Download PDF | (Warfare and History) Karl F. Friday - Samurai, Warfare and the State in Early Medieval Japan- (2003).
251 Pages
Warfare in early medieval Japan was intimately linked to social structure. Examining the causes and conduct of military operations informs and enhances our understanding of the tenth to fourteenth centuries – the formative age of the samurai. Karl Friday, an internationally recognized authority on Japanese warriors, provides the fi rst comprehensive study of the topic in English.
This work incorporates nearly twenty years of ongoing research, drawing on both new readings of primary sources and the most recent secondary scholarship. It over - turns many of the stereotypes that have dominated views of the period. Friday analyzes Heian-, Kamakura- and Nambokuchō-period warfare from fi ve thematic angles. He examines the principles that justifi ed armed confl ict, 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 causal relationships among the structures and sources of early medieval political power, technology and the conduct of war.
Karl F. Friday is a professor of Japanese History at the University of Georgia. A specialist in classical and early medieval Japanese history, he has also written widely on samurai culture and Japanese warrior traditions.
INTRODUCTION
On the second day of the fi fth month of 1213, the weather was cloudy. So, too, was the political future of the thirty-year-old Kamakura shogunate. That afternoon, as the hour of the monkey (3:00–5:00 pm) opened, three or four hundred horsemen and foot soldiers led by Wada Yoshimori and his kinsmen stormed eastward from Yoshimori’s home, and through the streets of Kamakura toward the residence of the shogunal regent (shikken), Hōjō Yoshitoki.1 Yoshimori, a warrior from Sagami province, had been one of the fi rst to rally to the cause of Minamoto Yoritomo, when the future Lord of Kamakura raised his war banners in 1180. Appointed head of Yoritomo’s Board of Retainers (samurai-dokoro) that same year, Yoshimori many times distinguished himself in both battlefi eld and administrative service to the regime.2 By 1213, however, Yoshitoki and his sister, Masako (the widow of Yoritomo, who died in 1199), appear to have identifi ed him as an obstacle to their domination of the shogunate.
In the spring of that year, Yoshitoki found the pretext he needed to pick a fi ght, arresting two of Yoshimori’s sons and his nephew Tanenaga on charges of conspiracy against the shogun. Although he subsequently released the sons in deference to Yoshimori, Yoshitoki rejected Yoshimori’s pleas on behalf of his nephew. Instead, he paraded Tanenaga, trussed up like a common thief, before Yoshimori and his assembled men. A month later, he compounded this insult by seizing Wada house lands that should, by right and custom, have been entrusted to Yoshimori. Yoshimori spent the next month assembling troops and allies.3 By early afternoon on the second, it must have been obvious to anyone out and about in Kamakura that something unusual was afoot, for horses and men had been assembling in and around Yoshimori’s home all morning.
The Wada compound stood opposite the Tsurugaoka Hachiman shrine, at the north end of the city, and faced Yoshitoki’s home, across the Wakamiya-ōji, the main avenue running through Kamakura, between the shrine and Yūhigahama beach. A force the size of the one Yoshimori had gathered could scarcely have been contained within the walls of his residential compound, nor could the sounds – or smells – of dozens of horses have been hidden from even the least attentive passers-by. Yoshimori probably attempted to conceal the bulk of his army in the woods, to the northwest of his residence, but he was rapidly losing any possible advantage of surprise. Indeed, Yoshitoki, occupied in a game of go, was receiving multiple reports of the goings-on across the street. At length, he quietly slipped out the back gate of his compound, and moved to the shogun’s residence, a block and a half to the northeast. In the meantime, the shogun, Sanetomo, and his mother, Hōjō Masako, left their home, to hide in the chambers of the chief administrator (bettō) of the shrine. Yoshimori’s plan appears to have centered on capturing or killing Yoshitoki.
Toward this end, he split his forces into three groups, sending one to invest the south gate of the shogun’s home, and the second to surround Yoshitoki’s residence. In the meantime, Yoshimori himself led the third group to attack the home of Yoshitoki’s confederate, Ōe Hiromoto. Hiromoto’s men were engaged in a drinking party, and were easily taken by the Wada troops pouring through their front gate; but Hiromoto himself had already slipped away, to join Yoshitoki at the shogun’s residence. Yoshitoki’s home was also quickly overrun, although the men left behind to guard it put up a valiant struggle, claiming numerous casualties from the Wada forces. Yoshimori and his men then moved on to the Yoko-ōji avenue on the south side of the shogun’s residence, where they ran into a group of horsemen hastily deployed by shogunal retainer Hitano Tadatsuna, and reinforced by Miura Yoshi mura. Yoshimura, a close kinsman of Yoshimori, had in fact been a con - federate to the plotting for the day’s attempted coup, but had gotten cold feet at the last minute, and warned Yoshitoki instead. His sudden appearance in the Yoko-ōji must have been Yoshimori’s fi rst indication that he had been betrayed.
The ensuing mêlée fi lled the streets for several blocks, as mounted warriors dodged around and past one another, shooting, pausing to identify new targets, and charging again. For the next two hours the combat raged on without clear lines or advantage to either side until, at the hour of the cock (5:00–7:00 pm), Wada troops under Asaina Yoshihide broke through the gate and stormed into the south garden of the shogunal compound, shooting down the defenders there and setting fi re to the buildings. Yoshitoki and Hiromoto continued the fi ght “while screaming arrows [narikabura] fl ew and sharp blades fl ashed.”4 Yoshimori’s warriors, we are told, “were each man worth a thousand, each fi ghting like the heavens and the earth and the angry thunder.” None more so, however, than Asaina Yoshihide, who “manifested strength as though he were a god; and none who opposed him escaped death.”5 The shogunate’s offi cial history of the battle offers four stirring testimonials to his valor and skills. Among Yoshihide’s victims was Yoshimori’s nephew Takai Shigemochi, who “had not taken part in his family’s plotting, but had come to the shogunal residence alone to throw down his life.”
