L A INFLUENCIA DE LOS DISTINTOS MOVIMIENTOS E INSTITUCIONES EN D ALÍ

The Gempei War and the Nambokuchō wars were momentous events that ushered in profound changes to the place of warriors in Japan’s social, political and economic order. Both, moreover, are celebrated in epic wartales whose vivid descriptions of battle have shaped the imaginations of scholars and popular audiences alike for centuries. Given all this, it seems only natural that these two great confl icts should have marked watersheds in the nature of combat and war as well; and, indeed, a veritable legion of historians have identifi ed fundamental shifts of strategy and tactics during one or both struggles.

Among the most infl uential of these was Ishii Susumu, in the early 1960s.

Basing his analysis primarily on the battle accounts in Heike monogatari and related literary works, Ishii argued that, while late twelfth-century warriors continued to fi ght as individuals and on horseback, they no longer engaged in the galloping archery duels favored by their forebears. Instead, they confronted one another at more intimate range, using swords or even grappling techniques to unseat opponents, whom they would then fi nish off on the ground, with daggers.⁶⁹

A decade later, Satō Shin’ichi, Amino Yoshihiko and others ascribed a similar sea change to the structure and tactics of Nambokuchō-era armies. The mounted professional warriors, fi ghting as individuals with bow and arrow that had dominated Heian- and Kamakura-era battlefi elds were, they maintained, superseded from the fourteenth century onward by spear-wielding peasant infantries, deployed in close-ordered formations.⁷⁰

More recent studies have challenged Ishii’s, Satō’s and Amino’s conclusions, identifying instead other sorts of fundamental shifts in tactics introduced in one or both eras. Kawai Yasushi, for example, cites the use of fortifi cations as a new and dominant pattern of fi ghting during the 1180s. Abe Takeshi maintains that, from the Gempei War onward, horses were more generally used for transport than for riding, and that mounted troops rarely actually clashed on horseback, preferring instead to dismount just outside arrow range and close on foot, to fi ght with swords. Okada Seiichi and Futaki Ken’ichi see fourteenth-century warfare as centering on guerrilla tactics, conducted by new types of military forces that appeared during the late Kamakura period. Kondō Yoshikazu contends that the

introduction of more powerful bows in the late twelfth century enabled warriors to shoot from longer distances, eliminating the need to gallop close to opponents, while the advent of lighter, less awkward armor in the fourteenth century permitted bushi greater freedom of movement when on horseback, and greater comfort when fi ghting on foot. Accordingly, he maintains, the prevailing tactic of the Gempei War was to shoot from horseback, with the animal standing at rest rather than at a gallop, while by the Nambokuchō era horse-borne warriors fought mainly with bladed weapons, and archers plied their trade on foot. Imai Seinosuke, however, argues that what stands out most about fourteenth-century armies is the degree of cooperation between cavalry and infantry, and the degree to which both horsemen and infantrymen became specialists in the use of either the bow or the blade. In other words, he says, by the Nambokuchō ^period, military forces had evolved into true armies, whereas during the Gempei era they had still been mostly arrays of individual warriors.⁷¹

The sheer variety of “sea changes” identifi ed in this cornucopia of theories in and of itself casts doubt on the notion that either the Gempei or the Nambokuchō wars gave rise to any sort of truly fundamental transformation of warfare. And indeed, neither did.

The underlying conditions and strategic priorities, and thus the central fi ghting methods, of war remained predominantly the same throughout the early medieval era. Thirteenth- and fourteenth-century warriors continued, by and large, to perceive themselves as followers of “the way of horse and bow”;

and thirteenth- and fourteenth-century commanders continued, by and large, to look to mounted bushi as their primary weapons.

Nevertheless, if the Gempei and Nambokuchō wars witnessed no epoch-making transfi gurations of warfare, neither did they leave the lineaments of battle unchanged. There were, as we have already noted, signifi cant innovations in weaponry and military organization introduced during and between both confl icts. The socio-political structure was also evolving rapidly. In combination, these factors led to substantial tactical innovation and restyling as well. The most important military vicissitude of the era, and the catalyst to all other changes, was the expanding scale of war and the size of armies.

