Japan enters somewhat late onto the historical stage and therefore requires some introduction. Because China so dominates east Asia, the first thing to emphasize is that Japan is not China. Despite significant cultural borrowing from its more powerful and developed neighbor, Japan had from the start a different economy, social structure, governmental structure, and culture from China. And it followed a very different trajectory of development, one in which a warrior class played a significant role (see the Issues box on page 276). In some ways, Japan’s history is more comparable to western Europe’s, as both were somewhat marginal outliers from the mainstream of Eurasian civilizations.
Japan’s isolation was important. It was far enough removed, over difficult seas, from the major mainland powers, civilized and nomadic, to ensure its military safety for the most part. During the entire period from the dawn of Japanese history in the 300s until the nineteenth century, Japan faced only two serious external invasions, by the Mongols in 1274 and 1281 (see below). In addition to being difficult for a major military expedition to reach, Japan was for some time not a particularly rich target, nor after the eleventh century was it an easy one, due to the rise of its own warrior class. This near immunity from invasion meant that Japan’s cultural borrowing from the mainland took place selectively and on its own terms, and that Japan’s political and military development were almost entirely internally driven—uniquely for a major Eurasian civilization.
Indeed, the lack of any consistent external threat raises an interesting question: Why did Japan develop such a rich and sophisticated military tradition? What the isolated military development of Japan highlights is a universal but often overlooked feature of warfare in traditional civilizations—namely, that a main (if not the main) function of a warrior class is self-preservation, especially against rivals from within that same class, and maintenance of that class’s dominance over the primary producers of wealth, the peasantry. War was thus as much, if not more, a feature of factional politics and internal state building as of defense against external threats. This was true everywhere; the isolation of Japan from outside threat simply demonstrates it unambiguously. And the dominance of the warrior class in Japan then had a profound influence on Japanese culture as a whole, as warrior values colored many aspects of Japanese life.
The Birth of Imperial Japan
A nominally unified Japanese polity arose out of struggles for dominance among various clans in the fourth and fifth centuries. Mythology about the divine origins of Japan and the imperial family reinforced the ruler’s moral position, but the imperial family still found its ability to rule fairly limited. To reinforce both their moral and their actual power, Japan’s rulers began borrowing selected aspects of imperial Chinese ideology and administrative techniques in the sixth and seventh centuries. Buddhism’s introduction into Japan played a role similar to the spread of Hinduism and Buddhism in southeast Asia, legitimating the imperial position further and linking the ruling house to the religious establishment. The seventh century saw decisive steps toward the establishment of a centralized state on the model of the Tang in China. A series of reforms in midcentury created a graded imperial bureaucracy, though without the open civil service exams used to fill the Chinese administrative machine. Instead, the powerful clans were drawn into the imperial structure by providing the officials of state and so became a civil aristocracy monopolizing power under imperial leadership.
Along with a Tang-style administrative system, the Taika reforms, as they were called, created an army establishment also modeled on the Tang. This was a conscript army, drawn selectively from the peasant population. The entire country was divided for taxation and recruitment purposes into administrative districts; conscripts from each district were armed, trained, and deployed by the central government. The newly invigorated military machine was launched at Korea in 662, but the invasion proved disastrous. Thereafter, the army was turned mostly against the Ainu, the indigenous population of the Japanese islands, who were steadily pushed northward and subdued during the 700s. But, as the campaigns moved farther north, away from the centers of power, the peasant conscript army proved increasingly ill suited for prosecuting this war. At the same time, a general transformation of the Japanese government was taking place.
The Heian Transformation
From the mid-700s, there was a steady trend toward privatization of government functions in all spheres. The growing herita- bility of offices within particular families, one result of the lack of a competitive exam system, contributed to this trend. So did the growth of shoen, landed estates that were exempt from the supposedly universal burdens of taxation and conscription. These were granted to powerful families as favors by the imperial court. Such grants were useful in the short term for building coalitions and gaining support, but in the long run, they undermined the viability of a centralized Chinese model of administration—a model always at odds with the power of the aristocratic families anyway. There was a marked increase in factional competition as a result of the trend toward privatization, and central authority declined at first. Emperor Kammu reasserted central control over the more privatized model of government in the last decades of the 700s. The imperial court remained the sole source of prestige and of the titles that legitimized the officeholders in the system, so competition was not against the center but for control of the center.
