Cultural Imprints: War and Memory in the Samurai Age

Introduction

Remembering the Samurai in Medieval and Early Modern Japan

ELIZABETH OYLER AND KATHERINE SALTZMAN-LI

This volume brings together the work of an interdisciplinary group of scholars to address the impact of war and war memory during Japan’s samurai age, the period of time lasting from the establishment of the first shogunate as a result of the Genpei War (1180–1185) through the fall of the Tokugawa shogunate in 1868. We offer studies of cultural imprints, which we define as traces holding specifically grounded historical meanings that persist through time. Our selection of imprints includes literary works, artifacts, performing arts, and documents that were created by or about the samurai. We examine them for what they can suggest about how thinkers, writers, artists, performers, and samurai themselves viewed warfare and its lingering impact at various points over the seven hundred years during which they dominated political and cultural spheres. In spite of the historical reality of many wars throughout the medieval era (thirteenth through the sixteenth century) and none during the Tokugawa period (seventeenth through most of the nineteenth century, also known as the early modern period), the significance of war, experienced directly or through re-presentations in a variety of forms, cut across temporal demarcations within and between this divide. By drawing attention to specific but varied cultural practices related to war and memory, we highlight the overarching centrality in the cultural realm of representing and remembering samurai and the experience of warfare, its traumas and its glories. The chapters also gesture toward the formation of national identity in the modern age: samurai, banned as a class from the advent of the modern era, were nevertheless newly mobilized in the modern imaginary as a coalescing factor in the development of the Japanese nation-state. That they could play such a role rested on the very cultural centrality we claim for them and the widely shared notions regarding samurai that had developed over the samurai age.

Our focus on war and war memory places the chapters of this volume in conversation with the field of memory studies, in which scholars study acts of remembrance and forgetting, together with their causes and consequences. In examining specific imprints, we address memorializing and memory itself in their capacity for sense-making, identity formation, healing, and renewal. As we know, war trauma (all trauma) is not coterminous with its causal event. Its effects persist on trajectories through history, leaving a long-lasting wake in human memories that carry down through generations with social and political agency, and which often become memorialized in the kinds of artifacts explored in this volume. These artifacts are both a foundation and the products of what Maurice Halbwachs identifies as collective memory, a shared perception of the past that is reconstructed on the basis of the present. He emphasizes the importance of collective frameworks … the instruments used by the collective memory to reconstruct an image of the past which is in accord, in each epoch, with the predominant thoughts of the society.¹ What we call cultural imprints are components of these frameworks. Each instantiation, arising from a set of circumstances at a particular moment, gives shape to the past in service to the present, reflecting or responding to gradually solidifying ideas about the samurai during the long time frame in which power was consolidated under successive shogunates, each led by the victors of war.

Animated in part by what memory studies has brought to cultural historiography, we offer a rethinking of the long-term historical and cultural significance of the samurai. We examine how experiences of war are presented through our imprints, each a signpost in the ongoing formation of a collective memory with Japan’s warriors at its center. Jan Assmann addresses the cultural dimension of collective memory, what he terms cultural memory. Examining and defining cultural memory means investigat[ing] the conditions that enable [the text of memorable events] to be established and handed down. It draws our attention to the role of the past in constituting our world through dialogue and intercommunication, and it investigates the forms in which the past presents itself to us as well as the motives that prompt our recourse to it.² We explore such forms and motives in this volume, as well as what Assmann describes as the effects of the circulation of cultural memory, disseminat[ing] and reproduce[ing] a consciousness of unity, particularity, and a sense of belonging among the members of a group.³ Subjective responses figure and reconfigure memory, adding new layers according to changing circumstances without always erasing the old, and out of personal memories, group narratives arise.

The process by which individual memories of war contribute to group narratives has been traced by anthropologist Efrat Ben-Ze’ev, who has studied veterans’ memories of the 1948 Palestine war in relation to the national narrative.⁴ She stresses that individual memories differ in nature and purpose from national narratives, but that social cohesion is formed when singular narratives join together in various configurations and are transmitted over time. This process, also evident over the course of the samurai age, is not always organic but can also be directed through memory creation or revision, as some of our chapters highlight. While samurai behavior and values, transmitted through cultural production based in war memory, became crucial elements in the development of a national Japanese identity in the modern era, war-related cultural production created collectivity and group formations in earlier periods as well, as many of our chapters demonstrate.

