were extraordinary. In the Taiheiki, we get our first taste of junshi not as an uncommon, rare act, but
as something that is all but expected of a samurai whose lord has been defeated. The custom seems
to have achieved prominence with great rapidity, such that at the aforementioned Siege of Akasaka,
Kusunoki was able to fake the mass suicide of his men, and to present it as a reasonable story to his
enemies.
Notably, siege warfare is a constantly recurring theme in the Taiheiki. No sooner has
Kusunoki fled from Akasaka, than he has retaken it, ready for a second siege in the same place when
the Bakufu soldiers come after him once more. Later on in 1333, having escaped a second time, he is
hemmed in at still another fortress, Chihaya, a short distance to the south, supposedly outnumbered
a thousand to one. At Chihaya, Kusunoki continues to decimate the enemy with trickery. He sneaks
out under cover of darkness to place armoured dummies at the base of the wall, and then has his
men create a racket at dawn. This leads the besiegers to think that the imperial forces have sallied
forth for hand-to—hand combat; they rush to engage the dummies, discovering too late that they
have been had, just as heavy boulders rain down on their heads from the real soldiers, still safe
behind the walls. The enemy tries cunning tactics of its own, engaging 500 carpenters to build a
bridge, which they then lower across a gap between a ridge and Chihaya’s walls. This is dealt with in
an unsurprising manner set aflame by the defenders in a stirring scene, as the bridge collapses,
taking the attackers with it.
If the rules changed on engagement, armour and weapons, they also seemed to change on
respect. Common to many military traditions is the dehumanizing of the enemy. We have already
seen how the Emishi were regarded as subhuman until they were assimilated and how Chinese and
Koreans were all written off as “Mongols’. However, at times of conflict between samurai and
samurai, previous accounts have often been kind to both sides. The Tale of the Heike only had one
villain in the shape of Kiyomori, and he was arguably dead before the bulk of the battles were
fought. His shadow lurks in the background of the Genpei War as its true instigator, whereas the
impression is strongly suggested that both Minamoto and Taira are good folk, steered into conflict
by powers beyond their control. Not so in the Taiheiki, which often characterizes the men of the
imperial faction as true, loyal servants of the Emperor, and the forces of the Bakufu as corrupt, evil
usurpers.
Perhaps the chroniclers of the conflict felt able to do this because of the way that the
conflict was ended. A third side entered the fray, with behaviour that any other generation of
samurai would have found contemptibly treacherous. However, since the third side effectively won,
its behaviour has been refashioned and reinterpreted as an act of over arching, supreme loyalty.
‘Loyalty’, to a higher purpose, to the Emperor and not his underlings, is hence a constant refrain in
the Taiheiki because it is the only argument that permits the victors to finish their story with
any semblance of being on the moral high ground. Tiring of the wild goose chase against Kusunoki,
the Bakufu resolved to send an army directly after Go-Daigo himself, and to hence nip the Kenmu
Restoration in the bud by depriving it of an emperor to restore. The man they sent to do it was
Ashikaga Takauji (1305-58), another distant cousin of the Minamoto, and a veteran of the sieges of
Akasaka and Chihaya. Marching at the head of his army, Ashikaga waited until he was safely out of
Bakufu-friendly territory before announcing that he had no intention of attacking Go-Daigo. Instead,
he was prepared to declare his loyal service to Go-Daigo, and to prove it, he arrived in Kyōto and
killed the local Bakufu official.
Ashikaga was not the only turncoat. Realizing that many of the Bakufu’s soldiers were
loitering pointlessly in the fields around Chihaya Castle in the ongoing attempt to starve Kusunoki
out, and that the next biggest Bakufu army had just switched sides, yet another Minamoto
descendant, Nitta Yoshisada (1301-38) decided not only to declare for Emperor Go-Daigo, but also to
do so by marching on Kamakura itself. Nitta advanced on Kamakura in three columns, the first of
which was wiped out by strong Bakufu resistance. The others, however, approached Kamakura from
an unexpected direction, marching across the sands at low tide. Unsurprisingly, such an act of
betrayal required supernatural approval, and folktales of Nitta’s march have him praying to the Sun