributes, he could live in hope of being promoted to a higher position up the ranks. This, however, was very much the exception rather than the norm.
On the other hand, the “loyalty of counsel” was reserved for upper-ranking samurai. To fulfill their important duty of counselling the lord, as well as remonstrating with him for his transgressions for his and the domain’s benefit, required skills in diplomacy, selfless resolve, wisdom, and prudence. Honor was found in the act of offering judicious, yet discreet, advice. This, too, was a precarious existence, as it might mean sacrificing one’s life to take the blame for a lord’s foolishness, or to atone for angering him. In both virtual and counsel-based forms of loyalty, the important mind-set was to act in accordance with a single-minded, pure will and intention, referred to throughout the pages of Hagakure as ichinen.
All that matters is having single-minded purpose ( ichinen), in the here and now. Life is an ongoing succession of ‘one will’ at a time, each and every moment. A man who realizes this truth need not hurry to do, or seek, anything else anymore. Just live in the present with single-minded purpose. People forget this important truth, and keep seeking other things to accomplish. (2-17)
A warrior who can demonstrate such resolve and purity in thought and action is hailed as a kusemono. In modern Japanese parlance, kusemono has negative connotations, indicating an eccentric or abnormal person—a quintessential weirdo. The kusemono depicted in Hagakure, however, represents the supreme warrior. Such an ideal man could be relied upon to always be there in a calamity, but remained behind the scenes when not needed. “Exceptional warriors (kusemono) are dependable men. Dependable men are exceptional warriors. I know this through considerable experience. Dependable men can be relied upon to keep away when things are going well, but will come to your aid without fail when you are in need. A man of such temperament is most certainly a kusemono.” (1-132)
The presence of the kusemono is pervasive throughout Hagakure. The kusemono is the archetypical warrior whom Jōchō aspired to be, and the unnamed hero of the book. It is the kusemono who embodies the essence of Hagakure’s bushido.
CONCLUSION
This introductory chapter was written with the intention of contextualizing the myriad of influences that resulted in the writing of, and subsequent fascination with, this collection of guileless but sometimes quixotic aphorisms known as Hagakure. Controversial from the beginning, modified interpretations of the text’s mentality in the twentieth century made the book particularly useful for stirring ultra-nationalistic sentiment and inculcating militarism. Consequently, Hagakure temporarily became a “forbidden text” of sorts again in the aftermath of World War II. Gradually, though, Japan entered a period of renewed interest in Hagakure from the 1960s. Renowned historians such as Furukawa Tetsushi and authors such as Mishima Yukio acclaimed Hagakure as representing the most exquisitely “beautiful” aspects of Japanese culture that had been indiscriminately purged in the immediate post-war period.
Western interest in the book was also piqued with a growing fascination for samurai culture and philosophy, especially following Japan’s rise as an economic superpower in the 1980s. In recent years, a handful of translations into modern Japanese have become available, as have several English language translations that seek to introduce the “wisdom” of Hagakure to a wide international readership.
Given the historical importance of the work for understanding the samurai psyche, it is hardly surprising that a number of English translations have already been published. This begs the question as to why it is necessary to produce yet another. Although the extant translations are reliable to varying degrees, they often tend to gloss over the finer nuances in the original Japanese. In addition, to date there have been no complete translations of Hagakure in book form. This book is by no means complete, but it is the first to contain translations of all the vignettes in the first two books. These two are particularly important as they were dictations of Yamamoto Jōchō. The remaining books were comprised of information possibly from Jōchō, but a considerable portion of the material was collated elsewhere by Tashiro Tsuramoto. In the third section of this translation, I have included a selection of these later aphorisms which I find interesting, or have used in previous research.
This translation is based on the Hagakure version contained in Saiki Kazuma (et al eds.), Mikawa Monogatari, Hagakure (Nihon Shisō Taikei 26), which I consider to be the most academically rigorous. It is based on the aforementioned Kōhaku Book and makes exhaustive comparisons with the other extant copies, providing many notes which aid in the understanding of the obscure references in the text. I have incorporated relevant notes in the hope that this translation of Hagakure will facilitate the reader’s understanding of this complex yet profoundly interesting window on human experience in eighteenth-century Japan, when warriors struggled to find equilibrium between their honor and the dictates of social order.
Finally, I would like to thank Professor Lachlan Jackson, Professor Uozumi Takashi, Professor Yamaori Tetsuo, Trevor Jones, and my research assistant for this project, Remi Yamaguchi, for their opinions and invaluable assistance in completing this translation.
_______________________
1 Bushidō (武士道)—literally “the Way of the warrior.” “Bushi” is the common Japanese word denoting warriors in academic circles, although “samurai” is probably better known in the West. Nowadays, both terms are used interchangeably; however, the word samurai is used most frequently in this book.
2 Tsunetomo is written with the kanji characters 常朝. When Tsunetomo took the tonsure following the death of his lord in 1700, he began using his Buddhist name, Jōchō, which uses the same kanji characters in their on reading. Discussions of Hagakure are divided as to which reading is used. As Hagakure was written after Jōchō became a monk, throughout my translation he is mostly referred to as Jōchō rather than Tsunetomo.
3 The Saga domain is also known as the Hizen domain and Nabeshima domain. It is located in the Hizen province in the modern-day prefecture of Saga on the southern island of Kyushu. The region was originally controlled by the Ryūzōji clan, of whom the Nabeshima were originally vassals. Nabeshima Naoshige became the guardian of Ryūzōji Takanobu’s son, Takafusa, when he was killed in battle in 1584. In 1590 Toyotomi Hideyoshi allowed the Nabeshima clan to usurp the region, and the Ryūzōji hegemony was superseded with Naoshige becoming the first Nabeshima daimyo of the fiefdom.
4 Eiko Ikegami, The Taming of the Samurai, p. 297
5 S. Garon, Molding Japanese Minds, p. 8
6 Kevin Doak, A History of Nationalism in Modern Japan: Placing the People, p. 195
7 H. Befu, Japan: An Anthropological Introduction, pp. 50–52
8 Ikegami, Op. Cit., p. 288
9 Koike Yoshiaki, Hagakure–Bushi to Hōkō, p. 44
10 Motoki Yasuo, Bushi no Seiritsu, p. 1
11 Karl Friday, Samurai, Warfare and the State in Early Medieval Japan, p. 6
12 Although the lines were often blurred and inter-class mobility certainly existed, shi-nō-kō-shō represented the social strata enforced by the shogunate which placed samurai at the top of the pyramid, followed by farmers, artisans, and merchants respectively.
13 William R. Lafleur, Awesome Nightfall: The Life, Times, and Poetry of Saigyo, p. 653
14 See the timeline for a chronological list of events outlining the history of the Saga domain from the time of the Ryūzōji clan and the transition to the Nabeshima clan.
15 Olivier Ansart, “Embracing Death: Pure will in Hagakure,” Early Modern Japan: An Interdisciplinary Journal v. 18, (2010): pp. 57–75