The Rise of the Warrior Class
Together, these two factors—distant campaigning and the privatization of government—worked a momentous transformation on the bases of Japanese military organization. The conscript army was allowed to decay. It was expensive to maintain in both financial and administrative terms, and had been from the start an overambitious vehicle for Japan’s limited economic development. Distant campaigns worsened the problem at the same time that the growth of the shoen system reduced the land available to support the conscript army.
In its place arose a class of “hired swords”: professional warriors drawn from increasingly powerful, rurally based families. Their numbers were far fewer than the theoretical maximum of the conscript army, but they could be employed full-time and in any location far more easily than could reluctant peasant soldiers, and with less disruption of agricultural production. Their use and place in the hierarchy was, like that of the civil aristocracy, formalized and legitimized by grants of offices and titles by the imperial court. Under Kammu, an army reorganized around such hired swords subdued the last Ainu holdouts in northern Honshu and also proved effective against increasingly powerful sects of Buddhist warrior-monks—an odd phenomenon combining several strands of the emerging Japanese cultural and political establishment.
At this point, hired swords demonstrated another advantage over a public force. Under this model, both aristocratic families and the central government maintained their personal military retainers. Indeed, the decentralization of the cost of maintaining armed forces was one of the attractions of the system for the court. In addition, the shoen, lost to the government as a means for supporting a public army, became the basis for the maintenance of private forces as aristocratic families granted income from their shoen to their personal warriors in exchange for their support.
Samurai Warriors
This thirteenth-century scroll painting shows a twelfth-century samurai battle. Note that the key weapon for both horsemen and foot soldiers is the bow. The Japanese bow was unusually long and had an asymmetrical grip about a third of the way up the bow.
Aristocratic families could then deploy their forces in their factional disputes. Two broad leagues of warrior groups, headed by the Taira and Minamoto families, coalesced around these disputes.
The End of the Heian Polity
Despite such disputes, the ninth and tenth centuries were generally peaceful, and the warriors were limited to fighting the court’s and aristocracy’s battles—perhaps most accurately described as police actions—for them. But competition intensified in the eleventh century, and the warrior leagues began to be more assertive in their own right for influence at court. A series of wars of increasing directness broke out between the Taira and Minamoto clans after 1150. The Minamoto suffered defeat and near annihilation in 1160, but Minamoto Yoritomo, a young member of the clan, survived and led a Minamoto revival. Between 1180 and 1184, his forces overcame the Taira, inflicting the decisive defeat at the naval battle of Dannoura in 1184. Eliminating all opposition among both his enemies and his most powerful relatives, Yoritomo created a new institution, the bakufu (tent government), a military government within the imperial government, headquartered at Kamakura in eastern Japan. He took the title shogun (generalissimo). A new era of Japanese warfare and political evolution, dominated by the warrior class, had opened.
The style of warfare practiced by the Minamoto and Taira clans in the twelfth century remained relatively unchanged until the late fifteenth century, as did the types of soldiers who engaged in war. One reason this was possible was the lack of outside influence on Japanese military practice. But styles of warfare also became part of a larger web of stable and respected cultural traditions expressed through heroic literature and war stories familiar to every member of the warrior class. Such traditions became self-perpetuating within the country’s political structure, and styles of warfare would not change significantly until the political context was revolutionized after 1477 (see Chapter 19).
Manpower
In discussing the composition of Japanese armies, it is necessary to clarify the meaning of the Japanese terms for various types of s oldiers, as they are a potential source of confusion. Three terms are crucial: Bushi was the warrior class, elite warriors from dominant families who followed an informal code of conduct, bushido, “the way of the warrior.” Samurai is often used as a synonym for bushi, but the terms are not, in fact, strictly interchangeable. Samurai comes from the verb saburu, “to serve,” and designates a military retainer. Not all bushi were samurai, and not all samurai were bushi, though in this period most were. Finally, ashigaru designates low-born soldiers, often peasant conscripts. Ashigaru were definitely not bushi, but they might be samurai of a sort. The important thing to note about these terms is that they are primarily class markers: They specify the soldier’s place in a social hierarchy rather than his battlefield function. Thus, almost all ashigaru were foot soldiers because of their economic status, but ashigaru does not mean foot soldier. Even more important, samurai and bushi might or might not be mounted; and, even if a warrior owned a horse, he might well fight on foot. One should not assume cavalry for a force of samurai.
