Samurai

The Last Warrior: A History

John Man

• Publisher: Mariner Books
• Year: 2014
• Print ISBN:
  9780062202673
• eBook ISBN:
  9780062202680
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: 19th Century History
• Index: History

The definitive history of the Samurai, by acclaimed author of Ninja: 1,000 Years of the Shadow Warrior

"One could ask for no better storyteller or analyst than John Man." —Simon Sebag Montefiore, author of  Jerusalem: The Biography 

The inspiration for the Jedi knights of  Star Wars and the films of Akira Kurosawa, the legendary Japanese samurai have captured modern imaginations. Yet with these elite warriors who were bound by a code of honor called Bushido—the Way of the Warrior—the reality behind the myth proves more fascinating than any fiction. In  Samurai, celebrated author John Man provides a unique and captivating look at their true history, told through the life of one man: Saigo Takamori, known to many as "the last samurai." In 1877 Takamori led a rebel army of samurai in a heroic "last stand" against the Imperial Japanese Army, who sought to end the "way of the sword" in favor of firearms and modern warfare. Man's thrilling narrative brings to life the hidden world of the samurai as never before.

1

THE WAY OF THE WARRIOR: BEGINNINGS

AT LEAST THE VOLCANO HAD NOT ERUPTED RECENTLY. THERE was only a dusting of dark gray ash on the paving stones, not enough to cake car windshields. Mr. Fukuda, head of the Museum of the Meiji Restoration, led the way out of his museum into the September heat, down from the embankment overlooking Kagoshima’s river. He was taking me to the birthplace of Saigo Takamori.

Not that there was much to see—a small square hemmed in by newish glass-and-concrete buildings, a grove of trees, a pile of rocks, a plaque. The house itself, the simple wooden house he was born in, was long gone.

“The government put this here in 1880,” said Mr. Fukuda. “The year of the new constitution.”

The government? But Saigo had died a rebel, fighting imperial troops.

“That was three years earlier. They couldn’t go on denying that he was a patriot at heart, and a hero, so he was pardoned.”

And instantly became a role model, as the plaque confirmed: “We want the young people of Kagoshima to follow in the footsteps of men like Saigo.”

This was a hero with humble origins, as Mr. Fukuda was eager to reveal, leading me on to the nearby reconstruction of Saigo’s house: a thatched roof and just four rooms, five if you included the area where the futons were stored during the day. Mr. Fukuda took off his shoes and stepped up into the shadowy kitchen, where a pot hung from a beam over the fire pit.

“He lived with his grandparents and his parents, and six younger brothers and sisters, and a servant—that’s twelve people in such a little house.”

The design was beautiful in its simplicity, with high ceilings to soak up the summer heat and the fire smoke, and tatami mats to sit on, and neat sliding partitions of wood and semitransparent paper. But it would have been crowded, with little privacy. Was this how all samurai used to live?

“Not all. His father was of low rank. But samurai are samurai! Even a low-ranking samurai was better off than a peasant.”

Not much, though. For one thing, other family members sometimes came to stay, swelling the household to sixteen. For another, his father’s pay for his job in the local tax office was not enough, even when added to the small stipend of rice that all samurai received. They might have had just about enough rice, but they still needed soy sauce, salt, bean paste, fish, vegetables, sake, oil for the lamps, charcoal, cotton cloth. The house was always in need of repair, the kids always in need of food and clothes. Saigo and his brothers were big boys, crowding onto a single futon with the girls. To get by, his father borrowed money and farmed part-time.

As a child, then, Saigo lived with contradiction: samurai status offset by poverty. His young life was one of hard work for the sake of the family. The struggle might have left him embittered; in fact, he was proud of both his roots, which made him stoical in adversity, and his poverty, which hardened his determination to help those in need. His strength came from his sense of identity—as a samurai, as a citizen of a proudly independent province, and as the product of an ancient culture.

