Civil war and religion in medieval Japan and medieval Europe: War for the Gods,emotions at death and treason

Abstract

To compare and contrast medieval Japan and medieval Western Europe allows one to discover three things. First, analogous to Catholic holy war, in Japan becomes visible a potential for war (albeit seldom actualised) for the sake, quite surprisingly, of Buddhism. Second, the different role played by emotions during war: in Europe, when vicious (and motivated by emotions such as greed, ambition or lust), they endanger the victors; thus the concern for right emotions foster, to a point, proper behavior during war; in Japan, however, the focus is on the emotions of the defeated, which may hamper a good reincarnation and produce vengeful spirits harmful to the victors and to the community at large. Finally, while Japanese warriors could and often did switch sides, the archipelago did not know for centuries anything approaching the European concept of treason, ideally punished with the highest cruelty, hated and feared to the point of generating collective paranoia and conspiracy theories. Western treason was (and is still) a secularised offspring of the Christian belief in the internal enemy of the Church, the false brethren. Arguably, the texture of the religions present in the two ensembles gave their specific form to these three aspects of warfare.

Master narratives guide the thinking of many historians as well as the non-thinking of many others, including public intellectuals and other historians. We know how shallow comparisons enabled colonial history and constructed the Sociology of Modernity. In this earlier comparative mode, the Modern West became a universal horizon and model, and yet was made so particular a horizon that all other cultures were found lacking on the road to a European-grade Modernity. All cultures were found lacking, or rather, almost all cultures. Japan was an exception, perhaps the exception. Its late nineteenth-century and early twentieth-century state was a remarkable entrepreneur. It invested massive resources to replicate Western European and American economy, science and education. ¹ On the ideological front, late nineteenth and early twentieth-century Japanese historians inscribed their land’s past in the then current Western historiographic models, finding or inventing parallels. Next to German-style Rankean positivism, one of these models was feudalism. By the early twentieth century, around 1900, some Japanese historians posited that there had been a Japanese Middle Ages (chūsei), and that there had been a Japanese feudalism. ² This position was crafted for a Western audience starting in 1914 by the Yale historian of Japan, Asakawa Kan’ichi, ³ and employed by Marc Bloch in his famous masterpiece, La société féodale, Feudal Society. ⁴ Then came the imperial adventure of the 1930s and its colossal failure. In the 1930s and 1940s, some Japanese historians retreated into a positivism that was insulated from the nationalistic instrumentalisation of history; others turned to Marxism. After the Second World War, Japanese Marxists, in particular the schools of Ishimoda Shō (author of Chūseiteki sekai no keisei, The formation of the medieval world, 1946), Matsumoto Shinpachirō and Nagahara Keiji, thus also stuck to the idea of fitting the islands’ trajectory in a paradigm defined by the West—this time, Marxist feudalism. ⁵

In Western historiography, the paradigm of ‘feudalism’ came under attack, starting in the 1970s with an article by Elizabeth Brown entitled ‘Feudalism: The Tyranny of a Construct’ (1974), and with renewed strength with the publication ten years later of Susan Reynold’s Fiefs and Vassals. ⁶ In Japanese scholarship, disaffection with feudalism manifested itself in the late 1960s, where one solvent among several was the so-called anthropological turn, whose flag-bearer was Amino Yoshihiko. ⁷ Parallels between Japan and Europe had crumbled even in institutional history, which revised the earlier master narrative. Earlier historians of Japan had located the rise of the warriors in the eleventh and twelfth centuries. ⁸ In broad brushstrokes, two warrior families, the Taira or Heike and the Minamoto or Genji, had accumulated power in the provinces and created military clienteles beholden to them. Their growing importance and rivalry had culminated in the Genpei War of 1180–1185, triggered by the attempt of Retired Emperor Go-Shirakawa to mobilise one warrior clan, the Minamoto, against the warrior clan that had illegitimately taken power at court, the Taira. The warriors’ growing importance had been institutionalised via the establishment of the Shogunate of Kamakura by the victor in the Genpei War, Minamoto Yoritomo, in 1192. Commented a Japanese scholar beholden to this narrative: ‘The war was (…) part of a broader political, economic, and social upheaval, a revolution that eventually resulted in a changed society, a society that may loosely be called feudal’. ⁹ In 1186, Yoritomo obtained the privilege from the court that his vassals would have rights as ‘stewards’ (jitō) on estates belonging to the court nobility or temples, rights that allowed these vassals to skim off part of the landed economy’s revenues. Key followers also became provincial military governors (shugo, also translated ‘military constables’). In this older narrative also, by the mid-thirteenth century, the warriors had fully marginalised the authority and economic power of the imperial court. ¹⁰ But starting no later than the 1990s, another historiographical position became dominant: this ‘rise’ had been much less radical, much less total and much less sudden. Revisionism drew on a slowly gathering critique of the concept of feudalism. Already in the mid-1960s John Whitney Hall, while accepting there were political forms ‘in’ Japan that could be fruitfully compared to those ‘in’ Europe, had also underlined that the warriors had ‘risen’ between 1000 and 1200 not against the ‘public’ sphere and the court-centred structures but within it, as hereditary agents. ¹¹ Like some Japanese colleagues, Hall saw a sharp acceleration of feudal traits in the fourteenth century, a process that came in the sixteenth century to bring Japan very ‘close to the feudal model’, with fiefs and sub-infeodation, oaths of loyalty, and peasant corvée labour and dues. ¹² The rise of the warriors now lost its attractiveness as a pendant to the French ‘feudal revolution’. ¹³ As for this feudal revolution, it was being attacked also in the 1990s in Europe by Dominique Barthélemy. ¹⁴ A warrior-centred history of Japan became much more dubious; merchants and peasants, plus marginals, came into their own as research topics and as agents in early medieval history. ¹⁵

