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Among the great bugeisha (martial artists) whose lives fanned the flames of countless legends in Japan stands one unfortunately not as well known by many Westerners.
In Japan, however, Yagyu Jubei became the stuff of legends, the focus of several semi-fictitious novels written soon after his death, and the protagonist in many newspaper serials, novels, movies and television shows. Legends have become so entwined with real documents that, like Musashi, we often can't tell what is true and what is fairy tale.
Born to the Sword
Yagyu Jubei Mitsuyoshi (some sources read his given name as Mitsutoshi) was the first son of Yagyu Tajima No Kami Munenori; the swordmaster to the Tokugawa shoguns. It was this Munenori who served the first Tokugawa shogun, Ieyasu, at the Battle of Sekigahara. After the battle, Ieyasu secured dominion over the country, and made Munenori a sword instructor (kenjutsu shinan) and minor daimyo (lord of a province). Subsequently, Munenori rose to become a major advisor and sometsuke or oh-metsuke (overseer of the daimyo).Munenori's father, Yagyu Matauemon No Jo Muneyoshi Sekishusai, was the founder of the family's swordfighting tradition. Muneyoshi was lord of Koyagyu Castle, near present-day Hotokuji Temple. The Yagyu clan is listed as one of many who fought against the Miyoshi and Matsunaga clans, and for a time it appears that Muneyoshi served Oda Nobunaga, who was also fighting the Miyoshi and Matsunaga. The Yagyu, under Muneyoshi, lived in a quiet hamlet in the area of Yagyu, several miles outside of Nara City proper, in the middle of the Yamato river basin.
This location, as we shall see later, was pivotal in later struggles for dominion of the land, and figured into the Yagyu family's involvement in the political machinations of the great warlords. Although Yagyu village was tiny hamlet in the countryside, it was surrounded by fiercely independent farmer-warriors who would band together when their common interests were threatened by outside forces. While isolated by valleys and mountains, access through the Yamato plains was essential for any general hoping to consolidate rule over all of Japan. The rolling flatlands, interspersed by deep valleys and pine-covered mountains, surrounded the first capitol of Japan, Nara, and touched the southern edges of Kyoto, the then-current capitol. An eastern daimyo hoping to advance into Kyoto to claim the title of shogun, the supreme generalissimo of the land, had only a few options of passes through natural barriers. One road led straight through the Yamato area. Currying favor with the landed gentry and samurai of that locale, therefore, would be a crucial factor for any ambitious warlord east of Kyoto.
In terms of martial arts, Yagyu Muneyoshi studied the Shinto-ryu and the Toda Itto-ryu. Finally, he trained with a genius of swordsmanship, Kamiizumi Ise No Kami, and received a master's license in the Shinkage-ryu.
Muneyoshi, so they say, was already quite a capable swordsman, but lost to Ise No Kami in a two-out-of-three match using the Shinkage-ryu's innovative leather-wrapped split bamboo practice sword. Straightaway, Muneyoshi asked to be a disciple. Some years later, he was awarded a license of mastery in the ryu. The family's version of the style became known later as the Yagyu Shinkage-ryu. Later, family members were enlisted to serve two branches of the Tokugawa family, and thus two major strains of this ryu developed; the Edo Yagyu, based in Edo town (present-day Tokyo), and the Owari Yagyu. Some martial arts historians say that a slightly different variation also developed among the family members that remained in Yagyu village, and called this system the Yamato Yagyu.
Muneyoshi first encountered Tokugawa Ieyasu at Kyoto's Takagamine mountain. Currently a busy, crowded suburb of Kyoto City, Takagamine was once a quiet hillside, dotted only by the huts of farmers, craftsmen, temples and shrines. It was there that Ieyasu, facing troubling intrigues by his rival, Ishida Mitsunari, took the time to observe a demonstration of martial arts by a relatively unknown country samurai, Muneyoshi.
After demonstrating his martial art with his sons, Muneyoshi faced Ieyasu, who was armed with a wooden practice sword. The aged Muneyoshi was barehanded, but he disarmed and threw Ieyasu with ease.
