favor the second option. The general tendency of the buke, consequently, was that of continuing to emphasize, as the primary justification for their own existence, the military arts (bu), while at the same time mastering those administrative skills (bun) by which the nation was run. Their choice was further limited as to the subject and content of possible studies, since operative and functional knowledge was largely restricted to the upper category and ranks of the buke. In addition, their curriculum ignored large areas of knowledge whose speculative and expanding nature, capable of leading the mind of man into unknown and unexplored domains (as had been the case with so many scholars and priests of the Heian period), was a disturbing factor to warriors who based their very existence upon the regularity and rigid discipline of military life.
A definite cultural selection of subject matter was evident, therefore, as the upper bushi began to attend aristocratic academies during the late Heian period. Public administration, mathematics, law and the administration of justice (as well as military planning and strategy, of course) seem to have been the major subjects of academic interest for this “new” breed of men, backed by so many strong and brooding warrior clans. The executive positions of magistrates, court supervisors, and generals began to be filled, with increasing regularity, by members of the buke who submitted themselves to the system of career advancement run by the imperial court. From within and from without, those leaders pressed on and began to close in upon Kyoto. But while the upper category and ranks of warriors were thereby exposed to learning (although on an increasingly selective basis), the interest of their retainers seems to have been concentrated almost exclusively upon perfecting those military skills which had opened so many doors for the leaders of the buke. Expertise in handling the bow and arrow, the spear, and the sword was of paramount importance to the samurai then, and became even more so as the center of imperial power was slowly and irresistibly eroded. Those weapons became the ultimate instruments for devising and executing the policy of the buke. The lower samurai, therefore, was trained at home or in the clan centers of military instruction—his education in the literary sense being neglected to the point of almost completely eliminating its influence upon his life. The continuing condition of rampant illiteracy among the lower samurai is reported upon at length in many chronicles dealing not only with the late Heian period, but also with the advanced stages of the pre-Tokugawa period, deep into the Ashikaga (Muromachi) period.
With the establishment of the Kamakura shogunate (1192), the displacement of the kuge by the buke began in earnest. Large military clans established centers of superior education where their leaders concentrated upon the study of the disciplines and functions of government. The Hojo clan, which provided outstanding leadership throughout the dangerous Kamakura period (1185-1333), is reputed to have been the motivating force behind the Kanazawa Bunko, an institution of eclectic learning within the grounds of Shomyo-ji Temple, housing large libraries filled with Chinese and Japanese classics. The Ashikaga clan is also known to have established its own school during the age which followed (Muromachi, 1336-1568), although the cultural tradition of this particular family is said to have reached as far back as the eleventh century, when one of its leaders, Yoshikane (?—1199), founded a study-center (gakumonjo) in the family’s Banna-ji Temple. The increased importance of expertise in administrative skills (bun) is evidenced by the repeated admonitions, directed to military leaders by their elders and advisors, “that there should be training in both cultural and military arts” (Kaigo, 20). These admonitions were clearly well received by the highest category and ranks of the buke, for there is ample historical evidence that the military leadership of the Rokuhara, Ashikaga (Muromachi), and Momoyama periods, from 1156 to 1600, became well versed in the finer points of power manipulation at which their aristocratic predecessors, the kuge, had excelled. The latter had slowly begun to lose ground as the military centers of power turned into semi-imperial courts, attracting scholars and artists of various denominations.
The same cannot be said for the lower category and rank of samurai, however. As indicated earlier, they seem to have been and to have remained, for the most part, functionally illiterate. Frederic relates that in the Kamakura period (1185-1333) the incidence of warriors unable to read Sino-Japanese written characters was not a rare one. Their constant involvement with warfare, as their leaders jostled for power and prestige, made even the lowest level of scholarship not only irrelevant to their condition but often downright detrimental, since it took time (of which they, as retainers in the service of a lord, had very little to call their own) and, furthermore, might have encouraged them to develop insights into other dimensions and possibilities which those same leaders had clearly marked as being above and beyond the status of the lower ranks. At this point, still very close to the emergence of the professional warrior, we see the development of an interesting phenomenon, often qualified by scholars of Japanese history as “anti-intellectualism,” to identify a peculiarly Japanese aversion for uncontrolled knowledge—that is, knowledge left unfettered so that one might explore, in an active sense, the entire range and all the aspects of human existence. A note here is particularly intriguing: the Japanese language in feudal times contained no term which would be the equivalent of the English word “curiosity”—nor does it contain such a term today (Dore1, 51).
With the singular intuition of military leaders the world over, the high-ranking members of the buke (that is, the lords and masters of the various military clans) had understood from the first that a wide range of knowledge was a prerequisite for successful choice, evaluation, and decision in any field of human endeavor. This, in turn, implied the admission of a certain individuality of opinion as the basis for independent action—even though the rigid stratification of clan culture was a direct practical as well as theoretical negation of any such freedom of thought or action. The comparatively equalitarian condition enjoyed by the court nobles (kuge) during the Heian period and, to a certain extent, by the leaders of the military knights (buke) during successive periods was not easier to assimilate in Japan than it had been in Greece during that country’s classical age. The court nobles of Nara and Kyoto had been notoriously factious and belligerent in their dealings with one another, as were the feudal barons of the military clans in the provinces, who plunged the country into their own version of chaos before finally being forced to adhere to the uneasy truce inaugurated by Ieyasu in the seventeenth century (which they promptly abrogated after 1868, once the hold of the Tokugawa clan and their allies upon the nation had been broken).
Fully aware of the centrifugal effects of unrestricted knowledge, each lord and master usually endeavored to limit the intellectual development of his retainers to those levels which would insure the retainers’ efficiency in carrying out the functions and duties assigned to them, but no others. The intellectual preparation of each clan’s warriors, accordingly, was increasingly restricted as they descended in rank from the higher to the lower levels. Beyond that knowledge and skill in the use of specific weapons which the retainers of each clan were expected to pursue, they received specialized instruction in various administrative functions which, being largely hereditary, did not usually provide any scope for creative innovations. By the beginning of 1600, each provincial lord had conditioned his military retainers in such a specialized way that, in place of the ancient spontaneous and creative clansmen with their many skills, who had survived the “ages of troubles” (from the tenth to the sixteenth century), there emerged a compact mass of fighting “technicians,” conditioned by and committed to a cult of absolute loyalty to their warlords and masters.
There were, of course, warriors of the lower category and ranks who did not agree wholeheartedly with such an extreme specialization of their existence. Whenever and wherever they could, such men would send their children to temples and monasteries, where they joined the “long-haired novices” (chigo-suihatsu), learning to read and write. That education, in a few adventurous and often unfortunate cases, gave a number of lower samurai the basis for independent thinking, thereby leading to clashes against a system which was slowly congealing into a social rigidity to which Tokugawa Ieyasu was to give the final touches.
With the advent to power of the Tokugawa, in fact, the process of military specialization and conditioning reached its apotheosis. The leaders of this clan carried to their extreme and ultimate consequences the implications of their predecessors’ restrictive policies concerning the education of both the upper
