The samurai way of death
(© Osprey Publishing. Chapter 4: The samurai
way of death, Samurai: The
World of the Warrior)
Although every aspect of a samurai’s
life is important in understanding the totality of the world of the
warrior, nothing is more fundamental than a knowledge of the beliefs
and traditions that surround the moment the warrior takes leave of
the physical world. Whether that passing is voluntary or
involuntary, the intense focus in so much of the relevant literature
on the end of a samurai’s life makes one very inclined to agree with
the 17th-century samurai Yamamoto Tsunetomo, who wrote in his book
Hagakure that 'the way of the samurai is found in
deat'.
Hagakure is a collection of short anecdotes and maxims
from the traditions of the Nabeshima family, in whose samurai ranks
Yamamoto Tsunetomo served. It was compiled in 1716, a good hundred
years after the Period of Warring States had officially finished,
but its tone is nonetheless warlike. Hagakure covers a vast
spectrum of samurai behaviour, from the useful ‘if you attach a
number of bags of cloves to your body you will not be affected by
inclemency and colds’ to advice on bringing up children (‘one should
encourage bravery and avoid trivially frightening or teasing ...’).
It is also delightfully snobbish in its rejection of alternative
beliefs and practices in other less-favoured provinces:
The saying, ‘the arts aid the body’, is for samurai of other
regions. For the samurai of the Nabeshima clan the arts bring ruin
to the body. In all cases the person who practises an art is an
artist, not a samurai ...
Yet it is the handful of passages referring directly to death
that have given Hagakure its chilling reputation. In
addition to the famous quotation with which we began this chapter,
there is a long passage almost at the end of the work that
reads:
Meditation on inevitable death should be performed daily.
Every day when one’s body and mind are at peace, one should meditate
upon being ripped apart by arrows, muskets, spears and swords, being
carried away by surging waves, being thrown into the midst of a
great fire, being struck by lightning, being shaken to death by a
great earthquake, falling from thousand-foot cliffs, dying of
disease or committing seppuku at the death of one’s master. And
every day without fail one should consider himself as dead.
Leaving aside the references to natural disasters (and
earthquakes have always been a common preoccupation in Japan),
because a samurai's function in life was to fight, a calm acceptance
of being ‘ripped apart’ might almost be regarded as the warrior's
stock in trade. Nor does it set the samurai apart from any other
contemporary professional fighter. The phrase that makes the samurai
unique is the one about committing seppuku at the death of
one’s master. In a handful of words we are told all we need to know
about the ultimate demands that might be made on the life of the
samurai. The first, seppuku, refers to the deed itself. The
second ‘at the death of one’s master’, refers to a particular (and
very controversial) set of circumstances in which the samurai might
be required perform it.
Suicide and the samurai
Seppuku is a more correct expression for an act of
suicide performed by the process of cutting open the abdomen.
Seppuku is better known in the West as hara kiri
(belly-cutting), and is a concept so alien to the European
tradition that it is one of the few words from the world of the
samurai to have entered foreign languages without a need for
translation. Seppuku was commonly performed using a dagger.
It could take place with preparation and ritual in the privacy of
one’s home, or speedily in a quiet corner of a battlefield while
one’s comrades kept the enemy at bay.
In the world of the warrior, seppuku was a deed of
bravery that was admirable in a samurai who knew he was defeated,
disgraced, or mortally wounded. It meant that he could end his days
with his transgressions wiped away and with his reputation not
merely intact but actually enhanced. The cutting of the abdomen
released the samurai’s spirit in the most dramatic fashion, but it
was an extremely painful and unpleasant way to die, and sometimes
the samurai who was performing the act asked a loyal comrade to cut
off his head at the moment of agony.
The earliest reference to seppuku occurs in Hogen
Monogatari, which deals with the conflicts in which the Taira
and the Minamoto were involved in 1156. The mention of the fact that
a samurai called Uno Chikaharu and his followers were captured so
quickly that ‘they did not have time to draw their swords or cut
their bellies’ is so matter-of-fact that it implies that the
practice was already commonplace, at least among the warriors from
eastern Japan.
The first named individual to commit seppuku in the war
chronicles was the celebrated archer Minamoto Tametomo, who
committed suicide in this way as boatloads of Taira samurai
approached his island of exile. The first recorded account of
seppuku after certain defeat in a battle that was still
going on is that of Minamoto Yorimasa in the battle of Uji in 1180.