However, is the data that had allowed generations of historians to fit the Japanese archipelago in successive European historiographic frameworks fully resilient to serious comparison? Inverting comparative history’s earlier interest in a catalogue of sameness, one can put Japan between ca. 1000 and ca. 1600 side by side with Western and Central Europe in approximately the same centuries, ca. 1000 to ca. 1500, to notice, in fact, contrasts that have to be explained; contrasts that bring out with surprising clarity the specificities of each ensemble. In short, the historian has to work to explain contrasts embedded in similarities. And conversely, sometimes, it is possible to suggest surprising similarities where master narratives had assumed difference. This presentation will focus on medieval Japan and medieval Europe’s cultures of war and on how the religions present in each contributed to the form that warfare took. In West and Central Europe, there was just one religion: a Catholic Christian faith increasingly centralised and homogenised, after ca. 1100, by the Roman papacy. In Japan, religion was a hybrid of a Buddhism brought from Korea and China alloyed with the cult of local gods, the kami. Additionally, there were notions stemming from Confucianism, and elements coming from Daoism (which are hard to disentangle from native beliefs). ¹⁶

The set of similarities between Japan and Europe are institutional: (1) the existence of a warrior class; (2) the existence of politically and economically powerful religious institutions, in particular monasteries, and of a clergy; (3) the presence of authority figures, emperors and kings, Japanese retired emperors, Catholic popes. The differences that this presentation will explore concern: (1) rebellion and its justifications or critiques; (2) the rules of war, the fate of the defeated, and death pollution, in relation to notions concerning emotions; and (3) side-switching or treason.

Justifications and motivations for armed conflict—for pacification, rebellion or restoration of legitimate power—oftentimes drew on notions of right order and proper authority. Some were straightforwardly religious. This was more the case with Western Europe, where starting in the High Middle Ages, so from about 1100 onward, many internal conflicts drew on crusading culture. As for Japan, scholarship has tended to assume that there were no Buddhist holy wars in South and East Asia. ¹⁷ In this narrative, both the bellicose Zen of Japanese colonial expansion and the recent Sri Lankan ethnic conflict, in which Buddhist monks have taken a militant part, are considered to be deviations driven by modern politics. ¹⁸ Of course, no one would deny that there was in the Japanese Middle Ages religion in war (as opposed to religious war). As is common in most premodern societies, Japanese medieval warriors mustered temples and shrines’ prayers, curses and spells; and they believed that the gods helped them in battle. ¹⁹ However, unlike in Catholic Europe or Islamicate polities, the scholarly consensus is that there was no war for religion. Yet, as ever so often, the Devil is in the details. This position—that there was no holy war in Japan—may be true comparatively if one considers the European alloy of Roman imperialism and Christianity initiated by Emperor Constantine’s fourth-century conversion, and confirmed by successive late Antique rulers. ²⁰ It has been argued elsewhere that the medieval holy war, building on pre-Constantinian Christian ideas of sacred history, vengeance and purification, came with a package of notions: holy war moved history forward; holy war had a global meaning; holy war had the function to cleanse from sin, social and religious, both the in-group and its enemies; and it fostered liberty. ²¹

Appeals to liberty are common in the West starting with the eleventh century. In the civil war that King Henry IV of Germany (r. 1065–1104) fought against the anti-king Rudolph of Rheinfelden and his Saxon allies after 1075, ²² Pope Gregory VII (r. 1073–1085) exhorted the latter ‘to protect the truth of the Church and to defend the freedom of their noble status (pro tuenda ueritate ecclesiastica, pro defendenda uestre nobilitatis libertate)’. ²³ This great rebellion against King Henry had begun in 1073 as a defence of Saxon freedoms from excessive royal lordship, which the partisan chronicler of the Saxon War, Bruno of Merseburg, expressed years later in a speech put in the mouth of Duke Otto of Northeim: ²⁴

Possibly since you are Christians, you fear to violate the oaths you took to the king. Indeed, but to the king [understand, as king]. As long as he [Henry IV] was my king and did what pertains to a king, I preserved entire and untouched the fidelity that I had sworn him. But after he stopped to be king-like, he was no longer one vis-à-vis whom I was to preserve fidelity. Therefore, it is not against a king that I take arms and exhort you to take arms along with me, but against an unjust snatcher of my freedom. [I do] not [take arms] against the fatherland, but for the fatherland and for my liberty. No good man loses liberty unless he loses his life along with liberty. ²⁵

