Japan's warrior centuries are better known through movies than through records, and the records are stranger. A shogun resigned and kept ruling. A peasant's son outranked the shogun. A castle keep burned in 1657 and nobody rebuilt it. These thirty-six stories run from the Heian court to the 1870s, when the warrior class was quietly legislated out of existence.
Every tile in a Samurai Japan game carries one of these. Open one to read it now, or leave them for the board to hand you.
Warriors and Leaders
nine stories
1The shogun who picked a town he could defend
On the tile: Yoritomo1192
Minamoto no Yoritomo raised an army in 1180 and made the coastal town of Kamakura his base, and after the Genpei War ended in 1185 he kept his government there instead of moving to Kyoto, the imperial capital. It was a defensible choice: mountains guarded Kamakura on three sides and the sea on the fourth, about 30 miles southwest of modern Tokyo, and the hills behind the town were fortified with earthwork walls that can still be visited. Named shogun in 1192, he died after a fall from his horse seven years later.
When Minamoto no Yoritomo died in 1199, his widow, Hojo Masako, shaved her head and became a Buddhist nun, and then stayed in politics anyway. With her father, Hojo Tokimasa, she created the post of shogunal regent, an arrangement in which the regent held the real power and the shogun was a puppet. In 1205 she and her brother forced their father out. A nun who never left government, she became known as the nun shogun. In 1221 the retired emperor Go-Toba tried to seize authority back, failed, and was exiled to the distant Oki Islands.
3He helped topple one shogunate and founded the next
On the tile: Takauji1338
Emperor Go-Daigo wanted all administrative power back in imperial hands, and in 1333 the Kamakura shogunate sent an army under Ashikaga Takauji to crush his movement. Takauji switched sides. He declared for the emperor and seized the shogunate's offices in Kyoto while another rebel army captured Kamakura, and the Hojo regime fell. His loyalty did not last: Takauji found a more compliant emperor and in 1338 became shogun himself. His family ruled from the Muromachi district of Kyoto until 1573, more than two centuries after his death in 1358.
Ginkaku-ji is called the Silver Pavilion, and there is no silver on it. Ashikaga Yoshimasa was planning a retirement villa in eastern Kyoto as early as 1460, but the Onin War halted the work, and the building went up in the 1480s. After he died in 1490 it became a Zen temple. The silver name dates only from the Edo period. Whether silver foil was ever planned is still argued; another theory credits moonlight on the black-lacquered exterior. The grounds also hold a four-and-a-half-mat room said to be the first of the size that became standard for tea.
Firearms reached Japan in the sixteenth century, and Oda Nobunaga took them seriously early. Around 1549, when he was about fifteen, he is said to have raised a corps of 500 men armed with matchlocks. The payoff came at Nagashino in 1575, where he posted his gunners behind board screens and fired into wave after wave of attacking Takeda troops. He was the foremost military leader in Japan from 1568 to 1582 but did not live to unify it; Toyotomi Hideyoshi and then Tokugawa Ieyasu finished the job.
Toyotomi Hideyoshi was born in Owari Province around 1537, reportedly the son of a peasant who served as a foot soldier, with no traceable samurai lineage. He joined Oda Nobunaga's army and rose through it to general. Like Nobunaga, he never became shogun. The court made him kampaku, imperial regent, instead, and when he passed that office to his nephew Hidetsugu he took the title taiko, retired regent. In 1591 the former commoner issued an edict forbidding low-ranking samurai to become townsmen or farmers, and farmers to take up trade or craftwork.
7He resigned as shogun and kept running the country
On the tile: Ieyasu1605
Tokugawa Ieyasu was made shogun in 1603, and two years later he quit. Handing the title to his son Hidetada in 1605 established the principle that the office was hereditary in the Tokugawa family, and it freed Ieyasu from the day-to-day work of the job. He did not give up control. From Sunpu, in modern Shizuoka Prefecture, he ran a shadow government until his death in 1616, and the shogunate he founded governed Japan until 1868.
He arrived with the Jesuit Alessandro Valignano, who had recruited him as a bodyguard for a journey through India, China and Japan, and he stood about six feet tall in a country where that was remarkable. Oda Nobunaga gave him a house, money, servants and a sword. The Chronicle of Lord Nobunaga says his strength surpassed that of ten men. When Nobunaga died at Honno-ji in 1582, Yasuke was captured and spared, and what became of him after that is unknown.