His suicide was undertaken with such finesse that it was to provide
a model for noble and heroic hara kiri for centuries to
come. While his sons held off the enemy, Yorimasa retired to the
seclusion of the beautiful Byodo-In temple. He then wrote a poem on
the back of his war fan, which read:
Like a fossil tree
From which we gather no flowers
Sad
has been my life
Fated no fruit to produce.
Minamoto Yorimasa’s sequence of poem and suicide was followed
many times in later history. After the battle of Yamazaki in 1582
Akechi Mitsutoshi performed the unprecedented act of committing
seppuku and writing a poem on the door with the blood from
his abdomen, using a brush. Minamoto Yorimasa’s classic act of
seppuku was performed without the aid of a
kaishaku, or second, to deliver a merciful blow on to his
neck at the moment of agony. This was a practice that become more
frequent, and much more acceptable, as the years went by, but it was
never a popular duty, as Yamamoto Tsunetomo tells us:
From ages past it has been considered ill-omened by samurai
to be requested as kaishaku. The reason for this is that one gains
no fame even if the job is well done. And if by chance one should
blunder, it becomes a lifetime disgrace.
Yamamoto Tsunetomo even gives a helpful tip concerning the
performance of this most unpleasant of duties:
In the practice of past times, there were instances when the
head flew off. It was said that it was best to cut leaving a little
skin remaining so that it did not fly off in the direction of the
verifying officials. However, at present it is best to cut clean
through.
As the description earlier in this book of the mass suicide by
drowning at Dan no Ura shows, seppuku was not the only way
of ending a samurai’s life, and may have been a tradition espoused
only by eastern Japan until after the time of the Gempei War. No
member of the Taira family is recorded as having committed
seppuku. In other cases of alternative suicide the choice
of how to end one’s life was dictated by circumstances. When Imai
Kanehira committed suicide at the battle of Awazu in 1184 he was
surrounded by enemies, so he killed himself quickly by jumping head
first from his horse with his sword in his mouth.
Suicide and motivation
There are several instances in samurai history of suicide being
performed as a result of personal failure. Here the samurai would
commit sokotsu-shi, or 'expiatory suicide', the very act itself
wiping the slate clean. Some later examples are quite bizarre.
Legend tells us that Togo Shigechika had failed to capture a certain
castle, so had himself buried alive, fully armoured and mounted on
his horse, staring in the direction of his failure. Other decisions
to act in this way could be spontaneous and dramatic, like the
action of the veteran warrior Yamamoto Kansuke at the fourth battle
of Kawanakajima in 1561. As Takeda Shingen's chief strategist he had
devised the plan by which the Takeda were to surprise the Uesugi
army. When his bold plan apparently failed, Kansuke took his spear
and plunged into the midst of the enemy army, committing suicide to
make amends for his error. The tragedy of his death was that his
conclusion about the destruction of the Takeda proved incorrect.
Reinforcements arrived, the army rallied, and a defeat was turned
into victory. Yet an experienced general had been lost, and he would
have served Shingen better by staying alive.
Committing suicide was not always a voluntary activity. It could
be allowed as an honourable alternative to execution for a condemned
criminal of the samurai class. Sasa Narimasa was 'invited' to commit
suicide by Hideyoshi following his disastrous handling of the
territory Hideyoshi had given him. Hagakure adds a rather
extreme example:
At the fall of the castle of Arima, on the twenty-eighth day
in the vicinity of the inmost citadel, Mitsue Genbei sat down on a
levee between the fields. When Nakano Shigetoshi passed by and asked
the reason for this, Mitsuse replied, ‘I have abdominal pains and
can’t go a step further. I have sent the members of my group ahead,
so please take command. The situation was reported by the overseer,
pronounced to be a case of cowardice, and Mitsuse was ordered to
commit seppuku.
Sometimes a daimyo was called upon to perform
seppuku as the basis of a peace agreement. This would so
weaken the defeated clan that resistance would effectively cease.
Toyotomi Hideyoshi used an enemy's suicide in this way on several
occasions, of which the most dramatic, in that it effectively ended
a dynasty of daimyo for ever, is what happened when the
Hojo were defeated at Odawara in 1590. Hideyoshi insisted on the
suicide of the retired daimyo Hojo Ujimasa, and the exile
of his son Ujinao. With one sweep of a sword the most powerful
daimyo family in eastern Japan disappeared from
history.