Which, as it happens, is exactly what he did, almost literally. Yoshihide and Shigemochi rode at one another and, having already emptied their quivers of arrows, “cast away their bows and aligned their bridles, seeking to determine cock from hen.” Drawing their daggers, the pair took hold of one another and grappled. Shigemochi momentarily gained the upper hand, throwing Yoshihide from his mount, only to lose his own balance and topple to the ground with him. The tussle continued for several minutes, until “at length Shigemochi was struck down.” Before Yoshihide could get back onto his horse, however, another warrior, Sagami Tomotoki, came running at him, his long sword in hand. Once again Yoshihide prevailed.6 After regaining his mount, Yoshihide rode back through the gate and south - west into the Yoko-ōji, where he spotted Ashikaga Yoshiuji beside a bridge that spanned the ditch surrounding the shogunate’s administrative head -quarters (mandokoro). Yoshiuji wheeled and whipped his horse to fl ee, while Yoshihide galloped forward, catching Yoshiuji by the shoulder plate (ōsode) of his armor. In almost the same instant, however, Yoshiuji leaped across the ditch, leaving Yoshihide clutching the shoulder plate, astonished that Yoshiuji’s horse had managed the jump without breaking its legs or throwing its rider. Unable to follow on a mount already fatigued from a battle now entering its third or fourth hour, Yoshihide pulled up, and glared across the ditch at Yoshiuji, while onlookers around them clapped and cheered.
A moment later, he turned and galloped around to the bridge, intent on renewing his pursuit. But just as he reached the crossway, a warrior named Taka no Shikan broke from the crowd and rode to support Yoshiuji. Yoshihide quickly killed him but, while the two were thus engaged, Yoshiuji escaped. By this time it was growing dark, and the Wada men and horses were becoming exhausted. They were also running out of arrows. At length, Yoshi mori ordered a withdrawal southward, down the Wakamiya-ōji, to the beach. Hōjō Yasutoki (Yoshitoki’s son) and his men pursued them, clashing at Nakashimōma bridge, and at the Komemachi and Ōmachi intersections along the way. In the meantime, Ōe Hiromoto and his troops pulled back to guard the administrative headquarters and the documents stored there. The fi ghting continued sporadically throughout the night. By dawn, Yoshi - mori and his men were nearly out of provisions, and worn out from more than twelve hours of combat; they were also cold and wet, from the light rain that had been falling since midnight. To make matters worse, they were pinned down on the beach by Hōjō troops, who controlled all the major arteries running northwest into the city. As Yoshimori contemplated his increasingly bleak options, however, his fortunes abruptly changed.
At the hour of the tiger (3:00–5:00 am), Yokoyama Tokikane, a warrior from southern Musashi, rode onto the beach from the west, along the old Tōkaidō road, at the head of an enormous contingent of troops under several dozen of his sons, nephews, retainers and allies. Tokikane had, in fact, been part of Yoshimori’s plotting from the start. The two had agreed to open hostilities together on the morning of the third. Tokikane, arriving according to plan, must have been startled to fi nd himself in the middle of a battle already long underway. As Tokikane’s troops shed their straw rain coats, making a pile “said to form a mountain,” the allied forces now numbered some 3,000 mounted troops.7 Curiously, however, Yoshimori did not move quickly to exploit his now overwhelming advantage in numbers, a miscalculation that proved to be his undoing. While he delayed – perhaps in order to allow his warriors time to rest – troops belonging to the Sōga, Nakamura, Futamiyama and Kawamura houses, “as tumultuous as the clouds and as stirred up as bees,” took up positions and erected shields and barricades across the Wakamiya-ōji and other streets leading from the beach. Nevertheless, thoroughly cowed by the size of the enemy forces, the Hōjō allies held in place, in spite of orders to attack.
Meanwhile, Yoshitoki and Hiromoto were about to turn things around yet again. At the hour of the snake (9:00–11:00 am), the pair drafted and countersigned a letter of instruction (migyōsho) under the shogun’s personal seal, declaring the Wada and Yokoyama to be rebels and enemies of the state – turning what had, to this point, been a private confl ict between Yoshimori, Yoshitoki, and their respective allies into a government-sanctioned pursuit of outlaws. They then put the letter to dramatic use, dispatching it by courier to shogunal vassals in neighboring provinces, and simultaneously arranging to have it read before the troops forming ranks on the beach. The effect was spectacular. Yoshimori’s and Tokikane’s allies deserted them en masse for Yoshitoki, and what was now the government army. Stunned by this sudden reversal of fortune, Yoshimori led his remaining forces in a desperate attempt to cut their way up the Wakamiya-ōji to Yoshitoki, in the shogun’s residence. Amazingly, although once again outnumbered, the rebels were still able to advance, scattering many of the shogunate’s presumably less than highly motivated allies in their wake. When Hōjō Yasutoki, the government commander on the front, sent a messenger for instructions, a surprised and frightened Sanetomo could only respond with an exhortation to fi rm up defensive efforts. At this juncture, fate and superstition intervened on behalf of the Hōjō.
