Tag: Japanese

Dojo is a word most martial arts students are familiar with, though many students erroneously associate it with the word school, as in high school or college. The dojo, however, is a place where only martial arts are taught and. strictly translated, it implies the instruction of only the “true Japanese martial arts” of Ken-Jutsu. Ju-Jutsu. and Kyu-Jutsu. It is more than a gymnasium or club; it is a cherished place of learning and brotherhood.

The Japanese use a broad interpretation of the word. To them, dojo is symbolic of the methodical, ideological, philosophical, and, most importantly, the spiritual aspects of the martial arts. Jujitsu involves more than physical techniques: it involves the molding of one’s character, the training of one’s mind, and—last, but not least—the developing of one’s body. The dojo’s foundation is based on the idea of virtue. Keep in mind that students of martial arts today are, in effect, the descendants of the samurai of yesteryear. Today’s students should work toward the propagation of the spirit of the Zen warrior, a spirit that encompasses more than an expert knowledge of lethal fighting techniques. It represents the attainment of a virtuous way of life where the main theme is the code of Bushido—The Way of the Warrior.

— Japan’s Ultimate Martial Art, Chapter 1

There is a major difference between a trick and a technique. A true technique involves the skillful execution of timing, balance, posture, coordination, and speed and will always work if properly executed. Its development and mastery depend entirely on your personal commitment to training. Jujitsu training requires practicing at the dojo at least twice—preferably three times—a week. But true training requires more than just practicing techniques at the dojo: it requires a change in one’s way of life. One must train oneself both physically and mentally. In Jujitsu, extreme mental discipline is both, a requirement and a result.

— Japan’s Ultimate Martial Art, Chapter 1

[The protagonist is a trained swordsman staying in a city far from home. His sensei arranges for him to train at a local dojo. This is his first time there. As a “new student”, he is given a white belt to wear.]

…When the class was called to order, I made sure I sat at the end with the beginners. Everything in a traditional Japanese training hall is related to issues of rank: it conditions whom you bow to and how, the roles of people in paired exercises, and how you’re supposed to behave in general. Even the room is divided into spheres of higher and lower status. Higher ranks line up closest to the place of honor where the scroll hung. As sensei, Hasegawa would sit at that end. The line would stretch away from him, across the room, and as individual rank decreased, so your place in the line grew farther and farther away from the teacher.

I sat near the door, with the kids….

…The Hasegawa school was rooted in the traditions of judo and aikido. The advanced students worked with wooden swords and the short staff known as a jo. They handed me one of the staffs, which were made from white oak.

We moved through some basics, practicing movement and strikes in isolation. Then we progressed to paired techniques….

“Kata,” [the sensei] called. Kata are the formal practice routines of the old arts, choreographed actions developed from traditions where the slightest error with a weapon could maim your opponent. Some martial artists disdain kata. When done right, true kata practice can make the sweat stream off you and your hair stand on end.

In the paired exercises focusing on jo, the attacker uses a wooden sword and the defender wields a jo. There are twelve kata for jo, and they grow subtly more complex as you progress through them. As a junior ranked person in this school, I got to defend with the jo. I was looking about for a partner, when [Hasegawa sensei] slipped into place in front of me carrying a wooden sword. He grinned slightly as we bowed.

But when we came together, he was all business—focused, smooth, and lethal. We started with the kata called tsukizue. Hasegawa was holding back a bit, getting a feel for my skill level. As we advanced through each form, his movements grew crisper, harder, and faster. His eyes tightened in concentration as my response kept pace with the increasing intensity of his actions.

By the time we had finished the final kata called Ranai, we were both sweaty. We brought our weapons down and bowed formally to each other. The smile was back on his face. I glanced around me and noticed that the rest of the class had sat down to watch. Thinking back, I remember the fleeting impression that most other activity had stopped some time ago.

“Thank you, Sensei,” I said. “That was the sort of thing I needed.”

“My pleasure, Dr. Burke,” he said, and sounded like he meant it. He called the class to order and we began to line up for the formal bow that would end the session. I started to move down to the end of the line, but Hasegawa laid a gentle hand upon my arm.

