In early medieval Japan, honor and reputation lay at the heart of a warrior’s self-perception, and provide the context within which the conventions of war must be evaluated. A samurai’s reputation, honor and pride were almost tangible entities that took precedence over all other obligations. As a thirteenth-century commentary enumerating the “seven virtues of a warrior” concludes, “To go forth to the fi eld of battle and miss death by an inch; to leave behind one’s name for myriad generations; all in all, this is the way.” Slights to reputation or honor were often catalysts to belligerence and bloodshed. Warriors might refuse orders from their superiors, risk the loss of valuable retainers, and even murder men to whom they owed their lives, all for the sake of their reputations.4
Honor – or conversely, shame – could reach beyond the warrior himself, and even beyond his lifespan. Bushi could prosper through the inherited glory of their ancestors or suffer the stigma of their disgrace. Thus, even a warrior’s life could be of less consequence to him than his name and image, and we fi nd in accounts of battles numerous sketches of warriors choosing to sacrifi ce themselves in order to enhance their reputations or those of their families.5
One must, however, be careful not to make anachronistic or ethnocentric
assumptions about the nature of honor, or about the sort of battlefi eld conduct it might be expected to have engendered. For, while honor and shame were central to the self-perception of early bushi, honor turned on a warrior’s military reputation, which turned fi rst and foremost on his record of victories. Early medieval Japanese concepts of honor and of honorable conduct in battle were fl exible enough to permit successful warriors to rationalize almost any sort behavior. Expediency, self-interest, and tactical, strategic or political advantage proved to be much more powerful determinants of early medieval Japanese military conventions than abstractions such as honor.6
Stolid pragmatism and a detached, professional approach to their calling seem, in fact, to have been the dominant tenets of bushi personality. Warriors in the sources appear as unruffl ed, realistic men with powerful forces of will and equally powerful egos. A report presented to the Iwashimizu Hachiman shrine in 1046 by Minamoto Yorinobu showcases this point nicely:
Recently, in the fourth year of Manjū [1027] that rat of wolf-like greed, Taira Tadatsune of Kazusa, strode about the East. He defi ed the governors of the eastern provinces, spread his own infl uence, and oppressed the collection of taxes. He embraced a treacherous, wild heart.
He turned the structure of the court upside down, collecting taxes and tax goods for himself, and ignoring imperial orders. Although the nobles repeatedly summoned men of valor that he should be apprehended, he fi rmed up his stronghold and fl ed into it. . . . I was then chosen by the court and appointed to pacify the East. In 1029, I was named governor of Kai. Without rousing the people, without extending my jurisdiction, without beating any drums, without fl ying any banners, without pulling a bow, without releasing an arrow, without deliberation, without attacking, I captured the rebel where I sat.7
Warriors were not callous or emotionless robots. There is ample evidence that they also valued tenderness and compassion, particularly as qualities appropriate to warrior leaders. One text, for example, reports Abe Yoritoki deciding to defy his provincial governor’s summons for his son, Sadatō, with the explanation that, “It is for the sake of their wives and children that men exist in this world. While Sadatō may be a fool, a father loves his son – he cannot abandon and forget him. How could I bear it if he were executed?”8 The same text speaks even more poignantly of Minamoto Yoriyoshi’s behavior in the aftermath of a victory:
He provided his men a feast, and saw to their weapons and armor.
He personally circulated through the army, tending to the wounded.
Deeply moved, the warriors declared, “With our bodies we shall repay this debt; our lives are made light by loyalty. Now we feel no aversion even toward dying for our commander.”9
Nevertheless, where confl icts arose between emotionally and rationally inspired courses of action, pragmatism nearly always prevailed. In fact early literary depictions of warriors go out of their way to demonstrate that important decisions were always buttressed by rational contemplation. Yoritoki’s decision to ignore the governor’s orders, for example, although purportedly made out of fatherly affection, was also a reasoned and deliberate one. The passage quoted above goes on to show Yoritoki qualifying his emotional declaration with the codicil “We shall pretend that we did not hear the summons. I doubt that [provincial Governor Minamoto] Yoriyoshi will come to attack me, but should he come, we can resist him. We do not yet have cause for grief.”10
Warrior relationships with the supernatural were similarly matter-of-fact.
