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Thread: Group training and the battlefield

  1. #1
    Fred Stakem Guest

    Default Group training and the battlefield

    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 imployed 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.
    To start with, I will pleade ignorance to the actual workings of the koryu because the depth of my knowledge is limited to second hand sources…such as Draeger, the Skoss compilations, and various historical treaties. I think I have a certain grasp of what makes a koryu a koryu, but no indepth training to cement the theoretical ideas. I have read extensively on the asian martial arts and have even had the chance to practice a few, but I don’t feel as though much has been published to the questions I will pose.
    How much does of the classical western military relate to the koryu? When I think of the western approach to war, the first group that of course comes to mind are the greeks. And what do you imagine when you think of the greeks. A shiney bronze phalanx with overlapped shields locked together for mutual protection. Often group together by tribe or strong fraternal bond because the very nature of the warfare demanded it. If the line fell then the army was doomed. The Spartans trained together, ate together and slept together(in many different ways).
    Did the koryu ever train in this way? In text, I have read of Nobunaga’s use of a musket line being a monumental step in the nature of Japanese warfare, but what of the koryu? The little I know of the koryu is of drills done in pairs. Were formations ever taught, and if so did the role of the koryu change from active paticipant to the western equivalent of the officer class in later European history. If so this would entail a different set of skills more akin to Clausewitz than Conan.
    In modern western warfare there is still a vestige of the past in close order drill. When a student enrolls in boot camp or military school, the first thing that is taught it how to line up, form platoons, and march in step. Is there any koryu equivalent to this?I know with my experience in budo the practitioners tend to line up in order of rank. Is this a western methodology or do the koryu assemble themselves accordingly? I find it interesting that some people now associate lack of a belt system the more classical military way and the belt system more sporting. When traditionally in the west it would be the opposite.
    I have read in the books about koryu of other skills such as signaling, espionage, and musketry. But it seems to me more more emphasis has been placed in the literature on swordsmanship and weapons play than army organization. This seems to me more akin to chivalry and knights dueling than to practical considerations of how to win wars. Not that those skills are not needed, but I would argue that a skilled technical samurai is no match against a few men trained in basic group warefare tactics. Did the training methods of the samurai change to reflect a less battlefield oriented martial art?
    I know the argument am going to hear. A Japanese warrior was more a man at arms in the medevil European sense than a common foot soldier. That could be true, but a battle is won by the foot soldier, not the man at arms. I am making this minute distinction not to belittle the technical skills of the koryu, but to question the assumption sometimes expressed that the koryu is the battlefield martial art while others are not. A hundred men skilled in a simple kendo stroke is more important that a single well trained practitioner of kenjustu.
    In the budo training in pairs is an integral part of training. Is this emphasis carried over into the koryu? This I found very interesting compare to the western method. In fact I remember reading some of greek scholars speaking out against individual pursuits such as western boxing and wrestling since they have no benefit on the battlefield. As I recall, the Spartans were known not to be involved in such pursuits, but instead played team sports. This has even been used in modern times where I have read of marines emphasizing the team work developed by playing western sports. Very ironic that sports have become a negative word in the martial arts world, but the very team nature of western sport has been a sought after quality in modern combat circles. Of course it is also very ironic that the individuallity is valued so much in the west, but in our sports we tend to think in teams. In the east the confucian paternalism tends to favor an individual that conforms to society, where as the traditional martial sports focus on individuals.


    Fred Stakem

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    Geez, Fred, you sure know how to ask a hard question.

    There are a couple books in English that discuss premodern Japanese warfare, although not as well or as philosophically as some books on Greek hoplite theory and warfare. I'm at work so the book isn't in front of me, but I believe a book by Ferris (? sp?) gives a general historical overview of how warfare changed from the earliest dates recorded of Japanese warmaking to the 1600s. There are a couple "general readership" books, albeit in Japanese, that describes battlefield tactics and concepts as practiced by the bushi, from big shiny full color books to stuff by Sasama Yoshihiko, etc.

    Basically--and I'm sure others (Prof. Goldsbury?) will have more detailed info for your--I think we have to understand that warfare in Japan from circa 700 ACE to the 1600s due to technical, historical and strategic differences. From the 700s, Chinese strategic texts were imported and studied, although upon reading some of the records of battles, I am led to think that Chinese theory were utilized but a distinctively Japanese style of strategic fighting (or lack thereof) ensued. Many of the koryu are based on different levels of combat by different combatants, from ashigaru to mounted warriors with tachi, and also on different historical contexts, as well as different technological innovations and reactions to them, hence you see the differences in ryu to ryu.

