♦ The day they left for war
♦ The day of the battle
♦ The hour of the battle
♦ The element of the year in reference to other factors
♦ The element of the allied and enemy lords
♦ The year of birth for the allied and enemy lords
♦ The position of evil directions in relation to the army, including evil stars in the night sky and the position of the gods at that time
♦ The movement of birds and animals
♦ The movement of flags and banners and how they act in the wind
♦ The types and color of chi visible in the sky
♦ The types and color of chi rising from an allied or enemy army
♦ The results of divination through such things as burning turtle shells
After consulting the teachings and skills of that school, the master astrologer would give his advice to the lord, who would match it to the advice of his more practical tacticians and make a decision on an army’s next move.
The shinobi also had to perform divination when they were to move out to attack or venture on a secret mission; the following elements are found in the shinobi curriculum:
♦ Divination by torches, to throw up to three torches—with spikes on the bottom—around an enemy target. The fumes from the sulphur and gunpowder mixtures would force an enemy to surrender, or at least be incapacitated; the torch that made the enemy surrender, be it number one, two, or three, would be used to divine a future attack.
♦ The sound of birds and the movement of birds in the sky
♦ The direction that the shinobi left home from
♦ The hour and day on which the shinobi left for his mission
♦ Before a shinobi infiltrated a position they would pick the most auspicious direction for that hour or day and in response defenders would defend those directions
♦ Divination through the observation of incense smoke would tell a shinobi if a mission was to be ill-fated or not
♦ The use of protective amulets to avert the eyes of the enemy and render the shinobi invisible
Samurai Vengeance Attacks
With the samurai being a knightly warrior class, honor and family are important central elements of a samurai’s being. The blood feud is a common factor in Western history and literature and family feuds, such as the infamous Campbells versus McDonalds of Scotland, have become the symbols of this form of warfare. Like the rest of the world, Japan has its fair share of family vendettas.
This form of conflict is called adauchi, and can be broken down into 仇 “grudge,” and 討 “killing” or “strike,” allowing it to be rendered as “grudge-strike” or “revenge-killing.” The idea of family feuds or revenge killings stretches back into samurai history. However for the main part, revenge killings and feuds become lost and mixed in with the turbulent war years—of which there are many in samurai history when most wars were feuds between clans—so therefore I will concentrate on the “peaceful” Edo Period. If a fight was initiated between samurai, and if one of them was killed, then this would start the legal procedure of “official murder.” The man to take up the act of revenge would report to his lord and ask for a leave of absence while he tracked down the enemy in question and attempted to kill him. If given permission and if the man was in his own domain, then a game of cat-and-mouse would start—deception, infiltration, street fights and blood would start to flow. However, if the enemy was in another province then the samurai would have to travel there as a rōnin, where he would have to report to the local magistrate and obtain permission to kill his target. The problem this caused is that, when officially registered the enemy knew that his pursuer was in town. If permission was granted, then the pursuer would hunt down his enemy and vengeance was unleashed. Having killed the enemy, the head of his opponent was his to take and vengeance was complete.
The difference with Edo Period revenge attacks is that once a vengeance killing had taken place then the family of the now dead samurai could not take further vengeance and the matter was considered closed, halting any escalating family wars. However, keeping to the rules was not always the path that some samurai took and samurai would sometimes not get authorization for the killing; this made the vengeance attack an act of true murder. If the pursuing samurai had committed an unlawful killing then he may be captured and killed as a murderer or released without charge—the latter because samurai had a tendency to support acts of filial devotion—but also and most likely, the samurai would go on the run, trying to reach the safety of his own province. Alternatively, the samurai may not be successful in the murder; they may spend years on the road, go into poverty and starvation and may even have to hire themselves out to another clan to fund their death mission. Furthermore, even if he finds his enemy, the enemy may outmatch him in skill and win the combat; this is called kaeriuchi, and this is a man who is on a vengeance killing but has been killed by his own target.
His lord may stop a samurai from leaving for a mission of vengeance; however, the common understanding in Edo Period Japan was that if a member of a family dies through ill measure, then vengeance must be undertaken. Furthermore, it happened at times that if the head of the family has been killed then the inheritor might not inherit the family lands and income until they had killed the enemy of their father/leader.
In the mid to late 1600s, Natori-Ryu lists the following skills as requirements for a mission of vengeance:
♦ Swordsmanship
♦ Sword quick-drawing
♦ Capturing and binding skills
♦ Fast-travel skills
♦ Concealed chainmail
♦ Traveling as a rōnin
♦ Understanding how to accumulate money to cover expenses
♦ Constructing plans and tactics
♦ Spying
♦ The arts of the shinobi
The three most famous vengeance stories in Japan are:
1. Ako-jiken 1702—the 47 Rōnin
2. Igagoe no Adauchi 1634—Vengeance in Iga
3. Soga Kyodai Aduchi 1193—The Vengeance of the Soga Brothers
The Bansenshukai shinobi manual of 1676 gives the following episode as an example of vengeance:
In older days, someone from another province killed his colleague and ran to Edo. He sought shelter with a hatamoto warrior, and the warrior carefully hid him. The victim’s son came to Edo to look for his father’s killer and searched for a few years. However, the enemy was securely protected and there was no way to kill him. After all the years, he eventually worked out a plan, in which he wrote a letter saying: “Though I have sought after my enemy for years, I have had no luck and have no clue where he is. As all of my effort has come to nothing, I am bitterly disappointed and therefore I will kill myself by disembowelment.” He then sent this letter, together with his short sword, to his mother, wife and children. Then he hid himself while his mother, wife and children grieved deeply, a fact that became known. This resulted in a message from the enemy family being sent to the killer in Edo; he did not doubt the validity of the letter and that it might be a stratagem and thus fully allowed his guard to slip, going out here and about. This then ended with the son killing him without difficulty.
