Yamato Takeru, the Brave of Japan

Prince Yamato Takeru, the archetype of Japan’s long line of lonely, poignant heroes, started his career in an unedifying style by murdering his elder twin brother in the lavatory. According to The Record of Ancient Events, the Prince’s father, Emperor Keiko, summoned him one day and asked why his brother was no longer appearing at mealtimes. Regular attendance at the imperial board was a token of loyalty, and the Emperor now ordered the young Prince to reprimand his delinquent twin.

‘Five days went by, but still the elder brother did not come. His Majesty accordingly asked, “Why has your brother not appeared for such a long time? Can it be that you did not give him my instructions?” “I have already instructed him,” replied the Prince. “And how did you instruct him?”

“Early in the morning,” said the Prince, “when my brother went to the privy, I was lying in wait for him. I seized him, smashed him to pieces, tore off his limbs, wrapped them in a straw mat, and threw them away”.’

By any standards this was a severe penalty for missing some meals, and we are told that Emperor Keiko was shocked by his son’s ‘rough, fearless nature’. No doubt to prevent further mischief at Court, he despatched the impetuous youth to the southern island of Kyushu where he might put his zeal to better use by attacking the dissident Kumaso tribesmen.

The young man who burst on the scene with an act of such furious violence died fifteen years later on a solitary plain, a melancholy, romantic figure who, having been defeated in his last battle, had lost all desire to live. It is this final image of Yamato Takeru that has most appealed to the sensibility of the Japanese people and established him as an epic hero rather than his ‘rough, fearless nature’ as a boy or his subsequent military successes, which were frequently marred by trickery and vindictiveness.

The contrast between Yamato Takeru’s ferocity in his early career and his gentle, poetic quality towards the end confirms what we already know from a study of the chronicles: this many-faceted hero corresponds to no single historical personage but is a composite figure, of a type common in the antiquity of many countries, who became the centre of an entire cycle of legends.

The Chronicles of Japan gives his date of birth as a year corresponding to A.D. 72 in our calendar and describes his career during the following three decades as though he were an actual member of the imperial family who won a brilliant series of victories against the enemies of the Court until he was finally defeated in Omi Province and perished on Nobo Plain in the thirtieth year of the reign of Emperor Keiko. In fact, his story reflects the careers of numerous commanders who were sent from Yamato to subdue unreconciled tribes in Kyushu and the eastern provinces and who died during their campaigns.

The actual period is not the first but the fourth century A.D., the so-called ‘riddle century’ in Japanese history. It was a time of strife and disorder, marked by bitter fighting in Korea and by a concerted effort of the ruling clan, which had recently established itself in the Yamato region, to bring the population of the main islands of Japan under its control. From numerous tales and traditions that originated during this misty period, and from a gallimaufry of myths, poems, legends and Chinese literary influences, there evolved the figure of ‘the Brave of Japan’, who is presented in the chronicles as the greatest man of the period.

In some ways he is a standard folk hero that we can find in almost every culture on the boundary between legend and history. At the same time Yamato Takeru has a peculiarly Japanese appeal, and a study of his legend is a useful introduction to the mystique of the defeated hero. For this purpose we may piece together the accounts in the chronicles and present him as though he were a single person who actually lived and suffered and died some sixteen centuries ago.

The hero’s father, Keiko, was one of the semi-historical Emperors who reigned during the troubled period when the imperial family was consolidating its position as primus inter pares among numerous independent clans. He is listed as the twelfth Emperor of Japan (the present Emperor, Hirohito, who is theoretically his direct descendant, is the 124th); but like most of the early rulers he is a shadowy figure and though he is said to have reigned for sixty years and to have lived to the venerable age of 106, the chronicles have little to reveal about his character or his practical achievements.

The most remarkable feat credited to the Emperor Keiko is his marriage to his own great great-granddaughter. This genealogical tour de force (which incidentally suggests how much we can trust the chronicles in their facts about the fourth century) occurred when he took as wife a princess who was the great-granddaughter of his son, Yamato Takeru. Among Keiko’s eighty children were two male twins ‘born on the same day with the same placenta’. The Emperor, much impressed by this event, climbed on top of a mortar to announce it to the Court, and the twins were accordingly dubbed Ousu (Great Mortar) and Ousu (Little Mortar).

