For a little entertainment this Thanksgiving, I read Andrew Rankin’s Seppuku: A History of Samurai Suicide (Kodansha, 2011).¹ Since I’m teaching both Samurai and Early Japan this semester, seemed like a good supplemental read, and this is the first thing resembling a lull I’ve had all semester. This is an attractive little book, substantially researched, but not much of a history. It’s more like a miscellany, a collection of materials in search of a thesis.

Andrew Rankin is a graduate student in literature, specializing in Mishima Yukio: no wonder then, that he has collected materials on extremes of samurai culture, though Mishima is conspicuous by his almost-total absence from this work.² Mishima is the subtext, though, as the entire work is dominated by discourses of aesthetics and authenticity, without the complications of anthropological or historical theory, economics or historical context. Thus you get sentences like: “Their chief aspiration, in its psychological essence, was to realize the perennial samurai fantasy of inviolable rectitude and fearless self-sacrifice culminating in sanguinary apotheosis.” (197) While Rankin acknowledges changes in practice over time, the view of samurai culture is anachronistic and stands little close scrutiny. Too bad, because even within the realm of performative aesthetics, there’s a fascinating set of problems on display here that deserve serious thought.

While academics are often accused of bibliography-dumping on our younger colleagues, that Kodansha would publish a footnoted, bibliography-laden book on samurai culture without references to Eiko Ikegami, Thomas Conlan or Paul Varley — to pick the first three that I looked for and didn’t find — seems a bit haphazard. This book could be an interesting counterpoint to Ikegami, in particular, because of her focus on the tensions between control and individual self-expression around the warrior class, but without any engagement or thesis statement, this work remains frustratingly aloof.

What this book does reasonably well is present nearly-raw materials on the stomach-cutting suicide practice, how it evolved from an exceptional display to a tradition, then to a routinized procedure and finally to a romantic gesture in the Bakumatsu-Meiji era, where it stops. This process is as close as the book comes to a thesis, though “point of view” might be closer. There are two substantive chapters chronicling this evolution. separated by one on the procedure of the mature seppuku ritual of the Tokugawa era. All of these chapters are more episodic than coherently narrative, focusing on individual events selected, as near as I can tell, for cultural impact or typicality: Well over half the book is short prose portraits of seppuku events and their ilk. There’s a great deal of interesting stuff here, details and terminology that will liven up lectures and spur the imaginations of historical novelists. There’s also a sort of epilogue, called “Paradigms” which is a collection of primary source quotations… well, it starts as primary source quotations, chronological, then Westerners and 20th century Japanese views start to slip in, material which was never addressed in the rest of the work. My favorite bit from that section is the “Death poem of Kanzawa Toko (1795)”

Death poems
are a delusion.
You just die.

It feels incomplete. Not just because I’m a scholar and I want analysis and counterarguments. But because the book doesn’t even hold together to the standards of a popular history. Despite the example above, the prose is mostly fine, though the endless progression of stomach-cutting does get to be a bit much: there aren’t enough synonyms, though Rankin doesn’t resort to euphemisms, which is good. While there’s great value in a detailed examination of a powerful social and cultural phenomenon like this, there should be some conclusion, some cohesion, which is just lacking.

1. It helps to have friends who are journal editors: my colleague at Midwest Quarterly passed it on to see if it was worth a review, shortly before the journal gave up reviewing.
2. Three references, mostly directed at the presentation of suicide in his writing, and one brief mention of the Mishima’s own “anachronistic seppuku suicide.” (18) The Satsuma uprising is also missing, except for its role in General Nogi’s own anachronistic death.

The ninja question came up last week in my Samurai class — we were talking about possible writing projects — so I had to do my ninja spiel, which has become a bit of a set piece. The history of ninja in three stages: Sneaky samurai, literary device, and school.

The first stage covers the history up through the Warring States, possibly including the early Tokugawa, and it’s the age when, as Karl Friday put it, ““ninja” denotes a function, not a special kind of warrior–ninja WERE samurai … performing “ninja” work.” Turnbull describes this period in some detail, and it’s fairly clear from his collected episodes that there may have been some warriors who were especially sneaky, but not a continual tradition. There are a variety of figures that are credited as “the first ninja”: I’m partial to the yamabushi theory, just because it does highlight the warrior-priest tradition, and because it attributes to the ninja magical powers and ethical principles which are clearly absurd. Ignoring, though, the origins snipe-hunt, there clearly was a place for stealth, surprise and spycraft in the free-for-all conflicts of Japan’s warrior ages, when samurai honor was based more on “victory or death” than battlefield procedure.¹ So some warriors did that.