The need to bolster morale and courage make actively seeking divine aid in the pursuit of victory a natural and obvious concern for military men of any time and place. And there are, of course, pressing political – as well as moral – reasons for commanders to be conscious of the dictates of religion in order to justify and legitimize their wars. But bushi interaction with the divine ran much deeper than this. As Thomas Conlan observes, the medieval battlefi eld was “a realm where gods and buddhas mingled with men.”11
A key feature of the medieval Japanese worldview, formed at the nexus of Buddhist, Taoist, Confucian and nativist (“Shintō”) beliefs, was its monistic, or unitary, world of meaning. In this conceptualization, the phenomenal realm – the natural or manifest world – was synonymous with the sacred realm. The cosmos was a unitary whole, permeated throughout by sacred, or kami, nature.12 Medieval Japanese saw the hands of their gods everywhere: every success and every failure was the result of divine approval or displeasure. Men lived or died, prospered or declined, at the whim of divinities, who were tangible, accessible and open to infl uence.
Medieval warriors were no more estranged from the superhuman forces around them than were other Japanese of their age. They regularly consulted oracles, and attributed military triumphs to the assistance of guardian deities and setbacks to the exhaustion of divine grace.13
An anecdote concerning a retainer of Fujiwara Yasumasa, and recorded in a twelfth-century tale collection, is particularly revealing in this regard: Yasumasa, who, “although not of a warrior house,” was “of fi erce courage and a master of the way of the bow and arrow,” was serving at the time as governor of Tango, and had gotten into the habit of holding regular deer hunts. On the night before one such hunt, an exceptionally skillful retainer dreams of his mother appearing to him to reveal that she has been reincarnated as a deer, and to implore him to watch out for her when he hunts. The next morning, the retainer approaches Yasumasa, attempting to beg out of the day’s hunt by claiming illness. Yasumasa, however, is unconvinced and insists the retainer participate. Later, in the excitement of the hunt, the warrior forgets his dream and shoots down a large doe that bounds across his path. But when he approaches it, he is shocked to discover that the deer has his mother’s face. Grief stricken, he cuts his hair and
renounces the world on the spot. When Yasumasa, puzzled by this action and by the man’s obvious distress, inquires why he is behaving this way, the retainer relates the whole story. Whereupon Yasumasa scolds him, saying that, had he known the truth, he would certainly not have forced him to go on the hunt.14
It would, therefore, be a mistake to discount the reality or the depth of warrior religious concerns and beliefs. At the same time, early medieval relationships with the supramundane were immediate and functional, and warriors were sometimes content to rationalize away apparent confl icts between religious and practical imperatives. Thus we fi nd accounts like the following, related about Minamoto Yoriyoshi’s attack on Abe Sadatō at Komatsu stockade, in 1062:
Since it was evening, and the date was inauspicious, Yoriyoshi did not intend to attack. But while [Kiyowara] Takesada, [Tachibana] Yorisada and others scouted nearby, their foot soldiers set fi re to some buildings and reeds outside the enemy palisade. Responding to this, those inside the fort shouted and sent forth a haphazard shower of rocks and arrows.
[Yoriyoshi’s] government army answered in kind, each man competing to be the fi rst to reach the stockade. [Yoriyoshi] then said to [his deputy commander,] Takenori, “Our reckoning for tomorrow is suddenly skewed. The battle has already erupted at this hour. Still, a warrior waits for opportunity; he cannot always choose the time and day. Sung Wu-ti did not avoid the wang-wang and in so-doing achieved merit. When a warrior sees an opportunity, he must follow it quickly, before it is too late.”*