Bushido: The Way of the Warrior
Samurai stories are about medieval swordsmen—but they’re also about the ethical code the audience should live by. That’s why some modern samurai swing a baseball bat or line up a perfect putt.
America has Wyatt Earp, Britain has Robin Hood, and Japan has Yagyu Jubei.1 Okay, maybe it’s not that simple, but it’s a place to start. When dealing with an icon as vital to Japanese culture and masculinity as the historic samurai, you should start by looking for whatever parallels your own culture has to offer.
Jubei the Prototype
The specific details of the life and times of Yagyu Jubei Mitsuyoshi (or, in some sources, Mitsutoshi) are a bit hazy, given that he lived in the early 1600s.2 His father, Yagyu Tajima no Kami Munenori, was no less than sword instructor to shogun Tokugawa Ieyasu, and he landed that position the old-fashioned way: he earned it, at the battle of Sekigahara (September 15, 1600) that established the control of the Tokugawa shogunate over the entire country. Along the way, he was elevated to the rank of daimyo (a provincial feudal lord recognized by the shogun) with a fief centered on what is now called Yagyu no Sato, near the ancient capital of Nara. The elder Yagyu also developed his own school of swordfighting, although the main move in this school is more strategy than skill: find the enemy’s weak point and go for it as soon as possible.
Jubei is heard from at court in 1616 as an attendant to Hidetada, the second Tokugawa shogun, but then vanishes from the record for a decade. He returns to history at age thirty-six, and dies at forty-four on a hunting expedition. In between, he loses an eye, gains two daughters, and writes an oblique book about his swordmanship called Tsukimi no Sho (The Book of Gazing at the Moon), giving future storytellers all the ammunition they needed for their imaginations to fill in the gaps.
Just as the real Robin of Locksley soon vanished under the weighty legends of Robin Hood, stories of Jubei began adding to the original reality. His appearance in legend now pretty much determines the “look” of the samurai in Japanese pop culture. With a hat pulled down over his face to cover his features, including the simple leather strap he wrapped around his head as an eyepatch, the legendary Jubei roamed the country incognito, revealing his identity only when he drew his sword to punish evil.
According to some, he roamed the land to sharpen his skills; other say he was actually spying for the Tokugawa shogun. Some say that he loitered about the Yoshiwara, the prostitution district of Edo, reasoning that he could get in some practice by slashing the throats of lower-level samurai who wasted their time with whores and would never be missed. Other stories relate that Jubei did not adopt the diplomatic speech of the shogunal court, which might explain why he wasn’t heard from for a decade.
He was, in legend, a blunt, no-nonsense type who let his sword do the talking, and it spoke volumes. In one story, Jubei reportedly fought seven men at once, slicing the limbs off of three of them and scaring off the others. In another tale, a gang of bandits tried to rob him in Kyoto; he killed twelve of them, frightening away the rest.
Probably Jubei’s best-known legend is alluded to in Akira Kurosawa’s classic film Seven Samurai. In this case, a ronin challenges Jubei to a practice duel with wooden swords. The daimyo who referees the match calls it a draw, but Jubei declares himself the winner. The ronin demands a rematch to settle the point, this time with real swords. Jubei dispatches his opponent with a single blow.
Jubei lives on in pop culture in a variety of forms. A lurid novel, Futaro Yamada’s Yagyu Ichi-zoku no Inbo (The Intrigues of the Yagyu Family), became the basis of first a film and then a television series starring Japanese action hero Shinichi “Sonny” Chiba. The name Jubei is invoked in anime as well, usually in stories unrelated to the real figure. The 1993 film known as Ninja Scroll in the West is actually titled Jubei the Wind Ninja, although there’s no historical evidence that Yagyu Jubei ever studied the combined magical/martial/assassin art called ninjutsu. A 1997 OAV series called Ninja Resurrection sets a samurai named Jubei down in the middle of the Shimabara Rebellion of 1637. Even if the timeline was historically possible, it’s highly unlikely that Jubei, whose family owed a great deal to the Tokugawa shogunate, would ever turn against the shogunal government, the Bakufu, and side with the Christian rebels. At the far edge of fantasy, there’s Jubei-chan the Ninja Girl (1999), a twenty-six-week anime series by Akitaro Daichi. This comedy gives us Jiyu Nanohana, a contemporary adolescent schoolgirl who “becomes” Jubei by putting on his eyepatch—improbably shaped in this series like a big red heart. We’ll consider how girls can become samurai in the next chapter.
