Ninja (11 page)

Another way for ordinary men to look after themselves was to join an
ikki
, a term that came to apply to both landowners and peasants. This was an attractive alternative because as a fighting unit the members all knew one another and trained together. They were very effective, controlling the abuses of lords, mounting protests, and demanding rent rebates. In 1428, peasants objecting to tax increases ran riot in Kyoto. In 1441, when the shogun was assassinated and there was no central government to speak of, tens of thousands converged on Kyoto, and several thousand made camps within its walls, burning buildings and setting up roadblocks that isolated the capital. The rulers bought peace by promising “virtuous government,” returning land sold over the previous twenty years, and canceling debts. Peasant uprisings followed every one or two years for the next fifteen years, including one ending in an all-out battle in which the
ikki
forces thrashed a samurai army of eight hundred.

The peasants had a point. At the other end of the social scale, lords and samurai could, it seemed, do nothing but fight battle after battle, with results well displayed by a decade of extremely bloody unrest (1467–77) known as the
O
nin War, after the year it started.
²
Amid a welter of causes, a major factor was the rivalry of two families fighting to succeed the ineffective shogun, Yoshimasa, who had been childless, adopted an heir, then promptly produced a son. The adopted son and new baby acquired their own factions, who started to tear the country apart. One was led by a priest so famous for his paroxysms of red-faced fury that he was known as “the Red Monk”; on the other side was his son-in-law, equally famous for his restraint. In just a single year, their conflict turned Kyoto's palaces, temples, and great houses into burned-out ruins. After one action, eight carts were filled with heads, the rest—uncounted—being tossed into ditches. The streets were barricaded, the gardens trenched. “The flowery capital which we thought would last forever,” lamented one official, “is to become the lair of foxes and wolves.” Kyoto became a miniature Western Front, with the two sides glaring at each other across a no-man's-land of weeds and blackened timbers, divided by a trench seven meters wide. It was a war of negatives—no aims, no heroes, no leadership, a total waste of lives and resources. Finally, the carnage ushered in war-weariness. At the end of 1477, one side burned their positions and fled into the darkness. Looters moved in to complete the city's ruin, and all to no purpose. The historian George Sansom calls the unheroic leaders “unfortunate creatures demented by their own ambitions.”

An uneasy peace came to ruined Kyoto, but the surrounding countryside remained at war, with armies and bandits prowling for loot. To the south, in Yamato and Yamashiro, villagers intent on self-defense and self-government built their houses behind earth levees and surrounded themselves with ditches, ponds, and moats. They had good reason, because Yamashiro was still at war with its neighbor, Kawachi, over control of the main road between Kyoto and Nara (a mere fifteen kilometers from Kasagi, where Emperor Go-Daigo had based himself at the beginning of the civil war a century and a half before; even in a chaotic world, some things never change). On the front line, armies from both sides pillaged, plundered, looted, stole, raped, and burned, until the locals had had enough. In 1485 lower-order warriors and
ashigaru
, appalled by the loss of crops and farmland, deserted from both sides and marched to a local shrine. Peasants joined them. The decision was made to turn the whole southern part of Yamashiro into an
ikki
. They sent an ultimatum to both armies, demanding withdrawal or else, forcing mass desertions. The following year, warrior chiefs proclaimed virtual independence as a “provincial commune.” This was not a peasant or a village commune but rather a new government, which quickly alienated its peasant constituents, with the result that after eight years and the appointment of a new governor by Kyoto, it collapsed.

One hundred and twenty kilometers north, in what was then Kaga and is now Ishikawa, there was another sort of rebellion from below, this one driven by warrior monks belonging to the Buddhist True Pure Land (J
o
do Shinsh
u
) sect. This group, which appealed to ordinary people because it was rooted in village life without the usual trappings of monasticism, had been in existence for two hundred years, without making much impression on those beyond its communities, referred to as Ikk
o
(meaning “single-minded, devoted,” or as we might put it today, “fundamentalist.” Not to be confused with
ikki
). The True Pure Landers believed that to escape the tribulations of this life you only had to have faith in a form of Buddha known as Amida, a symbol for the transcendent reality and mystery, which is unborn, uncreated, and formless. No, I don't know what that means either, but anyone desiring rebirth into this mystical realm could achieve it by calling Amida's name ten times or more. Its founder was said to have repeated Amida's name sixty thousand times a day, which must have qualified him for many instant rebirths.

