and strength in the mystical powers of its leaders. A pattern of vertical, mystical supremacy was also apparent in those groups of people with special professional skills, such as earthenware-makers (suebe), carpenters (takumibe), and masons (ishizukuri-be), whether they endeavored to function alone or, as was more frequently the case, attached themselves to the major clans of the nobles. In the first case, the members of these professional guilds looked upon their own leaders as the repositories of an awesome professional knowledge, divinely inspired, which the leaders generally monopolized. In the second case, they and their professional leaders looked upon the clan headman, uji-no-osa, as the exclusive repository of an even more comprehensive type of knowledge, whose overtones of divine inspiration made it doubly potent politically. The most noted examples of the persistence to the present day of this mystic concentration of power are swordsmiths and masters of martial arts who refer, in their practices and teachings, to secret rituals and forms directly or indirectly related to the metaphysical dimensions of man’s existence. This element will appear over and over again as an important factor in the evolution of bujutsu.
The clan, as a primary social unit, had achieved self-sufficiency through the cultivation of its own rice paddies and the production of its own artifacts, textiles, agricultural instruments, and, naturally, weapons. From the very beginning, the history of these clans was not one of peaceful coexistence. The archaic weapons found in the mounds and dolmens of the period from 250 B.C. to A.D. 560 indicate that, as was true during every other national age of formation, warfare was the predominant condition. By 600, these weapons were quite highly developed. Chinese records, compiled at the court of the Sui dynasty on the basis of testimonials given by Japanese envoys a century before the first written classic of the Japanese nation came into existence, related that “bows, arrows barbed with iron or bone, swords, crossbows, long and short spears, and armor made of lacquered hide constituted their warlike equipment” (Brinkley2, 105).
Historians are still searching for other, more illuminating references to the five original kobetsu clans: the Otomo, the Kumebe, the Nakatomi, the Imibe, and the Mono-nobe, which are mentioned in the early records of the nation together with the clan of Emperor Jimmu, the Yamato. Eventually, this clan gained supreme but by no means unchallenged ascendancy over all the others. From its central hierarchy and from its descendants came the emperors who were to be titular heads of the nation, while its cult of the sun goddess, Amaterasu, overcame and absorbed all the other cults in the hitherto simple polytheistic worship of the age which is the root of Shinto, the indigenous religion of Japan. Every major clan had its own cohorts of warriors, but three clans in particular seem to have been concerned with the art of combat and, therefore, with its traditional specializations. The Otomo, for example, were referred to as Great Escorts, the Kumebe as Military Corporations, and the Mononobe as Corporations of Arms, while the Nakatomi and the Imibe were linked to more specifically religious and political functions. It is not clear whether these military clans and their affiliated “corporations” (be) were independent units (as the feudal clans emerging from the provinces centuries later proved to be) or simply branches of the imperial clan through which it carried out its policies of expansion and centralization of power. Given the gradual but relentless consolidation of power by the Yamato clan, the second thesis seems more plausible. The very existence and specific compactness of these early military clans, however, clearly implies the existence of strong opposition and competition among various militant forces, in addition to the resistance provided by the alien Ainu at the ever receding frontiers.
The clan, then, was the sum of the Japanese soul. Seligman, in fact, qualified the Japanese subject as being, throughout his long history, “essentially a clansman, with all the group feelings which a clan organization implies” (Seligman, 129). In such “group feelings” many historians find the first roots of a human commitment to force as the primary instrument for imposing a new social entity, as well as for preserving the primacy of that social form. This commitment to the use of arms in developing the earliest structures of Japanese society seems to have been particularly intense—to the extent of actually relegating all the other features of their national psyche to a subordinate position even when the necessity for fighting in defense of clan interests ceased to be an overriding one. In his observations concerning the Japanese character, Seligman wrote that “fighting came to him so naturally that when, as was generally the case, there was no outside enemy, clan fought against clan and district against district, so that the greater part of Japanese history, at least up to the Tokugawa times, is a series of civil wars” (Seligman, 129). The facility with which the Japanese resorted to armed and unarmed violence became identified, in the eyes of Western observers as well as in the eyes of the Japanese themselves, with his nature, with his interpretation of man’s role in reality, with his tradition. St. Francis Xavier (1506-52) was among the first Westerners to define them as “very warlike,” and centuries later, even such an aesthete as Okakura Kakuzo (1862-1913) still referred to them as “fierce warriors.”
After the seventh century, with the adoption of the Chinese system of political centralization and recognition of the imperial court as the nucleus of an expanding and homogeneous nation, all clans provided soldiers for a unified army through a system of general conscription which, although widely despised, was the only possible answer to constant engagements at the frontiers with tribes of aborigines who were retreating reluctantly before the steady advance of the new empire throughout the archipelago. Conscription on a massive basis could hardly have been a permanent system at this time, however, since the clan subjects who were asked to fight were also (for the most part) the clan farmers who produced the only means of subsistence the new nation possessed. Sustenance through conquest, after all, had been possible only where the conquered peoples had riches to surrender or advanced systems of production that could be made to operate for the conqueror. There is little evidence to prove that, in archaic Japan, the local aborigines were such a people. The Japanese clansmen were confronted, generally, with nomadic tribes whose agriculture was quite primitive and who relied heavily upon their rude farming and hunting methods for fulfillment of their daily needs—as did most nomadic tribes of northern Asia. The only riches available, then, must have been the land itself. Thus, it seems, the massive military organizations which emerged from the records of this age were intrinsic parts of a massive colonizing effort which maintained a strong identification between the Japanese soldier and the Japanese farmer—both often being (as was true of the Roman legionnaires) one and the same. If such an assumption appears reasonable enough in relation to large numbers of clansmen bearing arms, it also appears reasonable to infer from the records the existence of a smaller but more stable line of military succession based on heredity. At the frontiers, for example, a military organization of officers and veterans was maintained to insure the conditions essential to expansion in a militarily administered territory: continuity and professionalism. The origins of the feudal warriors who imploded from the provinces back into the center of political power in the sixteenth century are considered by most historians to have been in these military organizations. Tightly knit groups, they were led by officers whose entire lives were devoted to arms and arts of combat such as kyujutsu, yarijutsu, kenjutsu (using the long tachi), and jobajutsu—arts which were ancient even in the tenth century, when the rise of the military class clearly began.
It would appear, then, that bujutsu actually began to take shape with the early Japanese clansman and has followed him in one form or another ever since. Any attempt to further probe the origins of bujutsu would encounter the infinitely more difficult question of the origins of that fighting biped—man himself. That which appears incontrovertible, even in times as ancient as those of the original uji, is the clannish nature of bujutsu—the feeling of total commitment to the theories and practices of combat adopted by a specific social unit, to the exclusion (often violently expressed) of those adopted by other social units. This was a pronounced characteristic during the feudal ages of Japan, not only within the military class, which, after all, was intrinsically clannish, but also in all those other classes whose members organized themselves in guilds or corporations according to the vertical hierarchy and structure of the archaic clan. Even religious orders in Japan, although supposedly removed from the harsh competition and the exclusivism of mundane affairs and inspired by the universal simplicity of Buddhist brotherhood, generally repeated the clan pattern in their religious or para-religious organizations. This