How to Be a Samurai
The basic function of a samurai—a warrior retained in the service of a feudal lord—didn’t change much over the years, but attitudes toward samurai did. By the mid-seventeenth century, the Tokugawa shogunate had a firm hold on both the imperial court and the daimyo who held the key to local power in Japan. Consequently, there was less and less for samurai to do. Samurai was a social status, not just a job description, yet some samurai, with families to provide for but no battles to fight, had to abandon the warrior’s life and take up a trade. Others arranged for their daughters to marry into merchant families, while still others became bandits.3 And in the seventeenth-century equivalent of corporate downsizing, many were dismissed from service to become ronin, or masterless samurai.
One such ronin, Yamamoto Tsunetomo (1659– 1719), lived in the Saga domain on the southern island of Kyushu and served Saga’s lord, Nabeshima Mitsushige. When Mitsushige died in 1700, Tsunetomo tried to commit tsuifuku (suicide of a retainer after his master’s death), but by then this form of extreme loyalty had been outlawed. So Tsunetomo retired to a monastery where he held forth on what he thought was the ideal samurai philosophy. A young samurai took down many of his statements and reprinted them verbatim in Hagakure (In the Shadow of Leaves), the bible of bushido—the “martial way” or the “way of the warrior”—first published in 1716 and never out of print.
Even a casual glance at Hagakure, though, reveals that the words of Tsunetomo could have benefited from an editor. His advice runs literally from the sublime (“The end is important in all things; if things end badly, all good that may have come before it will be erased”) to the ridiculous (“Walk with a real man one hundred yards and he’ll tell you at least seven lies”), but he does lay out the five core values a samurai is supposed to live by: loyalty, bravery, politeness, simplicity, and truthfulness.
The main thing to note about Hagakure, though, is that it is all theory and no practice: Tsunetomo—like Jubei before him—never fought in a single recorded battle. His musings were motivated by nostalgia, for an ethos and a way of life he considered dead if not dying. His book is thus an idealization of the reality of the sword that was surely much grittier a century earlier. And this also means that any modern pop culture portrayal of the samurai, whether true to Hagakure or wildly deviating from it, is in a sense an ideal of an ideal. Modern samurai sagas tell us more about the time of their creator than the time their adventures supposedly took place.
Postwar Swordsmen
The manga revolution of Dr. Tezuka began during the Occupation of Japan, at a time when all facets of Japanese life were under the eye of America. Samurai stories were a staple of prewar Japan, when Japan’s military government approved of bushido’s emphasis on stoic self-sacrifice and obedience to one’s lord. When the militarists were discredited by defeat, their favored literature also declined for a few years.4 It wasn’t until 1954—with the Occupation over, the Korean War over, Astro Boy dominating the comics, and Godzilla the latest movie star—that a samurai story became a popular hit: Akado Suzunosuke (Suzunosuke with the Red Breastplate) by Tsunayoshi Takeuchi. Apart from the vibrant artwork, Takeuchi’s stories may have found popularity because the militarism of prewar manga was gone. After a decade spent rebuilding postwar destruction, the old attitudes would not have been welcomed, either by official monitors of pop culture or the mass audience, who simply wouldn’t have stood still for the same old propaganda. Instead, the emphasis is on skillful swordsmanship.
This continued the pattern of reshaping samurai to conform, not to history, but to the needs of the moment. The militarists, after all, had encouraged pop culture that praised the military—now it was the opposition’s turn. And one thing defeated Japan needed to prove to itself and to the rest of the world was that it had not lost its talents and abilities. As the years went on, each generation recast the samurai according to its own attitudes and agenda.