While drawing in its rhetoric from the Classical, non-Christian Roman Republican tradition, medieval libertas was nurtured and hallowed by the Christian liberty from sin. ²⁶ As a contrast, appeals to freedom seem wholly lacking in the medieval Japanese discourse on war. One does find figures rebelling as they consider that a lord is their social inferior, something also present in Europe, ²⁷ but rebellion in Japan is not about liberty, it is about proper hierarchy, honour and status. ²⁸ Here, however, one must take a step back, and guard against the Western master narrative of European destiny leading to democracy. Liberty has oftentimes been a half-empty, floating signifier, with varying content: the liberty to own slaves, for instance, for which the Southern United States Confederacy fought a bloody civil war against the North. ²⁹

But back to holy war. A closer comparative scrutiny indicates that something like war for religion was not fully absent in Japan. Whatever took place in the conflicts that accompanied Buddhism’s arrival in the archipelago has been lost in the complicated fog of social memory. However, social memory can be more potent than actual historical facts. Over the centuries, social memory heavily commemorated one royal figure, Prince Shōtoku, as the founder of the intimate connection between Buddhism and imperial rule. The Nihon Shoki (ca. 720, a.k.a. Nihongi) recounted how Prince Shōtoku (574–622) had, with supernatural help, victoriously fought with the opponents of Buddhism led by the Mononobe clan. Before marching to war, Shōtoku had promised that ‘if victory over our enemies is now granted to us’, he would build a Buddhist temple. The temple (the Shitennōji) was placed under the patronage of the four Buddhist protector deities, the Four Heavenly Kings (shitennō), ‘who defend the world’. Its core endowment came from the defeated Mononobe clan’s lands and serfs. ³⁰ By circa 1000, the Prince was considered as the author of regulations for the royal sphere and promulgator of Buddhist teachings, and as one of the key implementers of the ideal harmony between the ōbō, the Royal or Imperial Law (王法), and the buppō, the Buddha Law or Buddhadharma (佛法). ³¹ This heavily commemorated episode of war for the Buddhadharma parallels a foundational episode for European holy war, Constantine’s alleged vision before the Milvian Bridge battle in 312. Shōtoku’s defence of the dharma was activated in the opening salvos of the Genpei War. In 1180 Prince Mochihito, one of Retired Emperor Go-Shirakawa’s sons, decided to raise troops against the Taira clan. Taira no Kiyomori had just imposed his will at court by forcing an emperor to abdicate in favour of his son by Kiyomori’s daughter. Prince Mochihito issued an order (ryōji) to rise up against the Taira. ³² The central passage for our purposes states: ³³

[The Taira] have (…) defied the sovereign emperor (帝皇, mikado) and destroyed the Buddhist Law (佛法 buppō, Buddhadharma) in a manner unprecedented in history. (…) In consequence thereof, I, the second son of the ex-sovereign [Go-Shirakawa], in search of the ancient principles of Heavenly Sovereign (tennō) Tenmu [r. 672/3-686], and following in the footsteps of Prince Shōtoku, proclaim war against those who would usurp the imperial throne (王位 ōi) and destroy the Buddhist Law. We rely not on man’s efforts alone but on the assistance of the Way of Heaven (天道 tendō) as well.

And indeed, recounted the partisan narrative in the eighth-century Nihon shoki, gods had assisted Emperor Tenmu and his courageous son Prince Takechi ³⁴ in their just war against the upstart court of Afumi, which favoured a rival claimant to the throne. ³⁵

Two statements that stem from a later version of the call to rise up against the Taira, also refracts medieval conceptions, at least fourteenth-century ones (given the source’s date). They also assume the possibility to war for the Buddhist Law. When answering favourably another monastery’s call to take arms and help Prince Mochihito, the Nara monks referred to the Shakyamuni Buddha’s greatest human opponent, his cousin, Devadatta. They identified Taira no Kiyomori with Devadatta, a Buddhist exemplar of evil: ‘It is this temple’s duty as it is that of others to quell the evil of any Devadatta’. ³⁶ And in another episode, having decided to side with the Taira’s enemies, the Enryakuji monks explained that ‘in the world unseen, the Twelve Generals [former yaksa demons converted to Buddhism] shall add their might by order of the Medicine King to that of the champions who smite evil, while in the visible world we three thousand monks shall for a while suspend study and [religious] practice in order to assist the imperial forces intent on chastising the wicked’. ³⁷ Thus, like Christian monks, the Enryakuji monastics wage spiritual warfare in support of material warfare, but unlike Christian monks they are ready, although by way of exception, to take up arms to fight in the same material war. ³⁸ The occasional combination of material and spiritual combat in Japan looks like the institutionalised dual warfare of the Knights Templar, who fought both Satan (as monks) and Muslims (as knights). This duality is exemplified in the Templar church of San Bevignate in Perugia (Italy). There, a mural painting represents, below, the armoured knights fighting on horseback Muslims (with devilish dragon armorials), and, above, the knights, cowled as monks, facing a demonic lion, likely the one who, according to the Bible, circles in the desert, looking for a prey to devour. ³⁹ To conclude on this question of religious war, the close comparison between Japan and Catholic Europe suggests that there existed a minor potential in Japanese Buddhism for holy war, checked most of the time by conjuncture, other forces and other institutions. This potential was comparatively much smaller than the one inherent in the Catholic and, later, Catholic and Protestant West, which was activated repeatedly, all the way to the present. But this Buddhist potential existed. A side comment, the war for the Dharma of Sri Lankan and Burmese monks is likely, thus, not a full oddity. There exists, at least in the Lankan tradition, something like a Constantinian legend. ⁴⁰