    To compare the relative strengths of strategy between Japanese and Western classical warfare is really too great a topic for one reply due to the long history of both Western and Japanese warfare before the gun, or more to the point, before the advent of Western strategic theory influencing Japanese warfare to a great degree. Do we talk about the Heian period expeditions to the Tohoku, or the Gempei Wars, the Mongol invasions, the Muromachi period, Sengoku, Azuchi Momoyama? Each era had a different kind of warfare, different players, different levels of strategy, different technologies, different aims, different enemy composition, different needs in terms of training soldiery to move en masse.

    In the earlier eras, mounted bushi conducted most of the wars, accompanied by their footsoldiers. These battles were fluid and fast moving. But as the ashigaru (footsoldiers) became more involved in decisive combat, the need to train lower class samurai and even part-time peasantry finally necessitated some kind of training, not just in single combat but in massed maneuvering. By the time of Sengoku, the use of spears and guns were well established in most daimyo armies, because it did take less time, money and effort to train an ashigaru or conscript to use a spear or a rifle than to train a warrior to use a sword and horse.

    If you're talking about the 1600s, yes, it does in a way resemble hoplitic combat...in that large masses of ashigaru were put into formations that attacked each other with spears, usually after volleys of arrows and/or rifle shot. You might want to try to find some people who do something like the Owari Kan-ryu spear to see how the yari was adapted over the years for that kind of combat.

    I'm sure others can comment more completely on your specific questions, so I'll sign off now. I would comment though, that as is apparent in a reading of Western warfare, excellent generalship was more the exception than the rule, if you ask me. Strategic geniuses in Japan looked really good because their opponents were pretty awful. Even up to and including WWII, my opinion of the Japanese military is that they had a couple brilliant generals, and a whole bunch of dopes who got where they got by kissing butt. But isn't that the case in a lot of armies?

    Wayne Muromoto

  3. #3
    ben johanson Guest

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    Fred wrote:

    "I have read in the books about koryu of other skills such as signaling, espionage, and musketry. But it seems to me more more emphasis has been placed in the literature on swordsmanship and weapons play than army organization. This seems to me more akin to chivalry and knights dueling than to practical considerations of how to win wars. Not that those skills are not needed, but I would argue that a skilled technical samurai is no match against a few men trained in basic group warfare tactics. Did the training methods of the samurai change to reflect a less battlefield oriented martial art?"

    I will offer my understanding of the situation that prevailed during the Sengoku period. I think the preponderance of individual-centered combat arts found in koryu over tactics of battlefield organization is due to the fact that almost all koryu, virtually without exception, were founded by one or maybe a couple of individuals who were without variation members of the samurai class. These samurai were of course more concerned with the arts of swordsmanship and spear fighting because they were the arts most likely to be employed by them, whether on or off the battlefield. The men that founded the various koryu were not generally of the daimyo class (although there were exceptions) and therefore were less concerned with organization than with training to perfect their skills at one-on-one combat. Koryu founders such as Tsukahara Bokuden and Kamiizumi Hidetsuna functioned either as captains who commanded lower-ranking footsoldiers and served under the command of other higher-ranking generals or simply as members of a single battlefield unit. In other words, they were more likely to follow the orders and battle plans of other commanders rather than develope them on their own. Thus, they were more inclined to found schools of individual combat techniques rather than of strategy and/or battlefield organization. Although I do believe that there were schools of strategy founded during the sixteenth century, but I am not sure by whom they were developed or how representative of the general trend of koryu development they were (in fact, I don't think they are representative. They were probably more of a seperate entity entirely from the koryu).

    Another contributing factor here may be the long-standing tradition of individualism on the battlefield that existed amongst the samurai since their inception in the 9th-10th centuries. Although I do not believe in the received notion that Japanese battles in the Heian period and beyond consisted simply of many individual combats (for I think the object of war was more far-reaching and general than this view suggests) there was undoubtedly a strong spirit of individualism in samurai warfare from the beginning. This, too, may have contributed to the tendancy of samurai of the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries to found koryu of individual-based combat techniques.

    There are clearly many other determinants at work here which contributed to the koryu developing as they did, but I will not go into them all now (for instance, the fact that individual-based schools of archery existed well before those of the sword and spear which clearly had roots in the warfare of the Heian period and the near absence of comprehensive battlefield strategy in that era). But it is important to realize that there was in fact extensive "group training" conducted during the Sengoku period; it just generally did not include the samurai and thus such drills were excluded from the koryu founded by them. I believe it is documented that many daimyo drilled ashigaru spearmen in group spear tactics and of course we know of Oda Nobunaga's use of organized volley musket fire at Nagashino.