As the Wada and Yokoyama warriors galloped through the streets, Ōe Hiromoto composed an appeal for help and dispatched it, along with two poems in his own hand, to the Tsurugaoka Hachiman shrine. At about the same time, one of Yoshimori’s key allies, Tsuchiya Yoshikiyo, closing in on the shogunal compound, was suddenly struck and killed by an unidentifi ed arrow. Seeing this, and noting that the arrow had come from the north, the direction of the shrine, the Kamakura men began to shout that the arrow had been a divine one (kami kabura), sparking a rally that slowly built to a rout. By the hour of the cock (5:00–7:00 pm), the rebels were in fl ight. Yoshimori’s eldest son, Yoshinao, was shot down by shogunal houseman Iguma Shideshige. A short time later Yoshimori himself, and three of his other sons, fell to Edo Yoshinori. Yoshihide and 500 of his horsemen managed to reach the beach, where they had prepared escape boats, and put to oars for Awa, while six other Wada commanders and the remaining rebel forces scattered and fl ed by land. Yoshitoki collected the heads of Yoshimori and the other principals, and put them on display in a temporary hut erected on the beach. Afterward, the victors held a party at Yoshitoki’s home that lasted for two days. According to a report presented three days later, casualties on the Wada side included 142 ranking warriors of the Wada, Yokoyama, Tsuchiya, Yamanouchi, Shibuya, Mōri, Kamakura and Hemmi houses, in addition to a presumably much larger number of “retainers and lesser fi gures not listed.” Another twenty-eight warrior leaders were captured alive. Yoshitoki and his allies had lost only fi fty named warriors, while “over a thousand servants of the Minamoto [shogunate] suffered wounds.” The shogunate confi scated just over two dozen properties and titles from Yoshimori’s allies, redistributing them among Yoshitoki and his men as rewards.8 While the skirmishing attendant to the Wada rebellion can hardly be ranked among the celebrated battles of the Kamakura period, it nevertheless exempli - fi ed the warfare of the era – in its origins and goals, in the organization of the forces involved, and in the weapons and tactics by which it was fought. Indeed, the fl ames and smoke and noise and rain and mud and stench and heroics and cruelties and allegiances and betrayals of the second and third days of the fi fth month of 1213 refl ect the broader face of battle in tenth- to fourteenth-century Japan. So, too, does the warfare of this early medieval epoch refl ect the broader face of the age itself. A careful study of early medieval warfare informs and deepens our understanding of the Japanese world, such as it was during the Heian, Kamakura and Nambokuchō periods.
For Heraclitus was wrong. War is not the father of all things, it is the offspring – a quintessential human institution intimately intertwined with two other quintessentially human institutions, society and polity. War can create, defi ne and defend both states and peoples, but it is also created, defi ned and delimited by them. The purposes for wars and the means by which they are conducted are set forth by the polities and the societies that fi ght them. From the mid-tenth century until the late nineteenth, warfare in Japan was the province of professional men-at-arms, known variously as bushi, tsuwamono, musha, mononofu or – more popularly among Western audiences – samurai. This warrior order came into being, during the early Heian period to serve the imperial court and the noble houses that comprised it – as hired swords and contract bows. Its members ended the Nambokuchō era as the de facto masters of the country. Intriguingly, however, the “rise of the bushi” was less a matter of dramatic revolution than one incremental evolution, occurring in fi ts and starts. Around the turn of the eighth century, the newly restyled imperial house and its supporters secured their position at the apex of Japan’s socio-political hierarchy with the promulgation of an elaborate battery of governing institutions modeled in large measure on those of T’ang China. These included numerous provisions for domestic law-enforcement and foreign defense. Contrary to popular belief, these institutions were not simply adopted wholesale, they were carefully adapted to meet Japanese needs. But the various goals and requirements of the state were often in confl ict with one another, with the result that the ritsuryō (the statutory, or imperial state) military apparatus incorporated a number of unhappy compromises.
Problems inherent in the system at its inception were, moreover, made worse by changing conditions as the principal threats the state armies were designed to meet – invasion from the continent and regional challenges to the new, centralized polity – dwindled rapidly. By the mid-700s, the court had begun to reevaluate its martial needs and to restructure its armed forces, tinkering and experimenting with mechanisms for using and directing a new and different kind of soldiery, until a workable system was achieved around the late tenth century.9 The warrior order that would monopolize the application of arms throughout the medieval and early modern eras emerged rapidly during the ninth and tenth centuries, as incentives toward private arms-bearing received new impetus from a variety of directions. First and foremost among these was the dismantling of the ritsuryō military apparatus, and the concomitant amplifi cation of the role of elites – members of the upper tiers of provincial society and the lower echelons of the court nobility – in the new military establishment. Bit by bit, the government ceased trying to draft and drill the population at large and concentrated instead on co-opting the privately acquired skills of martially talented elites through a series of new military posts and titles that legitimized the use of the personal martial resources of this group on behalf of the state. In essence, the court moved from a conscripted, publicly trained military force to one composed of privately trained, privately equipped professional mercenaries. The expansive socio-political changes taking shape in Japan during the Heian period broadened other avenues for parlaying skill at arms into personal success as well. As it happened, government interest in the martial talents of provincial elites and the scions of lower-ranked central noble families dovetailed with growing demands for these same resources spawned by competition for wealth and infl uence among the premier noble houses of the court. State and personal needs served to create continually expanding opportunities for advancement for those with military talent.
Increasingly, from the late eighth century onward, skill at arms offered a means for an ambitious young man to get his foot in the door for a career in government service and/or in the service of some powerful aristocrat in the capital. The greater such opportunities became, the more enthusiastically and the more seriously such young men committed themselves to the profession of arms. The result was the gradual emergence of an order of professional fi ghting men in the countryside and the capital that came to be known as the bushi. At the heart of these developments lay a phenomenon that is often summarized as the privatization of the workings of government, or, more accurately, as the blurring of lines separating the public and private persona of those who carried out the affairs of governance.