The ’60s, for example, a time of social experimentation and political ferment, gave rise to Sanpei Shirato’s Ninja Bugeicho (Chronicle of a Ninja’s Military Accomplishments). This samurai series could never have been done in another decade, since it examined the battles of Oda Nobunaga and the other sixteenth-century warlords from a leftist perspective, clearly siding with the oppressed masses and reform-minded ninja—whether they were historical or not.5 The year 1974 saw publication of a lengthy samurai manga of a different kind: Joji Akiyama’s Haguregumo. The word means “wandering cloud” and is the name of the ronin who is the leading figure in the story. No longer in service to a noble, he’s a husband, a father, and leader of a group of palanquin-bearers. The time is late in the Tokugawa period; European education, known as “Dutch studies” at the time, has been making a comeback, and Hagu-regumo’s son Shinnosuke has been picking up the new knowledge in school (including one phrase in English: “My father very nice”).
All in all, Haguregumo breaks the mold of the classic samurai tale by showing a samurai who’s changing to accommodate the changing times. He’s more interested in chasing girls, drinking saké, and raising his son than in swinging a sword. It’s a lifestyle that would have found sympathy in 1970s Japan, which like the United States had just gone through a period of social unrest on college campuses and saw the questioning of many traditions and values. Still, this domesticated samurai finds a number of opportunities to draw blood in the name of justice. Akiyama’s idea of a swordsman was thus less consistent with the classical ideal, but well-suited to his audience at the time.
A no less interesting ronin is the title character of Nobuhiro Watsuki’s Rurouni Kenshin (1996). The time of the story is the 1880s, during the Meiji Restoration. The emperor is back in power, westernization is taking hold in Japan, and the authorities have traded in their kimono for European uniforms. They’ve also waged a ruthless campaign against a group of renegade samurai who want to resist westernization and return to the old ways.
Into the middle of this society in upheaval wanders a swordsman who looks all of fourteen years old (his good looks and cute behavior when not battling evil have made this manga and its anime a crossover success with both boys and girls). A cross-shaped scar on his cheek is the only sign that he has had a rough life, but he has left a long and bloody trail of victims. Now, however, he has abandoned the road of blood. He has even reversed his sword (which is sharp only on one edge) and uses the blunt edge to fight people, if he has to fight them at all. The anime and manga both create situations in which bloodshed would seem to be unavoidable for Kenshin, and then we watch as he manages to avoid it after all. Add to this a succession of enemies of an almost science-fiction level of unreality, and the result is a samurai story that bears little resemblance to Hagakure. This is clearly samurai life as it was never lived, but as pacifists at the end of the twentieth century would have liked it to be lived.
Brawling in Love
Romance and marriage happen with so many variations, at so many stages of life, that just about all an observer can say about it is that it happens. Sometimes the route is very circuitous, but, since popular culture exists to point the way toward socially acceptable behavior, the trick is to get across the finish line, no matter how unconventional the route.
Anime even holds out hope for school bullies and violent delinquents. Not all of them, of course; sometimes they’re just window dressing for the hero (or heroine!) to get past. But some who take the samurai code to extremes get reformed and find love along the way.
This is an unexpected teen romance, based on a manga by Ken Yagami. It has the expected brawling boy, Nenji Nakahara, but he’s not the villain, even in the beginning. There’s the title girl he’s liked since childhood, but Nanaka is cold, businesslike, and needs to broaden her horizons beyond academic success to include romance. But even she isn’t the villain. A blow to the head in classical sitcom fashion causes Nanaka to revert to her six-year-old self, when she obsessed over a Magical Girl TV anime series, Magical Domical. And, in a sense, this anime is the villain. Nanaka’s mother died when Nanaka was six years old; Nenji tried to cheer up Nanaka by invoking Magical Domical and asking her to turn them into grown-ups to help them cope. Nanaka has to grow up again, this time to a teenager who isn’t so cold and self-absorbed. Still, there’s one more crisis: the final episode of Magical Domical!
This thirteen-week anime series started as a fantasy boys’ manga by Kazuro Inoue. It tells how a school brawler named Seiji finds love by way of a bawdy joke. Seiji isn’t known for much of anything except his knockout right fist, although he sometimes fights on behalf of those who can’t fight for themselves. Still, this reputation has caused him to be rejected on the twenty occasions he’s asked a girl for a date. At one point in the first episode, he wails, “I don’t want to end up engaged to my right hand!” (One meaning is that he’s known exclusively for punching guys with his right fist; the other meaning is the obvious one.)
The next morning, reality changes for Seiji: he wakes to find at the end of his right arm, not a hand but a miniature girl. She announces that her name is Midori6 and has loved Seiji from afar. From then on, the series is about Seiji hiding Midori, pretending she’s a puppet, and all the time growing to love her. The real Midori, meanwhile, lies in a coma. . . .