  4. #4
    Fred Stakem Guest

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    Thanks for the help Mr Muromoto.I will check for a book by Ferris? Is it more an academic book...less likely to be found at borders or other bookstores? If anyone else knows a book that fitts into the question of japanese strategy I would be interested to hear about it. The problem I see is that the more academic work I have seen is vague as to how strategy relates to the techniques that are preserved in the koryu. And the books on koryu
    don't seem to address the training of large groups. This is true of greek warefare too, but people such as Hanson and has tried to reconstuct
    what an actual battle must have been like. Of course most of that is guesses and opinions.

    Mr Muromoto said:
    "To compare the relative strengths of strategy between Japanese and Western classical warfare is really too great a
    topic for one reply due to the long history of both Western and Japanese warfare before the gun, or more to the
    point, before the advent of Western strategic theory influencing Japanese warfare to a great degree."

    Sorry, I didn't really specify my question well. What I was trying to get at is that formations were important in greek warfare and more modern western warfare. Even after the gun was invented, western battles were fought in formation.( I am thinking it must have been scary as hell marching within paces of the enemy line to exchange fire in the open.) Even during WWI Keagan tells of units,not in step as the Napoleanic days, attacking in mass formations(his pictures in the the book Face of Battle? are very interesting). Western warefare is so ingrained with idea of group warfare, that the first thing they do in a military school or boot camp is to teach the soldiers to march. Marching in step is completely irrelavent for modern warfare, but is a vestige of the past. My question, is what has happened in the
    koryu, in little that I have read, that seems to make individual combat paramont. In a sense, I am not concerned with a specific time period, but what has happened to make modern koryu what it is. I understand the great variety of koryu, but do any of the practioners think certain styles are more pratical or battlefield oriented. In a similiar question, i am wondering if any of the koryu taught today have special skills developed for group warfare....such as how to go from a line to a square in case of a calvary charge.

    Mr. Muromoto said:
    "If you're talking about the 1600s, yes, it does in a way resemble hoplitic combat...in that large masses of ashigaru
    were put into formations that attacked each other with spears, usually after volleys of arrows and/or rifle shot. You
    might want to try to find some people who do something like the Owari Kan-ryu spear to see how the yari was
    adapted over the years for that kind of combat."

    Sounds interesting. I do not practice the koryu(and regretfully don't have the time for it) but am always interested in articles or lectures on the subject. I understand the old fashion nature of the koryu, but are there ever any lectures or demonstations of this stateside?

    I think Mr Johanson answered it when he said:
    "I will offer my understanding of the situation that prevailed during the Sengoku period. I think the preponderance of
    individual-centered combat arts found in koryu over tactics of battlefield organization is due to the fact that almost
    all koryu, virtually without exception, were founded by one or maybe a couple of individuals who were without
    variation members of the samurai class. These samurai were of course more concerned with the arts of
    swordsmanship and spear fighting because they were the arts most likely to be employed by them,"

    I can sort of agree with this, but not fully. Why?
    Because I think if that was so, then wouldn't the samurai be a sort of junior officer class that had to carry out orders.(like a leuitenant in the modern army) If so there would still be an emphasis in how to organize men. Not on the army level, but on the platoon or company level. Keeping an army tightly woven together is easier said than done. Does anyone know of koryu practicing these skills?


    One thought coming to mind is that the great amount of turning in the chinese martial arts of bagau would not be permisible in a tight formation. With large formations what sort of techniques would be better to perform, and do the practitioners ever sift through the koryu they practice to find later non-battlefield additions?

    I have seen many experts of bjj beat people without similiar training. I don't think it is a bad martial art, but with the emphasis of going to the ground, it would be disasterous on an old battlefield. On the battlefield of greece the person on the ground would likely be trampled in the pushing of armies.
    But in personal combat bjj adapts make formible opponents. If there is such a thing as a better school of koryu, what would be its defining characteristics and techniques taking into account group warfare instead of individual combat.



    Fred Stakem

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    Fred,

    Whew! I can't reply with any authority on many of your questions, but would hope that others (Meik Skoss, Prof. Goldsbury, Prof. Karl Friday etc.) might help you further. I too enjoyed Keegan's essays on the history of warfare.

    Without going back to my library at home, I can say that daimyo employed gunshi, or masters of strategy, to map out battle plans, strategies, battle formations and fortifications. Gunshi, therefore, were higher ranking warriors, I guess you would call them staff members in the field HQs, so to speak, of the leader. Arranging the samurai into battle formations fell to the next rank of leaders, I guess we'd call them captains and lieutanants, who were also hereditarily rather high up on the brown-nosing scale. They often commanded atop horses, even if they led footsoldiers, as due to their rank. Squad leaders were drawn from lower-ranked samurai, who controlled the squads of ashigaru in tight battle formations. You had different groups: gunnery, archers, spearsmen, horsemen--the mobile shock troop cavalry--supplies, field HQ, etc. Formations, as I can recall from some books, were based originally on Chinese models and had fanciful names such as uroko gaeshi ("returning scales"), and so on.