Yagyu No Sato, the ancestral home of the Yagyu family, in present-day Nara Prefecture.
Ieyasu, always one to take advantage of such encounters with great men, wrote a note on the spot awarding Muneyoshi a stipend of 200 koku (-a koku is an ancient measure roughly equivalent to the yearly intake of rice by one person. In other words, owning land worth 200 koku meant you could conceivably feed an army of some 200 followers) and the title of official Tokugawa fencing instructor. However, Muneyoshi was 68 at the time and claimed that his age would keep him from fulfilling such duties. He asked that his fifth son, Munenori, be placed in Ieyasu's service in his stead, a request that Ieyasu eagerly confirmed.
When Ieyasu enlisted the aid of the Yagyu, some historians speculate that while it was ostensibly because of the family's swordsmanship skills, what Ieyasu was really after was the clan's connections to other other warrior families that controlled the Yamato area. When Munenori pledged his allegiance to Ieyasu, he may also have brought with him an already well- entrenched intelligence network that criss-crossed the Yamato.
In fact, shortly before the Battle of Sekigahara in 1600, Munenori left the side of Ieyasu, who was headed for the north of Japan, supposedly to subdue a rebellion. He was allowed to return postehaste to his own central lands of Yagyu No Sato. He gathered warriors from that area to support Ieyasu's upcoming decisive battle with the Western alliance, led by Ishida Mitsunari.
This might explain, then, how Munenori rose so quickly to become an overseer of all the daimyo. While a shogun's sword master may be nothing to sneeze at, the stipend and prestige was not as high as the income and status of the major daimyo lords, not by a long shot. Yet it was Munenori and not the more wealthy and powerful warlords who eventually became sometsuke. Was it, many think, because Munenori could call upon his shadowy connections to ferret out information about any secret machinations among any traitorous daimyo? In addition, as the official fencing style of the shogun, the Yagyu Shinkage-ryu engendered respect as tenka ichi; the best sword school in the land. As such, many clans requested sword instructors from that school. In his dual role as swordmaster and overseer of the daimyo, Munenori was in an advantageous position to send sword instructors to different provinces who could also report back to him of any suspicious movements among the daimyo.
Munenori did not neglect his legacy, however. He trained three successive shoguns in swordmanship: Ieyasu, Hidetada and Iemitsu. Munenori also practiced Zen Buddhist austerities, and was influenced by the great (and eccentric) priest Takuan Soho. The discourses on Zen and martial arts that occurred between the two became the basis for the famous Heiho Kadensho, which is currently available in English translation.
According to the Kansei Juushu Shokafu, Jubei's childhood name was Shichiro. In 1616, Jubei appears in official documents as a young attendant to the second Tokugawa shogun, Hidetada. He subsequently became a follower of the third shogun, Iemitsu, and taught him some swordsmanship in his father's stead from time to time.
The decade-long period, from when he was 24 to 36, is a blank in official documents. Jubei disappears from the official Edo records for some 12 years. He reappears in offical records only at a demonstration of swordsmanship before the shogun. Then, at the end of that period, Jubei wrote the Tsukimi No Sho (The Text of Looking at the Moon). The forward to this manuscript has some cryptic and tantalizing hints of what he was up to, but do not decisively solve the mystery of that missing decade. Speculations abound as to the reasons why Jubei left Edo Castle and disappeared.
Jubei later served as a gosho inban, a sort of government inspector, and upon his father's death in 1646 (at the age of 80 or 78), he took over control of the family domains, worth some 8,300 koku. His younger brother Munefuyu received 4,000 koku, and another brother, Retsudo (Yagyu Gisen Rokuro Retsudo), who became a priest at the family temple of Hotokuji, received a 200 koku share.
After only a few years of living in Edo, Jubei left his civil duties and returned to his village. He died suddenly in 1650, on the 21st day of the third lunar month. Some scrolls say he died in his home, but Watatani feels that the more reliable account is that he passed away in a small village called Oh-kawahara Mura, near his home of Yagyu No Sato, while falcon hunting, at the age of 44 (according to the Tokugawa Jikki). His posthumous Buddhist name (homyo) is Soh-go.