Still, elite soldiers were likely to have horses—here, as elsewhere in the world, riding was a sure sign of status—and they were well armed and armored. Japanese armor generally consisted of small plates or chain mail sewn with silk cords to silk and leather backings. Elaborate decorative helmets, sometimes topped with antlers, plumes, and so on, served as ready battlefield identifiers (much like European heraldry) and as protective gear. Japanese arms reflected the high quality of Japanese metallurgy, especially in sword making, which contained significant ritual and religious elements and produced swords unmatched in the world at this time. A well-armed warrior carried both a long sword and a short sword; some carried massive two-handed swords. An elite warrior’s other weaponry would have included a bow and arrows, which he could fire either from horseback or on foot, and at times a spear or lance. Again, depending on terrain and the tactical situation, elite warriors were as likely to fight on foot as on horseback.
Ashigaru were much less well armed in this period. In fact, archaeological evidence from battlefield graves indicates that even helmets or other forms of head protection were rare. Ashigaru would have been peasant levies called out in emergencies, armed with little more than a simple spear and perhaps wearing a coarse silk or leather body garment but little else in the way of protective gear. Ashigaru were therefore not terribly useful except in defending walls, and they ended up being slaughtered by the elites when caught on the losing side of a battle.
Throughout this period, army sizes were quite small, usually in the hundreds. For major conflicts, the numbers may have risen into the thousands; probably only to meet the emergency of the Mongol invasions, however, did the strength of a Japanese army rise into the tens of thousands, and that effort, though successful, put intolerable strain on the political structure of the Kamakura bakufu (see below). Japan’s administrative and economic resources were mostly insufficient for maintaining larger forces, while the concentration of armed power in a small elite and the limited cultural and political function of combat made larger forces generally unnecessary.
Armies at War
Geography and logistics also contributed to small army sizes. Japan is very mountainous, and much of it was heavily wooded in this period. Such conditions complicated the movement of large armies and made transport of supplies in wheeled carts problematic. Smaller forces could more easily traverse mountain roads and paths and forage for supplies. Furthermore, Japan’s wet-field rice agriculture was concentrated in valleys favorable for such cultivation. The combination of natural and human geography tended to restrict the routes available to armies, and, as a result, certain key roads and districts became regular foci of campaigns. This in itself could create logistical problems, as the frequent passage of armies through a district was likely to do significant damage to the area’s farms and rice fields. Even a rich district could become temporarily unsuitable for campaigning, and famine halted several campaigns in this period.
With conditions militating against long, sustained campaigns, strategy depended heavily on political and psychological factors. Alliance making was a key to strategy, because full conquest of enemy areas was logistically difficult. Even more, all conflict took place in the context of a unified polity and was thus in a way civil war. The traditional or hereditary claims of certain families to certain districts could not easily be eliminated through war; takeovers had to be legitimated from the center. Thus, strategy focused on seizing control of the center, often in terms of possession of the capital and a legitimate heir to the imperial throne. To do this required, again, a strong coalition of allied powers, held together by symbolic legitimacy and material success. The need for visible successes to hold coalitions together, in turn, favored battle-seeking strategies as opposed to extended campaigns.
In this context, fortifications played a secondary role in Japanese warfare in this period. Forts served as refuges and bases of operation, but they were not large, elaborate stone structures. Instead, wooden hilltop forts were common. Siege techniques were correspondingly simple, relying less on machines than on sudden assault, fire, and blockade in the rare last resort.
Battle tactics, too, reflected the political and cultural context. Many battles, including some substantial ones as at Kurikara in 1183, at least opened in a formalized, almost ritualized, style that imitated the art of heroic tales (and, in turn, generated further tales). With two armies facing each other, selected champions would advance individually or in small groups and issue challenges to the enemy. Such challenges loudly proclaimed the family, lineage, and connections of the challenger for all to hear. When an individual or group emerged to answer the challenge, an exchange of archery preceded sword fights on horse or on foot, depending on the terrain (see the Sources box “Japanese War Tales”).
But such stylized fighting was only a part of Japanese battle. Ambushes and surprise attacks were frequent—indeed, at Kurikara, one side used the ritual phase of battle to cover a flanking maneuver by a contingent that then attacked suddenly from the rear. Deception, especially the use of banners (carried for group identification and as rallying points) to mislead the enemy as to an army’s size or whereabouts, was common, and trickery involving birds and oxen are also recorded (see the Sources box). And beyond the ritual phase, battles were likely to be bloody: There was no intraclass ethic of sparing an enemy’s life, nor any tradition of capture for ransom. A losing commander and the surviving remnants of a beaten army actually do seem to have been as likely to commit suicide as to surrender at the end of the day.