Instead of the daimyo's death, the victor might be
satisfied with the death of his enemy's retainer if the subordinate
was in charge of the castle the victor was besieging. The most
theatrical example of this occurred when Hideyoshi besieged
Takamatsu Castle in 1582. It was a long siege, and only looked like
being successful when Hideyoshi diverted a river to make a lake that
gradually began to flood the castle. Hideyoshi drew up peace terms
with Mori Terumoto that included the clause that the valiant
defender of Takamatsu, Shimizu Muneharu, should commit suicide.
Shimizu Muneharu was determined to go to his death as dramatically
as he had lived, and took a boat out into the middle of the
artificial lake. When he was satisfied that Hideyoshi's men were
taking careful note of what he was doing he committed
seppuku. In 1581 Tottori castle in Inaba province held out
for an incredible 200 days before it surrendered to Hideyoshi. Its
commander, Kikkawa Tsuneie, inspired his men to this long resistance
even though they were reduced to eating grass and dead horses, and
may even have practised cannibalism. Tsuneie's suicide was one of
the conditions of surrender. His letter to his son survives to this
day. It reads:
We have endured for over two hundred days. We now have no
provisions left. It is my belief that by giving up my life I will
help my garrison. There is nothing greater than the honour of our
family. I wish our soldiers to hear of the circumstances of my
death.
Another reason for committing suicide was the making of a
protest. This is known as kanshi. Examples of this are rare, but it
profoundly affected one of the greatest daimyo of the
Sengoku Period. Oda Nobunaga inherited his father's domains at the
age of 15, and although he was a brave warrior he showed little
interest in the administration of his territory. One of his best
retainers, Hirade Kiyohide, tried in vain to persuade him to mend
his ways, but when the young Nobunaga showed no inclination to
listen to him Kiyohide put all his feelings into a letter to his
lord, and committed seppuku in protest. Nobunaga was
greatly moved, and changed his ways for the better, with, of course,
considerable consequences for the history of Japan.
Following in death
Junshi (following in death), is the second element in
Yamamoto Tsunetomo’s exhortation to preparedness for death in
Hagakure, when he insists on a willingness to perform
seppuku on the death of one’s master. Again there are early
examples to be found in the war chronicles. In Hogen
Monogatari, when Minamoto Yoshitomo ordered the execution of
his younger brothers, the boys’ attendants killed themselves
immediately afterwards. Four committed seppuku. Two others
stabbed each other. Hogen Monogatari comments:
Though it was their duty to have the same death, though to go
forth to the place of battle to be struck down with one’s lord and
to cut one’s belly is the usual custom, on the grounds that there
had not yet been such an example as this, there was no one who did
not praise it.
When Kamakura was captured in 1333, an operation that will be
described in detail later in this chapter, we read of many acts of
suicide, including this classic account of junshi:
The retainers who were left behind ran out to the middle
gate, crying aloud, ‘Our lord has killed himself. Let all loyal men
accompany him! Then these twenty lit a fire in the mansion, quickly
lined up together in the smoke and cut their bellies. And not
willing to be outdone, three hundred other warriors cut their
bellies and leapt into the consuming flames.
There are examples of junshi being performed even before
the daimyo was dead. Shortly before Shimizu Muneharu's
dramatic suicide on the artificial lake of Takamatsu in 1582, one of
his retainers invited Muneharu to his room. The loyal retainer
explained that he wished to reassure his master about the ease with
which seppuku could be performed. He explained that he had
in fact already committed suicide, and, pulling aside his robe,
showed Muneharu his severed abdomen. Muneharu was touched by the
gesture, and acted as his retainer's second to bring the act to a
speedy and less painful conclusion by cutting off the man's
head.