This series has more than its share of fun with otaku, fanboys and obsessed nerds involved, in this case, in puppets and cosplay. So pop culture can mock itself, as long as there’s a greater good. It was also an “after hours” series, its late broadcast time required by the few fairly mild examples of frontal nudity in what is essentially a sweet romantic comedy. That does not make it trivial, however. The clue is when the dream sequences start.
In one dream episode, the roles are reversed, and Seiji ends up being the puppet on Midori’s right hand. Another begins when a boy named Koda dreams of meeting another child in the woods, a very young Midori, reading a picture book about Snow White. Suddenly she vanishes, and an older Midori appears, as if in an enchanted sleep. . . . He wakes up just as he dreams of Seiji, dressed as Prince Charming, riding up on a horse.
This introduces the center of the plot, that the painfully shy Midori has had a crush on Seiji for a long time, but hasn’t worked up the courage to say a single word to him. The intensity of her feelings causes her to fall into a coma, and, for her spirit to have an out-of-body experience,7 to take over for Seiji’s right hand. Just as Seiji learns to live without brawling, Midori learns to speak up for herself. Her conversion is unstable at first, so we actually see her return to her body from time to time, and we know she’ll be ready to deal with Seiji when the time is right. Likewise, Seiji learns there’s more to life than brawls and porno. Each was being, in their own way, too self-absorbed to do what the culture needed from them to stay alive. Each was brought, by circumstances, back into conformity, and each thinks it was their own idea to do so.
Train Man
This isn’t about school and only slightly about brawling, but is another, very circuitous route to love. Bear in mind that the following is reportedly based on a true story:
One day, as so often happens in large cities, a drunken man started bothering some of the women on the subway car he was riding. One otherwise shy guy tried to get the drunk to stop, they tussled for a while, and the passengers took the opportunity to get a conductor to remove the drunk. The women made a point of thanking the shy guy, with one asking for his address. Normally this might be the end of the story, but, this being 2004, the shy guy goes home and tells the story on an Internet message board.
After a while, “shy guy,” now known online as Densha Otoko (Train Man), receives a very fancy, very pricey thank-you gift. He again took to the Internet, stating that he wanted to meet the woman, but had never been on a date in his life. There followed a flurry of postings with the others on the board offering advice and encouragement. They dated briefly, then, when some of the messages took a bawdy turn, the thread stopped abruptly.
The Internet messages were collected into a book, with the writer assuming the pen name “Nakano Hitori” (a pun on the Japanese phrase “naka no hitori”—one among a group). It spawned a small media industry: no less than four manga adaptations, a television series, a stage play, and one of Japan’s top grossing movies of 2005.
One thing that these three love stories have in common: the happy couple aren’t the only people involved. Students are encouraged in pop culture to include classmates; businesspeople include coworkers; if family can’t be there, friends take the place of family.
The Sandlot Samurai
Rurouni Kenshin points to an interesting paradox in Japanese pop culture, one that leads directly to the modern male role models of anime and manga. On the one hand, heroic deeds are supposed to be commonplace to special people like Kenshin. On the other hand, ordinary people like those who read about Kenshin are supposed to be able to perform ordinary deeds heroically. The ordinary deeds are as diverse as life itself, and as plentiful as the fans of anime and manga. Pop culture heroes range from chefs to surgeons, from investment bankers to hotel managers, from policemen to bicycle messengers. The common thread in all these roles is to strive for perfection, to do one’s best, to—as the Japanese say—ganbaru. And the present-day arena most like medieval Japan is the world of sports.
Science fiction anime and its manga source material are well represented in the West, but sports anime are hardly ever seen here. However, sports is one of the biggest genres, encompassing both traditional Japanese activities such as archery, kendo, karate, and other martial arts, and Western imports, including golf, soccer, tennis, and the ever-present baseball. Sports even crosses gender lines, in a segregated way, with boxing and basketball for the boys and volleyball and tennis for the girls.8 The genre even goes over the top into the flaky fantasy realm of pro wrestling.
