Hubbard The Samurai Warrior

The Golden Age of Japan's Elite Warriors 1560-1615
1. Auflage 2015
ISBN: 978-1-78274-194-7
Verlag: Amber Books Ltd
Format: EPUB
Kopierschutz: 0 - No protection

E-Book, Englisch, 224 Seiten

Reihe: Landscape History

During Japan's Warring States period, centuries of strife had left the country divided and leaderless. Those who filled the power vacuum were the daimyo, warlords who ruled over the clans and provinces of Japan. Serving their daimyo, the samurai were the ultimate warriors at a time when military prowess won out over hereditary power and position. The nature of warfare itself changed-romantic ideas of mounted duels and battlefield decorum became as rare as aristocratic samurai leaders. Marching in to replace them were the common foot soldiers, the ashigaru, armed with pikes and matchlock rifles.
The Samurai Warrior examines the fighting men of this key period in Japanese history. Divided into six chapters, the book describes the unification under the Tokugawa bakufu, the major battles of the era, the weapons and armour used, the social structure of Japanese society, myths about the samurai, and finally the decline of the samurai amidst the modernization of the Meiji period.
Including more than 200 photographs, illustrations, paintings, and maps, The Samurai Warrior is a colourful, accessible study of Japan's famous but often misunderstood warrior elite.

Autoren/Hrsg.

