The Lone Samurai

by William Scott Wilson

  Much has been said about Musashi’s independence and, in many cases, these comments have been critical. Some writers ignore his desire for independence, and instead declare that he was too dirty and strange-looking to be hired by anyone. Here are descriptions of Musashi from the Tanji hokin hikki and the Watanabe koan taiwaki, respectively, that added fire to the fuel of this theory.

  When Musashi was young, he was afflicted with a carbuncle on his head, and for this reason, said it was unsightly to shave his forehead (as was the style at that time). He went his entire life without shaving his forehead and instead went about with a full head of hair. His eyes were a yellowish brown and sometimes shone like amber. According to his disciples, he always cleaned himself with a damp towel and he never once took a bath.

  Musashi’s worst point was that he hated the foot and bathtubs and went his whole life without bathing. When he went outside barefoot and his feet got dirty, he simply wiped them off. For this reason, his clothes were soiled and, in order to mask how soiled they were, he wore clothing that was velvet on both sides.

  But Musashi’s constant association with the Ogasawara, the Honda, and later the Hosokawa daimyo would argue strongly against such stories. Rumors about Musashi were often repeated, embellished, and finally turned into stories bordering on the fantastic (see Appendix 1). It should also be remembered that Japanese culture places an extraordinary emphasis on personal cleanliness and that, with the way rumors are spread, any infraction of the rules would likely be discussed and exaggerated as the stories circulated from village to village. Nevertheless, the most reliable portraits that still exist of Musashi show him well dressed in normal garb. His storied aversion to bathtubs may have been a result of his early days as a shugyosha wishing to avoid sudden attacks, but it is doubtful that even Tadazane would have deigned to come close to him had he not been clean and presentable.

  A number of events occurred during Musashi’s stay with the Ogasawara in Kokura that give an indication of his character. One is the time that a cook who thought Musashi arrogant decided to defeat the swordsman by lying in wait for him and taking him by surprise. As it happened, the man did hide and wait for Musashi, but just as he saw his chance and made his attack, Musashi dodged the blow and struck the cook’s arm with the back of his sword. The man never picked up a cleaver again, but escaped with his life and likely counted himself as lucky. Musashi had defended himself but had not dealt the cook as heavy a punishment for his presumptuousness as other swordsmen might have.

  In another case there was a martial artist residing in Kokura by the name of Aoki Kuwaemon. This man was widely known to be very capable with the sword. When insulted by someone and moved to contest the provocation with a match, however, he would produce a gaudy red-lacquered wooden sword from a cloth bag as the weapon of his choice. Musashi felt that this sort of display was both pretentious and vulgar, and when he met the man, he told him in no uncertain terms that he was foolish, adding that using such a sword in a real match was unthinkable. As he could see Kuwaemon’s anger rising, he put a grain of rice on the forelocks of a page, and then split the grain in two with one stroke. Musashi was well known for his ability in tsumeru, or “holding back” at just the right moment, and Kuwaemon was advanced enough to realize that this ability suggested even deeper ones that were far beyond his understanding. Musashi then left the younger man with a caustic but instructive remark: “Though your skill is ripe, it will be difficult to beat an opponent with such a sword. Having it lacquered red is outrageous.” Swordsmanship was a serious business to Musashi. It was not something to be made into a sideshow or an amusement, and he was frankly critical of those who would make it such. In the Wind chapter of The Book of Five Rings, he wrote: “[O]ther schools get along with this [swordsmanship] as a performance art, as a method of making a living, as a colorful decoration or as a means of forcing flowers into bloom. Can this be the true Way if it has been made into a salable item?”

  KUMOI

  Guest status at Kokura assured Musashi the considerable freedom he required; indeed, his need to travel seems to have matched that of Matsuo Basho, the great haiku poet who would be born the year before Musashi died. Even after establishing a comfortable home base in Kokura, he continued his old life on the road.

