Yari (槍) – The True Weapon of Samurai Wars. And Why Myth Replaced It with the Katana
The katana was the soul of the samurai. The wakizashi – his honor. But on the fields of Sengoku, it was the yari that decided the battle.
I have written before about the katana – the long sword (or, if you prefer, sabre) that a samurai polished in silence, handed down to his son in the coming-of-age rite, revered like a relic, and displayed in the most exposed, place of honor in his house. I have written about the wakizashi, the shorter companion waiting at the belt for the final decision, the one every warrior had to be able to make for himself, before himself. I have written about samurai cuirasses (dō) and the wrathful men yoroi masks, about the banners on shafts visible from the far end of the field, about the tsuba ornamented with intricate patterns no one but the owner would ever inspect up close. Yet most of this consists more of the props of peacetime. Things one polished, displayed, gave names to. Today we examine what the samurai actually held in his hands when he went out to kill and to die, in the era when he was still a soldier, not a clerk.
Consider the morning of 28 June 1575, the plain of Shitaragahara in Mikawa province. Fog lifts from a forest of wooden palisades, behind which men stand pressed one against another. Not samurai in full armor with swords sheathed at the hip. Ashigaru, „light feet”, foot soldiers recruited by Oda Nobunaga from the villages of Owari province. In their hands they hold poles so long it is hard to accept them as personal weapons rather than scaffolding. Six meters from the tip of the head to the butt. A forest of spearheads. The moment the sun glances over the valley, the cavalry of Takeda Katsuyori will set off in a charge that all of Japan at the time considered invincible. Nine hours later, the core of the Takeda army will be ten thousand corpses, eight of the clan's twenty-four generals dead, and the myth of the horsemen under the red-fan banner finished. Most of those corpses will bear no wound from a bullet or an arrow. They will be wounds from spear thrusts.
And yet, when we say „samurai”, we see a katana. A six-meter pole tipped with a blade does not fit the image that myth paints for us at night, as we finish watching „Seven Samurai” by Kurosawa and go to sleep. Why? What happened in the Edo era that the weapon which actually did the killing on the battlefield was thrown out of memory, and another was set in its place – one that killed far more rarely, but required years of training, was expensive, and helped distinguish one man's social standing from another's? Let us see what the Japanese yari really did in a warrior's hands – and who, for what purpose, stole its place in history.
Hoko, the Bow, and the Horse. Before the Yari
The earliest samurai had no spear. He had a bow. The ideal of the Heian-era warrior, shaped in the houses of Minamoto and Taira, rested on the art of mounted archery, which the Japanese called kyūba no michi (弓馬の道), literally „the way of bow and horse”. Battle was a ritual in which two riders exchanged arrows, calling out the names of their ancestors as if inviting every grandfather on both sides to take part in the decision of who would live. Only at the end, when one of them had his horse killed under him or an arrow pierced his armor, did it come to close combat – and then they drew the tachi (the katana did not yet exist) – a long sword, or the naginata, a polearm with a slightly curved blade at the end.
The spear existed in this world, but it was a peasant's weapon or a temple ornament. Hoko (鉾), the precursor of the yari, appeared in Japan during the Nara period (8th century) as an import from China and Korea. A leaf-shaped, broad blade mounted on a wooden shaft. It was used in religious processions, in temple guard, sometimes in local skirmishes. Neither Heian nor early Kamakura treated the spear as a samurai's weapon. The very term yari (槍) appears in writing for the first time only in 1334, in the Nanboku-chō period, nearly two hundred years after the founding of the Kamakura shogunate.
Everything was changed by a foreign army. The Mongols attacked the island of Kyūshū twice: in 1274 and 1281. Though both invasions ultimately broke against the kamikaze typhoons (more on which here: Kamikaze – Two Divine Typhoons of Life, One Grim Wind of Death), they left behind a tactical shock. Samurai who rode out to the beach to duel as their fathers had done saw something they did not expect. The Mongols did not exchange names. They attacked in tight foot formations, with Chinese and Korean pikemen in the front rank. They shot recurve bows in volleys, used explosive rockets, fought as a group, not as individuals. The bushi, accustomed to war as a sequence of aristocratic duels, suddenly found themselves in the middle of a brutal slaughter – and they were the prey.
