Every month I receive the magazine Muy Interesante which is a fine piece of Tid Bit journalism in Spanish. The content is always ‘Very Interesting,’ the meaning of the name of the magazine, and the illustrations and content are amazingly good. The only doubtful part is the cover, which though beautifully drawn or photographed is always of something sensational.
For example: the May edition cover had a picture of a passenger plane in flames and the heading was 15 Accidents that made Aviation History, June was Satanic Possession, the Science behind 12 Genuine Cases, July had a picture of Superman’s chest with a great Mars Male Symbol instead of the usual S. The heading was Latest Advances in Male Sexuality. August had a picture of Obama’s back with four cartridges spiraling towards it. Title was about 12 Assassinations of Leaders that made History. And August’s cover had a beautifully rendered picture of a human hand with a golden thumb ring holding a bloody human heart. The title, Human Sacrifices, Blood for the Gods.
Every cover was sensational and eye catching. The contents however were interesting, well researched and well worth reading. I’ve mentioned this in case you read Spanish and see the magazine in a Hispanic store near you and don’t look inside because of the cover. You’ll be missing an interesting read if you avoid the magazine for that reason. Only one of many articles inside will relate to the cover picture, and not necessarily in a sensational way. Like the recent Newsweek cover ‘Killing Granny’ the covers are meant to attract attention and sell the magazine, not to code the thrust of the accompanying article.
In the July magazine was an article that brought back very happy memories of my days as a Judo instructor of my own club and as a member of the Buddhist Society of London. In the fifties I was a member of the Budokwai, the oldest judo club in Europe. Many of the members were Zen Buddhists, including Trevor Leggett, the Times correspondent in Tokyo. All the younger members like myself, in our twenties, were fascinated by the Japanese concept of samurai honor and skill and watched samurai movies whenever we could.
And then, recently, a very good friend had a dilemma about whether to stay in his place of employment or move into another, even with an offer of over a third increase in salary. His dilemma was based on his samurai take on loyalty to the lord. I don’t regard any American company as having any loyalty to their workers so I wouldn’t have that dilemma. But it made me begin to recall those happy days of yore as the poet says, when I was young and extraordinarily strong and athletic, and the samurai were the heroes.
The Oriental martial arts have always fascinated Western students because of the almost supernatural powers attained by those Orientals who survived the discipline. Movie goers know about Bruce Lee, and Jet Lee, genuine world class martial artists, and the movies Enter the Dragon, Hero, Crouching Tiger Hidden Dragon and House of Flying Daggers. These are mainly about the Chinese methods based on Shaolin practice, made famous by Grasshopper Carradine and the Kung Fu TV series.
All the martial arts people I knew thought that Bruce Lee should be Grasshopper, as he was already supernormally able in speed and power. The reason that David Carradine got the part was apparently Hollywood type politics. He was more of a dancer than a martial artist. But the TV series did make the American public realize that there was more than just brute force employed by the best fighters in the world. And there was a code of ethics embedded in the training. The Japanese martial arts, like the Chinese martial arts required as much discipline and produced similar apparently supernatural abilities in those who survived.
The Seven Samurai was the most famous of the Japanese samurai movies in those days. But Akira Kurosawa had a gem of an actor in Toshiro Mifune and the samurai movies he made with him have all become samurai classics. Some of them were copied as Westerns by the Italian spaghetti western people, with Clint Eastwood and by Hollywood, with Yul Brunner. Most of my judo and kendo students had seen Seven Samurai at least twenty times to try to get into the head of the master swordsman and also of the leader of the group.
Our mutual hero was the ace of historical samurai, Miyamoto Musashi, and Muy Interesante had a short article about him and his exploits. I have read Musashi’s book and learned as much as I could about the Zen attitude of the top samurai of his era, and as an example of totally self taught excellence in several fields he is without peer. The magazine paragraph and the dilemma of my friend troubled the well of memory and a great deal more came out of my memories about his life and times. Here is a summary for anyone interested in excellence pursued in the face of constant threat of immediate death.
First a little history to show where the words come from that are in all the movies.
In Japan from 794 to 1185 Japan was divided into provinces, each one governed by someone installed by people sent from the Imperial capital. Then it was Heiankyo, now called Kyoto. Many of those governors were princes from the royal family and had their own armed guards who were called samurai. This means ‘ those who serve.’
Over the years these provincial governors became more and more independent, expanded the number of samurai they maintained and made their family clans into hereditary rulers over the provinces. Their highly trained armies of samurai became professional soldiers, also from families where they entered their duties in an hereditary fashion. So the lord and his soldiers always had family traditions to hold to. Such a great system…the family of the lord was always served by the family of his samurai.
