Some General Thoughts on Japanese History, Budo and Bushido

[TEA]

I'm new here and on the other MA boards, so forgive me if this has been covered before. I keep seeing references in various threads to the various MA that we study and its application on the "battlefield." In one recent thread, it was pointed out that unarmed combat was highly unlikely on the battlefields of Japan, so to speak of the historical battlefields of Japan with regards to that particular budo is somewhat ahistorical. I posit that the same could be said to a lesser degree for a lot weapons arts that we train in if we are thinking about the Sengoku-Jidai (Warring States or Country at War Period) battlefields that culmanated in Tokugawa Ieyasu wiping out the remnants of the Toyotomi clan in Osaka-jo in 1615. By that time, the two dominant weapons on the battlefield were the pike and matchlock musket (actually the arquebus). As with the European battlefield at roughly the same time, the development of large armies of pike wielding infantry with smaller formations of supporting arquebus toting infantry (as an interesting side note, Hideyoshi was the first general in to develop the concept of volley fire) rendered the mounted samurai/knight obsolete and relegated them to a supporting role on the battlefield. Prior to this, the mounted samurai's primary weapon was the bow, not the sword. The sword was a back up weapon.

So, why is the sword the weapon we most associate with the samurai? Why don't we learn the arquebus and pike in our dojo? The answers to that question have a lot to do with the social controls pioneered by Hideyoshi and perfected by Ieyasu and his sons.

One of these was hei no bunri (seperating warriors from farmers). One of the greatest contributors to the breakdown of the previous bakufu and the outbreak of 100 years of civil war was the rise of landed samurai and independent warlords as the centuries old shoen system (system of tax exempt holdings, such as farms, fishing villages and timber producing areas held by members of court and religious institutions - the samurai class in part arose as the armed administrators of these holdings) collapsed and the local samurai took control of these assets. This provided these jizamurai (lit. "landed samurai") with and independent economic base. The more assets a jizamurai controlled, the more power he had. Gain enough titles (myo ) to enough assets and a jizamurai could become a daimyo . The three ways to increase one's assets were to either to invade one's neighbors and seize their assets, ally oneself to a more powerful jizamurai or daimyo (thus becoming his vassal) who was invading his neighbors and would reward you with a piece of the pie for your support, or to betray your this more powerful jizamurai or daimyo (i.e. your overlord) at an opportune time and supplant him. This last method was so common that it had a name, gekokujo(lit. "low overthrowing the high") and was used somewhat synomously with the age. This is a bit of an oversimplification, as it does not discuss the shugo daimyo, but its good enough to get where we're going with this thread - i.e. why do we study what we study in our respective dojo.

Hideyoshi himself came from a low ranking jizamurai family (most jizamurai were little more than wealthy farmers who took up arms to better their position in the world) and came to powere through a combination of all three of these methods. He was also determined to make sure that no one else followed his path to power, as that would be a threat to him. Moreover, gekokojo posed a threat to his allies/vassals, so it was in his interest to eliminate this practice in order to ensure a reliable base of support. To this end, he began the process of hei no bunri. The first two steps in this process that he began were to ban non-samurai from carrying weapons and to implement a cadastral survey of all of the rice producing land under his control to standardize the tax system. What does this cadastral survey have to do with heinobunri ? By creating a uniform tax system, his goal was to pay the samurai stipends/salaries and move them off of the land, thus eliminating the jizamurai and their independent economic base. Hideyoshi died before he had a chance to finalize heinobunri and it was left to Tokugawa Ieyasu and his sons to finalize once they did their own bit of gekokujo and wiped out Hideyoshi's heirs and his entire clan.

Once in power, the Tokugawa continued heinobunri by completing the cadastral surveys of all of Japan and giving all of the jizamurai a choice: either give up their weapons and return to their farms as commoners or to move into the castle towns of their daimyo, give up their lands and live on a stipend/salary based on their status and the assessed rice production of their daimyo's domain. This choice would be binding on all of the jizamurai's descendents as well, thus creating a caste system. Once established, the sword became the symbol of status for the new ruling class, as only samurai were allowed to carry the longer of the two swords.