Even as we argue for the long samurai age, we aim to break down the ahistorical, monolithic idea of the warrior through an examination of the changes and iterations of samurai existence over time as expressed by members of the warrior class itself, as well as by nonwarrior members of society. Interdisciplinarity is an important means toward this effort: gathering scholars from several fields who employ different methodologies brings in a range of perceptions that cut away at uniformity, but also allow us to argue for a long time frame of historical and cultural significance of warrior activity and sensibilities as carried out under fluctuating historical circumstances. In the early medieval era samurai referred to a small segment of fighting men who were also identified by other generally analogous terms (musha 武者, mononofu or bushi 武士, tsuwamono 強者). They were also often described in early tales as men following the ways of the bow and arrow (yumiya no michi 弓矢の道) or masters of the twinned arts of war and letters (bunbu ryōdō 文武両道). In the Tokugawa period samurai was an official status within the fuller social organization. The term samurai therefore can be applied to men in several situations, and the chapters in this volume draw attention to the particularities of when and by whom the term is employed, and to what effects.

The scope of materials focused on samurai, and the significance of the warrior to collective identity and cultural production—mutually formative of each other—increased during the seven hundred years we examine. Over time, cultural expressions and records that originally concentrated on specific memories and commemoration in a religious context for individual war dead shifted to include the perceived experiences and challenges of warrior life that were increasingly cast in a shared humanity: by the mid-Tokugawa period a great variety of cultural practices and products paradoxically presented relatively consistent ideas about samurai conduct and social place and disseminated conceptions that became widely recognized. Borrowing from Assmann, we might say that our cultural imprints are constituents of that body of reusable texts, images, and rituals specific to each society in each epoch, whose ‘cultivation’ serves to stabilize and convey that society’s self-image.⁵ Preceding the relatively fixed image of the samurai in the modern era—conveyed largely through new media, particularly film, often under nationalistic impulses that made good use of traditional values of loyalty, do-or-die bravery, and unquestioned commitment—was the complexity of samurai identities in the samurai age and the cultural articulations through which ideas of the samurai were formed.

The Samurai

Men with specialized expertise in the military arts in Japan predate the samurai age by centuries. From earliest times, warriors bore arms in the name of and in service to a superior, and they appear in chronicles from the eighth century as protectors of the throne and subjugators of threats at the realm’s peripheries. Often called on to exercise these important duties, they came to the fore as a recognizable segment of society in the latter half of the Heian 平安 period (794–1185), when they were increasingly employed to suppress insurrections in the realm’s hinterlands and at its borders. They were, in the main, from the middle or lower ranks of the aristocracy, and they filled provincial government roles, including governors and officials serving under them. As representatives of the central government in sometimes quite distant locales, provincial administrators were expected to keep order in the territories they oversaw, as well as ensure the safe transport of people and goods through those territories. Over time, these provincial responsibilities allowed certain families to build economic and geographic bases and rise to prominence as military clans. In the mid-tenth century, two men holding such positions led insurrections near the edges of the realm: Fujiwara no Sumitomo 藤原純友 in the western maritime provinces on the inland sea and Taira no Masakado 平将門 in the eastern provinces. They were put down by men of similar rank, in service to the emperor. A little over one hundred years later, warriors again clashed at the northeast extremity of the realm, and these clashes were brought to conclusion in favor of the throne by members of one of the most powerful of the military families, the Minamoto 源. These conflicts were early signs of changes to come in the status of warriors, and they also presaged the eventual winners and losers in the battles that ended the Heian period and led to the samurai age.

By the middle of the twelfth century, two families, the Taira and the Minamoto, dominated the role of the central government’s enforcers, and when succession disputes rocked the imperial line in 1156 (the Hōgen Rebellion) and then again in 1159 (the Heiji Rebellion), members of these clans were called on to support both sides. The Taira consistently chose the winning side and rose to the highest status as maternal relatives to the sitting emperor, causing resentment among longstanding aristocrats. As tensions swelled, those aristocrats threw support behind the Minamoto, resulting in Japan’s first major civil conflict, the Genpei War (1180–1185). The outcome was the definitive defeat of the Taira and the establishment by the victorious Minamoto no Yoritomo 源頼朝 (1147–1199) of his shogunal headquarters in Kamakura, a small seaside village at the time, some three hundred miles from the capital city (modern-day Kyoto). The establishment of the shogunate led to a system of bifurcated government, with the shogunal office and its samurai retainers increasingly taking on administrative duties, especially in the provinces. In one form or another, this system would dominate the political landscape of Japan until 1868, marking the boundaries of the samurai age, although Minamoto control ended with the generation following Yoritomo.

