The Yagyû Comparison Project, Part 1 - Historical Background, or, "Why This Matters"

Having completed my review of the various editions of Fiore currently on the market (I suppose I should write up the Hatcher edition of the Getty, but it's been out a few years and is kind of a gold standard!), it's time for a project I've been delaying for months.

That project is a comparison of the four editions I have found of Yagyû Munenori's first volume, "The Killing Sword."  To understand why I'd be doing that, and why there have been delays, one must first understand who Munenori was, what the formative environment of Yagyû shinkage-ryû was, and why the school persists.

First, the Yagyû themselves.  All Japanese noble families trace themselves, at least nominally, to one of three origins, the Taira, the Minamoto, or the Fujiwara.  The Taira and Minamoto (or, if one is feeling particularly fancy, the Heike and Genji, after their On'myo, or "Chinese-style," readings) were descendants of emperors who had been mediatized as nobles no longer capable of inheriting the imperial throne, while the Fujiwara were highly-honored court functionaries.  There is some dispute as to whether the Yagyû were originally descended from the Fujiwara or the Taira, but by the late 1500s they were regarded as Taira descendants.  "Regarded as" is relevant; since they had stayed relatively stationary for the entire history of the clan, their claim was stronger than that of Tokugawa Ieyasu, last of the great unifiers.

In any case, the villages of upper and lower Yagyû were documented in property records as early as the mid-800s, and by the early 1100s, they were in the hands of a branch of the Sugawara family.  They played no great role in the Gempei (from "Gen" and "Hei," or Minamoto and Taira) War, but it stands to reason given their blood ties and later actions that the Sugawara ancestors of the Yagyû sided with the Taira in that conflict.

Those "later actions" began in the early 1300s, in a period where the power of the Kamakura shogunate was collapsing.  The Yagyû - identified in the records as such for the first time, instead of as Sugawara - were early supporters of the emperor Go-Daigo, and stayed loyal to the emperor even into the Northern and Southern Courts period.  There is a pattern in Japanese history of nothern (or eastern) and southern (or western) division, which is a product of Japan's geography and mostly continues as a rivalry between Tokyo and Osaka, but in this period it was between the imperial court and the newly established - under a rival claimant to the imperial throne - Ashikaga shogunate.  By the end of the 1300s, the Yagyû were, at least nominally, vassals of the Ashikaga.  This is less betrayal, than the political realities of late-1300s Japan - the two competing imperial lines were merged, and divisions in the country largely papered over, in 1392.

Of course, papered-over fixes rarely stay fixed; less than 75 years later, the Ashikaga found themselves clinging to a shrinking power base and local warlords engaged in score-settling, in a period known today as the Sengoku Jidai ("the whole nation at war with itself").  There are two conflicting interpretations for the behavior of the Yagyû from about 1475 to about 1575 - that they, like every other local noble family, leapt at the main chance, and then paid the price when needed, or that they were traditionalist isolationists, who did what was necessary to preserve their clan.  It is impossible at this remove to say which is which, but I will say that either approach fits with what is known of the clan's general philosophy, and there are examples of them doing both later on.  I suspect that the true answer is closer to "leaping at the main chance," with a veneer of respectability provided by tradition.  Certainly this explains why they allied themselves with Matsunaga Hisahide against their nominal overlord, Tsutsui Junshô, how Yagyû Munetoshi found himself an attendant at the court of the final Ashikaga shogun, Yoshiaki, and why, after seeing Matsunaga Hisahide betray the Ashikaga, then betray and then be defeated by Oda Nobunaga, Munetoshi retired to Yagyû village rather than continue gambling with his clan's fortunes.  In Kenny Rogers terms, he had decided this was the time to fold 'em.

There is a strong streak in Yagyû history that manifests itself here.  Paraphrased, it's that it's better to be a small, live fish than a big, dead one.  The Yagyû had spent time in exile for supporting Go-Daigo, and had been restored to their lands by him; they had been reduced by the Tsutsui, but stayed alive through a clever marriage that bound Munetoshi to Junshô's daughter, and when Nobunaga was destroying the last vestiges of the Ashikaga shogunate, and later his rebellious vassal Matsunaga Hisahide, they did what they had to first to survive, then to ensure they would be better-positioned to weather the next storm.  All of this is in many ways similar to the behavior of William Marshal - Marshal, and the Yagyû, were generally loyalists and gave good service to whatever their cause of the moment was, but could display a remarkable flexibility when that cause, lord, or leader died out, and shift with the winds to accept a new cause, lord, or leader.  Neither of them stayed loyal to a dead cause, however much they might have privately longed for the Good Old Days.

