Ninja (9 page)

“To be sure,” comes the voice from the darkness, and they hear no more. So they proceed, boldly pretending to be guards, shouting, “All positions be on the alert!” They find the main hall, where candles burn and a bell rings faintly. Three or four retainers, capped and robed, ask where the intruders are from. They come out with convincing answers, “giving the names of such and such persons and thus and so provinces.”

And finally they and their fifty comrades fulfill their mission, lighting a fire that tells their waiting forces to attack, while they themselves run from place to place yelling war cries and starting fires in offices and towers. It's still dark, and the defenders think a whole army has broken in. They cast off their armor, throw down their weapons and flee, “falling and tumbling over cliffs and into ditches.” Only one warrior has the courage to fight back, leading his son and thirteen servants, but having shot off all his arrows and broken his sword, he sees death looming, and all fifteen commit
seppuku.

The emperor, too, flees, barefoot and aimless, along with his princes and nobles, all but two losing their master in the wind, rain, and darkness. Thus did the Son of Heaven “transform his august person into the figure of a rustic and wander forth without an object. How shocking it was!” Hiding behind hillocks by day and by night stumbling through dewdrops on desolate moors, he is eventually captured, along with his entourage and hundreds of courtiers and retainers. Kasagi Castle is left burned out and abandoned, while the emperor is sent into exile, from which he will shortly escape.

On goes the shogun's vast army to the next hilltop castle, Akasaka, forty kilometers to the southwest. (The
Taiheiki
says the army numbered 300,000 riders, and scholars agree it was large, though not
that
large, consisting of three divisions attacking the loyalists from three directions. No one knows the true numbers of the shogun's army, but a likely figure is 100,000.) Akasaka is Kusunoki's base. But it doesn't seem all that formidable. “The moat was not a proper moat and there was but a single wooden wall, plastered over with mud. Likewise in size the castle was not more than 100 or 200 yards around, with but 20 or 30 towers within, made ready in haste. Of those who saw it, not one but thought: ‘Ah, what a pitiable spectacle the enemy presents!'” They try a frontal assault. But it isn't so easy. Archers (scholars estimate their numbers at 200) fire devastating volleys, and contingents of horsemen mount raids that throw the attackers into confusion. They try again. This time they scale a wall—which turns out to be a false wall, built to fall when the supporting ropes are released. “More than a thousand of the attackers became as though crushed by a weight, so that only their eyes moved as the defenders threw down logs and boulders on them.” A third assault is met by cascades of boiling water. So the attackers decide to starve the castle into surrender.

Kusunoki opts for deception in a rousing speech announcing that he will, in effect, become a shadow warrior:

During the past weeks we have overcome the enemy in one engagement after another and killed countless quantities of his soldiers. Yet so great are his numbers that these setbacks mean nothing to him. Meanwhile we have used up all our food, and no one is coming to our rescue. Being the first warrior in the land to enlist himself in His Majesty's great cause, I am not likely to begrudge my life when virtue and honour are at stake. Nevertheless in the face of danger the courageous man chooses to exercise caution and devise stratagems. I therefore intend to abandon this castle for a while and to make the enemy believe I have taken my life. If they are convinced that I have killed myself, those eastern soldiers will no doubt return to their provinces rejoicing. If they leave, I shall return; and if they come back here, I shall withdraw deep into the mountains. After I have harassed them a few times in this way, they are sure to grow weary. Such is my plan for fulfilling my [mission] and destroying the enemy.
⁵

Luckily, a storm, with “rain violent enough to pierce bamboo,” allows the defenders to dig their pit, gather bodies, set them ablaze, and then slip away by twos and threes. “When the flames died away, [the attackers] saw a mighty hole inside the castle, piled with charcoal, wherein lay the burned bodies of many men. And then not a man of them but spoke words of praise, saying: ‘How pitiful! [Kusunoki] Masashige has ended his life! Though he was an enemy, his was a glorious death.'”