Prince Ousu turned out to be a disobedient lad, and we have already noted the stern punishment that brought his career to an end. Of the younger twin we are told that ‘while a child he was endowed with a brave spirit, and when he reached manhood he was of sublime beauty’; the future hero was enormously tall and strong enough - the hyperbole is Chinese- to lift a great tripod single-handedly.

At the age of fifteen Prince Ousu, having thoroughly alarmed Emperor Keiko by his unruly nature, was sent West to attack the Kumaso. The word Kumaso, like Emishi for early inhabitants of the eastern and northern provinces, was a general term designating certain backward groups of tribesmen. Though belonging to the same racial stock as the main Japanese population, they were concentrated in remote regions and had been separated from the main stream of cultural development for so long that they were regarded as aliens or aborigines who had to be forcibly subdued and brought under the civilizing control of the powerful Yamato clans; the campaigns against these rude, hirsute tribesmen started in the semi-legendary period of Yamato Takeru and continued for some four centuries until they had all finally been killed, pacified, or assimilated by about A.D. 800.

The hero’s first victory over the Kumaso exemplified the ‘successful’ part of his career, and I shall quote the full version contained in The Record of Ancient Events. Before setting out for the West, the boy-hero visited his aunt, the High Priestess of the Great Shrine at Ise, and she gave him a robe, a skirt, and a sword.

‘When he reached the house of the Brave of the Kumaso, he saw that it was surrounded by three ranks of warriors who had entrenched themselves in a pit dwelling by the wall. There was a great deal of noise and bustle in anticipation of a party that was to be held to celebrate the completion of the dwelling, and food was being prepared for the banquet. He wandered round the house, waiting for the day of the celebration.

When the time came, he unfastened his hair and combed it down over his shoulders in maidenly style. Then he put on his aunt’s robe and skirt and, having made himself look exactly like a girl, mingled with the women and entered the pit dwelling.

‘The two Kumaso chieftains were much impressed when they saw the maiden and invited her to sit between them as they continued their merry carousing. Prince Ousu waited until the festivities were at their height, when he pulled out the sword from the breast of his robe and, seizing the elder Kumaso by the collar, pierced him through the chest.

The younger Kumaso rushed from the room in terror. The prince chased him to the foot of the stairs, grabbed him from behind, and thrust his sword up his backside. Then the chieftain said, “Do not move your sword any further. I have something to say to you.”

‘The prince held him down on the floor and agreed to listen. Then the chieftain said, “Who may you be, my lord?” “I am the son of [the Emperor] who dwells in the palace of Hishiro and who rules the Great Land of the Eight Islands ... Hearing that you two Kumaso chieftains were disrespectful and refused to submit to his commands, His Majesty sent me here with orders to kill you.”

“Yes, this must be true,” said the chieftain. “For here in the West there are no strong, brave men except us two, but in the Great Land of Yamato there is one who excels us both in courage. I shall therefore present you with a name. Henceforth may you be known as Prince Yamato Takeru!”

‘As soon as the chieftain had finished speaking the prince killed him, slashing him to pieces like a ripe melon. From that time forward he was called Prince Yamato Takeru.’

His mission accomplished, the young prince set off for Yamato. On his way home he stopped in the western province of Izumo to subdue the local chieftain. For this purpose he resorted to a remarkably unattractive ruse. Having first pledged friendship with Izumo Takeru (the Brave of Izumo), and thus established a form of bond that is regarded as sacrosanct in any early society, he secretly manufactured an imitation wooden sword which he wore at his side.

One day he invited Izumo Takeru to go bathing with him in the river, and when they came out of the water he picked up his friend’s weapon, saying, ‘Let us exchange swords!’ This was a further pledge of comradeship and Izumo Takeru innocently put on the imitation weapon. The hero then invited him to cross swords in a friendly bout. The chieftain agreed but he was of course unable to unsheathe his wooden weapon and Yamato Takeru lost no time in slashing him to death. He celebrated this success by composing the first of his famous poems, a thirty-one syllable verse in which he mocked Izumo Takeru for carrying a sword without a blade.

When Yamato Takeru finally returned to the capital, exhausted from his campaigns, he was not greeted as a conquering hero or allowed to bask in his success, but almost immediately sent on a new mission, this time to subdue the Emishi in the eastern provinces. According to The Chronicles of Japan, this was because his elder brother, who by rights should have undertaken the next expedition, was so terrified by the prospect that he ran away and hid in the grass.