How do we account for the unusual combination of ritualized tactical display with high levels of killing within the confines of a warrior class? Factional politics again supplies the answer. As noted, conquest of land was neither practical nor politically possible when legitimate title to land and income was dispensed by a central authority. This reduced the importance of fortifications, as holding forts was not directly useful in such a context. But maintaining one’s honor was useful. Advertising one’s family in the challenge phase of a ritual battle and winning fame for oneself and one’s family in individual combat could build or enhance a heroic reputation, which would then be useful in attracting followers or the notice of a powerful patron—that is, in building a powerful coalition. Even the honor earned through a heroic suicide might rescue for the family some of the advantage lost in a battle.
On the other hand, killing off one’s rivals was also directly useful. Slaying all the battleworthy heirs of a house could eliminate it as a factional player and might even result in the reassignment of its lands to another family. Thus, ritual conflict and real killing reinforced each other in an unusual way, but the combination was logical and utilitarian given the political context and the culture that supported it.
But such warfare was not without consequences, as the results of the wars of the period drove the evolution of the Japanese political structure.
The Kamakura Shogunate, 1189-1333
Yoritomo placed the headquarters of his bakufu in Kamakura, a fishing village south of modern Tokyo and far from the imperial capital at Kyoto (Figure 14.2). This symbolized the division of authority that obtained at every level of government under the bakufu. The civil aristocrats and their bureaucratic offices continued to wield power within restricted spheres of authority, alongside the new military officials. While the balance of actual power lay somewhat with the military government, especially in terms of policing the population and administering justice among the warrior class, legitimacy flowed from the civil government, and income rights from the shoen were divided between civil and military officials. Inevitably, the disparity of force available to the bakufu meant that tensions were exploited steadily in favor of warriors and against the civil aristocracy. Such tensions increased after the retired emperor Go-Toba led an unsuccessful revolt in 1221 designed to restore direct imperial rule. But, until the civil war of 1331-33, the power- sharing arrangement continued to function.
The organization of the bakufu started with the shogun, though after Yoritomo’s early death the shoguns themselves were figureheads under the control of the Hojo, the family of Yoritomo’s widow. Under the shogun were the shugo, the military governors of the provinces of Japan. Shugo could be moved from province to province and removed from office. The shugo, in turn, supervised the warrior clans in their provinces, some of whom were linked more securely to the ruling family than others, depending on ties of kinship and loyalty.
Figure 14.2 Kamakura and Muromachi Japan
The hierarchical system of warrior ties was held together in part by a system of grants and rewards. Income rights from the shoen were assigned for the maintenance of a warrior band and were usually augmented for meritorious service. Augmentation had to come from the incomes of losers in a struggle, as there was no external expansion possible to add to the bakufu's landed resources. At the level of the bakufu and its major supporters and dependents among the warrior class, grants of landed income linked clan to clan rather than individual to individual, since the most important bond among the warrior class was kinship. Such ties were important both within extended families, with certain branches of a family recognized as senior, and between families, as some clans were traditionally dependents of others. Kinship ties could also be manufactured through adoption, as among the Roman ruling class. The importance of kinship as the primary bond of warrior society in this period also showed up at the highest level. The reason the Hojo family remained regents rather than assuming the shogunate themselves is that only descendants of the Minamoto could inherit that title, just as descendants of the imperial family had an exclusive claim to the throne, no matter how removed from actual power that title might be. Of course, this rule did not preclude civil war between different lines of the Minamoto clan (or the imperial family), as the civil war of 1331-33 would show. This demonstrates that the kinship bond held tremendous moral force, but practical sanctions for enforcing the claims of kin loyalty on uncooperative followers were often weak.
The potential flaws in the system holding together the bakufu were exposed in the aftermath of the Mongol invasions. The first of these, a large exploratory expedition, arrived from Korea in 1274, capturing the small islands of Tsushima and Iki before landing on northern Kyushu. Though caught somewhat by surprise by the invasion, the bakufu hastily assembled a force that attacked the Mongols near the beaches. This attack was defeated, in large part because the disciplined Mongols ignored the ritual elements of Japanese warfare and so caught the individualistic Japanese by surprise. But as more Japanese troops gathered, a storm wrecked part of the invasion fleet, and the remainder returned to Korea. A second, far larger, attack came in 1281, after the Japanese had refused to acknowledge Mongol suzerainty and killed the Mongol ambassadors. An army of perhaps 50,000 again landed on northern Kyushu, but this time met a prepared resistance. Though unable to drive the invaders back to their ships, the Japanese contained the landing force, limiting the space available for the Mongol cavalry to operate and restricting the invaders’ ability to gather fresh supplies. Small Japanese ships also attacked the invading fleet at anchorage (see Chapter 15). When a typhoon wrecked the Mongol fleet, the stranded army, cut off from all supplies, was annihilated.