Western sports entered Japan during the Meiji period, and later governments encouraged sports for developing patriotic spirit. During the Occupation, all sports were suspended for a time, for fear they were echoing the bushido spirit that led to World War II. The suspension was lifted in 1950, and Japan eagerly got back on the sports track, the high point being the 1964 Tokyo Olympics. Japanese schools started having Sports Day (Taiiku no Hi) in October 1966, consciously evoking the Olympic Games of 1964.9 One thing about manga sports: they—seem—to—take—a—very—long—time. Every pitch, every lob, every golf stroke is played for the maximum dramatic value. Consequently, a boxing match in a weekly magazine like Shonen Jump can take weeks, and a round of golf can be drawn out for months. In anime, on the other hand, time and not space is the medium, and the story may only feature the highlights of a match.
Often, however, the story will feature a bit of business that is virtually a ritual: the training regimen. It usually starts when the athlete in question is just a child. At some point he (and sometimes she) becomes consumed with a desire to become the best (fill in the blank) in the world. Often, he does this to emulate his father, or to fulfill a dream his father was unable to accomplish. Next, he develops his own homemade, crude, but effective training schedule, and pushes himself into it with single-minded determination. Stories as different as the boxing title God Is a Southpaw and the girls’ wrestling manga Super Angels use this device. The girls-competing-against-boys baseball story Princess Nine has one of its players develop a powerful batting style in a very singular manner: the batter, a fisherman’s daughter on the island of Shikoku, hits incoming waves with a fishing rod.
Even the supernatural take part in training regimens, as shown in an episode of the “after-hours” anime Haunted Junction (1997). Red Mantle, a drop-dead gorgeous masked ghost who haunts toilets and hands out tissue to those who are caught short, is approached by his sister (also a ghost), who wants to take up toilet-haunting. They prepare her by having her stand under waterfalls (a traditional Japanese spiritual purification technique), hike through mountain blizzards (since public toilets are never heated in the winter) and spend time in garbage dumps (to get used to bad smells). But the girl has a problem: she’s too shy to speak to strangers. So the training regimen is expanded to include handing out samples on street corners, dancing in discos, and wearing funny costumes in public. None of this is meant to mock the idea of a training regimen—it just extends the training into humorous territory.
The regimen is rough, but exhaustion, bruises, and bloody knuckles are just minor annoyances. After all, the point of the training regimen is not merely training, but about the will to win and the commitment to do whatever it takes to be the best. Almost every sports story in the Japanese pop culture has this underlying idea as the lesson to be learned. Victories are not accepted if they come too easily.
Baseball in Japan
At the turn of the millennium, one of the biggest names in American baseball is Ichiro Suzuki. This heavy hitter may not have all of the baggage Jackie Robinson brought in desegregating the game, but he certainly opened a few eyes and raised a few questions.
Baseball has long been known as America’s “national pastime,” which had a lot to do with why Horace Wilson brought the game to Japan in 1873. He had come to teach English and American history, but the pastime caught on in a big way. In 1891, a Japanese team challenged the Americans in Yokohama to a game. The American Athletic Club initially did not take the challenge seriously. Convinced of their own superiority as the masters of an American game and sure of a win over the smaller Japanese, it took five years before they finally agreed to a game. The game took place at the AAC, where Japanese had previously not been allowed to enter, and the Japanese team showed no reaction to the boos and catcalls of the gaijin (foreigner) crowd. What happened next shocked the complacent Americans. The Japanese won 29–4.
The game went professional in 1935. World War II interrupted things, but the game came back after the Occupation. Now there are two pro leagues in Japan, with a total of twelve teams. The teams have rather unusual names, though; sometimes the name will be American style, with the city and the team (Hiroshima Carp, for example), and sometimes the name will include the team’s corporate sponsor (the Nippon Ham Fighters).
Another unusual aspect: sometimes a Japanese game, which is even slower and more deliberate than the American variety, will end play abruptly—because the commuter trains are about to stop running. It’s not often that baseball is played for the convenience of the fan. Then again, we don’t see baseball as developing “loyalty, self-control, moral discipline, and selflessness.”1 At least, not in America, and not these days.
1. Quote from “Take Me Out to the Beseboru Game” by David Parker, reprinted at http://isaac.exploratorium.edu/dbarker/beseboru.html
This also reflects Japan’s self-image in the world as a cluster of islands with neither the size nor the mineral riches to compete with the superpowers. Victory comes from perseverance—or, as in jujitsu, by strategically exploiting the opponent’s strengths and weaknesses.
