Originally posted by Earl Hartman
1) What did the horses used by the Japanese look like if they do not resemble modern horses that one sees in movies? Should I assume that they were smaller, like Mongolian ponies?
Japanese horses (until Arabians and other thoroughbreds were imported after the late 19th century) were short, stubby ponies--a lot like the Mongolian ponies Earl mentions. The only place I know of in Japan where you can still see Japanese horses of the sort the samurai rode is the island of Oshima.
An analysis by Hayashida Shigeyuki of areport on an excavation of the bodies of men and horses involved in Nitta Yoshisada's attack on Kamakura in 1333 shows that the 128 horse skeletons found ranged in height from 109 to 140 cm at the shoulder, with the average height being 129.5 and the most common height being 126-136 cms. The 8 horses described in the Gempei josuiki as "famous" range from 139 to 145 cm. Modern Japanese ponies of about the same size as the Kamakura skeletons average around 280 kg. Modern thoroughbreds, by contrast, average around 160-65 cms and about 450-550 kg in weight.
Japanese ponies were also relatively weak animals, incapable of carrying more than about 90 kilograms--including rider, saddle and weapons--and unshod, so that their hooves could not take heavy pounding and they could have galloped long distances only with great difficulty. They were also unruly and difficult to control--especially when both hands are occupied with a task like archery.
In general a horse can carry about one third of his own weight; more than this and his running power decreases by 30% or more. Horses today of roughly the same breed as traditional Japanese ponies weigh around 350 kg. Armor during the early Kamakura period weighed between 22 and 32 kg.
Modern thoroughbreds have a maximum speed of about 60 kph; Modern Japanese ponies top out at 40 kph, even without the weight of a saddle, rider, armor, and weapons, which would weigh in at around 90 kg. In an experiment conducted by NHK in 1980 for an episode of the series "Rekishi e no shotai" titled "Yoshitsune kiba gundan," the speed of such ponies so laden was tested. A 130 cm., 350 kg horse was timed with a rider and 45 kg in sacks of sand (the equivalent of the armor and weapons). The horse dropped from a gallop to a trot almost immediately. A horse at gallop normally travels about 300 meters per minute, but this one never exceeded 150 meters per minute.
Even modern racing horses can only run full out for 200-300 yards. And medieval ponies were unshod. A horse running at full speed places nearly 8 times his normal weight on his hooves, which makes it very difficult for a horse to run fast for very long.
Moreover, Japanese stirrups were not well-suited to high-speed riding. They are long and high up, to facilitate standing in the saddle. Mounted troops probably did not, therefore, gallop about except in special situations; the movements of an army on a battlefield were determined by the speed of foot soldiers marching or running.
Thus the purpose and utility of the horse on medieval battlefields was less exploitation of its superior speed, than to distinguish the class of the riders from the foot soldiers, and to bear the weight of the armor.
What did medieval Japanese cavalry actually look like, then, if the depiction of it in modern films is inaccurate?
The sort of cavalry units depicted in the movies never existed in medieval Japan. Clear tactical division of cavalry from infantry troops disappeared with the ritsuryo (imperial state) military apparatus, in the 8th century, and wasn't revived until the introduction of modern (European-style) cavalry, in the late 19th century. Medieval military units mixed mounted with unmounted troops, with warriors of a given status and rank fighting mounted, and everyone else fighting on foot.
Moreover, even the mounted troops appear to have dismounted to do their real fighting: Luis Frois, a Jesuit missionary in 16th century Japan, noted, in his extensive commentary on things Japanese that, "We [Europeans] fight on horseback, but when the Japanese must fight, they get down from their mounts."
Also, I suppose that there is probably no good answer for this, but would you care to speculate why the Japanese apparently never developed fighting methods employing a shield and a single-handed weapon used in conjunction with a shield, and why they never developed the couched lance as was used in Europe?
As Earl says, there's probably no good answer for this, but my guess is that it's simply a matter of trajectory of technological and tactical development.
Early samurai military forces were defined by and created around the skill of mounted archery, and early samurai armor was developed for use in this style of fighting. Using a bow from horseback pretty much precludes the use of a shield, but the style of armor (oyoroi) that evolved compensated for this with the two big plates (osode) that hang from the wearer's shoulders. At the same time, the heavy armor was probably a major factor in prompting the development of long, heavy polearms (like the naginata, and later the yari), which required both hands to wield effectively, to augment the missile weapons. (In point of fact, polearms--such as the hoko--had been long, two-handed weapons, even during the ritsuryo era.)
By the 15th century, Japanese were doing a lot more of their fighting on foot, using bigger armies, but tactically the essence of battles didn't change all that much. The Japanese simply never developed a tactical tradition of marching closely-ordered infantry head-on into a waiting enemy host--ala the Greeks or the Romans--which is the style of fighting best-suited to using shields and one-handed weapons (medieval European knightly cavalry is simply a mounted version of the same thing). Japanese battles, from the ritsuryo era onward, always centered on missile exchanges of one sort or another; hand-to-hand fighting occurred mainly in special circumstances or in the closing phases of battles, after one side or the other had begun to break. Standing shields, which the Japanese did use, were more useful for covering archers or gunners than hand-held shields would have been; and the length and power of heavy, two-handed polearms was probably of more value when mopping up troops who were breaking and scattering than whatever protection warriors might have gotten from hand-held shields would have been--especially given the heavy armor they wore.
In other words: the Japanese had never had a tradition of using hand-held shields (although there are one or two depictions of this sort of shield in medieval picture scrolls) and never had any particular reason to develop one. So they didn't!
Karl Friday
Dept. of History
University of Georgia
Athens, GA 30602