The history of religions suggests two universal laws: (1) that all religions spawn sects; and (2) that extremist sects, drunk with self-righteous certainty, often turn to violence. Such was the case here. After a century and a half of ineffective nonviolence, True Pure Land changed. In 1457 a charismatic monk named Renny
o
set up shop in Kaga, preaching salvation by faith in Amida, rejecting the established Buddhist church, and appealing directly to ordinary people. Like Martin Luther, he taught that anyone could arrange his own salvation without recourse to priests, and as Luther promoted German over Latin, so Renny
o
taught in direct, simple language, avoiding Chinese, so that “even women and the most miserable peasants” could understand, political correctness not being much in evidence at the time. One of his articles of faith was that death in battle was rewarded by eternal bliss. “Advance and be reborn in paradise,” read his banner. “Retreat and go instantly to hell.” Official Buddhism insisted on celibacy, hard work, such as copying religious tracts, and paying for religious services. Renny
o
dispensed with all the rules, proclaiming that only his followers went to paradise and everyone else didn't, a simplistic creed that appealed particularly to those who had been barred from salvation by their occupation as killers, whether of people or vermin. He had many wives and fathered twenty-eight children, the last when he was eighty-four, just before his death. When he retired, he built himself a hermitage, Ishiyama Hongan-ji, which became the heart of a city. It lay on a well-forested plateau on the coast downstream from Kyoto at a place called “the Long Slope”—
O
saka, the core of today's city. He was hugely successful. His church was thronged with believers of peasant stock, eager for women, war, death, and paradise. Ishiyama Hongan-ji grew from a hermitage into an immense temple-fortress with ten thousand monks and a score of major and minor outlying temples.

Soon other Ikk
o
leagues sprang up. In Kaga itself a local lord recruited battalions of warrior monks under the command of his samurai. In 1488 they revolted, threw out the samurai, and seized a dominant role, so that Kaga became “a province held by commoners,” in a much-quoted phrase—the first time a province was ruled by a nonaristocratic, non-samurai group. This was people power, Japanese-style, and it was just the beginning. Ikk
o
bands would seize temples and land, and rule and fight for a century, escaping from their peasant roots to build commercial and military strongpoints defended by walls and ditches.

Everyone had an idea of Japan as a unified nation, for all shared common literature, religions, and culture. Unfortunately, they didn't accept the same idea of political unity beneath the umbrella authority of the emperor and shogun, for war had reduced both to impotence, even penury. When one emperor died in 1501, there was no money to bury him. Another sold autographs to passersby. Without a universal victory, there could be no political unity, and thus no lasting peace.

Everywhere war continued, family against family, warriors against Ikk
o
s, province against province, shogun against emperor, and the
ashigaru
against everyone else. It was a world turned upside down, and thus it became known as
gekokuj
o
, translated as “the low oppress the high,” or “the lower commanding the upper.” To compound this chaos, around 1500 there were some two dozen major warlords and three hundred minor ones, all acting as gods in their own domains, each eager to expand his little empire. To track them would be like following particles in a cloud chamber. In Shinano—today's Nagano, a landlocked province in the middle of Honsh
u
—two rival lords fought in the same place every year for five years, as if determined to do no more than provide their samurai with chances to display themselves. Every leader struggled to find some advantage, and for more than a century—the long century (1480–1600) known as the Age of the Warring States—none achieved lasting success.

These chaotic times inspired the evolution of the ninja proper. Several sources refer to ninja and its Japanese-language counterpart,
shinobi
, while others mention soldiers who acted in a ninja-like fashion as spies, scouts, surprise attackers, and agitators. But the ninja training and activities were mainly focused in the areas still most closely associated with them, the regions then known as Iga and K
o
ga (now parts of Mie and Shiga Prefectures, Iga being a province and K
o
ga—today's K
o
ka—a town and its surrounding area).

