Forty-Seven Samurai

A Tale of Vengeance and Suicide in Haiku and Letters

Hiroaki Sato

• Publisher: Stone Bridge Press
• Year: 2019
• ISBN:
  9781611729382
• Topic: Historia
• Subtopic: Historia japonesa

One of the most spectacular vendettas ever: the history and haiku behind the mass-suicide featured in the 2013 film 47 Ronin.

A remarkable and true tale of loyalty, vengeance, and ritual suicide.... In the spring of 1701, the regional lord Asano Naganori wounded his supervising official, Kira Yoshinaka, during an important ceremony in the ruling shogunate's Edo Castle and was at once condemned to death. Within two years, in the dead of winter, a band of forty-seven of Asano's retainers avenged him by breaking into Yoshinaka's mansion and killing him. Subsequently, all the men were sentenced to death but allowed to perform it honorably by seppuku.

This incident—often called the Ako Incident—became a symbol of samurai honor andat once prompted stage dramatization in kabuki and puppet theater. It has since has been told and retold in short and long stories, movies, TV dramas. The story has also attracted the attention of foreign writers and translators. The most recent retelling was the 2013 Hollywood film 47 Ronin, with Keanu Reeves, though it was wildly and willfully distorted.

What did actually happen and how has this famous vendetta resonated through history? Hiroaki Sato's examination is a close, comprehensive look at the Ako Incident through the context of its times, portraits of the main protagonists, and its literary legacy in the haiku ofthe avengers. Also included is Sato's new translation of Akutagawa Ryunosuke's short story about leader Oishi Kuranosuke as he awaited sentencing.

1

Grudge and Seppuku under “Dog Shogun”

In his Chronicle of the Current Rule (Go-tōdai ki), the samurai-turned-poet-critic Toda Mosui wrote this down for Third Month of the fourteenth year of Genroku, 1701:¹

Fourteenth Day, Third Month:² Imperial reply. This day, in the Castle, Chief of Carpentry Asano wounded Lieutenant Governor of Kōzuke Kira with a sword. Someone close by quickly restrained him, allowing no second strike. Chief of Carpentry Asano was placed in [Magistrate of] Ukyō Tamura’s custody, the entertainment of nobles given to Governor of Noto Toda by order. That same night, again by order, seppuku was given to Chief of Carpentry Asano; it was decided that, albeit in the Palace, he was heedless. His second was a lesser inspector, witnesses were two inspectors-general. [Asano’s] younger brother Daigaku was put under house arrest. . . .

The incident mentioned matter-of-factly in this entry would lead, in less than two years, to the most famous act of vengeance in Japanese history, one carried out by a group of forty-seven samurai.

But before going any further, let’s take a brief look at the historical background of the era.

The Land Is “Full of Light”

The “current rule” in the title of Mosui’s chronicle refers to that of the fifth Tokugawa shogun, Tsunayoshi, so the account begins in the year he succeeded his older brother Ietsuna as shogun, on the eighth of Fifth Month 1680. The country had been at peace for decades. It had been nearly seven decades since Ieyasu, founder of the Tokugawa dynasty,³ destroyed the remnants of the allies and sympathizers of the country’s unifier Toyotomi Hideyoshi in the Battles of Osaka, fought during the winter of 1614 and the summer of 1615, completely putting an end to Japan’s Age of Warring States. And it had been four decades since the biggest civilian rebellion took 37,000 lives, a slaughter that necessitated the painstaking process of repopulating a whole region.

That rebellion, in Shimabara, Nagasaki, from the end of 1637 to early 1638, is often thought to have been a Christian revolt. There are some reasons for this. A great many persecuted Christians joined it, with the sixteen-year-old Masuda Shirō (whose baptismal name was Francisco) at the head, à la Jeanne d’Arc. Holland—by then more or less the only European country allowed to trade with Japan, on a strict pledge not to proselytize Christianity—bombarded the rebels’ stronghold from its ships to solidify its own position and symbolically brought to an end “Japan’s Christian Century.” But the main cause of the uprising was the heavy taxation and the unrest among the peasantry and the samurai who had lost their jobs under Tokugawa rule.