    By the time of the Sengoku Period, as one example of large scale fighting, black powder rifles were in use. But as commentators of the Civil War and other wars in which such guns were used will tell you, after a couple of volleys, it gets pretty darned smoky and hard to aim. In addition, the barrel, if I understand it correctly, can overheat. From all accounts, therefore after an exchange of volleys using arrows and rifle shot, formations would then close in and strike at each other in various setups. Often, there would be an initial charge of horsemen to break a barrier or formation down, in coordination with a set formation of spearsmen. I watch a lot of historical dramas on Hawaii TV and whenever they show a recreation of such battles, it seems like they start of in a certain set formation, then when the two sides make contact, all hell breaks loose, and shortly, the formations of massed spearsmen and horsemen often break apart into chaotic skirmishes. It's hard to generalize, though, because different battles (formation against formation, formation against castle, formation against field fortification, sea battles, river battles, etc.) called for different methods of fighting, including siege as well as open combat.

    Many of the koryu bugei were developed by middle-level or upper samurai who primarily used swords, both as a mark of their station and as their main weapon, and such composite bugei will then include secondarily other weaponry, such as the spear, naginata, etc. In other words, the emphasis was on that class of samurai learning what they needed to know given the kind of weaponry and combative applications they would probably prefer to use in battle. "Ashigaru bugei" is a term given to bugei that appear to be more for the footsoldiers, and perhaps their techniques are more direct, not as influenced by upper class etiquette or sensibilities. If you wanted to find schools of heiho (hyoho), you'd have to find more upper class samurai bugei...I believe the Katori Shinto-ryu still has remnants of hyoho in its curriculum, as does the Takeuchi-ryu, my own school. There once also existed schools primarily devoted to heiho, such as the Takeda-ryu, the Kusunoki-ryu, the Sanada-ryu, and so on. But as you probably surmise, during the combative era of the Sengoku, what you studied often boiled down to what level or class of samurai you belonged to. If you were a higly ranked samurai who would by heredity and station be a general, it was in your best interest to study strategy first, swordsmanship second. If you were in the middle, you studied a little bit of both...Of course if you were an ashigaru and wanted a promotion, you'd try to apply yourself to studying such methods as well as simply learning how to march in formation and thrust a spear.

    I'm not sure how well the ashigaru trained to be in formation. They marched in retinue and formations but I don't know if there's a tradition of lock-step marching as in the West. Apparently, however, the formations of spearsmen were similar to hoplitic combat in that the samurai squad leaders tried to establish a fearsome line of spears in the front, spearsman next to spearsman, to smash through enemy formations. The clash of spear formations against spear formations must have been pretty frightening. And as you surmised, you didn't really want to be on the ground, else you'd get trampled by feet and hooves. But there was combative grappling methods, mainly to hold a guy down long enough so you could stab him and/or take his head. In our ryu, these are the kogusoku methods. Then you got the heck up and made sure no one was going for you from all sides.

    Wayne

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    Fred,

    Whew! I can't reply with any authority on many of your questions, but would hope that others (Meik Skoss, Prof. Goldsbury, Prof. Karl Friday etc.) might help you further. I too enjoyed Keegan's essays on the history of warfare.

    Without going back to my library at home, I can say that daimyo employed gunshi, or masters of strategy, to map out battle plans, strategies, battle formations and fortifications. Gunshi, therefore, were higher ranking warriors, I guess you would call them staff members in the field HQs, so to speak, of the leader. Arranging the samurai into battle formations fell to the next rank of leaders, I guess we'd call them captains and lieutanants, who were also hereditarily rather high up on the brown-nosing scale. They often commanded atop horses, even if they led footsoldiers, as due to their rank. Squad leaders were drawn from lower-ranked samurai, who controlled the squads of ashigaru in tight battle formations. You had different groups: gunnery, archers, spearsmen, horsemen--the mobile shock troop cavalry--supplies, field HQ, etc. Formations, as I can recall from some books, were based originally on Chinese models and had fanciful names such as uroko gaeshi ("returning scales"), and so on.