While it has become somewhat unfashionable today to employ the concepts of “public” and “private” in discussions of the early medieval era, these terms do, in fact, appear regularly in sources for the period and are not only useful, but critical to understanding political developments. “Public,” in this context, indicates the notion of a corporate entity – the state – having an existence above and beyond the sum of its parts, as well as to activities overtly sanctioned by the laws and procedural regulations of that entity. “Private” refers, then, to the personal affairs and relationships of the units – the families and individuals – who made up the collective. During the Heian period, the identity between hereditary status and offi ceholding, a cardinal feature of the ritsuryō polity from its outset, grew increasingly deeper and more rigid. Eligibility for any given post in the bureaucratic hierarchy became progressively more circumscribed, limited to smaller and smaller num bers of houses. Gradually, as the prospect that descendants of particular families would hold the same posts generation after generation turned more and more predictable, many offi ces – and the tasks assigned them – came to be closely associated with certain houses; and key government functions came to be performed through personal, rather than formal public, channels, rendering “public” and “private” rights and responsibilities harder and harder to distinguish.10
From the late ninth century onward, court society and the operations of government were increasingly dominated by powerful familial interest groups headed by senior courtiers (kugyō), who established complex networks of vertical alliances with low- and middle-ranked nobles.11 Intense political competition at court made control of military resources of one sort or another an invaluable tool for guarding the status, as well as the persons, of the top courtiers and their heirs. Efforts on the part of the great court families to assemble private military forces and to press for control of state military assets were, therefore, ongoing from the inception of the ritsuryō state. As the system evolved, kugyō vied with one another to recruit men with warrior skills into the ranks of their household service, and to staff the offi cerships of the military units operating in the capital with their own kinsmen or clients.12 Waxing opportunities to parlay skill at arms into advancement through offi cial and semioffi cial channels were paralleled and reinforced by profound changes occurring in the fundamental relationship between the court the countryside. While the provinces were by no means simply left to fend for themselves in matters of law and order, the mechanisms by which they were kept bound to the center evolved considerably between the eighth and eleventh centuries.13 In the public sphere, the signal changes revolved around the tax system, which was amended to make tax collection a problem between the central and provincial governments, rather than one between the court and individual subjects. Henceforth, revenue quotas were set province by province, and provincial offi cials were made accountable for seeing that they were met, as well as for making up shortfalls – out of their own pockets, if necessary.
The means by which the taxes were actually collected were left largely to the discretion of the provincial governors and their staffs, who, in turn, delegated most of the burden to local elites charged with assembling whatever revenues were deemed appropriate from the specifi c locales in which they had infl uence. For their part, the local elites welcomed and encouraged such policy measures as opportunities for increasing their personal wealth and power. In the event, the new tax structure proved lucrative to all involved, turning provincial offi cials and local managers alike into tax farmers, who collected revenues beyond their assigned quotas and pocketed the surplus.14 Local elites and provincial offi cials were not, however, the only ones coming to view the agriculturalist residents of the provinces as simple resources for enhancing personal wealth. “Agents of temples, shrines, princes and offi cials” of the court were also “disobeying provincial governors, ignoring district offi cials, invading provinces and districts and using their prestige and infl uence” to pressure residents there, as well as “forcibly impressing men and horses,” “robbing tax shipments,” and “confi scating by force boats, carts, horses and men.”15 Thus, by the mid-Heian period, the provinces had become a forum for competition for wealth and infl uence between three groups: provincial resident elites; provincial government offi cers; and the “temples, shrines, princes and offi cials” of the court.
At the axis of this competition were the middle-ranked court nobles whose careers centered on appointments to provincial government offi ces. Such career provincial offi cials (zuryō) forged alliances with the lofty aristocrats above them to ensure a continued succession of posts. At the same time, many found that they could use the power and perquisites of their offi ces, and the strength of their court connections, to establish landed bases in their provinces of appointment and to continue to exploit the resources of these provinces even after their terms of offi ce expired. 16 Against this backdrop, some residents of the provinces were discovering that service to the court was not the only use to which martial skills could be applied. By the ninth century, a signifi cant element was turning to banditry, as either an alternative or an addition to public service. In response, provincial governors, compelled by a need to defend themselves and their prerogatives against outlawry and armed resistance, as well as by the desire to maximize the profi ts that could be squeezed from taxpayers, began to include “warriors of ability” among the personal entourages that accompanied them to their provinces of appointment. A substantial number of zuryō also took up the profession of arms for themselves.17
Military skills and resources were undoubtedly useful to provincial offi cials in winning the respect of, or intimidating, armed residents of their provinces. But, far more importantly, they could also enhance an up-and-coming zuryō’s prospects at court, by opening doors to the patronage of important aristocrats and to posts in court military units. By the tenth century, military service at court and service as a provincial offi cial had become parallel and mutually supportive careers for the members of several middle-ranked courtier houses collectively known as the miyako no musha, or “warriors of the capital.” The most illustrious of these belonged to a handful of competing branches of the Seiwa Minamoto – or Genji – and the Kammu Taira – or Heishi.* Miyako no musha were, to borrow a pet phrase of the late Jeffrey Mass, “bridging fi gures,” who maintained close economic and personal ties in both the capital and the provinces. Many developed marriage and other alliances with local fi gures, and held packages of lands scattered about the countryside, which provided them with income. But they resided primarily in the capital, and looked chiefl y to the central court for their livelihoods. To provincial governors and their families, Kyoto was the source of the human and physical resources that made their provincial business activities possible, as well as the marketplace for the goods they brought from the country.† It was, nevertheless, mainly the central direction of their career emphasis, rather than pedigree or residence as such, that distinguished “warriors of the capital” from “provincial warriors.”18
The latter were, broadly speaking, men of two main types of ancestry: descendants of cadet branches of central court houses – the Minamoto, the Fujiwara, the Tachibana and the Taira – that had established bases in the provinces; and the scions of families that traced their descent back to pre-ritsuryō provincial chieftains. The genealogies of medieval warrior houses suggest a preponderance of the former group. But the reliability of such records is open to some question, and in practice both groups intermarried and interacted so thoroughly as to become functionally indistinguishable. Heian court marriages were uxorilocal or neolocal, and polygamous or serially monogamous. Children reckoned descent primarily from their father, and took his surname, but they were usually raised in their mother’s home, and inherited much of their material property from her. Often, moreover, when the bride’s family was of signifi cantly higher station than the groom’s, the children – and sometimes the new husband – adopted the surname of the bride’s father. Zuryō sent to work in the provinces took their marriage customs with them. Numerous edicts forbidding the practice make it clear that provincial offi cials took wives and sons-in-law from provincial elite houses with considerable frequency. As a result, surnames such as Taira, Minamoto and Fujiwara gradually supplanted those of the older provincial noble families among the leading houses of provincial society.19 Superfi cial similarities between the samurai and the knights of northern Europe make it tempting to equate the birth of the samurai with the onset of “feudalism” in the Japanese countryside; but such was not the case. Heian Japan remained fi rmly under civil authority; the socio-economic hierarchy still culminated in a civil, not a military, nobility; and the idea of a warrior order was still more nascent than real. Warrior leaders still looked to the center and to the civil ladder for success, and still saw the profession of arms largely as a means to an end – a foot in the door toward civil rank and offi ce.
