LITMIR.BIZ

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after the Battle of Azukashiyama in 1189, while a thirteenth-century warrior called Obusuma Saburō liked to maintain a steady supply of fresh heads hanging on the fence surrounding the riding field of his home.⁴⁰ Given the importance of the custom, it is not surprising that a little deception was sometimes practiced, but to have five different heads displayed, each with the name of the same man, was to invite considerable ridicule:

      Suda and Takahashi galloped through the capital gathering up the heads of the wounded and dead men from ditches here and there, and hung them up in rows at the Rokujō river bed, eight hundred and seventy-three of them. Yet not so many of the enemy had been struck down. Some were merely heads brought forth by Rokuhara warriors who had not joined in the fighting, but sought to gain honour for themselves, heads of commoners from the capital and other places, labelled with various names. Among them were five heads labelled, “The lay monk Akamatsu Enshin” which were all hung up in the same way, since all of them were heads of unknown men. Seeing them, the urchins of the capital laughed.⁴¹

      The main focus of head collection, however, came after a battle, when most of the ritual surrounding a victory celebration concerned the formal inspection of the heads by the victorious general. He would sit in state, and one by one the heads would be brought before him for comment. These ceremonies appear to have been quite informal affairs until the fourteenth century. The Mōko Shūrai Ekotoba shows head inspection taking place during the Mongol invasions. The heads, from which blood is still seeping, have been casually placed on the ground.⁴² The ceremony later grew into one of considerable formality, to which the victorious commander would give his full attention—a matter that proved to be the undoing of Imagawa Yoshimoto in 1560. He was so engrossed in head viewing that he suffered a surprise attack, and a few hours later it was his own head that was being viewed by someone else!

      The press of battle often left little opportunity for anything other than simple head identification. The formalities had to wait until later, and during the Age of Warring States it became most undesirable for a daimyō to be presented with an untidy trophy. Prior to his inspection, the heads would be washed, the hair combed, and the resulting trophy made presentable with cosmetics, tasks traditionally done by women. The heads would then be mounted on a spiked wooden board with red labels for identification. This act of cleaning the heads was in part a sign of respect for fallen warriors. It also represented a tribute to the victors’ pride as men who could defeat heroic enemies.

      An obsessive concentration on head collection could, of course, be detrimental to the course of a battle. If one’s finest warriors were expected to quit the field with their trophies or spend time in collection, then the army’s progress would be unnecessarily slowed. One samurai was felled by an arrow while taking a head.⁴³ We therefore read of prohibitions on head taking, and the substitution of written reports on battlefield glory. Heads might therefore be cut off, recorded, and then discarded. One warrior even contented himself with a piece of his enemy’s armor as a trophy because the fighting was so fierce.⁴⁴ Time was far better spent in following the general’s plan of victory than in furthering one’s own reputation.

      Yet in spite of the evident quality of Japanese swords the style of samurai warfare during the fourteenth and early fifteenth century remained very similar to that employed in previous conflicts. Thomas Conlan’s fascinating study of the Nambokuchō Wars shows that the bow remained the dominant weapon, because arrows caused on average 73 percent of all wounds. These wounds, however, were not necessarily lethal, a conclusion that is supported by the image of the monk Jomyō at the Battle of Uji in 1180 counting sixty-three arrows or arrow wounds in his armor or his body. In Conlan’s fourteenth-century example, one Imagawa Yorikuni required twenty arrows to finish him off.⁴⁵ Wounds could, however, be cumulative in their effects, so that Wada Takanori was unable to see properly because his wounds had not healed from a previous battle. Takeda Gorō was unable to hold a sword because of his damaged fingers, but went into battle regardless.⁴⁶

      Swords were still primarily a weapon for use while dismounted. Many of the battles of the Nambokuchō Wars were fought in wooded and mountainous terrain, where horses were not appropriate, making swords the weapon of choice. Also, the sight of a naked tachi blade being swung close to a horse’s head might cause the mount to buck and throw off its rider, so it was sometimes better to dismount first. Just as in the case of the “little ships” raids against the Mongols, the choice of weaponry depended upon circumstances, and the samurai had to be willing to adapt. Horsemen could still easily overcome infantry when out in the open, and one account notes that “the strongest soldiers cannot withstand the bite of arrows, nor can the fastest of men outrun a horse.”⁴⁷ Mounted archers naturally preferred open ground on which to operate, and one reason for the frequent reference to arson in the chronicles was the need to create such an open space artificially. A horseman could then ride around, picking off foot soldiers at will.

      Yet at this point in history came the greatest challenge so far to traditional samurai cavalry tactics. Generals realized that one way to use the numerous foot soldiers in their armies was to take away their edged weapons and give them bows to pour volleys of arrows into the enemy, much as the Mongol archers had done. This was the complete antithesis of the notion of the elite mounted archer delivering one arrow with great precision—and, of course, enemy mounted archers provided excellent targets for this new technique. The practice also implies a better organization of foot soldiers and an increase in discipline. If these factors could be achieved, then a general would possess an ordered infantry corps for the first time since the days of the conscript armies. A samurai galloping forward and loosing a few arrows into a mass of disciplined foot archers was unlikely to discourage them, and they would reply with scores of arrows of their own. The Taiheiki refers to these lower-class archers as shashu no ashigaru (“light foot shooters”), the first use in Japanese history of the term ashigaru, a word that was later to be adopted to describe all infantry troops. Out of two thousand men who fought for the Sasaki at the battle of Shijo Nawate in 1348, eight hundred were these “light archers.”⁴⁸ Such mass firing of arrows is implied in the following account that describes what happened when some samurai horse-men of the Hosokawa were trapped on the edge of Lake Biwa and came under fire from men in boats:

      They could not pass to the north because they had not finished burning the dwellings of Otsu. A deep lake to the east was likewise impassable, forcing the Hosokawa army to advance in single file along a narrow road. The enemy rowed parallel to the Hosokawa and shot them from the side, killing five hundred in all.⁴⁹

      The taking of a victim’s head, from a painted scroll of the Battle of Ichinotani in the Watanabe Museum, Tottori.

      Chapter 3

      SWORD AND SPEAR

      So far in this book, the samurai swordsman has proved to be a somewhat elusive character who greatly prefers his role as a mounted archer and delivers death from a distance, rather than close at hand. When forced by circumstances both to dismount and to discard his bow, he wields the world’s finest edged weapon and is very proficient in its use, but accounts of its employment are tantalizingly few. Even the Mongol invasions provide no overall change to this pattern. Sword use against the invaders is decisive and dramatic, but the employment of swords rather than bows is dictated totally by circumstances and runs contrary to the prevailing mood. For a major change in weaponry to occur, we must wait for a social change, and the first stirrings of one are discernible during the fifteenth century.

      We noted earlier how the greatest of the Ashikaga shoguns, Ashikaga Yoshimitsu (1358 – 1408), had ended the Nambokuchō Wars and restored relations with Ming China, but his descendants were not to enjoy such glory, and the last century of the Ashikaga dynasty witnessed the total collapse of their authority. The Ashikaga shoguns had followed a policy of decentralization, so that military governors, or shugo, ruled the provinces of Japan on their behalf. Many shugo were samurai aristocrats who had ruled their provinces for centuries and had submitted to the Ashikaga. The system worked well until the mid-fifteenth century, when a dispute over the succession to the shogunate led to a number of prominent shugo taking opposing sides and resorting to violence.

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