The lesson sank in slowly. Through the next century the naginata remained the principal polearm in the samurai arsenal, and the appearance of long pikemen formations was put off until the Ōnin War (1467–1477), which destroyed Kyoto and opened the Sengoku, the era of „warring states” (more on the Sengoku here: The Real Sengoku – What Was Life Like for the Swordless in the Shadow of Samurai Wars?). Then it became clear that the old „chivalrous” war could no longer be waged. One question came into focus: how, as quickly, as cheaply, and in the largest numbers possible, to arm men who had never trained in their lives. The answer had three words: bow, spear, musket. And it was the spear, not the sword, that began to accumulate variants, to lengthen, to cross itself, to curve and bend into a sickle.
Anatomy of Death. What the Yari Was Made Of
The yari of medieval Japan is not a single object but a whole family of tools sharing one principle: a long shaft tipped with a metal blade designed above all for thrusting. The rest is the geometry of craftsmanship. Su yari (素槍, „plain spear”) is the basic version, a leaf-shaped or narrow square-section blade set directly on the shaft. Ōmi yari (大身槍) had a blade up to seventy-six centimeters long, almost a short katana hammered onto a pole, used by mounted samurai. It was extremely lethal, but it demanded strength and space; it suited individual combat, less so formation fighting.
More refined variants emerged when warriors looked for ways to make the spear do more than thrust. Jūmonji yari (十文字槍) is a cross-shaped head: a central spike with two side blades set perpendicular to it. It was used to hook the opponent's weapon, drag him from his horse, block a sword thrust. Kama yari had downward-curving sickles in place of the side blades, hence the name: „sickle spear”. Kata kama yari had such a sickle on only one side, and this was the favorite weapon of Katō Kiyomasa, one of Hideyoshi's generals. The most curious was the kuda yari, a spear with a metal tube slid onto the shaft, within which the blade rotated as it thrust, adding a spinning motion, like a screw. Kagi yari had a small hook beneath the head, allowing one to block and control the opponent.
Shafts were made from oak, from bamboo, from wood laminated with fish glue and wrapped in silk cord beneath a layer of lacquer. With the longest pikes – the six-meter nagae yari – a simple uniform shaft would have been too flexible: it would have wobbled in motion like a fishing rod, losing precision. So they were composed of several layers of wood with contrasting grain orientation, reinforced with metal plates, and lacquered against moisture. This was craftsmanship comparable to bow-making, and like the bow, the spear had to be seasoned, controlled, stored in a particular position so it would not warp before battle.
Most importantly: the yari blade was forged by the same techniques used to forge the katana. From tamahagane, the steel rendered from iron sand in tatara furnaces. With hardening, hamon, and the smith's signature. The greatest sword-smiths of Japan – Sengo Masazane of the Muramasa school, Fujiwara Kanabō, Kanemoto – forged both katana and spears. From a technical point of view, the yari was simply a particular kind of Japanese blade, a nihontō. The only thing that distinguished it was the geometry of its mounting: instead of a hilt, it had a long tang (nakago) set permanently into the shaft. There is irony in this: some of the most famous spears of Japan were forged by the same men whose swords today stand at the center of museum halls. The spears – if shown at all – wait in the corner, without placards, without lighting.
A Forest of Pikes. Sengoku as a Tactical Revolution
After the Ōnin War, the samurai army in the old sense ceased to exist in Japan. It was replaced by a feudal army, a mixture of professional warriors, mercenaries, and peasants pulled from the soil, who had to be armed and taught the art of killing in weeks, not years. These men, ashigaru (足軽, literally „light feet”), made up as much as forty percent of the troops in Oda Nobunaga's armies. They could not handle a sword; most had never touched a bow in their lives. The spear was the only sensible weapon for them.