During the Heian period, warriors thought of themselves as warriors in much the same way that modern corporate CEOs view themselves as shoe makers, automobile manufacturers or magazine distributors: just as the latter tend to identify more closely with CEOs in other industries than with the workers, engineers or middle managers in their factories, design workshops and offi ces, so too did bushi at all levels in the sociopolitical hierarchy identify more strongly with their non-military social peers than with warriors above or below them in the hierarchy.20 Bushi class-consciousness – a sense of warriors as a separate estate – did not begin to emerge until the thirteenth century, after the Kamakura shogunate was in place. The new institution created the category of shogunal retainer (gokenin) as a self-conscious class of individuals with special privileges and responsibilities. It also narrowed the range of social classes from which bushi came, by eliminating or supplanting the miyako no musha houses in all military affairs outside the capital. Its founder, Minamoto Yoritomo, consciously helped foster this new sense of warrior identity by holding hunts and archery competitions, which were staged in an atmosphere not entirely unlike those of medieval European tournaments.21 The sequence of events that led to the birth of Japan’s fi rst warrior government began in 1156, when Yoritomo’s father, Yoshitomo, and his long-time rival Taira Kiyomori found themselves fi ghting on the same side of a dispute between a reigning and a retired emperor. In the ensuing Hōgen Incident (named for the calendar era in which it occurred), Kiyomori reaped what Yoshitomo considered to have been far more than his fair share of the rewards distributed to the victors.
The enmity this precipitated led to the Heiji Incident (again named for the calendar era) of 1159, a poorly conceived and clumsily executed attempt by Yoshitomo to eliminate his rival. This time, several days of bloody fi ghting left Yoshitomo and most of his supporters dead, and Kiyomori as the premier warrior leader in Japan. For the next two decades, Kiyomori’s prestige and infl uence at court grew steadily, capped by the marriage of his daughter, Tokuko, to the reigning emperor, Takakura, in 1171, his seizure and confi nement of the retired emperor Go-Shirakawa in 1179, and the accession of his grandson to the throne as Emperor Antoku in 1180.
That same year, however, Yoritomo issued a call to arms, parlaying his own pedigree, the localized ambitions of provincial warriors, and the upheavals within the court into a new and innovative base of power. Exiled at thirteen years of age, in the wake of the Heiji Incident – and therefore dispossessed of the career path that would otherwise have been his by right of patrimony – Yoritomo had been effectively locked out of the system, unable to advance his interests through traditional means. His response was to initiate what amounted to an end run around the status quo hitherto existing between the central nobility and warriors in the provinces.22 Seizing on a pretext of rescuing the court from Kiyomori – in answer to a plea broadcast by Prince Mochihito, a frustrated claimant to the throne – Yoritomo announced that he was assuming jurisdiction over all lands and offi ces in the east, further declaring that, in return for an oath of allegiance to himself, henceforth he (Yoritomo) would assume the role of the court in guaranteeing whatever lands and administrative rights an enlisting vassal considered to be rightfully his own. In essence, Yoritomo was proclaiming the existence of an independent state in the east, a polity run by warriors for warriors.
The ensuing groundswell of support touched off a countrywide series of feuds and civil wars subsumed under the rubric of Yoritomo’s crusade against Kiyomori and his heirs. In the course of this so-called Gempei War (the name of which derives from the Sino-Japanese readings for the characters used to write “Minamoto” and “Taira”), however, Yoritomo revealed himself to be a surprisingly conservative revolutionary. Rather than maintain his independent warrior state in the east, Yoritomo instead negotiated a series of accords with the retired emperor Go-Shirakawa that gave permanent status to the Kamakura regime, trading formal court recognition of many of the powers Yoritomo had seized for reincorporation of the east into the court-centered national polity. Yoritomo’s successes at fi rst breaking the east free from court control and then reintegrating it to the imperial fold both raise scholarly eyebrows – for he was hardly the fi rst eastern warrior leader to attempt either feat. The most famous warrior rebellions of the Heian period began in 939, when Taira Masakado seized control of the provincial government offi ces in Hitachi, and in 1028, when his grandson Taira Tadatsune ravaged the government compound in Awa. Masakado’s insurrection climaxed with his claiming for himself the title “New Emperor.” Tadatsune’s reach did not extend so far, but his grasp held the provinces of the Bōsō peninsula – Kazusa, Shimōsa and Awa – for the better part of three years, and left much of the region in ruin. And yet, a careful look at these and similar events during the Heian period demonstrates how strong the underlying ties between the periphery and the center remained, in spite of the loosening of bonds and the expansion of local freedom of action that developed during the epoch. Freedom of local action was not the same as independence, or even autonomy, for the simple reason that the warriors themselves did not yet think in those terms. Even Masakado and Tadatsune, whose insurrections are among the most momentous events of the period, were not willfully in defi ance of central government authority – at least not initially.
