Samurai, Warfare and the State in Early Medieval Japan

Karl F. Friday

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2004
• eBook ISBN: 9781134330225
• Edition: 1
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: Asian History
• Index: History

Karl Friday, an internationally recognised authority on Japanese warriors, provides the first comprehensive study of the topic to be published in English. This work incorporates nearly twenty years of on-going research and draws on both new readings of primary sources and the most recent secondary scholarship.

It overturns many of the stereotypes that have dominated views of the period. Friday analyzes Heian -, Kamakura- and Nambokucho-period warfare from five thematic angles. He examines the principles that justified armed conflict, the mechanisms used to raise and deploy armed forces, the weapons available to early medieval warriors, the means by which they obtained them, and the techniques and customs of battle.

A thorough, accessible and informative review, this study highlights the complex casual relationships among the structures and sources of early medieval political power, technology, and the conduct of war.

1
THE MEANING OF WAR

A just war is hospitable to every self-deception on the part of those waging it, none more than the certainty of virtue, under whose shelter every abomination can be committed with a clear conscience.

Alexander Cockburn, New Statesman and Society, 1991

You cannot have good laws without good arms, and where there are good arms, good laws inevitably follow.

Niccolo Machiavelli, The Prince, 1514

Warfare – armed conflict between organized bands or bodies – may well be a ubiquitous phenomenon, occurring in all times and all places that humans have grouped themselves into exclusively defined troupes; but war is anything but a universal construct. While men everywhere and every when have taken up arms, the purposes and objectives toward which they strive are as varied as the clothing they wear and the languages they speak. The meaning of war is highly particularized to specific times and places, and always susceptible to change brought on by social or technological evolution.

Carl von Clausewitz's famous definition of war as “an act of force to compel our enemy to do our will,” and “a continuation of political intercourse with the intermixing of other means,” rings true for modern Western audiences.¹ But while his views may have been typical of the age and place in which he penned them, they were expressed in defiance of historical reality. Warfare and martial power have forms and purposes beyond resolving interstate disputes – beyond even killing enemies or protecting oneself. And some of these are more important or more common in premodern societies than the shapes and objectives we associate with “war” today. Warfare can also be a form of communication. It can be a means of divination or other intercourse with deities. It can be a competition, a means of entertainment or self-expression. It can serve a judicial function, or be a symbol of the power of the observers of its exercise over those who perform it.

And if the identity of war is contingent on time, place and circumstance, still more so are the rules of war, the bases for distinguishing between acceptable and unacceptable grounds for resorting to arms. Societies differentiate just from unjust wars, warriors from brigands, and even guerrillas from terrorists. Yet one people's or one age's holy cause is another's malefaction. In practice, moreover, a culture's ideas about why wars are – or should be – fought are interwoven with its customs and routines for fighting them.

This chapter explores the ways that the socio-political climate in which the early bushi functioned shaped early medieval Japanese customs and beliefs regarding the purposes of armed conflict, and the principles that separated righteous from criminal hostilities.

The concept of Just War

Modern Western ideas concerning the purpose of armies and war trace back to antiquity and the political philosophers of Greece and Rome. Aristotle, who coined the term and the concept of Just War for the Hellenic world, saw it not as an end in and of itself, but as a means to higher goals. He cast war in the light of conflict to further peace and justice, which in turn rested on the concept of natural law, a universal and self-vindicating morality rooted in religious or cosmic sanction. Under this view, war became acceptable only as a last resort and only when conducted so as not to preclude the restoration of a lasting peace.

To this the Romans appended the role of the polity. As defined by Cicero, a war could be just only when conducted by the state, which excluded revolution and rebellion, and only when accompanied by a formal declaration of hostilities. The Romans further saw war as analogous to the process of recovering damages for breach of contract in a civil suit, with the injured city-state enjoying rights to seek compensation and redress, and acting as advocate, judge and sheriff. Against an enemy from whom Rome sought to recover lost goods, whether real property or incorporeal rights, warfare was not a willful exercise of violence but a just and pious endeavor occasioned by injustices propagated by the enemy. Conversely, combat waged without a proper causa belli or without state sanction was not war but piracy (lactrocinium).²

Early Christians rejected war in toto. This position was not, however, due to any explicit prohibition of war in the New Testament. It derived instead from an effort to apply what was taken to be the mind of Christ. And it offered a new vision of peace that centered on well-being and security, but without physical characteristics. Christian peace was the absence not only of war but of contention. The earliest forms of Christian pacifism had as much to do with rejection of politics and worldliness as with abhorrence of violence itself.

After Constantine, however, the clear separation of the Church and the world ceased to exist, and Christianity could no longer be pacifist in the same way it had been. As a result, it began to focus on the evil of violence itself, and to attempt some reconciliation of Christian ideals with the necessity of using armed force in governance. Against this background Augustine formulated a doctrine centered on the twin themes of permission and limitation. Christians, whether acting as individuals or collectively in war, could engage in violence only under circumstances that met key criteria: right authority, just cause, right intention, proportionality, last resort, and the end of peace.³

Japan generated no significant dialog of its own on what circumstances rendered it right and proper for the state to direct its military power at its own subjects or at outsiders, and instead drew the philosophical base it needed for such decisions from Chinese – predominantly Confucian – principles. China produced a staggeringly prodigious volume of theoretical work on war. One estimate puts the total number of treatises at 1,340 books in 6,831 volumes, of which some 288 books, containing 2,160 volumes, survive today. Most of the original thinking on military theory was developed during the Chou period, with later texts focusing on interpretation of older ones. The Warring States era (475–221 BCE) in particular saw the emergence of a rich commentary on warfare, both in specialized works on military theory and strategy, such as Sun Tzu, and in more general works by Legalist, Taoist, Confucian and other thinkers.⁴

Post-Ch'in dynasty political theory cast the governing institutions of the state as nothing more – and nothing less – than a conduit for the expression of the will of the sovereign. Government officials were held to be advisors and sometimes surrogates acting in loco parentis for the emperor, who was himself the earthly agent and custodian of the cosmic order, with authority over and responsibility for his subjects analogous to those of a father for his children. The emperor's role in the social order applied equally to domestic and foreign affairs, which formed a single continuum with the emperor at the center of a series of radial zones of influence. Any disruptions of the social order, from petty crimes and familial disputes in the capital to armed conflicts abroad, were thus transgressions against the proper cosmic order and deserving of imperial attention.

