The Way of the Warrior
Cultivated over centuries, the samurai developed a philosophy where honour, loyalty, discipline and a noble death were more important than life itself
The making of Japan’s Bushido code and its impact
Few acts better encapsulate the spirit of the samurai than the ritualistic form of suicidal belly-cutting, known as seppuku, or harakiri. The ultimate extension of martial virtue, honour suicide was woven through the gradual development of samurai culture. It represented an embrace of an agonising death over dishonour, an oath of loyalty to one’s lord unto the grave, and the ultimate form of discipline.
The act was also incredibly subjective in intent; for those who had disgraced themselves, it was a grotesque form of baptism by pain, through which warriors could purify their transgressions. Like Cato, who killed himself to deny Julius Caesar the satisfaction of pardoning him, it was also practised as a form of protest.
Ritualistic suicide in Japan can be traced back to the act of junshi – a form of ‘voluntary’ human sacrifice, where servants were buried alive alongside their dead masters. Although junshi was outlawed in 646, it reared its head again just three years later, when a prominent official, Soga Kurayamada, was falsely accused of plotting to kill his son-in-law.
Denied the opportunity to defend his honour, he proved his innocence by strangling himself inside a temple he had built for the emperor. In a show of solidarity, his wife, children and servants followed suit. Yet, although Kurayamada certainly died like a true samurai, his example was merely a prelude of things to come. The samurai order did not begin taking shape until the Heian era, particularly with the rise of the man who was dubbed the ’first samurai’, Taira no Masakado.
The most renowned warrior, or tsuwamono, of his time, after defeating his rival family members, he broke out in rebellion, declaring himself the ‘New Emperor’. When his own brother denounced him for acting against the Mandate of Heaven, he spat back: “Our age dictates that those who are victorious become rulers.” In other words, power was not a self-justifying force, but waiting to be grabbed by whoever was bold enough to seize it.
Despite committing an egregious crime in rebelling against the emperor, Masakado legitimised his power-grab with a sort of Robin Hood reputation. On one occasion, when he was ordered to arrest an outlaw, he refused, proclaiming it his duty to protect the weak against the strong.
After capturing one of his rival uncles, he allowed him to escape unharmed, lest he break the social taboo of slaying a family member. That same uncle went on to attack Masakado, erecting images of his father and grandfather at the front of his army, knowing that Masakado’s men would be reluctant to attack images of his ancestors. Coupled with his martial prowess, this reputation drew 5,000 soldiers to his banner like moths to the flame.
Simultaneously, on the opposite end of the archipelago, the governor-turnedpirate king Fujiwara no Sumitomo began
raiding the Inland Sea with a fleet of fishermen and seamen. When offered a senior post in return for peace, he refused, capturing a vice-governor and cutting off his ears and nose. Although both rebellions were eventually quashed, their violent obstinance had a seismic impact on the emerging proto-samurai philosophy – raising dangerous questions about the role of the warrior and the nature of loyalty.
In the mid 12th century, as power shifted into the hands of the royal offshoot clans, the Taira and Minamoto, the nature of loyalty became increasingly complicated. When the Taira-backed emperor went to war with his brother,
Minamoto no Yoshitomo sided with the emperor, against his own father. However, when ordered to execute his father, Yoshitomo refused. Instead he left the task to one of his officers, who later committed suicide in shame.
Decades later, yet another Minamoto clan member broke out in revolt, this time triggering a wider civil war. Although recently retired 74-year-old poet Minamoto no Yorimasa had previously sided with the Taira, when the Taira leader’s son stole Yorimasa’s son’s horse – and mockingly named it after him – honour dictated that he seek vengeance. Joined by just a few hundred followers, he mounted a suicidal last stand at the Battle of Uji, where, as his men held the attackers back, Yorimasa calmy knelt down and wrote a final poem on his fan: “Like a fossil tree from which we gather no flowers, sad has been my life, no fruit to produce.” With that, he calmly removed his dagger and carved open his own belly; ordering his men to cut off his head and throw it in the river, denying the enemy a coveted trophy.
Thus the tone was set. Although the subsequent Genpei War only lasted five years, it dragged the entire realm into a great bloodletting of violence, creating a crucible in which the emerging warrior class known as the samurai finally formed a unique identity of their own.
The victorious Minamoto not only wiped out the Taira but relegated the emperor to a figurehead, establishing a new order, known as the bakufu, or ‘tent government’. Henceforth, the ruling clan leader would serve as a military dictator known as shogun, who presided over a new feudal system, splintered into a network of provincial lords, clans and vassals. The samurai were now the ruling class in an intricate hierarchy in which loyalty to one’s feudal lord was paramount.