Nobunaga understood the arithmetic of the battlefield better than any of his contemporary daimyō. His province of Owari had a reputation for being a weak, backward periphery, and his ashigaru were considered the worst soldiers in Japan. He responded with a simple idea: give them spears longer than anyone else's. Owari's soldiers went into battle with poles five and a half, sometimes more than six meters long. Nagae yari (長柄槍, „long-shafted spear”) in his hands changed from an individual weapon into an element of block formation. Set in two or three lines, it lowered its heads on command and formed a barrier no horse could cross, and that a man could force only at the cost of several blades in his own chest.
At Nagashino in 1575 those long pikes stood in the decisive hour together with three thousand arquebusiers. Popular myths tell that battle as a revolution of fire: muskets in three ranks firing in turn, mowing down the famous Takeda cavalry. The truth is more complicated. The shooters needed up to two minutes to reload. During that time, as the Takeda horses came up to the palisade, the ashigaru with spears stood just behind the fence and through its gaps drove their points into the oncoming horse breasts and rider legs. Anyone who got through the fire fell on the spears. After nine hours Takeda Katsuyori had lost ten thousand men – two thirds of his army. Of his father Shingen's twenty-four famous generals, eight died that day. Most of them from the thrusts of peasant pikemen.
The tactic of this battle had its own name: yari-busuma (槍襖), „a wall of spears”, literally „a sliding wall of spearheads”. The first rank lowered the blades at an angle toward the ground, the second straight ahead, the third raised them to strike from above, because with a long spear one could strike not only by thrusting but also like a hammer: from above, downward, to quarter shoulders and heads. On command the entire line struck the same way. Training consisted mainly of coordination – the ashigaru spear was not individual, it was shared, like an oar in a boat. The anonymous ashigaru from Owari province had no chance of entering history, even though it was he, his comrade on the left, and his comrade on the right, shoulder to shoulder, who carried out most of the killing on Japanese battlefields in the 16th century. The katana, if used at all, finished off the fallen. Battles were won with the spear.
A Monk, the Moon, and the Cross-Blade. Sōjutsu and the Hōzōin-ryū
Since the spear decided the fate of battles, a separate martial art had to grow up around it. Sōjutsu (槍術), „the technique of the spear”, developed in hundreds of local schools, of which around a dozen survive today. The most famous among them, the one most often cited in documents and best known, is the Hōzōin-ryū, founded in the mid-16th century in Nara by the Buddhist monk Kakuzenbō In'ei (1521–1607).
Hōzōin was a temple subordinate to the great complex of Kōfuku-ji, belonging to the Kegon school. From an early age In'ei combined monastic life with a passion for martial arts (which in those days were rather poorly aligned with one another, see here: The Monk with the Naginata: The Martial Face of Buddhism in Kamakura Japan). He studied swordsmanship under masters of kenjutsu, and the spear under Daizendayū Moritada, a local expert in the yari. Legend has it that one evening, walking by the Sarusawa pond, he saw the reflection of the crescent moon in the water. He was holding a spear at the time. The silhouette of the head and the sickle of the moon crossed in the reflection at a right angle. In'ei stopped and thought: what if you were to add two side blades, perpendicular, to a straight head? Then with such a spear you could not only thrust, but hook, drag, counter a sword thrust with a downward cutting motion. So, according to Hōzōin tradition, was born the jūmonji yari, the cross-shaped blade that became the school's signature.
The doctrine of the Hōzōin-ryū was set down in an old eika (詠歌 – a rhythmic motto, a song of the school of combat):
突けば槍 薙げば薙刀 引けば鎌 とにもかくにも 外れあらまし
(Tsukeba yari / nageba naginata / hikeba kama / tonimokakunimo / hazure aramashi)
„Thrust – and it's a spear,
Sweep – and it's a naginata,
Pull – and it's a sickle,
And one way or another –
It will not miss its mark.”
These three motions were to be performed fluidly, one passing into the next, the blade never ceasing to work. The school's most famous technique consisted of thrusting the blade into the opponent's joint – knee, elbow, armpit – and turning the weapon in a circular motion that bent the limb and threw the man to the ground. For decades Nara was a place of martial pilgrimage. If we are to believe Dave Lowry (American writer, journalist, martial arts practitioner), author of „Autumn Lightning”, the young Miyamoto Musashi came there and pitted himself against the Hōzōin monks. The outcome of that encounter depends on which version one reads: Musashi himself in „The Book of Five Rings” suggests that he defeated In'ei's successor; the local Hōzōin tradition says otherwise.