As the Hideyoshi-Tokugawa peace takes hold, and Samurai become a more cohesive class with an interest in Confucian ethics, a more rule-oriented value system,² they become ashamed of the sneaky successes of their predecessors, and also start to become more specialized and formalized with regard to combat styles. Most schools of martial arts have both public and secret teachings, so the idea of a separate class of stealth specialists with secret traditions is entirely consistent with the Tokugawa-era samurai tradition. This is where the second stage begins: the cultural ninja.

Ninja were a lively part of the Tokugawa entertainment industrial complex: plays, fun houses, books, and visual art all explored the idea of the secret warrior, turning him in to a mighty, nearly mystical, foe, a haunting presence which could only be beaten through preparedness and righteousness by the mightiest samurai.³ Ninja become Robin Hood/Jesse James type outlaws, a friend to the common man — sometimes said to be of peasant origin themselves — and a blight on the establishment. By being a kind of anti-hero, occupying a rhetorical tactical space that the samurai could not, the ninja helped to legitimate the samurai as ethical warriors, as well as providing a kind of outlet for anti-samurai frustration and fantasy. This version of the ninja enters the western literary tradition through, among others, Ian Fleming’s James Bond novels.⁴ This stage is still very much in existence, of course, as the literary/cinematic tradition persists, even adding new themes like environmental consciousness.

The third stage overlaps the second — a common problem for historians attempting stage theories; perhaps ‘state’ or ‘thread’ would be a better unit — from the early modern to the modern. At some point in the Tokugawa or Meiji eras, depending on the form and who you believe, styles of martial arts became formalized more or less at the same time that they become largely irrelevant. As noted above, most have some form of “secret teaching” for advanced adepts, and a “hidden history” as well tracing back to a noteworthy ancestor-teacher, and most of them also have well-established rivalries with related schools. In that regard, Ninja as a modern “warrior way” isn’t distinguishable from other Japanese or Chinese martial practices. In the modern age, when combat techniques are as much a matter of market forces and fashions as military necessities, the secret traditions have largely become routinized; the mythology of the ninja requires an overlay of mystery, which is maintained both by the continuing use of ninja legends as entertainment⁵ and a passionate defense of the narrative of ninja as a secret, continuing tradition which has emerged into the light with modernity.

These three phases of the ninja tradition help separate out the fact from the fiction, clarify how and why ninja might be a substantial historical topic, and why the entertainment tradition has strayed so far from anything resembling reality.

1. see Conlan, State of War, which we’ll be reading in a few weeks.
2. see Ikegami, The Taming of the Samurai, which we’re reading now
3. Friday and Turnbull both address this
4. There’s a whole history yet to be written on the relationship between US military presences in East Asia, kung fu movies and the rise of Japanese martial arts in the US. But nobody’s written it yet.
5. From children’s literature to Mito Komon….

I was going to post about it here, but Another Damned Medievalist raised the question of how to deal with primary sources in a class where students lack important background concepts, and so I’m going to share the comment I made over there and then expand on it a bit:

I’m not sure if I’d call it a ‘brilliant’ idea, but I faced a similar dilemma in my Early Japan course: rich primary sources, but weak general knowledge. The way I handled it this time was to break the semester up into two units: in the first, we went through the textbook and political/economic source reader, covering the basic narrative, political and economic and religious history in a fairly traditional fashion; in the second half of the course, I went back over the same history through the primary sources — Genji, Heike, etc. — with a big secondary work on mentalite at the end. The goal, obviously, was to give the students the context first, along with some basic skill-building, then to delve deeper into the material that they were now more comfortable with, without all the “you don’t know it yet, but this is important because…” stuff that drove me crazy. The class size wasn’t big enough for a definitive result, but I think it worked pretty well. Our second-half discussions, in particular, were much better informed than I’d gotten in the past.

As a side benefit, by the way, we’d gone through the entire history before students got into their end-of-semester research projects, so they actually could pick topics they were interested in with some level of informed judgement and without a bias towards the early stuff (or pop culture-privileged topics in the later stuff).

This is something which I’ve considered doing for a long time, but not all of my courses break down quite so neatly in terms of the material I use. On the whole, as I said, I think it was quite successful. One of my students suggested a change which makes a great deal of sense: instead of putting Mary Beth Berry’s Japan in Print at the end, after the primary sources — I was using it instead of any particular 17th century reading — she pointed out that it would be a good transition reading. That made a great deal of sense: it introduces a great deal of theory about reading and audiences, and the argument creates a tension between classical/medieval and early modern culture which would be give more focus to the primary source discussions. I would have to add another 17th century reading: Given the rumors of a Chushingura movie in the works, maybe it’s time to bring that back into my syllabi!

What is that circular disk which early medieval samurai wear over their swords? Is it a weight, to keep it from flopping around while horseriding?