  While in the city of Matsue in the coastal area of Izumo in 1638, the swordsman was invited to give a demonstration of his skill by Lord Matsudaira Izumo no kami Naomasa. There he defeated the most skilled sword practitioner in the entire fief in a bout in which neither man was injured. Not quite believing that this had been accomplished with such apparent ease, Lord Matsudaira himself took up a wooden sword and declared himself ready for a match. Musashi took up two wooden swords and chased Naomasa around the area three times before driving him into a corner. The match finished, Musashi went on his way.

  The year before this event, Musashi had traveled to the lively new capital of Edo on business that had nothing to do with swordsmanship at all.

  Although he had emphasized that a man truly serious about developing his swordsmanship should stay away from women, and even wrote in his final advice, “The Way of Walking Alone,” that one should “have no heart for approaching the path of love,” about the time he was fifty-four, he seems to have been a frequent visitor to the Yoshiwara courtesan quarters in Edo, and to have even fallen in love with a young woman by the name of Kumoi. This Kumoi was classified as a tsubone, which was the second-lowest of the six classes of the fifteen hundred courtesans and prostitutes in the Yoshiwara at the time. This relationship was recorded by Shoji Kasutomi, the sixth-generation descendant of the founder of the Yoshiwara, Shoji Jin’emon, in his book, Dobo goen, published in 1720. According to this work: “Among the women of Kawai Kenzaemon in Shinmachi, there was a lady-in-waiting by the name of Kumoi. At the time, she became familiar with Miyamoto Musashi, the master of two swords. She also frequented the brothel of Jinzaburo in the same quarter.”13

  It should not be surprising that Musashi might have sought the affections of a woman,14 however briefly, particularly in his middle age. He would write that we must know “all the Ways,” and he had likely been invited to courtesan houses a number of times by artist friends in Kyoto and elsewhere. It is also not surprising that Musashi would choose a courtesan to dally with, as commitment to a family and other emotional and practical ties would be out of the question, and his freedom—given the restrictions of her trade and his limited income—would remain intact. Certainly, he was not “swept away” by this affair, and at a later date would write the following poem:

  When it comes to love,

  Don’t write letters,

  Don’t write poems.

  For even a single penny,

  Watch your money carefully.

  Kumoi seems to have been playful and popular with the women of her trade, and considering Musashi’s sustained interests in the arts, she was probably not entirely uncultured. But if we have been reading between the lines, we will have noticed that Musashi, too, had his lighter side, and may have developed his relationship with Kumoi strictly for the sake of the transient human pleasures it afforded.

  SHIMABARA

  While Musashi was in Edo, circumstances were conspiring to set the stage for a large and important battle in distant Kyushu. Matsukura Shigemasa, the daimyo of Shimabara in Hizen, had been another ally of the Toyotomi before that family’s annihilation at Osaka; and, as in the case of Kato Kiyomasa, his loyalty to the Tokugawa government had never really been proven. When Shigemasa died in 1630, his son, Shigeharu, ruled the fief in such an economically and politically repressive way that it became an embarrassment even to the other daimyo in Kyushu. His extraordinarily heavy hand became too much for the peasants to bear and in 1637 they banded together in revolt. In this, they were joined by Christians of the nearby Amakusa area, who had found a messianic figure in the seventeen-year-old youth Masuda Tokisada, whom they called Amakusa Shiro. People of the new Christian faith were most heavily concentrated in K
yushu, and had been persecuted for some time under both the local laws of the daimyo of Amakusa, Terasawa Katataka, and the anti-Christian promulgations of the Tokugawa government. These two groups—the poorest farmers in Japan and the harassed Christians—which had probably never been completely distinct, now gathered together in Hara Castle in the Shimabara Peninsula for a last stand.

  Given the Tokugawa clan’s need for total control of the country, these actions alone would likely have caused the government to directly oppose those ensconced in the castle. But, adding insult to injury, included in the opposition forces were a number of seasoned veteran samurai of Konishi Yukinaga, a leader of the Toyotomi forces at Sekigahara and a man closely connected to Ukita Hideie. Yukinaga had been captured and beheaded after Sekigahara, but many of his troops, who had gained great experience during the invasion of Korea, the Battle of Sekigahara, and the Osaka Castle campaign, remained loyal to the memory of their lord (who, incidentally, had been bap-tized as a Christian as early as 1583). The time was ripe for their final obliteration.