Their quarrels were local, not national; their insurgency was aimed at specifi c provincial offi cials and their subordinates and policies, not the national polity. And when they found themselves branded outlaws and rebels, their fi rst – and most enduring – instincts were to seek reconciliation with the state, through the offi ces of their patrons at court.23 Neither Masakado nor Tadatsune – nor any of their epigones – were, however, successful in their efforts. Before Yoritomo, whenever powerful warriors stepped too far out of line and posed a challenge to central authority, the court was always able to fi nd peers and rivals more conservative in their ambitions and assessments of the odds against successful rebellion to subdue them. There was little need, therefore, for the court to bargain with felonious warrior leaders. Yoritomo’s theretofore unprecedented achievements were possible because of the sheer scale of the autonomous zone he was able to seize, and because his timing was fortuitous. When he raised his standard in 1180, he was tapping into a wellspring of intra-familial and inter-class frustration with the structure of land-holding and administrative rights in the provinces. This discontent brought him a vast following. Nevertheless, it by no means earned him a universal following – a point that is perhaps more signifi cant to understanding the socio-political dynamics of the period than was Yoritomo’s revolution itself. The battle lines in the Gempei War were not really drawn between the “Gen” and the “Hei” (that is, between the Minamoto and the Taira); there were men of Taira kinship on Yoritomo’s side and of Minamoto on Kiyomori’s. The real confl ict was between those, on the one side, who were suffi ciently dissatisfi ed with their lot under the status quo to chance an enormous gamble and those, on the other, who were content with their current situation – or simply more conservative in their thinking or more skeptical of Yoritomo’s chances for success.
The former group signed on with Yoritomo, while the latter fought for the Taira. The same dynamic that had brought Yoritomo to power, however, necessitated his moves toward reconciliation with the court. As his following mushroomed, he was quick to recognize two key precepts relating to his circumstances and to the nature of authority: fi rst, that the forces he had unleashed were inherently unstable, and could all too easily expand beyond his control; and second, that his only cogent claims to preeminence over other eastern warrior leaders were rooted in his pedigree and his exploitation of Mochihito’s warrant against Kiyomori – that is, that his incipient feudal lordship was in fact inextricably bound to the court-centered socio-political structure. As it happened, the powers-that-were in the court were just as unhappy with Yoritomo’s enemies – the Taira, and Minamoto Yoshinaka – as they were with him. In contrast to the circumstances prevailing during previous warrior uprisings, the events of the 1180s left the court with no more palatable choice available to send as champion against Yoritomo, making rapprochement with him the least of several evils.
The resulting Kamakura shogunate was in effect a government within a government, at once a part of and distinct from the imperial court in Kyoto. Dominated after Yoritomo’s death by the Hōjō family, who established a permanent regency over a succession of fi gurehead shoguns, the regime exercised broad administrative powers over the eastern provinces, and held special authority over the warriors, scattered nationwide, whom it recognized as its formal vassals (gokenin). After the Jōkyū War of 1221, an ill-fated attempt by a retired emperor, Go-Toba, to eliminate the shogunate, the balance of real power shifted steadily toward Kamakura and away from Kyoto. By the end of that century, the shogunate had assumed control of most of the state’s judicial, military and foreign affairs.
In the meantime, gokenin across the country discovered that they could manipulate the insulation from direct court supervision Kamakura offered them in order to lay ever stronger and more personal claims to lands – and the people on them – which they ostensibly administered on behalf of the powersthat-were in the capital. Through a ratcheting process of gradual advance by fait accompli, a new warrior-dominated system of authority absorbed the older, courtier-dominated one, and real power over the countryside spun off steadily from the center to the hands of local fi gures.24 By the second quarter of the fourteenth century, this evolution had progressed to the point where the most successful of the shogunate’s provincial vassals had begun to question the value of continued submission to Kamakura at all. The regime fell in 1333, as the result of events spawned by an imperial succession dispute. Both the imperial house and the loyalties of the court had, since the 1260s, been divided between competing lineages descended from Emperor Go-Saga (r. 1242–6): the Senior, or Jimmyōin, line deriving from Go-Saga’s eldest son, Go-Fukakasa (r. 1246–59); and the Junior, or Daikakuji, line, descended from his younger brother Kameyama (r. 1259–74).