From Yoritomo’s time, military rulers took great interest in cultural matters, both material and intangible. Yoritomo sponsored the rebuilding of Tōdaiji 東大寺, among the oldest and most prominent temples in the ancient capital of Nara, which had been destroyed during the Genpei War. Numerous new temples were constructed around his headquarters at Kamakura and elsewhere. He and his successors also nurtured strong ties with the aristocracy via traditional cultural practices, studying poetry and painting under the tutelage of established masters from the capital and learning the literary canon. At the same time, both aristocrats and warriors began to embrace performing arts originating in rural areas. Among these were narrative arts associated with recounting the Genpei War, a subject of inherent political and cultural import to the Kamakura shogunate. War tales (gunki monogatari 軍記物語) flourished during the first centuries of warrior domination. The best known today is Heike monogatari 平家物語 (Tale of the Heike), which narrates the rise and fall of the Taira clan during the late 1100s, and in which warrior vocation and encounters, on the battlefield and off, became the subjects of lyrical paeans and memorable stories. Other war tales closely connected to Tale of the Heike took form over the course of the Kamakura 鎌倉 and Muromachi 室町 periods, including Gikeiki 義経記 (Tale of Yoshitsune) and Soga monogatari 曽我物語 (Tale of the Soga Brothers). These tales, consisting of multiple variants of both oral-performative and written provenances, not only presented the first artistic descriptions of warriors but also set a foundation for later cultural definitions of the samurai. Several of the chapters in this volume address material rooted in the war tales, particularly the chapters that focus on the performing arts by Alison Tokita, Katherine Saltzman-Li, and the chapters on the noh play Tomonaga by Monica Bethe and Tom Hare.

One function of the Tale of the Heike and other war tales was to serve an elegiac role, preserving the memory and soothing the spirits of the war dead. Proper care of these spirits was essential for a society holding a general concern about the possible destructive intentions of malevolent spirits toward the living. Within the religious context, foreshortened lives raised the possibility of posthumous regret or anger that required appeasement, even beyond the usual placation practiced for any dead, resulting in war tales and other artistic forms of memorialization. These memorializing genres and religio-cultural practices and beliefs—including those underlying many noh plays—contributed strongly to the early formation of warrior identity, celebrating and commemorating the individual, but always in terms of his role as an actor in larger webs of culture and community.

The thirteenth through sixteenth centuries continued to be rocked by military conflict. A military clash between emperor and shogun (the Jōkyū Disturbance, 1221), and two attempted invasions from the continent by the Mongols (1274 and 1281) dominated the thirteenth century. The fourteenth century was equally momentous: the Kamakura shogunate fell in the third decade, to be replaced by a branch family of the Minamoto, the Ashikaga (who established their power base in the Muromachi district of Kyoto, giving rise to the name of the period during which they ruled), and a rift between branches of the imperial family led to nearly sixty years of competing imperial courts (1336–1392)—the only such occurrence in Japan’s imperial history—and sporadic warfare. War tales chronicling the events of this period, including Jōkyūki 承久記 (Record of the Jōkyū Disturbance) and Taiheiki 太平記 (Chronicle of the Great Peace), emerged and developed through interaction with tales of earlier conflicts and other records. The multiple variants and long period of development for all of these works led to mutual and complex lines of influence among them, a topic explored by Elizabeth Oyler in this volume.

During this time, warriors, and particularly the heroes from war tales, also appeared prominently in other medieval narrative and performance traditions, including setsuwa 説話 (anecdotes), legends, noh drama, and the narrative performing art known as kōwakamai 幸若舞, whose repertoire derives from Tale of the Heike and other war tales. Noh, kōwakamai, and recitation of the Tale of the Heike enjoyed the patronage and often participation of members of the warrior class; noh, in particular, owes its rise to prominence in large part to the patronage of the third Ashikaga shogun, Yoshimitsu 義満 (1358–1408). Under the patronage of ensuing generations of Ashikaga shoguns and other elite samurai, these arts commemorating warrior experience gained cultural status. At the same time, the war tales were carried through the archipelago by storytellers or troupes of performers and as such were accessible not only to the elite but to all levels of audience in even the furthest reaches of the realm. They contributed to what Barbara Ruch termed Japan’s first national literature, a body of narratives shared across social groups and geographic locales.⁶ Medieval representations reflect a broad range of portrayals of warrior behavior, but in general they lament the irreconcilable situation warriors faced on the battlefield: taking life is a Buddhist sin, but it is the inevitable duty of the man born to a military house.