In'ei's school survives to this day. In 1991 its twentieth master became Kagita Chūbei; after him, since 2020, Manabu Komakita. They practice with spears no shorter than two meters seventy centimeters; the opponent's pole is three meters sixty, a full eighty centimeters longer. This distance, two to three meters between practicing bodies, is awkward in today's Japan, because streets, dōjō, and trains are not built with a weapon used by three people on one side and one on the other in mind. Nara remembers what a world looked like in which such dimensions were the norm.
Honor Hung on a Spearhead. Ichiban Yari and Shichihon Yari
For the samurai of Sengoku, the list of highest honors began not with the killing of a particular enemy, but with reaching him first. The title ichiban yari (一番槍, „first spear”) was awarded after battle to the warrior who first broke the enemy line. The word „spear” in this context was not a metaphor interchangeable with „sword”; it referred literally to the weapon the attacker held in his hands. „First katana” does not exist in the linguistic habits of Sengoku. The hero of the battlefield was identified by his spearhead.
The most famous group of ichiban yari in Japanese history remains the seven from Shizugatake. In April 1583 Toyotomi Hideyoshi (then still Hashiba) clashed with Shibata Katsuie, Nobunaga's old comrade, in a battle over the succession. At the decisive moment, Hideyoshi ordered seven young warriors from his personal guard to charge Katsuie's positions. All seven – Fukushima Masanori, Katō Kiyomasa, Katō Yoshiaki, Wakizaka Yasuharu, Hirano Nagayasu, Kasuya Takenori, Katagiri Katsumoto – survived, and each received three thousand koku of land as a reward. They became the legendary Shichihon yari (賤ヶ岳の七本槍), „The Seven Spears of Shizugatake”. In reality, nine were distinguished, but two – Sakurai Iekazu and Ishikawa Heisuke – either died in the battle or shortly after, so tradition „rounded down” to seven.
The recurrence of this title is telling. „Seven Spears” appears in the descriptions of many different Sengoku battles, as though the number seven were a vessel reserved for heroes of the polearm. What became of these seven later? Fukushima later received the province of Owari with 240,000 koku. Katō Kiyomasa got Higo on Kyūshū. Katō Yoshiaki received Iyo. All of them became daimyō. Each of them, when in old age he wrote his memoirs or had his life recorded by chroniclers, said of himself: „I was a spear”. Not „I was a sword”. Not „I was a bow”. A spear. A single word was enough to denote a man's station.
Tenka Sanmeisō. Three Famous Spears Under Heaven
The classification of Japan's most famous feudal weapons was codified in the 18th century by the Hon'ami clan in the catalog „Kyōhō Meibutsuchō”. Among the swords, there is a long list of named blades. Among the spears – only three, but each holds the title „under heaven”: Tenka Sanmeisō (天下三名槍), „The Three Famous Spears Under Heaven”. Tonbogiri, Nihongō, Otegine. Each has its own story, each leaves a shadow in which something about the samurai can be seen better than in a sword displayed behind glass.
Tonbogiri
Tonbogiri (蜻蛉切, „Dragonfly Cutter”) belonged to Honda Tadakatsu (1548–1610), one of the Four Heavenly Kings of Tokugawa Ieyasu. It was forged by Sengo Masazane, a student of the famous Muramasa, whose blades had the reputation of being haunted, bloodthirsty, leading their owners to misfortune. Tonbogiri did not confirm that reputation. The blade was just over forty-three centimeters long, the shaft over three meters. Legend says that one day after a battle Tadakatsu set the weapon aside to rest, and a dragonfly alighted on its tip. Touching the steel, the insect split itself in half. Hence the name, in which tonbo means dragonfly and kiri – cut.