Currently a trendy topic in the scholarship originating from emotions-driven America, ⁴¹ emotions played different roles in the context of war in the Middle Ages. In the Catholic West, what we now call emotions, were called ‘passions of the soul’ (passiones animi). When sinful, passions of the soul endangered success on the battlefield. Other emotions, like fear, sadness or grief, were acceptable; they could even be a sign of religious authenticity. ⁴² In comparison, in Japan, emotions were also acceptable in warriors, but they had to be carefully managed, especially when one was close to death. Shedding tears in the face of a tragic occurrence was compassion, a Buddhist virtue. But when tearful emotion corresponded to excessive attachment to kin, to lover, or to a close warrior ally, at the moment of one’s death, it allowed one’s ‘thoughts to stray’. In order to obtain salvation, and in order to avoid falling into a hell, it was necessary to renounce ‘all deluded anxiety’. Thus when Taira Munemori, at the very moment when the executioner’s sword cleaved his neck, asked about his son ‘with affecting concern’, the holy man who had prepared him for a good death and had sought to train him away from misguided emotions ‘burst into tears’. He knew that he had failed: ‘Lord Munemori had displayed so sinful an attachment to his son’. ⁴³ The monk’s tears of Buddhist compassion were far from being out of place; it was Munemori’s anguish, however, that was misplaced. Right and wrong emotions at the moment of death constitute a major theme in the source just cited and paraphrased, the Heike monogatari, in a fourteenth-century version (the Kakuichi-bon, ca. 1371) that dramatised the fall of the Taira clan in the civil war of 1180–1185. The manner in which Taira no Kiyomori, the head of the Taira clan, died, indicted his life. Burning with a hellish heat, and destined to ‘the hell of unbroken agony’, Kiyomori explained that he did not want temples or pagodas built, and prayers said for him after his death. ‘No’, he whispered, ‘I want [Minamoto] Yoritomo’s head off and hung before my grave. That is the only commemoration I wish’. The Kakuichi-bon Heike monogatari comments laconically: ‘What profoundly sinful words!’ ⁴⁴

Another war chronicle, also from the fourteenth century, the Taiheiki, is devoted to the next major civil war to erupt in Japan, initiated by Emperor Go-Daigo’s attempt in 1331 to destroy the Kamakura Shogunate. It underscores the consequences of earthly attachments at the moment of death: ‘Though it is said that the things of life are forgotten after death, yet does the karma of a fleeting thought endure for five hundred lives, while the effect of fixing the mind on a thing endures through worlds without end’. ⁴⁵ The Taiheiki illustrates this principle with a dramatic anecdote, set in the context of Kamakura’s fall in 1333 to the imperial armies. ⁴⁶ Three great lords from the same family, in the face of coming defeat, commit suicide, slashing their stomachs and burning to death in their fortress. Prior to that, the much loving and much loved wives of the three had drowned themselves in a first suicide. In the following night, three men hail a boatman’s skiff, and in the middle of the bay, walk onto the sea. There float up three women. ‘The men looked upon them with loving eyes, as though to draw near to them, but a fierce fire burned up suddenly, coming between the men and the women with its flames’. Separated, the six ghosts—for these are the ghosts of the three loving pairs—disappear, the females sinking to the water’s bottom. The chronicle comments: ‘(…) sinful indeed was the love of the dead that caused such things to appear in the world before men’s eyes!’ ⁴⁷

The Japanese concern for a proper death was not simply care for the individual dead and his or her position in his or her next lifecycle. It was also worried concern for the living. Since Japan’s earliest documented history, people dreaded one emotion in particular—the anger of the war-dead and even of live men and women who, defeated, had been demoted and sent into exile. This anger personified itself into an onryō, a vengeful spirit. Being a potent force, the onryō could damage both, the victor or killer—for example, with disease or harm to a pregnant wife—and wider spheres—for instance, the capital city or even the nation. ⁴⁸ Relatedly, a formerly powerful person might become a tengu, a lower world creature with the magical ability to do great harm. Holy men might out of pride become tengus: so might angry emperors. The Taiheiki recounts how in 1347/48 a coven of four tengus plotted to add massive oil to an ongoing civil war. Including Moriyoshi, all four tengus had been in their former lives supporters of Go-Daigo. As said earlier, Emperor Go-Daigo’s attempt to restore imperial power in 1331–1333 had led to the destruction of the Kamakura Shogunate. But starting in 1333, Go-Daigo’s plans had been thwarted by the brothers Ashikaga Takauji and Ashikaga Tadayoshi. They turned against the emperor, and soon founded the new Muromachi Shogunate (1336/38). The Ashikaga coup d’état was not immediately successful; rather, a Japan-wide civil war ensued. In the course of this new usurpation, an abbot turned warrior and major actor in the imperial restoration, Prince Moriyoshi, Go-Daigo’s son, was murdered in 1335. Moriyoshi became, the Taiheiki story tells us, a tengu—one of the four present. The three other tengus charged themselves with the task of possessing a number of important warlords belonging to the Ashikaga faction (plus a monk, in order to make him propound perverted Buddhist teachings). The warlords would be set against one another. The fourth tengu, the former Prince Moriyoshi, would reincarnate himself as a son of Ashikaga Tadayoshi (despite Tadayoshi’s wife being rather aged). This unexpected birth would trigger a conflict between Tadayoshi and his brother Ashikaga Takauji over succession to the Shogunate and to the Shogunate’s various offices. ⁴⁹ And so it happened.

