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The Gunshi:
Master of Disaster
by Wayne Muromoto
A photograph from the popular NHK hisortical television drama series, Hideyoshi, about the rise of Toyotomi Hideyoshi. Actors portray Hideyoshi (center), gunshi Takenaka Hanbei, Kuroda Kanbei (right) and Toyotomi Koichiro Hidenaga (second from right). (Note: the swastika on the armor of the samurai second from the left is the Indian Hindu and Buddhist manji symbol and predates teh Nazi swastika by several thousand years. Photo courtesy of JN Productions.)
Who you gonna call on? In ancient times, when a samurai warlord went to battle, he inevitably summoned forth a council of elder advisors, and they planned the weighty undertaking with great care and foresight.
In recorded history, most daimyo (warrior leader who ruled a domain) depended for advice and wise council in almost every step he took, and woe usually betook those few who refused to heed their elders. The council of advisors, called karo (elderly housemen) or toshiyori (elders) was often augmented by the office of someone called the gunshi, a master of martial and military arts. In other words, a strategist of what the swordsman Miyamoto Musashi (in his Gorin Sho, or Book of Five Rings) would call the "big and small martial methods."
What does this mean for us, the modern practitioner of martial arts; of combative techniques now turned into a sportive, health and/or philosophical pursuit, not of military strategy? Plenty. It was the gunshi, that master of the big (largescale military strategy and civil administration) and little (martial arts) heiho (methods of the warrior; or heishi), who served as the model for all fighting bushi (hereditary warriors).
It was the gunshi who was the unmoving anchor of reason and wisdom, the immovable rock upon which the daimyo lord and his attendants could look to for sage advice in the midst of chaotic battle or in the dead calm of peacetime, who unwaveringly could refer to ancient Japanese and Chinese texts and classics to find the way out of a dilemma.
Indeed, at the height of the Sengoku Period (Japan's Warring States period from 1482 -1558, so named after a similar period in Chinese history) and immediately thereafter, the sage figure of the gunshi was the model that the cultivated samurai wished to emulate. In a time of massed armies staging great battles across lines of engagement that stretched for miles, the need for such a still point in a turbulent world was immensely more important than the lone horseman out to carve his own niche of fame and glory for himself and his family.
The term means a sage (shi) of military matters (gun). Gunsha, another term, simply means a person (sha) versed in military matters. He was supposed to have a thorough knowledge of the Chinese classics, including the works of Confucius, Lao Tzu, and the strategist Sun Tzu. By the 1600s, a great many gunshi were also influenced by esoteric Buddhism (mikkyo) and shugendo (esoteric Buddhism practiced by the mountain ascetics, or yamabushi). (1)
In fact, it seems that the origins of the advisory office of gunshi derived from the onmyoshi, a person who advised imperial courtiers and families by using Chinese and native divination and astrology. (2) Onmyo is a variation of inyo, the Japanese pronunciation of the Chinese yinyang, the theory that the cosmos is made of two complementary but opposite forces. An understanding of the natural workings of the yin and yang in human and natural events would allow the onmyoshi to foretell the future, whether by reading the stars, casting sticks, reading the I Ching text, or by the art of geomancy; predicting good or bad fortune based on geography.
A knowledge of military strategy was only a small part of the entire body of knowledge that such wise men were supposed to command. In the early stages of this office, therefore, the onmyoshi was called upon to make predictions or forecast tendencies based upon such things as the birthdate of generals involved in battle, the time and date of the battle, and the direction of the attacks. In other words, in a war in which every advantage was used, including direct and indirect intelligence agents (later romanticized as "ninja"), the onmyoshi-later to evolve into the gunshi-tried to peer into the mysterious, the unseen, the supernatural for any insight that could tip the scale of advantage to their side of a battle.