Not so, of course. He is more ninja than samurai. Over the next two years, he learned his lesson, regrouped, created a new castle close by—at Chihaya—and also rebuilt Akasaka on higher ground as an outlying defense, his “front gate,” in his own term. It was therefore the rebuilt Akasaka that the shogun's army had to take first when they returned to the attack in 1332. “Tall cliffs like folding screens fell away below this castle on three sides, while on the south side, which alone was near to flat land, there was a wide and deep ditch with a wall on its bank bearing a line of towers.” A head-on assault fails. The commander guesses that Kusunoki has prepared for a long siege but is puzzled that there is no obvious source of water, “yet they extinguish our fire-arrows with water-jets.” So there must be an underground water supply. He orders his men to dig on the only piece of flat land, and “they uncovered a trough twenty feet below the ground, with stone walls and cypress tiles on top, bringing water from a place more than a thousand yards distant.”
⁶

With the water cut, that's the end in sight for Akasaka. For four or five days the defenders lick morning dew from leaves and grass. Fire arrows set the place ablaze. A monk negotiates surrender, with the assurance that the defenders will be spared because to kill them would be to harden Kusunoki's opposition. So 282 warriors—epic poems are often exact to give the impression of realism—are sent off as prisoners with their arms bent at the elbows and tied, to Kyoto, where the shogun promptly has them beheaded. When they heard of this deception, Kusunoki's men “ground their teeth like lions, nor did any man think of coming out to surrender.”

This leaves two remaining fortresses, Yoshino under Go-Daigo's son, Prince Morinaga, and Kusunoki's extremely formidable Chihaya.

Yoshino, a fortified monastery named after its 455-meter mountain, is today a town of many hilltops and ridges and one of Japan's favorite spots for viewing cherry blossoms, because the trees range up the hillsides and come into bloom at successive altitudes, flowing uphill like an incoming tide.
⁷
In the words of a famous haiku:

“Ah!” I said, “Ah!”

It was all that I could say—

The cherry flowers of Mount Yoshino!
⁸

The mountain no doubt had its springtime charms back in 1333, but this was high summer, and the blossoms were long gone. This cross between monastery and town is “a place of steep heights and slippery moss.” For a week the two sides fight, until “green things were dyed with blood and bodies lay across the paths.” A warrior monk tells the attackers they will lose more men uselessly if they keep on with frontal assaults. What's needed is guile, says the monk. “I shall choose a hundred and fifty foot-soldiers, men acquainted with the mountain, to steal inside the castle in the darkness, and raise a battle shout when the light of dawn appears.” In the chaos, the main army will attack. The plan works well. The 150 special-ops men—lightly armed
ashigaru
(light feet)—make their entry, raise their shout, and set the place alight. “Powerless to stand against their enemies in front and behind, the monks of Yoshino perished each after his own fashion, cutting open their bellies and running into the blazing fire to die.”
⁹

But Prince Morinaga launches a counterattack, and . . .

A brief interruption about this prince, because he was already a noted loyalist hero, and still is today. His father had made him abbot of the Enryaku-ji monastery, known as the Great Pagoda, when he was only eighteen—it helps, of course, if your father is the emperor—but he trained as a warrior, at which he proved a champion, becoming a masterfencer with an ability to leap over “seven-foot screens,” as the
Taiheiki
says, and a determination to read “even the shortest of the secret military treatises. Never had there been so strange an abbot.” At twenty-three, when his father started the civil war, he gave up life as a monk to join him. On the prince's way through the old capital of Nara, Kasagi fell and his father was captured, which meant that the shogun's forces would be after him. “The prince's peril was even as that of one treading on a tiger's tail.” He hid in a monastery, where in due course his enemies came looking for him.

At this the
Taiheiki
tells one of its detailed stories:

There is no way out, and the prince is considering whether to commit
seppuku
when, in the main hall, he sees a monk reading near three Chinese chests that contain Buddhist scriptures. (Why the monk? I have no idea. In terms of the narrative, he's not necessary, and creates a problem, for modern readers anyway, because he does nothing except read.) Two of the chests are full, but the monk has removed some manuscripts from the third, which stands open. The prince climbs in—apparently without disturbing the scholarly monk—covers himself with books, and begins muttering prayers, holding a dagger against his stomach in case discovery should force him to commit
seppuku.
Just in time—the searchers enter, hunt high and low, then become suspicious of the boxes and turn the two full ones over, scattering the books. Wonderful to relate, they do not look in the open box, and leave, for no reason (narrative technique today would demand one—a shout from outside, perhaps). Again, no reaction from the scholarly monk. The prince thinks: Perhaps they will be back. So he gets out and hides again, in one of the other two chests.