However, one of the shogun’s first acts was to betray his half-brother, the hero Minamoto no Yoshitsune. Yoshitsune’s most-trusted general, Benkei, singlehandedly staved off the attackers, buying his master enough time to kill his own family before committing seppuku,
“THESE MASTERLESS SAMURAI FOUND THEMSELVES UNEMPLOYED, DESPERATELY SEARCHING FOR WORK OR FOOD”
declaring it more noble to die by his own hand than by that of an obscure soldier. Yoshitsune stabbed himself under his left nipple, “stretched the incision in three directions” and ripped out his intestines. Japan’s quintessential samurai, his death raised the bar for all future acts of seppuku.
One can scarcely imagine the willpower, or ideology, that would drive a sane man to leave the world in so gruesome a manner, and to violate every war-hardened survival instinct. Like his fellow Genpei War samurai, Yoshitsune’s philosophy brought together elements of the indigenous
Shinto faith with Buddhist and Confucian values; such as accepting one’s lot in life, and duty to one’s superiors. The warriors infused these values and teachings with a deeply martial mentality, which saw death not as an end, but as a transition. From childhood, they were raised to devote themselves entirely to the principles of loyalty, honour and courage.
In a world where loyalty to one’s master was the most defining role of one’s life, the loss of a lord was tantamount to spiritual death. After the death of Kiso no Yoshinaka, one of his followers clenched a sword between his teeth and jumped headfirst from his horse onto the frozen ground below. When the ruling Hōjō clan were defeated in a civil war in 1333, the leader Hōjō Nakatoki gathered 500 of his warriors and apologised for being unable to repay their loyalty – “I shall kill myself for your sakes, requiting in death the favours received in life” – before committing seppuku. Alongside the Hōjō leadership, around 6,000 clansmen followed suit in an act of mass honour suicide.
In 1441, when Akamatsu Mitsusuke was attacked with a huge force for murdering the shogun, rather than fight a losing battle, his men committed mass suicide. One of them, Asaka, jumped down from a tower, butchered numerous enemies, climbed back up and roared: “Weaklings, watch me cut my stomach and I will show you how it is done!” He then maniacally hurled his guts over the enemy, set fire to his lord’s room, slit his throat and crawled onto his master’s corpse to die.
When the Samurai were not ripping out their guts, they embraced the finer pleasures of high culture. While poetry had always been a celebrated pursuit, even the gruff Hideyoshi could appreciate Sen Rikyu’s mastery of the Zen Buddhisminspired tea ceremony – making him the tea master of Japan, before ordering him to commit suicide in a fit of paranoia. While many of Buddhism’s major tenets may have long been lost to the ultraviolence of samurai society, the tea ceremony offered grizzled samurai a rare opportunity to bask in peace. Sen Rikyū elevated the tea ceremony to a process where the tea-preparation ritual was in many ways more important than the act of drinking it – drawing one’s attention to the impermanence of life, while rejecting shallow materialism and appreciating the beauty in the pedestrian aspects of life.
Such pleasantries became all the more important when Tokugawa Ieyasu brought peace to the realm, ushering in a sweeping set of social reforms designed to kick out the ladder that he had climbed to reach the top of the pecking order. Building on Hideyoshi’s social policies, he oversaw a series of increasingly pervasive reforms that segregated the four classes of citizen – peasants, artisans, merchants and samurai – more than ever. Peasants were forbidden from leaving their villages,
and samurai were confined to their appointed castle cities.
In this time of peace, the samurai underwent somewhat of an existential crisis. Just years before, they had been the vanguard of a system of perpetual warfare; now they had been reduced to bureaucrats and administrators. The Tokugawa’s strict caps on local retinue sizes also forced many lords to lay off huge numbers of soldiers. These masterless samurai, known as rōnin, found themselves unemployed, desperately searching for work or food.
Among the most famous rōnin was a martial arts instructor named Musashi Miyamoto, who was said to have never lost a duel. Miyamoto was also a writer, and penned a seminal work, The Book of Five Rings, celebrating the techniques and ideals of the warrior code, which writers were now beginning to refer to as bushidō, or ‘The Way of the Warrior’.
Miyamoto wrote: “The martial way of life practised by warriors is based on excelling others in anything and everything. Whether by victory in an individual duel or by winning a battle with several people, one thinks of serving the interests of one’s employer, of serving one’s own interests, of becoming well known and socially established.”
In reality, the word ‘samurai’ literally translated to ‘one who serves’, and there was little meaning in being a servant without a master. While some rōnin went on to become bandits and brigands, others sold off their swords and became merchants, physicians or priests instead. Many could not handle the tumble from grace and had no choice but to commit suicide with dignity. In fact, mass suicides became so endemic that by 1663 the Tokugawa had to outlaw it, seeing it as a serious drain of labour and experience. Reflecting the mood of the time, the samurai-turned-monk Yamamoto Tsunetomo explained: “The way of the samurai is found in death.”
For the samurai who remained employed, their class entitled them to a series of exclusive privileges. They were not only allowed to bear arms, but had the right to cut down any commoner who disrespected them. However, this status was a double-edged sword, for the samurai were held to far higher moral standards than the lower classes. Any soldiers caught gambling were exiled from the capital, and a samurai who killed their parent would be dragged through the streets and crucified.