The invasions showed the Japanese warriors to be of high quality. Their weaponry and ability to fight equally well on horse or foot matched up well tactically against the Mongols, especially on a restricted battleground where Mongol unit cohesion could not be brought fully to bear. Japanese unity and morale in the face of the invasions was impressive. But once the threat had passed, the clans that had participated in the defense expected to be rewarded. The problem for the bakufu was that, again, there was no land from a defeated faction to distribute to meet these expectations. As a result, the bonds of loyalty between these clans and the Hojo weakened, and factional struggles within the bakufu increased.
In 1331, these simmering strains were brought to a boil by the revolt of Emperor Go Daigo, who aimed at restoring direct imperial rule. A number of important clans backed him, and the bakufu leadership responded less decisively than in 1221. Though defeated and captured in 1332, Go Daigo escaped and gained the backing of a number of top bakufu generals, including Ashikaga Takauji, a relative of the shogunal house. Kamakura fell to Go Daigo’s forces in 1333 after a bitter battle in the streets of the city; the last Hojo defenders committed suicide.
The Muromachi Period, 1335-1467
Takauji then expected to be made shogun, but Go Daigo intended to rule directly. Takauji revolted in 1335, driving Go Daigo from Kyoto, placing a different member of the imperial house on the throne, and becoming shogun. But Go Daigo continued the struggle, and, until 1392, a bitter civil war ensued. It was settled only when Yoshimitsu, the third and strongest of the Ashikaga shoguns, negotiated a settlement with Go Daigo’s successor, who abdicated, reuniting the throne.
The Ashikaga shoguns established their capital in the Muromachi section of Kyoto (hence historians’ name for the period) alongside the imperial court (see Figure 14.2). This symbolized the complete eclipse of the civil aristocracy and the end of the divided, power- sharing arrangement of the Kamakura period. The warrior class was now dominant. But this dominance came at a cost: The legitimacy provided to warrior power by the civil government now ceased to exist. The problem was exacerbated by the divided throne prior to 1392 and by the more obvious puppet status of the emperor in Kyoto throughout the period. The justification for rule was increasingly “might makes right,” a recipe for instability that proved to be one of a set of structural weaknesses that plagued Ashikaga government.
In addition to establishing themselves in Kyoto, the shoguns required the shugo, the military gover nors of the provinces, to reside much of the year in the capital, so as to manage them and their ambitions more closely. This put the shoguns at the center of the nation’s politics, as somewhat more than a first among equals with the shugo but somewhat less than in complete control. But removing the shugo from their provinces for long periods meant a divorce of central authority figures from their local subordinates and lieutenants, who increasingly turned to bolstering their positions in the local areas they administered. As another curb on potential shugo revolts and independence, the shoguns tended to appoint shugo to provinces where they had little or no land of their own. Since control of land and the income it represented was the ultimate basis of the power and cohesion of warrior groups, this step tended to divorce formal authority from actual power in the provinces. Both absentee leadership and divided authority and power at the local level fostered continued village independence. In all, the warrior class of the Muromachi period was dominant politically but very insecurely rooted in the soil of local power, with underdeveloped mechanisms of district governance.
But the period also saw significant developments, and the power of the central government was not as stunted as appears on first inspection. First, this was a period of economic growth, especially in terms of overseas trade. The shoguns largely controlled the duties and taxes accruing from trade, and the financial resources this provided contributed in large part to their dominant position among the shugo. Second, most trade was with China, and the period also saw a new and significant wave of cultural borrowing from the Ming. This indicates the growing cultural sophistication of the warrior class—literacy was widespread, and, as they moved to the capital, the warriors assumed some of the literary trappings of the old civil aristocracy. The shoguns, partly because of their control of trade, were at the center of cultural developments and derived significant prestige from their patronage of the arts.
Two other developments were important for the structure of the warrior class. First, the long civil war and the instability of a might-makes-right justification of power led to a decline in kinship as the key bond among warriors, as its weakening moral force proved unable to meet the stresses of the age. Second, the same instabilities, combined with the disappearance of the old civil aristocracy, gradually erased the remains of the old shoen, and assignment of income rights from
them faded as the chief mechanism of material reward for armed retainers. Instead, in an attempt to tie their increasingly unruly subordinates to them more securely, local and regional warlords began granting control over actual pieces of land, called chiggyo, to their followers. Chiggyo began to form the bases of local power alliances, underneath the level of the shugo, and carried a potential new emphasis on territoriality since the grants came from areas under a local warlord’s direct control. These two developments, clearly related, would take on added significance when the mechanisms of central government that contained local conflict disintegrated after 1467.