With Tonbogiri, Tadakatsu went through fifty-seven battles. He emerged unwounded from each. At Mikatagahara in 1572 he held the rear for his lord as Takeda's forces shattered the Tokugawa army; he himself was never struck. At Nagashino in 1575 his pikemen with their spears killed Yamagata Masakage, one of the legendary twenty-four generals. At Komaki-Nagakute in 1584 he rode out with a handful of men against Hideyoshi's army, and Hideyoshi, seeing the challenge, forbade his own to attack. „A samurai among samurai”, Nobunaga said of him. Takeda Shingen, his enemy from another generation, is said to have remarked: „Ieyasu has two things better than himself, his strange helmet and Honda Tadakatsu”. Tadakatsu's helmet bore deer antlers – a distinctive silhouette by which he could be recognized from afar. Helmet and spear – these were the identifying marks the Tokugawa forces saw in the front rank. Tonbogiri is today in private hands, on loan to the Sano Art Museum.
Nihongō
Nihongō (日本号) has the strangest history. Originally it was an imperial weapon, one of the personal spears of the Imperial Palace court, forged during the Muromachi period by Kanabō Masatsugu. In 1568 Emperor Ōgimachi gave it to Ashikaga Yoshiaki, the last shōgun of the Ashikaga dynasty. After Ashikaga's overthrow, the spear passed into the hands of Oda Nobunaga, then of Hideyoshi, and from him to Fukushima Masanori – the same man, one of the Seven Spears of Shizugatake. And here begins one of the more famous tales of Japanese folklore.
One winter, at the beginning of the 17th century, a warrior named Mori Tomonobu, known also as Tahei, came on a mission from Kuroda Nagamasa to Hiroshima, where Fukushima Masanori then had his residence as lord of the Aki domain. Kuroda had given him one instruction: not to drink a drop of sake at Fukushima's, no matter the circumstances. Fukushima, who reportedly had an extraordinarily strong head, learned that he had a guest in town and at once sent for him. Tahei tried to refuse, but Fukushima would not yield. „If you can hold the drinking with me”, he said, „you may choose any object from my armory as a reward”. Mori sat down and drank. They drank together no one knows how many masu (cups) of sake. When Fukushima was already lying against the wall, Mori, to his rising horror, pointed at Nihongō, the imperial spear, the legacy of three rulers. Fukushima begged him to choose something else. „A warrior does not take back his word”, Mori answered, took the spear on his shoulder, and walked out into the street perfectly sober.
From this story arose the folk song „Kuroda Bushi”, still sung today in Fukuoka, where Mori Tomonobu is buried, and where Nihongō rests in the City Museum, sometimes called Nomitori Nihongō, „The Nihongō That Was Drunk Away”. The Fuku-Haku Deai bridge in central Fukuoka has on its railings metal sculptures of sake cups pierced by a spear; all of Japan decided that Fukushima's drinking bout had been too important a political event to forget. The spear measures three meters twenty-one centimeters today; the blade alone is seventy-nine point two centimeters. It is one of very few objects ever granted by the imperial court the third rank, shōsanmi, normally reserved for high officials and priests. The spear holds the dignity of a man – and no ordinary man at that.
Otegine
The third, Otegine (御手杵), belonged to Yūki Harutomo, a daimyō from Shimōsa province (today northern Chiba). The spear was monstrous: the blade was one hundred thirty-nine centimeters long, the total length over three meters thirty. The name comes from a battlefield anecdote. Returning from a fight, Yūki had skewered onto the shaft of his spear several severed enemy heads. One slipped down and lodged just under the blade – the whole thing then resembled a tegine, the wooden pestle with a rounded head used to pound rice into mochi. The same shape – a thick, cylindrical mass set upon a handle – was given to the ornate sheath in which the spear was later kept. The dark humor of men coming out alive from a bloody battle.
Otegine burned in the bombing of Tokyo in March 1945. Today only a replica exists, made from old measurements. The first spear in Japanese history to disappear because of modern fire. Of the heavenly spears, only two remain.
Lives Written in Spear
In the Sengoku period it sometimes happened that a warrior lost his own name for the name of his weapon. The best example is Maeda Toshiie (1538–1599), one of Nobunaga's generals, founder of the Kaga domain, whose capital was reckoned in „a million koku”. Diplomatically he was called Toshiie. At home they called him Matazaemon. The army, however, called him: Yari no Mataza (槍の又左) – „Mataza-the-Spear”.