From the account in The Record of Ancient Events, however, one gets the impression that Emperor Keiko simply wanted to get his fiery young son out of the way as soon as possible. In any case, it is at this point in the narrative that the figure of Yamato Takeru assumes a different cast: the callous, unprincipled bully gives way to a solitary, ill-starred wanderer who, for all his ardent loyalism and achievements in battle, is destined for defeat and early death.

On receiving his marching orders, Yamato Takeru addressed the Emperor as follows: ‘It is only a few years ago that I subdued the Kumaso. Now it is the Emishi in the East who have rebelled. When shall we finally have peace in the land? I am weary of fighting. Yet I shall exert all my powers to quell this new rebellion.’ Emperor Keiko then gave his son a symbol of military command (a Chinese-type axe in The Chronicles of Japan account, a giant holly spear in the more Japanese version of The Record of Ancient Events ) and delivered a long harangue about the importance of subduing ‘the rough deities in the mountains, the malicious demons in the plains, who bar the highways and obstruct the roads, causing much suffering to our people’.

Clearly there was little distinction between these supernatural creatures (kami deities and oni demons) and the actual tribesmen who worshipped them; for the Emperor immediately went on to say, ‘Among the eastern savages the most powerful of all are the Emishi’. He described their primitive state of culture (‘men and women dwell together in promiscuity ... they dress in furs and drink blood’) and ordered Yamato Takeru to subdue them all so that the Imperial House might be preserved.

Before leaving for his final campaign, the hero once more visited the Great Ise Shrine. Keenly aware of his unjust treatment, he unburdened himself to the High Priestess, Emperor Keiko’s sister:

‘Is it because His Majesty wants me to die early? First he sent me to attack the wicked people of the West. Then hardly had I returned when he again sent me on a campaign, this time to subdue the wicked people of the twelve eastern districts, and he has not even provided me with troops. Why should he have done this if it is not that he wishes me to die at an early age?’

The High Priestess responded to her nephew’s cri de coeur by giving him the famous Kusanagi (‘grass mower’) sword and also a bag, which he was instructed to open in case of emergency.

On his way east, Yamato Takeru was betrothed to a princess in Owari Province, but decided not to marry her until he had carried out his mission for the Emperor. When he reached the eastern province of Sagami, a local chieftain deceived him with a story about a ferocious deity who dwelt in a marsh on the plain, and Yamato Takeru innocently set off for the attack. As soon as he was on the plain, the chieftain set fire to it; but the hero saved himself by mowing down the grass with the Kusanagi sword and by setting a ‘counter-fire’ with a flint that his aunt had providently placed in the bag.

Yamato Takeru’s next adventure is one of his most famous, no doubt because it is imbued with the type of pathos that has always characterized the hero in people’s imaginations. While crossing the straits between Sagami and Kazusa (present-day Tokyo Bay), he aroused the enmity of the Deity of the Straits, who promptly stirred up the waves and set his boat adrift. Princess Otota-chibana, who was accompanying him (and who is rather confusingly identified as his ‘empress’), knew exactly what must be done in such emergencies:

‘I will go into the water in your stead,’ she declared, ‘so that you, my prince, may carry out the sacred mission that has been entrusted to you and may return to His Majesty and report on it.’ Then eight layers of rush matting, eight skin mats, and eight silken carpets were spread on top of the waves, and the princess lay in them and sank into the water. This immediately calmed the sea, and Yamato Takeru was able to cross the bay. Seven days later Princess Ototachibana’s comb was washed ashore and carefully buried in a tomb.

In the earlier part of his career the hero was pictured as an unfeeling brute; now he has become a different person-a man capable of being profoundly moved by a woman’s selfsacrifice. ‘He was forever lamenting the death of Princess Ototachibana,’ says The Chronicles of Japan. ‘One day when he had climbed to the top of Mount Usuhi and was gazing towards the south-east, he sighed three times and said, “Alas, my wife!” Accordingly the provinces east of the mountains were named the Land of Azuma.’ (A tsuma.) 

The hero’s final encounters were not with the hairy Emishi but with a series of malignant local deities. It is as though he had now reached a stage where mere human enemies were unworthy of his powers. Entering the wild province of Shinano, he ascended a great mountain, ‘bravely making his way through the smoky mist’. When he reached the summit, he became hungry and sat down for a solitary snack.The god of the mountain took this opportunity to torment the prince and, changing himself into a white deer, came and stood before him. Yamato Takeru, though startled by this apparition, had the wits to pick up a clove of garlic that remained from his meal and hurl it at the deer, hitting the animal in the eye and promptly killing it.