The first use of such an onmyoshi as a military advisor is documented in the eighth month of 1180. Minamoto Yoritomo raised up an army against the Taira in the Izu peninsula. (3) He asked the onmyoshi Sumiyoshi Kodaiyu Masanaga what would be an auspicious day to mark the establishment of his army. Military battles became more of a largescale affair with thousands of footsoldiers acting in unison, and the role of the gunshi evolved naturally into that of a primarily military advisor, although some gunshi still continued their roles as divinators. It seems, therefore, that gunshi and onmyoshi roles varied according to the individual's talents and the needs and beliefs of the daimyo lord.
The use of gunshi to foretell auspicious days and direction of advance continued, and are documented as early as the end of the Muromachi period (1392 - 1568; this period overlaps the Sengoku Period, according to some historians).
In the Intoku Taiheiki, the daimyo lord Takeda Shingen is recorded as saying, "It it not good to commence a battle on an inauspicious day." The Koyo Gunkan, a collection of advice on strategy, mentions a maruhi tori, or literally, "taking the day," i.e., being able to choose the proper day for battle. (4)
An auspicious day meant that the universe had properly aligned itself so that the spirits of one's followers were at their peak, prime time for a battle. One role of the gunshi was in divining the "ten death days," the ten most inauspicious days of a leader based upon his birthday.
In truth, the Nihon Budo Jiten deduces that the decisions based solely on goodbad days (from Chinese astrological tradition) did not truly make much of a difference in the actual battles fought. However, Sasama does write that the great depth of knowledge that the gunshi had of continental and native strategy, philosophy, psychology and geography, had as much or even more real influence on the outcome of conflict than the gunshi's casting of fortunes.
Among his many advisors, Takeda Shingen was ably served by the gunshi Yamamoto Kansuke, who inspired the Koyo Gunkan text. Subsequently, the most famous gunshi of the Sengoku and Azuchi-Momoyama period included Toyotomi Hideyoshi's two military advisors, Kuroda Kanbei Kiyotaka (Myosui) and Takenaka Hanbei Tsuneharu. The two are credited with Hideyoshi's masterful wartime strategies that used bribery, stealth, surprising and unorthodox maneuvers and actions that wasted little of his own men's lives. (Hideyoshi's stratagems are all the more impressive in comparison to other daimyo who thought little of sending their men charging headlong into the maw of rifle squads or slaughtering thousands of enemy rather than working out amicable and mutually beneficial treaties.)
Some opinions have arisen lately that Hideyoshi's most horrendously miscalculated acts in his later years came about because such wise men had by then died off or retired, leaving Hideyoshi with selfserving lackeys to fawn over him and give him bad advice. Without a Takenaka Hanbei, Kuroda Kanbei or Hideyoshi's brother Toyotomi Koichiro Hidenaga, Hideyoshi attempted a grossly tragic invasion of Korea, with the intent of subjugating all of Asia. He also ordered the death of his longtime advisor Sen No Rikyu, the tea master, and other deeds very much out of keeping with his earlier, more conciliatory style.
The Satsuma daimyo lord Shimazu Yoshihisa depended on Kawata Yoshiro as his gunshi, and listened to his advice as to the auspicious time to embark on a campaign (shutsujin). Yoshiro went to a Shinto shrine, Kirishima Jinja, to meditate and ascertain the proper time, date and direction that Shimazu's army should take in its march out of Satsuma.
Otomo Sorin, the Christian daimyo of Higo province, relied upon Tsunokuma Sekiso. In 1578, Sorin asked Sekiso about starting a war with Shimazu. Sekiso used his divinatory powers and replied, "The present is not a good time." He based his conclusion on three factors: Sorin was 49 years old, a dangerous year for a man; in order to directly attack the Shimazu army, Sorin would have to march southwest, an unlucky direction to take; and in the previous year a shooting star appeared, the bright tail of which pointed south, towards Shimazu, another ill omen. (5)
Sorin, however, ignored the superstitious advice, perhaps because of his skeptical Christian beliefs, and as a result was defeated at the battle of Mimigawa. The defeat eventually paved the way for the collapse of Sorin's oncemighty rule.