Another social control that was implemented by the Tokugawas shoguns was the bukeshohato, which was a set of laws that governed the behavior of the buke (i.e. samurai class), especially the behaviour of the daimyo . The daimyo were forbidden from building any new castles (except for the three new castles for the Tokugawa family in Edo, Osaka and Himeji that they were all required to contribute labor and materials to build), from making or importing any firearms, from conducting any military exercizes with their troops, or making war upon each other without permission from the Shogun (fat chance). As a result, the two most dominant technologies on the Sengoku battlefied soon became obsolete or irrelevent, as their successul implementation on the battlefield requires training troops as a body and not developing individual martial skills.

Additionally, samurai themselves were prohibited from fighting unless given permission by the Shogun. The reason for this last was to prevent vendetas that could undermine the stable and peaceful social order that the Tokugawa were trying to create. Yes, I know, we all here about duels like those of Miyamoto Musashi; however, these duels would have been illegal and became extremely uncommon once the first generation of samurai who had been actual warriors died off and a new generation of urban samurai who were in effect paid not to fight became the norm. It was after the establishment of the Pax Tokugawa that the idea of training in budo as a means of cultivating self improvement rather than as a means of self preservation arose. It was also at this time that the art of swordsmanship took on the role as the most revered of the samurai martial arts in both the dojo and in literature.

I'm not an expert on koryu arts and jujitsu, so someone please correct me if I'm wrong, but it is my understanding that it is also at this time that the study of unarmed combat became more prevalent, as regulations within daimyo and the Shogun's residences would have generally precluded the use of the sword. Moreover, the heinobunri policy of paying samurai stipends based upon the assessed rice production of the respective domains at the time that age of civil wars passed had a couple of fatal flaws in it that had the side result of spreading the practice of the samurai's martial arts to commoners in the cities. First, once the wars ended rice production greatly increased, doubling within the first generation after Sekigahara. This caused an inflationary cycle that saw the real value of the samurai's income cut in half. In addition, the buying and selling of rice was controlled by the merchant class; thus the samurai's conversion of their rice stipend to cash was outside of their control and was at the mercy of fluctations in the market. As a result, by the middle of the Tokugawa period many samurai were forced to sell their titles and become commoners. Some of these samurai marketed their martial arts skills and opened up commercial dojos. I think that it was in these samurai founded commercial dojos, which sold samurai skills to the despised merchant class, that probably placed the biggest emphasis on unarmed methods of combat or on using non-edged weapons like the bo and jo, since commoners could not carry swords. So, in essence, what we think of as budo (the way of of war) today has more to do with the imposition of peace than it does to war.

As for Bushido, it too was a product of Pax Tokugawa. As discussed earlier, during the Sengoku period, gekokujo was the norm, not the idea of faithfully serving one's lord unto death. Even prior to the Sengoku period, the Ashikawa had come to power by betraying the Emperor, and even the Miyamoto's rise to power could be construed as an act of les majeste. Its ironic that the opening lines of Hagakure, "the way of the warrior lies in death," were written by a samurai of a daimyo who was on the losing side at Sekigahara. If this guy was such an expert, then he should never have lived long enough to pen (OK, brush) those words because he should have either died on the battlefield in defense of his lord or committed seppuku afterwards out of shame for his failure. The Tokugawa shogunate encouraged the writing of such tracts because it helped provide a moral foundation for the social order that they forged.

The tale of the 47 Ronin is so famous because it was such and aboration. It was like a living example of Kings Arthur's noble knights throne into the court of Louis XIV or Catherine the Great. Even Saikaku, who wrote the first popular account of this vendetta, seems to be aware of the irony in many of the passages of Chushingura. The more "standard" interpretation of this incident as being symbolic of the "true" nature of bushido is more of a product of the Meiji Restoration and the Japanese militarism of the mid-20th Century. Bushido, like Chivalry, is a code that was written by the descendents of those that never practiced it.

