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Reviews
| The First Samurai: The Life and Legend of the Warrior Rebel Taira Masakado, by Karl Friday. Hoboken, NJ: John Wiley & Sons, Inc., 2008. 240 pages. $24.95, cloth.
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| This illuminating, eminently readable book reevaluates the career of Japan's first warrior to mount a major rebellion against imperial authority, Taira Masakado (900?-940 CE). Securely grounded in recent Japanese scholarship, The First Samurai utilizes but also problematizes The Masakado Records (Shômonki, mid-tenth century), a chronicle long considered "our most expansive record of Masakado's adventures" (p. 10). The result is a skillfully redrawn portrait of a legendary battlefield leader that deftly debunks stereotypes about Japan's early warrior culture. |
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Scion of the noble Taira lineage, Masakado was based northeast of modern Tokyo on his family's extensive lands, which "supported six hundred horses and a similar number of cattle" (p. 39). Starting in 935, he struggled with various relatives for control of family estates. Five years later, he led a thousand troops to Hitachi, seizing the provincial government headquarters there and in seven neighboring provinces. This unprecedented warrior rebellion against the central government in Kyoto struck deep fear among imperial officials. Yet Karl Friday is skeptical of claims in the Records that Masakado took the title of new emperor and sought to displace Kyoto by creating a successor realm in eastern Japan. Effective as Masakado was in dealing with local rivals, Friday concludes that he was "unwilling or unable to reconcile himself to an existence fully independent of the court" in Kyoto (p. 123). He met his end early in 940 at the hands of counterattacking forces loyal to the emperor. |
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Stimulated by Japanese films, animation, and manga comics, students around the world continue to be fascinated by samurai culture and its martial arts. The First Samurai is most appropriate for upper-division undergraduate courses, but teachers at every level will benefit from its important corrections of myths about Japan's warriors. Friday shows that before 1185, the samurai arose more in tandem with imperial authority than in defiance of it. He points out that "the rise of the warrior class as a political and economic power is a tale of the thirteenth through the sixteenth centuries," not earlier (pp. 17–18). Horses were essential to military success because mounted archers, not infantry, dominated the battlefield; swords were never a key weapon in Japan (p. 73). The author points out that "a retreating force can almost always outrun a pursuing one," so that victory for defenders was often "just a matter of survival: evasion was as good as actually winning" (pp. 44–45). |
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The First Samurai shows that early samurai warfare was bloody, often ruthless, and little governed by ethical codes (the "way of the warrior" is a construction of philosophers and playwrights starting in the seventeenth century). In one engagement, according to the Records, Masakado's fighters pillaged "thousands of houses" and burned "tens of thousands" of grain plots (quoted on p. 57). Night attacks "usually involved setting fire to the enemy's home" (p. 59). Women and children "faced indiscriminate slaughter"; as in other countries at the time, women who survived were liable to "be handed over to victorious troops to be robbed or raped" (p. 129). Most warhorses, interbred with broncos, were small and slow by continental Eurasian standards, often exhausted after a short sprint carrying a fully armored rider. Samurai armies were usually "patchwork affairs gathered for specific campaigns and disbanded immediately after the mission ended" and most engagements were "mêlées of duels and brawls between small groups, punctuated by general advances and retreats" (pp. 68–69). Samurai served brief terms and often switched masters, despite "Confucian-inspired rhetoric" of seven hundred years later: "most warriors were remarkably practical men who viewed loyalty as a commodity predicated on adequate remuneration rather than as an obligation transcending self-interest" (p. 99). |
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This fine work of scholarship makes it clear that, despite rebellion, "Masakado, his allies, and his enemies" had "one foot in the countryside and the other firmly planted in Kyoto" (p. 161). His head was less lucky: after dying in battle in early 940, he was decapitated, the head marked with a red tag, packed in salt, and brought to Kyoto for display outside the East Market. Even today, Masakado is revered as a principal deity at Tokyo's Kanda Myôjin Shrine. Next to the Ministry of Finance in central Tokyo still lies his grave, known as Kubizuka (tomb of the head), regularly decorated with fresh flowers and eternally guarded by vigilant stone frogs. |
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| Northeastern University, Boston, Massachusetts |
Tom Havens |
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