    By the time of the Sengoku Period, as one example of large scale fighting, black powder rifles were in use. But as commentators of the Civil War and other wars in which such guns were used will tell you, after a couple of volleys, it gets pretty darned smoky and hard to aim. In addition, the barrel, if I understand it correctly, can overheat. From all accounts, therefore after an exchange of volleys using arrows and rifle shot, formations would then close in and strike at each other in various setups. Often, there would be an initial charge of horsemen to break a barrier or formation down, in coordination with a set formation of spearsmen. I watch a lot of historical dramas on Hawaii TV and whenever they show a recreation of such battles, it seems like they start of in a certain set formation, then when the two sides make contact, all hell breaks loose, and shortly, the formations of massed spearsmen and horsemen often break apart into chaotic skirmishes. It's hard to generalize, though, because different battles (formation against formation, formation against castle, formation against field fortification, sea battles, river battles, etc.) called for different methods of fighting, including siege as well as open combat.

    Many of the koryu bugei were developed by middle-level or upper samurai who primarily used swords, both as a mark of their station and as their main weapon, and such composite bugei will then include secondarily other weaponry, such as the spear, naginata, etc. In other words, the emphasis was on that class of samurai learning what they needed to know given the kind of weaponry and combative applications they would probably prefer to use in battle. "Ashigaru bugei" is a term given to bugei that appear to be more for the footsoldiers, and perhaps their techniques are more direct, not as influenced by upper class etiquette or sensibilities. If you wanted to find schools of heiho (hyoho), you'd have to find more upper class samurai bugei...I believe the Katori Shinto-ryu still has remnants of hyoho in its curriculum, as does the Takeuchi-ryu, my own school. There once also existed schools primarily devoted to heiho, such as the Takeda-ryu, the Kusunoki-ryu, the Sanada-ryu, and so on. But as you probably surmise, during the combative era of the Sengoku, what you studied often boiled down to what level or class of samurai you belonged to. If you were a higly ranked samurai who would by heredity and station be a general, it was in your best interest to study strategy first, swordsmanship second. If you were in the middle, you studied a little bit of both...Of course if you were an ashigaru and wanted a promotion, you'd try to apply yourself to studying such methods as well as simply learning how to march in formation and thrust a spear.

    I'm not sure how well the ashigaru trained to be in formation. They marched in retinue and formations but I don't know if there's a tradition of lock-step marching as in the West. Apparently, however, the formations of spearsmen were similar to hoplitic combat in that the samurai squad leaders tried to establish a fearsome line of spears in the front, spearsman next to spearsman, to smash through enemy formations. The clash of spear formations against spear formations must have been pretty frightening. And as you surmised, you didn't really want to be on the ground, else you'd get trampled by feet and hooves. But there was combative grappling methods, mainly to hold a guy down long enough so you could stab him and/or take his head. In our ryu, these are the kogusoku methods. Then you got the heck up and made sure no one was going for you from all sides.

    Wayne

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    Haven't time to read through all of the replies, but I will tell you what little I know.

    There still exists in Kyushu, in the town of Izumi in Miyazaki Prefecture, the Satsuma Heki Ryu, which maintains the practice of battlefield kyujutsu as pracitced by the Shimazu han. These archers often give demonstrations at various kyudo events.

    I was privileged to be given a private demonstration and talk with members of the ryu. The standard procedure is called "yari waki no shaho" (archery at the side of the spears) and consists of two distinct elements:

    1. sashiya (long distance shooting)
    2. koshiya (close distsance shooting)

    In the sashiya, a line of archers lays down a long-distance volley which is designed to keep the enemy archers behind their shields and so to allow your own spearmen to advance under cover of the barrage and engage the enemy without getting shot by the enemy's archers.

    Once the distance between opposing forces has decreased to under 50 yards or so, the archers employ the "koshiya" technique where alternating lines of archers advance on the enemy while firing in turn so as to keep up an uninterrupted barrage of arrows. As the first line fires, the second line advances with their arrows nocked, and fires while the second line nocks their arrows in preparation to fire. Thus, the archers advance on the enemy while keeping up an uninterrupted stream of arrows. When the battle is joined, the archers then use the tips of their bows, which were fitted with blades, as spears. After that, the archers presumably draw their swords and engage the enemy at close quarters.

    The Satsuma Heki Ryu is distinct from other styles of battlefield archery in that 1) all ranks of warriors, from the highest to the lowest, were required to train in this method whereas in other fiefdoms only the ashigaru archers were required to train in this way, and 2) only the Stasuma Heki Ryu used the alternating-volley method, whereas other schools simply shot their arrows at random. I was told that this regulated, alternating volley method was adapted from French musket tactics about 200 years ago.
    Last edited by Earl Hartman; 20th August 2001 at 23:31.
    Earl Hartman

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    Default 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

  9. #9
    ben johanson Guest

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    Karl Friday wrote:
    "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."