  This combined group of rebels in Hara Castle numbered over thirty-seven thousand men. The Tokugawa government ordered the daimyo of Kyushu to raise an army to attack the castle and put down the rebellion. The state-sanctioned troops eventually numbered over one hundred thousand, and the Ogasawara, of course, were among their numbers.

  When, in the spring of 1637, Musashi received news of the imminent action in Kyushu involving troops with whom he was connected, he made immediate arrangements to join the fray. Just before departing Edo, he took his leave of Kumoi. According to the Dobo goen, “When he was about to leave for (Kyushu), he went to Jinzaburo’s house in order to take his leave from Kumoi, and prepared his departure from the brothel.”

  Musashi put a bag that had been woven for him by the affectionate Kumoi on two “spatulas,” and put it on his back as a sort of banner. Then, wearing a black satin haori she had also sewn for him, on the breast of which was a red fawn of wadded silk, he departed the Yoshiwara pleasure quarters. A crowd of courtesans came to see him off. After this rather unusual departure, which must have put a smile on everyone’s face, perhaps even Musashi’s own, he rode straight to Kyushu. It is not known if he ever returned, nor is anything about Kumoi recorded after this event. There can be little doubt, however, about what would have been in her heart as she turned back to Jinzaemon’s when Musashi’s figure had finally disappeared. She had had intimate access to the more tender side of a man who was to make so strong a mark on Japanese culture that his legend would live on for centuries. Kumoi had indeed known a “real live human being.”

  At Shimabara, Musashi was appointed, possibly in deference to his age, as an inspector of the shogun’s staff under the Kuroda clan. His adopted son, Iori, was made a commander of one of the units of the Ogasawara, which, however, had been placed toward the rear of the action.

  The action did not go especially well for the government troops. They may have suffered some overconfidence in their own ability and some lack of confidence in their Tokugawa-appointed commander, Itakura Shigemasa. But they would not have wished to rally with the unsavory Matsukura Shigeharu. The troops attacking Hara Castle lacked enthusiasm and sufficient coordination. When the Tokugawa government made a show of changing commanders, Itakura led a desperate attack on the castle walls and was killed for his efforts. At this, the Tokugawa sent even more troops and gave the command to Matsudaira Nobutsuna, who, on 14 April 1638, stormed the castle and put all those who had survived the attack to the sword. Soon afterward, Matsukura Shigeharu was ordered to commit harakiri, probably as much for his connections with the Toyotomi as for causing the revolt with his severe oppression of the farmers. His son was subsequently banished to the island of Shikoku and his fief was awarded to others.

  Both Musashi and Iori must have chafed at their relatively safe positions among the attacking forces. Iori eventually was able to maneuver his troops to the front and achieved a number of meritorious deeds for which he was well rewarded. Musashi, on the other hand, as a staff inspector, had to hold back. Finally, unable to hold back any longer, he joined in the attack at the base of the castle. With this demonstration of gratitude and loyalty to the Ogasawara, however, he was struck and wounded by a rock hurled from the castle ramparts. His recovery would not take long, but it did remove him from the action for the rest of the siege.

  After the fall of the castle, Musashi returned to Kokura and made it his base of operations for the next two years. In 1640, however, he received a visit from a man named Iwama Rokubei that would lead to the flowering of Musashi’s last years and ultimately to our own knowledge of the man.

