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RAID
THE REVENGE OF
THE 47 RONIN
Edo 1703
STEPHEN TURNBULL
© Osprey Publishing • www.ospreypublishing.com
THE REVENGE
OF THE 47 RONIN
Edo 1703
STEPHEN TURNBULL
© Osprey Publishing • www.ospreypublishing.com
CONTENTS
INTRODUCTION
4
CHRONOLOGY
7
ORIGINS
8
The Glory that was Genroku
8
The Triumph of the Tokugawa
8
The Delicate Balance
10
The Dog Shogun
14
Asano Naganori
16
Kira Yoshihisa
17
The Incident in the Corridor of Pines
19
INITIAL STRATEGY
22
Challenge to the Ronin
22
In the Shadow of Soko
24
The Vengeful Imperative
28
THE PLAN
30
The Final Decision
30
The Great Deception
31
Troop Numbers
31
The Costume and Armour of the Forty-Seven Ronin
34
The Plan of Attack
38
The Final Dispositions
40
THE RAID
46
The Night Attack
46
The March to Sengakuji
59
Judgment and Punishment
63
The Immediate Aftermath
66
ANALYSIS
67
Reactions to the Ronin
67
The Forty-Seven Ronin in Art and Literature
70
Sites and Memorials
72
CONCLUSION
76
FURTHER READING
78
INDEX
80
© Osprey Publishing • www.ospreypublishing.com
INTRODUCTION
The revenge raid by the Forty-Seven Ronin of Ako was an incident that
turned samurai culture on its head. As any popular account will relate, a
young lord called Asano Naganori was taunted mercilessly by the greedy
and cunning Kira Yoshinaka. Goaded to the limit, Asano struck Kira with a
sword. As a result of the attack Asano was condemned to death, thus making
the 47 samurai retainers who remained faithful into impoverished
ronin
or
‘men of the waves’, a word implying that they had been cast adrift on the
ocean. Motivated solely by the principles of samurai honour and loyalty to
their late master, the Forty-Seven Ronin, as history now knows them
collectively, hatched a plot in complete secrecy and then, on a snowy night
in January 1703, launched a raid to take the life of the cowardly Kira
Yoshinaka. The Shogun, the ruler of Japan, utterly failed to recognize that
the samurai code of
bushido
(the way of the warrior) and the self-denying
tenets of Zen Buddhism had compelled them to seek revenge, and instead
condemned them all to death. Within days they all committed suicide,
earning thereby the respect and admiration of their contemporaries.
That is the popular version of the Raid of the Forty-Seven Ronin,
immortalized ever since through numerous plays, prints, novels and films.
The unfortunate thing about the above account, however, is that hardly a
word of it is true. The date was 1703 not 1702. Their victim’s name was
Yoshihisa not Yoshinaka. He was no coward. Greed and treachery were not
involved and he played almost no part in bringing about Asano’s death. Not
all of Asano’s 270 former retainers joined the plot or even sympathized with
it. Religion played almost no part in their deliberations. The secrecy involved
in their convoluted plot compounded the utter illegality and underhand
nature of their act, to which the Shogun responded correctly by invoking the
law of the land. The reaction by their contemporaries involved condemnation
in addition to admiration, with both the Forty-Seven Ronin and their late
lord being dismissed as cowards and a disgrace to the name of samurai.
Finally, instead of 47 loyal samurai there were (according to some
authorities) actually only 46, or maybe even 48. In fairness to the popular
4
© Osprey Publishing • www.ospreypublishing.com
Introduction
account, however, I can assure the baffled reader
that on the night the raid was launched it was
indeed snowing.
Up to the point when I undertook an extensive
study tour of the places associated with the Forty-
Seven Ronin, I shared fully and largely uncritically
in the concepts and images provided by the popular
version of the story, and in this I was not alone.
One of the compilers of the
Cambridge History of
Japan
, for example, in one of three references to
the incident, calls the Raid of the Forty-Seven
Ronin a ‘vendetta against a single wicked
bureaucrat’. This negative judgement of Kira
Yoshihisa’s character, together with the main
details of the story, were set out succinctly in the
first account of the raid to be published in the
English language. It was contained within a book
of 1822 entitled
Illustrations of Japan, consisting of
Private Memoirs and Anecdotes of the reigning
dynasty of the Djogouns, or Sovereigns of Japan
by Isaac Titsingh, where we read that the injustice
of Lord Asano’s death sentence ‘exasperated the
servants of the prince, so much the more since it
was Kozuke [i.e. Kira], who, by his repeated
insults, had caused the death of their master.’ Half
a century later, a similar but much better-known
and more influential account of the vendetta was to be contained within a
book published in 1871 entitled
Tales of Old Japan
, written by A. B. Mitford
(Lord Redesdale), one of the pioneers of Anglo-Japanese relations.
We now know that Titsingh and Mitford, in common with most of their
successors, were looking at the incident through a very large distorting lens.
This lens was provided by a play from the Japanese
kabuki
theatre that was
based on the raid and is usually referred to by the abbreviated title
Chushingura
(The Treasure House of the Loyal Retainers). It was first
produced in Edo (modern Tokyo) in 1748 and has never left the repertoire
since; in fact the National Theatre in Tokyo was due to stage a performance
of it shortly after my departure from Japan in the summer of 2010. This
version of the story, involving changes of names, dates and locations, is
universally recognized for what it really is: a classic drama based on an
unashamedly fictionalized account of an actual historical event; yet somehow
the overall impression of the nature and circumstances of the raid provided
by
Chushingura
has completely eclipsed the sober historical reality. To use
an analogy from English history: it is as if our total knowledge of Richard
III and our commemoration of him was based solely and completely upon the
fictionalized version contained within Shakespeare’s play. So, for example,
the popular physical appearance of the Forty-Seven Ronin derives almost
entirely from 19th-century woodblock prints that are based not on authentic
This statue of Oishi
Kuranosuke, the karo(chief
retainer) of the Ako branch
of the Asano han(domain),
greets visitors outside the
station of Banshu-Ako in
Hyogo prefecture. Oishi was
the leader of the Raid of the
Forty-Seven Ronin.
5
© Osprey Publishing • www.ospreypublishing.com
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