At Ellis Amdur's excellent Kogen Budo blog, there was a guest post describing how classical martial arts was employed during the Shogunate by the constabulary. Fascinating stuff. An excerpt is below. The full post may be read here.“If a person is cut down with a sword in
front of the compound, chase the assailant down. If he will not hand
over his sword you may kill him. Should he surrender his sword, however,
hand him over to the magistrates office.”
-1620s Shogunal notice to Tosa domain on duties during incidents in front of their Edo compound.1
The classical martial traditions of Japan, or koryū bugei
(古流武藝) – “military arts flowing from the past” – have undergone
something of a minor renaissance in the West in recent decades. Seen as
distinct from modern martial arts, the koryū bugei are said to preserve
the battlefield skills of the Japanese warrior class down to the present
day. Specialist scholarship has long demonstrated this is largely an
“invented tradition,” and that the reality is more nuanced.2 Certainly warriors of the Sengoku Jidai,
or “Era of the Country at War,” practiced fighting techniques, and in
the first few decades after the turn of the 17th century, at beginning
of the Tokugawa era (1603 – 1868), a culture of musha shugyo (“warrior
pilgrimage”) flourished, that entailed engaging in challenge matches,
including fatal duels. This largely ended by the mid 17th century when
authorities put an end to it. From then on, bushi of status
pursued bugei primarily as a means of cultivating warrior identity and
character development. There was “increasingly an emphasis on formal
gymnastics and disciplined choreography,” where combative etiolation was
perhaps inevitable, and roundly criticized in the explosion of
commercial print on all manner of subjects at the time. (Dore 1965 p.
151 et al) 3
The persistent discourse on the martial arts as “arts of war” in the
parlance of practitioners, and on their well-documented peacetime
deterioration on the part of professors, may have obscured a pragmatic
approach that still existed: law enforcement.
Formal law codes had, for centuries, addressed various kinds of
offenses, both civil and criminal: the Joei Code (1232), among various
administrative regulations for matters regarding shrines, temples, lands
and civil lawsuits also included processes for handling “crimes of
killing, maiming, and wounding . . . serious crimes, such as treason,
murder, banditry (sanzoku), piracy (kaizoku), night
attacks, robbery, and the like” as well as more conventional beatings,
forgery, and “abusive language,” that had a tendency to cause quarrels.
(Conlan 2022: 47) This calls to mind what we might today call
“disorderly conduct” or “provoking assault.”
The Joei Code and its principles were used as common law in the domains of regional lords (daimyo), or included in their house precepts.4
In 1459, the Ouchi domain published law on the walls surrounding the
lord’s mansion, where they could be read by all. They prohibited, among
other offenses, “wandering along major roads at night” “sumo wrestling
at crossroads,” “taking women on the roadside,” (a reference to
prostitution/sex trafficking rather than rape or kidnapping), and
“wearing strange clothes, claiming that it is the style of the capital.”
(Conlan 2022: 194) These were updated over time and in 1487 expanded,
prohibiting carrying “[L]ong weapons (nagagusoku – ‘ referring to glaives (naginata), longswords (odachi), or pikes (yari)’
), bows, and quivers,” although certain individuals were exempt.
Apparently one could not walk with “flutes, shakuhachi, or other
instruments” unless close to one’s residence, and there was a problem
with “loitering” involving “people leering into the Ouchi mansions.”
“Night watchmen” were expected to know the law and enjoined to enforce
it, for example, for the crime of killing soft-shelled turtles to use as
hawk-bait, “the common rabble (honge no tomogara) if they are
seen, or rumored to be, killing turtles, they shall be arrested or cut
down at the place where it happened, according to the situation.” (Ibid:
194 -197)
In 1506, in the then-capital (Kyoto), law forbade theft, arson, armed
assault, “quarrels,” sumo wrestling (again!), and the troublesome
dancing (in the streets). (Berry 1994: 245 ) The Jinkaishu, a
1536 legal code of the Date house of Mutsu Province in northern Japan,
codified practices for handling offenses including “violent contests;”
or “when crazed drunkards kill people [and] claim inebriation as an
excuse;” “cases where people impulsively quarreled, or were crazed at a
banquet, and unpremeditatedly killed someone.” And, perhaps particularly
interesting, instances where people “claimed that through skill they
killed ambushers when in fact they ambushed their rival in a surprise
attack.” Behavioral expectations are laid out for lords and retainers
involved in violent altercations, assassinations, and other killings,
including not abetting or harboring killers, tracking them down,
searching locations for them, and capturing or killing them. There were
punishments for when offenders were killed inadvertently, when captured
suspects did not confess, or when personally performing arrests or
cutting people down when there was not proper evidence demonstrating
guilt. (Ibid: 206-215 ) 5 After the early years of the 17th century, Tokugawa shoguns began promulgating the Buke Shohatto,
Laws for Warrior Houses, codes of conduct, laws, and expectations for
the warrior class intended to establish the absolute authority of the
shogun’s government – called the Bakufu – over other domains. This was
institutionalized in 1635, and from then daimyo were required to follow
Bakufu law in enforcement and sentencing procedures, and were
periodically checked on to ensure compliance. (Botsman: 15)
Maintaining order was an overriding concern, for “below the peace
that was taking place at the national level with no wars there was still
a fair amount of violence in Tokugawa society.” (Vaporis 2022: 235) We
learn from the Omurochuki (Diary of a Parrot in a Cage),
the journal of the low-ranking samurai Asahi Shigeaki (1674 -1718),
that some young, unemployed samurai killed for sport and material gain,
in what was known as “‘street murders’ (tsuji kiri), passersby were killed with swords and robbed.” (Vaporis 2022: 234-235, 351) 6
At the same time. there was a conscious effort by the warrior
government to ameliorate the general image of warriors as fiendish
butchers carried over from the Warring States period, and to turn
warrior-lords away from ideas of military conquest toward keeping civil
order. “‘[T]he way of the warrior’ (budō) should be understood
as an ‘instrument for killing evil.” The government “was to use it to
‘purify the realm.’” Warriors were now to be seen as benevolent, serving
and protecting the public, as “the Tokugawa judicial system came to
place considerable emphasis on what would today be called “victim’s
rights.” It was realized that too harsh a system of punishment would
interfere with the shogun being seen as a benevolent ruler. “[W]arrior
officials in the Tokugawa period combined relatively lax enforcement and
a tendency to turn a blind eye to minor infractions with the use of
“flamboyant” displays of their own power – to pardon as well as punish.
