three items of the imperial regalia. After Prince Yamato’s adventures had finished, the Grass-Mowing Sword was placed in the Atsuta Shrine near modern Nagoya. In the appendix to the thirteenth-century epic the Heike Monogatari, known as The Book of Swords, the anonymous author recounts another legend associated with the sacred sword. It concerns an attempt to steal the sword, and brings in a further element of martial accomplishment, namely unarmed combat.
The thief was a Chinese priest called Dogyō, who came to worship at the Atsuta Shrine. He stayed for seven days, at the end of which he stole the sword, wrapping it in the folds of his kesa, the priest’s wide, scarflike garment. But the Grass-Mowing Sword had a will of its own; it cut its way through the kesa and flew back to the shrine. Once more the priest took it, and wrapped it more securely, but again the sword made its escape. On his third attempt, Dogyō managed to wrap the sword in nine folds of cloth, which was apparently sufficient to prevent it from cutting its way through, and he got a considerable distance away from the shrine. At this point, the enraged spirit of Prince Yamato enters the story. He sent a fellow kami, Sumiyoshi Daimyōjin, to fight Dogyō for the sword. An interesting point about their subsequent combat is that the deity achieved victory by kicking the thief to death, an early example of atemi, the decisive striking techniques with fist or foot that have always been part of unarmed combat in Japan.6
The Rise of the Samurai
For Prince Yamato, or for the actual warriors whose exploits provide the basis for the Yamato legend, the word “samurai,” which is often used to describe a Japanese fighting man at any period, did not in fact exist. Samurai means “one who serves,” and although it first referred to domestic servants, the word soon implied military service, provided for a powerful overlord or even the emperor of Japan. The very appearance of the word indicates the enormous change in the military and political life of Japan that had taken place since the days of the early emperors.
By the seventh century ad, the imperial system had evolved from a line of warrior chieftains, for whom martial prowess was a necessary fact of life, to a ruling house whose hegemony was largely accepted. The imperial lineage claimed to wield divine authority, through the emperor’s descent from the sun goddess Amaterasu. At this time the greatest threat to the existence of the imperial line, and indeed of Japan itself, was perceived as being invasion from China. There was also the danger of the emishi, the tribes who lived in the north and east of Japan and were the last to accept the dominance of the Yamato line. To counter these threats, a conscript system was created. Theoretically, all adult males who were fit for military duty were liable for enlistment as heishi (soldiers). The resulting army, which spent much of its time on guard duty in remote areas of Japan, was heavily infantry-based, but backed up by mounted troops supplied by the wealthier landowners. These men were descended from the old provincial nobility, some of whom had once opposed the rise of the Yamato state. The creation of the conscript system shows both the resources possessed by the emperors and the authority they now wielded.
Military service was unpopular, but the arrangement sufficed for several decades until the threat from China began to fade during the eighth century. Security policies now had to concentrate on more mundane issues such as the capture of criminals and the suppression of bandits. The lengthy process of raising a conscript army was too cumbersome for dealing with such eventualities. What was needed was a rapid response force, primarily mounted, who could respond quickly when needed.
The gap was filled by hiring the forces of the old nobility, and this proved so successful that the use of conscripted troops rapidly diminished, and then was completely abandoned in ad 792.7 The noble contribution had always been an elite force, the officer class in the conscript armies, largely privately funded and privately trained. The men who served in these elite forces were the first samurai, but it is important to realize that these samurai were still firmly under the control of the emperor, just as the conscripted peasants had been. The first samurai, who were virtually imperial mercenaries, may have constituted private armies, but they did not conduct private warfare.8
However, several factors would make their mark over the next three centuries to produce the spectacle of samurai fighting samurai in wars of their own, or in wars carried out only nominally in the name of the emperor. First, there was a succession of younger imperial princes leaving the capital and heading off for the “new frontiers” of Japan to serve their family’s name and open up new territories. This may have widened the emperor’s authority, but it also had the potential to weaken it by dispersal. Second, there was the domination of the imperial family by the Fujiwara clan, who supplied a seemingly endless line of imperial consorts, causing great jealousy among other powerful families, who felt squeezed out. Two in particular greatly resented the Fujiwara domination, the clans of Taira and Minamoto. Both these families had imperial blood in their veins, through intermarriage with some of the above-mentioned distant princes, and both had built up spheres of influence far from the capital. The Taira were based in the west, on the shores of the Inland Sea, and the Minamoto to the east and north.
Prince Genji dressed in the fashion of the Heian period and carrying a bow.
The emperors had the occasional rebels against the throne to deal with, and the frontiers of the civilized imperial state were constantly being pushed out. Both these tasks were performed eagerly by the samurai of the Taira and Minamoto, who grew rich on rewards for this service. They grew closer to the imperial court until, by a process of imperial matchmaking, Taira Kiyomori (1118–1181) held great influence at court by virtue of being the emperor’s grandfather. So the center held, and the “sun line” survived, as it has to this day, as the oldest established ruling house in the world. In fact, it is somewhat surprising that the samurai clans did not assert themselves politically earlier than they did, but the bonds of imperial loyalty and the generosity of the rewards that the emperor bestowed were both considerable.9
The maku (curtains) from which the term bakufu derives.
Taira Shigehira, the classic samurai mounted archer.
But there was one other factor: the tendency that developed during the tenth century ad for an emperor to abdicate while still young and active, in favor of a child relative, thus freeing himself from the huge religious and ritual responsibility of kingship. The child emperor thus created was still honored, but was also extremely vulnerable to manipulation. No rebel in Japan would ever have sought to overthrow the emperor. Such a course of action was unthinkable, and was also totally unnecessary—the important thing was to control the emperor. It is the attempts by the Taira and the Minamoto to control emperors, or at least to control their nominees for the post, that form the background to the civil wars that exploded during the twelfth century. Two skirmishes, the Hōen and Heiji “disturbances,” named for the years when they were fought (1156 and 1160 respectively), were the curtain raisers to a major war that lasted from 1180 to 1185. It was called the Gempei War, from the Chinese reading of the names of the warring clans, the Minamoto (Genji) and Taira (Heike).
The Hōgen Rebellion, however, was fought in 1156 by two coalitions of warrior houses that included Taira and Minamoto warriors on each side. The subsequent 1160 troubles saw the first direct Minamoto/Taira clash, and the brutal way by which Taira Kiyomori, who had supplanted the Fujiwara in imperial favor, did away with his Minamoto rivals sowed the seeds of the major war that began in 1180. After some initial success by the Taira, their samurai were swept aside in a series of brilliant battles fought by the general Minamoto Yoshitsune, whose victories at Ichinotani (1184), Yashima (1184), and Dannoura (1185) enabled his elder brother Yoritomo to become military dictator.
Yoritomo took a title that is almost as familiar as samurai when he became Japan’s