To be born a samurai, even in 1827, was to win a top prize in the lottery of life. It really should not have been so. The violent, proud, prickly and thoroughly medieval samurai should have been swept into history’s trash basket after Japan was unified in 1600. But they weren’t. Quite the opposite. They survived, living on the rice stipends wrung as tax from farmers, merchants and artisans, and would remain a vital force for another three hundred relatively peaceful years. To outsiders, their peculiar attitudes and practices seem as exotic as peacocks’ tails; to themselves, and to most of their compatriots then and since, they were the very essence of Japanese society.

The key to their survival was the way they renewed their sense of identity, not by abandoning the past but by cherry-picking aspects of it to suit new circumstances. Luckily for them, they had many rich centuries and much folklore from which to pick their cherries.

Emerging from a thousand years rich in legend and poor in historical record, Japan first came together under an emperor in the seventh century. All emperors thereafter were related, making Japan’s the oldest hereditary ruling house in the world. Imperial unity lasted for some five hundred years, the seedbed of the earliest samurai traditions.

When you hear the word “samurai,” you probably think “sword.” But samurai swords—the proper curved ones, not the heavy-duty, straight iron type that was imported from China—came later, because it took a while to create a tradition of sword making. The first heyday of the samurai was the age of the bow: so the first samurai were mounted bowmen, not swordsmen. Their bow was something very different from the short semicircle of wood and bone used all across mainland Eurasia. By comparison, the Japanese bow (yumi), made of laminated bamboo, looks lanky and unwieldy, an unlikely weapon for mounted archers.

There had been similar bows on the mainland. They were used by the Xiongnu, who had ruled an empire centered on Mongolia and today’s northern China from the third century BC to about AD 200. The Huns (perhaps descendants of the Xiongnu) had had something similar when they invaded Europe in the fourth and fifth centuries AD. These bows—Xiongnu, Hun and early Japanese—had one thing in common: they were all “asymmetrical,” the grip being placed about one-third of the way along the shaft, the shorter section being the bottom bit. Why? It’s a mystery. Some claim it allowed a horseman to lift the bow across the horse’s neck (surely not: when you shoot from horseback you do so on one side only, the left if you are right-handed; you can’t shoot to the right if you are holding the bow in your left hand). Or perhaps hunters liked their bows to have a short lower limb so they could shoot while kneeling. A third theory claims that asymmetry originally derived from the nature of bamboo: it tapers, which meant that for a bow to draw evenly, it had to be asymmetrical, thicker and shorter at the bottom, thinner and longer at the top (but any good bowyer can get over that). A leading member of Britain’s kyudo community—those who practice Japanese archery—shook his head when I asked about this: “Personally, I think they liked their bows to have a long upper limb because it made them look taller. It’s good to have something tall to threaten opponents with.” As I said, a mystery. No one has a clue. If there was a reason for the asymmetry, it had vanished from consciousness before the gangly bamboo bow became traditional. In Japan, that was the way you made a bow. End of story.

There’s nothing very samurai about Japanese archery today. Kyudo practitioners are the very opposite of samurai, being dedicated to archery as a ritual art rather than a war-fighting skill. Since all things martial were banned by the Americans after the Second World War, kyudo is a post-1945 invention, with dress and actions that proclaim its purely cultural significance. You wear a sort of white kimono top, with a sweeping black skirt and white slipper-socks. You take your turn; you approach your mark with reverence; you stand edge on, legs akimbo; you set the shoulders just so; you nock the arrow with the correct gestures, the arrow resting to the right of the bow on thumb and forefinger (which looks wrong to me, because with the English longbow, the arrow is on the left, resting on the knuckle); you hold the bow lightly; you raise it and the nocked arrow above your head; you solemnly lower the bow and at the same time draw the string right back beyond the ear; you hold, straining Zen-like not to struggle to attain the proper level of calm; you feel the balance between the forces—the drawn bow, your quivering muscles, your attention on the little circles of black and white fifty paces away—and you release, allowing your arm to swing back so that your two arms make the right aesthetic balance. It’s like a cross between Noh theater and ballet, and almost as demanding. Beauty and inner peace: those are the aims. Hitting the target is incidental. Not exactly the sort of activity for a warrior in single combat.