The shogunate, which had taken an active hand in matters of imperial succession since the Jōkyū War, was able to keep this rift under control by arranging a compromise whereby the two lineages would alternate in succession. In 1218, however, Emperor Go-Daigo, of the Junior line, came to the throne, and immediately set about reorganizing the power structure around himself.25 In 1331 Kamakura discovered that Go-Daigo had been plotting its elimination, and responded by forcing his abdication, and later his exile to the remote province of Oki. At this, Emperor Kōgon, of the Senior branch, ascended the throne. In the second month of 1333, however, Go-Daigo escaped from Oki and took refuge with supporters, who had continued to be active in working against the shogunate, under Go-Daigo’s son, Prince Moriyoshi. Kamakura responded by dispatching armies under Ashikaga Takauji and Niita Yoshisada to subdue the “loyalist” forces and recapture Go-Daigo. But, in mid-course, both commanders turned on the shogunate, Takauji attacking and destroying its offi ces in Kyoto, and Yoshisada marching on Kamakura itself. In the sixth month of 1333, Go-Daigo returned to Kyoto, insisting that he had never formally abdicated, and proclaiming the start of a Kemmu (named for the calendar era) Restoration of imperial rule. Within three years, however, he found himself once again driven from power by the very men who put him there. In 1335 Takauji changed sides yet again, and by the middle of the following year he had destroyed Go-Daigo’s coalition, forced the once-and-future monarch to abdicate for a second time, and established a new shogunate, headquartered in the Muromachi district of Kyoto. Go-Daigo fl ed to the mountains of Yoshino, south of Kyoto, where he and his remaining supporters set up a rival court, insisting that the Takauji-sponsored succession of Emperor Kōmyō in Kyoto had been illegitimate, and therefore illegal.
Thus began the sixdecade long Nambokuchō (literally, “Southern and Northern Court”) era, the longest and most signifi cant dynastic schism in Japanese history. Warfare between the two courts broke out immediately, and rapidly spread across the country.26 Leading warriors – including Takauji and his brother Tadayoshi! – shifted sides again and again in response to advantages and opportunities of the moment, playing each court off the other in much the same way that the court had once kept warriors weak by pitting them against one another. As this happened, it took a predictably heavy toll on imperial authority. By the time the third Ashikaga shogun, Yoshimitsu, tricked the southern pretender, GoKameyama, and his followers into returning to Kyoto – subsequently reneging on his promise to reinstitute the old system of alternating succession – whatever remained of centralized power in Japan was in the hands of the shogunate.
The end of the Nambokuchō era thus marks a convenient point for dividing the early medieval epoch from what followed. In subsequent decades, warriors, not emperors or courtier houses, dominated not only the countryside, but the entire socio-economic and political structure of Japan. Fifteen Ashikaga shoguns reigned between 1336 and 1573, when the last, Yoshiaki, was deposed; but only the fi rst six could lay claim to having actually ruled the country. The dynamic modus vivendi that had characterized the early medieval era – in which private or provincial military power had been balanced by public authority emanating from the top down or the center out – were gone. Meaningful power now depended on pyramids of control and relationships built from the ground up, as scores of feudal barons, called daimyo, contested with one another for control.
The study presented in the fi ve chapters of this volume is not about wars, but about what wars and warfare meant, and why they took the form they did, within the socio-political structure of early medieval Japan (defi ned, for our purposes here, as the tenth through the fourteenth centuries). It examines early medieval Japanese warfare from fi ve thematic angles, focusing primarily on the Heian and Kamakura periods. The following chapters, then, explore the purposes of the military and military activities, the principles according to which armed confl ict was justifi ed or condemned, the mechanisms through which armed forces were raised and deployed, the form of weapons available to early medieval warriors, the means by which they obtained them, and the techniques and customs of battle.
My aim throughout is to highlight the delicate balance, the interpenetrated, interdependent, causal relationship that held between the structures and sources of political power, the objectives and purposes of warfare, the composition and organization of military forces, and the tactics and equipment of war. The conclusions presented in this study are built from a wide variety of sources, ranging from legal documents to picture scrolls to works of literature. Reconstruction of battlefi eld ethics and behavior presents a particularly thorny historiographical challenge, which merits a bit of elaboration here, before I move on to the fi rst chapter. Until very recently, historians’ images of early medieval warfare were pre - dominantly shaped by facile analyses of literary wartales (gunkimono), particularly the Heike monogatari, the classic saga of the Gempei War.
This masterpiece bristles with vivid descriptions of battles and other encounters between warriors so detailed they even record the colors of horses ridden and clothing worn. Long assumed to have been built closely around accounts compiled shortly after the occurrence of the events they portray, and preserved more or less verbatim henceforth, Heike monogatari and other gunkimono beckon historians as compelling, and readily accessible, sources of information on early medieval warfare. Modern literary scholars have, however, raised considerable doubt about the historical reliability of these chronicles, observing that much of the most compelling detail contained in the narratives was in fact manufactured largely of whole cloth. Kenneth Butler’s careful reconstruction of the textual development of Heike monogatari, for example, demonstrates that, while the outline forms of the great medieval wartales were fi rst committed to paper shortly after the occurrence of the events they portray, these antetype accounts lacked the meticulous descriptions of battlefi eld behavior that have shaped our images of early bushi warfare. The Heike monogatari as we know it today is the result of a merger of enrichments and embellishments developed by traveling entertainers (biwa-hōshi) into the original stories and written texts (said merger having occurred in stages over the course of the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries).