Together, the two offered unique advantages to their villagers. Both straddled the eighty-kilometer-wide neck of land between Lake Biwa and the coast, neatly bisecting the main island and placing them in a potentially dominant position. To the north was the ancient capital Kyoto, and the road that would one day become the great east-west coastal highway linking Kyoto and Edo, the T
o
kaid
o
(Eastern Sea Road), which ran through a pass on the borders of K
o
ga. Yet both were isolated by their mountainous landscapes. Iga is a basin about forty kilometers across surrounded by hills ranging from five hundred to one thousand meters, through which the Nabari River cuts a dramatic gorge. K
o
ga lies over the hills to the north, where high ground falls away to the shores of Lake Biwa.

These areas were only two or three days' walk from Kyoto but were never natural centers that would have made cities from which lords could build miniature empires. Instead, they had networks of villages and fortified manors, several hundred of them, which were proud of their independence and self-reliance. Iga, in particular, had no military governor for many centuries, being under the loose control of a temple in the ancient capital of Nara, and so never paid a land tax either to the shogun or to the emperor. Both relied on a main river and had managed to control floods and distribute water cooperatively. And both were sturdily independent, with families known as “warriors of the soil,” who would not tolerate the empire-building landowners and towering castles that dominated the rest of the country.

These days Iga and K
o
ga are easy to cross by road. But in the Middle Ages the going was tough—still is, actually, when you get off the paved roads. The pine-covered slopes are divided by streams that turn to torrents in rain, carving deep gorges. The one-horse paths linking the villages were narrow and steep—“tiger's mouths,” as they were called by the locals, who knew all the passes intimately and could block them with just a few men. This was a happy balance between accessibility and remoteness, between density and diffuseness. They had something worth defending, and moved from near anarchy to communality in order to do so.

Several other elements made these remote-yet-accessible areas just right for the development of ninja self-defense forces.

First, both areas were a natural base for bandits—the
akut
o
—attracted to the rich pickings available on the highway from Kyoto, the future T
o
kaid
o
road, which in the early Middle Ages was mainly used to get to the great Shinto shrine at Ise, dedicated to the sun goddess from whom all emperors descend. You can understand the attraction for bandits even now, if you follow what is still the T
o
kaid
o
from Minakuchi, the fiftieth of the fifty-three post stations that marked the way from Edo (now Tokyo) to Kyoto. Go eastward, toward Kyoto, for ten kilometers or so, a day and a half's journey on foot.

I did, with my host Yoshihisa Yoshinori, who was keen to show it to me because he lived right on the T
o
kaid
o
. Along the way, now neatly paved and suburbanized by single-story gray-tiled houses, the old track is the same width it always was, still hardly wide enough for two palanquins, or cars, to pass. “That's where I was born,” said Yoshihisa, pointing out a house as plain and simple as most others, its front right on the road. I wondered if this was a choice made by his parents, a way of buying into a privileged community, perhaps? No, nothing like that. “My great-grandparents wanted the rice field behind it, that's all. Better a rice field than a house.” But he was proud of living on such a historic way, like his neighbors, as the houses themselves showed. There are no formal planning regulations, but—this being Japan, with a strong sense of community—residents conform with tradition when they build.

The low gray houses marshaled us out into flat, open lands, which gave way to one of the two ranges on the whole route, the Suzuka hills. The track rose steeply. It was up here that travelers faced danger from lurking highwaymen. We were far beyond houses. Back then, it was hard to find your way at night, especially in winter when the slope was slick with mud, and you had to dismount to climb, if you were rich enough to have a horse, and if not, then your straw sandals, bought from some wayside stall only a few hours before, were already falling apart. So the locals had made a huge stone lantern, still in place after five hundred years (well, almost in place; a motorway runs in a tunnel underneath, and the builders had to move the lantern fifty meters). It's a monstrous thing, thirty-eight tons and more than five meters high, consisting of a bulbous base, a pillar supporting the hollowed-out lantern, and a roughly carved, monolithic roof to keep the rain away from the flickering oil lamp. The “road” may have been nothing but a muddy, three-meter-wide track, but this lantern proclaimed its importance.