Tokugawa Ieyasu completed Nijo Castle in Kyoto in 1603 as the shogun's base near the imperial palace. In 1867 the fifteenth and last Tokugawa shogun, Yoshinobu, summoned senior retainers from forty domains to the Ohiroma, the great hall of the castle's Ninomaru Palace. The next day he announced his intention to return his political authority to the imperial court, and the emperor accepted the day after that. The Tokugawa had ruled Japan for more than 260 years, and the last shogun began handing back power in the castle the first one had completed.
Ikeda Terumasa rebuilt Himeji between 1601 and 1609 into something close to a puzzle: to reach the keep, an attacker had to spiral inward from the main gate through eight more heavily fortified gates. The keep rises about 150 feet and holds six floors and a basement, though from outside it reads as five. Nobody ever tested the design, because the castle was never attacked. Its fire-resistant white plaster earned it the nickname White Heron Castle, and it came through the 1945 air raids that destroyed the city mostly unscathed, then survived the 1995 Great Hanshin earthquake.
2Its towers burned, and the castle held out anyway
On the tile: Kumamoto1877
Kato Kiyomasa completed his castle at Kumamoto in 1607, and 270 years later, in 1877, it became a battleground in the Satsuma Rebellion. Just before the war broke out, the castle towers and the entire Honmaru-Goten palace burned to the ground, and no one has settled whether by arson or accident. The castle was besieged anyway, and its garrison of a few thousand held out for about fifty days against a much larger Satsuma army until relief arrived. After the Second World War the citizens of Kumamoto pushed to rebuild, and in 1960 the exteriors of the large and small towers went up again in steel-reinforced concrete.
Tokugawa Ieyasu had Nagoya Castle built for his ninth son, Yoshinao. Work began in 1610, the keeps were finished in 1612 and the Hommaru Palace in 1615. What everyone remembers is the pair of golden shachihoko on the roof, votive tiger-fish figures. The keep had the largest floor space of any tower keep, and in 1930 Nagoya became Japan's first castle designated a National Treasure. Firebombing in a 1945 air raid destroyed it, but it was still named a National Historic Site, and the towers were rebuilt in 1959.
Matsumoto's keep was built for war. Toyotomi Hideyoshi gave the castle to Ishikawa Kazumasa in 1590, and his son Yasunaga oversaw the keep's completion, dug the outermost moat and laid the stone foundation. Four decades later the mood had changed. From 1633 Matsudaira Naomasa added a southeast wing and a Moon-Viewing Tower, preparing for a stop by the shogun Tokugawa Iemitsu. The tower has no defenses, and three of its sides stand open behind vermilion handrails. The shogun never came: falling rocks on the Nakasendo road kept him away.
Edo Castle's five-story main keep stood more than 140 feet high. In 1657 a fire swept the city, destroyed many of the castle's buildings including the keep, and is said to have killed around 100,000 people. Edo burned so often that its fires had a nickname, the flower of Edo. The shogunate replaced many buildings but decided the keep was too expensive to rebuild at a time when it no longer served any purpose. Stone foundations laid for a replacement were never used, and they survive. In 1868 the Tokugawa surrendered the castle without a fight.
Oda Nobunaga built Azuchi Castle from 1576 to 1579 on the eastern shore of Lake Biwa, close enough to Kyoto to guard the approaches to the capital. It is often called the birthplace of the tenshu, the castle keep, but towers at Tamonyama and Gifu castles already had that form, and Azuchi more likely helped attach the name to it. Many researchers see it as the catalyst for the castles that followed. In 1582, just after Nobunaga's death, his betrayer's forces took Azuchi, and a week or so later it was set on fire. Only its stonework remains.
Dejima was finished in 1636, an artificial island shaped like a fan in Nagasaki harbor, and it was built to keep foreigners at arm's length rather than to welcome them. The Portuguese were expelled after the Shimabara Rebellion, and in 1641 the shogunate ordered the Dutch to move their trading post from Hirado onto the island. From there the Dutch held a 218-year monopoly on European trade with Japan, ending when the ports opened in 1859.
Work on the Great Buddha of Kamakura began in 1252. The seated bronze Amida is about 37 feet tall, weighs 121 tons, and was covered in gold when new; traces remain on both cheeks. It was first enshrined in a hall, but old records say typhoons in 1334 and 1369 and then a severe earthquake in 1498 damaged and destroyed that building. The statue has sat in the open air ever since. It is hollow, and visitors can step inside and see from the lattice pattern on its walls that it was cast in 40 separate pieces.