The village in which he died was the residence of his elder half-brother, Yagyu Tomonori, and Jubei was a frequent visitor there. Villagers used to have a legend of their own; they feel that Jubei actually died while fishing, and that the falcon-hunting story was made up by officials to make his death more warrior-like in nature.
The abruptness of Jubei's death also raised speculation that there was some foul play involved. Perhaps Jubei simply had a heart attack or a stroke. On the other hand, some speculate that for some reason he was sent back to assassinate his half- brother, and his half-brother's attendants surrounded and slew him in return. (1)
This, however is sheer speculation.
Jubei is buried alongside his grandfather, Muneyoshi. Jubei was survived by two daughters.
Oddly, there is not a lot of information about Jubei even in the official family records, the Gyoku-eishuu-i, especially compared to the lengthy passages about his younger brother Munefuyu, or his father Munenori. (2)
Jubei's younger brother Munefuyu took over as head of the Edo branch of the Yagyu Shinkage-ryu, and while in service to the shogunate, he too rose to the level of a minor daimyo, like his father Munenori.
The Owari Shinkage-ryu branch of the Yagyu system was passed on from Yagyu Muneyoshi to another son, Yagyu Toshikatsu, thence to Toshikatsu's second son, Yagyu Hyogo No Suke Toshiyoshi Myo-unsai, who founded the Owari province branch of the Yagyu family.
The Stuff of Legends
We know that Jubei was a renowned bugeisha in his own time. That much, so far, is clear. But the details of his life, even a few years after his death, became uncertain because of the accumulation of popular fiction about his life and death.The popular image, therefore, of Yagyu Jubei Mitsuyoshi has become that of a swashbuckling warrior dressed in black, with a shock of hair tied simply with a cord, a flat sword guard covering his blind right eye, and sedge hat obscuring his features. He travels about the countryside incognito, until he whips out his avenging sword to save the innocent from wicked evildoers.
In Jubei's case, the blanks in the official documentation of his life were filled with speculation. It was, perhaps, inevitable. He was a skilled swordsman, from such an illustrious family of swordsmen whose members were so deeply involved in the intrigues that brought the Tokugawa to power. Nature and fiction writers abhor a vacuum, so pulp writers had a field day filling in the void with their own speculations.
For example, Jubei was released from service in Edo Castle and official documentation of his life are nonexistent for some ten years, just when he would have been at the peak of his fighting prowess. So some fiction writers speculate that Jubei, portrayed as a hot-headed but straight-talking youth in some novels, was expelled from the castle because of a disagreement that he had with the shogun. Unlike his father, who was erudite and worldly enough to smooth talk other politician-samurai, Jubei was a true warrior's warrior, blunt and unpretentious. His straightforward manner of speech, some say, got him in trouble with Iemitsu.
Others say that Jubei was found in Edo Castle in a drunken mess and Shogun Iemitsu kicked him out and forced him to go back to his village to train and atone for his serious breach of conduct.
No records exist of this censure, however. Japanese love to document nearly everything, and the Kansei Choshushokafu is a list of all the samurai serving the shogunate during that period, who had committed crimes, sins or breaches of conduct for which they were meted punishments ranging from official censure and house arrest to banishment and even seppuku (ritual suicide). There were a lot of entries, but nothing concerning Yagyu Jubei.
One could say that money, connections and status might have been able to get an errant son out of a sticky mess. Munenori might have managed to keep his son's name out of the lists, in return for Daddy taking him back to the old home and forcing him to mend his ways. This, some say, might be a reason why Jubei's name doesn't appear in the blacklist.
Others speculate that Jubei went on a long journey up and down the length and breadth of Japan, like a true bugeisha, to hone his skills in the time-honored tradition of musha shugyo. Some romanticists like to think that while pursuing his martial arts, Jubei also acted as a secret agent for the government.
Still others say that Jubei secluded himself in his homeland, training diligently with other Yagyu family members for years, in order to became a great master worthy of succeeding his father. The Tsukimi No Sho, Jubei's own writing, seems to indicate that he secluded himself in his home village, and wandered about the surrounding forests and glens seeking to perfect the family tradition of swordsmanship.