“Oh, no.” He gestured beside him in the special spot reserved for teachers. “You sit beside me here….”

— Kage, Chapter 6

My previous post dug out a conversion rate of 25 gold pieces (GP) for one koku. That post focused upon the minimum income of a single samurai. As we have a historical record of the kokudaka (tax assessment of the entire country), I can expand my conversion to the daimyō—the landholding baronial class of pre-modern Japan. Under the kokudaka:

• The minimum annual revenue needed to be considered a daimyō was 10,000 koku. So 250,000 GP in agricultural production, annually.
• Many daimyō had revenue in excess of 100,000 koku. 2.5 million GP.
• The future Shōgun, Tokugawa Ieyasu, was daimyō of the eight provinces of the Kanto plain which produced an annual revenue of 2.5 million koku. 62.5 million GP.
• Out of a (1598) national total of just under 19 million koku. That is 475 million GP! Per year!
• Most of that was eaten, of course; Japan’s population at the time was somewhere around 19 million.

It was the 1980 television miniseries Shōgun that introduced me to the concept of koku as a measure of wealth in pre-modern Japan. I purchased the original AD&D Oriental Adventures rulebook when it came out in 1985. I only ever used it for inspiration, though. That never included using koku for player character income/wealth.

It was the 2024 streaming miniseries Shōgun that finally got me curious enough about koku to do the research. My questions were:

1. How many koku of income did a common samurai need to live?
2. How was it distributed to him?
3. What was one koku worth in D&D coinage?

The answers I found:

1. The Samurai Archives Wiki project’s page for koku states a samurai’s annual expenses “was around 1.8” koku. That does not count the one koku he eats, so it takes almost 3 koku to basically live.
2. That same page states “one-quarter of the annual stipend was paid in spring, one-quarter in summer, and the remaining one-half in the winter.”
3. The Oriental Adventures rulebook has two tables in its “Money & Equipment” chapter. The first sets one koku worth 5 ch’ien. The second sets one ch’ien equal to 5 gold pieces (GP). So one koku is worth 25 GP.

So the wage of a “historical” samurai in D&D would be about 70 GP per year. Almost 6 GP per month.

ADDENDUM: 6 GP per month is what the AD&D Dungeon Masters Guide lists as the wage for a mercenary heavy cavalryman or mounted archer. So internally consistent between the rulebooks.

See also Fiefs Were Measured By How Much Food They Produced.

“Your fief is increased from five hundred koku to three thousand. You will have control within twenty ri.” A ri was a measure of distance that approximated one mile. “As a further token of my affection, when I return to Yedo I will send you two horses, twenty silk kimonos, one suit of armor, two swords, and enough arms to equip a further hundred samurai which you will recruit. When war comes you will immediately join my personal staff as a hatamoto.” Yabu was feeling expansive: a hatamoto was a special personal retainer of a daimyo who had the right of access to his lord and could wear swords in the presence of his lord….

— Shōgun, Chapter 6

Emphasis mine.

Swords were thought to have miraculous powers and lives of their own. Soldiers defeated in battle prayed at the shrines of the war-god Hachiman, asking why their swords had lost their spirit. Many stories have come down about the spiritual powers of notable blades. One of these tells about two famous swordsmiths, named Muramasa and Masamune, who were almost equal in skill. When a sword made by Muramasa was held upright in a running stream, every dead leaf that drifted against the edge was cut neatly in two. This was a good performance, but not the best. When a Masamune sword was put to the same test, the floating leaves avoided its edge and passed unhurt on either side; Masamune’s blade therefore possessed spiritual power over the leaves and was superior to its rival.

— Early Japan, pp. 77-78

…Before the Tokugawa period [in Japan], when the feudal [daimyo] depended upon the martial skills of their retainers, inspired leaders understood the fundamental importance of foot soldiers in the winning of battles, and warriors of the lower ranks, such as the nakakosho, the tomokosho, and the kachi (that is, the huge mass of foot soldiers (ashigaru)), were properly trained and even encouraged to develop their abilities to the point where the might even attain a position of supreme command as had Oda Nobunaga, Hideyoshi, and others equally famous. The age of heroes defeating armies singlehandedly had always been more myth than reality—history proving with depressing regularity that battles were usually worn by using masses of troops in the most advantageous manner.

