Profiles in Virtue - Yagyu Munenori - "No Magic, Just Practice."

As I discussed indirectly in the cases of William Marshal and Yamamoto Tsunetomo, there is a correlation between being well-rounded and being virtuous.  It is not causation; it is possible to be a well-rounded scoundrel, as, for instance, Gilles de Rais.  However, being a jack of all trades, and master of at least one, is a good way to stand out from the pack.  It should be at least an entertaining exercise to highlight what someone does best, because there should be multiple reasonable choices.

So it is with Yagyû Munenori, who was the personal sword instructor and advisor to three generations of Tokugawa shoguns, Ieyasu, Hidetada, and Iemitsu.  He was the head of the Edo line of Yagyû shinkage-ryû and author of what could be described as its school text, the Heihô Kadensho, which has a singular advantage over the better known Book of Five Rings, in that Munenori also gave a series of drawings illustrating his school to an actor with whom he was especially impressed.  It's said that Musashi prepared similar drawings; the difference is that Munenori's survived and, a century later, a member of his school wrote a gloss on them, meaning that we have some idea what each one shows.

"You think you've practiced enough? AGAIN!"

There are two main sources of information about Munenori's life, equally useful.  First is that, as the shogun's personal advisor and sword instructor, he was a noteworthy figure at court, and so his doings were recorded.  Second, the Yagyû school, for that matter the family, is still alive, and maintains a rich oral history.  There are places where both of these fail - Munenori's son Mitsuyoshi, better known as Jûbei, is almost a Japanese equivalent of Robin Hood - but for the purposes of this discussion, there is more than enough information on Munenori.

The difference between Munenori and, say, William Marshal is that Munenori was expected to follow the precept that a Gentleman, in the Confucian sense, should be neither too enamored of the sword or the pen, but accomplished at a great many things, and as a result we have, compared to the Marshal, a great deal of material written, painted, or drawn by him.  This allows us a much closer look at what he thought mattered; one of the key points of this is a continued emphasis on diligent study - "We call a man who has mastered one subject an expert; we call a man who has mastered many subjects an accomplished man, and such men are rare," runs one passage in Heihô Kadensho.

He was born in 1571 in Yagyû no Sato (or Zato, in either case "village"), a village that still exists outside Nara, to a minor gentry family.  His father, Munetoshi (or Sekishûhai), had been, like many other minor warlords of Japan, an ambitious young man once, but by the 1570s was largely withdrawn from politics and the world in general and was focused almost entirely on the sword school which he had inherited from Kamiizumi Nobutsuna, a rônin widely regarded in his own lifetime as a master of the sword.  Munetoshi's obsession with the sword passed down to all of his children (indeed, it was the root of why the Yagyû school split into two lines) but Munenori was the one who would make the greatest impression with it.

In 1594, during the rule of Toyotomi Hideyoshi, Tokugawa Ieyasu was gathering supporters for the inevitable power struggle that would follow Hideyoshi's death.  He had few allies in central or western Japan, and thus was doing some of this work in Hideyoshi's capital of Osaka.  At the time, the Yagyû had a dojo there, and Ieyasu attended a demonstration put on by Munetoshi and Munenori.  He had heard about a secret technique they had developed for fighting an armed man while unarmed, and asked to see it.  Instead, he was asked to participate in the demonstration, and wound up landing on his backside, disarmed.  Oral history says that he was so impressed that he offered Munetoshi a job on the spot, but the elder Yagyû pleaded age, and instead asked him to take the 23-year-old Munenori as his swordmaster.  Ieyasu accepted, and the Yagyû entered Tokugawa service for the first time.

It would prove a fruitful relationship - the Yagyû family's friendship with the Kitabatake may have been part of why the latter changed sides mid-battle at Sekigahara and made Ieyasu undisputed master of Japan - but for Munenori, it was merely the beginning.  He would spend more than fifty years in service to the Tokugawa, including through Sekigahara and through the fateful second siege of Osaka Castle in 1615-16, under Hidetada.  This is one of two anecdotes that directly tie to Munenori's exceptional diligence in the study of the sword.