He earned the title young, in 1558 at the battle of Ukino, at the age of twenty. He rode onto the field with a spear whose shaft was six meters thirty long. Six thirty. A man carrying such a pole cannot wear full armor, cannot ride into the very center of combat. Toshiie rode in. He cut down men from horseback, he cut them down on foot, he took heads. The „Shinchō-kōki”, the official chronicle of Nobunaga, records that at Okehazama in 1560 he collected three severed heads in one battle – although he should not have been there at all (he was at the time out of his lord's favor for having killed a fellow retainer in a dispute over an ornamental object). The spear became for him a way back into public life. Today, in front of Arako station in Nagoya, stands his bronze statue: a rider holding a long pole, the head pointing upward.
Another chapter was written by Katō Kiyomasa, one of the Seven Spears of Shizugatake. After the battle he was granted Higo province and, on Hideyoshi's orders, went to Korea. There, in the winter of 1592–1593, during the first Imjin campaign, he entered legend in a way he had not planned. He hunted tigers. Tigers really were present in Korea at the time; Korean peasants called them „lords of the mountains”, they lived in the forested ranges of the peninsula and attacked villages. Kiyomasa took a kata kama yari, the spear with a side sickle, and set out into the mountains. According to one tradition he did this to supply meat to Hideyoshi, who believed that the edible organs of a tiger were good for the health. According to another, he was after a trophy.
The hunt was a success. Kiyomasa returned with two tiger skulls, one of which is today preserved by the Tokugawa-Kii family and the other by the Abe house. His spear is in the Tōkyō Kokuritsu Hakubutsukan, the Tokyo National Museum. There is a story that the blade was originally a jūmonji (cross-shape), and that the tiger bit off one of the side blades in the fight. Modern study of its forging shows this to be false – the head was made as kata kama from the start. The myth of the tiger biting off a sickle is more beautiful than the truth, which is precisely why it survived in the woodblock prints of Kuniyoshi, Yoshiiku, Yoshifusa. At some point Hideyoshi forbade tiger hunts, because too many imitators of Kiyomasa were dying in Korea from claws rather than from the fire of battle. That prohibition says more about the power of the myth than it does about the tigers themselves.
And a third figure – the already mentioned Honda Tadakatsu, whose full biography would require a separate essay, if not a series of books. It is enough to say that there is no other warrior in Japanese history whose life was so deeply tied to the spear. Fifty-seven battles, not a single wound. A helmet with deer antlers (from the legend of the deer that showed him the ford across a river during a retreat), a weapon forged by a smith associated with the master Muramasa, a role in every decisive engagement of Sengoku, from Anegawa through Mikatagahara and Nagashino to Sekigahara. When he died in 1610, Tokugawa Ieyasu already controlled Japan, but those still writing his biography used one word to describe him. Spear.
Edo and the Amputation of the Memory of Spears
In 1588 Toyotomi Hideyoshi issued an edict known in historiography as katanagari (刀狩) – „the sword hunt”. Peasants were to surrender their weapons. The armed order was officially taken away from most of society and left in a narrow group – the class known from then on as buke (in the West more often referred to collectively as samurai, though the terms are not strictly identical) – which alone had the right to carry weapons. Tokugawa Ieyasu, after Sekigahara (1600) and the fall of Osaka (1615), reinforced the rule systematically. Four classes: shi (warriors), nō (peasants), kō (craftsmen), shō (merchants) – in short, shi-nō-kō-shō. Only the first carried swords.
And here a problem appears that the Tokugawa shogunate had to solve. The spear, that real weapon of war, was not a good class marker. The nagae yari could be handled by any peasant one could train in three weeks. Most Sengoku samurai had fought shoulder to shoulder with ashigaru, using the same weapon. The social divide the Tokugawa wanted to create between the classes could not rest on the spear, because the spear was democratic. They needed an object that demanded years of training, that was expensive, that was beautiful, and above all that required status simply in order to be carried.