Even great warriors, vastly skilled in the arts of archery and spearmanship, were, upon occasion, cut to pieces by veteran spearmen of hirazamurai rank or by their attendants (chugen) led by leaders of kogashira rank. Each group of spearmen composed of warriors of these ranks was a formidable unit of combat that could be neutralized, not by a lonely knight charging blindly and vaingloriously into their midst, but only by similar body of trained archers or spearmen. Once the compact unity of the group had been shattered, the warriors of higher rank and their sword-wielding officers could finally engage in individual, close-range swordplay. And there is evidence to indicate that even then many of these officers and leaders fell beneath the skilled spear-thrust of an obscure veteran of the lower ranks.

— Secrets of the Samurai, pp. 108-9

Toda Hiro-matsu, overlord of the provinces of Sagami and Kozuké, Toranaga’s most trusted general and adviser, commander-in-chief of all his armies, strode down the gangplank onto the wharf alone. He was tall for a Japanese, just under six feet, a bull-like man with heavy jowls, who carried his sixty-seven years with strength. His military kimono was brown silk, stark but for the five small Toranaga crests—three interlocked bamboo sprays. He wore a burnished breastplate and steel arm protectors. Only the short sword was in his belt. The other, the killing sword, he carried loose in his hand. He was ready to unsheathe it instantly and to kill instantly to protect his liege lord. This had been his custom ever since he was fifteen.

No one, not even the Taikō, had been able to change him.

A year ago, when the Taikō died, Hiro-matsu had become Toranaga’s vassal. Toranaga had given him Sagami and Kozuké, two of his eight provinces, to overlord, five hundred thousand koku yearly, and had also left him to his custom. Hiro-matsu was very good at killing.

— Shōgun, Chapter 7

This character was my inspiration for Grimblade.

The bulk of Japan’s people in the early feudal age were peasants, as in any simple agrarian society. Most of them were serfs bound to the land they cultivated and forced to surrender a large part of their crop to a landlord, usually a nobleman or a monastery. To these masses who tilled the soil, the comparative stability imposed by the early feudal rulers brought little change, but it had far-reaching consequences for the merchants and skilled artisans, whose numbers increased in Kamakura times. The coming and going between the imperial capital, Kyoto, and the shogun’s headquarters at Kamakura, some 300 miles apart, stimulated travel and thereby opened new market areas to the merchant class. This led to the growth of commercial towns, which formed in much the same way as trading centers in medieval Europe. Settlements of merchants gathered at road junctions, at the gates of important monasteries, near the strongholds of noblemen who offered good protection and at natural harbors along the seacoast. The merchants attracted artisans and encouraged them to produce goods that could be sold, sent to other districts or shipped abroad….

— Early Japan, p. 75

A samurai may…be more simply understood by his practice of bearing arms rather than any social status or aesthetic sensibilities. The word therefore becomes a generic term for any pre-modern Japanese fighting man, and there is something to be said for such a pragmatic view, because the official definition of the word samurai changed considerably over the centuries. For much of Japanese history (if contemporary writings are to be believed) everyone with something to defend—a landowner, a villager, a priest or a pirate—was armed to the teeth and was therefore a warrior (bushi or musha) of some sort at some time. Yet back in the tenth century [C.E.] no fighter of any reputation would have wished to be called a samurai, because that expression still had connotations of menial rather than military service. By the thirteenth century the word had acquired the exclusively military meaning it enjoys today, although to be a samurai still involved the notion of subservience to someone else. The samurai’s superiors were leaders called gokenin (‘honourable houseman’), whose elite status derived not only from their skills at warfare, but also from the ownership of the patches of land from which they took their surnames. Gokenin expected loyalty from the non-landowning samurai who followed them into battle. Their samurai followers (the European notion of a squire is a good parallel) were able to rise in society because of good service and the rewards that followed.