Tokugawa Ieyasu, the ruler who eventually unified all of Japan, relied upon Honda Masanobu for military advice. Ishida Mitsunari, who lost to Ieyasu at the Battle of Sekigahara in 1600, was probably poorly served by his own gunshi, Shima Sakon.
The curriculum of the gunshi were codified when the Ashikaga Gakko was established in Shinano province by the Ashikaga family of shoguns, who nominally held some kind of dominance during the Muromachi (Ashikaga) period (1392 - 1568). There, strategists received a thorough training in Chinese classics, including Confucius, Taoism, divination, classic Chinese military strategy, medicine, and Eastern sciences, etc. They studied tenbungaku, or Chinese astrology, and were required to read the Rikutoh (Japanese pronunciation) and Sanryaku, two classics of Chinese warfare, as well as the works of Sonshi (Suntzu), Goshi (Wutzu), and so forth.
The most successful of such gunshi were able to take their lessons in classical Chinese learning and apply it to the decidedly different environment of Japanese internal warfare. In the latter half of the 1500s, guns became a major factor in battles, and the gunshi was also supposed to be knowledgeable of basic chemistry, in order to direct the production of guns and gunpowder and the implementation of this new weapon in battle. While overwhelming firepower could shatter the charge of a classical attack of mounted samurai, a rainy day could cause mayhem, damping a rifleman's powder charges and snuffing out their burning ropes which ignited the powder in the gun's firing pan. Thus, the gunshi was also asked to be a medieval weatherman, in order to predict good clear days for battle!
By the end of the Sengoku Period, most gunshi were rather like our own military senior staff advisors, and less like occult fortune tellers. However, remnants of their original kind lingered on. In the third month of 1611, Tokugawa Ieyasu ordered Toyotomi Hideyori, the son of Hideyoshi, out of Nijo Castle. A gunshi named Shirai Yuhaku was consulted by Hideyori, and documents say that he tried to read the future by gazing into the rising smoke from a consecrated fire.
Shirai's intercourse with the supernatural, however, did not seem to give Hideyori much advantage over Ieyasu. The Winter and Summer Osaka campaigns subsequently destroyed the last remnants of the oncegreat Toyotomi power. Hideyori and his followers perished in the siege of Osaka Castle, and the hegemony of the Toyotomi house lasted but a few years after the death of its founder, Hideyoshi.
While the gunshi was revered in the days of battle, Sasama notes that the long peacetime of the Edo period (1600 - 1868) led to a degeneration of the status of the gunshi and of the respect given to such a person. By the Boshin Civil Wars, which preceded the Meiji Restoration and modernization of Japan in 1868, many of the gunshi were being replaced by Japanese or foreign military advisors who were trained in "modern" battlefield tactics of 19th Century Europe.
Thus faded away the long and deep tradition of the gunshi, the skilled wise man who was equally at home with the spirits of the universe and the armorclad samurai warriors. While forgotten in the short run, however, their influence lives on. Strategists and New Age business writers are digging up Miyamoto Musashi's Gorin Sho and various translations of Suntzu in order to recapture a bit of the wisdom of the gunshi. And we hearken back to the gunshi's legacy whenever we respect a sensei of the martial arts for his/her wisdom, depth of knowledge, and seemingly mystical understanding of the human condition. These teachers are not just technicians of "small" martial arts; they are the inheritors of the spiritual advisory role of the ancient gunshi, those masters of the arts martial, human, civil and supernatural.
Footnotes
(1) p. 275, Nihon Budo Jiten, by Sasama Yoshihiko. Kashiwa Shobo Kabushikigaisha, Tokyo, Japan. 1982.
(2) p. 206, Senryakusenjutsu Heikijiten (2), Nihon Sengoku shu, edited by Daimaru Shinsho, Nihon Guraphic Senshishirizu, Kabushikigaisha Gakushu Kenkyusha, Tokyo, Japan. 1995.
(3) Ibid.
(4) p. 275, Nihon Budo Jiten.
(5) p. 206, Senryakusenjutsu Heikijiten (2).
Copyright ©Tengu Press and Wayne Muromoto. All rights reserved.