Sanjusangendo was founded in 1164 for the retired emperor Go-Shirakawa, and its single-story hall runs about 393 feet. Inside stand a thousand life-size statues of Kannon, ranked in ten tiers on either side of a large seated figure. A fire in 1249 destroyed the buildings, and only 124 of the original statues were saved; 876 new ones were carved to replace those lost. From the late 1500s archers competed to shoot down the length of the hall's veranda, and in 1686 one of them, Wasa Daihachiro, sent 8,133 of his 13,053 arrows the full distance.
Murasaki Shikibu, a lady-in-waiting at the Heian court, wrote The Tale of Genji in the eleventh century, in an age remarkable for the poetry, diaries and fiction of court ladies. Many consider it the first novel in world literature, and it has been called a novel rather than simply a romance because of its attention to the psychological states of its characters. She wrote it in Japanese. Court men still wrote formally in Chinese, but kana, a Japanese script developed in the ninth century, had become the written language of intimacy and of noblewomen.
Noh grew out of older rituals, dance and music, and it became especially popular from the fourteenth century, when Kan'ami and his son Zeami, who acted, directed and wrote, developed it into a highly artistic performing art. The shogun Ashikaga Yoshimitsu saw the pair perform when Zeami was twelve and gave them generous patronage. Performers wear masks representing stock characters. The shoguns remained noh's greatest sponsors, so their fall in 1867 hit hard: some performers gave up the art, and valuable masks and costumes were sold abroad. Influential figures in the new government helped revive it.
Kabuki began with a woman. Izumo no Okuni, a dancer who probably came from Izumo Province, created a bold new style in the early 1600s, including comic skits in which she dressed as a kabukimono, one of the flamboyant rule-breakers, many of them masterless samurai, who paraded the streets of Kyoto. The name comes from kabuku, to slant or to deviate. In 1629, under the shogun Iemitsu, women were banned from the public stage. Adolescent boys replaced them until they too were banned in 1652, which is how adult men came to play every role.
Sen no Rikyu, who lived from 1522 to 1591, made the tea ceremony even more genteel and shrank the tea room to make it more intimate. He is credited with the first nijiriguchi, a wriggle-in entrance for a room of just two tatami mats. It was so small that every guest had to bend low to get through, a sign that all who entered were equal for the ceremony. The objects inside were meant to show wabi, a simple beauty, and sabi, the faded beauty that much-loved, well-used objects acquire as they gain a patina.
Sumo is thought to have begun as part of Shinto ritual, and the ritual never left: wrestlers stamp, clap and throw salt across the ring to purify it, and the roof pavilion above closely resembles a Shinto shrine. The modern sport took shape at Tomioka Hachimangu, a shrine in Edo, now Tokyo. In 1684 the government approved sumo there for paying audiences, and it was staged at the shrine for more than a hundred years. Today the ring is fifteen feet across. Touch the clay with anything but your feet and you have lost.
6The samurai code that Nitobe Inazo called unwritten
On the tile: Bushido1899-1900Myth busted
Bushido is often imagined as the samurai's ancient written code. Nitobe Inazo explained it to the West in an English-language book first published in Philadelphia, its preface dated December 1899. There he traced the book to a walk with the Belgian professor de Laveleye, who was astonished that Japanese schools gave no religious instruction, and to his wife's questions about Japanese customs. Yet bushido, Nitobe wrote, is not a written code, and at best consists of a few maxims handed down by word of mouth or from the pen of a well-known warrior or scholar.
Katsushika Hokusai began Thirty-Six Views of Mount Fuji around 1830, when he was about seventy, and the series established the popularity of landscape prints. In Under the Wave off Kanagawa, known as The Great Wave, a diminutive Fuji sits far off beneath the crest of a giant wave. Part of the series' look came from a new material: Berlin blue, an imported pigment that had just become affordable, which Hokusai used for the sky and water in many of the prints.
Matsuo Basho, born in 1644, left Edo in 1684 on the first of four major journeys, and the walking became the work. His travel writing, most famously The Narrow Road to the Deep North, the record of a walk of about 150 days with his student Kawai Sora that began in 1689, helped establish haibun, a form that connects haiku with narrative prose. Back in Edo from 1691, he lived in a hut his disciples provided. He died in Osaka on November 28, 1694.
The rock garden at Ryoan-ji is a level rectangle of raked gravel with no trees, holding fifteen stones and little else but some moss around them. The often-repeated claim about it holds up: the stones are arranged so that no viewer on the veranda can see all fifteen at once, and at least one always stays hidden. Much else is uncertain. Most sources date the garden to the second half of the fifteenth century, and its design is usually credited to Soami, a landscape garden designer and artist who died in 1525, though other scholars dispute the attribution.