Appraising the numbers of troops involved in early medieval confl icts is an exceedingly woolly task. Few records specify the size of forces; many of those that do are literary accounts, prone to hyperbole; and different sources often give vastly different numbers for the same armies and battles. Moreover, as Hans Delbrück reminds us, even the most dependable records are shaped by the prejudices and foibles of their authors, including “the general tendency to hyperbolic concepts, a lack of feel for numbers, boastfulness, fear, apology, or other similar human weaknesses,” over and above the simple reality that “it is very hard, even for a practiced eye, to estimate accurately rather large masses” of men. Thus even prosaic sources like personal diaries are prone to overestimation – and to understatement as well. Nevertheless, in assessments recorded at or very close to the time of the events recounted, “even underestimates and

exaggerations must still take into account the prevailing contemporary notions,”

and commanders or observers compiling battle reports could not offer up numbers so distorted that contemporaries would immediately have recognized them as such.⁷² Within these limitations, then, it does seem possible to reckon the scale of forces with enough precision to support the conclusion that the battles and armies of the Gempei War were an order of magnitude larger than anything experienced in earlier bushi confl icts.⁷³

The vast majority of Heian skirmishes were localized and very small-scale.

The most trustworthy sources for the period – legal documents, court records, diaries and the like – describe forces numbering in single or double digits.⁷⁴ Even melodramatically hyperbolic literary accounts (and court records demonstrably based on them) of major struggles, such as the campaign against Taira Masakado, recount “surprisingly large armies” as consisting of “more than a thousand men,” “a few thousand troops,” or “more than 4,000 warriors.”⁷⁵ For the Gempei War, discrepancies between the numbers given in courtier diaries such as Gokuyō, offi cial chronicles such as Azuma kagami, and literary texts such as Heike monogatari are sometimes dramatic. Nevertheless, even the former describe armies of 5,000, 6,000, “several tens of thousands,” “seven or eight thousand,”

and even 20,000 or 40,000 clashing in some battles.⁷⁶

The relatively sudden appearance of armies of this magnitude – a product of the countrywide scope of the Gempei confl ict – introduced new tactical problems, which were intensifi ed by the use of fi eld fortifi cations. Kawai Yasushi suggests such challenges may have been further exacerbated by a decline in quality of troops that accompanied efforts to enlarge the ranks. While, he argues, it is impossible to calculate with even reasonable precision the total number of warriors in Japan during any part of the Heian or Kamakura periods, it is unlikely that there were, before 1180, vast numbers of skillful, but hitherto unemployed, mounted bowmen waiting in the hinterlands for a call to arms and new lives as bushi. This being the case, the majority of even the cavalrymen who fi lled out the Gempei armies must have been relatively new recruits to military life. Commanders would, therefore, have been faced with fi nding ways to compensate for the lack of profi ciency of many of their troops at combat in the classical, archery-at-a-gallop style.⁷⁷

In any event, defense works enhanced the role and value of foot soldiers in the fi ghting. More importantly, the combination of fortifi cations with larger forces concentrated battles and battlefi elds, rendering the former longer and the latter more crowded. These factors, in turn, limited the mobility of both attacking and defending troops, mitigating some of the shortcomings of warriors inexperienced at mounted archery. The inability of Japanese horses to continue to run about for the entire duration of long battles, and the inability of the bushi to carry suffi cient numbers of arrows to last through the entire skirmish, moreover, forced even seasoned veterans to make adaptations. Thus in the accounts of Gempei battles we see warriors shooting from stationary mounts, engaging in swordplay and grappling from horseback, and even using their horses to ram opponents.

Nevertheless, it is clear that the new tactics augmented traditional ones; they did not supplant them. Warriors engaged in archery at a gallop still took the forefront in Gempei War battles. They also featured prominently in later Kamakura confl icts, including the Ō^shū campaign, the Wada rebellion, the Jō^kyū ^{War, and} the Mongol invasions.⁷⁸ Swords, by contrast, were rarely employed except under circumstances in which warriors could not use their bows.

As I noted in Chapter 3, there is not a single example in any Heian-period document, text or drawing of warriors wielding bladed weapons from horseback.

