Ninja (8 page)

Anarchy, suspicion, and fear do strange things to minds and behavior. People took to concealing themselves with disguises and masks. Travelers wore wide-brimmed sun hats that hid their faces. Women veiled themselves. When warrior monks paraded through Kyoto in protest against some act or law of which they disapproved, they disguised their voices, wore masks, or wrapped their faces in shawls, cutting slits to see through (like other men of violence of recent times, in Palestine, or the Basque Country, or Northern Ireland). Things came to such a pass that when the Ashikaga seized the shogunate in 1336, they banned outlandish clothing. It didn't make much difference. People responded by adopting the fashions associated with
hinin
—the “unhuman” pariahs who performed “unclean” tasks, such as dealing with corpses on the riverbanks, tasks that were unclean but also vital, which gave the
hinin
a cachet despite their occupations. Riverbanks were outside the reach of any lord. They were places where gangs staged stone-throwing battles, troops practiced maneuvers, artisans set up informal markets, and performers and artists gathered. From a world of lepers and corpses and sand and pebbles sprang great talent, such as the landscape gardener Zen'ami, who created the sand-and-stone Zen gardens that we now see as typically Japanese. The “people of the riverbanks” made a vibrant demimonde, a sort of medieval Left Bank, a hip, arty, decadent, freewheeling world, which produced weird mixtures of male and female fashions that were adopted by those who liked to proclaim themselves yet hide their faces.

All this was against a background of anarchic violence, involving every subgroup: classes, families, temples, landowners, city dwellers, peasants, and many more. Another was formed by bandits known as
akut
o
, the “evil groups,” gangs of ruffians of all sorts—disaffected warriors, pirates, vagabonds, farmworkers eager for pillage, mercenaries, poachers—who sometimes resorted to a sort of uniform, carrying bamboo spears and rusty swords, wearing sleeveless war kimonos and six-sided caps, and covering their faces with yellow scarves to make themselves look “strange.” They were, perhaps, the equivalent of roving gang members terrorizing a neighborhood, taking anything unattached and undefended, and moving on. A monk writing in Harima Province (in the southwest of Honsh
u
, part of today's Hy
o
go Prefecture) about the years around 1300 portrayed an area “awash in blood and fire and abounding in violence, assaults, piracy, robberies and manhunts.”
¹

Yet another force were the warrior monks, who had their tenth-century origins in the rivalry between two Buddhist factions with temples on Mount Hiei, near Kyoto. The two fought over land and the appointment of abbots, their violent conflicts often spilling over into Kyoto itself and mixing with other wars between warlords. In 1117 an ex-emperor commented, “There are three things that are beyond my control: the rapids of the Kamo river, the dice at gambling and the monks of the Mountain” (that is, Enryaku-ji, the temple on Mount Hiei).
²
They settled into a more peaceful existence in the thirteenth century but would surface again in the fourteenth, when anarchy returned and violence rose to new levels.

So far, the sources make no mention of ninjas, not because there weren't any but because their equivalents had many different names, depending on where they lived. There were several famous ninja-like operations, stories told in the great late-fourteenth-century chronicle, the
Taiheiki
(
Chronicle of the Great Peace
, an odd title given that it's all about war). Like other medieval epics, it was rooted in the tales told and sung by blind bards, Japanese Homers who went from castle to castle, entertaining the courts with tales of derring-do. Unlike the two great Homerian epics, it lacked a good editor; two-thirds of it, as Helen Craig McCullough says in the introduction to her translation, is “dull reading for any but the specialist.” But the narrative was based on real events and real people, and here and there it soars. The problem for historians is that they can seldom separate out truth from exaggeration and invention.

