The Fate of the Vanquished
Greater differences between knights and samurai arise when we turn from the technology of the military revolution to its more personal expression. Medieval Europe espoused the great tradition of ransom, and the high prices that could be asked for a captured nobleman made the wholesale slaughter of knights an economic nonsense. When the King of France was captured at Poitiers in 1356 he was almost crushed to death in the scrum of Englishmen eager to claim him as a prize, and his eventual redemption almost bankrupted his kingdom. Yet by the beginning of the 16th century this tradition was beginning to fade. The mass and often anonymous slaughter by arquebus and cannon made the capture of a particularly valuable individual a difficult matter. Prisoners of high rank also tended to be claimed by the government rather than his actual captor, so the rewards were much less when filtered down through the hierarchy. With such incentives gone, savagery could flourish, and when the Swiss castle of Grandson was tricked into surrendering to the Burgundians in 1476 the entire garrison were either drowned in the lake or hanged from the walnut trees on its shore. When the Swiss took their revenge no quarter was either asked or expected. The Burgundian garrison of the recaptured Grandson were all flung to their deaths from the battlements except for one nobleman who pleaded that he was worth trying to ransom.
Ransom for money was unknown in Japan, and the closest parallel to it was the practice of hostage taking, although warriors defeated on a battlefield were rarely taken captive. Instead the hostages were usually members of a lord's family, whose throats could be cut at the least sign of resistance, and peace was frequently concluded by an exchange of family prisoners. With the establishment of the Tokugawa Shogunate something resembling a national hostage scheme was set up when the daimyô's families were required to reside in the Shogun's capital as a guarantee of good behaviour.
When battles occurred in Japan the samurai collected heads rather than living bodies, severed heads being the time-honoured proof of duty done and the finest invoice for payment to present to one's lord. Yet here too the Sengoku Jidai (the 'Age of War', i.e. the 16th century) saw changes. Instead of beheading the defeated the Japanese began to recycle them. The hoary myth of a samurai's undying and unflinching loyalty to his lord, which had a basis in solid fact, ran into difficulties when that lord was either defeated or dead, or both. Contrary to the popular view, samurai warfare rarely ended with acts of either mass slaughter or mass seppuku (suicide). Defeated daimyô were often encouraged to surrender their territories for the guarantee of having their original holdings returned to them in exchange for a pledge of allegiance. A good example is the process by which Takeda Shingen expanded his domains. Rivals such as the Sanada of Shinano were first defeated then absorbed, and their leaders took their places among the Takeda 'Twenty-Four Generals', Shingen's most trusted retainers. When the Takeda were defeated in their turn in 1582, many of their number passed over into the service of the victorious Tokugawa.
There were, however, many times in Japanese warfare when the demands of personal glory or the need for security made the absorption of an enemy impractical, and in these conditions head collecting still continued with undiminished fervour. A good example is found in the account of the taking of the Korean castle of Namwon in 1597 by Okochi Hidemoto. After scaling the walls the Japanese assault party were faced with a counter-attack from mounted men, yet even in all this confusion and danger personal achievement was all important, in particular over the samurai obsession with taking one's opponent's head:
Using his two shaku one sun blade Okochi cut at the right groin of the enemy on horseback and he tumbled down. As his groin was excruciatingly painful from this one assault the enemy fell off on the left hand side. There were some samurai standing nearby and three of them struck at the mounted enemy to take his head. Four men had now cut him down, but as his plan of attack had been that the abdominal cut would make him fall off on the left, Okochi came running round so that he would not be deprived of his head.
Okochi Hidemoto' s master, Ota Kazuyoshi, is also honoured as follows during the siege of Ulsan in 1598:
Afterwards they performed the head inspection ceremony for the men's eleven meritorious heads. Kato Kiyomasa's men had taken one head. Asano Nagayoshi's men had taken one head, but Ota Kazuyoshi's men had taken a total of nine heads. Everyone inside the castle noticed this and praised him, saying, 'While Kiyomasa owns half of Higo province, and Nagayoshi owns the whole province of Kai, they only took one head each, yet Kazuyoshi is a person of low degree and has taken nine heads. Indeed, he conducts himself as a fine, brave samurai.'