Although Hogen Monogatari commends the practice,
junshi was the one reason for committing suicide that did
not meet with universal approval. However inspiring the example may
have been to one’s fellow samurai, there were many circumstances
when junshi merely added more unnecessary deaths to an
existing disaster. The death of a daimyo may or may not
have brought about the extinction of his house, but the practice of
junshi by the senior retainers who would otherwise support
and guide the lord’s infant heir only made extinction more likely. A
spontaneous gesture on the battlefield was understandable and even
forgivable, and in the confusion of a battle the circumstances of a
retainer's death could never be clearly established. But when the
death of a daimyo from natural causes during times of peace
provoked the performance of junshi such an act was almost
universally condemned. In such cases a loyal retainer committed
suicide to show that he could serve none other than his departed
lord. During the Sengoku Period some retainers did have little left
to live for, but in the later times of peace junshi was
hardly helpful in maintaining the stability of a dynasty. In the
early Edo Period as many as 20 leading retainers of various
daimyo were known to have committed junshi on the
deaths of their lords.
A better way to serve one's departed lord, the shogun argued, was
to render equally loyal service to his heir, but junshi was
firmly engrained in the Japanese mentality. A strong condemnation of
it is found in the so-called Legacy of Ieyasu, the House Laws left
by the first Tokugawa shogun in 1616. But at the death of his
grandson the third Tokugawa shogun, Iemitsu, in 1651, five of the
leading retainers of the Tokugawa committed junshi, a
remarkable gesture against the law they themselves had formulated. A
further attempt to ban it was introduced by the shogunate in 1663,
and included the statement:
In the event that a lord has a presentiment that a certain
vassal is liable to immolate himself, he should admonish him
strongly against it during his lifetime. If he fails to do so, it
shall be counted as his fault. His heir will not escape appropriate
punishment.
Five years later an instance of junshi occurred among
the retainers of the recently deceased daimyo of the house
of Okudaira, but little action was taken against the family because
of the great service the Okudaira had rendered to the Tokugawa in
previous years. Their ancestor had been the defender of Nagashino
Castle at the time of the famous battle. The family of the actual
performer of junshi were not so fortunate. His two sons
were ordered to commit seppuku, and his two sons in law,
one of whom was of the Okudaira family, were exiled. Other
daimyos finally took note, and from the mid-17th century
onwards the practice of junshi effectively ceased until it
came dramatically to the attention of modern Japan in 1912. On the
eve of the funeral of Emperor Meiji, General Nogi and his wife
committed suicide. Nogi had commanded troops in the Sino-Japanese
War of 1894–95, and led the battle to take Port Arthur in the
Russo-Japanese War of 1904–05. It was an act that astounded his
contemporaries because of the bizarre disloyalty to the Emperor's
wishes that the illegal act implied. It was also sobering evidence
that the samurai spirit lived on in the Japan of the 20th
century.
Suicide as a group activity
Reference was made earlier to the tension between the needs
of the samurai as an individual warrior and the needs of the group
to which he belonged, a definition that almost always meant the army
of the daimyo whom he was sworn to serve. The tradition of
ritual suicide was the most dramatic individual gesture that any
samurai could make, but occasionally in samurai history we see the
act of suicide as a group expression. The battle of Dan no Ura has
already been presented as an important example, but in this chapter
we will move forward two centuries to the epic of the 14th-century
Nanbokucho Wars called the Taiheiki. Here we see a
remarkable interplay between the samurai as an individual and the
samurai as a member of a group. In the story of how Nitta Yoshisada
(1301–38) captured Kamakura in 1333, we see these tensions at their
most revealing. His victory caused a mass act of suicide, while his
own death just five years later represents the other extreme. We now
see a lonely, failed warrior, whose death retains his honour and
adds another chapter to the story of samurai greatness as part of
the tremendous continuity to be found within the world of the
samurai.
The fall of Kamakura
Kamakura, which is nowadays a pleasant seaside town, was the
capital for the Minamoto bakufu and the Hojo
shikken. Kyoto was relegated to the status of the divine
emperor's home, and little else. All the important decisions were
made in Kamakura, which was set in the heartlands of the fierce
eastern warriors, so that the century and a half between 1192 and
1333 is known as the Kamakura Period in Japanese history.
The challenge to the rule of the Hojo came from the attempt at
imperial restoration launched by Emperor Go Daigo in 1331. We noted
earlier how Go Daigo took refuge in the mountains under the
protection of Kusunoki Masashige, but he also needed a warrior
family in the east to take the war directly against the Hojo. Such a
man was found in the person of Nitta Yoshisada. Yoshisada had
previously served the Hojo army and had in fact pitted himself and
his samurai against Kusunoki Masashige's mountain strongholds. His
reasons for changing sides and joining Go Daigo were different from
Kusunoki's. The Kusunoki had been tenants of imperial lands for
centuries, and owed allegiance to the emperor as to an ordinary
feudal lord. The Nitta were much more humble, and therefore had much
more to gain by picking the winning side. They were related to the
Ashikaga, but were regarded as being of inferior status because, at
the time of the Gempei War, an ancestor had committed the
unforgivable sin of failing to respond to Yoritomo's call to arms.