‘Yes, the angry dead inspire fear’, sang the Heike monogatari. ⁵⁰ For this reason, medieval Japanese victors took care to propitiate the defeated, dead or alive, with promotions in rank, various sacred offerings, all the way to dedicated temples and shrines, and deification. One had to turn a powerful tengu or a potentially powerful tengu into a kami, a deity. Over time, political conflicts and conflicts of interpretation could lead to surprising biographies. One example is the trajectory of the great late-tenth century head abbot of Mount Hiei’s Enryakuji, Ryōgen (d. 985). In what was possibly the inversion of a hostile monastery’s take on the same Ryōgen, which alleged that the abbot had become a tengu after his death, he became a tengu king protecting Mount Hiei. ⁵¹ Further, Ryōgen was reincarnated as Taira no Kiyomori— according to a rumour recorded in the Kakuichi-bon Heike monogatari, and allegedly revealed to a pious abbot in 1172 by the high king of Hell, Enma (Enma dai-ō, the Hindic Yama). This did not prevent another anecdote, recorded in the same chronicle, to recount how Enma had summoned Kiyomori at his death to a lower hell because he had ordered the destruction of Buddhist temples that had taken arms against his rule. ⁵²

A comparison of the complex that comprises bad emotions, onryō and tengu, with medieval Christian Europe takes us in two directions. First, it takes us to the Christian cult of the martyrs. Catholicism knew also dangerous dead, among whom were devout kings or clergy killed by pagans in the process of Christianisation. Second, it takes us to atrocities at war and their inhibitors.

First, the cult of the martyrs. In Japan, a wide swath of persons might produce a vengeful spirit, an onryō. The most dangerous were those of powerful men and women, and the victors had to placate them, sometime by recognising them as gods. In Europe, rendering a cult to persons one had killed, as one did in Japan, was rare. There existed a cult of the saints, including of martyrs, who had been real or putative victims of pagan persecutions. Saints were dangerous and vengeful as onryō, but a cult to one’s victims took place only in the seventh to tenth centuries, in Merovingian Francia, Anglo-Saxon England and Scandinavia. The victors promoted their victims to the status of martyr saints in order to forestall their supernatural retaliation and also to reconcile oneself to the human allies of the dead. ⁵³ But these figures are rare, even in the seventh to tenth centuries, and after that period, the papally led Church of the High and Late Middle Ages limited the scope of the angry dead to recognised martyrs, a comparatively small group. ⁵⁴ Comparison thus underscores how the Catholic constellation, that is, the limiting of the dead’s ability to harm, was far from evident. Peter Brown called the saints ‘the very special dead’. ⁵⁵ Comparatively considered, Catholic martyrs’ monopoly of political vengeance is indeed a very special thing.

Second, bad emotions take us to warfare’s atrocities and their limits. In medieval Europe, the focus was on bad passions of the soul present when one killed, or in general when one was waging warfare. Thus, attention is drawn to the emotions of the killers, and not of the victims. In the aftermath of the fratricidal battle of Fontenoy (841), which left scores of noble casualties, a discussion arose as to penance. An influential position held that even in a just war, to have killed out of greed, ambition, pride, or private animosity necessitated penance (meagre food or fasts, abstinence from sexual intercourse, humiliating actions). ⁵⁶ While not universally accepted, and perhaps geographically limited, ⁵⁷ this tradition gained traction circa 1100 with the rediscovery of Augustine’s position on just war, and its canonisation by thirteenth-century theologians and lawyers. For a war to be a just war, it was necessary that it be declared by a proper authority (typically by a sovereign king); that it be waged for a just cause; and that those men who conducted war have ‘right intention’—understand, that these warriors were not moved by greed, hate, vengeance, pride or ambition for power, and suchlike (nocendi cupiditas, ulciscendi crudelitas, impacatus atque implacabilis animus, feritas rebellandi, libido dominandi, et si qua similia haec sunt). ⁵⁸ God might cause the defeat of men so wickedly motivated. He punished warrior’s sinful ‘intentions of the soul’, even when they were crusaders fighting in His name. God might grant victory to just causes, but this could be trumped by the injustice and sinfulness of men fighting for this just cause. God would then side with the enemies, even with pagans or Muslims. To some degree, this concern contributed to limiting atrocities in warfare. The following thesis in particular will perhaps raise eyebrows: the fear that sexual pollution would anger God may have reduced instances of rape by Christian warriors. As for Japan, as just explained, radical violence was braked by a different factor (while still one involving passions of the soul), the belief in onryō. This belief may have lost some of its potency with the paroxystic civil wars of Japan’s sixteenth century (Oda Nobunaga’s biographer Ōta Gyūichi presented it as superstition that he did not share), ⁵⁹ but it is omnipresent from 1000 to 1400. To conclude this section, in Europe, what was dangerous was the emotions of the potential victors; in Japan, what was dangerous was the emotions of the defeated.

