brunt of the attack, which is celebrated in the annals of Tsushima as the Oei Invasion. Sadamori appears to have been as successful at diplomacy as he was at fighting, because he entered into successful negotiations with the Koreans. He promised to quell the wakō, but it was his warning of the approaching typhoon season, which would have stirred some very acute folk memories among the invaders, that finally persuaded them to withdraw.36
Onchi Sakon, a follower of the great loyalist Kusunoki Masashige, fights bravely. His helmet crest is in the form of a tengu.
In that same year of 1419, the Chinese also hit back against pirate raiding. A large wakō fleet was ambushed off the Liaodong Peninsula, and perhaps a thousand Japanese pirates were relieved of their heads. At the same time, diplomatic discussions took place between the Choson court and the Ashikaga shogun on ways to curb the wakō by more peaceful means. One result was a report from the Korean ambassador Pak So-saeng in 1429, recommending a direct approach to the particular Japanese daimyō who controlled the territories where the pirates lurked. After all, as another ambassador reported in 1444, these people lived in a barren land that constantly threatened them with starvation, so piracy was only natural to them. It was a generous memorandum, but one that merely echoed comments that had been made earlier.
Swords in Action
Perhaps because of tales taken home by the survivors of the Mongol invasions, or more likely because of the destructive effects of Japanese pirates, the inhabitants of continental Asia had acquired a healthy respect for the qualities of the Japanese sword by the beginning of the fifteenth century. Thus, when, under the influence of the shogun Ashikaga Yoshimitsu, Japan began to trade with Ming China, swords were among the objects most in demand. Initially, they were needed for use against the pirates, but as Yoshimitsu had taken pains to demonstrate his determination to curtail this aspect of his countrymen’s activity by boiling a few of them alive, this need disappeared. The largest quantity of swords shipped in one consignment totalled thirty thousand, which led to a major disagreement over the price.37
What is interesting from the point of view of samurai fighting arts is that, although the Japanese sword is commonly regarded as a very precious and symbolic individual weapon, here we have evidence of mass production. We also read of blades breaking or becoming stuck in the bodies of victims. The Japanese sword was sometimes not all that its reputation would have led one to expect.38
Nor was it always used for the noble purposes of honorable combat. One menial task for which the short katana sword was very frequently used was the decapitation of defeated enemies. This practice, known as buntori (literally, “taking one’s share”), was no mere finishing stroke to make sure that the man was dead. The head was taken as a trophy, the best evidence of duty done, because it proved the samurai’s competence in combat. Nothing was more acceptable or more certain to win recognition from a samurai’s lord than the presentation of the enemy’s head. A major victory would always end with the piling up of dozens, even hundreds, of severed heads in the commander’s headquarters.
An intense ritual attended this bizarre but critical practice, which went from mere proof of a job well done, to a practice that developed its own mystique. Although its origins are obscure, the persistence of the tradition of head collection spans the entire period of samurai warfare and dates back at least to the system of assessing battlefield merit for the ancient conscript armies.39 As early as 1062, we read of Minamoto Yoshiie riding into Kyoto carrying the head of the rebel Abe Sadato as proof that he had fulfilled the government’s commission. A few years later, he was to throw the heads of vanquished rebels into a ditch when the government refused to reward the quelling of a rebellion undertaken without the correct requisition. Two centuries on, the chronicle Azuma Kagami records that the insurrection of Wada Yoshimori in 1213 yielded 234 heads of defeated warriors, which were duly displayed along the banks of the Katasegawa River.
Head collection was never a casual practice. There was a hierarchy of value based on the rank or prestige of the victim and the circumstances under which the victor had killed him. Great rivalry attended the choice of a potential victim, and there are records of heads being stolen before presentation. Someone who had taken a particularly eminent head would want it to be noted immediately. Brandishing a fresh head on the point of a spear or a sword was not unknown, and the effects on morale could be profound. The Azuma Kagami tells us how Minamoto Yoritomo exhibited the heads of nineteen enemy samurai after the Battle of Azukashiyama in 1189, while a thirteenth-century warrior called Obusuma Saburō liked to maintain a steady supply of fresh heads hanging on the fence surrounding the riding field of his home.40 Given the importance of the custom, it is not surprising that a little deception was sometimes practiced, but to have five different heads displayed, each with the name of the same man, was to invite considerable ridicule:
Suda and Takahashi galloped through the capital gathering up the heads of the wounded and dead men from ditches here and there, and hung them up in rows at the Rokujō river bed, eight hundred and seventy-three of them. Yet not so many of the enemy had been struck down. Some were merely heads brought forth by Rokuhara warriors who had not joined in the fighting, but sought to gain honour for themselves, heads of commoners from the capital and other places, labelled with various names. Among them were five heads labelled, “The lay monk Akamatsu Enshin” which were all hung up in the same way, since all of them were heads of unknown men. Seeing them, the urchins of the capital laughed.41
The main focus of head collection, however, came after a battle, when most of the ritual surrounding a victory celebration concerned the formal inspection of the heads by the victorious general. He would sit in state, and one by one the heads would be brought before him for comment. These ceremonies appear to have been quite informal affairs until the fourteenth century. The Mōko Shūrai Ekotoba shows head inspection taking place during the Mongol invasions. The heads, from which blood is still seeping, have been casually placed on the ground.42 The ceremony later grew into one of considerable formality, to which the victorious commander would give his full attention—a matter that proved to be the undoing of Imagawa Yoshimoto in 1560. He was so engrossed in head viewing that he suffered a surprise attack, and a few hours later it was his own head that was being viewed by someone else!
The press of battle often left little opportunity for anything other than simple head identification. The formalities had to wait until later, and during the Age of Warring States it became most undesirable for a daimyō to be presented with an untidy trophy. Prior to his inspection, the heads would be washed, the hair combed, and the resulting trophy made presentable with cosmetics, tasks traditionally done by women. The heads would then be mounted on a spiked wooden board with red labels for identification. This act of cleaning the heads was in part a sign of respect for fallen warriors. It also represented a tribute to the victors’ pride as men who could defeat heroic enemies.
An obsessive concentration on head collection could, of course, be detrimental to the course of a battle. If one’s finest warriors were expected to quit the field with their trophies or spend time in collection, then the army’s progress would be unnecessarily slowed. One samurai was felled by an arrow while taking a head.43 We therefore read of prohibitions on head taking, and the substitution of written reports on battlefield glory. Heads might therefore be cut off, recorded, and then discarded. One warrior even contented himself with a piece of his enemy’s armor as a trophy because the fighting was so fierce.44 Time was far better spent in following the general’s plan of victory than in furthering one’s own reputation.
Yet in spite of the evident quality of Japanese swords the style of samurai warfare during the fourteenth and early fifteenth century remained very similar to that employed in previous conflicts. Thomas Conlan’s fascinating study of the Nambokuchō Wars shows that the bow remained the dominant weapon, because arrows caused on average 73 percent of all wounds. These wounds, however, were not necessarily lethal, a conclusion that is supported