Let us now return to Yagyû Munetoshi.  He was widely regarded as an excellent swordsman, and in 1564 - a decade prior to his withdrawal - he met and became the student of Kamiizumi Nobutsuna (or Hidetsuna; he signed documents both ways and I choose Nobutsuna as the name by which I first encountered him), a onetime student of the Kage-ryû who had made quite a name for himself as a martial arts teacher.  He had established a new school, the Shinkage-ryû, based on his own observations and experiences.  Like many minor samurai of the period, Nobutsuna wanted one thing more than anything else - steady employment.  Much of his career, in fact, reads less like the romantic wanderings of an ascetic shugyôsha, and more like the itinerant travels of a hungry, unemployed man with a band of students dependent on him.  When Yagyû Munetoshi offered him a place to stay with his closest disciples for several years in exchange for tutelage, he took it, and a menkyô - the certificate of transmission - from 1564 gave the school to Munetoshi, at which point it became the Yagyû shinkage-ryû.

One reason to believe that the Yagyû were less traditionalist isolationists, and more grabbing at the main chance, is that shortly after this, their lands were taken by Toyotomi Hideyoshi, who had completed Nobunaga's work of uniting the country, for failure to disclose new grain fields.  While it is entirely possible that tax evasion was indeed the true reason, it is equally possible that they had been either truly involved in, or were suspected of, scheming - Hideyoshi was paranoid, martial-arts schools were known hotbeds of intrigue because of all the students' comings and goings, and in 1594, the same year that the lands were taken, the Yagyû had hosted Tokugawa Ieyasu, the second most powerful man in Japan at that point, in the capital.  In fact, that incident deserves further explanation, because it's the "coming out" of an important figure in this story - Yagyû Munenori.

The story is that Tokugawa Ieyasu, a keen swordsman on his own, wanted to see the highest technique of the Yagyû school - mutôdori, or no-sword technique.  Munetoshi claimed he was too old, and asked his fifth son, Munenori, to demonstrate instead.  This led to some disagreement as to whether it was acceptable to endanger the head of the Tokugawa clan in a demonstration, at the end of which Ieyasu picked up a bokken (a wooden training sword, to the two of you who read this for reasons other than swords) and made it quite clear that it was all right with him.  Munenori supposedly quickly and easily disarmed him, leaving Ieyasu on his back.  Ieyasu was incredulous, and asked for a repeat performance, which Munenori gave.  Ieyasu decided this was the school he needed to study, and asked Munetoshi to become his private tutor.  Munetoshi declined because of age and a sense of disillusionment with the games of the big fish, and instead recommended Munenori.  Ieyasu accepted, and Munenori's career began.

I've written about Munenori before, so I will restrain myself from too much hero-worship here. Suffice it to say that when the Tokugawa rose, that tide lifted the stone boat (pun explanation - Sekishuhai, 石舟斎, Munetoshi's nom de guerre, can also be read as meaning "stone boat" and he wrote a poem comparing swordsmanship to being as useful as a stone boat).  However, Munenori managed to thread the court politics of the first three Tokugawa shogun, and was influential enough on the third, Iemitsu, to have the exile of Takuan Sôhô, a Zen monk and something of a Japanese Socrates (in the "itinerant troublemaking philosopher" sense, not the "Plato needs a sock puppet" sense), lifted.  Iemitsu was notoriously difficult, but Munenori seemed to have a gift for managing it.  In fact, though Munenori was widely viewed as the second best swordsman of his generation, the difference between him and Ono Tadaaki, head of the Ittô-ryu, the other official school of the Tokugawa, largely summarizes the difference in the two schools.  Munenori was viewed as more calm, collegial, and a man for any season or company; Tadaaki was viewed as dedicated strictly to his craft.  This difference conveys itself in shinkage and in ittô, where shinkage focuses heavily on measure and timing, and ittô and its successor schools focuses very heavily on cutting technique.

This emphasis on manipulation of measure and timing is the core of shinkage, and the school applies this not just to swords, but to everything else as well.  Swords are just the easiest way to express that.  One wonders how much of that shinkage emphasis on right action in the moment, unexpected action in breaking timing, and unorthodox seizure of small advantages is a product of being small fish in a very large pond, especially in the final sengoku years, when Munenori was growing up.  Munetoshi's maneuvers to keep the Yagyû afloat, and Munenori's maneuvers to stay in the good graces of the Tokugawa shogun, mirror this basic approach.

What, then, does Munenori have to say about swordsmanship? Stick around and find out.