Perseverance is an important lesson for other facets of life as well as sports. Schoolwork requires it, certainly, but so does the job or a hobby. This makes “Ganbatte!” one of the most common exhortations in Japanese pop culture. As a command carrying the meanings “Go for it!,” “Do your best!,” and “Hang in there!” it’s a word Japanese boys and girls start hearing at an early age.
This is due in part to the influence of Confucius. The teachings of the ancient Chinese educator have had a deep influence on Japanese life in general and the educational system in particular. One teaching is that (all other things being equal) just about anyone can learn to do just about anything, to some degree, if they persevere. Accordingly, the Japanese school system is designed to offer a wide range of choices and opportunities for its students. This is reflected in anime in the penchant for school clubs. Virtually every school story shows some of these activities. Maho Tsukai Tai is named after one such group, the five-member “Magic User’s Club,” which has to compete for meeting space with the much larger Manga Club. One episode of Here Is Greenwood has the entire dormitory out trying to make its own sword-and-sorcery movie for a school festival, complete with animated clay demons. The 1995 series El-Hazard: The Wanderers opens during another such school festival, and hints at the wide variety of available clubs, from cooking to broadcasting; a similar fair takes place during episodes of Sailor Moon and in the 1993 made-for-TV Studio Ghibli film Umi ga Kikoeru (I Can Hear the Ocean). The trend even continues into college: in Maison Ikkoku, Godai joins a university puppetry club, which serves him later in the series, as he finds a career in child care.
According to the hero of xxxholic, the major manga series by CLAMP that spawned two seasons of anime, clublessness can itself be a club. Nobuhiro Watanuki notes that his rival, Domeki, is a member of the school Archery Club. Watanuki bitterly refers to himself as a “member” of the “Go Home Right After School Club.”10 In other words, there’s no reason to stick around since nobody else at school sees spirits and monsters. However, by stretching the point, he could say he’s a member of the “Working for Yuko the Witch Club”—even if the only other members are the strange little girls Moro and Maru.
If this concern with striving for superiority makes Japanese men and boys seem like joyless workaholics, that’s because they are—part of the time. Whether in its agrarian past or its industrialized present, the need to succeed and the recognition that success won’t come easily have long been a part of life in Japan. Hence the cram schools and the late nights at the office. Among the compensations is the belief that in their own way they are carrying on the heroic tradition of the past. Bravery on an exam and loyalty to the company aren’t exactly the life of a samurai, but they are as close as this century will get to the glorious past. Meanwhile, on the schoolbus or commuter train, men and boys can open up a manga magazine and sense the connection between their seemingly unheroic lives and the lives of the heroes of old.
As for being a girl in Japan; that’s a different story. . . .
1. I know I said back at the beginning of the book that Japanese names would be given Western-style, with the family name last. However, when dealing with historical figures, long-standing tradition puts the family name first.
2. For the biographical information here, I thank the online martial arts magazine Furyu at http://www.furyu.com/archives/issue9/jubei.html.
3. Mikiso Hane, Japan: A Historical Survey (New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1972), 226–27.
4. Frederik L. Schodt, Manga! Manga!: The World of Japanese Comics (Tokyo: Kodansha International, 1983), 68--–69.
5. Schodt, Manga! Manga!, 70–71.
6. Anime characters have oddly colored hair, but in this case it’s part of the pun. Midori is Japanese for “green,” and you can imagine what color Midori’s hair is. . . .
7. This echoes all the way back to the oldest novel still in existence: Genji Monogatari (The Tale of Genji), written about the year 1000 by Lady Murasaki Shikibu, a member of the Heian court. In one chapter of this book, a woman likewise goes out-of-body, but jealousy is the motivation, and the results are deadlier.
8. Examples of clubs and sports for girls will come up in this chapter ostensibly about male role models simply because Japanese society is still reinventing itself regarding the role of women, especially in coeducational schools. In any event, girls copy the lead determined by boys, rather than vice versa.
9. http://ourworld.compuserve.com/homepages/HFeid/home_2e.htm
10. CLAMP, xxxholic, trans. Bill Flanagan (New York: Del Rey Manga, 2004), 2:114.