Yet even the practice of head collection is not without its parallels in Europe. The Venetians employed Albanian light cavalrymen, called stradiots, as mercenaries and paid them one ducat for every enemy head they brought back. At the battle of Fornovo in 1495 one stradiot, despairing of being able to find a French head for his reward cut off instead the head of a local priest and claimed it as a warrior's.
The Treatment of Civilians
In all ages war has brought death and destruction to those unfortunate enough to be caught up in its wake. The Black Prince's chevauchée raids caused terror in 14th-century France. In 1544 the Earl of Surrey said to Henry VIII that 'Edinburgh had been well burnt', and in Ireland in 1593 Sir Arthur Chichester recorded the following about a raid along Lough Neagh: 'We have killed above one hundred people of all sorts, besides such as were burnt, how many I know not. We spare none of what quality or sex soever, and it has bred much terror in the people, who heard not a drum nor saw not a fire there for a long time.'
The depredations sometimes inflicted upon the inhabitants of a defeated or surrendered town could be much worse. The sack of Antwerp by the Spanish in 1576 was an orgy of rape and plunder which led to the loss of 7,000 lives, and when Maastricht fell in 1579 one-third of the city's women and children were slaughtered on the spot or died from the brutalities inflicted upon them.
A comparison with Japan, however, throws up a very different claim with respect to the samurai tradition. This belief states that because nearly all their wars were civil wars, then not only were the samurai no worse than their Europeans counterparts, they were actually much better. As the oppressed peasant could easily cross a provincial border to till the fields of an enemy, so the argument goes, there was no cruelty against civilians. The samurai, therefore, were immune from the tendency to random violence and economic devastation inherent in contemporary Europe. This is a considerable claim to make, and in support of this view it must be admitted that the most dramatic example of a peasant uprising against a cruel daimyô occurred two decades after the civil wars had ceased. This was the Shimabara Rebellion of 1637 to 1638, directed against the tyrant Matsukura Shigemasa, who was given to tying peasants inside straw raincoats and setting fire to them. From this it may be argued that if Matsukura had lived at a time when one's neighbour was by definition one's rival then self-interest alone would have prevented him from acting in such an outrageous manner. The behaviour of Japanese forces abroad during the 20th century is then seen as an aberration of the samurai tradition, and not in any way as its consequence.
It is indeed difficult to tease out much evidence of deliberate civilian casualties from contemporary Japanese writings, though this may simply be that the compilers did not think that such matters were worth recording. In the early war tales we read of civilian houses being set on fire as an act of war by the ruthless rebel Taira Masakado, and similar acts occur during the Gempei Wars, but these incidents tend to be portrayed as the actions of a maverick. When Takeda Shingen was repulsed before Odawara castle in 1569, he burned the town of Odawara before retiring, but when Toyotomi Hideyoshi took Kagoshima in 1587 and Odawara in 1590 there was nothing that remotely resembled the sack of a European town. By contrast, civilian deaths are implied in the accounts of wars conducted against peasant armies, such as Nobunaga's campaign against the Ikkô sectarians or the Shimabara Rebellion, where the distinction between soldier and non-combatant was blurred and the rebels took shelter in fortresses along with their families. The fall of Osaka castle in 1615, where the castle walls surrounded a city, inevitably led to many civilian deaths.
However, the Korean campaign added a different dimension. Here the fortified town often replaced the isolated castle as a battle site, and many civilian deaths must be inferred from the huge number of heads taken at such conflicts as Chinju and Namwon. But the most powerful evidence comes in the form of a unique and little known document. We noted above how Ota Kazuyoshi had taken along with him to Korea the chronicler Okochi Hidemoto.
Ota Kazuyoshi, however, was accompanied not by one chronicler, but by two, because he had also taken along as personal physician and chaplain a Buddhist monk called Keinen. Keinen kept a diary in which he recorded his observations and emotions about the human suffering inflicted on the Korean population. So critical was Keinen that the diary remained unpublished in Japan until 1965.