But the truth is, no one really knows what Jubei did during that missing decade of his life. However, in 1638, Jubei makes his reappearance as a superlative swordsman. Records clearly document Jubei, with his father Munenori and brother Munefuyu, and Kimura Sukekuro, appearing before the shogun in a demonstration of swordsmanship. Three years later, at the age of 36, Jubei wrote Tsukimi No Sho, a treatise which validated his succession to the Edo branch of the Yagyu Shinkage-ryu tradition. In it, Jubei discusses the methods of his school, his own concepts of some of the techniques, and some of the Buddhist teachings derived from his father's friend, the priest Takuan Soho.
The Nanki Tokugawashi notes that ". . .from its origins, the Yagyu Shinkage-ryu was known for its philosophy of winning by taking the initiative (sen o toru). However, Yagyu Jubei mastered this technique and developed it further. Jubei would wait for the opponent to move, and according to the movement, he would win by attacking the weak point in the opponent's defenses. . ."
Thereupon, this text embarks on what is probably an apocryphal story: Because it was peacetime, Jubei lamented that he could not test his skills with a real sword. As swordmaster to the shogun, from generations of swordsmen, he yearned to test his skills in true combat. He asked for permission to use his sword in actual battle, and was finally granted it by the third shogun, Iemitsu. This tsujigiri (cutting someone at a street crossing), was permitted only at Sanya, in the red light district of Edo (present-day Tokyo), called Shin-Yoshiwara.
The Nanki Tokugawashi notes that the young, hot-blooded Shougn Iemitsu said, "It won't matter much if you kill a low-class samurai who dallies too much with prostitutes. . ."
Jubei went straightaway to Sanya and encountered a band of seven samurai. Deliberately provoking a fight and causing the samurai to draw their swords, Jubei cut off the arm of two of them, cleanly sliced through the leg of another, causing his death by blood loss, and scared the other four away.
It's a stirring action saga, except that to scholars like Watatani Kiyoshi, this incident probably never happened. Firstly, no matter how much some writers would like to think that Ye Olde Japan was like the Ye Olde Wild American West of all those spaghetti western movies, the Tokugawa shoguns were very much concerned with order and stability. Whole daimyo families were executed if their lord disturbed the peace in any way. To counter their own edicts with deliberate, unprovoked murders by their own sword instructor is just too hard to believe. And another point: the details of the story don't add up. Shin-Yoshiwara, especially the Sanya district, wasn't built until three years after Jubei's death. During Jubei's lifetime, the same area was called Nihonbashi, at Yoshiwara, or Moto-Yoshiwara.
Perhaps, the tale disguised a simple fact, Watatani concludes. It highlighted the reality that the great Yagyu Jubei, the instructor to the supreme warrior of the land, had up until he was appointed swordmaster never used a sword in actual combat, like his father or grandfather before him did in the era of the great wars.
But because of the mysterious blanks in Jubei's life, novelists wrote many romanticized tales about his real or imaginary exploits. Here's a few more:
During his travels, Jubei ended up in the ancient imperial capitol of Kyoto. One night, he was wandering around by himself in the Kuritaguchi district. A large band of cutthroats surrounded him, demanding his overcoat and his swords in return for his life.
As ordered, Jubei took off his silken haori. When one of the thieves stepped up to take the overcoat, Jubei let it drop. The thief's eyes followed the falling silk overcoat. Jubei quickly drew out his sword and struck the robber down with one blow. The other thieves ran up to avenge their cohort's death, but Jubei cut down 12 of them before the remainder ran away in a panic.
In another tale, Jubei was at a daimyo lord's estate when a masterless samurai, or ronin, managed to enter the domicile and requested a match. This led to a debacle depicted in Kurosawa Akira's movie, Seven Samurai. The two met with wooden swords. Two matches were played out before the daimyo.
At the end of the second round, Jubei turned to the swordman and said, "Well, did you see the results of the match?"
The ronin said, "Of course, it was a tie (ai-uchi) both times!"
Jubei then turned to the daimyo and said, "Did my lord see the true results?"