This was the act of a true culture-hero: by slaying the beast Yamato Takeru saved all future travellers from the maleficent effect of the god’s breath, which in the past had always made it dangerous to cross the mountain. His encounter with the deer did not leave him unscathed, for he promptly lost his way and wandered about helplessly until a kindly white dog came and led him down the other side of the mountain.

Yamato Takeru now decided that the time had come to return to the capital and give the Emperor a report of his eastern expedition. On his way he stopped in Owari and married the princess; but there was little chance for connubial dalliance, since he was now informed about a fierce god who was entrenched on Mount Ibuki near Lake Biwa. In an access of hubris, he declared that he would subdue this particular deity with his bare hands, and he promptly set off by himself, leaving the invincible Kusanagi sword in his wife’s house.

When Yamato Takeru reached Mount Ibuki, the deity assumed the shape of a huge serpent (or, according to the account in The Record of Ancient Events, of a white boar ‘as large as a cow’) and lay across the road in front of him. Once again the hero was the victim of a ruse, since he was deluded into believing that the monster was not the actual deity but his messenger. A mere servant, he explained to the animal, was hardly worth the trouble of someone who had vanquished so many actual gods. Yamato Takeru then continued up the mountain. It was a fatal mistake. As The Record of Ancient Events points out with Teutonic precision, ‘This was not a messenger of the deity; it was the deity himself’. By addressing himself directly to this supernatural creature, Yamato Takeru had violated a strict taboo.

‘Then the god of the mountain raised clouds in the sky and produced a hail storm. The top of the mountain was covered with mist and the lower part shrouded in gloom. Unable to find the path, Yamato Takeru wandered about in confusion. Yet he forced his way onward through the mist and finally managed to make his way out.’

Yet the hero had been mortally damaged by the deity’s emanations. When he reached the foot of the mountain, he was still in a daze ‘as though he were a drunken man’. It is at this point in the story that The Record of Ancient Events reports the most striking of all Yamato Takeru’s remarks:

‘I had always felt in my heart that one day I would soar high up into the sky. But now my legs will not move properly and have become all wobbly.’

Recognizing that his ambitions had been thwarted and that he was now hopelessly earth-bound, the exhausted hero hobbled along, supporting himself with a stick. For a while he recovered his senses thanks to the magic waters of a spring at the foot of the mountain; but his illness (which a modern medical scholar has rather prosaically diagnosed as beri-beri) soon returned and, knowing that death was imminent, the young man did not even stop on his way through Owari to see his bride but pressed on for the capital, determined to make his last report to the Emperor in person.

He failed. On reaching the Plain of Nobo in northern Ise, he collapsed and, after reciting a final series of nostalgic poems, sent a farewell message concluding with the words:

‘I had hoped that the day and hour might come when I could report on my mission to Your Majesty, but my span of life has suddenly reached its end. Time passes as swiftly as a four-horse carriage flashing by a crack in the wall, and nothing will stay its course.

So now I must lie down alone on this wild plain without a single companion to hear my words. Yet why should I repine at the death of this body? My only regret is that I shall never again set eyes on Your Majesty.’

This was the end. He died at the age of thirty. On hearing the news, the Emperor was shattered. He could not eat or sleep, and spent his days in tears and breast-beating. He ordered that an imperial tumulus be built on the Plain of Nobo and that the hero be buried where he had died. The last part of the legend is perhaps the most remarkable. The following version is from The Chronicles of Japan:

‘Now Yamato Takeru was transformed into a white bird, and came out of the tomb and flew towards the Land of Yamato. The officials accordingly opened his coffin and, looking in, saw that the shroud was empty and the corpse had vanished.

Messengers were sent in pursuit of the white bird. It stopped first on Kotohiki Plain in Yamato, and so a tumulus was built there. Next the white bird flew to Kochi, alighting in the village of Furuichi, where another tumulus was built ... Finally it soared high into the sky. Nothing of the Prince remained to be buried except his robes and his Court cap.’