Keinen's diary entries covering the fall of Namwon castle in 1597 make very different reading when compared to Okochi's account of the same siege. When the castle fell he left the town and saw dead bodies lying near the road like grains of sand. 'My emotions were such that I could not even glance at them.' As he walked further on he found more bodies in nearby houses, 'and this went on into the fields and mountains'. The bodies were of innocent men, women and children. To the samurai chronicler of the Wakizaka family, however, the slaughter was just a further stage of the military operation:
From early dawn of the following morning we gave chase and hunted them in the mountains and scoured the villages for the distance of one day's travel. When cornered, we made a wholesale slaughter of them. During a period of ten days we seized 10,000 of the enemy, but we did not cut off their heads. We cut off their noses, which told us how many heads there were. By this time [Wakizaka] Yasuharu's total of heads was over 2,000.
The collection of noses in lieu of heads was to become a horrid characteristic of the second Korean invasion of 1597—98. The Japanese dictator Toyotomi Hideyoshi, who was growing increasingly insane, insisted upon proof of his soldiers' loyalty and achievements like the reward-giving generals of the ancient civil wars, but the process was hampered by the logistical problems of shipping heads. Hideyoshi therefore began to receive a steady stream of noses, the ghastly trophies being pickled in salt and packed into wooden barrels. Each one was meticulously enumerated and recorded by the yokome-shû (inspectors unit) before leaving Korea. In Japan they were suitably interred in a mound near Hideyoshi's Great Buddha, and there they remain to this day inside Kyoto's least mentioned and most often avoided tourist attraction, the grassy burial mound that bears the erroneous name of Mimizuka, the 'Mound of Ears'.
In spite of there being several references in the diaries of the Korean Admiral Yi Sun-sin to the practice of sending severed Japanese ears to the Korean Court, the practice from the Korean side was confined to soldiers on the battlefield. Keinen's diary, and several other samurai chronicles, confirms that the Japanese carried out the practice on non-combatants. The chronicle of a certain Motoyama contains the stark and unambiguous statement that men and women, down to the newborn infants, everyone was wiped out, no one was left alive.
It is also strange to read in Keinen's diary his evidence of the cruel treatment meted out by the samurai to the Japanese labourers press-ganged into the invading army to complete the building of Ulsan castle. They were forced to work alongside Korean captives and treated equally badly. Their fate stirred Keinen to pity. While recognising that everyone in the Japanese army was involved in the desperate construction programme 'from those who are in the arquebus squads or who wear horô (i.e. the samurai), down to the boatmen and the labourers', Keinen noticed a very different attitude being shown to those who were soldiers and those who were not. 'To prevent carelessness heads are cut off,' he writes, 'but blame is not shared, and to the sorrow of the peasants it is their heads that they cut off and stick up at the crossroads.' In the intense pressure to have the walls of Ulsan finished before the Chinese army arrived, the labourers were clearly regarded as expendable, and were worked until they dropped. The astonishing thing is that these peasants would be expected to till the lands of these same samurai overlords when they returned to Japan. But in the unreal atmosphere of the Korean campaign there was no thought for the future other than the immediate short-term goal of completing the defences. 'With no distinction being made between day and night,' writes Keinen, 'men are made to exceed their personal limits. There are beatings for the slightest mistake in performing a task such as tying knots. In many cases I have witnessed, this is the last ever occasion on which the person gets into trouble,' and in his diary entry for 23 December he makes one of his most despairing statements of all: 'I am fearful of these things. Hell cannot be in any other place except here.'
Such observations remind us that both the samurai tradition and the knightly tradition had a very dark side. It may well not have been evident at home, but it was certainly the prevailing image abroad to those who were its victims. Thanks to Keinen, we now know that the samurai may have been no worse than their European counterparts, but they were certainly no better.
Chivalry and Bushido
Being faced with such horrors on a daily basis, and with the ever present likelihood of one's own death, it would be foolish to think of either breed of military aristocrats as blind to the reality of their calling. As well as glorifying the individual warrior, Froissart's Chroniques and Heike Monogatari also performed a similar function in making the practice of war into something noble, as both societies responded to the realities of their profession by a similar mixture of group solidarity, nostalgia and snobbery. In Europe it was called chivalry. In Japan in the early years of the Edo Period it was to be called bushido, but the foundations were there centuries before in the loyalty and bravery that tradition demanded from the lowliest samurai. The code itself may have been unwritten, but the exploits of one's ancestors provided sufficient case studies for its precepts to be thoroughly understood, even if they could not always be realised.
