Dale Furutani - Kill the Shogun

Tokugawa Ieyasu had been ruler of the Kanto, the rich plain around the Edo area, for only thirteen years. He had been Shogun for less than a year. Many in the crowd had never seen the new ruler of Japan, and this public inspection was an occasion to gaze on the mighty. As people gathered, street entertainers and vendors gathered too, feeding off the press of people and their need to keep amused while waiting for the daimyo and Shogun.

A captain of the guards and four men patrolled the crowd. The captain stopped for a few moments, looking at the kami-shibai puppet play. The dancing figures at the end of the skewers brought back fond memories from the captain’s childhood.

The captain looked over the crowd gathered at the edge of the Edo-jo construction site. Before them was the wide ditch that would eventually be filled with water to form a moat. The moat was turning into a benefit of another type, because the soil excavated from it was being used to fill in the marshy land surrounding Edo, providing more room for expansion. The moat spiraled out from the castle, cutting through the city and giving it future opportunities for the creation of additional canals and water-borne commerce. Across the now dry ditch was the stone block wall that would form the outer rampart of the castle. Each block of stone was transported by boat on the Sumida River and brought to the construction site, where skilled stonecutters dressed the large blocks so they would fit together in a cunning puzzle designed to thwart attack.

Behind the crowd, houses and shops formed a thick wall of their own. In crowded Edo, each scrap of land was precious, and the town sprang up wherever the land was not claimed by the Shogun, a daimyo, or a temple. The wooden and paper structures were prone to fire, and sections of Edo caught fire constantly. The only method for fighting the fires was to tear down structures in their path, a task done lustily by the volunteer firemen, who were mostly carpenters and roofers, and who would soon prosper as the structures were rebuilt. Sometimes the authorities had problems restraining the firefighters from tearing down structures that weren’t threatened by the fire.

If conditions were right, fires could get out of control and destroy vast sections of the city. Fire towers, called yagura , dotted the city, where lookouts were stationed to watch for the first wisps of smoke that could lead to disaster.

Because of the size of Edo Castle, the captain knew the inspection would take most of the day. Eventually, however, the new Shogun would want to inspect this section of wall, so the captain wanted to make sure that order was maintained in the crowd. So far, the crowd seemed to be quiet and in a festive mood. The captain had caught a thief earlier, but he knew the law would ensure that the thief would die within the week, so there would be one less villain on the streets of Edo.

The captain and his men left the children at the puppet play and went to see what another crowd was looking at. A gasp came from the crowd, and the captain motioned for his men to clear a path for him, so he could see what was so interesting. As the crowd became aware that samurai were at its edge, people moved out of the way, bowing politely, so the officer and his men could see.

In the center of the crowd was a free space with a lone man. He was of average height, but muscular. He didn’t have the shaved pate of the samurai, and his hair was pulled back into a topknot, but there was something about his bearing that made the captain think he was a military man. With fifty thousand samurai left defeated and unemployed after the Tokugawa victory at Sekigahara, it was not unusual to find ex-samurai trying to make a living at all sorts of enterprises. Many had become farmers, some had become robbers and brigands, some had become merchants, very few had found employment with some lord or daimyo, and many were still wandering Japan, living by their wits and trying to find employment for their blades. This last group were ronin -literally, “wave men.”

This man had the look of a ronin, but it was hard for the captain to imagine that a real samurai would sink so low as to become a street entertainer.

The man took a large child’s wooden top, as wide as the span of his hand, and tightly wound a hemp cord around it. Throwing it with a snap of his wrist while still holding the end of the cord, the man set the top spinning. From a scabbard lying at his feet, the man withdrew a sword. Then, with a quick sweep of the sword, the man picked up the spinning top on the flat of the blade.

The man held the blade steady for a few moments, then he tilted the blade slightly and guided the top down the length of the shiny ribbon of steel. The captain was struck by the quality of the blade. Like all men of his class, he had been trained to judge a sword since he was a child, and this was an exceptionally fine blade. Either the ronin had fallen a great distance from his former station, or he had been extremely lucky at scavenging some forgotten battlefield.

When the top reached the hilt of the sword, the man tilted the blade in the opposite direction and moved the top back to the sword’s tip, stopping it there. Then with a smart flip of the blade, he tossed the top in the air and caught it with the opposite side of the sword. He again guided the top down the length of the blade and back to the tip. The captain marveled at the man’s control of the sword and the steadiness of his hand. The man was so sure of himself that he even had time to look at the faces of the fascinated children sprinkled throughout the crowd around him. In fact, he almost seemed to be searching for someone.

When the top returned to the tip of the sword, the man gave another flip, but this time he caught the top on the narrow back of the sword blade. The crowd gave another gasp, and this time the captain joined them. With total nonchalance, the man guided the top down the narrow back of the sword up to the sword tsuba , or hilt, and back to the tip again. The crowd applauded wildly.

The man kept the top on the sword until it started to lose momentum and wobble, and he tossed it high in the air and caught it with one hand. The crowd gave him generous applause, and a few threw coins into a cloth spread at the man’s feet. The man dipped his head to acknowledge the applause, then he looked directly at the captain and smiled.

The captain was surprised that a street entertainer, even one who might have once been a samurai, would be so bold. He was used to townspeople bowing, then keeping their heads down and their eyes averted. He wondered if he should say something to the man, but something in the back of his mind kept nagging at him. He looked at the man’s face and knew he was not someone he had met formally, but there was something so familiar about him … the captain just couldn’t place him. He was turning this puzzle over and over in his mind when someone in the crowd shouted, “There’s Ieyasu-sama!”

Snapping to attention, the captain yelled, “Everybody down!”

The crowd fell to their knees, most putting their hands in front of them on the dirt in a proper kowtow. A few mothers called over to their children, gathering them to their sides and showing them the proper, respectful position to assume when in the presence of the Shogun. The captain nodded with approval, and took a look around to make sure that all of the crowd was showing proper respect. He saw, to his surprise, that the man with the tops had vanished.

Taking a quick glance to see if he could spot the man somewhere in the crowd, the captain then joined his men in kneeling, one knee on the ground in a proper military salute to a high superior. The man with the tops still bothered him, but he knew that if he thought about it long enough, he would eventually remember who the man was.