According to an eminent pre-war historian, the myth of the white bird reflects certain Taoist ideas about immortal spirits. No doubt it is also connected with beliefs about the magical power of white animals. Its main significance in the story of Yamato Takeru, however, is surely the image of flying and escape: the hero, thwarted in his dreams of‘soaring up high into the sky’, that is, of transcending the wordly limitations that lead to defeat and failure, finds eventual liberation in death.

This accords perfectly with the romantic character of Yamato Takeru in the second part of his career: the melancholy young hero who makes his way through the wild eastern provinces, intrepidly attacking hostile deities and tribesmen until finally he is overcome by the wiles of a mountain god and dies on a barren plain, ‘alone and palely loitering’, the victim of a typically romantic confrontation between fate and his own pride.

Yamato Takeru’s status as the great romantic hero of the legendary period is confirmed by his love of poetry, the indispensable art for men and women of sensibility throughout Japanese culture. For all the conventional limits of its form, the little Japanese poem with its rigid syllabic framework has been honoured as the supreme means of expressing deep emotion. The Japanese tragic hero, whose life is pitched at a higher emotional level than most men’s, will often reveal his most powerful feelings in verse, especially as his career races towards its culmination.

The tradition of farewell poems goes back to the country’s most distant past, and it is almost unthinkable that any Japanese hero, from Yamato Takeru in legendary times until the kamikaze pilots or Yukio Mishima in recent years, should go to his death without having first taken poetic leave of the world. For obvious reasons this verse is rarely of the highest quality (even Mishima’s staunchest admirers could sum up little enthusiasm for his farewell poems); yet, whatever such valedictions may lack in elegance and prosodic skill, they will always reflect the emotional sincerity that is the mark of the defeated hero.

With one unendearing exception, Yamato Takeru’s poems belong to the romantic part of his career, which started with his departure for the eastern provinces. Shortly after the hero’s lament for the drowned princess, we come upon an incident that exemplifies his respect for the ancient art of versification. Yamato Takeru had reached the land of Kai and, having evidently lost track of the time, he asked how long had elapsed since he passed Tsukuba (a mountainous district in Hitach Province). He worded the question as the first lines of a poem, and the answer was provided in perfect metrical form (5-7-7 syllables) by an old man who was tending the fire. The hero was so delighted by this humble labourer’s show of poetic dexterity that he appointed him to be Local Chieftain of the East.

Among the romantic verse attributed to Yamato Takeru, the following lines are said to have been composed during his final illness when he discovered a sword that he had left under a pine tree. The personification of the tree, an unusual device for early Japanese poetry, evokes the hero’s forlorn state of mind during his final days:

On the Cape of Otsu

Directly facing Owari,

There you stand,

Oh, lonely pine tree!

Oh, my brother!

Were you a man,

Oh, lonely pine,

I would gird you with a sword,

I would give you robes to wear.

Oh, lone pine tree!

Oh, my brother!

By far the most famous of Yamato Takeru’s poems are the final ‘homesick songs’ (kuni-shinobi uta), of which the following are the first and the last:

Ah, Yamato, fairest of all lands,

Girt with mountains like a many-layered hedge of green!

How dear to me is the beauty of Yamato!

Alas, the precious sword

That I left by the maiden’s bed!

Ah, for that sword of mine!

‘As soon as he had finished these poems,’ reports The Record of Ancient Events, ‘His Highness died.’

It is above all the aura of failure and tragedy surrounding his end that establishes Yamato Takeru, among the multifarious figures of myth and legend, as the model hero. The only other character in Japanese pre-history whose individuality emerges as strongly is the tempestuous windstorm deity, Susanoo no Mikoto, who, owing to his unruly nature and abominable conduct, was disgraced among the gods and banished from the Plain of High Heaven. Susanoo, too, is pictured as an unhappy, isolated figure. Despite his wilfulness and bluster he has an unmistakable sincerity and even a certain outrageous charm; all this, combined with his poignant role as a wandering outcast, would have tended to establish him as the perfect Japanese un-hero. He was disqualified, however, by having flagrantly violated certain basic rules of society and, worse still, by having ended his career safely and successfully ensconced in his great Izumo palace among numerous wives and broods of deity-children.

Yamato Takeru, on the other hand, had the advantage of capping his early success with failure when, after an uninterrupted series of victories, he was eventually defeated on Mount Ibuki and died before he could return to Yamato for his last report to the Emperor. Here he sets the pattern for great historical figures like Yoshitsune and Saigo Takamori whose early triumphs led to glorious fiasco.