Lacing patterns began to incorporate sigils and crests, samurai began to favour brightly coloured
battle-flags, and helmets began to gain distinctive headpieces. Even as the samurai assembled into
clans and houses and fought as part of great armies, each individual did all in his power to single
himself out among the crowd. This served another purpose for any observers, it would also be
immediately clear who was retreating. In making themselves easy to identify, the samurai pushed
themselves into a martial attitude that would brook no surrender.
The need for identity, and for ever more intricate armour led to another change in materials
from days of old. Where- as armour lacings had previously been made of leather, this material was
no longer deemed appropriate. It was only available in relatively short lengths, and, perhaps more
tellingly, in a limited number of colours. As samurai began to rely on ease of identification to others,
they began to favour silk armour lacings that could be dyed with more vivid colours.
One of the reasons for the delayed court response to Masakado’s insurrection was that his
was not the only one. An unrelated second ‘revolt’, this time in the west, also kept the court
occupied, although without quite the legendary status of Masakado’s epic insurrection. Fujiwara
Sumitomo c.893-941) was an administrator in Iyo province, a coastal region on the Inland Sea. As his
name implied, he was already part of the great courtly Fujiwara clan, although presumably a low-
ranking official with similar grievances about being posted so far from the pleasures of courtly life. In
939, a rival Fujiwara governor accused Sumitomo of plotting an insurrection, and prepared to head
to the capital to warn the court that Sumitomo had set up a signal system of watch fires designed
ahead of a rebellion. The accusation appears to have been well-founded, since Sumitomo managed
to overtake his rival en route, cut off his ears and nose, stole his wife and killed his children.
This rather surprising behaviour for a Fujiwara suggests a very different background.
Sumitomo was the great- nephew of a prominent Fujiwara regent, but his branch of the family had
fallen on hard times. Like Masakado, he was stuck out in the provinces with little hope of getting
closer to the capital. Sumitomo, however, was not in league with farmers-turned-soldiers, but with
fisherman-turned- pirates. Far from being a mere government appointee, Sumitomo had until
recently been the ‘chief of the pirates’, commander of a fleet of up to 1,000 ships that had preyed on
shipping in the Inland Sea. A government amnesty in 936, in which up to thirty separate bands of
pirates were allotted land in exchange for giving up their ways, seems to have been written up in
courtly records as a victory whereas it was probably more of a collection of protection money. The
‘pirates’, liable to have been the legitimate residents turning to crime amid the famines and
deprivations already reported in the 930s, only remained quiet for a while, before rising up again,
with Sumitomo at their head.
Although it is Masakado’s rebellion that gained all the attention from historians, it was
Sumitomo’s that was taken far more seriously by the court at the time. Masakado was based in the
Kanto region, still regarded as a distant vassal, whereas the Inland Sea. was still the heart of the
Japanese self-image. Western Japan was home to many prominent nobles, and many fiefs operated
by residents of the capital or their family. Notably, Sumitomo was also one of the courtiers’ own,
and treated in a different way to the provincial Masakado. Instead of sending an army to deal with
him, the court sent a proclamation, offering him a junior court rank if he stopped his predatory
ways. This only worked for a few months; if the government had hoped to set a thief to catch a thief,
leaving Sumitomo in charge of policing the activities of lesser pirates, the attempt failed. Instead, a
force was sent to the region to deal with Sumitomo with extreme prejudice, successfully enticing
one of Sumitomo’s most trusted lieutenants to defect, and using the information he offered to hunt
down and destroy Sumitomo’s fleet in 941. Justice caught up with Sumitomo two weeks later, when
he was apprehended and beheaded.
Masakado and Sumitomo were mere symptoms, and dealing with them did not remove the
underlying causes of their rebellion. There was, however, a century of relative peace after the
suppression of their insurrections. Re-sources had been assigned to local elites, and the prospect of
resisting the court grimly demonstrated to be a suicidal act. The turn of the eleventh century saw the
pinnacle of courtly life, best summarized today in the genteel cultural pursuits of the