That’s my best guess at this point. I’ve done a little research on this, but haven’t come up with answers, but my collection’s a bit thin on armor parts.

I’ve seen it in the Heiji Scroll, and a few other pre-Warring States images, but I don’t recall seeing it after about the Onin War.

I get this question every time I show my students the War Scrolls, but I’ve never had a good answer. Help?

Premodernists, particularly those who focus on history, sometimes feel gloomy about the state of premodern Japanese studies in the U.S., where a number of large graduate programs have shrunk, disappeared, or fundamentally changed in emphasis in the past two decades. Some of us have even been known to eulogize the field, as if the heart of our collective endeavors had already stopped beating. Is the field more like a rotting corpse, or perhaps a mummified one? Have we been subject to cremation, leaving behind only bone fragments to be buried in an urn? Or was the corpse of the field left lying on the banks of the river, food for the crows and source of anxiety for locals, known as “wind burial”? (Thanks, PMJS!)

Two upcoming events prove that the rumors of the death of medieval Japanese studies were greatly exaggerated.

This weekend, Princeton University is hosting “Pieces of Sengoku: Interpreting Historical Sources and Objects from Japan’s Long Sixteenth Century”

202 Jones Hall, Princeton University

***April 25th (Saturday)***

9:00am – 9:30am   Registration and Breakfast

9:30am – 12:00pm   Session I

Opening Remarks by David L. Howell (Princeton University)

Special Remarks by Andrew M. Watsky (Princeton University) Re-assembling the “Pieces of Sengoku”

【黒印状】 Tomoko Kitagawa (Princeton University) Who Owned the Black-Seal?: The Black-Seal Letter Issued (not) by Kusu

【書札礼】 Taizo Noda (Kyoto Kōka Women’s University) Hierarchy in the Manners of Writing: The Letters from the Uesugi Collection

【御置目】 David Eason (SUNY, University at Albany) Affective Law in the Long Sixteenth Century: The Rokkaku-shi Shikimoku Revealed

12:00pm   Lunch 1:00pm – 2:30pm   Session II

【西笑承兌】 Masatoshi Harada (Kansai University) Monks of the Five Mountains and the Unification of Japan: Excerpts from Seishō Oshō Bun’an

【西笑承兌】Nam-lin Hur (University of British Columbia) Truce Negotiations in the Final Phase of the Toyotomi Regime’s Invasion of Korea

2:30pm – 3:00pm   Break 3:00pm – 4:30pm   Session III

【禁制】 David Spafford (University of Washington) Violators Will Be Punished: Kinzei Placards and the Performance of Local Authority

【過所旗】 Peter Shapinsky (University of Illinois at Springfield) Japanese ‘Jolly Roger’: The Functions and Symbolism of ‘Pirate’ Flags in Sixteenth-Century Japan

4:30pm – 5:00pm   Break 5:00pm – 6:30pm   Session IV

【肖像画】Hiroshi Kitagawa (Osaka Castle Museum) Deification and the Political History of the Sengoku Period: The Portraits of Toyotomi Hideyoshi

【御道具帳】Morgan Pitelka (Occidental College) The Social Life of Ieyasu’s Things: Tokugawa Probate in the Long Sixteenth Century
***April 26th (Sunday)***

11:00am – 1:30pm     Round Table Discussion and Lunch

Then, May 8-10 – Text and Context: New Directions in Medieval Japanese Literary and Historical Studies

A Colby Bates and Bowdoin (CBB) Initiative, to be held at Bowdoin College on May 8-10, 2009.

Organized by Thomas Conlan, Vyjayanthi Selinger, Roberta Strippoli

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Presentations (diacritics-free version)

Soundscapes: Music and Ritual in The Tale of the Heike and other Medieval Texts – David Bialock University of Southern California

Sovereign Authority and the Medieval Japanese State – Thomas Conlan Bowdoin College

Why’d They Do That & How d’ya Know?:  Some Thoughts on Reconstructing Early Medieval Warfare – Karl Friday University of Georgia

Warriors and Illness – Andrew Goble University of Oregon

Ghosts Along the Road: The Kaidoki and the Jokyu Rebellion – Elizabeth Oyler University of Illinois

Analyzing Japan’s Early Medieval Economy – Ethan Segal Harvard University

The Heike monogatari and Manuscript Textuality – Vyjayanthi Selinger Bowdoin College

Gio’s Temples, Landmarks, and Documents: When Literature Becomes “History” – Roberta Strippoli Bates College

Seppuku: A Methodological Problem – Hitomi Tonomura University of Michigan

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The symposium is open to the public, but space is limited.  Those who plan to attend should get in touch with Roberta Strippoli  (rstrippo@bates.edu) to reserve a seat.  Roberta will also provide a   more detailed program.

Sponsored by CBB and the Luce Foundation