As always happens in human affairs, the larger families began to consider taking over the smaller ones. The Taira family had married into the royal family so their clan was virtually the ruler of the country. The Minamoto family clan began a campaign in 1170 to defeat the Tairas. There was a great sea battle of Dannoura in 1185, often portrayed in Japanese movies as a folding screen background to a story. In that battle the Minamoto clan and their allies defeated the Taira clan. Those members of the Taira clan not already killed in the various battles all drowned themselves, men, women and children. Death before dishonor was already established as a standard operating procedure. The whole clan disappeared from history.
Yoritomo was the leader of the Minamoto victors and soon established his grip over the whole country. He forced the powerless emperor to designate him as shogun. This means as military dictator. You may have seen a TV series called Shogun.
Yoritomo acted like he had read Machiavelli’s instructions on being a lord. He created a feudal system in Japan that lasted until the 1860’s. He gave provinces to his allies and established them as hereditary lords over their fiefs. The Japanese name for them was daimyo, which you will hear on the movies about the period. It means ‘great names.’
After Yoritomo came many shoguns, daimyo and their private samurai armies. They became a group of people unique in any society and ruled Japan for over 670 years. As time went on everyone in this ruling group from shogun down to beginning hereditary warrior became known as samurai.
By the 1400’s the samurai were 10% of the Japanese population. There had been no wars for nearly 300 years so the samurai began practicing other skills in conjunction with their daily obligatory martial arts practice. They studied the Chinese classics, wrote and illustrated haiku and other types of poetry requiring a strict discipline of syllabification, and learned calligraphy, painting and the making of pottery. The more important the samurai the more important it was for him to be learned in the civilized arts as well as the ‘taken for granted’ skill in weaponry.
This state of affairs carried on until 1467 when the shogunate had begun to weaken and the leading daimyo began to maneuver towards getting the supreme power for themselves. The next 101 years were known as the Warring States Period…the Sengoku Period, and it was filled with skirmishes and battles among the various daimyo.
It was absolutely essential that the samurai of this period became superbly skilled in the use of their various weapons, particularly the sword. The shogun and every daimyo in the country had his own dojo (school) staffed by master swordsman. Dozens of different fighting styles were taught, some of them hundreds of years old. It was during this period that some of the scholarly samurai began to formulate a code of behavior that was to be followed by all samurai. This was eventually condensed into a code of ethics called Bushido…The Way of the Warrior. And that code molded the character and behavior of the Japanese in a way that has no counterpart in any other country. Even the code of chivalry of the mediaeval knights was a loose bunch of suggestions compared with Bushido.
By the 1500’s the code ruled every aspect of the life of a samurai. There were three major directives: they had to practice every day to develop extraordinary skill with the various weapons they had available. They had to wear a specific uniform to show which lord they served. They had to be prepared to risk death at a moment’s notice for their daimyo, and to commit suicide and even kill their own families if their master thought it was necessary for any reason. One of the first ceremonies of the samurai initiation was their funeral. After that they were already officially dead and had no fear at all whatever the orders they received.
These samurai were recognized as members of the forces of their lords and received an annual salary. Their code forbade them to do any ordinary work or have anything to do with any commercial activity. They were to be super efficient, civilized fighting machines who obeyed any orders at once.
Now comes another of the words often used in Japanese movie titles. When the relationship with their lord ceased because his domain had been captured by some other daimyo, or confiscated by the shogun through political chicanery, then the now masterless samurai became known as ronin (wave men). They roamed the country looking for employment as bodyguards, spies, enforcers for officials or just hired swords for a particular job that required expert warriors.
Whenever a major battle loomed the ronin heard about it and joined one side or the other. Sometimes as many as 100,000 of the soldiers in the battle were ronin. But they were people. And as with all people some of them kept to the samurai code of ethics, others became bandits.
So we have samurai and ronin. There was a third group that our hero belonged to. They were independent samurai who roamed all over Japan looking for opponents. These were called shugyosha (swordsman in training).
They went all over Japan looking for skilled opponents in order to better their fighting skills. They arranged duels for this purpose, and they were usually to the death, not casual fights for fun. Sometimes they arranged the duel themselves by personal challenge and sometimes the daimyo and martial arts schools called on one of them to prove themselves, their school of swordplay against that of the challenging school.
In a way these were like the gunmen of the Wild West who wandered around hoping to be the one who was faster and more accurate than someone with a lot of notches on his gun. Quite a few people challenged Wild Bill Hickok, Wyatt Earp, Doc Holliday, and other famous gunslingers. They usually died, just like the challengers among the shugyosha who came up against the wrong man.
