sixty-three arrows or arrow wounds in his armor or his body. In Conlan’s fourteenth-century example, one Imagawa Yorikuni required twenty arrows to finish him off.45 Wounds could, however, be cumulative in their effects, so that Wada Takanori was unable to see properly because his wounds had not healed from a previous battle. Takeda Gorō was unable to hold a sword because of his damaged fingers, but went into battle regardless.46
Swords were still primarily a weapon for use while dismounted. Many of the battles of the Nambokuchō Wars were fought in wooded and mountainous terrain, where horses were not appropriate, making swords the weapon of choice. Also, the sight of a naked tachi blade being swung close to a horse’s head might cause the mount to buck and throw off its rider, so it was sometimes better to dismount first. Just as in the case of the “little ships” raids against the Mongols, the choice of weaponry depended upon circumstances, and the samurai had to be willing to adapt. Horsemen could still easily overcome infantry when out in the open, and one account notes that “the strongest soldiers cannot withstand the bite of arrows, nor can the fastest of men outrun a horse.”47 Mounted archers naturally preferred open ground on which to operate, and one reason for the frequent reference to arson in the chronicles was the need to create such an open space artificially. A horseman could then ride around, picking off foot soldiers at will.
Yet at this point in history came the greatest challenge so far to traditional samurai cavalry tactics. Generals realized that one way to use the numerous foot soldiers in their armies was to take away their edged weapons and give them bows to pour volleys of arrows into the enemy, much as the Mongol archers had done. This was the complete antithesis of the notion of the elite mounted archer delivering one arrow with great precision—and, of course, enemy mounted archers provided excellent targets for this new technique. The practice also implies a better organization of foot soldiers and an increase in discipline. If these factors could be achieved, then a general would possess an ordered infantry corps for the first time since the days of the conscript armies. A samurai galloping forward and loosing a few arrows into a mass of disciplined foot archers was unlikely to discourage them, and they would reply with scores of arrows of their own. The Taiheiki refers to these lower-class archers as shashu no ashigaru (“light foot shooters”), the first use in Japanese history of the term ashigaru, a word that was later to be adopted to describe all infantry troops. Out of two thousand men who fought for the Sasaki at the battle of Shijo Nawate in 1348, eight hundred were these “light archers.”48 Such mass firing of arrows is implied in the following account that describes what happened when some samurai horse-men of the Hosokawa were trapped on the edge of Lake Biwa and came under fire from men in boats:
They could not pass to the north because they had not finished burning the dwellings of Otsu. A deep lake to the east was likewise impassable, forcing the Hosokawa army to advance in single file along a narrow road. The enemy rowed parallel to the Hosokawa and shot them from the side, killing five hundred in all.49
The taking of a victim’s head, from a painted scroll of the Battle of Ichinotani in the Watanabe Museum, Tottori.
Chapter 3
SWORD AND SPEAR
So far in this book, the samurai swordsman has proved to be a somewhat elusive character who greatly prefers his role as a mounted archer and delivers death from a distance, rather than close at hand. When forced by circumstances both to dismount and to discard his bow, he wields the world’s finest edged weapon and is very proficient in its use, but accounts of its employment are tantalizingly few. Even the Mongol invasions provide no overall change to this pattern. Sword use against the invaders is decisive and dramatic, but the employment of swords rather than bows is dictated totally by circumstances and runs contrary to the prevailing mood. For a major change in weaponry to occur, we must wait for a social change, and the first stirrings of one are discernible during the fifteenth century.
We noted earlier how the greatest of the Ashikaga shoguns, Ashikaga Yoshimitsu (1358 – 1408), had ended the Nambokuchō Wars and restored relations with Ming China, but his descendants were not to enjoy such glory, and the last century of the Ashikaga dynasty witnessed the total collapse of their authority. The Ashikaga shoguns had followed a policy of decentralization, so that military governors, or shugo, ruled the provinces of Japan on their behalf. Many shugo were samurai aristocrats who had ruled their provinces for centuries and had submitted to the Ashikaga. The system worked well until the mid-fifteenth century, when a dispute over the succession to the shogunate led to a number of prominent shugo taking opposing sides and resorting to violence. The incumbent shogun was powerless to control them, and suffered the indignity of witnessing fighting in the streets of Kyoto, Japan’s capital. The disturbances in Kyoto proved to be the beginning of a civil war known as the Onin War, which lasted from 1467 to 1477. Kyoto was devastated and the fighting spread to the provinces.
The Age of Warring States
The tragic Onin War ushered in a century and a half of conflict that is known as the Sengoku Jidai —the Age of Warring States, by analogy with the most warlike period in ancient Chinese history. As the shogunate had been exposed as a powerless entity, erstwhile shugo took the opportunity to create petty kingdoms for themselves in the provinces they had formerly administered. These men were the daimyō (feudal lords), a title with the literal meaning “great name.” Their ancestors were as likely to have been farmers or umbrella makers as glorious samurai, and the present head of a family might well have risen to that height by murdering his former master. Alliances between daimyō were regularly made and as easily broken. New family names were created by opportunistic warriors, while old established ones disappeared forever.
A good example is provided by one of the most successful daimyō dynasties of the Age of Warring States: the Hōjō family of Odawara. Their founder, a samurai who bore the Buddhist name of Sōun and was formerly known as Ise Nagauji, was skilled in war but of modest background; he appropriated his new surname from the long-extinct samurai lineage of the Hōjō because it sounded impressive. Another new warlord called Uesugi Kenshin (1530 – 1578) saved his former daimyō’s life, on condition that the daimyō adopt him as his heir and give him the glorious name of Uesugi. From about 1530 onwards, the Hōjō and Uesugi were engaged in sporadic armed rivalry with each other and with their neighbors, the Takeda and Imagawa, to name but two opponents. Scores of smaller samurai families were alternately crushed, courted, and absorbed by these growing giants. The southern Japanese island of Kyūshū witnessed a similar rivalry among the samurai who fought under the flags of Shimazu, Itō, Otomo, and Ryūzōji, while the Mōri family steadily increased its influence along the Inland Sea at the expense of the Amako. The Age of Warring States was a time of large-scale strategy, huge battles, and tremendous developments in weaponry and tactics. From the mid-1540s onwards, we read of firearms being used for the first time in Japanese history, although their full potential was not to be realized for three decades.
Suzuki the sharpshooter. Suzuki Shigehide was a follower of the Ikko-ikki, and tried unsuccessfully to shoot Oda Nobunaga.
The quarrel between Oda Nobunaga and Akechi Mitsuhide.
This situation of chaos persisted until a succession of “super-daimyō” managed to reunify the country. The first important name is that of Oda Nobunaga (1534–1582). Nobunaga inherited a comparatively minor territory from his father and appeared to be heading for quick extinction when his lands were invaded by the hosts of Imagawa Yoshimoto in 1560. Nobunaga, however, took advantage of a lull in Yoshimoto’s advance while the latter was enjoying the traditional head-viewing ceremony in a narrow gorge called Okehazama. A fortuitous thunderstorm cloaked