These actions happen in the 1330s, during a would-be revolution started by the emperor Go-Daigo (in Kyoto) in a supposedly secret attempt to destroy the shogunate (in Kamakura) and restore direct imperial rule, something that had not existed for centuries. A man named Hino Suketomo went off to recruit allies, disguised as a wandering monk. The plot was revealed and the shogun sent an army to stop Go-Daigo. He protested his innocence, and Suketomo, left to carry the can, was exiled to Sado, an island off the north coast where dissidents were sent. The military leaders debated. Order had to be restored, dissidents killed. Suketomo was sentenced to death. It happened that Suketomo had a thirteen-year-old son, Master Kumawaka, who heard of the sentence and decided to do something about it. And so the story with its ninja-like hero, sometimes called the “first ninja,” begins:

The boy says to his mother, “Why should I prize life? Let me perish together with my father, that I may share his journey to the nether regions.”
³

His mother cannot bear the thought. Sado is a dreadful island, she says, unfrequented by human beings. If he goes, she will die. In that case, he says, he might as well throw himself into a river and drown. So, unwillingly, she relents, and he goes, walking, in straw sandals and tilted sedge hat. He reaches the coast, takes a ferry, and arrives at the castle of Sado's governor, a monk named Homma. He begs to see his father. Homma is moved, bathes the boy's feet, and treats him with all consideration, but he refuses to allow father and son to meet. It would only increase Kumawaka's anguish, he says. But father and son are so close that the father, imprisoned in a place overgrown with bamboo, hears of his son's presence. How cold was Homma's heart, laments the poet. Since the father was a prisoner and the son but a child, why was it dangerous to place them together?

Men come to Suketomo, inviting him to bathe as a prelude to execution. He takes the news calmly, as a samurai should. They lead him to a river beach, where he writes a farewell poem seated upright on an animal skin, and even as he finishes, “his noble head fell on to the animal skin while yet his body sat up straight.” He is cremated, and his bones taken to his son.

Kumawaka is grief-stricken and swears revenge. “If there is a chance,” he says, “I will stab Homma or his son and rip out my belly.”

So to avoid returning home with his father's remains, he feigns illness for four or five days. Then one night a storm comes. The boy takes his chance but fails to find either of his intended victims. Instead, in a well-lit room, he comes across the executioner. “Very well,” thinks Kumawaka. “He too may be called my father's enemy.” Moreover, he has his sword and dagger beside him. But the candle is too bright. Kumawaka notices moths on the outside of the door. He opens the door. The moths swarm in and put out the candle. He carefully draws the sword, kicks the executioner awake, and stabs him twice, ignoring his cries, through the navel and the throat. Then he hides in a bamboo thicket.

Guards come, see the little footprints, and at once guess who has committed the crime. The boy must still be on the premises, they say, because the moat is deep. They start searching. Kumawaka wonders whether to kill himself; but no—and this is what marks him as more ninja, less traditional samurai—better to live a useful life than die a useless death. “If I can preserve my life in some way, may I not assist the emperor as well, and accomplish my father's desire of many years?”

So he climbs a bamboo, which bends until it reaches across the moat, depositing him on the other side. Day dawns. He hides again, this time in a growth of hemp and mugwort, while guards gallop this way and that, hunting him. In the evening he comes out and looks for the harbor, where he intends to take a ferry. Perhaps the spirits were protecting him in reward for his filial resolution (despite the fact that he has not killed his intended victim), for he meets a monk, who carries him on his back to the harbor, summons a boat, and climbs aboard, just in time to evade their pursuers. Thus it was with divine protection that Kumawaka “came forth alive from the crocodile's mouth.”

The story is told with no great narrative technique, for we never learn what happens to Homma or whether Kumawaka ever gets to aid the emperor. But it does reveal something about ninja-style acts, though of somewhat dubious morality: Vengeance is a valid motive; any victim will do; opportunities must be seized; escape must be improvised with whatever means are available; better to survive ninja-like to fight again than die a samurai's death; and if the motive is pure—apparently the intention is more vital than the deed—then luck will be with you.

Meanwhile, Go-Daigo had fled south from Kyoto with the imperial regalia to the mountains and forests of Yamato Province, where scattered castles—so-called “hilltop” castles, though few were actually on the very top—guarded remote valleys. He holed up in one of them, on Mount Kasagi, while his greatest general, Kusunoki Masashige, and his son, Prince Morinaga, based themselves in other castles. The shogun's army went in pursuit. The consequences were horribly complicated—castles were taken and Go-Daigo exiled to “Oki Island,” as most sources claim. In fact, Oki is a group of four islands, none of which is called Oki, fifty kilometers off the north coast, but never mind the details, because he escaped, hiding under seaweed in a fishing boat; he returned to Kyoto, made a total mess of governing for four years, and fled again to Yamato. The Kamakura
bakufu
(shogunate) fell, leaving power in the hands of the incoming Ashikaga; Go-Daigo set up a rival Southern Court in Yoshino, a division that would last, with almost continuous warfare between Northern and Southern Courts, rebel versus loyalist, shogun versus emperor, for another sixty years.