    Then why, Dr. Friday, were the many ryuha begun in the first place? Why did the samurai of the Sengoku period spend so much time practicing and developing techniques for the sword and spear? Why did they embark on musha shugyo and engage in one-on-one dueling as a means of improving their combative skills for the battlefield if one-on-one combat was never a significant part of Japanese warfare?

    These are questions that have bothered me since I first started studying Japanese history. It just doesn't add up. During the Sengoku period, the samurai were the political and military leaders of Japan who clearly prided themselves on their martial prowess and accomplishments on the battlefield and yet they seem to have left most of the fighting in battle up to masses of low-class ashigaru. The latter were the first into battle and it would seem that the bows, and later the guns, used by them accounted for a significant majority of the casualties on Sengoku battlefields.

    What purpose exactly did the samurai who were not officers serve in battle? It seems to me that their presence was almost unnecessary if the skills with the sword and spear they trained so hard to perfect were scarcely even employed on the battlefild.

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    Originally posted by ben johanson
    Why did the samurai of the Sengoku period spend so much time practicing and developing techniques for the sword and spear? Why did they embark on musha shugyo and engage in one-on-one dueling as a means of improving their combative skills for the battlefield if one-on-one combat was never a significant part of Japanese warfare? . . .

    What purpose exactly did the samurai who were not officers serve in battle? It seems to me that their presence was almost unnecessary if the skills with the sword and spear they trained so hard to perfect were scarcely even employed on the battlefild.
    By the sengoku period, the upper ranks of the bushi order--the group most people associate with the term "samurai"--were officers whose primary task was directing the fighting. The decisive part of most battles was the exchange of missile weapons fire--bows until the late 1500s and then guns and bows. Hand-to-hand combat occurred mainly after the battle had been decided--when one side had broken and begun to run, and the other side moved in to mop up.

    But the fact that they were officers, rather than "grunts," didn't make samurai unnecessary, nor did it make their skills or training with sword and spear superfluous or pointless.

    For one thing, officers have to be able to defend themselves, especially when their jobs involve leading charges into retreating enemies. During the late medieval period samurai may not have been the main striking force of armies, but they were still in the thick of things in most battles.

    For another, in Japan, as in many premodern military cultures, personal military skills were seen as a microcosm of group-oriented ones. Directing a squad or a company was believed to be essentially just a larger-scale application of the same principles involved in fighting a single opponent. So study of kenjutsu and sojutsu was also a route to mastery of strategy and tactics.

    And then too, keep in mind that the level of sophistication, organization and intricacy of training that we now associate with classical Japanese martial art was largely a development of the Tokugawa period. Sengoku military training was more informal and more ad hoc.

    It was, on the other hand, also not all strictly about military efficacy or results on the battlefield. The kernels of the idea of bugei as self-development--certainly the ideal of striving for perfection in a chosen discipline--were already around by the 1500s. Most musha-shugyo and the like was probably more about this aspect of martial art than it was about perfecting skills for practical application in battle.

    In other words: samurai did have need for skills with sword and spear; they saw important benefits to acquiring and developing such skills above and beyond the direct application of them to battle; and the overwhelming majority weren't spending as much time and effort polishing their fencing technique as we tend to imagine today.
    Karl Friday
    Dept. of History
    University of Georgia
    Athens, GA 30602

  11. #11
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    Karl Friday wrote:
    "By the sengoku period, the upper ranks of the bushi order--the group most people associate with the term "samurai"--were officers whose primary task was directing the fighting. The decisive part of most battles was the exchange of missile weapons fire--bows until the late 1500s and then guns and bows. Hand-to-hand combat occurred mainly after the battle had been decided--when one side had broken and begun to run, and the other side moved in to mop up."

    Thank you Dr. Friday for taking the time to answer my questions, but I'm afraid I have more. Your above quote conflicts with other things I have read. I was under the impression that there were samurai on the battlefield who were not officers, but merely members of an individual military unit. These soldiers, members of the samurai class, fought either mountedor on foot.

    I can site a few sources for this:

    In G. Cameron Hurst's Armed Martial arts of Japan, he states on page 39 that the "lower-ranking warriors and ashigaru" who fought "on foot and (wore) lightweight armor" were the ones who had to master the use of sword and spear because they were the ones most likely to employ such skills in battle. He goes on to say that the great swordsmen of the day who started the various ryuha were among the lower-ranking warrior numbers.

    Steven Turnbull, in his Samurai Warfare and The Samurai Sourcebook, mentions units of foot samurai many times and almost all of the painted skrolls and woodblock prints in his books depicting various Sengoku period battles show such corps of samurai fighting on foot or on horseback in the manner of regular soldiers.