In two ways, though, modern kyudo archers connect with their samurai forebears. The bow is the traditional design, asymmetrical, with many laminations of bamboo. Also, it is built ever so slightly out of true, so that the two limbs lean a little to the right to place the string off center. Why? With an English longbow—with most types of bow, actually—the arrow is nocked centrally but is directed minutely off course by the width of the bow. In the Japanese bow, it flies straight and true. And second, in Japan itself, there are once more horseback archers, riding and shooting with the skills developed by their ancestors over one thousand years ago. Hun-style mounted archery is a growing sport internationally, but no one outside Japan does it Japanese style. Not yet.

By the early twelfth century, horseback archery had developed a complex set of fighting rituals. Opposing sides would line up and fire whistling arrows to call upon the gods as witnesses. Then top warriors, boxed into their leather-and-iron armor, would call out challenges to single combat, each boasting his achievements, virtues and pedigree. They would then discharge arrows, either at a distance or galloping past each other. Then, if there was no winner, came a rather unseemly grapple, like sumo wrestling on horseback (or in my mind’s eye more like a tussle between two rather old-fashioned sci-fi robots), with each trying to unseat the other. And then came a final bout with daggers. Since both warriors were totally enclosed in armor, the rounds of horseback archery were usually more show than substance, designed to give the individual samurai a chance to display himself and his skills. In one sea battle (Yashima, 1184) between the two great rival families of the day, the Taira and the Minamoto, the Taira hung a fan on the mast of one of their ships and, to induce their opponents to waste arrows, challenged them to shoot it down. A bowman named Nasu nu Yoichi, on horseback in shallow water, hit it with his first shot, guaranteeing himself immortality for doing what the samurai admired most: winning glory for oneself in battle.

At this time, in the late twelfth century, the Taira and the Minamoto were vying for dominance, each seeking to sideline the cloistered emperor. Their war ended in 1185, when the Minamoto, under their great general Yoshitsune, crushed their rivals in a monumental sea battle. Yoshitsune—a brilliant military leader, but headstrong—was then hounded to death by his equally brilliant and far more devious elder brother, Yoritomo. It was Yoritomo who took a step that would define Japanese administration for the next seven hundred years. With the approval of the emperor (who was in no position to disapprove), he appointed his own officials in every province and estate so that he could wield power across the land. Had this been China, he would have seized absolute power, made himself emperor and established a new dynasty. But that was not the Japanese way. For centuries the emperor had been sacrosanct. Instead, Yoritomo had himself awarded the highest military rank, sei i tai shogun, “barbarian-quelling great general.” This ancient title had once referred to the general empowered to wage war against the wild indigenous tribe of northern Honshu, the Ainu. Now its holder, known simply as the shogun, ruled the whole country as top samurai—in effect, military dictator—in the name of the revered but impotent emperor, basing his military government, the bakufu, at his HQ in Kamakura.

Under the remote and ineffectual emperor and his notional servant the shogun, Japan became a patchwork of sixty provinces and six hundred estates, all scrapping with their neighbors. Warlord battled warlord, temples raised their own militias, armed bands plagued the countryside.

Warfare was an expensive business even then. No lord or commander could survive without an investment in armor, horses, bows, swords, daggers and fighting men. There arose an élite of landowning warriors—bushi—fighting for their masters, to whom they were bound by mutual need, the lord providing land, war booty and protection in exchange for the skills of the specialist warriors, the samurai (originally saburai, meaning “one who serves,” in particular one who provides military service for the nobility). That was the deal, the Japanese version of the system that scholars call feudalism.

But there was an inherent instability in this relationship. If a samurai prospered, he would win status, power and wealth enough to claim his freedom. Why, as a boastful, independent warrior, would he continue to devote himself to a lord? How could a master ensure his loyalty? How, in brief, could the feudal system be made stable?