The Onin War, 1467-77
A succession dispute in 1467 in the Ashikaga family triggered an intense conflict in and around Kyoto. It lasted ten years and drew in most of the shugo and their immediate followers. Many of the most prominent shugo died in the struggle, and the shugo as a class virtually self-destructed. Though the succession to the shogunate was settled in 1477, the balance of shugo power on which the shogun’s authority had rested was destroyed. From 1477 until the Ashikaga shogunate was ended by Oda Nobunaga in 1573, it was little more than a regional power around Kyoto.
In fact, the Onin War effectively destroyed central power in Japan, as the shogun and emperor were for the time being merely figureheads. The daimyo, the subordinates of the shugo who had been building their power bases in the provinces, now emerged as effectively independent powers ruling the more than 100 small states into which the Japanese archipelago was now divided. These independent states would become the breeding ground for a Japanese military revolution in the following century, a topic taken up in Chapter 19.
Although not always accurate with respect to the details of specific historical incidents (especially the number of combatants), medieval Japanese war tales paint a vivid picture of the battle practices, customs, and cultural conventions of the warrior elite. The following passages from Yoshitsune and The Taiheike illustrate a number of these, including an early example of ritual suicide.
[From Yoshitsune.] Suzuki Saburo sought to engage Terui Taro. “What are you called?” he shouted.
“Terui Taro Takaharu, a retainer of Lord Yasuhira.”
“Then your master is one of Yoritomo’s retainers. . . . I can’t even count the number of my ancestors who have served the Genji, and I certainly have no business bothering with you, but a man ought to be ready to fight any enemy he meets on the field. All right! They tell me that you at least are one of Yasuhira’s men who knows the meaning of shame. Will you show your back to another honorable man? Stop, coward!”
Shamed by these words, Terui returned to the fight, only to suffer a wound on his right shoulder and retreat again. Then Suzuki cut down five warriors, two on his left and three on his right, and wounded seven or eight more. In the fighting he himself was severely injured.
“Don’t sell your life cheaply, Kamei Rokuro. I am finished.” Those were Suzuki’s last words before he ripped open his belly and fell dead.
[From Taiheiki.] Akamatsu led his three thousand horsemen toward the enemy camp. . . . [A]s these approached, they beheld two or three hundred family banners, fluttering in the breeze from the treetops eastward and westward of Segawa station, as though the enemy were in - deed a great host of twenty or thirty thousand riders.
At the sight of these banners, seven of Akamatsu’s warriors thought, “Not even one or two can we match against a hundred, if our force meets them in battle. Nonetheless, we must fall on this field, since there is no way of gaining a victory without fighting.”
They moved up toward the southern mountains from the shelter of some bamboo. . . . Beholding them, the enemy moved the edges of their shields as though to attack; yet after all they but watched hesitantly while the seven flew down from off their horses to the shelter of a thick clump of bamboo, wherefrom they shot arrows furiously. By no means might the enemy escape those arrows, crowded together as close as tacks in a shoe, . . . but sorely stricken twenty-five of the closest men fell down headlong from off their horses. And the enemy warriors shielded themselves behind the foremost of their numbers, fearful lest their horses be wounded.
Then seven hundred of Akamatsu’s riders struck their quivers and raised a victory shout, saying, “Aha! The enemy wavers!” They attacked with bridles aligned. . . .
When the foremost men of Rokuhara fell back, the rearmost failed to come forward in their stead, for it is ever thus when a mighty force wavers. Although the leaders commanded, “Withdraw in good order! The road is narrow!” heedlessly did sons desert their fathers and retainers forget their lords, and all fled thinking only of themselves. So they made their way back toward the capital, but more than half of their host were slain.
Akamatsu cut off the heads of three hundred wounded men and prisoners at Shuka-ga-wara, [and] hung them up. . . . That night they left Shuka-ga-wara without delay, pursuing the fleeing enemy in the direction of the capital and burning houses on their way to make a light.
source: Helen Craig McCullough, trans., The Taiheike: A Chronicle of Medieval Japan (New York: Columbia University Press, 1959) and Yoshitsune: A Fifteenth Century Japanese Chronicle (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1966).