    I could even site Akira Kurosawa's movie "Ran," which shows several samurai armies that have mounted and foot samurai units, the members of which are clearly not officers, but are merely "grunts." I know it is only a movie, but I am sure Kurosawa and his production team strove to achieve as much historical accuracy as possible.

    There are others, but I do not feel like going through all of my books right now and these should suffice to demonstrate where I received the impression that there existed a non-officer class of samurai during the sixteenth century.

    So the questions are, 1) do you disagree with all of these sources that there was such a thing as a non-officer samurai in sixteenth-century Japan; and 2) if these sources are mistaken, then are there any reliable books in English that deal with the make-up of samurai armies and the functions of the different parts of said armies?

    I thank you in advance Dr Friday and hope very much that you will take the time once again to answer my queries and ease my confused mind!

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    Ben Johanson wrote:

    "Why did they embark on musha shugyo and engage in one-on-one dueling as a means of improving their combative skills for the battlefield if one-on-one combat was never a significant part of Japanese warfare?"

    I that think that although sengoku era battles may have been tactically, and practically decided primarily by lower-ranking ashigaru with bows (and spears), and later even non-samurai participants wielding muskets and such, I think the point is that higher ranking bushi directed the initial movements of these troops using strategy learned from the study of sword and spearmanship.

    Karl Friday wrote: "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."

    Prof Friday, wouldn't it be more correct to say that although one-on-one combat was not a decisive factor in Japanese warfare, it was still a significant part for those samurai who participated in those battles?

    I guess I'm thinking that one-on-one combat skills WERE still a significant part of Japanese warfare (even if not decisive). As you also pointed out, the higher-ranked samurai still had to charge into the melee along with their troops and clean up.

    As professional warriors weren't they still expected to distinguish themselves in battle and make a name for themselves? Assuming they survived the intitial, decisive exchanges of projectile weapons, didn't their professional livelihood (as well as their personal survival) depend on their close quarter skills during the succeeding charges and retreats?

    The experience gained in those battles and training in whatever ryuha they did would naturally form the basis of how they would direct their troops in later battles and campaigns would it not?

    Karl Friday wrote:

    "For another, in Japan, as in many premodern military cultures, personal military skills were seen as a microcosm of group-oriented ones. Directing a squad or a company was believed to be essentially just a larger-scale application of the same principles involved in fighting a single opponent. So study of kenjutsu and sojutsu was also a route to mastery of strategy and tactics."

    I think this answer nails it. Many schools of swordsmanship were also thought of as hyoho/heiho. The principles of strategy and swordsmanship were deemed to be identical. Examples of this are found in the writings and even names of many schools such as Hyoho Niten Ichi-ryu (Musashi's school), Yagyu Shinkage-ryu Hyoho, Asayama Ichiden-ryu Heiho, Tatsumi-ryu Hyoho, etc...

    My own experience in Daito-ryu also reflects this microcosm idea as well. Daito-ryu is said to originally have been a school of strategy whose principles were the basis of it's jujutsu, aikijujutsu, and weapons tactics. Many of Sokaku Takeda's students were military officers and politicians who were interested in studying Daito-ryu specifically for it's strategy.

    We may not study group battlefield tactics anymore per se, but the principles of our techniques allude to it, just as the principles of strategy and group tactics also illustrate many characteristics of Daito-ryu techniques. I can recall a number of times that my sensei actually explained principles of techniques he was teaching in terms of battlefield strategy & tactics, and I often use the same examples (and others I learned implicitly) as well.

    I would suspect that this microcosm concept was actually widely accepted, and used by bushi during the sengoku era, but that the number of those who understood it may have declined during more peaceable times along with the shifting emphasis in bujutsu toward spiritual/self-development rather than achieving practical military or political objectives. Arts that emphasize only self-defense techniques or techniques for winning duels may fail to grasp the underlying principles and their wider application.

    Throughout history many of the greatest swordsmen and strategists have lamented those that failed to make that distinction. I think this concept is further validated even now, by guys like James Williams and Ken Good who regularly teach the wider application of these sort of principles derived from aikijujutsu and kenjutsu to modern special forces and such.

    In addition to the principles of strategy, and techniques taught in the various koryu, I think the whole mindset taught in koryu was invaluable to the bushi who were participating in battles.

    It's a known fact that mindset is more important than techniques in combat, and I'm sure that the bushi knew this. The most famous, and most skilled founders and teachers of the koryu arts all certainly knew this, and often it was a mindset, attitude, or set of attributes that they most tried to convey as the "secret essence" of their art or secret(s) of obtaining victory.