The answer was to invest loyalty—to one’s lord, not to the far-off emperor—with ever greater significance and mystique, turning it into an ideal more loved than life itself, guaranteeing status and glory in both life and death. An eleventh-century history tells of the Minamoto, future military overlords, and in particular of a warrior called Minamoto no Yoriyoshi and his loyal vassal Tsunenori. In one battle,

though Tsunenori had broken through the victorious enemies around him, he had barely managed to escape, and knew nothing about what had happened to Yoriyoshi. He questioned a soldier, who said, “The general is surrounded by rebels. Only five or six men are with him; it is hard to see how he can get away.”

“For thirty years now I have been in Yoriyoshi’s service,” said Tsunenori. “I am sixty and he is almost seventy. If he must die, I intend to share his fate and go with him to the underworld.”

He wheeled and entered the enemy cordon.

Two or three of Tsunenori’s retainers were present. “Now that our lord is about to die honorably by sharing Yoriyoshi’s fate,” they said, “how can we stay alive? Although we are merely subvassals, we are honorable men too.” They penetrated the enemy ranks together and fought savagely. They killed a dozen rebels—and all fell in front of the enemy.

Holding themselves apart from the aristocrats, intellectuals, peasants and brigands, the samurai became fiercely proud of their toughness and valor, quick to perceive an insult and as quick to avenge it. In war, a warrior equated his very being with extreme acts of bravery and self-sacrifice, especially in the face of overwhelming odds, for this was the way to gain reputation and rewards. In peace, quickness to see an insult was a virtue. At the lowest level, samurai were like the “foot soldiers” of inner-city street gangs; at the highest, like paramilitaries in the government of an old-style South American dictatorship or the well-off enforcers of top Mafia “families,” with estates and armies of their own. To survive in this anarchic world, in which power and life could be snatched away in an instant, self-image was vital. Every man had to strut and preen like a cockerel, or seem a loser. The samurai’s whole way of life was dominated by their extreme sensitivity to any threat or insult to their honor, and their near-instantaneous readiness to take violent action in its defense. Only in this way could “honor” be asserted, protected or restored.

Honor cultures are popular subjects with sociologists, who discern certain features in common. Most, for instance, are outside the mainstream of ordinary life: their members do not produce anything, but rather fight each other to control some crucial resource—usually territory—which cannot be created, only seized or defended. Ordinary foot soldiers—young, sexually mature males who dream of power and wealth but have neither—fight for their boss, their territory and their “name,” because that, in the end, is all they have. Honor systems involve young men on the lookout for anything that appears to demean them and are eager to make a violent, often fatal response.

But all honor systems also have unique features of their own. To take two examples:

In rural Greece, even as recently as the late 1960s, a man was dishonored if a female relative had sex outside an acceptable relationship. The woman, too, was dishonored. Honor was partly ...

Table of contents

• Contents
• List of Maps
• Preface
• A Note on Transliteration and Dating
• Prologue: Out of the Volcano
• 1 The Way of the Warrior: Beginnings
• 2 A Young Life Transformed
• 3 The Way of the Warrior: A Short History of Swords
• 4 The Coming of the Americans
• 5 The Way of the Warrior: Cutting the Belly
• 6 New World, New Life
• 7 The Way of the Warrior: Bushido
• 8 A Death in Kinko Bay
• 9 Exile, and a New Life
• 10 A Brief Taste of Power
• 11 The Prisoner
• 12 Into the Maelstrom
• Photographic Insert
• 13 The Unhappy Revolutionary
• 14 The Accidental Rebel
• 15 Failure at Kumamoto
• 16 Retreat
• 17 The Long Road to Death
• 18 Saigo’s Last Stand
• 19 Transfiguration
• Acknowledgments
• Bibliography
• Index
• Also by John Man
• Credits
• P.S.
• Copyright
• About the Publisher