And rise they did, until the expression ‘samurai’ acquired an elite connotation that allowed it to encompass the entirety of Japan’s military aristocracy. The samurai’s upward social mobility found its greatest expression during the Sengoku Period, Japan’s ‘Age of War’, which is conventionally dated from 1467 to 1603. The long conflicts of the Sengoku Period sucked into their whirlpool a huge number of elite mounted warriors, lowly fighting samurai, armed monks, village communities and an intermediate class of jizamurai (‘local samurai’), who owned some land and were both farmers and fighters at the same time.

— The Lost Samurai, Chapter 1

To modern readers of these gloriously bloody legends [told in The Tales of the Heike], a remarkable feature is the role played by women. Some of the champions in the war tales are girls, for in the early feudal age the women of Japan had not yet been reduced to the humble submissiveness that would be their posture in later centuries. They were expected to exhibit the same loyalty and bravery as the men, and occasionally a woman exceptionally endowed with these qualities won an honored place in the warrior coterie. Tomoe of the Minamoto faction must have been such a one.

Tomoe had long black hair and a fair complexion, and her face was very lovely; moreover she was a fearless rider whom neither the fiercest horse nor the roughest ground could dismay, and so dexterously did she handle sword and bow that she was a match for a thousand warriors and fit to meet either god or devil. Many times had she taken the field, armed at all points, and won matchless renown in encounters with the bravest captains, and so in this last fight, when all the others had been slain or had fled, among the last seven there rode Tomoe.

— Early Japan, Chapter 4

“So,” Tomita said calmly as he kneeled again, “to the task at hand.” He sat up a bit straighter and said, “I am Tomita…”

“Formerly of the Kunaicho,” I interrupted, just to rattle him a bit. Some of the true danger in him shot out briefly from his eyes, escaping from behind the barrier he had placed there.

“I am a student of the Morita-ha Tengu-shin ryu. I am menkyo-kaiden there and a yudansha in Yanagi-ryu jujutsu and kendo. I have killed four men in duels. I request a lesson.”

It told me nothing, other than that there were more victims than we were aware of. I had never heard of the Tengu-shin ryu. Tengu are the winged mountain goblins of Japanese legend. Master swordsmen, in the old stories they sometimes teach mortals their art. Depending on how “shin” was written, it could refer to some sort of divine revelation, the heart, or a deity of some sort. All I really could tell was that the man before me had had a variety of training. And he killed people.

He bowed toward me at the conclusion of his recital. It was my turn.

“I am Burke,” I began. The Japanese tend not to use the given name in situations like this. “I am a student of Yamashita-ha Itto ryu. I am yudansha in Shotokan karatedo and Kodokan judo. I have killed no man in a duel.”

Tomita grinned ferally at me.

“Until tonight,” I concluded. His grin just got harder looking.

— Sensei, Chapter 18

For the children of the samurai, training for their martial way of life began early…. Particularly between the ages of seven and eight they were encouraged to be sociable and cooperative with their playmates, and discouraged from being confrontational or overly self-absorbed. At nine and ten, they concentrated on more academic subjects like reading and writing, although from the age of seven they were likely to be studying regularly at temple school.

The serious work took place between the ages of ten and twelve, when the child’s day could include as many as twelve hours of work in subjects ranging from abstract academics to learning musical instruments or undergoing physical training.

By the time he was thirteen, he was ready to fight: more than one famous daimyō fought in his first engagement at this age….

— Samurai 1550-1600, p. 10

While discussing this excerpt last week with my brother, a comment of his gave me a crystal-clear mental image. He said, “remember our [American high school] freshmen football team.”

[In Japan, the] last half of the sixteenth century [C.E.] was a period of almost constant warfare; weapons training was more often than not done ‘on the job’. It was a sink or swim mentality, where warriors fought their first battles at a youthful age, and if they lived, they had learnt something for the next time. Tokugawa Ieyasu was a general at sixteen years of age.

Most who fought in the campaigns were in their late teens or twenties. Save the generals and the lords, samurai armies were very young in makeup. Few from the ranks attained a venerable age.