Just war, in its aspect as ius in bello, what is legal to do during warfare, was fostered in the West by religious considerations. ⁶⁰ This article’s scope does not allow an extended discussion of non-combatants, so it will just be noted in passing that one category theoretically immune from violence in the West, the clergy, was not so easily spared in Japan. ⁶¹

But to return to the main point. As just argued, Catholic Christianity may have promoted ius in bello, but it also fed another current, which played in the opposite direction. Christianity fostered atrocities at war. The argument here is that while Japanese chroniclers documented side-switching and sometime condemned it, the moral and religious onus attached to it was much lesser than in Catholic Europe. One finds in the thirteenth and fourteenth-century epic chronicles the shaming of some turncoats as well as admiration for the tactical wile of other side-switchers. ⁶² However, even this shaming, when it is expressed, is rarely a religious onus.

One rare case of religious valence attached to treachery comes from the Heiji monogatari. This war tale, composed after the Gempei war (likely ca. 1230–1240), does contain one act of retaliation for betrayal with religious valence. ⁶³ Fleeing after his defeat in the Heiji incident of 1159, Minamoto Yoshitomo sought provisions from a hereditary retainer, who instead offered shelter and rest. This Osada no Shōji Tadamune then killed his lord in his bath. Years later, Minamoto Yoritomo, victorious over the Taira, got his revenge:

Nomi no Kojitō swept down on him [Osada no Shōji Tadamune] and his son, seized them, and crucified them. Nor was this done in any ordinary way. Their hands and feet were nailed with huge nails to boards laid before Yoshitomo’s grave, the nails were torn from their fingers and toes; the skin was stripped from their cheeks; and four or five days later they were beaten to death. Perhaps they had imagined that assassinating their hereditary lord would assure their descendants prosperity, but they suffered in this very life the karmic reward for their crime, made their infamy known to all, and exposed their shame. ⁶⁴

Yoshitomo’s betrayal was itself the fruit of an earlier transgression, a parricide detailed in the twin epic, the Hōgen monogatari, set in 1156. ⁶⁵ The Heiji monogatari, describing the spectacle of the parading and exposition of Minamoto Yoshitomo’s head in the capital, ⁶⁶ comments:

During the Hōgen [1156] conflict (…) Yoshitomo had had Hadano Yoshimichi, a retainer, behead his own father, [Minamoto] Tameyoshi. Now, after his recent defeat, Yoshitomo had fallen by the hand of another retainer, Tadamune. ‘He reaped in this very life the reward for his gyakuzai,’ both high and low (…) muttered, ‘and no doubt he will spend the next [life] in the lowest pit of hell.’ ⁶⁷ Half the voices reviled him, and half pitied him. ⁶⁸

In the narrative economy of the Heiji monogatari, the cruel death meted to Tadamune as murderer of his lord, coupled with the spectator’s sense that this karma would take him to the worse possible reincarnation, served to dramatise the Minamoto clan’s predestined return to power and the destruction of the Taira in 1180-1185. It was a drama: Yoritomo, a teenager in 1156, had been wondrously spared by Taira Kiyomori thanks to the joint action of Kannon, the Bodhisattva of mercy, and of Hachiman, a god of war and divine patron of the Minamoto. Yoritomo’s younger half-brothers, also spared, took part in the Gempei war; the youngest, Yoshitsune, underlines the Heiji monogatari, was the military hero who defeated the Taira. ‘So it is with those whose lines are destined to endure’, the tale concludes, on these words. ⁶⁹ The negative karma of parricide and killing one’s lord serves as a counterpoint to the positive karmic destiny fostered by Hachiman, and explains the delay, across the two incidents, Hōgen and Heiji, in the preordained Minamoto triumph. Betrayal is not the true focus.

Thus as a rule, side-switching was not, as it were, ‘demonised’. The Japanese word muhon came to mean treason in the late sixteenth century, and it was increasingly severely punished in the paroxystic violence that accompanied the wars of reunification. This is attested both in daimyo law codes and in the Chronicle of Lord Nobunaga, the biography of Japan’s first unifier. But from late Antiquity to medieval Japan’s mid-1500s, muhon meant, rather, rebellion or even less judgmentally, an uprising. ⁷⁰ Switching sides was considered rebellion or denial of service and obedience. It was not treason in the Western sense. The Portuguese Jesuit Luís Froís (d. 1597 in Nagasaki), in his 1585 treatise comparing the customs of Japanese and Europeans, laconically wrote ‘Among us, treason is rare and highly reprehensible; in Japan, it is so common that it is almost never considered reprehensible’. ⁷¹ So what about treason in Europe?

