Interpersonal Violence between Samurai: Acts of Revenge, Quarrels and Fights

Samurai could obtain permission to test a new sword on the corpse of a convicted criminal, but they were circumscribed, legally, in their rights to use their two swords against another living person.

In all but two of the more than 100-plus known cases of katakiuchi, vengeance was carried out for the murder of a blood relation; in cases where revenge was not deemed appropriate, the correct procedure was to allow the government authorities to take charge of the punishment. In addition, while the practice was almost exclusively restricted to samurai, in a number of unusual cases the shogunate gave permission for a commoner to carry out an act of revenge.^[388] In all cases, though, secondary vengeance, or retaliatory revenge, was prohibited. In other words, once a legally sanctioned revenge killing had been carried out, the family of the original killer was not allowed to take any further action against the avenger or his family. This prevented the multigenerational family or blood feuds that sometimes took place in earlier periods of Japanese history or in other societies across the globe.

One example from the nineteenth century reveals some of the variables that came into play in blood revenge cases.

The brothers and their uncle received official authorisations from the domain authorities two weeks later. While reminding them of their responsibility to report the results of their mission - whether they were successful in killing Takizawa or if they discovered that he had died - the trio were also informed that the domain would continue to support their families' salaries (in allotments of rice) during their search. The eldest son was given a valuable sword and 20 ryo (gold coins) to support his mission. The uncle was praised by the lord for his request; not only was he granted leave from his official duties to accompany his

Samurai, Masculinity and Violence in Japan nephews, but his allowance was actually increased. The notice went further in saying, ‘Every effort will be made to see that you lack for nothing and to enable you to achieve your goal. Accordingly you are granted a sum of fifteen ryo of gold.’^[CCCXC] As it turns out, the brothers were lucky to achieve their goal, as some would-be avengers never did. However, the search for their father’s murderer took nearly thirty years - almost forty years after the crime - before they succeeded in 1857. Whether the three men were commended by the authorities for their efforts is not known, but in other cases the avenging samurai were presented with gifts and even given promotions.

As noted above, there are only two cases in which legal revenge killing did not involve the murder of a blood relation. This may have been more due to the fact that in the peaceful Tokugawa era the murder of daimyo or overlords was extremely rare, if not unknown, rather than family loyalty being more highly valued than feudal loyalty. One of the two cases, from 1723, involved a maidservant named Yamaji who killed a senior lady-in-waiting because she had humiliated Yamaji’s mistress to such a degree that she committed suicide.1² The other, and more celebrated, case is known as the Ako Incident, or Chushingura, and involved the revenge plot of forty-seven samurai from Ako domain who avenged the death of their daimyo, Asano Naganori, who had been condemned to death, via seppuku, for having drawn his sword in the shogun’s palace to attack Lord Kira Kozunosuke, a direct vassal of the Tokugawa family.1³ This affair is celebrated in popular Japanese culture as a katakiuchi, but this is not accurate in the sense that Asano was not the victim of a murder and it was the Tokugawa shogunate that forced his seppuku, not Lord Kira.

Sometimes it was difficult for revenge seekers to succeed in their goal even when they tracked down the assailant, due to the custom of offering refuge to samurai who had committed an act of bloodshed. This custom persisted in spite of frequent prohibitions issued by govern­ment officials. According to an early eighteenth-century primer on the ‘way of the warrior’, a samurai seeking refuge should not be handed

over summarily to his pursuers, even if he had committed an ‘injustice' fugi), such as stealing or killing his master. Implicit here was the notion that the granting of refuge should be automatic.^[391] In the customary practice, the victor in a fight was not considered a killer or murderer; instead, he was seen as upholding his honour and having acted according to that code.

More frequently than was the case with ‘revenge killings', violent fights between samurai took place as a result of private disputes, which were known as kenka (literally ‘fights'). Since under the peaceful condi­tions of the Tokugawa period samurai could no longer demonstrate their honour and bravery on the battlefield, they became hypersensitive to challenges to their manhood, which often led to fights. One example which demonstrates this hypersensitivity involved the Tosa samurai Mori Masana, who reported that he observed a heated discussion between a Tokugawa bannerman and a low-ranking foot soldier from Mito domain in Edo. When the foot soldier saw Masana and others watching the altercation, he came straight towards Masana and demanded to know who he was. Enraged, the samurai from Mito shook his sun umbrella at Masana, as if to hit him. Masana told the man that if he was to hit him with the umbrella Masana would have no choice but to draw his sword and kill him. This would also result in Masana having to commit seppuku. In other words, both men would die a ‘dog's death' (inujini), meaning a meaningless death. Masana concluded his diary entry for the day commenting that ‘In Edo one must take extreme care when walking the streets'.^[393]

The shogunate's Laws for the Military Houses prohibited daimyo lords from engaging in private disputes, but it did not contain clear language for dealing with quarrels among their samurai retainers. To some extent the medieval practice of kenka ryoseibai (‘double-guilt doctrine'), which held that both parties to a quarrel were equally guilty regardless of the particular circumstances, continued to be observed as a kind of customary law during the Tokugawa period, but it was not uniformly applied.^[394]

Tensions resulted from the ruler's needs for law and order, which coex­isted with their perceived need to uphold the martial traditions of the samurai.

Over the course of the seventeenth century ‘the violence of the samurai was progressively restricted, but approval of a spirit of vengeance and a warrior version of the honour culture survived'. For the government, its interest in law and order was paramount, but it found ways to respect the samurai honour code; in the case of the Ako samurai, for example, it honoured their spirit of loyalty and vengeance by allowing them to commit seppuku, but upheld the principle of law and order by punishing their illegal act.

The concern with reputation or public face could also lead samurai to employ violence within the patriarchal household, against a wife who had committed adultery. In Tokugawa society it was acceptable for a married man to have sexual relations with an unmarried woman, but the reverse was illegal. In fact, a samurai was legally permitted to murder an adulterous wife and her lover, a right known as megataki-uchi or ‘wife revenge killing'. The purpose of such an act was to defend a samurai's male honour, not to defend a woman's virtue and chastity. The practice of wife revenge killing first arose during the earlier, Kamakura period (1185-1333), and was ‘related to the development of a more rigid marriage system in Japanese elite circles in general, as well as the emergence of the highly patriarchal samurai ie [household]'.²⁰

In reality, these acts of violence directed towards the wife were rarely carried out, since in taking retaliatory measures the samurai husband did not regain his lost honour. In fact, the husband would likely have been viewed as ‘negligent' for not having maintained control over his household and its women, and would lose face in his social circles. As a result, samurai tended to conceal incidents of infidelity or to seek a private settlement, usually involving a cash payment from the lover to the offended husband. This was done, one might say, ‘in order to avoid a public display of his private failure'. While wife revenge killing and ‘disrespect killing' (the latter practice to be discussed in the next section) were not practised frequently, these legal prerogatives remained important ‘because they conveyed significant sym­bolic messages of the valuation of the samurai's cultural and social tradition', including their superiority to the other social groups.²¹