This is scarcely surprising, when one considers how ill-suited early medieval tachi and ōyoroi were to mounted swordplay. It would, to begin with, have been no easy task to close to sword range on horseback against a mounted adversary armed with bow and arrows. Cutting or stabbing through ōyoroi with the slender, short-hilted tachi of the era – or even walloping an antagonist with suffi cient force to unhorse him – presented a still more formidable challenge, particularly for a warrior whose balance, striking power and freedom of movement were impeded by the rigid, boxy cuirass and loose-hanging shoulder plates of his own armor.^* Simply knocking the opponent to the ground would not, moreover, have concluded the contest; the warrior would have had to dismount himself, to fi nish him off with sword or dagger. But repetition of that sort of tactic – which Ishii Susumu envisioned as the prevailing form of combat in Gempei battles – would have rapidly exhausted even the hardiest warrior, for his armor added nearly half again to his own body weight. It would also have given the warrior’s horse ample opportunity to scamper off, converting him to a foot soldier for the duration of the battle.

Grappling on horseback was fraught with similar problems – as are scholarly speculations that Kamakura warriors preferred to fi ght that way. To be sure, wrestling skills were fundamental components of a warrior’s bag of tricks, and notable contributors to his reputation and identity. In fact the phrase “master of bow, horse and grappling” (kyū^{ba sum}ō no tatsusha) was a common appellation for illustrious bushi.⁷⁹ Medieval wartales, moreover, intone that “warriors of the East . . . ride after their foes, and overtaking them, decide the contest by grappling – this is their war art,” or “how, indeed, the young bands of Musashi and Sagami excel at pushing and wrestling on horseback!”⁸⁰ They also feature quite a number of episodes in which contending samurai grappled with one another, fi rst on horseback and then on the ground.

* Even expert swordsmen under optimal conditions cannot readily cut through Japanese armor. Sword techniques developed during the late medieval and early modern periods for use against armored opponents target gaps and weak spots in the armor, but this requires considerable precision and skill, even fi ghting on foot and wielding the sword with both hands. It would have been doubly hard to accomplish one-handed on the back of a bouncing horse. Suzuki Masaya makes a strong case for the conclusion that swords continued to play only a minor role, even in late medieval battles. See Teppō ^to Nihonjin or Katana to kubi-tori.

All such incidents, however, occur during the fi nal stages of large battles, at points when the warriors involved had exhausted their arrow supplies and one side or the other was in retreat.⁸¹ Swordfi ghts took place at similar times, or under other circumstances in which bushi did not have recourse to their bows. One searches in vain for a single battlefi eld example of warriors voluntarily forsaking bow and arrow to fi ght one another hand-to-hand. All bushi carried long swords (tachi), as well as shorter, companion blades (katana), and trained at grappling; but they viewed these weapons as supplements to their bows and arrows, never as replacements for them. Kamakura warriors were still, by preference and for good reason, fi rst and foremost bowmen on horseback. Azuma kagami makes this point explicitly in an entry from 1180:

While [Matano] Kagehisa and his retainers camped in the hills north of Mt. Fuji, rats gnawed and ruined over a hundred of their heavy-duty bowstrings. At this inopportune time, Yasuda Saburō Yoshihisa; Kudō Kagemitsu; his son, Kojirō Yukimitsu; and the Ichikawa Intendent, Yukifusa, having heard of the battle at Ishibashi, had set forth from Kai to join it, when they met up with Kagehisa and his men at Mt. Hashida.

Wheeling their mounts and letting fl y arrows, they attacked Kagehisa.

The hour of the fray had come! Their bowstrings severed, Kagehisa and his men unsheathed their swords and brandished them, but they could not thus contend against arrows and stones. Many were shot. . . . Kagehisa cast away his pride and fl ed like lightning.⁸²

Mounted archers remained central to Nambokuchō warfare as well. Recent studies by Thomas Conlan, Shakadō Mitsuhiro, Suzuki Masaya, Imai Seinosuke and others have persuasively undermined long-cherished presumptions that the fourteenth century marked the advent of a new age of infantry supremacy.

