LITMIR.BIZ

      The archer Minamoto Tametomo, who fought during the attack on the Shirakawa Palace in the Hogen Incident of 1156, was renowned both for his skill and for his immense strength. In this print, we see him on his island of exile, but his bow is still ready for action.

      Pausing a moment, he let it off whistling. Piercing unchecked the breastplate of Itō Roku who was in the lead, the arrow passed on the other side through the left sleeve of Itō Go and stuck in the lining of his armour. Rokurō fell dead on the spot.¹⁹

      Later in the same action:

      His first arrow having missed, Koreyuki was fitting the second to his string when Tametomo drew his bow to the full and fired with a whiz. The shot went through from the front bow of Yamada Kosaburō’s saddle, passing through the armour skirts and hitting the rear bow, and the point stuck out more than three inches on the other side. For a moment he seemed to be staying in the saddle, held up by the arrow. Then when he fell headlong to the left, the arrowhead remained in the saddle, and the horse galloped towards the riverbed.²⁰

      Minamoto Tametomo is also credited with using a bow and arrow to sink a ship full of Taira samurai, as a gesture of defiance, immediately before he committed suicide. The massive arrowhead struck the overloaded boat just above the waterline and split the planking!²¹

      The Samurai Battle

      A samurai battle would traditionally begin by the firing of signal arrows high into the air over the enemy lines. Each signal arrow had a large, bulblike, perforated wooden head that whistled as it flew through the air. The sound was a call to the kami, to draw their attention to the great deeds of bravery that were about to be performed by rival warriors. The two armies would then clash, and it is concerning this phase of a battle that the gunkimono can be most misleading. Heike Monogatari gives the impression that what followed was a series of almost exclusively individual combats between worthy opponents, who sought each other out by issuing a verbal challenge that involved reciting one’s exploits and pedigree. The challenge would be answered from within the opposing army, providing a recognized mechanism whereby only worthy opponents would meet in combat. This process, the stock in trade of the traditional samurai image, has recently been discussed critically and convincingly by Karl Friday.²² Leaving aside the obvious difficul-ties of being able to conduct verbal negotiations among the din of battle, there are in fact very few examples in the gunkimono where elaborate declarations are recorded. Instead, a more likely scenario is that samurai, when entering a battle situation, shouted out their names as war cries. Also, as Friday cleverly points out, “in any given pairing of warriors, one of the challengers would always have been a worthwhile adversary for the other,” and would be most unlikely to let the occasion pass if the other disdained his challenge! He concludes by suggesting that name calling and pedigree recitations were general, rather than specific challenges.²³

      The recital of pedigrees is only one aspect of samurai combat that had a ritualized form, which again has led to the misunderstanding that battles themselves were largely ritual-istic affairs: mock battles where honor could be satisfied without actually killing anyone. In fact there is only one encounter in Heike Monogatari that can be regarded as a ritualized battle, and this is the archery duel, and the series of challenges that followed it, at the Battle of Kurikara (also known as the Battle of Tonamiyama) in 1183, but on this occasion the madness had method in it. Minamoto Yoshinaka planned to divide his forces and surround the Taira army, but how was he to cover these movements and hold the Taira in position? His solution was to conceal his maneuvers by fighting a battle, but a battle so formal and so stylized that there would be no risk of his side being defeated. Nor would there be any opportunity for the Taira to realize that the whole purpose was to confine them to this small area until night fell. The trick worked, and the Taira samurai gave it their full concentration, hoping thereby to earn a name for themselves in the epic poetry that would be written about the event in the future. As Heike Monogatari relates, the Minamoto “purposely avoided a decision.”²⁴

      A suit of armor opened out flat, from a military manual.

      Taira Tomomori, defeated at the battle of Dannoura in 1185, prepares to drown himself, tied to a massive anchor.

      The cruel reality of samurai warfare could not have been further from the notion of battle as a ritualized set piece. Yoshinaka’s illustrious predecessor Minamoto Tametomo believed that surprise was essential to victory, particularly when fire was involved:

      Whether to break strong positions though surrounded by the enemy, or to destroy the enemy when attacking a fortified place, in any case there is nothing equal to night attack to achieve victory. Therefore if we bear down on the Takamatsu Palace immediately, set fire to it on three sides and hold them in check on the fourth side, those who escape fire cannot escape arrows, and those who escape arrows cannot escape fire.²⁵

      Konjaku Monogatari shows one encounter beginning with clear enthusiasm for the element of surprise that the situation offered:

      As he advanced Yogo had a man sent ahead with orders to search out carefully where Sawamata was and report back. The scout came running back and said, “They are in a meadow with a marsh on the south face of that hill over there. They’ve been eating and drinking sake; some are lying down, and some seem to be sick.” Yogo was delighted to hear this and he commanded his men, “Just hit them fast.”²⁶

      In the Azuma Kagami, the sequence of events in a battle may be traced in all its savagery and confusion, from the use of deception at the start:

      The complete antithesis to the “super-swordsman” is Mionoya Juro of Musashi. He had his horse shot from under him during the Battle of Yashima in 1184. He was attacked by a samurai with

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