As a result, he had not benefited from Yoritomo's generosity in the
same way as other families had, such as the Hojo. There were
therefore sound reasons for the Nitta to be envious of the Hojo, so
they now threw in their lot with Go Daigo, hoping that this time
they were supporting an eventual victor.
Nitta's defection to the imperial cause came in 1333, shortly
after he had received orders from the Hojo to continue the siege of
Masashige’s castle of Chihaya. By sending messages on ahead to
samurai in his home province whom he knew would support him, Nitta
Yoshisada was able to return to Kozuke in June 1333 and proclaim his
rebellion. It was soon obvious that he intended to attack Kamakura
directly, so Hojo Takatoki sent a force out to meet him, which
engaged Nitta as he was attempting to cross the Tamagawa river. He
was not stopped, and Kamakura lay at his mercy.
As the administrative capital of Japan, Kamakura had grown
rapidly during its heyday, and numerous important edifices, which
today make Kamakura one of the most fascinating Japanese cities to
visit, date from the Kamakura Period. The city is still squeezed in
by mountains on three sides and the sea on a fourth. The topography
is best appreciated nowadays from the train, which winds its way
through tunnels and cuttings to reach Kamakura, and these hills were
no less important in 1333 as they formed the main, natural outer
defences of the Hojo’s headquarters. Seven passes guarded by
checkpoints ran through these hills. The western approach to
Kamakura was covered by the Daibutsu Pass, which drops down beside
one of Kamakura's most famous sights, the Great Buddha. This huge
and beautiful bronze statue witnessed the fighting in 1333, although
none of the combatants would have seen it as one does today as, at
that time, it was concealed within a wooden temple building, much
like the other Great Buddha at the Todaiji in Nara. In 1335, and
again in 1368, violent storms all but wrecked the building, and then
in 1495 a tsunami (freak wave) swept away all remnants of the
structure to leave the Buddha sitting in the open air.
Nitta Yoshisada divided his forces into three divisions to attack
from the north, east and west. The Taiheiki describes the
fighting in great detail, using such hyperbolic expressions as:
When a son was stricken, his father did not minister to him, but
rode over his body to attack the enemy in front; when a lord was
shot down from his horse by an arrow, his retainer did not raise him
up, but mounted on to the horse and galloped forward.
In spite of hours of fierce fighting, no real breakthrough had
been achieved by the loyalists, particularly on the western side
where the Gokurakuji Pass was held firmly behind rows of stout
wooden shields. Nitta Yoshisada went there himself to take a closer
look, and realised that there was a chance of bypassing Gokurakuji
altogether if it were possible to round the cape where the
promontory of Inamuragasaki projects into the sea. There was a small
expanse of beach at low tide, but the tide was then high, and the
Hojo had taken the added precaution of placing several ships a short
distance from the shore, from which a barrage of arrows could
covered any flanking attack. At this point there occurred the great
legend of the battle of Kamakura, because Nitta Yoshisada threw his
sword into the sea as an offering to the Sun Goddess, and the waters
parted to let his army through. Once Nitta Yoshisada’s troops were
in the city the battle became a fierce hand-to-hand struggle among
the burning houses, while the Hojo forces were torn between holding
the passes and resisting the new advance round the cape. The
Taiheiki is driven to use Hindu and Buddhist cosmology to
convey to its readers the horror of the fighting as the loyalists
swept into the city:
Fires were lighted among the commoners' houses along the
beach, and also east and west of the Inase river, where from flames
like carriage wheels flew and scattered in black smoke ... Entering
clamorously beneath the fierce flames, the warriors of the Genji
[the imperialists] everywhere shot the bewildered enemy with arrows,
cut them down with their swords, grappled with them, and stabbed
them ... Surely even thus was the battle of Indra's palace, when the
asuras fell onto the swords and halberds, punished by the ruler of
heaven! Even thus is the plight of sinners in the Hell of Constant
Scorching, who sink to the bottom of the molten iron, driven by
jailers' whips!