To gain a reputation quickly some shugyosha would offer their services to some daimyo engaged in battle with another. Their aim was to kill great numbers of their temporary master’s opponents, and thus be noticed. They had a phrase for this fun game. It was ‘ borrowing the battlefield.’ Those shugyosha who survived many duels and battles became masters of schools of the sword, teaching the methods that had proved successful to them.
And so we come to the most skilled and famous samurai of all, Miyamoto Musashi who was born in 1584 and died a natural death in 1655. He was sixty one as the arithmetic shows. The Japanese and many Western martial arts people regard him as the epitome of all the samurai vintues: ability to focus totally on a specific goal, perseverance to continue to improve skills, never resting on his laurels, being totally dedicated to improving the quality of his skills in whatever he was doing, diligence in work, and never, ever giving up. The book he eventually wrote for his students was Go Rin Sho…The Book of Five Rings.
This is the book used by Japanese business men to do what they have done in the car industry and the motor cycle industry for example. It’s the strategy text book of Toyota and Honda. And Musashi never lost a contest.
Now Musashi’s example is unique because he never had a teacher. He had an almost supernaturally acute ability to observe everything in a situation and draw instant conclusions from his observations. His father Munisai was a master of many weaponry techniques and was considered a leading swordsman of his time. He became a little miffed when Musashi as a young boy criticized his father’s movement when using the jitte ( a small metal rod used to deflect sword blows). He threw a carving knife at his son, and as an expert samurai he would be an expert knife thrower. Musashi was very quick and dodged it. His father became even more riled and threw his short sword at him. Obviously not in fun. Once again Musashi dodged to avoid death or serious injury and ran away from home. He made his way to his mother’s village where he lived with a priest who was a relative of his mother. He never went back home. He started out as a loner.
Musashi had an awesome goal, to be the best swordsman in the country. And in a country filled with amazingly skilled swordsmen, that was a high and very dangerous goal. To further this aim he traveled all over the country along the great roads that connected the two hundred or so different fiefs. He traveled from place to place, usually with only the clothes on his back and his two swords. He bartered for room and board in exchange for lessons in his way of fighting. Often he slept in the open.
Now Japan isn’t Florida. Most of the year it’s usually too cold, or too humid, or too hot for comfort for ordinary mortals. The spring rains last for weeks on end. In late summer and fall there are typhoons. In winter the mountains are covered in deep snow. Musashi treated the elements as his trainers in endurance and fitness. He never married, and advised his students to avoid get tangled up with any type of permanent relationship with women. He did, like most men of his era, visit the courtesan quarters in towns he visited, though always aware that someone may be inviting him into a trap.
He was unusually big for a Japanese and fought his first duel when he was only thirteen. A very skilled shugyosha named Arima was traveling the country and posting a challenge in every town he visited. A challenge to the death. When he arrived in Musashi’s town he put up his public sign in gold letters. Musashi defaced it with his own counter saying that he accepted and would be there next day.
Arima was not pleased when he heard that his challenger was a thirteen year old boy, but he agreed to spare Musashi’s life if he offered a formal apology. Next day Musashi turned up armed only with a long wooden staff and accompanied by the priest who was acting as a go between.
Musashi didn’t apologize. He rushed at the samurai with his staff and aimed a fierce blow at him. Arima dodged and drew his sword. Musashi dropped his staff, rushed in under Arima’s guard, a totally unexpected maneuver, picked him up in the air and threw him to the ground head first. Then he picked up his staff and crushed Arima’s skull with a couple of powerful blows.
He fought his second duel when he was sixteen. He met the samurai Akiyama, described as a strong fighter and killed him with a sword. The next year he did the ‘borrowing the battlefield’ thing and fought against the Tokugawa clan in the famous battle of Sekigahara, often seen in movies. Tokugawa won and became shogun in 1603.
Musashi probably thought that after demonstrating his powers in the battle that one of the lords fighting Tokugawa would employ him as a teacher. But although his success in the battle made him famous among the samurai on both sides, he had fought on the losing side, so he continued his journeys as a shugyosha looking for worthy opponents to hone his already astonishing skills.
In 1604 Musashi was twenty-one. He challenged the whole school of fencing of the Yoshioka clan in Kyoto. This too is portrayed in movies. In his first duel he killed the leader of the school. In the second he killed the brother of the leader. In the third encounter which was a trap, he killed the son of the leader and was immediately attacked by the entire school of over a hundred samurai. Totally unafraid, Musashi rushed into them and in a few moments had killed so many that the others ran away. This battle against impossible odds, that he knew beforehand he was going to face, made him famous throughout Japan. And made him a prime target for those top class swordsmen who wanted the honor of killing Musashi on their resumé.