Fortunately, we do not need to know much about the war as a whole. We are interested in the opening actions against the hilltop castles, because these assaults, sieges, and defenses demanded new and unconventional tactics from both attackers and defenders. The way Kusunoki, in particular, established his bases and fought held lessons for anyone fighting superior forces in similar landscapes, which is precisely what the ninjas were doing as they developed their communities and their techniques in neighboring regions.

In this world of steep forests, rocky outcrops, and precipitous ravines, set-piece battles were impossible, and cavalry useless. Both sides had to use other means. Kusunoki, later to acquire a reputation as the epitome of loyalty, was a noted guerrilla fighter, so skilled in covert warfare that some wishful thinkers, of which there are many in the world of martial arts, credit him with setting up his own martial arts “school” (
ryu
). His opponents, the shogun's generals, were faced with the need to take four great mountain castles, the first shielding the emperor, the others his partisan defenders, including the great Kusunoki himself.

It is autumn 1331. The emperor is holed up in a mountain-top castle on Mount Kasagi, a holy place of wooden palisades and towers set about with massive boulders that have images of Buddha carved into them (the
Taiheiki
mentions the boulders but not the Buddha images, which remain to this day). The shogun's forces, seventy-five thousand of them, are preparing an assault. The numbers are arbitrary; they grow with each new chapter, adding a steady crescendo to the drama, for the
Taiheiki
at its best tells a tale in the style of epics from Homer to Hollywood, in which every feature and action is larger than life, with a wealth of detail, some realistic, some poetic, all designed to make the events appeal to the imaginations of an openmouthed audience.

The peak is covered in cloud, and mossy crags drop away below for a myriad fathoms. The winding approach path is walled with immense boulders. It is no easy climb, even without a single defender. The attackers yell their battle cries, as loud as a hundred thousand thunderclaps, and fire humming arrows announce the assault. Yet from the castle, not a sound, not an arrow. Perhaps it has been abandoned. The shogun's forces climb, and see the emperor's banner flapping over the walls. His men are ready, three thousand archers moistening their bowstrings and lining the wooden walls like clouds. The battle that follows is fierce enough to knock the earth off its axis. A giant monk tosses boulders from the walls to smash shields below. Valleys fill with dead and the river below runs red with blood, but the castle holds out. Then news comes of other bases falling to the rebels. It seems the imperial army must withdraw to face them.

No! Two samurai, Suyama and Komiyama, urge a covert operation. Too many have fallen uselessly, they say, their names forgotten because they died without doing great deeds. “How much the more glorious if by our strength alone we bring down this castle. . . . Our fame will be unequalled for all time; our loyalty will stand above that of a myriad men. Come! Under cover of this night's rain and wind, let us secretly enter the castle precincts.”
⁴

So in pitch darkness and foul weather they and fifty volunteers make knots in a rope tied to a grapnel, which they use to clamber over branches and boulders and then to scale the cliff that leads to the castle's northern rampart, where even a bird could not fly easily. Halfway up, they are stopped by a mossy overhang. Suyama blazes a trail upward, carrying the rope, which he loops over a branch, allowing the squad to climb safely to the top. After that, the castle wall is no obstacle at all, for the defenders thought the cliffs unclimbable and “no warriors watched there, but only two or three soldiers of low degree,” who had fallen asleep on their straw mats beside their campfire.

“Then in stealth they spied upon the castle's interior by following a sentry making his rounds,” noting the numbers and positions of the defenders. Suyama and Komiyama decide to pinpoint the emperor. A guard accosts them from the shadows, but Suyama has a quick answer: “We are warriors of Yamato, guarding against attackers slipping in by night, for the wind and rain are violent, and there is much noise.”