Immolation at Kamakura
When the battle was seen to be lost, the Hojo family and their
closest retainers decided to die like true samurai, and the
Taiheiki has preserved the gory record of their departure.
Once again we have the spectacle of the members of a defeated
samurai army taking their own lives, but there are several
interesting differences from the situation at Dan no Ura. At Dan no
Ura the decision to die by drowning was made at the last minute. We
therefore see no examples of rituals such as the writing of a
farewell poem. At Kamakura the defeated Hojo had more time to
prepare, and the Taiheiki recounts the process in detail.
So, for example, we read how a certain warrior monk called Fuonji
Shinnin wrote a poem on a pillar inside a temple using his own blood
while he committed seppuku. It read:
Wait awhile
Traversing together the road of
Shideyama
Let us talk of the transient world.
Another monk used his trousers as a writing surface for his death
poem with the words:
Holding the trenchant hair-splitter
He severs
emptiness
Within the mighty flames
A pure cool
breeze.
The monk then commanded his son to decapitate him. After
performing the deed, the tearful son took the long sword and plunged
it through his own body. At this three of their retainers ran up and
impaled themselves in turn on the protruding blade, so that they
fell down 'with their heads in a row like fish on a skewer' as the
Taiheiki so eloquently puts it. Women too committed suicide
as the news of the fall of Kamakura spread:
Heedless of men’s eyes, the weeping nurse called Osai ran
after him barefoot for five or six hundred yards, falling down to
the ground again and again ... And when her eyes beheld him no
longer, the nurse Osai cast her body into a deep well and
perished.
It was only fitting that the closest members of the Hojo family
should perform the most dramatic act of suicide. They withdrew from
their positions to a temple called the Toshoji, a rather ironic name
which means 'the temple of the victory in the east'. Here, they made
ready to commit suicide in the privacy of a cave dug out of the rock
at the rear within the temple compound. The Toshoji no longer
exists, but the so-called 'hara kiri cave' is still there,
and although it lies in a remote wooded spot on the fringe of the
city centre, it still attracts many pilgrims. It is rare to visit it
and not see fresh flowers left as an offering.
Several of the senior family members were concerned that their
leader Hojo Takatoki would not have the courage to commit hara
kiri himself, so the others decided to set a precedent. Inside
the temple, one samurai 'cut his body with a long cut from left to
right and fell down, pulling out his intestines ...'. Nearby another
exemplary suicide took place between a grandfather and his grandson.
Nagasaki Shin'uemon, a young boy 15 years old that year, bowed
before his grandfather saying, 'Assuredly will the Buddhas and
kami give sanction to this deed. The filial descendant is he
who brings honour to the name of his father.' With two thrusts of
his dagger he slashed the veins of his aged grandfather's arms. He
then cut his own belly, pushing his grandfather down and fell on top
of him.
The young boy's example provided the stimulus that Hojo Takatoki
needed, and he too committed seppuku. The Taiheiki
gives a number of 283 ‘men of the Hojo’ who took their lives in the
Toshoji. That number was to grow, because:
a fire was lighted in the hall, where from fierce flames
leapt up and black smoke darkened the sky. When the warriors in the
courtyard and before the gate beheld that fire, some among them cut
their bellies and ran into the flames, while others smote one
another with their swords and fell down together in a heap, fathers,
sons and brothers. As a great river was the rushing of their blood;
as on a burial field were their dead bodies laid everywhere in
heaps! Although the bodies of these disappeared in the flames, later
it was known that more than eight hundred and seventy men perished
in this one place.
As the news spread into Kamakura itself, many more people
followed the Hojo in death – ‘more than six thousand persons’ says
the Taiheiki. Thus passed the Hojo regency in a massive
bloodbath almost unparalleled in samurai history. They were the
family who had defeated the Mongols and presided over one of the
most peaceful centuries in Japanese history. But when they departed
out of history they did so in an unprecedented fashion that exceeded
the demands made by samurai tradition.
Evidence of how fierce the fighting at Kamakura really was has
recently come to light with the excavation and analysis of grave
pits in the Zaimokuza area, a district near the sea where the Hojo
made their last stand. Many skulls and fragments of weapons have
been found, which have been studied by archaeologists. The pattern
of wounds to the head indicate that none of the victims wore much in
the way of head protection, which inclines one to the view that
these grave pits were mass burial grounds for the common soldiers.