Many people challenged him over the next few years, and with many different weapons. He beat spearmen, swordsmen, men who used the ball and chain and sickle, and won every duel. His most famous duel, in which he proved his total mastery of the art, took place when he was still only twenty-nine. By that time note that he had met and killed more than sixty individual opponents.
This especially famous duel was with a samurai named Kajiro who had killed some two hundred men in duels. He used a very long sword that he called ‘Clothes pole’ and was known as the Demon of the Western Provinces. He was the sword master of a famous lord Hosokawa and the duel was arranged at Musashi’s challenge.
The duel took place on an island. Kojiro arrived at the time suggested and waited on his throne with his retainers. Musashi came late by boat and on the way carved himself a wooden sword out of an oar. In spite of Kojiro’s great skill Musashi crushed his skull with the wooden sword while avoiding the tremendous blow of the long sword of Kojiro. In all his duels the nearest anyone came to getting him was one opponent whose sword made a rent in Musashi’s tunic.
After that Kajiro encounter, with nobody left to beat, Musashi changed his life style and again, without a teacher, became a great sculptor, calligrapher, poet, painter and garden designer. In all these areas he was counted as a master.
Of course, though he challenged nobody else, there were others who challenged him. But now he often used a wooden sword and merely prevented his opponents from killing him until they became exhausted or until they realized they had no chance of beating his defense and stopped fighting. He didn’t kill any more duelists after Kajiro.
But he did fight as a warrior. In 1637, in his late fifties, he fought on the side of the Tokugawa Shogunate in the Shimabara Rebellion in which thousands of Japanese Christians and their hired ronins died.
In 1640 Musashi was asked by Hosokawa to write down the basics of his fighting style. Musashi gave Hosokawa a fifteen page manuscript on the martial arts which became the outline for his The Book of Five Rings. It contained his philosophy of winning
This book was printed in an English translation in 1974 by the Overlook Press. Not long afterward a column in Advertising Age mentioned that the fighting strategies outlined in it were the basis for the astonishing successes of Japanese business. In a very little time it was on the best seller lists.
But only people who knew about Shinto and Zen Buddhism and the culture and assumptions of the samurai period got much out of it. The Five Rings are the five elements of Buddhism: Earth, Air, Fire, Water and Void. The Earth was the foundation, the Fire was energy and the power to change direction quickly, Water was the fluid style of his fighting method, not dependent on forms, like Bruce Lee’s non system of fighting, Wind was other styles of fighting to be taken into account, and the Void is where everything originates.
People who didn’t know at least those basics were unlikely to pick up on hints that require the student to fill in the gaps.
The most famous exponent of samurai code and skills in movies was Toshiro Mifune. The basic set for anyone to check out would include the Samurai Trilogy, which was the life of Musashi from peasant type to civilized warrior, Seven Samurai, Yojimbo, Sanjuro, Rashomon, Throne of Blood, Hidden Fortress, and a samurai code expressed in a non martial life, Red Beard. All of these star Toshiro Mifune who was born in China of Japanese parents. He made over 170 feature movies so if you like him in these you have a good time ahead.
If you want to read about Musashi and how he attained enlightment on the path of the sword, the best version I know in English is a big book entitled Musashi by Charles S. Terry who has translated and shortened the huge book in Japanese by Yoshikawa.
Those interested in how Japanese culture worked then and works now must look up books by Boyé Lafayette De Mente. He specializes in finding out what makes other people tick. Here are a few of his titles to give you an idea: Japanese Etiquette and Ethics in Business, Japan's Cultural Code Words, Korean Business Etiquette, China's Cultural Code Words, The Japanese Samurai Code, Japan Unmasked. He has done the Cultural Code Words books for Mexico, the Hopi and the Navajo. An author well worth investigating.
You spiritual seekers, note what I said. Musashi attained enlightenment through his dedication to the path where death always awaited him at every step. He found out who he really was. He was in one sense no longer responsible for the death of anyone who challenged him. They were just committing suicide, their problem, and he didn't even know what happened until it was over, usually in one cut. Any path leads to spirit if pursued diligently enough and with honor, total dedication and integrity. And that enlightenment allowed him total freedom in any of the other arts without need of a teacher.
I could go on for dozens of pages recollecting events and amazing instances about the martial artists I have met and known and the wonderful code so many live by even now. But this is already long for those who may have no interest at all in the subject. So I leave you with this. Musashi gave himself the goal of being the best in the country in a field where failure meant instant death. Having achieved invulnerability by indomitable perseverance, courage and awareness, he became master of several art forms, and all without a teacher. If we all applied his attributes to our own goals, what could possibly stop us, except death. And who cares about a trifle like that when we have died so many times, and here we still are.