Yes, the warriors return, having decided to check the remaining chest. Nothing, of course, except books. They all leave. Prince Morinaga thanks his lucky stars. It's all due to the protection of the scriptures, he says, and of Marishiten, the multi-faced Indian goddess, also known as Marici (“light” or “mirage”), the deification of mirages who could make warriors difficult to see or even invisible. This is a story recalling the myth that ninja—for this is a very ninja-like act—could make themselves invisible. So he was able to escape and continue his journey in the guise of a wandering monk, ending up after many adventures in Yoshino.

Now here he is, driving the enemy back briefly, allowing him time—despite seven arrows sticking out of his armor and blood pouring from his wounded arm—to organize a drinking party to celebrate their coming death. With the battle still in progress outside, a warrior named Murakami Yoshiteru appears “with sixteen arrows drooping in his armor like lingering winter grasses.” He offers to don the prince's armor and stand in his place while the prince escapes. After demurring briefly, the prince agrees. While the prince flees, weeping—accompanied by Yoshiteru's son—Yoshiteru takes his place on a tower and addresses the enemy, announcing that he is the prince, and will now commit
seppuku.
“Mark me well,” he yells, “that you may know how to rip open your bellies when fortune fails.” Stripping off his armor, and “clad only in brocade trousers, he pierced his fair white skin with a dagger. He cut in a straight line from left to right, flung out his bowels onto the board of the tower, thrust his sword into his mouth, and fell forward on to his face.”
¹⁰
The prince, though, is not yet safe. An enemy force surrounds him. Yoshiteru's son stages a rearguard action on a narrow path, holding off five hundred men until wounds and imminent death force him to rip open his belly. The prince once again escapes.

Now the story reaches its climax, with a “million riders”—a million!—approaching Chihaya. “Thicker than plumes of pampas grass on an autumnal moor were their plumes; as morning dew on withered herbs were their weapons, glittering and shining in the sunlight.” Chihaya is small—probably defended by some two thousand men—but in a fine position, with deep chasms to the east and west and a high mountain protecting it to north and south. (I can't quite imagine this, but today's ruins lie three kilometers below the peak of Mount Kong
o
, 1,125 meters, a great shoulder of rock that is Osaka Prefecture's highest mountain, and a popular destination for mountain walkers; there is also a cable car that takes you almost to the top.) Frontal assaults fail—Kusunoki had prepared boulders and tree trunks, which flattened “thousands,” so many that “twelve scribes recorded their names day and night for three days.” The attackers wonder about the water supply and stake out a possible source, but Kusunoki has water enough inside, stored in two or three hundred troughs made from tree trunks. More frontal attacks, repelled by more falling tree trunks, “by which four or five hundred attackers were smitten, who fell over dead like chessmen.” So the attackers start a siege. Time passes. They turn to poetry writing, checkers, and backgammon. Inside, Kusunoki's defenders are bored out of their minds.

So Kusunoki makes a plan to raise their spirits with a ninja-like trick. He orders them to gather rubbish and make twenty or thirty life-size figures, which are placed at the foot of the castle by night. In the morning the besiegers draw close, not quite daring to attack the figures, at which the defenders drop boulders on them, mocking them for their cowardice. The attackers pull back again, demoralized, and entertain themselves with prostitutes and games. Some quarrel. Orders come from headquarters, demanding they do something positive. The commanders decide to build a bridge, an immense structure sixty-five yards long, which they haul into place and rush across over the chasm. But the defenders throw down torches and spray oil, setting the bridge and its crowds of warriors alight and consigning thousand to a fiery death in the chasm.