— Samurai 1550-1600, p. 15

Xenograg was also a general at age 16. 🙂

Jiujutsu is the old samurai art of fighting without weapons. To the uninitiated it looks like wrestling. Should you happen to enter the Zuihokwan while jiujutsu is being practiced, you would see a crowd of students watching ten or twelve lithe young comrades, barefooted and barelimbed, throwing each other about on the matting. The dead silence might seem to you very strange. No word is spoken, so sign of approbation or of amusement is given, no face even smiles. Absolute impassiveness is rigidly exacted by the rules of the school of jiujutsu. But probably only this impassibility of all, this hush of numbers, would impress you as remarkable.

A professional wrestler would observe more. He would see that those young men are very cautious about putting forth their strength, and that the grips, holds, and flings are both peculiar and risky. In spite of the care exercised, he would judge the whole performance to be dangerous play, and would be tempted, perhaps, to advise the adoption of Western “scientific” rules.

The real thing, however—not the play—is much more dangerous than a Western wrestler could guess at sight. The teacher there, slender and light as he seems, could probably disable an ordinary wrestler in two minutes. Jiujutsu is not an art of display at all. It is not a training for that sort of skill exhibited to public audiences: it is an art of self-defense in the most exact sense of the term; it is an art of war. The master of that art is able, in one moment, to put an untrained antagonist completely hors de combat. By some terrible legerdemain he suddenly dislocates a shoulder, unhinges a joint, bursts a tendon, or snaps a bone—without any apparent effort. He is much more than an athlete: he is an anatomist. And he knows also touches that kill—as by lightning. But this fatal knowledge he is under oath never to communicate except under such conditions as would render its abuse almost impossible. Tradition exacts that it be given only to men of perfect self-command and of unimpeachable moral character.

The feet, however, to which I want to call attention is that the master of jiujutsu never relies upon his own strength. He scarcely uses his own strength in the greatest emergency. Then what does he use? Simply the strength of his antagonist. The force of the enemy is the only means by which that enemy is overcome. The art of jiujutsu teaches you to rely for victory solely upon the strength of your opponent; and the greater his strength, the worse for him and the better for you. I remember that I was not a little astonished when one of the greatest teachers of jiujutsu told me that he found it extremely difficult to teach a certain very strong pupil, whom I had innocently imagined to be the best in the class. On asking why, I was answered: “Because he relies upon his enormous muscular strength, and uses it.” The very name “jiujutsu” means to conquer by yielding.

— The Overlook Martial Arts Reader, pp. 56-57

The essence of all martial arts and military strategies is self-protection and the prevention of danger. Ninjutsu epitomizes the fullest concept of self-protection through martial training in that the ninja art deals with the protection of not only the physical body, but the mind and spirit as well. The way of the ninja is the way of enduring, surviving, and prevailing over all that would destroy one. More than merely delivering strikes and slashes, and deeper in significance than the simple out-witting of an enemy; ninjutsu is the way of attaining that which we need while making the world a better place. The skill of the ninja is the art of winning.

— Ninjitsu, p. 3

The author makes ninjitsu sound so appealing. Yet another grand master asserting his martial art is supreme. 🙂

“…The movement patterns here are typical of Japanese as opposed to Chinese styles of unarmed fighting—the Japanese think of the torso as a cylinder that should be kept upright when fighting. The Chinese are a bit more flexible….”

— Tengu, Chapter 10

Narrator:

That year, at dawn of the twenty-first day of the tenth month—the month without gods—the main armies clashed. It was in the mountains near Sekigahara, astride the North Road. By late afternoon, Toranaga had won the battle and the slaughter began.

Forty thousand heads were taken.

— “Shōgun” (1980)

The year is 1600 C.E.

The book and television mini-series are a fictionalized account of the events leading up to this historical battle which de facto unified Japan.

40,000 heads!

Katsumoto:

…You do not fear death, but sometimes you wish for it. Is this not so?

Algren:

Yes.

Katsumoto:

I, also. It happens to men who have seen what we have seen. And then I come to this place of my ancestors, and I remember: like these blossoms, we are all dying. To know life in every breath. Every cup of tea. Every life we take.

The Way of the Warrior.

Algren:

(whispers) Life in every breath….

Katsumoto:

That is Bushidō.

— “The Last Samurai” (2003)