That object was the daishō (大小): a pair of swords, the long katana and the short wakizashi, thrust into the belt edge upward. Only a samurai had the right to a daishō. Only a samurai could carry them in the city, on the street, in the bathhouse, while visiting his tailor. The spear was left under the eaves of the manor house, in a state of full battlefield readiness one did not return to for three hundred years. When the daimyō made their annual journeys between their provinces and Edo (the sankin-kōtai, „alternate attendance” system), their retinues carried ornamental spears called keyari (毛槍) – with furry and feathered sheaths, sometimes shaped like animals, sometimes like fans. The ceremonial keyari with bear fur was an ornament, not a weapon. With a real yari it shared the name, the shape of the shaft, and not much more. Its task was not to kill but to announce – that, here comes the lord of domain X.
An analogous „amputation” was taking place in the schools of combat. Sōjutsu did not vanish, the Hōzōin-ryū still had its dōjō, masters found employment in the bakufu, but the attention of the Japanese bushi shifted gradually to the art of the sword. Kenjutsu, iaijutsu, battōjutsu, later iaidō and kendō – all disciplines of the katana. The spear was left in arsenals as a relic, used in demonstrations, sometimes in policing actions when one needed to subdue a brigand without killing. The te-yari, a short spear with hooks, served for restraint; it was the one that hung above the desk of every machi-bugyō. But in the imagination of the samurai of the latter half of Edo, the katana took the place that Sengoku had never known.
Yamamoto Tsunetomo's „Hagakure”, the famous bushidō book from the beginning of the 18th century, mentions the spear rarely. It urges the samurai to be ready to die with a sword in his hand. The idea „the sword is the soul of the samurai” is a product of Edo, not Sengoku. Earlier generations spoke differently: „the samurai is born of the spear”. Edo erased that sentence from the manuals.
What the Myth Forgot
The question that remains at the end is cognitive: why did the collective memory of Japan allow itself such an exchange? Why did the myth not choose the weapon that actually won the battles?
The answer has three layers. The first is the simplest and the most brutal. The spear was cheap. It could be forged in masses, given to every village drunk who had never seen armor. The myth of a class is not built on something the neighbor has in his garage. Classes need objects that cost, that demand, that exclude. Not an Opel, but a Ferrari. The katana was the only traditional Japanese weapon that met those three conditions simultaneously: its forging took weeks at the minimum, the cost was beyond a peasant's reach, and its carrying was legally restricted to samurai. The spear stood no chance in that symbolic rivalry.
The second layer is more subtle. Combat with a katana is individual. A duel of swords has a narrative: two men, a decision, a movement, one lives, the other dies. Combat with a spear was collective, anonymous, mechanical. To strike blindly at an opponent behind a palisade, in a mass of men striking beside you, on the commander's call. The myth does not know how to tell such a fight. The myth needs a separate face, a separate name, a separate decision. So even in those images of Sengoku that survived (the woodblock prints of Kuniyoshi, Yoshitoshi from the mid-19th century), duel-like spear scenes are depicted as one-on-one confrontations, as though the battlefield were a chessboard between individuals. In reality it looked like a factory. A factory, however, is not painted (or carved, in the case of woodblocks).
The third layer concerns how Japan in the 19th and 20th centuries reorganized its past. After the Meiji Restoration of 1868 the samurai formally ceased to exist, but their legend was needed by the new state as the core of a national myth. The concept of bushidō developed in that era not from the writings of Sengoku, but from the romanticized book of Inazo Nitobe, written for a Western reader. Nitobe's bushidō speaks of honor, loyalty, the sword as soul. Of the ashigaru and of hours spent training thrusts from the second rank, it says nothing. In Akira Kurosawa's mid-20th-century cinema, the samurai draws the katana, he does not reach for the spear. In „The Last Samurai” of Tom Cruise, what is shown is the katana, not the pike. This is how the memory of a culture is built – through a thousand decisions, each apparently aesthetic.