The most compelling evidence on this point comes from analyses of statistics on wounds, compiled from battle reports. Conlan looked at 1,302 such documents, cataloging 721 identifi able wounds. Of these, some 73 percent were caused by arrows, while only 25 percent were the result of sword strokes, and fewer than 2 percent involved spears. Suzuki examined 175 such documents, and found that nearly 87 percent of the 554 identifi able casualties reported therein came from arrows, 8 percent were caused by swords or naginata, just under 3 percent were the result of troops having been struck by rocks, and 1 percent were caused by spears. Shakadō’s less extensive survey of some thirty battle reports indicates that 82 percent of the wounds were caused by arrows.⁸³

Moreover, pictorial, narrative and documentary records alike indicate that ratios of horsemen to foot soldiers in fi eld battles remained similar to those of Heian and Gempei confl icts; and that troops on foot fought in scattered groups, shooting, whenever possible, from the cover of rocks, trees, buildings, or standing shields.⁸⁴ Clearly then, Nambokuchō battles continued to revolve around skirmishes between mixed clusters of mounted warriors and foot soldiers.

If bowmen on horseback no longer dominated the battlefi eld quite as thoroughly as they had during previous centuries, neither were they superseded by massed formations of spear-wielding peasant infantrymen – as Satō Shin’ichi, Amino Yoshihiko and others have contended.

There was no fourteenth-century military revolution comparable to the upheavals sweeping through the political, social and economic structures during the period. Signifi cant innovations in weaponry and military organization not-withstanding, strategic and tactical thinking continued along predominantly the same lines they had followed since the waning of the ritsuryō regiments.

* * * * *

The science of war in early medieval Japan was shaped by a complex and multifarious confl uence of geography, available resources, ideology, polity, technology, goals and mission. Some of these factors stood immutable – or nearly so – throughout the six centuries on which this study focuses. Others evolved steadily, or even dramatically. The early medieval period was an age in which struggles between competing political centers at once spawned and masked the rise of new socio-economic structures on the land. Certainly a warrior somehow transported from the mid-tenth century to the mid-1300s would have encountered much that would have been nigh unrecognizable to him. And yet the battlefi eld would have remained one place where he felt comfortably at home. By and large, while warfare changed a great deal in terms of scale, duration and frequency, it changed little in terms of strategies and tactics. Early medieval Japan remained, throughout, the age of horse and bow.

The pertinacity of hoary tactical paradigms refl ects the survival of key socio-cultural imperatives at the eye of a swirling maelstrom of change. Foremost among these were the bushi’s identity and self-image as a professional mercenary, and the belief in the existence of a centralized, national power structure.

Together, these ideological constructs stayed warriors from fully exploring the possibilities being opened by advances in weapons technology and military organization.

Between the late twelfth and late fourteenth centuries, bushi political power progressively displaced that of the imperial court, but the idea that a center existed continued to dominate political – and therefore strategic – thinking.

The evolving realities of power on the land notwithstanding, warrior leaders persistently clung to status defi ned in terms of hierarchies averring possession of countrywide authority. Early medieval bushi were not yet warlords.

Nor were they soldiers. Having come into being as hired swords for the state and for the kemmon powers that dominated the court, the bushi of the Heian era represented an order of professional mercenaries defi ned by their mastery of a unique style of mounted archery. Indeed, this technology created the bushi, and determined the form of their armor and other equipment – and this, in turn, circumscribed what they could and could not do in combat. The peculiar tactics they developed in response to political, strategic and technological

circumstances, moreover, maximized opportunities for individual warriors to distinguish themselves in the fi eld, and thereby advance their careers.

During the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries, the broadly cast warrior order of Heian times evolved rapidly into the provincially based warrior class of the later medieval period. Nevertheless, the survival of central government, and the success of the court and shogunate in keeping notions of droit de guerre bound to concepts of law enforcement and service to public authority, mitigated against fundamental changes to defi nitions of military success. The early medieval era was, moreover, a time when – with the exception of the very small-scale Jurchen invasion in the eleventh century and the Mongol invasions of the 1270s and 1280s – Japan faced no foreign enemies and bushi only fought one another. Such circumstances provided little incentive to seek out new tactical paradigms.

Tactics – in the narrow sense of techniques of combat – are, however, but one

Tactics – in the narrow sense of techniques of combat – are, however, but one