Gender of Violence

All cases of bodily mutilation, described in the administrative record and the tale, pertain to male bodies. Female bodies, or women themselves, existed outside the administrative scope of gunchujo and the combat-based sphere of violence in the Taiheiki.

Instead of accepting the warrior's maleness and the masculine character of violence as a universal given, I seek explanations for their formulation in the local context of this war. The first thing to note is the fundamental concept of the five cardinal relations within the Confucian moral order, which framed the war tale. It grants women a limited agency by including them only in the husband-wife axis. Men additionally functioned in the ruler-subject, father-son, older brother-younger brother and friend-friend relations. For war efforts, the critical axis was that of the rulersubject (lord-vassal), which was bound by the language of ‘loyalty'. ‘Reward' was the concrete return for a viable lord-vassal relationship. The merged concept of ‘loyalty' and ‘reward', formerly available to men only, possesses the explanatory power for meritorious male actions, often suggesting their value for patrilineally descending progeny through the possession of the material reward. Thus a man featured in the Taiheiki would join a battle ‘in order to receive rewards and leave them for the glory of one's posterity'.^{^[1066]} Reward was the moral foundation upon which the world of combat was built. Wounds accorded men the authority and power fitting their profession through their rewarded land, which in turn upheld the family name, a symbolic embodiment that defined their family both backward and forward in time. Women received no recognition for fighting, even if they in fact had fought, and were never depicted bearing wounds that had the exchange value of men's wounds.

While the Taiheiki features no female fighters, the Tale of the Heike famously presents Tomoe, who ‘was especially beautiful, with white skin, long hair, and charming features’, but was also ‘a warrior worth a thousand'.^{^[1067]} Tomoe is a beloved literary and media figure throughout the centuries, for the story offers a rare combat space for an expert female warrior.

Despite the praise given to her bravery and skills, the tale nevertheless allows her only an episodic appearance. Apparently Tomoe has accompanied Yoshinaka, a principal lord, throughout battles but the narrative includes her only in the single scene preceding his death. While also extolling her martial prowess that easily severs a man’s head, the text assigns Tomoe the function of invalidating the place of women on the battlefield, as Yoshinaka sends Tomoe away by admitting that he would be shamed if he were to die with a woman on his side.^{^[1068]} Tomoe’s narrative role appears to be to disgrace Yoshinaka, whose life ends in a miserable and unworthy death.^{^[1069]} Men who come into contact with women on battlefields, the space of masculinised action, die an unworthy death, even if the women are entertainers, as in the Taiheiki.^{^[1070]}

In the text, women are both excluded and immune from violence, and remain outside the parameter that yields high values such as honour and prestige. The Taiheiki shows that women fit ambiguously into the symbolic combat-based and violence-generating dichotomy that necessarily separates ‘we’ from ‘they’ and ‘licit’ from ‘illicit’, illustrated by a phrase: ‘Because we are women (onna), there must be a place where we can hide’, or ‘enemies are blocking roads... but since you are a woman (nyosho no mi nareba) it should be possible to escape’.³² The narrative posits women to be incompletely integrated into the violent dimensions of the war system.

In the Taiheiki, the dialectics of male gender and female gender can be read most poignantly in the use of hara (stomach, belly, womb). The words seppuku (cut-belly) and harakiri (belly-cut) are written with the same two Chinese characters and mean the same act. The one term hara applies to male and female, but hara for women functions to identify a notable child's biological origin and lineage, for example ‘Prince Sonryo had been in the honorable hara of Tameko'.^{^[1071]} Hara for men in the Taiheiki is a portal for resolve and self-annihilation.

It signifies the interdependency between creation and destruction, life and death. The term's translation into English conveniently suggests the gendered distinction. When used for women, the translation is ‘womb'. When used for men, the translation is ‘stomach' or ‘bowel', as in ‘disembowelment'. The Taiheiki's narrative community perpetuates itself by suggesting this dichotomous construction of male/female: men who fought and women who bred; men who destroyed and women who created.

The Taiheiki is a text that elevates and celebrates maleness and its violent manifestation.^{^[1072]} Seppuku definitively seals the combat/male/violence nexus. But in its destructive capacity seppuku also predicts restoration of order, and the generative power of women's hara reassures the dialectical cycle. Although androcentric narrative is found in other warrior tales as well, the Taiheiki amplifies it as never before, and the depiction of the war-mutilated male bodies plays a major role in this construction. While unnamed in the medieval sources, ‘violence' occurs most immediately and poignantly on man's flesh.

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Source: Gordon Matthew, Kaeuper Richard, Zurndorfer Harriet (eds.). The Cambridge World History of Violence. Volume 2: AD 500-AD 1500. Cambridge University Press,2020. — 696 p.. 2020

Gender of Violence

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