Yui Shōsetsu

Japanese rebel and military teacher

• Born: 1605
• Birthplace: Suruga Province (now Shizuoka Prefecture), Japan
• Died: September 1, 1651
• Place of death: Sumpu, Suruga Province (now Shizuoka, Shizuoka Prefecture), Japan

A noted teacher of military science beloved by his samurai students, Yui Shōsetsu staged an unsuccessful assault on the Tokugawa shogunate known as the Keian Incident. The rebellion was meant to highlight the plight of the rōnin, or masterless samurai, who had been robbed of their livelihood by the Tokugawa reorganization of Japan’s nobility.

Early Life

Yui Shōsetsu (yoo-ee shoh-seh-tsoo) was born to a samurai family in 1605 in Suruga province, which was situated on the southern coast of Honshu island, facing the Pacific Ocean. Suruga province was almost halfway between the old imperial capital of Kyōto to the west and Edo (now Tokyo), the new capital of the Tokugawa shoguns, to the east. Yui’s life would come to exemplify the conflict between medieval and Edo Japan.

Since 1603, Tokugawa Ieyasu had ruled Japan as shogun, officially in the name of the emperor, whom he reduced to a figurehead. In the year when Yui was born, Ieyasu officially resigned in favor of his third son, Tokugawa Hidetada, and moved his own court out of Edo to Sumpu, the capital of Suruga province. Until his death in 1616, Ieyasu kept residence in Sumpu, giving the town where Yui grew up an important position.

Because Yui was born in the samurai class, under the rules of feudal Japan he was destined to remain a samurai for life and to abide by the codes of conduct for his class. Since 1588, samurai had been the only men allowed to bear arms in Japan. Yui was educated in the bushidō code, a mixture of Zen Buddhism and Zhu Xi Confucianism imported from the Chinese in the twelfth century. Bushidō stressed a samurai’s absolute loyalty to his lord, the highest moral standards, and the necessity to live an exceptional life. When Yui was ten, the shogun promulgated the buke shohatto, or laws governing military (samurai) houses, and Yui received instruction in their precepts. His education included rigorous training in martial arts, archery, swordsmanship, and equestrian combat. As a teenager, Yui was given spiritual training, subjected to strict discipline, and taught to accept the inevitability of death with equanimity.

Life’s Work

Unable or unwilling to follow the traditional path and become a samurai in the service of a daimyo, or feudal lord, Yui was faced with limited choices as he entered adulthood. One option was to become a teacher. Education, especially in subjects considered related to the warrior’s life, was not considered work and was thus allowed to samurai. Yui became a student of Kusunoki Fuden, studying military arts with great success. After graduating, Yui opened his own school in Edo and taught military science.

Military science as understood in the Edo period of feudal Japan encompassed more than warfare. Traditional modes of fighting were part of the curriculum, which ironically excluded the modern European weapons such as muskets and cannons that had won the Tokugawa their position as shoguns. Besides strategy and tactics, Yui’s teaching included philosophy, religion, literature, and the arts. These subjects were considered essential for the comprehensive education of a samurai.

The teachings of Yui Shōsetsu soon became famous among the cultural and military elite of Edo. Even daimyo and senior vassals of the Tokugawa shogun, the hatamoto, became his students. As the third ruler of the dynasty, Tokugawa Iemitsu , consolidated the power of the shogunate, Yui taught in the capital and witnessed these developments firsthand. His students also provided him with topical information.

As shoguns, one of the greatest powers of the Tokugawa was the power to allocate the land to be ruled by the approximately 270 daimyos of feudal Japan. Immediately upon taking control of the shogunate, the Tokugawa used this power to reward their followers and to punish their opponents. From 1600 to 1650, the first three Tokugawa shoguns created 172 new daimyos, enlarged the domains of 206 others, and transferred 281 daimyos from one domain to another. However, 213 daimyos lost their domains or saw them significantly reduced.

In order to retain samurai under his command, a daimyo was required to possess a domain of at least 2,500 acres (1,012 hectares). When a daimyo lost his land, or lost enough to fall below this 2,500-acre minimum, he had to discharge all of his samurai. These discharged warriors became masterless samurai, or rōnin. With so much turbulence created by the Tokugawa redistribution of lands, increasing numbers of rōnin moved to Edo and roamed the streets of the capital. Often very poor because they neither were allowed to work nor had land or possessions of their own, the rōnin became desperate and sometimes molested the other citizens. Rōnin had high social status and prestige but very little material income or capital.

Many rōnin flocked to military schools, including Yui’s, and Yui considered ways to help these displaced samurai. One plan of Yui’s was to make his rōnin the samurai of daimyo Tokugawa Yorinobu of Kii province (now Wakayama prefecture). The rōnin ardently admired their teacher for this proposal, but the plan failed to materialize.