This is an example of making the enemy become less attentive and taking advantage of the gap. Learning from such an example, you can think of a countless number of ways to make the enemy drop their guard. The deepest principle of ninjutsu is to avoid where the enemy is attentive and strike where they are negligent.
Law officially banned the way of Adauchi in 1873 as Japan entered into the modern era.
Honor and bushido
The first thing to understand is that the term bushido 武士道 is made up of two parts, bushi 武士, military person or warrior, and do 道, the “Way,” which results in the now common translation, “the way of the warrior,” or “the way of the samurai.” The ideograms can be broken down thus:
武
Bu
&nbs
p; Military
Originally this ideogram was made up of two parts, 止 and 戈, and meant to “go to war with a halberd.” Later changed to “to stop a halberd” this has come about because the ideogram 止 now means “to stop” in Japanese. However, the original Chinese was “to go to war with weapons,” a warrior. The change from “to go to war with weapons” to “to stop a weapon” was made in later times.
士
Shi
Originally it represented a type of battle-ax, and came to mean those men in a proper position as to have a battle-ax.
道
Do
A path or “way,” as in the Way of Eastern philosophy.
A major misconception around this subject is that bushido was first developed in 1900, when Inazo Nitobe wrote the bestseller, Bushido: the Soul of Japan. The book was originally written in English and later translated into Japanese and was not the first use of the term “bushido.” The term bushido is much older and is a staple of samurai culture. While fine details may change on the interpretation of the matter by the samurai themselves, it was understood as following the ethics of samurai life, even if those ethics changed with the times; this meant that as long as the actions of a samurai fell inside the ethics of his time and his actions served the lord, he was following bushido.
In the West, the term “chivalry” has an accurate association with bushido but both Western chivalry and Japanese bushido are misrepresented by a connection to the word “honor.” The reason for this misguided and popular misunderstanding of honor and its connection to chivalry is an overshoot from Victorian romance.
The Oxford English dictionary states that honor is “the quality of knowing and doing what is morally right.” The problem with this is that what is considered moral or morally correct differs from country to country and between times. What was morally acceptable to a samurai is not that which is morally acceptable to us as modern people. Ethics and morals change with time and the Victorian need for high moral standards (often more of an ideal than a reality) was superimposed on medieval chivalry and in turn the term bushido was translated as chivalry, giving us a romantic idea of what chivalry should be but not what it actually was. Because of this, both chivalry and samurai bushido have been romanticized—the knight fights off evil in the land and the samurai is bound to the elevation of correct moral conduct. The problem is that the “evil in the land” may be the non tax-paying peasant class or the people over the hill who are led by a rival and thus are considered immoral. This has led to a position where some samurai ethics and morals are now considered honorable while others are most certainly not. A feudal network by its very nature is a hierarchy and those people below others in such a system are sometimes considered subhuman, or at least not entitled to the same ethical considerations as other more elite humans.
A samurai was concerned with honor, very much so, but this may not gel with our concept of honor. For example, it is considered acceptable for a samurai to kill someone who has been declared an enemy—for almost any reason, simply because the lord wishes it so—they may also take the “spoils of war” after the massacre of a village who are in league with the enemy, yet it is a dishonorable act to sneak in and steal the same property in a stealthy manner. This means that while the motivation may be as small as plain dislike, it was honorable to kill the enemy and steal from him, yet to leave him alive and steal from him without him knowing and in a stealthy manner was not. Yet, if that same samurai was trained as a shinobi and his lord so wished, it was a honorable act for him to infiltrate and take that which was “needed.” Also, for him to lie and construct vicious plans was considered a form of loyalty if it was done in the service of a lord, while if done for personal greed, then again this was an unspeakable act—meaning that ethics, chivalry and honor change with the intent of the action and that the action itself is neither chivalrous or honorable.
War was also under the scrutiny of what was and what was not honorable. Thomas Cleary in his book Training the Samurai Mind translates the writings of the samurai Naganuma Muneyoshi (1635–90) who talks about the classification and justification of wars. Naganuma states that war can be divided into the following, but that only wars of justice are acceptable for samurai:
Wars of Justice
These can be divided into seven types:
1. A war against a tyrant
2. To quell a rebellion against a truly just lord
3. To go to war against treacherous retainers who have killed their lord
4. To fight retainers who have taken power from their lord
5. When the land is still under the rule of a lord but is in chaos
6. To undertake an act of revenge for the killings of a samurai’s family
7. When a state is without a ruler
Wars of Prestige
These are unjustified wars and are when samurai use the idea of honor to establish a war that is based on a display or contest of prestige.