When all was as it should be, the virtuous and proper conduct of the ruler exerted a powerful edifying effect on his subjects, driving them toward righteous behavior without further need for coercion, just as ideal children acquire moral rectitude from their parents' example. But where, owing to shortcomings on the part of the ruler or the subjects, this was not enough (as was usually the case in the real world), the next best alternative was the law and the state, which encouraged virtuous conduct by reward and discouraged misbehavior by punishment. Recourse to war – to the violent coercion of large numbers of people – was justifi able only when all else had failed.

Thus war, in the Chinese scheme of things, could be pursued only by the rightful sovereign, and only if conducted as a matter of last resort. At the same time, the righteousness and the justice of any military action the emperor and his ministers deemed it necessary to pursue could not be questioned, save in retrospect. The success of any military venture was in itself proof that the campaign had been in accord with the cosmic order, and therefore by definition right and just.

Chinese ideas about war made their way into Japan along with other bits of Chinese culture over the course of the fifth, sixth and seventh centuries, and provided the framework for the military institutions of the imperial (ritsuryō) state, which in turn served as the core principles of the state's military system from the eighth through the end of the fourteenth century. Following the Chinese model, the Japanese court viewed both warfare with foreign powers and peoples and domestic law-enforcement as essentially the same activity. Outside the capital, military defense and police functions were carried out by the same units and officers, following the same procedures (see Chapter 2). And military adventures outside the parameters of the state were justified with the same rhetoric as police actions within it. The court's efforts to establish control over northeastern Honshu, ongoing from the late seventh to the early ninth century, for example, cast these campaigns as “pacifi cation” efforts (seii), and the emishi people against whom they were directed as criminals and rebels:⁵

Because [military action] brings hardship to the people, We have long embraced broader virtue [and have eschewed war]. [But] a report from Our generals makes it clear that the barbarians have not amended their wild hearts. They invade Our frontiers and ignore the instructions of the Sovereign. What must be done cannot be avoided.…Immediately dispatch the army to strike down and destroy in a timely fashion.⁶

These bandits are like wild-hearted wolf cubs. They do not reflect on the favors We have bestowed upon them but trust in the steepness of [the terrain around their bases] and time and again wreak havoc upon Our frontiers. Our soldiers are a dangerous weapon, but they cannot stop [these depredations]. Be it thus: mobilize 3000 troops and with these cut off the rebel progeny; with these put out the smoldering embers.⁷

Thus the Japanese court, like its Chinese paragon, laid claim to an authority whose boundaries often exceeded its real power, and whose implications left scarce room for debate concerning the parameters of Just War. The ritsuryō polity equated its existence, and the socio-political structure over which it reigned, with morality and the cosmic order. Military actions undertaken in order to preserve – or enhance – the imperial order were – must be – Just War, while any and all other recourses to force of arms were by definition selfish, particularistic and unjust.⁸

The ritsuryō codes enshrined these notions in their provisions reserving control and direction of all but the most minor military and police affairs for the emperor and his court. Overall administration of the state's armed forces was conducted by the Ministry of Military Affairs (hyōbushō) and the five offices under it. Its responsibilities included the supervision of military officers; the administration of troop registers, armories, pastures, war-horses, public and private pack animals, boats, fortifications, signal fires, and postal roads; the oversight of the manufacture of weapons; the collation of military communications from the provinces; and the calculation of overall troop strength and the balance of forces in the various provinces. All these functions were handled at the provincial level by the governor and his staff (all of whom were central appointees), who also conducted annual inspections of weapons, boats, livestock and the like, and forwarded the information collected to the Ministry of Military Affairs for collation.⁹

Any mobilization of more than twenty troops could be undertaken only by imperial edict. The procedures for promulgating such writs were complex, and required the concurrence of the Council of State (daijōkan). This meant that a decision to employ armed force could be effected only with the broad consensus of the ruling class. The issue would first be discussed by various deliberative bodies and decided on by the Council of State, whereupon an imperial edict was petitioned for and an order to fight issued in the emperor's name. The Ministry of Military Affairs would then be directed to calculate and report on the number of troops available for mobilization, the number appropriate for the current campaign, and the specific units most suitable for mobilization. This report would thereupon become the base upon which the Council of State would issue preparation and mobilization instructions “pursuant to an order from his imperial majesty.”¹⁰

Private war

By the mid-tenth century, the court had discarded most of the elaborate, Chinese-inspired military apparatus established under the ritsuryō codes, an excision that in part facilitated and was in part facilitated by the birth and rapid growth of a new order of professional fighting men in the capital and the countryside. From this time forward, the state maintained no armies of its own, depending instead on the members of the emerging bushi order deputized to act...

Table of contents

• Cover
• SAMURAI, WARFARE AND THE STATE IN EARLY MEDIEVAL JAPAN
• Warfare and History General Editor Jeremy Black
• Full Title
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Contents
• List of figures
• Acknowledgements
• Introduction
• 1 The meaning of war
• 2 The organization of war
• 3 The tools of war
• 4 The science of war
• 5 The culture of war
• Epilog
• Notes
• References and bibliography
• Index