And so, when Matsuo Bashō traveled north from Edo, today’s Tokyo, in 1689 to make a cross-country journey and first reached Nikkō (“Sunlight”) where Ieyasu’s mausoleum lay, he came up with the following hokku—part of the haikai genre, today called haiku—to express his gratitude, metaphorically, to the founder of the Tokugawa shogunate for bringing peace to the land:

Look, so holy: green leaves young leaves in the light of the sun

Ara tōto aoba wakaba no hi no hikari

Bashō’s gratitude was much clearer in the initial version of this 5-7-5-syllable verse, with the mid-seven saying, ki no shita yami mo, “even the darkness under the trees”; ki no shita, “under the trees,” directly pointed to Toyotomi Hideyoshi, who had started out with the surname Kinoshita.⁴ In his original version, Bashō must have thought he was unnecessarily denigrating Hideyoshi.⁵ After all, Hideyoshi had unified the Japanese archipelago in 1590, a grand accomplishment that one might say Ieyasu usurped. Before his death, Hideyoshi had formed a coalition cabinet by appointing five daimyo as “senior administrators” (go-tairō) to govern the country and another five as “magistrates” (go-bugyō)⁶ to manage day-to-day affairs. But after Hideyoshi’s death in 1598, Ieyasu, the most powerful of the administrators, moved to break up the coalition system to his advantage.⁷ One of the Five Magistrates, Ishida Mitsunari, resisted the move. This led to the Battle of Sekigahara in 1600, a one-day clash between Ieyasu and his allies and Mitsunari and his. The former trounced the latter.

Here, an international perspective may be worthwhile on the isolationism that makes the Tokugawa period stand out in Japan, although, to be exact, the semi-isolationism: Japan maintained its trade relations with Holland, China, Korea, and Lewchew (Ryūkyū), today’s Okinawa.⁸ Engelbert Kaempfer, a German physician and naturalist who went to Japan in 1690 as the Dutch East India Company’s chief surgeon and stayed there for almost three years, found Japan’s seclusionist policy sensible, even while it went against “the Supreme Will of the All-wise Creator.” Kaempfer had been born after the Thirty Years War (1618–48), which had reduced the German population from twenty-one million to thirteen million through slaughter, famine, and pestilence. So many European countries had turned Germany into a bloody playground; “the manly exploits,” as Norman Davies puts it, “of Spanish, Swedish, Italian, Croat, Flemish, and French soldiers had changed the racial composition of the people.”⁹ And wars, religious or otherwise, continued to rage in Europe well into the next century. Little wonder Kaempfer was relieved to find a society functioning far away from all that havoc by largely cutting off involvements with other countries as it could.

In his analysis, “An Enquiry, whether it be conducive for the good of the Japanese Empire, to keep it shut up, as it now is, and not to suffer its inhabitants to have any Commerce with foreign nations, either at home or abroad,” Kaempfer also noted that Tokugawa Tsunayoshi was “a Prince of great prudence and conduct, and heir of the virtues and good qualities of his predecessors, and withal eminent for his singular clemency and mildness, though a strict maintainer of the Laws of the Country.” In fact, he regarded the fifth Tokugawa shogun as far preferable to the self-claimed Sun King, Louis XIV.¹⁰

Kaempfer visited Tsunayoshi in Edo Castle twice, in 1691 and 1692. He may have had a benign view of him not only because the country was unravaged by foreign powers, but also because, on both occasions, the shogun behaved like a curious boy, though fifty years old.

The shogun had first been seated next to the women at some distance in front of us, but now he moved to the side, as close to us as he could behind the blind.¹¹ He had us [Kaempfer and the visiting Dutchmen] take off our kappa, or ceremonious robes, and sit upright so that he could inspect us, had us now stand up and walk, now pay compliments to each other, then again dance, jump, pretend to be drunk, speak Japanese, read Dutch, draw, sing, put on our coats, then take them off again. During this process I broke into the following song. . . . ¹²

Shogun Tsunayoshi and the Genroku Era

Tsunayoshi’s rule is often equated with the Genroku era, which, in turn, is sometimes called “Japan’s Renaissance,” even as his rule lasted almost thirty years while the era itself lasted about half as long, from 1688 to 1704. Culture flourished as agriculture and commerce expanded. Among the names readily recognizable today to those interested in Japanese art and literature are the just-mentioned Matsuo Bashō in poetry as well as Ihara Saikaku in fiction and Chikamatsu Monzaemon in drama. There were Tosa Mitsuoki and Hanabusa Itchō in painting, and Ogata Kōrin in crafts, painting, and design. Of these, Kōrin, a kimono dealer’s son in Kyoto, has left an episode as charming as some of his designs.