[Dan Harden]

Interesting
This has been covered here many times by experts in their fields. While I agree and have no cause or background to disagree with what is being presented. Where then, did the "martial arts" involving everything NOT associated with the weapons most commonly associated with battlefields; arrows,guns,spear, etc. come from?
Thin air?
Bored barracks time?
Made up of whole cloth and never, or even rarely tested? Or accounted for and discussed in a referenced and reasoned necessity for their time.

Where do some of the supposed historical records of injuries play-in? We have read that the injuries were mainly stones, arrows, guns, and spears. What are we missing? why haev the arts for jujutsu and sword been those most commonly passed down?
Are they (the sword ad jujutsu arts) for all practical reasons, always been as useless (in a way) as they are today?
So were the samurai- decent tactically- but all these arts are and were nothing more than local Bushi's equivalent of a mall Karate kids dream of being a warrior? A dream or teaching of a forest sprite?

No disrespect meant or intended But as more and more get discussed and broken down, no one offers any rationale for where the veracity or soundness of these skills truly lie.


I cannot help but feel that something is missing.
cheers
Dan

[nicojo]

I cannot help but feel that something is missing.

I don't know anything myself, but sometimes I feel like these arts resemble complex systems in that they create something greater than can be analyzed from their parts alone. "Emergent properties", as it were. Some background: wikipedia: Systems theory and wikipedia: Complex system since I don't have any time or academic training in this to develop anything right now. I'm most likely wrong anyway.

It's that, I don't know, how you say...je ne sais quois, that keeps me interested in all of it, at least.

But as more and more get discussed and broken down, no one offers any rationale for where the veracity or soundness of these skills truly lie.

I would say this is a problem of the analytical structure we use here--it has its benefits, and its limits.

[TEA]

why haev the arts for jujutsu and sword been those most commonly passed down? Are they (the sword ad jujutsu arts) for all practical reasons, always been as useless (in a way) as they are today?
So were the samurai- decent tactically- but all these arts are and were nothing more than local Bushi's equivalent of a mall Karate kids dream of being a warrior? A dream or teaching of a forest sprite?

My point is not that these arts weren't studied prior to Pax Tokugawa, but that the emphasis and importance placed on them is a bi-product of Pax Tokugawa. In a civil society, training for unarmed combat becomes more important as one is much more likely to find oneself unarmed or in a situation where using weapons may have negative legal repurcussions than one does in a society at war. For example, it'd be more important to learn how to use and AK-47 or an 88mm mortar than jujitsu in the DR Congo or the Sudan than in NYC, but jujitsu would be more useful to learn in NYC than and AK-47 or 88mm mortar. Both are skill sets that are useful for soldiers to train in, but one is more useful in a civil society than in a society at war.

As for kenjitsu, I'm not arguing that samurai didn't train in how to use the sword just because it wasn't their primary weapon. That would be like arguing that a modern soldier doesn't learn how to shoot a handgun because his primary weapon is a tank, mortar or rifle. However, in our civil society, when that soldier is not on the battlefield, he is infinately more likely to use his handgunning skills than call in close an air strike. During Pax Tokugawa, the sword not only became the primary personal defense weapon of the samurai, but because of hei no bunri it also became a status symbol, so training in kenjitsu took on more importance than its practical application on the battlefield warranted.

I guess what I'm trying to get at is that the terms "budo" and "martial art" are somewhat of misnomers, because most of the martial arts that we train in reached there apoge as training for self defense and personal/spiritual growth not for the battlefield but for civil society. The last idea in particular, that of the fighting arts as a means to cultivate personal and spiritual growth, is most associated with either Budhist monks or Tokugawa period samurai being paid to not fight.