  CHAPTER

  THREE

  The Way of the Brush: Kumamoto

  CONNECTIONS

  Over the years, Musashi’s relationships with a number of daimyo, particularly those of the Ogasawara and Honda clans, had grown stronger. Like many clans with close borders, these two families were also tied by marriage, Ogasawara Tadazane being married to the daughter of Honda Tadamasa. Such connections,1 however, did not stop there: Tadamasa’s son, Tadatoki, was married to the daughter of the second Tokugawa shogun, Hidetada, and Tadamasa’s daughter was married to Arima Naozane, the daimyo of Nobeoka in Hyuga. This was a normal state of affairs for clans that desired to secure their relationships—and indirectly their territories—both nearby and farther afield, and had been so since the days of the Fujiwara in the ancient capital of Nara. And while the policy of marrying daughters off to other powerful men or their sons had never proved to be a fail-safe plan, it did bring clans together on a family basis, and so provided some insurance against aggression.

  Musashi, too, was now connected to both the Ogasawara and Honda—not by marriage, of course, but by the fact that the lords of the clans had taken his adopted sons, Iori and Mikinosuke, respectively, as personal retainers. Indeed, he seemed also to enjoy the lateral connections, for he was on close terms with Arima Naozane and even exchanged letters with the man concerning the daimyo’s problems with the shogunate. Thus, Musashi, who was essentially a ronin, transcended social barriers in a way that even high-placed samurai could not. One suspects that this was not on account of his swordsmanship alone, but also because of his intellect, personality, and, as we shall see in this chapter, unique artistic abilities.

  The other important connection in these circles was the marriage of Ogasawara Tadazane’s sister, Chiyohime, to Hosokawa Tadatoshi. This man was the daimyo of Kumamoto, and the leader of a clan of astonishing military, political, and artistic achievement. It was from Tadatoshi that Iwama Rokubei had been sent with an offer to Musashi, whom the lord had met at a poetry circle in Kyoto some time before.

  Musashi at a poetry circle? At this point it may be relevant to discuss briefly how a man who had spent the first part of his life involved in over sixty duels could also distinguish himself in poetry as well as in garden design, tea ceremony, Noh drama, and india ink painting. By so doing, we may be better able to understand what would have attracted Tadatoshi to Musashi, and why Musashi would have been interested in a clan like the Hosokawa.

  THE WAY OF THE WARRIOR

  In the Chinese lexicon there is a word, 斌, pronounced uruwashi in Japanese, that means “balanced” and refers to the proper proportion of interior content and exterior form. The left side of this character, 文 (bun), originally meant something like “pattern” in the sense of the patterns of birds in flight or ripples in water, but eventually came to mean “literature,” or the patterns of human culture, and finally “culture” itself. The right-hand portion of the character, 武 (bu), means “martial” or warrior, and can be further broken down to the radicals 止, “stop,” and 戈, “halberd,” indicating a meaning of “to stop with the halberd.” The entire character, uruwashi, then, connotes a balance of cultural and martial abilities in a single person, and this ideal was established early on in both the Chinese and Japanese cultures.

  In the early Kamakura period (1185–1249) in
Japan, this sense of balance was expressed in exquisite form in the Heike monogatari, the story of the conflict between the Minamoto and Taira clans. The warrior is described as beautifully attired, well-versed in literature or music, and able to write a death poem at the time of his own demise. This concept of the masculine ideal as a balance between military and cultural strengths would endure throughout the history of the warrior class, although particular clans or individuals would sometimes emphasize one aspect over the other. Shiba Yoshimasa (1350–1410), the great general and administrator during the Ashikaga shogunate, wrote in his book, the Chikubasho, “When a man has ability in the arts, the depth of his heart can be imagined, and the mind of his clan understood.”

  Other great warlords and generals wrote in a similar vein. Hojo Nagauji (Soun) (1432–1519), who built one of the first great castle towns in Japan at Odawara, declared in his “Twenty-one Precepts,” that “a person who is lacking in the Way of Poetry is truly impoverished. The cultural and the martial are the constant Way of the warrior. It is hardly necessary to note that the ancient law has it that the cultured [arts] should be held on the left, and the military [arts] on the right.” Even Takeda Shingen (1521–73), widely considered the greatest general of his day, said, “A man’s learning is like the branches and leaves to a tree; he can not be without it. Learning, however, is not just in reading something, but rather is something we integrate with our own various Ways.”