Once Kōrin went with his friends to see cherry blossoms on Arashiyama. His friends brought beautiful boxes packed with rare, delicious foods from mountain and sea, but Kōrin came with rice balls simply wrapped in bamboo skin—albeit decorated with the glorious yet delicate inlays¹³ on it of “flower, bird, mountain, and water” that he made himself. When he was done with his food, he casually tossed the bamboo skin into the flow of the Ōi River.¹⁴

In pottery, Kōrin’s younger brother, Kanzan, distinguished himself, along with Nonomura Ninsei. There was the painter and illustrator Hishikawa Moronobu, “the father of ukiyo-e.” If you extend the period somewhat earlier, you may include Hon’ami Kōetsu in calligraphy, pottery, and design as well as Tawaraya Sōtatsu in painting. Far outside the fine arts, there was the Buddhist priest Enkū who traveled as far north as Hokkaidō and left at least 12,000 wooden Buddha sculptures he carved himself.

Knowledge and learning in various fields also advanced, partly encouraged by Tsunayoshi, who promoted Chinese studies by initiating a program with himself as a regular lecturer. Historiography, which the “deputy-shogun” Tokugawa Mitsukuni of Mito¹⁵ strongly pushed, made great strides. The scholar-cum-shogunate advisor Arai Hakuseki wrote books in a range of fields, including foreign affairs. He wrote What I Have Heard about the West (Seiyō kibun) based on his interviews with Italian Father Giovanni Battista Sidotti, who, having slipped into Japan to proselytize, had been captured, tortured, and, after apostatizing, put under house arrest.¹⁶ Hakuseki interviewed members of the Korean embassies and wrote books about Korean-Japanese relations.

Among the contemporary students of classical Japanese literature was Toda Mosui, quoted at the outset, who criticized traditional tanka poetry. Interest in natural history also increased, spawning people like Kaibara Ekiken, whose listing of Japanese plants by a taxonomy of his own device, accompanied by his own drawings, was the best of its kind in Japan until the Japanese were exposed to Western scientists like Carl Linnaeus from the late nineteenth to twentieth century.

Genroku was also the age of luxury, ostentation, and a flamboyant display of sex, male, female, homosexual—for those who could afford it, of course. Just as Kōrin had shown off the bamboo skin with his own inlays, well-to-do merchants’ wives and daughters competed in wearing expensively designed kimono, today generally known as Genroku kosode, in stylish combination with other garments, sashes, and various adornments. Ihara Saikaku, who turned from prolific hokku writing to prose writing, described the attire of various women. In Five Women Who Loved Love (Kōshoku gonin onna), for example, he presents a young woman of thirteen or fourteen this way:

. . . Her long hair was combed out in back, turned slightly up at the ends and secured with a scarlet band. Her forelock stood out and was parted like a young boy’s, the coiffure being tied with a paper cord of gold and decorated with a half-inch comb of immaculate beauty—all of which displayed such perfect grace that it would be idle to catalogue her charms one by one. Her under-kimono was of white satin relieved with a black-and-white design; the outer garment was a silken veil of Chinese lace, elegantly contrived so that beneath it one could perceive the iridescent stain of the middle kimono on which had been sewn a peacock pattern. All this was fastened with an unpadded sash of many colours. . . . ¹⁷

Women themselves couldn’t help thinking their life depended on their face and figure, let alone their getup, “in a world where men spent half a year to learn to scrutinize their own clothes, hair styles, and swords, but also the way they walked, just to go to pleasure quarters,” or so observed the historian Kodama Kōta in The Genroku Age (Genroku jidai). For that matter, what is given as “young boy” above is wakashu, a catamite, the object of male love; a great deal of care and money was spent on such young men to make them prettier, more enchanting. There were, in addition, kabukimono, date-otoko, yakko, yarō, etc.—many among them rowdy, tough men who galivanted while outlandishly decked out, often provoking quarrels and fights. Some of these figures later became the subjects of kabuki plays and one-man storytelling (kōdan). Among them, for example, was Banzui-in Chōbē, said to have beat up Mizuno Jūrōzaemon, a hatamoto¹⁸ with a stipend of 3,000 koku, who, in retaliation, entrapped Chōbē and killed him. The point of the story is that Chōbē, knowing what was up, went to Jūrōzaemon’s house as invited.¹⁹

In truth, you may say the country was peaceful only in that it was free from military clashes, for rambunctious men still prowled the streets.

In the mi...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Contents
• Preface
• 1 Grudge and Seppuku under “Dog Shogun”
• 2 The Leader and “Foxfire”
• 3 Poetic Connections: “My Strength Broken”
• 4 Chūshingura as a National Epic
• 5 Disloyal Men
• 6 “A Day in the Life of Ōishi Kuranosuke”
• Afterword: A History of Vengeance in Japan
• Endnotes
• Books Consulted
• Japan’s Provinces from 824 to 1868
• Index
• Back Cover