The most shameful punishment reserved for the most dishonourable samurai was a public beheading. For lesser offenses, those condemned to death were offered the opportunity to commit seppuku. The most valiant of victims would embrace this with defiance by making a second gruesome cut, carving an agonising X-shaped wound across their abdomen.
However, under the Tokugawa, the act was reduced to a shell of its former self; a metaphorical reflection on the hollow nature of bushidō in an age of peace.
One’s suffering was usually cut short by a second person who, after the initial cut, would decapitate the samurai, ending their misery. Some petty nobles might only be handed a symbolic wooden sword, or a fan, and have their heads cut off as soon as they reached out for it.
In one particularly telling case, after being mocked by a drunken group of footsoldiers, a young samurai called Suga Kozaemon killed six of them, before wounding several more and tying them to a boat. The authorities forced the surviving warriors to commit seppuku for being so thoroughly disgraced, while allowing Kozaemon to commit suicide in honour of his martial ability.
After the Meiji government crushed the Satsuma Rebellion, wiping out the samurai class, the rebel leader Saigō Takamori
was said to have committed seppuku, the great swansong of the samurai. Some even speculated that his head flew off into the heavens, landing on Mars, or that he died attaining Nirvana, circled by weeping disciples. In truth, Takamori may have been felled by a bullet. Either way, although the samurai were gone, the code of bushidō lived on.
Upon creating a new conscript army in 1871, Japan’s Ministry of War issued a set of instructions, listing seven martial ideals required from each soldier: loyalty, decorum, faith, obedience, courage, frugality and honour. It explained, “This spirit made up the substance of the bushidō of old.”
In the subsequent decades, as Japan desperately attempted to modernise, this new form of bushidō grew increasingly important. Military victories over
China and Russia only further fuelled its conceptual role in the country’s cultural homogenisation. As World War II drew nearer, politicians revived a bastardised form of bushidō to drum up ultranationalist militant fervour among the country’s youth. Historian Arthur Swinson says that even though the samurai system had been abolished for 74 years by the time of Pearl Harbor, the bushidō code lived on: “The fact that the code was not incorporated into Army Regulations did not invalidate it, for it existed on a superior plane – an ideal, a faith, a creed, and a key to the ultimate things of life and death.”
As a living god, the emperor served as a hyper-concentrated focal point of the Japanese spirit, to whom the Japanese must remain loyal unto death. This force manifested itself in a tidal wave of ultraviolence, driving the Japanese army to commit unspeakable atrocities across China and southeast Asia. Like the days of the Pirate King Sumitomo, violence became a purifying expression of the Japanese spirit. In time, even a shallow, propagandised image of the samurai was incorporated into this death cult.
Vice-admiral Ōnishi used this idea of the ‘samurai spirit’ to indoctrinate young kamikaze pilots, who were trained to launch suicide attacks, flying into enemy naval vessels. Some young men wept tears of joy at the prospect of performing these suicide attacks. As the war turned and the Allies closed in on Japan itself, the imperial army only became more frenzied. At Saipan, the Americans were on the receiving end of a ‘banzai’ charge, where waves of suicidal Japanese infantry charged at the enemy.
Things only escalated when the Japanese prime minister announced that every citizen should be prepared to die rather than face defeat. In Okinawa, civilians leapt from the cliffs with their children to evade capture, and scores of his generals performed seppuku. Local resident Kinjo Shigeaki recalled the Japanese army gathering his 700 to 800 fellow villagers, compelling them to yell “Banzai!” or “Long life (to the emperor)!” three times – an unspoken indication they must commit mass suicide.
Men were handed grenades, clubs and scythes to kill their own families and themselves. After killing their mother and younger siblings, Shigeaki and his brother decided to die in a suicide attack against the American soldiers. Shigeaki recalls, “However, the first person we met was not an American but a Japanese soldier. We were shocked and wondered why he was still alive when we had been told to kill each other. Why was it that only the locals had to commit suicide while Japanese soldiers were allowed to survive? We felt betrayed. After the war, I coined the phrase, ‘Gunsei, Minshi,’ which means ‘the army survives, the people die’.”
This mentality also manifested itself in Japan’s dogged refusal to surrender – even after the first atom bomb was dropped over Hiroshima. After the war, although Hirohito remained emperor, he was forced to renounce his divinity and sovereignty.
In 1970, one of the country’s most acclaimed writers, Yukio Mishima, barricaded himself inside the headquarters of Japan’s Self-defence Force. After a lengthy speech denouncing the country’s post-war military decline and constitution, in full view of heckling troops, he committed seppuku with a dagger, with his followers cutting off his head as his guts spilled out. It was a last desperate gasp of the samurai, roaring out in one final act of defiance. However, Japan had moved on – the country had seen enough death and war and this was the time for life and peace.
“MEN WERE HANDED GRENADES, CLUBS AND SCYTHES TO KILL THEIR OWN FAMILIES AND THEMSELVES”