The biwa-hōshi, Butler argues, produced these embellishments by manipulating stereotyped themes and formulae common to oral tale composition all over the world. The best-known (and most analyzed) version of Heike monogatari, the Kakuichi-bon, was recorded in its present form in 1371, after nearly 200 years of elaboration and enhancement on the lutes of jongleurs.27 Heike monogatari is, moreover, a heavily thematic narrative. Its central purpose is to explain how and why the once-mighty Taira fell from power and grace. It casts the Taira defeat as inevitable and shapes everything to this fatalistic theme of certain, predictable fall: Kiyomori and his heirs, it tells us, lost because they could not have won. Among the most important devices applied toward this end is the consistent exaggeration of a dichotomy alleged to have existed between the fi erce, rough-and-ready Minamoto warriors of the east and the genteel, courtifi ed Taira partisans of the west – a stereotype that has no evidential basis outside the Heike monogatari and its sister texts, but which has colored and dominated historical perceptions of early warriors for centuries.28 Similar problems of distortions introduced by the entertainment or didactic purposes for which they were written plague other literary texts as well, even those no biwa-hōshi ever sang. So too, do Hollywood-esque problems of anachronism and physical, biological or mechanical implausibility introduced by the authors’ lack of familiarity with real battlefi elds. The sharpest-eyed of historians have, in fact, been commenting on the latter problem for generations. In his famous 1891 essay on why “Taiheiki Has No Value for Historians,” Kume Kunitake, for example, offered several illustrations of this sort of scientifi c error in Taiheiki, a chronicle of the Nambokuchō wars. Among the most interesting of these is one concerning the battle at Akasaka Castle in 1331. Taiheiki alleges that, Those within the castle took up ladles with handles ten or twenty feet long, dipped up boiling water, and poured it onto [attackers attempting to pull down the castle walls]. The hot water passed through the holes in their helmet tops, ran down from the edges of their shoulder-guards, and burned their bodies so grievously that they fl ed panic-stricken.29
The problem with this assertion, notes Kume, is twofold: fi rst, a ladle with a 10- or 20-foot handle would become far too heavy to lift if it held more than a very small amount of water; and second, water dropped from a height quickly spreads out and is cooled by the air as it falls. Boiling water poured onto attackers from atop even fairly low castle walls would, therefore, be warm, not scalding, when it reached its targets.30 It would seem, then, that a truly scrupulous reaccounting of tenth- to fourteenth-century battlefi eld customs and behavior must ignore literary texts entirely. But, however desirable, this sort of approach is simply not feasible. Diaries, letters, public documents and court histories – the sort of sources scholars deem most reliable – are maddeningly laconic in their discussions of battles. Most, particularly those dealing with the period before the 1180s, tell us little more than the time, place and results of encounters between warriors. By the late twelfth century, it had become customary for warrior leaders to compile petitions for reward, called gunchūjō, which were in turn based on battle reports (kassen teioi chūmon or kassen teioi jikken-jō) submitted by their subordinates.
The earliest surviving example of this sort of document dates from 1265, but it is plain that the practice of compiling them began much earlier. Gunchūjō, therefore, offer an additional window on the late thirteenth and fourteenth centuries. The Kamakura shogunate’s offi cial chronicle of its own history, Azuma kagami, moreover, quotes and cites such reports frequently, and uses them as the base for detailed descriptions of battles in its entries.31 Azuma kagami is, in fact, the most dependable – and therefore the most useful – single source for information on early medieval Japanese warfare, for it is, at a minimum, a roughly contemporaneous chronicle written by warriors about warriors. Nevertheless, it covers only the years between 1180 and 1266 – that is, only the middle third of the period under scrutiny in the present study – and is far from comprehensive even for that span of time. For a fuller understanding of early medieval warfare, historians have little recourse but to depend, at least in part, on sources that are fi ctionalized to an uncertain degree, and therefore less than completely trustworthy.
These include pictorial as well as literary records. One of the most promising avenues of research is analysis of the numerous illustrated scrolls (emaki) that depict the wars and other military adventures of the early medieval era. A dozen or so emaki produced during the late thirteenth and fourteenth centuries survive, although with the singular exception of Takezaki Suenaga’s illustrated petition for rewards, the Mōko shūrai ekotoba, all of these scrolls postdate the events they portray by a half-century or more. They are, therefore, most reliably interpreted as refl ecting conditions during the late Kamakura and Nambokuchō eras, when they were drawn. Sadly, no comparable resources exist for the Heian and early Kamakura periods.32 Historians can also make use of some of the early variant texts of the Heike monogatari. The most helpful of these are the Engyōbon version and the Gempei jōsuiki, both written down during the early thirteenth century. These accounts differ considerably – sometimes dramatically – from the more familiar Kakuichi-bon, and, if approached with appropriate caution and skepticism, are indispensable sources of information.
For the Heian and Nambokuchō periods, we also have numerous literary accounts of warriors and warfare, ranging from anecdotes in didactic tale collections such as the Konjaku monogatarishū to longer chronicles of specifi c wars, such as Shōmonki and Mutsuwaki (which relate Taira Masakado’s rebellion and the so-called Former 9 Years’ War of 1055–62), to epic sagas such as Taiheiki, which spans some forty volumes. To be sure, these are tales and stories, not historical records, and must be used carefully. But if they have been embellished and sometimes deviate from fact, they nevertheless refl ect the perceptions – the images of warriors and battles – of men who lived roughly contemporaneously to the events depicted. As such, they can at least be trusted to be far closer to portraying “how things actually were” (to use von Ranke’s famous phrase) on early medieval battlefi elds than the Kakuichi-bon Heike monogatari and other gunkimono written centuries after the fact. The general credibility of the Heian literary works is, moreover, underscored by the fact that their portrayals of warriors and warfare are consistent with one another and with those in other sources for the period, even as they are at odds with much of the imagery of the later gunkimono.
The portrait of early medieval warfare that emerges from close analysis and cross-comparison of this diverse mixture of evidence is different but no less colorful than that found in the traditional literature. The early bushi were a fascinating enigma: men of fi erce, self-sacrifi cing courage, whose lives centered on the concept of honor but who seemingly held no notion of fair play; men seen by some of their contemporaries as “of imposing visage, great martial skills, courage, discretion and discrimination,” and by others as, “no different from barbarians . . . like wild wolves, butchering human fl esh and using it as ornaments for their bodies.”33 I begin my reproduction of this portrait with an examination of what early medieval warriors were fi ghting about.
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