This made it possible to bolster warrior authority with the threat of
terrifying punishment on the one hand, while also cultivating the
goodwill of the general population on the other, with evidence of
official flexibility, restraint, and mercy.” (Botsman: 41-42. 49) 7
As we see in newsfeeds today, turning a blind eye toward petty crimes
was not without its downstream effects or its critics. By the 1720s,
Ogyu Sorai complained that “houses are broken into everywhere; criminals
murder, steal and commit arson; and in the middle of the night they lie
in waiting in deserted places to rob people,” and remembered “the days
when officials routinely cut criminals down on the spot” while lamenting
a “dramatic decline in the warrior’s martial spirit.” (Botsman: 86-87)
No social strata was above reproach. In 1747, a mentally unstable
Shogun’s hatamoto murdered a man in the toilet at Edo castle. 8
Even daimyo were suspected of terrible crimes, including the lord of
Mito domain Tokugawa Mitsukuni, when he was young man. “The Tosa samurai
Mori Masana, while traveling to Edo in 1829 reported stories that the
retired lord of Wakayama would go out at night with four or five
attendants, enter people’s homes, and kill them. He is reputed to have
killed hundreds of people this way.” (Vaporis 2022: 351)
Enforcing laws and bringing violators to justice fell to local lords
following Bakufu law. In rural areas, village headmen and low-status
warriors acted as constabulary; maintaining order, capturing or killing
violators, and rounding up vagrants and beggars – a persistent problem
that only grew worse over time – and putting down public disturbances
and uprisings throughout the Edo period. (Botsman) This included duties
during sankin-kōtai, the system of “alternate attendance” at
the capital city, Edo, in which lords were required to alternate between
a year spent residing in their domains with one in the capital.
(Nishiyama 1997) Retainers of individual daimyo were required to staff
guard-houses in the samurai neighborhoods of Edo and perform basic
policing functions in their jurisdiction. Written guides were produced
for warriors staffing neighborhood guard stations (tsuji-bansho
) in “how to handle unusual situations.” These situations included
corpses (murders or suicides), violent behavior, altercations and fights
in front of samurai mansions, violence and injuries within the samurai
residences, and attacks using swords. The expectations and other job
duties for the guards were strikingly similar to the kinds of things
seen in law and policy for law enforcement today: deserted children (a
child under three is “deserted” but an older child is “lost”),
fugitives, drunks and vagrants, illegal disposals and dumping, lost
objects, unruly or dead horses, rescuing people who had fallen into
moats, suspicious characters, accidents on the streets, and
jurisdictional matters (for instance if a body is found on the border
between two tsuji-bansho, the location of the feet — for men it was the
left foot, and for women, the right — determined which jurisdiction bore
responsibility). 9
Lower-status warriors were required to train in the necessary skills
to fill these roles. Passin noted that upper-class samurai learned
swordsmanship, horse riding, and archery “as a form of spiritual
training,” while lower-class warriors “were taught jūjutsu,
lancemanship, group tactics, and rifle.” (1965 p. 21) Michael Wert, in
his study of rural swordsmen also pointed out that “martial arts and
swordsmanship were practiced differently by different samurai status
groups, with an inverse relationship between cultural capital value and
combat efficacy.” High ranking samurai were not compensated for their
training and their official schools focussed on swordsmanship to
strengthen their warrior identity. In the Kaga Han, low-status warriors
were “ordered by the domain to learn staff fighting and grappling
(jūjutsu).” These samurai foot soldiers (ashigaru), “who used the arts
directly in their duties” received compensation for training and
“studied arresting techniques or staff fighting (bōjutsu), skills used
in their policing roles.” (Wert, unpublished manuscript: 6-7)
The class expectations relative to “peace officer” duties, and how
they changed, were illustrated by Confucian scholar, writer, and
politician Arai Hakuseki (1657-1725) noting in his autobiography: “when
I was seventeen or eighteen, I accidentally dropped in my father’s
presence, a torinawa, a finely wound green cord with a hook at
the end used for tying people up, which I was carrying in my bosom.” His
father noticed the item and said “Long ago, when I was in office, I
used to keep this by me in my flint bag. I thought that if I ordered
men to seize and bind some disorderly fellow, they might not have it in
readiness. When I retired, I had no further use for it, and I kept it
for tying up the cat. It is proper that a warrior should know every part
of his duties. However, there are things which a man should or should
not do, according to his station. This cord is not something you should
keep about your person, and you are old enough to know better.”
(Hakuseki, p. 48-49)