The samurai were buried elsewhere, and for centuries there was a
traditional belief in Kamakura that many were interred in burial
caves in the hills. The local rock is quite soft, and there are 50
or so burial niches in the walls of the Shakado Tunnel, which was
cut through a hill leading to the north-east of Kamakura in about
1250. In 1965 the tradition of victims of the battle being buried
here was confirmed when a landslip revealed a tombstone bearing the
very date, 10 July 1333, when the city fell to Nitta
Yoshisada.
The lonely death of Nitta Yoshisada
We conclude this chapter with one of the most interesting
accounts of an individual warrior’s suicide in the whole of samurai
history, where several of the elements discussed above come
together. The samurai is Nitta Yoshisada, the conqueror of Kamakura.
In marked contrast to the mass suicide of the Hojo Yoshisada’s own
death was a lonely one in a bleak setting in Echizen province.
Nitta Yoshisada became the samurai general on whom Emperor Go
Daigo particularly depended after the death of Kusunoki Masashige at
the battle of Minatogawa in 1336. By 1338 the balance of power
between Ashikaga Takauji and Go Daigo’s loyalists had become very
uncertain, and nowhere was this more apparent than in the distant
provinces of the north-east on the Sea of Japan coast. Nitta
Yoshisada’s final campaign saw him being despatched by Go Daigo to
capture the fortress of Fujishima, an ordinary wooden stockade
enclosure defended by warrior monks, whose military skills Nitta
Yoshisada despised. But certain portents on his way into battle gave
him cause for concern. First Yoshisada’s horse reared and almost
trampled to death two of his grooms. Then as the army were crossing
a river Yoshisada’s standard-bearer’s horse collapsed and threw its
rider into the water clutching the Nitta banner.
More serious was the determined resistance put up by the monks of
Fujishima. Realising that he would have to take the lead if his men
were to break through, Yoshisada led the way through the rice
fields, where the enemy’s footsoldiers had erected wooden shields
and began to loose hundreds of arrows at him. Yoshisada’s mounted
attendants tried to form a line in front of him to protect him from
the archery, but one by one they were struck down and killed. His
comrades urged him to withdraw, but Yoshisada ignored them and drove
his horse forward into the attack. The poor animal then received an
arrow and fell like a folding screen, trapping Yoshisada’s left leg
under its body. At that moment an arrow smashed through Yoshisada’s
helmet and into his forehead. Still conscious, Yoshisada committed
suicide, but not by hara kiri. There was no time for that,
nor did his trapped position allow him to reach his abdomen. Instead
Nitta Yoshisada is said to have cut off his own head. It rolled into
a rice paddy and his body slid in after it. To cut off one’s own
head sounds far-fetched, but in the heat of the battle and with a
samurai sword of legendary sharpness it is entirely believable of
someone with Yoshisada’s fanaticism and in such desperate straits.
Yamamoto Tsunetomo was particularly impressed with the example of
Nitta Yoshisada and refers to his death twice in Hagakure.
In one mention he refers to a strange belief concerning Yoshisada –
that he carried on fighting after his head was cut off:
Even if one’s head were to be suddenly cut off, he should be able
to do one more action with certainty. The last moments of Nitta
Yoshisada are proof of this. Had his spirit been weak, he would have
fallen the moment his head was severed.
It was an example that certainly impressed Nitta Yoshisada’s
followers too, because several of his senior samurai immediately
performed junshi next to his body. This shows great
devotion on the part of the Nitta samurai, but their act of
following in death stands in marked contrast to what happened next,
because Yoshisada’s brother Nitta Yoshisuke resolved to lead another
Nitta army ‘to die in the place where their general died’. But the
passage of a couple of days had allowed time for reflection, and the
prospect of going on a suicide mission for a cause that was already
lost did not appeal to the majority of his army, who either
deserted, took Buddhist vows, or joined the enemy. Following in
death, the most dramatic gesture that a samurai could make, was most
easily accomplished when there was little time to think about it.
Yamamoto Tsunetomo’s exhortation in Hagakure from the
peaceful days of 1716 did not apply completely to the bitter days of
real samurai warfare.
(© Osprey Publishing. Chapter 4: The samurai
way of death, Samurai: The
World of the Warrior) |