By the late fifteenth century, the country had fallen again into civil war, with powerful warlords based in provincial locales vying for power. Known as the Warring States period (Sengoku jidai 戦国時代), the iconic warlords and battles of the sixteenth century loom large in cultural memories of the samurai age. In the latter part of the sixteenth century, three powerful warlords, the three great unifiers, Oda Nobunaga 織田信長 (1534–1582), Toyotomi Hideyoshi 豊臣秀吉 (1537–1598)—a key figure in chapters in this volume by Marimi Tateno and Andrew Goble—and Tokugawa Ieyasu 徳川家康 (1543–1616), were able to rally large armies to their causes. Military dominance by the Tokugawa clan at the end of the sixteenth century finally brought the Warring States period to a close.

Early in their tenure, the Tokugawa established a social hierarchy that defined a specific and superior status for samurai as a class, a new condition in the formation of samurai identity for both the samurai themselves and those of other classes with whom they coexisted. Tokugawa-period samurai led oddly contradictory lives; they existed as idle martial men meant for action but with no chance to act. The period is marked by attempts to come to terms with this contradiction and to find purpose and place in the new order; an early example is explored in the chapter by Luke Roberts. Placed at the top of the political and social hierarchy, warriors no longer needed to exercise their primary function and peacetime turned many of them instead into bureaucrats and men of culture. In spite of, or as a result of, the legal freezing of social mobility, political thinkers like Ogyū Sorai 荻生徂徠 (1666–1728) pushed for the ancient Confucian idea of identifying and relying on men of virtue and talent. While his concern was largely with governance and thus with forming the minds and outlook of his samurai-class followers, his promotion of relatively open doors based on talent had an important cultural effect as artistic and social circles were expanded beyond an individual’s narrow rung on the hierarchy to include men with similar interests and talents gathered in like-minded and shared pursuits. Diversity of backgrounds and diversity of interests became a hallmark of cultural circles, resulting in remarkable cross-fertilization of creative output.

By the end of the first century of Tokugawa rule, Kyoto and its exclusive aristocracy were losing their cultural preeminence. In the late Heian period, high-ranking warriors had begun to adopt Kyoto court customs and practices, but the most significant new products of medieval culture—noh drama, renga poetry, extended oral narrative—had found initial patronage from the warriors themselves. The rate of artistic change and development, and the expansion of those involved in artistic production and consumption, picked up dramatically with Tokugawa peace, expressed through a dizzying succession of variations on artistic form and content in literature—one such genre of fiction is explored in the chapter by William Fleming—the performing arts, and also in the visual arts, especially with the advent of woodblock prints as well as the formal and decorative attention given to practical-use objects.

The number of new urban centers grew rapidly, with Edo, the city of the Tokugawa rulers and their government, as the most significant in size and importance. In the early eighteenth century, only about one hundred years after it began to transform from a village into one of the world’s biggest and most sophisticated urban centers, Edo had a population of around one million. Along with Edo itself, there were hundreds of castle towns spread across the country. These regional seats of power, many with populations in the tens of thousands, were home to daimyo, samurai lords, and their retinue of retainers. Daimyo were also required to maintain mansions in Edo and to make the journeys back and forth from domain castle to Edo mansion with their large entourage of retainers, typically living alternate years in their domain and in Edo (with their wives and heirs remaining in Edo while they were away at the domain castle). Not only did this famous system, known as sankin kōtai 参勤交代, contribute to the stability of Tokugawa power, but it also led to other notable achievements of the period: the development of an extensive road system and infrastructure to facilitate the movement of the daimyo groups and others traveling for various reasons and the change from an agriculture-based economy to a monetary one that could support the commercial culture that grew in cities and along the roads that connected them. The networks of movement between centers large (Kyoto, Edo, Osaka), medium-sized (castle towns), and small (roadside villages, agricultural hamlets, and market towns along the way) furthered the effects of the peripatetic narrators of medieval Japan. From national literature to the formation of a national culture, an awareness of community on the largest level began to form.