Wars of Greed
These are unjustified wars and occur when samurai are motivated to war for personal gain.
Do not be mistaken, a samurai was fully concerned with personal honor and chivalry, but it was not what we imagine, i.e., it was not to fight fairly, to share peace and the word of Buddhism, or to defend the helpless—and while examples of this may be found in history, most samurai were concerned with the following:
♦ To have a formidable reputation
♦ To gain an escalation in pay
♦ To be seen as morally correct by his peers
♦ To serve his lord with services required of him (some of which we would not deem ethical)
♦ To move up the ladder of hierarchy (which for some could means moving to a different lord)
Acts that are considered dishonorable:
♦ Claiming that a head is not who it is named as
♦ Stealing a head
♦ Killing an ally to use his head to falsely claim a kill in battle
♦ Stealing by stealth
♦ Lying
♦ Commanding an inexperienced and younger samurai to perform an act that will get them killed so that his body can be used for cover from projectiles
♦ To kill women, take their nose and claim it was a man killed in combat
♦ To die a dog’s death, i.e., in a natural disaster or by something less heroic than battle
♦ Giving aid to a man who has been targeted for vengeance due to a family dispute
♦ Banditry, murder (the killing of someone in a non-acceptable way) and robbery
♦ Some forms of theater and entertainment
Acts that are considered honorable, loyal or have no connotations of negativity:
♦ Leading enemies into traps
♦ Ambushes performed by samurai on smaller enemy groups
♦ Deception in warfare and combat (something which was hailed as superior)
♦ To kill from a distance
♦ Infiltration in stealth—the deeper a samurai infiltrates the more prestige he gains
♦ Torture
♦ Decapitating a man while he is still alive by having him pinned down and sawing through his neck with a sword
♦ Giving aid to a stranger to help kill someone who has been targeted for vengeance
♦ For many to fight against one
♦ Ritual suicide
♦ Homosexuality
♦ Pedophilia (which had no negative or legal connotations)
Samurai honor must remain understood as honor, but the factors of moral and ethical shift must be applied. What a samurai considered honorable, or to be without shame is not what we as modern Western people consider honorable, and while some elements of moral conduct are universal to all, some elements of ethics normally shift in time. Therefore, a samurai is on a quest of honor but the idea of honor may change with the time and situation. As a modern reader of samurai history, consider the samurai as a man with a core of personal honor that each individual would try to promote; this could b
e done from behind the scenes by acting as a shinobi, it could be in the height of battle, banners snapping at the front lines of an army, but in most if not all cases, samurai honor came at the destruction of an enemy—an enemy who were other samurai like him, trying to gain honor. Remember, the enemy of the samurai is another samurai.
That being said, if a samurai did transgress against the current moral code there was one sure way to regain honor—ritual suicide.
Suicide and Seppuku
Ritual suicide is an iconic image which has become a hallmark of the samurai. However, again the romantic element has allowed to flourish and truth has been obscured leaving the topic as not fully explored. The following section will give an insight into the ritual and meaning; however, for a more comprehensive read on this subject see Seppuku by Andrew Rankin.
Ritual suicide is called by many names and while most revolve around terms to cut open the stomach, the most popular two in today’s world are Seppuku and Hari-kiri. The basic idea is to open the stomach and to expose the guts and innards to the world so that a samurai may take control of his own death instead of letting another take his life. This is done when all else has failed and the enemy may capture them; it is also done to correct a mistake that other actions will not correct. Ritual suicide was not a static ritual and forms changed depending on the time. According to the work of Rankin, the older forms of seppuku appear to be more spontaneous and in battlefield situations, examples such as samurai opening their stomachs on castle walls while the fortress burns around them or sitting down, still bloody from a battle, a samurai writes a death poem and opens up his stomach. Then as time progresses a fixed ritual takes place, drinks are offered to the condemned, small but sombre parties are held, poems may be written and measurements for the ceremony are mapped out as food is laid on thin wooden sheets placed upon small tables. Our image of the seppuku ceremony is altogether quite correct; the main issue is the darker side of the story, the fact that many men did not wish to commit suicide and that an unknown percentage were forced into the act. What cannot be known is how many people willingly opened up their stomachs to kill themselves for the loss of a lord or to atone for a “crime” and how many were forced into the act because their families and their future line were under threat. Therefore a middle lane approach must be taken again and the idea that sometimes, some samurai could be heroic and romantic and that they did in fact die for their lords and they did commit this ritual with the proper intent; while at the other end of the scale it must be remembered that there were many who did not wish to perform suicide and that the regulations of the ceremony itself were constructed to stop a person from striking out at those who had commanded such a death.
Samurai and Ninja: The Real Story Behind the Japanese Warrior Myth That Shatters the Bushido Mystique Page 11