The Genpei War between the Minamoto and Taira ended at sea in 1185, in the Strait of Shimonoseki at the tip of Honshu. Yoshitsune, younger brother of the Minamoto leader Yoritomo, pursued the fleeing Taira there, and they were beaten in a brief naval battle. Its tragic ending became a popular subject for later literature and theater: the emperor Antoku, six or seven years old, went into the water in the arms of his grandmother, Kiyomori's widow. The Taira never regained their former position, and military government followed for seven centuries.
Kublai Khan sent some 800 to 900 ships against Japan in 1274, and a storm badly damaged that fleet, though it is uncertain whether it struck in Hakata Bay or on the voyage home. In 1281 he sent 4,400 ships. Japanese raids forced the Mongol commanders to lash their large, unwieldy ships together with chains, and in August a typhoon destroyed most of the fleet. The storm winds were given the name kamikaze, divine winds, and were seen as the answer to Japanese appeals to Hachiman, the Shinto god of war.
The Onin War began in 1467 out of a bitter rivalry between the Hosokawa and Yamana families, each backing a different candidate for shogun, even though the shoguns had lost any real power. The fighting drew in most of Japan's influential clans and destroyed most of Kyoto, and the conflict's leading chronicler described blocks on end where birds were the only sign of life. By 1477 the war had moved out into the countryside, and it ended with no victor. For the next century, warlords fought one another with no one gaining the upper hand.
On June 21, 1582, Oda Nobunaga was staying at the temple Honno-ji in Kyoto, with only about 150 men escorting him, when one of his own commanders, Akechi Mitsuhide, launched a surprise attack for reasons still unknown. Accounts differ on how Nobunaga died, whether by his own hand as capture closed in or in the fire that took the temple. His son and chosen heir, Nobutada, died in the same uprising. The most powerful warlord in Japan, who then controlled half the country, was undone by one of his own men.
In 1588 Toyotomi Hideyoshi ordered the farmers of every province to give up their swords, short swords, bows, spears and firearms. His edict gave its reasons plainly: armed farmers made annual rent harder to collect and uprisings easier to start. It also offered comfort. The swords would not be wasted but used as nails and bolts in building the Great Image of Buddha, so the farmers would benefit in this life and in the lives to come. A commentary on the edict called the Buddha the ostensible purpose and preventing peasant uprisings the true one.
6The October battle that made Ieyasu Japan's ruler
On the tile: Sekigahara1600
In October 1600, at Sekigahara near Lake Biwa, Tokugawa Ieyasu led a coalition of daimyo from eastern Japan against a western coalition whose lords mostly supported Toyotomi Hideyori, the young son of Hideyoshi. Ieyasu won and became the de facto ruler of Japan. The battle ended a prolonged period of civil war that had run through the preceding 140 years, and the government his family built on the victory ruled Japan from 1603 until 1868.
Tokugawa Ieyasu had been the de facto ruler of Japan since 1600, but Hideyoshi's son Hideyori still held Osaka Castle. In 1614 Ieyasu found an excuse to attack it. The first campaign was indecisive, and in the negotiations that followed Hideyori agreed to fill in the castle's outer moats in exchange for a promise of peace. The next year Ieyasu broke his promise and attacked again. Hideyori was killed and Osaka Castle was destroyed. It was Ieyasu's last battle: he died the following year, in 1616.
On July 8, 1853, Commodore Matthew Perry brought four American ships into Tokyo Bay, and returned the following spring with a larger squadron. The Treaty of Kanagawa, signed March 31, 1854, is remembered as the document that opened Japan, which oversells it considerably. It required Japan to protect shipwrecked American sailors, opened Shimoda and Hakodate for fuel and supplies, and allowed consuls. It was not a commercial treaty and guaranteed no trading rights at all.
9Conscripts, a sword ban and the end of the samurai
On the tile: End of samurai1876
The long Tokugawa peace had already turned many samurai into teachers, administrators, especially in finance, and moral guides. Then came a run of new laws. In the early 1870s the new government introduced conscription, and the warrior class lost its monopoly on military service. In 1876 the samurai were formally disestablished, and an edict that year barred former samurai from carrying swords in public. The changes set off several samurai-led revolts. Even so, descendants of samurai were still distinguished with the title shizoku up to the Second World War.