In 1651, shogun Tokugawa Iemitsu died and was succeeded by his ten-year-old son, Tokugawa Ietsuna. By this time, Yui Shōsetsu had become a close friend with a fellow teacher, Marubashi Chūya, himself a rōnin. To support himself, this expert with the samurai lance had opened a martial arts school and taught in Edo as well. The two teachers plotted a major public disturbance against the Tokugawa shogunate. Because their planned plot fell into the last year of the Keian era of the traditional Japanese calendar, the ensuing event is often called the Keian Incident in Japanese history.

Yui and Marubashi resolved to launch a massive attack. Whether their goal was actually to overthrow the Tokugawa regime or merely to demonstrate against the shogunate politics that had disenfranchised so many warriors is a question that has been debated among historians. Whatever the case, the conspirators were able to enlist the secret aid of the traitorous deputy commander of the shogun’s military arsenal, Kawara Jūrōbei. They planned to explode the facility, set fire to the city of Edo, kill senior ministers, and take over Edo Castle, where the boy shogun resided with his adult advisers. Close to the planned date of the attack, Yui moved back to Sumpu with ten handpicked rōnin. His plan was to launch a simultaneous attack, burning Sumpu and seizing the shogun’s shrine at Kunōzan, outside the city gates.

Most likely because Marubashi began talking about their plan in increasingly boastful terms, government informants learned of the attack in advance. They told senior councilor Matsudaira Nobutsuna, a loyal adviser to the late shogun. Matsudaira was nicknamed Chie Izu (clever Izu), a play on his noble title of Izu no Kami. Clever Izu acted immediately and decisively, bringing the Keian Incident to a quick end. He arrested Marubashi and thirty-three of his fellow plotters, including some of their male family members. The conspirators were interrogated and then executed on September 24, 1651.

Learning of the arrest and execution of the Edo rebels, Yui Shōsetsu committed suicide in Sumpu. Adding flames to the later controversy over the true goals of the rebels, Yui left behind a suicide note. In it, he claimed that the goal of his rebellion had not been to overthrow the Tokugawa shogunate. Instead, he said, his intention had merely been to call attention to the dire position of the rōnin.

Significance

As a teacher of military science, Yui Shōsetsu insisted that the proper place of the samurai was with a daimyo. He considered it an injustice to deprive samurai of this relationship. Whether his attempted rebellion, including the burning of two cities, was ethical remains debatable, especially from the point of view of modern standards. Yui, however, chose to act on his beliefs, and this endeared him to the populace.

Yui Shōsetsu almost immediately became a folk hero. Astonishingly, later Tokugawa shoguns did not object when he and his fellow conspirator Marubashi Chūya became the heroes of popular historical fiction in the late seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. His fate was turned into a famous Kabuki play as well, and his support for the roaming rōnin was represented favorably.

Rōnin launched another rebellion one year after Yui’s death in 1652, but Matsudaira “Clever Izu” quickly crushed it as well. Nevertheless, Yui’s planned plot and the later incident seem to have changed Tokugawa politics towards the daimyo. While the first three shoguns had taken away from disfavored daimyos a total of 2,700,000 acres (1,093,000 hectares) in fifty years, that figure dropped for the fourth shogun. Under Tokugawa Ietsuna, from 1651 to 1680, only 182,000 acres (74,000 hectares) were confiscated and reassigned. The figures crept up again under the next shogun (425,000 acres; 172,000 hectares), but the total number of Japan’s rōnin dropped significantly.

Bibliography

De Benneville, James. The Haunted House: More Samurai Tales of the Tokugawa. 2d ed. London: Kegan Paul, 2001. Historical fiction based on contemporary Japanese chronicles of the era that also features Yui Shōsetsu as a character. Illustrated.

Ikegami, Eiko. The Taming of the Samurai. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1995. Academic study of development of samurai culture. Chapter 4 deals with samurai in the Tokugawa shogunate and sheds light on the forces leading to Yui’s rebellion. Illustrated, notes, index.

Jansen, Marius. The Making of Modern Japan. Cambridge, Mass.: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 2000. Useful description of the Tokugawa state that reveals what Yui rebelled against; also provides background on the time in which he lived and his society, culture, lifestyle, and beliefs. Illustrated, notes, index, bibliography.

McClain, James. Japan: A Modern History. New York: Norton, 2001. First three chapters deal with the Tokugawa period and illuminate the lifestyle shared by men like Yui and his adherents; the work shows what drove rōnin to rebel and why the shogunate remained successful. Illustrated, maps, index.

Turnbull, Stephen. Samurai: The World of the Warrior. Oxford, England: Osprey, 2003. Richly illustrated book, brings to life the subjects of Yui’s military studies and his planned revolt.