    I think that originally, the role of one-on-one kata in the koryu was primarily intended to teach the principles and mindset necessary to prevail in combat on the battlefield, more than to teach tactics to merely defeat an opponent. The one-on-one kata was to be a vehicle for achieving skills for the battlefield, a means toward an end (of achieving objectives). I don't believe the founders of the koryu envisioned their kata as ends in themselves, strictly for winning one-on-one encounters or duels. Nor do I think the bushi who trained in them felt they were insignificant. I think they saw their arts pragmatically as vehicles of preparation for both their roles in society and on the battlefield as professional warriors.

    I don't think the daimyo would've expected the samurai of their domains to study and train under the most skilled and experienced instructors they could find and/or afford, if the arts and skills those instructors were teaching weren't of significant value to their their bushi on the battlefield, and the security of their domains, not to mention their personal/political ambitions.

    These are just my lowly opinions of course, as others have also sometimes said, I reserve the right to change them at a future time if convinced that would be more appropriate.

    Brently Keen
    Last edited by Brently Keen; 24th August 2001 at 11:05.

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    Originally posted by ben johanson
    I was under the impression that there were samurai on the battlefield who were not officers, but merely members of an individual military unit. These soldiers, members of the samurai class, fought either mountedor on foot.
    I think your confusion is coming from the word "samurai." This is a broad, and rather ambiguous word, particularly when applied to the warriors of the pre-Tokugawa era. There was no "samurai class" until the Tokugawa regime defined it; before that, a warrior was anyone who chose to be one.

    As I said in my earlier post, the group that springs to most people's minds when they hear the word "samurai" were the officer class of medieval armies--the middle and upper ranked warriors. But the term can also be used to refer to much lower-ranked warriors--including most of the ashigaru level fighting men.

    I don't see any conflict between anything I've said and what Hurst or Turnbull say--except, possibly, the point about the relative unimportance of hand-to-hand combat in deciding battles, which comes from the most recent work on the topic appearing in Japan, since Hurst and Turnbull's stuff was written.

    Kurosawa, on the other hand, needs to be taken with a huge grain of salt--as numerous authorities have pointed out over the years. His battle scenes are colorful and fun, but they are staged with the priority on visual appear--good cinema--not accurate history. Japanese armies didn't look like that (among other things, units didn't wear uniform colored armor), Japanese horses didn't look like that, and cavalry of the sort depicted in Kurosawa movies (such as Kage Musha) never existed in Japan.
    Karl Friday
    Dept. of History
    University of Georgia
    Athens, GA 30602

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    Originally posted by Brently Keen
    Karl Friday wrote: "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."

    ... wouldn't it be more correct to say that although one-on-one combat was not a decisive factor in Japanese warfare, it was still a significant part for those samurai who participated in those battles?

    I guess I'm thinking that one-on-one combat skills WERE still a significant part of Japanese warfare (even if not decisive). As you also pointed out, the higher-ranked samurai still had to charge into the melee along with their troops and clean up.

    As professional warriors weren't they still expected to distinguish themselves in battle and make a name for themselves? Assuming they survived the intitial, decisive exchanges of projectile weapons, didn't their professional livelihood (as well as their personal survival) depend on their close quarter skills during the succeeding charges and retreats?
    Warriors certainly did get involved in close-quarters fighting during early and late medieval Japanese battles, but my point was in reference to the image of bushi deliberately squaring off to fight as individuals. That rarely, if ever, happened. The common pattern, from the earliest samurai battles onward, was for warriors to fight in small groups and teams. During the later medieval period, group tactics became increasingly sophisticated and larger scale.

    As to the expectation of bushi distinguishing themselves in the fighting, the answer is yes and no. Certainly the broad social ethic among warriors was to seek individual glory. (In fact, Suzuki Shin'ya argues quite persuasively that this penchant for showing off and for collecting heads was the key reason that warriors engaged in as much hand-to-hand fighting as they did--running down and finishing off opponents who were already in flight.) But it also appears to have been the bane of medieval commanders. From the 14th century onward, you find repeated injunctions issued to troops not to collect heads and such!

    I suspect this situation was kind of analogous to what goes on in modern team sports: Basketball players love to showboat, since that's what gets them noticed and hence gets them scholarships, constracts and big bucks; but coaches generally hate it when their players hog the ball, take unnecessary shots at 3-pointers, and the like.
    Karl Friday
    Dept. of History
    University of Georgia
    Athens, GA 30602

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    Dr. Friday:

    While it is of course somewhat silly to use modern films as evidence of what medieval Japanese battles loooked like, I have a couple of questions:

    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?

    2) What did medieval Japanese cavalry actually look like, then, if the depicition of it in modern films is innaccurate?

    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?
    Earl Hartman

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