In Western and Central Europe there existed both the word and the concept of ‘treason’. It could (even though it did not always) meet spectacular and cruel punishments. It was feared and hated, and was a quasi-religious transgression. Starting in the thirteenth century, scenarios attested mostly in England (but not only) of public executions document the religious valence of treason. Normally burning was a penalty associated with heresy. And normally traitors were drawn, hung or beheaded, and quartered—the body parts to be displayed in places of political importance. These were legal ideal types, opposing implicitly politics and religion. In a transfer of religious semantics, one could also burn the heart or the innards of traitors. In 1318, Gilbert of Middleton was accused of having rebelled, in alliance with Scots, banners unfurled, against his liege lord the king, Edward II, who had given him livery and pay (robas et vadia). He had also assaulted, plundered and held to ransom papal legates who had been negotiating the peace. As a punishment, Gilbert was to be drawn to the gallows, there hung alive and bits torn from his body while still alive, beheaded and quartered. But another clause dealt with inner dispositions: ‘Because his heart and other innards (viscera) had given him the audacity to think up such horrible felonies (…) and execute them against God, and Holy Church, and his legitimate lord, this very heart and innards’ were to be ‘burnt under the said gallows’. ⁷²

Jean Le Bel, a Flemish chronicler, reported another execution involving the cremation of innards, that of Edward II’s favourite, Hugh Despenser the Younger, in 1326. After Hugh had been drawn, ‘(..) one slit his stomach and took out of it the heart and threw it on the fire, because he was false in his heart and a traitor, and because through [his] treacherous counsel and exhortations, the king had sullied and damaged his kingdom, and put it in harm, and had had England’s highest barons beheaded ([barons] by whom the kingdom was supposed to be defended and maintained)’. ⁷³ In comparison, in Japan, such instances of extreme cruelty seem to have been absent. I say this with caution, since I am a semi-amateur. The first description of a lengthy and refined execution that I know of comes from the sixteenth century’s last third (1579). It was perpetrated at the order of Oda Nobunaga (1534–1582), a warlord who had made it his mission to pacify the realm under the aegis of the Way of Heaven, ⁷⁴ and it punished the side-switcher Araki Murashige. Or rather, since Murashige had cowardly escaped, Nobunaga ordered the spectacular and cruel execution of his wives, concubines, relatives, children and servants (and this by the hundreds). ⁷⁵

The West European figure of the traitor also generated fantasies of purges. In two forms: one, fantasies that traitors would suddenly trigger a vast massacre; or, two, fantasies that one had to purge traitors in one’s midst. In Paris during the fifteenth-century civil war opposing Burgundian and Armagnac factions, Parisian burghers allied to the Burgundians both recycled biblical pericopes calling for the eschatological weeding out of the wicked, and imagined that pro-Armagnac traitors prepared a sudden purge. ⁷⁶ This fear motivated the pro-Burgundian townsmen in 1418 to a purge of their own, which featured spectacular massacres in prisons of Armagnacs, real and suspected. Estimated casualties range from 1,000 to 5,000 dead. ⁷⁷

The religious valence attached to treachery had a genealogy. At play was—arguably—the sacral nature of fidelity, fides or fidelitas, intertwined with the lexicon of religious faith, present since the Later Roman Empire. One sees it in the oath, which was not as religiously charged in Ancient and Medieval Japan, or rather, was differently charged. ⁷⁸ In the High Middle Ages, newer notions compounded this well anchored European sacrality of fidelity to make treason deeply evil. What were these newer ideas? The Catholic twelfth century was an age of reform, and relatedly, of crusades. It has been posited elsewhere that the two, reform and crusade, went hand in hand from the first crusade on. Holy War outside Christendom was accompanied by reform in the shape of war against social vices and vicious human beings. These human deviants were not only the heretics but also the false brothers (also called hypocrites), men and women whose moral and social vices were weakening the Christian community. ⁷⁹ As famously argued by Ernst Kantorowicz in his The King’s Two Bodies, there took place in the following century, the thirteenth, a transfer— a semi-secularisation, as it were—of the sacral aura of the Christian community to political communities. ⁸⁰ Accompanying this, just as some intra-cultural wars were now fought as holy wars, side-switchers and internal opponents came to be seen as false brethren. ⁸¹ This is visible in the lexicon: the Apostle Paul’s ecclesiological falsus frater (Gal. 2.4; 2 Cor. 11.26) found a political counterpart in terms such as faux Francais or faulx traitre. ⁸² Civil war thus activated something like a latent paranoia—a cultural paranoia, not a psychiatric one.

There remains to square the discursive presence of this hatred and these fantasies with the actual rarity of actual executions involving the burning of innards as the seat of evil thoughts. The key may be in Claude Gauvard’s analysis of the death penalty in general within the late medieval French context. ⁸³ Often threatened or demanded by kings and their officials, highly visible in the public discourse, capital punishment along with its garniture of humiliating tortures and ceremonials was not so often applied. Circumstances, networks, behind-the-scene deals explain in part these non-implementations. But so does the religious imperative, to which the ‘most Christian’ French king (rex christianissimus), was beholden, and which he embraced: to pardon mercifully those he could condemn in full justice. What came into play then was both the accusation’s formulaic litany, piling up real or suspected crimes, and the accused’s confession. Judicial confession was also a transfer into the lay sphere; it derived from the Christian confession of sins (an obligatory yearly practice since the Fourth Lateran Council, 1215) conjoined to the forms engendered (also since the thirteenth century) by papally-mandated inquisitions. ⁸⁴ As we have learned from Michel Foucault’s early work, the constant desire to know vice, and the repetitive invocation of vice even when disconnected from its practice, and its punishment, shapes in depth a culture. ⁸⁵