The lord replied, "As the ronin said, they were both ties."
Jubei was disgusted, and told them that they were too inexperienced to see the actual outcome of the duel.
Angered, the ronin demanded a rematch, this time with real swords.
"It would be a good idea to stop asking for something unreasonable," Jubei replied coolly, but anger flickered in his own eyes. "You don't have two lives, you know."
The ronin kept pressing for a rematch, however, thinking that by decisively defeating Jubei he would secure his own fame. Finally, Jubei assented.
"Let it be on your own heads, then," Jubei said, passing a freezing glance at the daimyo and the ronin.
The two again met, this time with real swords, in front of the daimyo. The ronin attacked Jubei with the same technique he used in the previous two matches. However, Jubei's sword sliced quickly through the ronin's shoulder before he could utter a second kiai, or shout, and the swordsman toppled in a crumpled, bloody heap before the stunned daimyo.
Jubei was also touched by the ronin's sword, but the sword had only cut slightly through his kimono. Jubei had timed and distanced himself perfectly, something neither the daimyo or the hapless ronin were able to understand in the previous matches with wooden weapons.
"Please verify the match," Jubei said to the daimyo."Look at this dead man. True swordsmanship is a matter of a hundredth of an inch. You should have seen that in the previous matches and ruled it as such. This death was a senseless one."
The popularity of stories about Yagyu Jubei seemingly knew no ends. Even in the collections of tales called the Ise-tsuku, a couple of odd little stories occur about Jubei, including the following:
--Once, Jubei stopped at a haunted temple. In the middle of the night, a ghostly demon appeared before Jubei, intent on scaring him. Jubei rose up from his blankets and stared at the ghost right in his face. "What time is it?" he asked the ghost.
Alarmed at the coolness of Jubei, the ghost disappeared.
In some movies and novels, Jubei has only one good eye. His injured eye is covered by an eye patch fashioned out of a metal sword guard. That's a dashing figure, but outside of such novels, no historical data can verify this. The portraits of Jubei when he was alive all show him with two good eyes. In any case, the legends say that while a young man, Jubei was practicing a leaping technique. To make the training tougher, his father swung a real sword at him. The sword tip struck Jubei's right eye, blinding him.
Finally, there are legends that another famous swordsman, Araki Mataemon, was one of Yagyu Jubei's greatest pupils. However, to straighten this story out, Watatani notes that such stories claim that Mataemon was 15 when he became Jubei's student. But at the time, Jubei was no older than six years old.
In summary, Watatani feels that the texts many people use to research Jubei's life, such as Yagyu Jubei Tabi No Nikki, were written long after his death and contain many fictional fabrications. (3)
The fascination with Jubei's mysterious life continued into the 20th Century, on down to contemporary times. The Yagyu family appears in several samurai movies due to their alliance with the Tokugawa shoguns. A popular pulp novel, Yagyu Ichizoku No Inbo (The Intrigues of the Yagyu Family) became the basis for an entertaining swashbuckling movie of the same name, which led to a thelevision series.
Chiba Shinichi ("Sonny" Chiba) led a hyperactive band of stunt people who were coached by a relatively unknown martial arts consultant named Hatsumi Masaaki, and the fight scenes were wonderfully outlandish.
But was there really some shred of reality to all these mysterious tales about Yagyu Jubei? As the flow of time takes us further from the truth, we may never know for certain. Still, we should be aware of what we can discern as likely truth. If we know the difference between that and beloved mythology, I think we can still relish the speculative and exciting fictional stories that were created about this great swordsman from Japan's ancient past.
Footnotes and References
(1) page 855, Bugei Ryuha Daijiten, Watatani Kiyoshi and Yamada Tadashi, Tokyo Koppi Shuppanbu edition, Tokyo, Japan. 1979 edition.(2) page 36, "Yagyu Jubei Ikka No Nazo," by Watanabe Isamu, Rekishi Dokuhon Series 6, July edition, Tokyo, Japan. 1996.
(3) page 256, Nihon Bugei Shoden, by Watatani Kiyoshi, Junbutsu Oraisha, Tokyo, Japan. 1962.
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