Samurai and Ninja: The Real Story Behind the Japanese Warrior Myth That Shatters the Bushido Mystique (19 page)

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

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 be 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.