In the case of what inquisitions prosecuted, heresy and clerical vice, the absence of contrition and repentance stigmatised the culprit; it indicated that he or she could not climb back, thanks to mercy, into a positive sphere. The same applied to treason. René, Duke of Lorraine, had found agents in the enemy city of Metz, who would hand over the urban gates to his troops. ⁸⁶ One of them, the castellan Chairle (Charles) du Quennelet, revealed the conspiracy; his accomplice Jehan de Landremont underwent on 5 January 1492, a capital punishment highlighting his evil inner dispositions. The verdict mandated that Jehan was ‘(…) to be opened up alive, his belly slit, and the innards pulled out, showing to him his heart, and once his life would have expired’, one was ‘to behead him and put the body in four quarters (…)’. ⁸⁷ These evil dispositions included the refusal to repent (including on the way to the scaffold). ⁸⁸ The official protocol of the interrogation made this clear:

‘Further, the said De Landremont was asked whether he had had any remorse in his conscience or the desire not to carry through their undertaking from the moment that my lords Jennon [‘the Lombairt’] and Chairle had conceived together the treason, conspiracy, and undertaking against the city [of Metz]. To this, the said De Landremont answered that from the moment that the conspiracy and undertaking was conceived, he never had any remorse in his conscience, and that he did not repent. And had the matter not been put to accusation and made known as it is, he would as much as was in his power have executed and realized this undertaking, and led it to completion’. ⁸⁹

So evil was this plot, which would have led to massacres in Metz, that allegedly Charles du Quennelet and Jehan had sworn ‘a very stringent oath, to the point that they would renounce the Faith and baptism, and take the Devil as master and lord, to be good and loyal to the said lord duke in handing over the said city’. ⁹⁰ As in cases of heresy, Satan lurked, fleetingly. But he lurked.

So did opposing powers, which fostered the interiority and the repentance that Jehan de Landremont rejected. How had the conspiracy been found out? The Castellan Charles had had second thoughts, which he attributed, why not, to the Blessed Virgin. And thus he had confessed to a priest, revealed the plot and repented. Right after Jehan’s execution, just before the treacherous innards were burnt, and on the very same spot, the clerk of the patrician city council proclaimed loudly that Charles had not ‘persisted in his undertaking’. ⁹¹ He was not only spared and pardoned. He was rewarded with a beautiful house. The roles of interiority and contrition, well underscored in a Foucaldian vein by Claude Gauvard, are fully evident.

Generative of the figure of the ‘false’ traitor, the opposition between true and false derived from Catholic Christianity’s strong Manichean tendencies, that is, Catholic Christianity’s propensity to divide totality into two, radically opposed, unmediated spheres. Japanese religion was not so binary. The legend according to which Taira no Kiyomori was a reincarnation of the holy abbot Ryōgen expresses what to Western eyes is an alien affinity with paradoxes. Enma, king of the lower realms, gave a pious monk a note to hand over to Kiyomori. It revealed Kiyomori’s earlier being, and spoke of his present role:

I bow before the great teacher Jie [Ryōgen].

protector of [the] Tendai [School of Buddhist] teaching,

now manifest as a great general

so as by evil to lead all to good. ⁹²

Whatever the exact meaning of King Enma’s words, ⁹³ they are at home with the Japanese ability to bring together evil and good. One can find in Japanese narratives the—paradoxical, at least to Western eyes—juxtaposition of opposite judgments on an individual’s personality and actions. In a single work, a major historical figure can end up endowed with a tragic dimension, insofar as this person is inhabited by principles that, in this life, cannot be reconciled. Contrariwise, European chronicles, and even epics, are poor in the tragic. Narratives are far more partisan, and a major figure will be either right or wrong. Is it aesthetising orientalism or, more innocently, romanticism, to suspect that Japanese civil war destruction could be more easily rationalised and accepted than their European counterparts, precisely because they escaped a reductionist, binary rationality? This is something worth considering, albeit with caution, since the debate that opposed Marshal Sahlins and Gananath Obeyesekere is far from over. ⁹⁴

One of the first books devoted to a comparison between Japan and Europe, Frédéric Joüon des Longrais, L’Est et l’Ouest. Institutions du Japon et de l’Occident comparées (1958), proclaimed loudly that only ‘le général’ (understand ‘the generic’, as opposed to the specific) could be the object of scholarship, and that the sole method allowing for synthesis was the comparative method. ⁹⁵ Thus Joüon des Longrais’ comparisons aimed at ‘the general’. The present comparison, on the one hand, has reduced the gap between Japan and Europe on the question of holy war, allegedly absent in medieval Buddhism. Thus, as it were, it has gone some way in the direction of ‘the general’. Evidently, however, were one to bring a third term to the comparison, for instance adduce the Precolumbian Nahuas, one would swiftly see that war to defend the god or god’s law is not a universal. ⁹⁶ The comparison has, therefore, turned up particulars specific to either Japan or Europe, but not to both. It has highlighted different logics in the culture of war, first a different place of emotions, and, related to this, different rules of war; second, different impacts of notions of ‘pollution’ on behaviour at war and on the place of the killers and the killed; and, third, the radical hatred and violence of the West when dealing with side-switching, absent in medieval Japan. Those among us who are ill at ease with the word ‘culture’ will be ill at ease with the claims here made of particular cultural consistencies explainable, in part, by religion. But here they are.