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Rural Swordsmen in Early Modern Japan

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Rural Swordsmen in Early Modern Japan Rural Swordsmen in Early Modern Japan A work in progress by Michael Wert In 1800, a new book published in Kyoto claimed to impart the secrets of swordsmanship (kenjutsu) to its readers. Its author, using the pseudonym Sen’en, explained his reason for writing The Secret Transmission of Solo-Training in Swordsmanship: “In order to learn an art (geijutsu), one should have a teacher. I have written this book for those who are busy working and do not have time to practice, for those who live out in the sticks and can’t find a teacher or don’t have any friends, and for those who are motivated to learn, but because they are poor, cannot afford to study under a teacher.”1 Sen’en’s book undercuts typical descriptions of early modern cultural arts as social practices for those who can afford the time and finances. He promised to transmit secrets for the price of a book, circumventing the need to display loyalty, and offer payment, to a master teacher. The emphasis on secret transmissions (hiden), a central characteristic of cultural arts from poetry to tea ceremony to cooking, were deemed unnecessary, “Even if you do not receive secret teachings, if you train enough, you will figure it out.”2 And while Sen’en acknowledged that training alone was not ideal, his solution did not require formal entrance into a sword school. Instead, he advocated enlisting the help of one’s siblings or neighborhood children—simply give them some basic equipment and use them as dummies for attack and defense. The trick, he argued, would be keeping reluctant training partners interested. “The first two or three times they 1 Sen’en, Kenjutsu hiden hitori shūgyō, in Budō no meisho, 139. 2 Ibid., 144. 1 might have fun, but will soon become bored and begin to hate training with you…with this in mind, tell the child that you’ll give them something if they succeed in hitting you once or twice; candy, a drawing, a folding fan, something that they like. That way they’ll come to enjoy training and try harder.”3 Sen’en’s book was clearly not intended for a samurai readership. Even the poorest and lowest-ranking samurai, like Katsu Kokichi of Musui’s Story fame, belonged to a social network that presented young men with opportunities to learn swordsmanship. Marginal, wandering samurai who lacked sufficient status to live as a fulltime bureaucrat could eke out a decent living teaching swordsmanship to commoners. Sen’en, then, wrote for the non-samurai audience, capitalizing on the growing number of commoners who had been flocking to swordsmanship schools since the mid-eighteenth century. Like the samurai, commoners were attracted to the cultural and social capital that could be accrued from practicing swordsmanship. But commoners did not simply imitate some a prior form of samurai activity. Far from being an example of samurai culture trickling down to non-samurai, commoner swordsmen in the countryside actively participated in developing the art within a broad grey zone of elite commoners and low-ranking samurai, and appropriated swordsmanship for their own purposes. Historians have noted commoner participation in swordsmanship, but here I will analyze the implications that their activity had on the status system. On the one hand, it seems that commoner swordsmen threatened the status system. Past scholarship has viewed the rise of non- samurai swordsmen as evidence of a weakening status system or a subversion of the social order, particularly towards the end of the Tokugawa period. Instead, the status system was usefully ambiguous enough to allow daimyo and the shogunate to incorporate commoners into their rule, just as they had done with commoner swordsmanship. 3 Ibid., 148. 2 For their part, commoners did not directly challenge the everyday manifestations of status distinctions. They supported the bakuhan authority, which is why daimyo and shogunate officials rarely enforced the edicts prohibiting commoners from practicing martial arts, and, in some cases, even encouraged commoner swordsmanship. Authorities believed that the type of swordsmanship that developed among rural and urban swordsmen alike fulfilled the call to reform samurai martial identity, stabilize the Edo hinterland, and protect Japan against the rising Western threat. The martial ideal that samurai had lost was to be found among rural commoner elites. In tracing these development of commoner swordsmanship, I will explore the types of people, broadly included in the status group “commoner” (hyakushō), who practiced swordsmanship; why this activity increased during the mid-Tokugawa period, and how their practice influenced swordsmanship in general. Swordsmanship became so tied to notions of status that when the status system collapsed during the Meiji Restoration, it declined in popularity until its revival as modern kendo. Swordsmanship as a Status Art The dominant narrative regarding the development of swordsmanship from the late sixteenth century to the end of the Tokugawa period, and commoners’ role in it, generally