“purposely avoided a decision.”24
A suit of armor opened out flat, from a military manual.
Taira Tomomori, defeated at the battle of Dannoura in 1185, prepares to drown himself, tied to a massive anchor.
The cruel reality of samurai warfare could not have been further from the notion of battle as a ritualized set piece. Yoshinaka’s illustrious predecessor Minamoto Tametomo believed that surprise was essential to victory, particularly when fire was involved:
Whether to break strong positions though surrounded by the enemy, or to destroy the enemy when attacking a fortified place, in any case there is nothing equal to night attack to achieve victory. Therefore if we bear down on the Takamatsu Palace immediately, set fire to it on three sides and hold them in check on the fourth side, those who escape fire cannot escape arrows, and those who escape arrows cannot escape fire.25
Konjaku Monogatari shows one encounter beginning with clear enthusiasm for the element of surprise that the situation offered:
As he advanced Yogo had a man sent ahead with orders to search out carefully where Sawamata was and report back. The scout came running back and said, “They are in a meadow with a marsh on the south face of that hill over there. They’ve been eating and drinking sake; some are lying down, and some seem to be sick.” Yogo was delighted to hear this and he commanded his men, “Just hit them fast.”26
In the Azuma Kagami, the sequence of events in a battle may be traced in all its savagery and confusion, from the use of deception at the start:
The complete antithesis to the “super-swordsman” is Mionoya Juro of Musashi. He had his horse shot from under him during the Battle of Yashima in 1184. He was attacked by a samurai with a naginata, who grabbed him by the neckpiece of his helmet. When the lacing tore apart, Mionoya escaped.
Tomomasa’s men, who had climbed the trees at Todorokizawa and at Jigokutani, emitted battle cries according to a prearranged plan. The cries reverberated through the ravine, giving the impression of a huge force. In his astonishment and confusion Yoshihiro was attacked by Tomomasa’s followers.... At the time strong winds blowing from the southeast raised a cloud of dust from the burning fields and obscured the vision of men and horses, causing many to break ranks and lose their footing.27
The Sword in Combat
If a samurai had run out of arrows, or had otherwise lost the use of his bow, he would have to use cutting weapons, the best known of which, of course, was the famous “samurai sword.” The word usually used for the long sword carried by samurai in this early period is tachi. This was the samurai’s principal side arm. The other edged weapon that the samurai would carry was a sword with a much shorter blade, and the meticulous research of Karl Friday has shown that the names given to this weapon vary through history.28 What we see being worn on picture scrolls such as Heiji Monogatari Emaki are the tachi, which is slung from a separate sword belt with the cutting edge downwards, and the shorter weapon, which is stuck through the wide sashlike belt around the waist of the armor. Although it is frequently referred to as a tantō (dagger), Friday points out that this word is of much later origin. In translations of Heike Monogatari such as those quoted below, the shorter edged weapon usually appears as “dagger”—a convention I have retained for clarity. Contemporary names for this second weapon include katana —the word used later in history for the standard fighting sword—and koshigatana, the prefix koshi- meaning “the hips.” The tachi would be used for sword fighting, and when its use is described in the chronicles and the gunkimono, we note the use of verbs such as “cut” and “strike,” while the katana is used to “stab” and “thrust.”
There was, however, another type of sword coming into use, called an uchi-gatana. This was like a short tachi or a very long katana, and it was carried in the same way as the katana: that is, thrust through the belt. Originally used by warriors too poor to afford a tachi, it was eventually to supplant the tachi as the weapon of choice, as its size and position enabled the wearer to make a devastating stroke straight from the scabbard. With its name shortened to katana, it became the most familiar form of samurai sword. Some uchi-katana were in fact shortened tachi.29
However, as was implied by the phrase kyūba no michi, a samurai’s worth was measured in terms of his prowess with the bow, rather than the sword. Now, to the modern mind, the ideas of a samurai and of a sword are almost inseparable. The sword has acquired a quasi-religious, almost mystical, symbolism, and is wielded in a way that often appears to be a combination of superhuman skill and technical perfection. But between the tenth and twelfth centuries, all the traditions to be associated with the Japanese sword lay in the future, including that of the invincible swordsman. One incident in particular, described in Heike Monogatari, in fact describes the complete antithesis to the “super-swordsman.” Mionoya Jūrō of Musashi has had his horse shot from under him during the Battle of Yashima in 1184:
The rider at once threw his left leg over the animal and vaulted down to the right, drawing his sword to continue the fight, but when he saw the warrior behind the shield come to meet him flourishing a huge halberd, he knew that his own small sword would be useless, and blew on a conch and retreated.30
Two competing samurai could really only engage in swordplay when they had dismounted. Here, one samurai appears to have been unhorsed by a kumade (a rakelike polearm), which now is broken.
The story then diverges even further from the traditional samurai image:
The other immediately followed him, and it looked as though he would cut him down with his halberd, but instead of doing so, gripping the halberd under his left arm, he tried to seize Mionoya no Jūrō by the neckpiece of his helmet with his right. Three times Mionoya eluded his grasp, but at the fourth attempt his opponent held on. For a moment he could do nothing, but then, giving a sudden violent wrench, the neckpiece parted where it joined the helmet, and Mionoya escaped and hid behind his four companions to recover his breath.31
The “halberd” in the above account refers to a weapon known as a naginata, which had a long shaft, oval in cross section, and a curved blade. This gave a samurai a longer reach than a sword, but whatever the quality of his cutting weapons, the skill he showed with a bow was unquestionably the samurai’s most prized accomplishment. At the Battle of Yashima in 1184, the Minamoto commander, Yoshitsune, accidentally dropped his bow into the sea, and put himself at some personal risk in his efforts to retrieve it. When his older retainers reproached him, he replied:
It was not that I grudged the bow... and if the bow were one that required two or three men to bend it, like that of my uncle Tametomo, they would be quite welcome to it, but I should not like a weak one like mine to fall into the hands of the enemy for them to laugh at it.32
Yoshitsune clearly felt that his reputation as an archer, and therefore as a samurai, would be undermined if his enemies realized that he lacked the physical strength to draw a large bow. But this feeling that the sword was as nothing compared to the bow was not confined to the battlefield, and a passage in Konjaku Monogatari provides the most surprising anecdote for anyone brought up with the tradition of the invincible samurai swordsman. One night, robbers attacked a certain Tachibana Norimitsu while he was on his way to visit a female acquaintance. He was armed only with a sword:
