The Education of
Young Asunaro

Every morning, the young son of a certain feudal lord was woken at a fixed hour when the doors and paper screens of his bedroom were drawn open, in undeviating order and with the same predictable clatter. Impassively and regardless of the weather, his gaze fell first on the tasteful courtyard garden beyond the window.

Next, his eyes lifted to the lowest roof of the corner tower and began to count off through the pine branches the round eave tiles, their gold leaf flaking in patches, before he gave up half way as he always did. Thus did the young lord of the West Castle commence his day.

Lord though he was in name, not one important task in the governance of the domain ever came his way, despite his having reached maturity. He still vividly recalled the childhood experience of living with his father, the current lord. His father would be seated with weighty formality in the room where official business was conducted, running his eye over the documents that his personal attendants bustled to and fro to bring him, their socked feet brushing the floor with each obsequious step, and passing personal judgement or adding notes to what his secretary had recorded there. Strenuous work though it seemed, to the young boy’s eyes it all appeared to proceed with seamless ease.

From time to time the atmosphere in the castle underwent a radical change, a bevy of senior retainers came pouring in, and the secretary and others were dismissed. Safely hidden, the boy alone stayed on, peering out through a crack between the sliding doors of the neighbouring room.

There had been unprecedented flooding rains in the domain, he understood, and this meeting was to deal with the problem.

‘You’re telling me this is the state things have reached in my domain? What am I to make of this, now that matters are at such a pass?’

The lord’s shrill voice belied his age. While the retainers bent their little white-haired topknots to­gether in huddled conference he alone remained erect, head held high.

‘Unfortunately there has been heavy flooding throughout the domain this year, your lordship, and there is almost total devastation, particularly in the lowland area’s fields that produce good quality rice, and almost all of the fields that produce our finest rice.’

‘Hmm. So I suppose this means we must distribute our stockpiles of rice throughout the domain, even down to the farmers.’ The declaration was self-consciously in the style of The Benevolent Ruler.

‘If they heard of that, my lord, some in the castle would say, “You mean we samurai can be left to starve to death? Surely it doesn’t matter how many farmers die?”’

‘Don’t be ridiculous! If the commoners’ anger turns to riot, the central government will hear of it and it would be nothing short of disaster, just as happened in that other domain, remember? No, we must all tighten our belts here. No luxuries from now on, even for the women and children.’

‘Hey there, young master! You’ve been listening to this, have you? Well just make sure you don’t breathe a word of it, ho ho ho…’

A lady-in-waiting quickly hustled the boy away. This he did remember, but thereafter any such matters were always conducted out of his earshot. The answer to why he was thus excluded can be found in a certain ancient tome, essentially a kind of performance report on the feudal lords of the time, in which our young lord is candidly described as ‘a fool from birth, and lacking all judgement’.

The long period of warfare that had preceded this time did not come to any sudden resounding end, like some great door slamming shut, but lingered fractiously on for a while longer. Nevertheless, no domain was untouched by painful struggles in this time of transition from a wartime mentality to one of peace.

In this domain, as elsewhere, there was a pressing need to rectify the haphazard finances that had characterised the previous age when warfare was the norm. Enforcing frugality on the retainers necessitated merciless punishment of those who resisted. In such matters we catch a glimpse of the age’s cruelty. But thanks to these brutal remedies the finances of the domain did indeed recover, all were loud in the lord’s praise, and there were even some who numbered him among the four top rulers in the land.

‘This will surely have made you a Forebear, your lordship,’ declared one of his senior vassals. To ‘become a Forebear’ was to be deemed one whose name would wield retrospective authority, as in the admiring phrase ‘his forebear was so-and-so, you know’. Be it for teachings, fame, erudition or military prowess, if those who heard one’s name shrank in awe then one was effectively a Forebear. This being no mean feat, you would imagine that modesty should prevent a man from acknowledging it of himself, but his lordship felt no such qualms.

‘You think so? Well for good or ill, there’s no stopping people’s tongues from wagging I suppose, haw haw haw.’

His generally unsmiling countenance looked far from displeased. And sure enough, in the aforementioned ancient tome he is indeed recorded as being ‘renowned for both his literary and military skills’.

Yet this is not to say that no cares clouded his life. Seated before his vassals in conference, he would assume a relaxed air and encourage them to feel free to say whatever they liked, but not one word broke the general hush. Once a youthful voice from the dim recesses of the back row was heard to produce the following frank response:

‘But your lordship, if I may be so bold, the chamber so brims with the force of your esteemed presence that none of the foregathered has the courage to open his mouth.’

Thunderstruck, all those present tensed still more rigidly. His lordship was across every aspect of things, and whatever was said to him threatened to rebound on the speaker with interest; his ugly pockmarked face was an intimidating sight, and everyone flinched at what this utterance might provoke. Happily, however, he merely smiled grimly and chose to remain silent.

Thanks to the favour of The Supreme One (as the great Shogun Ieyasu Tokugawa was known), his lordship’s possession of the domain was secure – no doubt in reward for that admirable love of his not only for fighting but for learning. Along the walls of his library there towered a great cone-shaped mountain of bound books.

Since his realm continued thus unthreatened, his lordship was in no position to complain. There were times, however, when the question of a successor troubled him. Perhaps the son he pinned his hopes on would die young; perhaps the lad would prove to be without talent for the job of feudal lord… Such worries came crowding in on him.

It was then that his eye lit on this particular young son of his, who in infancy gave the impression of being a stoutly-built, bright and physically imposing lad. He was provided with what today would be termed an education for the gifted, but it was quickly realised that while the rest of him might be impressive, this apparently did not extend to the contents of his brain.

‘Might I venture to observe, your lordship,’ a senior vassal remarked, ‘that he is entirely different from yourself at that age.’

His lordship observed the boy, and understood that the first problem was his attitude. He couldn’t remain formally seated on the floor for any length of time, but very soon began to stretch out his legs, turn and stare out the window, and set about picking his nose, which he did so excessively that he developed nosebleeds, ending up in the care of the castle physician.

His lordship grimaced to witness this, and rashly remarked, ‘True enough, he’s a different kettle of fish from me. Can he really have sprung from my loins?’ – thus infuriating his wife.

Apart from the main castle, the domain also had a smaller West Castle, a secondary castle the very existence of which, in these days when regulations stipulated one castle per domain, was owing to the trust that the Shogun had placed in his lordship. Here his lordship’s wife huffily announced that she was taking their son. His lordship opposed the idea, of course, but his wife was the esteemed daughter of a certain important feudal lord, and if word got out that there was a falling out between them the consequences would be worse still.

In fact, his lordship held a further grudge against his son. He himself had been small from birth and loathed the compulsory practice of martial arts; it had been decided that in combat with his trainer the opponent would always obligingly arrange to lose. But an appraising look at his son told him that for his age the boy was sturdy, robust and tall. What was more, he was popular with those around him, unlike that other spotty little boy had been.

Empty-headed though he was, he was a mild and amiable child whom others were drawn to pamper. ‘Beware of one’s juniors,’ says Confucius (implying that their capacities are easily underestimated) and this seemed a fine instance of the aphorism. His own cravenness, so unbecoming in a ‘great lord’, filled him with disgust.

Such a state of mind will quickly communicate itself, and the lad was reserved with him; his lordship felt awkward if left alone with him, mere child though he was. This being the case, he had seized this opportunity to dispatch his son to the West Castle with a vast mountain of books and the injunction to read them all, along with special tutors to enforce the order, and heaved a private sigh of relief.

Back now to our freshly awakened young lord­ship. What happened next? A group of ladies-in-waiting first flocked to his side to briskly wash his face and dress him, then two identical trays were prepared for breakfast, and he sat motionless and still half-asleep, waiting until the pre-tasting was completed in another room and the food was declared free of poison.

‘Why does that man eat by himself first?’ he would ask innocently, his bewildered air causing great merriment. In fact, the same ritual had been conducted in the main castle, and since it happened every day he knew the answer perfectly well, but this was all that it occurred to him to say. The ladies-in-waiting took it in turns to laugh obligingly.

Once the whirlwind of early morning procedures was over, his natural childish impulse was to run about in the spacious room, but there was no indulging this for his tutors were already awaiting him, eager to train him up to match his father as quickly as possible. Preparations for the role of lord of the castle; rules of etiquette; readings from the works of the great sages of the past; practice of the special signature to append to documents, just a little different from that of his father; the composition of written directives; letter-writing; copying of Chinese texts – all manner of learning assailed him.

He struggled to resist with a combination of moans, shrieks and tears, and cries of ‘What’s this? What’s it for?’, but ‘Nursey’, the name for his old wet nurse (his real mother had recently died), knew his game.

‘Come now, your lordship, what do you mean! At your age your father could compose poems in Japanese and Chinese! You must keep to the contract and be prepared to follow in his footsteps someday soon…’ Her fingers rapped the tatami matting on which she sat, or drew lines and circles to reinforce her point, while her unnervingly steely gaze remained fixed on him.

‘Okay okay! And what’s with this “someday soon”? Stuffing my head full of too many facts is just like stuffing my stomach with too much food!’

Today you’d probably call it adolescent rebellion. Nothing anyone said could please him.

It’s true that back in the old days of warfare a boy of his status could live in hope of the prize of taking some enemy general’s head, or could leap to sudden prominence with a moment’s lucky chance to reveal his military prowess. But those days were over. Instead, his daily or monthly accomplishments were judged on how quickly he got through the books his father had set him. It was well known that all this talk of catching up with his father ‘someday soon’ was just empty morale-boosting.

Thanks to Nursey’s constant repetition of the phrase, he began to be secretly referred to by the nickname Lord Asunaro, or Lord Someday-soon, both within the castle and beyond its walls. The name is a play on words. Asunaro is actually the name of a kind of conifer, a little-known tree that is similar to the more well-known hinoki, the Japanese cedar so greatly prized for its appearance and its use as a building material. The sound of the word, and how it is written, however, also suggests a meaning along the lines of ‘to become something someday soon’. Legend even has it that the asunaro tree yearned that tomorrow it would be a hinoki. In fact, those are the two characters used to write its name. Why the fetching and fast-growing asunaro tree should aspire to become a gloomy cedar ‘someday soon’ is anyone’s guess. As with the vegetable known as ashitaba (literally ‘tomorrow’s leaf’, a variety of angelica), the name usually carries overtones of pristine freshness and of superior quality. It was, however, not for any such fine attributes that our young lord acquired his mocking nickname; but Nursey’s constant admonitions to our unfortunate young lord caused his nickname to stick.

The young Lord Asunaro lived in a protected inner part of the castle where limited sunlight penetrated, owing to the way the walls and pillars met to form a kind of spiral.

The death of a feudal ruler was always extremely problematic, both publicly and privately, which is why this ruler-to-be spent his days thus protected, and quite unoccupied apart from his tedious studies. The main castle maintained a strict division between the inner area and the retainers’ quarters, to prevent the possibility of anything untoward occurring between them and the ladies in the lord’s service. The West Castle was much the same, enclosed by a protective moat, which in turn was surrounded by the homes of senior retainers, beyond which were the houses of the samurai class, distantly ringed by a wide area of townsfolk’s dwellings. In other words, the whole place was arranged in a great protective coil that prevented the direct approach of any enemy.

Now that all this caution had become unnecessary with the new era of peace, the work of the retainers had radically altered. One by one the men who strutted their stuff in the retainers’ quarters, squaring their shoulders and striking their muscled arms and proudly proclaiming their feats in gruff voices – ‘Back then I used to take ’em on three at a time, you know!’ and so on – were slowly disappearing.

As for the castle watchtowers, they no longer fulfilled any function beyond an empty display of power. The new era’s first ‘Supreme Ruler’, the great and immensely popular Lord Nobunaga Oda (1534-1582), was probably the only person to actually inhabit his watchtower – he seems to have lived on the very top floor of the castle tower at Azuchi (a castle he himself had had built). This we can surmise from the fact that it was quite unlike the usual bare and uncouth watchtowers found elsewhere. The splendour of this watchtower room, replete with splendid screen paintings and covered in magnificent red lacquer, seems to suggest that he himself lived there. It must have been no easy matter to be in the irascible Nobunaga’s service, climbing up and down these steep narrow stairs in the days before elevators and escalators in order to see to his needs.

Nobunaga was the last of the great warlords of an earlier era, when warfare was rife and watchtowers were an essential part of any castle. The climate played a role in this story; from the late 16th to the early 17th centuries, the earth underwent a sudden temporary cooling. Crops failed and the people grew troubled, and Japan entered the so-called ‘Warring States’ period, when men fought each other for local power. In Europe there were similar upheavals, with the loss of faith in the Church leading to terrible religious wars.

This chaotic time ended in the early 17th century, when the climate stabilised and in Japan food became less scarce again, and people grew tired of the continual warfare and at last embraced peace. This was mirrored in Europe with, for instance, the establishment of Bourbon rule in France, whose monarchs united France as the Shoguns did Japan, and the subsequent Golden Age. In other words, this had been a moment when the earth chose to assert itself a little and remind everyone that it is a living being.

Despite the onset of a peaceful age in Japan, the old medieval status system nevertheless continued into the new era in much the same way as the castle watchtowers remained long after they had ceased to have any real function. The hereditary lines of senior retainers still maintained their status even when the sons were incompetent; but for most of the ordinary samurai, literary and calligraphic skills were now deemed of greater worth than military prowess, and the abacus had become a crucial tool in their arsenal.

Each autumn there was an ‘arithmetical compe­tition’ among the youthful retainers. It was really more a sort of employment exam than the equivalent of our university entrance tests, and the young were trained up for it in the art of Japanese mathematics at a version of the modern-day cram school. Competition was fierce, but the winners were permitted to attend the Accounting Bureau to learn the trade. Thus a group of young accountants gathered on the castle’s ground floor, and the click of abacus beads and the rustle of turning pages pervaded the place like the murmur of flowing water. Morning, noon and evening a large drum was sounded, signifying nothing more barbarous than the orderly passage of time.

Within this murmurous flow of sound was a flurry and bustle of special allowances, stipend amounts, pay reductions, loans, reimbursements and much else. Some might have been expected to complain that, with all this, surely anachronistic expenses such as the watchtower and suchlike, maintained solely for appearances’ sake, should be discontinued – but the mere rumour of such a suggestion would have been enough to bring down a severe rebuke from on high. No matter how profligate the two castles were, it was nothing out of the ordinary; they must be maintained in style for appearance’s sake.

Those ladies-in-waiting who swarmed around the young Lord Asunaro to dress him were likewise simply there for show. They supervised his every move, and they in turn were strictly overseen by old Nursey. All this may seem rather pointless, but it wasn’t entirely so.

One day, when naughtiness had prompted Lord Asunaro to slip past the surrounding supervision, he suddenly heard bewitching voices coming from the shelter of the castle wall. It so happened that it was the third day of the third month, the day of the Peach Festival, and a group of young girls had gathered there to play.

Toddling over, he discovered a scene quite unlike that of the courtyard garden with its round eave tiles that met his grim gaze every morning – a room replete with vases of peach blossom. And there, before his very eyes for the first time, were young girls his own age, some among them already tall enough to be wearing adult-length kimonos. Both in scent and in deportment they were quite unlike the ladies-in-waiting who normally crowded around him.

‘Oh, there’s some young man here!’ cried a voice, and instantly – oh calamity! – he was surrounded, and with cries of ‘Gracious, how do you come to be dressed like this?’ was seized by the sleeves, collar and hem and dragged along by them all, and before he could say a word Lord Asunaro found himself tumbled onto the tatami matting.

Children used to play various games back then – alphabet cards, sugoroku, top-spinning, battledore and shuttlecock, hide-and-seek, playing houses and doll play – and until that moment a festive game of dolls had been in progress, but it was quite forgotten with the advent of the young lord.

There were gentle questions: ‘So where are you from? Do tell us your name.’

‘Er… I’m the young lord.’ He had intended it to sound dignified, but he found himself reeling at the startling new fragrance he breathed, and his voice trembled.

‘He must have strayed here somehow.’

‘It’s a special festival today. Do come and play with us for a while.’

The sweet sake that was set before the festival doll display was poured into a red lacquered cup for him. The fumes of the finely brewed malted rice liquor were strong enough to choke on.

‘It will go to your head if you drink it down all at once! Slowly, slowly, yes, that’s right…’

Handled like a child yet so sweetly and tenderly, the young Lord Asunaro was enveloped in the scent of their incense-permeated robes.

‘Oh you drank that so well! Just like a true lord.’

He stood there simply agog, his shoulders slumped.

‘Listen, here’s a delightful game we can play. Now that you’re tipsy, you can be It for hide-and-seek.’

In no time he found his eyes bound with a silk cloth.

‘… Here, over here! Where my hands are clapping!’ But although the voices rose all around him, the sake seemed to have gone to his head and he could only stagger about on unsteady feet. Following the sounds of cajoling cries, laughter, shrieks and the rustle of clothing he made a guess and leapt, managing to grab someone and bring her down, and as they tumbled his hand slipped into her sleeve and down, meeting velvety flesh there; his weight came down on top of her, and from beneath him he heard a tantalising little squeal.

How long did it last? The ladies-in-waiting came upon him as he lay unresistingly sprawled there, quickly followed by old Nursey clutching the inevitable memorandum book to her breast, who proceeded to berate the girls.

‘Why pick on them?’ he objected crossly. ‘Surely I’m the one in the wrong for running away and coming here!’ But his head was filled only with the memory of that enticing little squeal.

‘Good gracious, young sir, just look at you!’ She grimly surveyed his rumpled clothing. ‘If his lordship were to see you now there’d be worse than hell to pay!’

At that age – although some of those girls were in fact rather mature for their age – nothing very momentous could have occurred, and they got off with no more than a scolding. But from this day onwards, something in Lord Asunaro collapsed and something new began to germinate in its stead. A suspicion gripped him that in this world (by which he meant the castle) there was some unfathomable thing, as utterly different from the ordinary as heaven is from earth, and henceforth his days, until now so absolutely predictable, went askew.

The impressive significance of the corner tower, which Nursey had explained as being ‘built by your father in case anything happens, with the aim of keeping your lordship safe and sound’, now began to fade from his mind. What seethed and flickered constantly in its place was the sensation of that girl’s breast against his hand down her sleeve, and that little squeal that she uttered when his weight came down on top of her. (What sort of cry was that, for heaven’s sake?)

‘You must show your mettle as your father’s heir, and dedicate yourself single-mindedly to your tasks…’

It was Nursey’s familiar harsh voice.

‘Well, father might be wonderful, but surely all I’m doing is just imitation. Don’t you think so, Nursey?’

This was only the second time in her long service that he had argued back like this, and it flustered her. ‘Now it’s not as simple as that, you know. You have to get past this stage, that’s the thing. Constant vigilance, firm tenacity…’

‘So when is that corner tower going to get used?’

‘Well, it’s symbolic. The day it actually came in useful would be a very frightening day…’

‘See? That’s what I mean!’

Staring up at the coffered ceiling, Lord Asunaro picked his nose and considered. While there was no way to understand what had gone on that day with the girls, it was certainly something quite different from any game he’d played before. Usually, it was a matter of tussles with the retainers’ young sons. Be it wrestling or hand-to-hand combat, even when his opponent was a big fellow it turned out before he knew it that he’d won. Of course that’s the way things had been fixed, and sure enough he had realised this and was bored mindless by it. As for his other tough training, of that more later.

Thenceforth, our young lord took to giving the slip to his nurse and ladies-in-waiting and creeping off to the girls’ quarters to play. For it was, after all, another realm, one that not only dazzled the eye but delighted both the nose and the hands.

At this time, the most expensive item in the governance of the domain was not anything to do with externalities but rather its innermost area: those ladies’ quarters into which the young Lord Asunaro now stole. He was no longer either surprised or perturbed these days by the welcome he received there – the way the girls clung to him and seized him by whatever part of his clothing they fancied, in much the same fashion as women of the street soliciting for custom. So far, though, whichever girl he pulled to the floor and lay on (and truth to tell he couldn’t really tell who was who) would only give that little squeal, and that was all that ever happened in this game.