What does this say about human psychology? Perhaps this: that the history one remembers is not the history that took place. Memory selects what can be sung, drawn, performed. Real killing, mechanical, in a crowd, without a name, is unable to compete against the duel in which the samurai draws his sword and stands face to face with another. A class chooses its symbols not according to what it has done, but according to what it wishes to appear. Edo built for Japan a memory of itself in which the spear was the peasant's redundant tool, and the katana – the soul of the nation. Three hundred years were enough for the whole world to believe it.
Perhaps myth, everywhere and always, chooses as Japan chose. Not what is true. What is beautiful, individual, set apart. A dragonfly alighted on the blade of Tonbogiri and split itself in two; we will never forget that story. The six-meter poles of the hundreds of ashigaru at Nagashino had no such legends. The pole simply struck. Until the last of Takeda's ten thousand men fell.
And so today, when we think „samurai”, we see a katana – though it was the spear that both made him and killed him.
Sources
1. Friday, Karl F., Samurai, Warfare and the State in Early Medieval Japan, Routledge, London 2004.
2. Turnbull, Stephen, The Samurai Sourcebook, Cassell, London 1998.
3. Turnbull, Stephen, Nagashino 1575: Slaughter at the Barricades, Osprey Publishing, Oxford 2000.
4. Conlan, Thomas D., Weapons & Fighting Techniques of the Samurai Warrior 1200–1877 AD, Amber Books, London 2008.
5. Farris, William Wayne, Heavenly Warriors: The Evolution of Japan's Military, 500–1300, Harvard University Press, Cambridge MA 1992.
6. Lowry, Dave, Autumn Lightning: The Education of an American Samurai, Shambhala, Boston 1985.
7. 鈴木眞哉『戦国時代の大誤解』PHP研究所, 東京 2007 (Suzuki Masaya, Great Misconceptions about the Sengoku Period, PHP Publishing, Tokyo 2007).
8. 近藤好和『騎兵と歩兵の中世史』吉川弘文館, 東京 2005 (Kondō Yoshikazu, A Medieval History of Cavalry and Infantry, Yoshikawa Kōbunkan, Tokyo 2005).
9. 二木謙一『戦国の作法』講談社学術文庫, 東京 2008 (Futaki Ken'ichi, Etiquette of the Sengoku Period, Kōdansha Gakujutsu Bunko, Tokyo 2008).
>> SEE ALSO SIMILAR ARTICLES:
Wakizashi – The Smaller Cousin of the Katana That Bore the Full Weight of Samurai Honor
A Heart of Iron. The Samurai Dō Breastplates
Men Yoroi: Wrathful and Impenetrable Battle Masks of the Samurai
"Strong Japanese Women"
see book by the author
of the page
未開 ソビエライ
An enthusiast of Asian culture with a deep appreciation for the diverse philosophies of the world. By education, a psychologist and philologist specializing in Korean studies. At heart, a programmer (primarily for Android) and a passionate technology enthusiast, as well as a practitioner of Zen and mono no aware. In moments of tranquility, adheres to a disciplined lifestyle, firmly believing that perseverance, continuous personal growth, and dedication to one's passions are the wisest paths in life. Author of the book "Strong Women of Japan" (>>see more)
Personal motto:
"The most powerful force in the universe is compound interest." - Albert Einstein (probably)
Mike Soray
(aka Michał Sobieraj)
未開 ソビエライ
An enthusiast of Asian culture with a deep appreciation for the diverse philosophies of the world. By education, a psychologist and philologist specializing in Korean studies. At heart, a programmer (primarily for Android) and a passionate technology enthusiast, as well as a practitioner of Zen and mono no aware. In moments of tranquility, adheres to a disciplined lifestyle, firmly believing that perseverance, continuous personal growth, and dedication to one's passions are the wisest paths in life. Author of the book "Strong Women of Japan" (>>see more)
Personal motto:
"The most powerful force in the universe is compound interest." - Albert Einstein (probably)
Mike Soray
(aka Michał Sobieraj)
Write us...
Ciechanów, Polska
dr.imyon@gmail.com
___________________
inari.smart
Would you like to share your thoughts or feedback about our website or app? Leave us a message, and we’ll get back to you quickly. We value your perspective!