It is very tempting to look back from our modern world and see the cults of chivalry and bushido as ways of coping with the horrors of war, or even of assuaging guilt by sanitising its profession on pages where civilians never appear. To counter this view it has to be noted that the contemporary world did not feel the need for this, because the samurai appear to have had no guilty feelings whatsoever about what they did, including the massacres in Korea. In Yoshino Jingoza'emon's account of the fall of Pusan in 1592, Japan's first victory of the war, he writes of an orgy of slaughter during which the frenzied samurai even cut the heads off dogs and cats. But it is all reported in a very matter of fact way. One is driven to the conclusion that if there was any 'reality of war' from which the chroniclers felt a need to shield their readers, then it was no more than the reality that wars were actually fought between anonymous groups of vulgar soldiers in an obscuring fog of cannon smoke, a concept that may indeed have held real terror for the proud individual samurai.
The greatest element of unreality that appears in the chronicles of bushido and chivalry is that romanticised descriptions of battles had the effect of promoting an ideal of warfare that rarely existed. Studies have shown that both the Chroniques of Froissart and the battle sections in Heike Monogatari, which were both written at about the same time, were not eyewitness accounts but an expression of 'how warfare should have been' to an author looking back through rose-tinted spectacles. The exploits of Minamoto Yoshitsune in Heike Monogatari, and Kusunoki Masashige in Taiheiki, therefore set impossible and largely fictionalised standards of conduct to which later generations might aspire. For example, the early Konjaku Monogatari reminds its readers that 'To overcome timidity, you must forget entirely about yourself and your wife and children.' This theme crops up later in the Heike Monogatari, which says, 'In battle, even though a parent or child is struck and killed, the eastern warrior rides over the body and keeps on fighting.' The same sentiment is then repeated almost word for word in the Taiheiki, where it states that, 'although lords and vassals were killed, they paid no heed to the number but rode over the bodies,' a good example of an idealised tradition growing with every repetition.
The result was that although Japanese battles in the Warring States Period were won through a skilful if unglamorous combination of samurai, foot soldiers and artillery, it was nostalgia and an appeal to precedent that still ruled supreme in the samurai mind. Thus it was that the capture of Ch'ungju, a particularly bloody struggle in Korea, was compared romantically to the battle of Ichi no tani in 1184, and the decision whether to attack at the battle of Chiksan in 1597 took into account the similarity of its situation to Nagashino. Even ancient Chinese chronicles were pressed into service for providing glorious examples and parallels from the past. Heike Monogatari has many passages describing such idealised warfare, where hostilities begin with chivalric challenges to single combat, and all fights are conducted cleanly, nobly and with enthusiasm.
Yet in both cultures these idealised examples of battlefield behaviour sometimes needed a little extra help. At the battle of Mauron in 1352, according to Baker's Chronicle, the French 'set up their position with a steep mountain slope behind them so that they could not fly. Their purpose was to increase their zeal for fighting by knowledge of the impossibility of flight.' At the siege of Chokoji in 1570 Shibata Katsuie deliberately smashed all the water storage jars before leading his men in a desperate sally out of the castle that succeeded in driving the enemy away.
This was the harsh historical reality of warfare, as was the widespread recognition that a surprise night attack, often to the accompaniment of burning buildings and mobs of foot soldiers, provided a better guarantee of victory than an openly declared challenge. When Minamoto Yoriyoshi burns Kuriyagawa, the chronicler Mutsu Waki has him exclaim, 'Let a mighty wind repay the loyalty of an old minister. Send the wind! Kindle the flames!' The European experience was very similar, and Denifle, the French historian of the Hundred Years War, wrote that 'fire was the constant ally of the English'. So frequent are the references to the use of fire as a weapon in Japan that many a samurai could have expressed in terms of their own culture the sentiments of the Margrave of Brandenburg, who wrote that fire 'gave glory to war in the same way that the Magnificat illuminated Vespers'.
