Re: Group training and the battlefield
Originally posted by Fred Stakem
In reading about the koryu of japan I have come upon articles about its history, its relation to modern budo, and technical smidgets. But what I have not been able to find is information on how they were employed on the battlefield…. to the like of what Hanson has done for greek warfare. I was wondering what is known of structure of the Japanese martial arts on the ancient battlefield and how it has shaped the koryu.
Most of the koryu (and other Japanese martial arts, for that matter) around today center on individual combat--the sort suitable for dueling and self-defense. This has less to do with conditions on Japanese battlefields than with conditions in Japanese society during the past 400 years., and particularly conditions during the last 150 years. In a nutshell: during the Tokugawa period and beyond, the emphasis of bugei training shifted to center on self-development, and the dominant areas of interest became martial art, rather than military science.
In addition to the martial arts most familiar to modern audiences, there were (maybe still are, although I don't know off hand of any still active) schools of strategy and tactics. These arts, most often called "gungaku," were around from the sengoku period onward and were required study for samurai of most domains. Most daimyo sponsored domain schools at which these arts were taught. But the value of these arts was heavily discredited by their dismal performance during Saigo Takamori's Satsuma Rebellion (1877), when Saigo's samurai troops were routed by an imperial army composed on peasant conscripts, using modern (European-style) tactics.
There are quite a few very good manuals and such available on various gungaku schools, although I don't know of anything available in translation to anything other than modern Japanese. John Rogers dealt with the topic in fair detail in his 1998 dissertation (from Harvard) "The Development of the Military Profession in Tokugawa Japan."
In any case, the forms and practices of bugei ryuha today, with the possible exception of schools of gunnery, don't reflect the nature of warfare, for any period of Japanese history. The ideal of one-on-one combat they seem to point to was never a significant part of Japanese warfare--particularly not during the later medieval period, when bugei ryuha were coalescing.
This is an enormous subject--too big to get into here--but there's a growing body of literature on the topic. Tom Conlan has a new book on the Mongol Wars (In Little Need of Divine Intervention [Cornell, 2001] and one forthcoming on 14th century warfare, as well as a few articles on the topic. I've done a couple of articles on various aspects of 10th-14th century warfare (including a few chapters for anthologies that are in press or otherwise in the works at the moment), and am now about halfway through a manuscript for Routledge's Warfare & History series, on early medieval warfare in Japan (hopefully the book will be out in a couple of years). In most of these, I do quite a bit of comparison with Western medieval ideas and technology. Paul Varley is also doing a book--for the same series--on sengoku era warfare, and has a couple of chapters on this topic in anthologies here and there--one edited by Jeremy Black, but I can't recall the title offhand.
Karl Friday
Dept. of History
University of Georgia
Athens, GA 30602