With reunification by Tokugawa Ieyasu in the early seventeenth century and the secure position mandated for samurai as a class, the fashioning of the samurai took new turns, in both the hands of those with the right to call themselves samurai and those of the newly emergent urban classes with whom they interacted in a world of social stratification but cultural collaboration. The Buddhist framework and religious ideology that governed the presentation of samurai lives in medieval works gave way to the conditions of popular culture—continually morphing reiterations of familiar material, secular and often playful, willing and eager to poke fun. Genres, creators, and audiences expanded, and the construction of samurai images proceeded through the Tokugawa-period centuries in an interplay of self-image and image, with contributions from both the demobilized men themselves and from those who bought, perused, and contributed to the creation of the various materials out of which an enduring image of the samurai emerged.

Volume Organization and Contributions

The chapters in this book take up moments in the long history of samurai rule and cultural production during the samurai age. They revolve around the two major crises or political and social alterations of the seven hundred years that we demarcate: first, the late twelfth-century Genpei War and the institutionalization of samurai rule in its aftermath, marking the start of the samurai age; and second, the sixteenth- to seventeenth-century establishment of a final, long-lasting shogunate after an intense century of warfare. Four chapters (Oyler, Tokita, Bethe, Hare) directly address practices that developed and were prevalent between these two temporal points, all of them related to memorializing the Genpei War and responding to beliefs in its potential for lingering harm. Three chapters (Goble, Tateno, Roberts) address the second major transition point, from medieval warfare into Tokugawa peace. The remaining two chapters (Fleming, Saltzman-Li) look to war from the comfort of the Tokugawa period, when references to earlier wars and samurai lives gave rise to new communal definitions, largely through popular culture and within radically altered social conditions.

The chapters are arranged to move thematically rather than simply chronologically in an effort to emphasize threads linking disparate moments, presentational modes, and ways in which a present is understood in relation to the past. We begin with two chapters addressing topics related to Toyotomi Hideyoshi, the second of the three great unifiers at the end of the Warring States period and a man of epic ambitions and eclectic tastes. Next is a chapter that focuses on early Tokugawa-period samurai, who sought new self-definitions by looking back to the period of warfare in which Hideyoshi played such an important role. Two chapters then examine literary works structured around war, one in the lyrical language of medieval Japan and one from the vibrant literary world of the Tokugawa period. Finally, four chapters consider war and memory in the performing arts.

Some chapters examine similar material but from different perspectives; in other cases, a topic stands out for its unique contribution to our thesis regarding the shaping influence of both actual and perceived warrior activity and the power that war memories had in forming collective identities over a large portion of Japanese history. The questions of who circulates whose memories, and with what intended meanings, are thus at the center of this volume. We look for the who and why of each imprint that we examine, keeping in mind that these questions serve several goals: from the illumination of specific practices and objects to an understanding of the ramifications of knowing what is told and what is not. The following brief summaries of the volume contributions are offered to enable readers to begin to engage with these goals.

Andrew Goble’s chapter, "Memento Mori: Mōri Warriors, Manase Physicians, and the New Medico-Cultural Nexus of the Late Sixteenth Century," focuses on documentary evidence, and particularly correspondence, to elucidate the close and multifaceted relationship between the Mōri, a powerful warrior family, and the Manase family of medical practitioners. Members of each served together on Hideyoshi’s military campaigns and otherwise built up the best-attested relationship between warriors and cultural figures of their age. The chapter reveals important ways in which warrior political and military power were connected to the cultural sphere of medical learning and medical practitioners. Highlighted Manase figures likened governing to healing and otherwise took part in the nonmedical ambitions of their high-placed Mōri patients. In drawing attention to personal communications, Goble illustrates a human dimension of Hideyoshi’s campaigns and the ways individuals positioned themselves and their families—with an eye toward an uncertain future—at this pivotal historical moment.