One major difference between chivalry and bushido is the total absence of courtly love from the Japanese version. The European knight, fighting with his lady's sleeve affixed to his helmet and dashing off a quick sonnet when there was a lull in the fighting, has no samurai equivalent. In the Gikeiki, a life of Minamoto Yoshitsune, there is a scene where the hero seduces a young woman, but his underlying motive is the acquisition of a Chinese military scroll possessed by her father! When women appear in the accounts of samurai heroism it is usually in a self-immolating role as they commit suicide when a castle falls, such as the wife of the keeper of Sakasai castle who lifted the castle's bronze bell on to her shoulders and drowned herself in the moat.
However, a factor common to both codes was the emphasis placed on a willingness to die for one's lord or for the cause. In Japan the ultimate expression of this was the committing of seppuku, otherwise known as hara kiri, the act of ritual suicide that was admired by friend and foe alike. In Europe the rare mentions of suicide after a battle are invariably the result of panic and terror, and are never seen as a noble deed. In 1333 many Scots drowned themselves in the sea after their defeat at Halidon Hill, because they anticipated correctly what would be the fate of any captives. Samurai killed themselves to avoid the disgrace of capture or to make amends for an error. But no European knight could have understood the attitude of Yamamoto Kansuke, who killed himself at the battle of Kawanakajima in 1461. When he perceived that his battle plan had gone disastrously wrong, he took responsibility for the failure in this most dramatic fashion. Suicide also offered a way to follow one's lord in death. The account of Ulsan in Taikoki tells of a certain Reizei Motomitsu, who, 'wielded his naginata [glaive] like a water wheel, slaying fifteen or sixteen of the nearby enemy', before being cut down, to the great distress of his followers.
Because Shiromatsu Zen'emonnojo, Igazaki Matabeinojo and Yoshida Tarobei were by chance somewhere else, they regretted that they had not been there with him to be killed in battle. So when they took possession of Motomitsu's corpse they performed the ritual cutting open their bellies in the shape of a cross on that very spot.
The greatest similarity between chivalry and bushido lies in the area of self-belief, because the mere existence of warriors' codes reinforced their perception of themselves as an elite. When Kato Kiyomasa attacked the Jurchens of Manchuria in 1592 his sole motivation was 'to show the savages the mettle of the Japanese'. In reporting the siege of Namwon, Okochi Hidemoto refers to foot soldiers as 'our inferiors', and when Lord Rivers, a veteran of the battle of Bosworth, went to Spain to assist in the Reconquista, a Spanish author could comment about the English knights that, 'Though from a remote and somewhat barbarous island, yet they believed themselves to be the most perfect men on earth.'
From Knight to Cavalryman
So what of the ultimate fate of our two archetypal figures, the knight and the samurai? The developments that made up the two 16th-century military revolutions changed the nature of warfare in both societies, but in neither case did they lead to the abolition of their aristocratic military class. Instead of disappearing in the quixotic smoke of gunpowder both knight and samurai survived and prospered, and instead of being overcome by a military revolution, each joined in with enthusiasm in a military evolution. The only caveat placed on this development was that the innovations should be controlled in such a way as to leave the aristocratic and leadership aspects of their calling very much intact.
It was only when this was no longer possible in reality, and heroic chronicles could no longer sustain it even in fiction, that the knightly role declined, and it is in the knightly decline, as the 16th century passed into the 17th, that we find the widest variation between the two military cultures of Europe and Japan. The triumph of the Tokugawa family at the battle of Sekigahara in 1600 eventually led to over two centuries of peace, but it was peace enforced by a totalitarian regime that closed its doors to European contact from 1639 onwards. This meant that the knight and the samurai would once again tread separate paths of development.
In Europe the innovations of the military revolution continued to be expanded by men such as Gustavus Adolphus and Oliver Cromwell, and over the next century knights became transformed into cavalry. In this complex process the lance and the mace gave way to the pistol and the sword, but even if the knight discarded his armour, he lost little of his elite status. The aristocratic cavalry officer in his unspeakable finery was the direct heir of the medieval ideal, and the Charge of the Light Brigade at Balaklava illustrates a particular aspect of arrogant knightly behaviour that would not have been out of place, nor any more sensible, at the battles of either Crécy or Nagashino.