Munenori was, in addition to being the shogun's sword instructor, a sometime bodyguard, and in this capacity he attended on Hidetada in the siege lines outside Osaka.  A party of Toyotomi samurai broke through the siege lines, exploding from the brush to assault the shogun's party.  This was a meeting engagement, neither side expecting the other, but the Toyotomi men were desperate, on a death-or-glory raid, and Hidetada's party was not expecting a fight.  Everyone on the field suffered a moment of paralysis.

Everyone, that is, except Yagyû Munenori.

He had been practicing every day for more than thirty years at this point, and a key component of that practice was reading circumstances and responding to them.  The "school solution" to being outnumbered in shinkage is unrelenting, aggressive offense, to buy space and time, and that is precisely what Munenori did.  In the space of heartbeats, he had wounded, disabled, or killed several of the attackers, and by the time the rest of the combatants thought to draw their blades, he had at the very least won the psychological battle.

He was able to do this only because he had practiced, under all conditions, from a very young age, and  despite having mastered the technical aspects of his craft by the time he was in his twenties - remember, he had demonstrated for Ieyasu then - he had continued to practice.  By the time he was in his forties, simple technical mastery had transformed into systematic mastery, to the point that when he was on an unfamiliar field in unexpected circumstances, he could apply that knowledge without hesitation.

When the de facto capital of Japan moved from Osaka to Edo, his school in Edo became a very popular destination, with morning lessons heavily attended and the afternoon reserved for private instruction with senior students of the school, senior members of the Tokugawa administration with an interest in swordcraft, or the shogun himself.  Hidetada was more concerned with affairs of state than swordsmanship, and the era of great battles had ended, but his son Iemitsu was an avid pupil of the Yagyû school.  Iemitsu, in fact, sent a letter, preserved by the Yagyû family and somewhat unusual in the relationship between master and student in Japan, where he complained that Munenori was not teaching him as fast as he could learn.  Were Iemitsu anyone else, he'd probably have been expelled, but that would be biting the hand, so to speak.

During this time, he also wrote Heihô Kadensho, at Iemitsu's request.  The section on mutô, or "no-sword," technique, is especially telling regarding the premium he placed on diligent practice; it is the one time in the book that he describes a technique in the Musashi-esque "practice this a lot."  The essence of mutô, according to Munenori, is simply not to get hit by the sword, and everything else is a matter of practice.  It was this that led to the second anecdote.

Iemitsu was frustrated at his lack of progress.  He was convinced there was a magic trick that Munenori was not showing him, and he pressed his teacher again and again to teach him this magic.  Munenori demonstrated again and again, until, at wits' end, Iemitsu decided to see it "in the wild."  He grabbed a training spear and lunged at Munenori unexpectedly and outside of normal practice, and next he knew, he was on his back with a spear pointed at his chest.  Munenori was incredulous.  Why had the shogun done something so rash, so stupid, without it being part of training?

Iemitsu got to his feet sheepishly and explained that he wanted to see what it looked like, because he was sure that Munenori was doing some sort of magic.  After all, even now legend said his father had been trained by a tengu.  It was so fast, there had to be some sort of supernatural explanation.  Munenori reflected for a moment on how to answer, then replied:

No magic.  Just practice.

That summed up the entire thing.  The magic tricks happened, just as with stage magicians, because he had trained himself to make them happen.  Diligence, not raw talent or supernatural influence, was what made Munenori one of Japan's greatest swordsmen.  Neither of his great legendary feats happened in his youth when he was a "gunslinger," they happened well into middle age when other men could have left their craft to younger men, or retired into comfortable teaching; instead, he practiced relentlessly, well into his seventies.  By the end, oral history says that he would stand, motionless, with his sword in hand in his garden, the sword turned into a conduit for meditation because its physical aspects had become so familiar to him.

This, then, was the secret - no magic, just practice.