Hubbard, Ben

Leseproben

A fourteenth-century century scroll depicts a dramatic battle between Minamoto and Taira samurai at the Rokuhara mansion in Kyoto. Introduction
The period of Japanese history between 1550 and 1615 is often considered something of a golden era for the samurai. This is when the warriors reached the zenith of their powers and united the country under the sword. This in turn led Japan into a new epoch, where samurai underlings could rise through the ranks and become powerful leaders. These warlords would then crush and conquer any clan that opposed them using the latest breakthrough in weapons technology – the arquebus. When the smoke cleared, Japan entered an enforced period of peace that would last for over 250 years. But this peace would also herald the beginning of the end for the samurai, who without wars to fight became an irrelevant burden on the feudal society they had created. The samurai first began as eighth-century warriors hired by the Emperor to subdue native ‘barbarians’ who harassed the empire’s furthest frontiers. Their battles were often skirmishes fought at close quarters, and the warriors’ long, straight, thrusting sword proved utterly useless against them. Instead, the Emperor’s men had to adopt the fighting methods of the natives they were charged with subduing. This meant mounted duels with bows and arrows, and swords cast with a special curved edge for slashing at opponents on horseback. Early samurai combat consisted of a mounted archery duel between two warriors of equal rank. A swordfight on the ground would often follow. Soul of the Samurai
This sword would later become the mighty katana, often called the ‘soul of the samurai’. Considered a spiritual extension of the warrior himself, the katana was a masterpiece of sword-making. The genius of the blade lay in its bimetallic makeup – a hard cutting edge wrapped around a soft, flexible core. A samurai’s katana would only leave his side in death and even after the warrior order had ceased to exist the sword continued to be a symbol of the samurai ethos.Bushido, or ‘Way of the Warrior’, was the samurai’s code of ethics, which enshrined loyalty, honour, fearlessness, honesty and self-sacrifice. Brave warriors would display their bushido virtues on the battlefield, or die trying. Any samurai defeated in battle was expected to commit seppuku, or suicide by slitting open the stomach, as a matter of honour. To an extent, early battles between samurai warriors were considered an honourable exchange. They would start when one mounted warrior called out his rank, family name and achievements to attract an enemy warrior of similar standing. The ensuing archery duel was therefore viewed as consensual combat between gentlemen. Sometimes the foot soldiers fighting around these gentlemen warriors would even take a consensual pause and halt proceedings to admire a particularly heroic bout. The Battle of Uji signalled the start of the Gempei War between the Minamoto and Taira clans. Here, naginata-wielding warrior monks stop the Taira from crossing Uji Bridge. But this would all change in the mid-sixteenth century when a new weapon that washed up on Japanese shores would challenge notions of honour and heroism in battle. This was the arquebus, a matchlock firearm that arrived on board a shipwrecked Portuguese trading boat. The weapon was of enormous interest to samurai warlords known as daimyo, the leaders of the warring samurai clans that now made up Japan. Known as the Sengoku Jidai, or the ‘Age of the Country at War’, this was a period of great upheaval. Many centuries previously the Emperor had his power wrested from his control by the Shogun, the ‘barbarian-subduing commander-in-chief’ tasked with protecting him. But over time the Shogun’s position too had weakened. Now, titles were all but meaningless in the face of the burgeoning military might of the daimyos. The sixteenth century rise of the daimyos was the first time in samurai history that a warlord without aristocratic blood could seize power and rule over Japan. This was so extraordinary that it even had its own name: gekokujo, or ‘the low overcomes the high.’ One of the most famous cases of gekokujo was Oda Nobunaga (1534–82), also known as the first great unifier of Japan. Nobunaga was a young upstart who took great risks in war and won the ultimate reward: domination of the country and the majority of the clans that opposed him. Nobunaga’s rapid and often brutal ascendancy to power was aided in no small part by the arquebus. Unlike some of his more gentlemanly rivals, who used the gun as an auxiliary weapon from their back lines, Nobunaga made the arquebus the central element of his armies. He first put the weapon to devastating use in the 1575 Battle of Nagashino. Here, protected by palisades, three frontlines of warriors delivered rotating volleys of arquebus fire to mow down the enemy’s charges. After this assault, samurai were able to slip through gaps in the palisades and finish off any survivors with their swords. Kusunoki Masashige’s statue stands guard outside Tokyo’s Imperial Palace. Masashige immortalized himself by leading an army into a battle he knew could not be won. The End of Honour
News of the battle astounded samurai veterans. It was a shock to think that Nobunaga’s sudden supremacy had apparently come to pass because of the arquebus. The weapon itself was considered to be offensive and dishonourable by bushido purists. Here was a weapon that a lowly foot soldier could learn to use in a day to take down a mounted samurai gentlemen who had spent his life training in the arts of war. But in the end, this complaint represented the last cry of a dying breed of samurai aristocrats who were losing their place to the ‘low’. Two ronin battle it out in the snow. Ronin were masterless samurai or ‘wave men’; destined to wander aimlessly like the waves in the sea. A fantasy scene showing ‘the last samurai’ Saigo Takamori committing seppuku as American gunboats approach. In reality, Takamori died on dry land at the Battle of Shiroyama. Heroic virtues were in short supply in the 40 years that followed, as the other great unifiers Toyotomi Hideyoshi (1536–98) and Tokugawa Ieyasu (1542–1616) succeeded Nobunaga. Hideyoshi, a one-time sandal-bearer, murdered several members of his family to ensure his son’s accession, and Ieyasu trained his cannon on female residents during a siege of his enemy’s castle. Perhaps surprisingly, then, it was during Ieyasu’s reign that the principles of bushido were codified for the first time. At the beginning of the seventeenth century, Ieyasu had decreed there would be ‘no more wars’ and by 1615 he had ensured that this would be a reality. The subsequent Edo Period brought 250 years of peace, and the emergence of many bushido texts on how a warrior ought to behave outside of the theatre of conflict. Life in the Edo Period became increasingly strained for the samurai, who were now a closed caste at the top of a social order that included peasants, artisans and merchants. Samurai were legally allowed to behead anyone who did not show them the proper respect, but they found themselves trapped within their own feudal system. The warriors were paid a rice stipend to stand battle-ready at their daimyo’s castle residence, but this barely covered their costs. Other samurai were made unemployed. These ronin, or masterless samurai, were then left to drift aimlessly around Japan. Often ronin got into trouble brawling and making a nuisance of themselves in provincial towns. Soon a law was passed that if two samurai were involved in a violent dispute both would be accountable, regardless of who was actually to blame. The punishment for this, alongside other crimes such as harbouring Christians and striking a superior, was the same: seppuku. Seppuku, often known more coarsely as hara-kiri in the West, is considered one of the most painful possible ways to die. The bravest samurai were those who made the longest open cut and let their viscera hang from the wound. As such, a samurai about to perform seppuku was allowed to have a second waiting nearby to behead him at the crucial moment and end his suffering. Seppuku manuals suggested leaving a flap of skin on the samurai’s neck to prevent his head rolling away or hitting an official. Great emphasis was placed on the importance of tea ceremonies during Japan’s Edo Period. With no wars to fight, warriors were encouraged into more cultural pursuits. With the deterrent of seppuku to keep bored samurai in check, it was suggested they spend their time on more cultural pursuits such as tea ceremonies and calligraphy. In reality, many samurai struggled to survive and were forced to take up part-time jobs trading bamboo or making umbrellas. Some even sold their swords, or replaced the blade with bamboo to keep up appearances. By the nineteenth century, the samurais’ position in the martial order of Japan became increasingly difficult to justify. Ironically, their role as protectors of the country would be called upon in the mid-nineteenth century, over 200 years after the Shogun closed Japan’s borders to foreigners. It caused great consternation when, in 1853, four American warships steamed into Edo Bay and demanded that Japan reopen her doors. After the...