From Samurai to Swordsman
In Japan things were somewhat different, because, in vivid contrast to the turmoil of Europe's Thirty Years War, the 'Pax Tokugawa' made Japan look back with nostalgia on an idealised samurai past, which a combination of politics and popular culture then began to transform into an equally idealistic samurai present. With no battles to fight the impetus of Japan's military revolution was quickly lost, and the Shimabara Rebellion, when a peasant army held out against the Shogun's forces, was a portent of a long, slow decline. Military technology continued to develop, but, shorn of purpose, it was a form of progress that was constantly looking over its shoulder with increased nostalgia. The result was the growth of a samurai tradition that became more and more separated from the actual practice of warfare, and the handling of large, well-disciplined armies was forgotten in a bizarre development of the cult of the individual warrior. While the European knight became the practical, modern, yet still aristocratic cavalryman, the mounted samurai warrior became transformed into the samurai swordsman, of which the most important feature was the way in which the hitherto little-regarded Japanese sword acquired a new life of its own as the classic samurai fetish.
The above remark requires some clarification, because, although Japanese craftsmen were producing the world's most technically perfect swords from the 12th century onwards, prowess in a warrior had been measured by his skill at mounted archery, not by his reputation as a swordsman. The earliest expression equivalent to bushido is 'The Way of Horse and Bow', never 'The Way of the Sword', and most instances of single combat in Heike Monogatari are settled with a dagger rather than a sword. Even in the 16th century it was the spear, wielded from horseback or on foot, that was the samurai's primary weapon, not the sword. At one stage the arquebus almost became the samurai's weapon of choice, and there exists an impassioned letter from Asano Nagayoshi pleading that all troops coming to join him in the Korean campaign, including samurai, should be armed with guns. However, as we have seen, the revelation of the power of the arquebus when used for volley firing worked against this trend, and, because the wheel-lock pistol was developed in Japan after wars had ceased, the caracole of pistol-armed cavalry with which Europe became familiar was never seen on a Japanese battlefield.
The long years of peace therefore ensured that into the place of a samurai tradition that had once taken pride in the skilful use of group fighting stepped the figure of the lone swordsman, and the sword, the 'soul of the samurai', began to reign supreme. It was both weapon and symbol, forged as a religious act and wielded with superhuman skill in a way that the battles of the Sengoku Jidai, with their firearms and hedges of spearmen, seldom witnessed. None the less it became a theme so dominant that one author, unaware of the tremendous arsenal possessed by the Tokugawa Shoguns, could actually write of Japan 'giving up the gun'.
Japan may not actually have given up the gun, but circumstances meant that she had given up using it, and the nostalgia for an idealised and largely mythical samurai past, where individual swordsmen fought each other on battlefields, became transformed into an equally idealised samurai present. On many occasions the myths of the past fed into a brutal everyday reality, because the absence of battles to fight had resulted in a large number of unemployed samurai. Some were engaged as teachers of martial arts, some became Zen monks, but enough individual swordsmen, made desperate by boredom, avarice or poverty, ended up fighting each other at crossroads to ensure a steady supply of plots for the Japanese theatre. The re-enactment of such activities on the stage then ensured that a formerly exclusive and aristocratic samurai tradition entered popular Japanese culture as well, and was transmitted through kabuki plays, ukiyoe prints and on into the films of Akira Kurosawa, whose Seven Samurai is for many people all we know on earth of the samurai tradition, and all we need to know.
By this time the knight and the samurai had long since gone their separate ways. These brothers in arms had for centuries developed similarly yet apart as aristocratic elites. They had then come together for a brief century when they faced similar challenges from new technology and responded in similar ways, only to part company dramatically, each to develop its own culture and sustain its own myths, which grew steadily more glorious with every year that passed.
by Stephen Turnbull
About the author
Stephen Turnbull is the leading authority outside Japan on the military history of the samurai. His previous books for Osprey include Men-at-Arms 86: Samurai Armies 1550-1658, Men-at-Arms 105: The Mongols and, most recently, Campaign 69: Nagashino 1575.
Suggested reading
Black, Jeremy (ed.), European Warfare 1453-1815 (1999)
Parker, Geoffrey, The Military Revolution: Military Innovation and the rise of the West 1500-1800 (Cambridge, 1996)
Turnbull, Stephen, Campaign 69: Nagashino 1575 (Oxford, 2000)
Turnbull, Stephen, The Samurai Sourcebook (Cassell, 1998)
Turnbull, Stephen, Samurai Warfare (Cassell, 1996)