In Hideyoshi and Okuni’s Kabuki: Memories Preserved in a Screen Painting, Marimi Tateno draws attention to the well-known screen Okuni Performing Kabuki, an important source for understanding the early years of kabuki performance. Tateno’s focus is not on the performance itself, but rather on the subject of the screen, its intended viewer, and how it was meant to be viewed. Depicting an audience composed of both commoners and the social and political elite, Tateno focuses on two viewing boxes, one that accommodates a man and three women. She joins other scholars in proposing Hideyoshi as the male figure, even though the event postdates his death, and she identifies the other figures in the boxes as members of the imperial family and their attendants. In situating Hideyoshi in relation to members of the imperial family, and in portraying him as a patron of emerging arts, the screen’s true function, she proposes, was memorialization. She explores the significance of the warlord-as-aristocrat Hideyoshi in the cultural memory of the very early Tokugawa period, anticipating the complex engagement with the warrior past that will appear time and again in Tokugawa-period cultural artifacts of samurai culture.

Luke Roberts examines one warrior domain’s response to Pax Tokugawa in Finding Origins and Meaning in the Warring States, a study of the ways in which the battles that brought an end to the Warring States period were remembered in Tosa domain over the Tokugawa period. Roberts discusses a body of writings from Tosa, particularly by partisans of the Chōsogabe and Yamauchi clans, that record or investigate clan histories of the sixteenth-century Unification era. Marking three stages in documenting clan relationships to that final period of pre-Tokugawa warfare, he finds complex motivations behind the creation and content of these discourses that illuminate the politics of war memory for peacetime samurai of the Tokugawa period.

In Plotting War during the Great Peace: The Uses of Warfare in Late Edo Tales of the Strange, William Fleming explores the specter of war and its trauma underlying kidan 奇談 (tales of the strange), a genre of fiction dating from the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. Focusing particularly on the portrayal of warriors and warfare in this genre centered on the eerie, he argues that while late Tokugawa-period historical fiction possesses a complicated, multivalent relationship with the past, its authors were closely attuned to contemporary political concerns. The uncanny in kidan provided a vehicle for exploring the uncertainties of the present, while highlighting the current era of peace in which the strange was made reassuringly distant.

The uneasy relationship between a past and present sundered by warfare, and the various forms memorialization of the past might take, are again the subjects of Elizabeth Oyler’s Ghosts along the Road: War Memory and Landscape in Medieval Narratives, a discussion of an early medieval travelogue, Kaidōki 海道記 (Record of a Journey Along the Eastern Sea Route, 1223). Although Kaidōki—part pilgrimage record, part memorial—has long been recognized as an important allusive referent for the Tale of the Heike, this chapter extends the consideration beyond traditional literary allusion to emphasize how a realm fractured by civil conflict is restructured in an early literary text addressing travel through formerly peripheral but suddenly meaningful landscapes.

In Narrated and Danced Memory of War and Resignation: The Role of Musical Delivery, Alison Tokita explores the musical substyles that enhance storytelling in the narrative arts collectively known as katarimono, particularly the medieval musical narrative genres of Heike recitation and kōwaka danced ballads, but also in later Tokugawa-period genres. The narration of war-related content and war memory in these genres is supported dramatically and affectively by musical formulae and musical styles that combine both vocal and instrumental delivery. Tokita discusses styles related to Heike recitation that have persisted over time and that have been adapted to different performance genres, exploring the proposition that the formulae and musical substyles employed for specific kinds of narrative content, in this case content related to war, enhanced the memorability of the narratives and their impact on listeners.

In Performing Trauma and Lament: Gendered Scenes of Samurai Anguish on the Eighteenth-Century Kabuki Stage, Katherine Saltzman-Li looks at two of the same performance sections discussed by Tokita, monogatari and kudoki, as they were adapted for kabuki. As found in puppet-derived jidaimono (period plays) of the mid-eighteenth century, monogatari and kudoki dramatize the extreme consequences of samurai action and duty resulting from the unbending codes that characterize the conditions for kabuki samurai-class heroes. She examines the role of memory in these important eighteenth-century scenes and the gendered reactions to terrible choices and circumstances arising from past events, also addressing further developments in the nineteenth century.

An heirloom robe held by the Kanze troupe of noh actors is the focus of Monica Bethe’s In Memorandum: Dragonflies and Drums. The robe was purportedly worn by the fifteenth-century Kanze troupe leader On’ami in connection with a 1443 performance of the warrior play Tomonaga dedicated to the repose of the recently deceased shogun Yoshikatsu 義勝. The play includes an enactment of the Kannon senbō repentance rite, and since On’ami’s time, the robe has been used exclusively for the variant performance of this rite (this variant is also discussed in chapter 9). Bethe situates the robe within its nexus of meanings: originally an elegant warrior costume, it was