follows three stages. In the first stage, during the early seventeenth century, swordsmanship consisted of a handful of styles that began, putatively, as effective combative arts forged from the experience of the warring states period. From roughly the late-seventeenth into the eighteenth century, those styles gradually became commercialized art forms, and began emphasizing abstract concepts and 3 mysticism to attract customers.4 Tokugawa period commentators, most famously Ogyū Sorai, bemoaned this transition as a watering-down of combat skill, referring to the activity as “flowery swordsmanship,” an interpretation that has continued into the modern era.5 During this second stage, scholars note a marked increase in the number of non-samurai practitioners of swordsmanship. As John Rogers argues, after the early 1700s, most of the eight or so styles of swordsmanship that existed in the early seventeenth century stagnated as the demand for swordsmanship among samurai elites became saturated. Teachers of the most prominent styles opened their schools to non-samurai, saving those styles from obscurity. Moreover, from about the mid-eighteenth century, swordsmanship, which presented few opportunities for competition other than outright dueling, developed free-style fencing methods within the community of elite commoners and low-ranking samurai.6 During the nineteenth century, this group pushed changes in equipment and established commonly accepted rules for fencing competitions; the forerunner of modern kendo. During the Tokugawa period, swordsmanship was not meant, primarily, to impart combat skill.7 For millennia, combat was conducted without the need to signify weapon styles, name famous teachers, nor write esoteric treatises on combat. While some primary sources from the sixteenth century suggest that a few men became well known as sword teachers, there is little 4 John Rogers, The Development of the Military Profession in Tokugawa Japan, (PhD Diss. Harvard, 1998), 155. 5 He complained that the samurai of his day focused only on outward appearances and wore protective equipment to keep from even the slightest injury. Ogyū’s critique was a familiar lament by contemporary writers who idealized samurai of the Warring States. For more examples of such complaints, see Tominaga, 267-268. 6 Scholars typically argue that the shogunate prohibited inter-style competition but there is no primary source evidence for this. However, there was also no official edict concerning kenka ryōseibai, the punishment for both parties involved in a fight. Also, such free style competition was often forbidden by swords teachers themselves. 7 Friday, “Off the Warpath,” 255 refers to a “growing body of evidence, on the other hand, points to the conclusion that ryūha bugei and the pedagogical devices associated with it aimed from the start at conveying more abstract ideals of self-development and enlightenment. That is, there was on fundamental shift of purpose in martial art education between the late sixteenth and mid-seventeenth centuries. Tokugawa period budō represented not a metamorphosis of late medieval martial art, but the maturation of it.” 4 evidence that they chose to articulate their art.8 The first writings about swordsmanship from the seventeenth century employed the vocabulary and pedagogy common among other cultural arts like Noh, tea ceremony, cooking, poetry, and religion. Only then did swordsmanship as a martial art come into existence through the propagation, and competition, of distinct styles (ryū).9 Reversing the narrative of swordsmanship from battle-tested skill, to commercialized cultural art, to sport, swordsmanship began, primarily, as an art used to accrue social and cultural capital and, while retaining those features, also developed ludic and competitive characteristics as it spread, becoming both a sport and method self-defense. Thus, the pursuit of swordsmanship was, to borrow Pierre Bourdieu’s phrase, “an activity with no purpose.”10 For amateur participants, as opposed to professional teachers, physical activity was an end in itself with no need to compete with one another. Free-style fencing was not practiced among the samurai elite; they made no effort to hold matches, or become professionalized experts. Swordsmanship may have had practical applicability, and there were stories of duels to the death using swords, but this was not its primary purpose--most samurai could reasonably expect never to have to draw upon their acquired skills. But swordsmanship was not useless. Samurai elite accumulated social and cultural capital proscribed from the uninitiated: knowledge of etiquette, bodily comportment, and behavior. Swordsmanship, practiced in a controlled manner with wooden swords, allowed men 8 An eighteenth century collection of pre-Tokugawa works called the Gunsho Ruijū does have sixteenth century writings about archery, but they mainly address issues such as behavior during archery gatherings, how to wear or take care of equipment, et cetera. Like swordsmanship, in-depth writing about archery as an art of self-cultivation appear during the Tokugawa period.
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