Forty-Seven Samurai: A Tale of Vengeance & Death in Haiku and Letters

By Hiroaki Sato

• the subject of the book is one of the most famous true samurai revenge tales in Japanese history, and was in 2013 made into a Hollywod movie with Keanu Reeves


• author Sato is well known to readers of Japanese literature and samurai history and has been called "“the pre-eminent translator of Japanese poetry in our time"


• tales of samurai loyalty and bushido are evergreen with American readers


• Sato's fresh combination of history, poetry, cultural analysis, and fictional narrative is a thoroughly new way of approaching a story that is already known to Western readers


• fits right into Stone Bridge's community of readers interested in Japanese culture and history

• Language: English
• Publisher: Stone Bridge Press
• Release date: Nov 26, 2019
• ISBN: 9781611729382

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Published by

Stone Bridge Press

P. O. Box 8208, Berkeley, CA 94707

tel [phone] • [e-mail] • www.stonebridge.com

Family crests used as decorations throughout are as follows: Endsheets, Title Page, Contents, Chapter 1, and Backmatter: Asano Naganori; Preface: Kanzaki Yogorō; Chapter 2: Kataoka Gengoemon; Chapter 3: Okuda Magodayū; Chapter 4: Onodera Jūnai; Chapter 5: Ōtaka Gengo; chapter 6: Ōishi Kuranosuke; Afterword: Horibe Yahē.

Text © 2019 Hiroaki Sato.

Front cover text design by Linda Ronan incorporating original artwork by Masaaki Noda.

The portion of Inoue Hisashi’s Fu-chūshingura in translation is included with Inoue Yuri’s permission.

All rights reserved.

No part of this book may be reproduced in any form without permission from the publisher.

Printed in the United States of America.

10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1    2023 2022 2021 2020 2019

p-ISBN 978-1-61172-054-9

e-ISBN 978-1-61172-938-2

To My Brother Masamichi (April 3, 1947–July 10, 2015) a high school dropout who rose to CL at Toyota

Asked to define bushidō in a modern corporation, he said: To help weaker ones to achieve a goal

Contents

Preface

1Grudge and Seppuku under Dog Shogun

The Land Is Full of Light

Shogun Tsunayoshi and the Genroku Era

Showing Who’s Boss?

Pitying the Sentient and Dog Shogun

The Dog Shogun’s Mother, Keishō-in

A Haiku Scholar’s Take

Titles and the Number of Participants

Asano Attacks Kira

Asano Naganori’s Seppuku

Seppuku

Why Did Asano Attack Kira?

Neither a Daimyo Nor a Samurai?

Yamaga Sokō’s Teachings

Kira Yoshinaka: Prestige and Suspicion

Other Quarrels in Edo Castle

The Judiciary Council’s Non-decision

Bureaucratic Breakdown

Which Mode of Execution?

Mass Execution and Its Aftermath

2The Leader and Foxfire

Escheatment

The First Ninja’s Report

We Are All Hicks

Another Ninja’s Report

The Disagreements

Onodera Jūnai’s Letters

Failure to Commit Seppuku Mocked

Restoring the Asano House

The Radicals

What the Sengaku Temple Looked Like

Kuranosuke Responds

Kuranosuke’s Appearance and His Son Chikara

Horibe Yasubē’s Eighteen Killings

Uncertain Samurai Life

Kuranosuke Indulges in the Pleasure Quarters

A House of Sorrow

Did Kuranosuke Really Drown in Wine and Flesh?

Chikara’s Male Love

The Way of the Samurai

Jūnai Describes His Trek to Edo

Kuranosuke’s Last Letters

3Poetic Connections: My Strength Broken

Gengo’s Travelogue

Was the Lord President of Akō Stingy?

Gengo Pays Respects to Bashō’s Grave

1697: Another Ill Effect of Pitying the Sentient

Gengo’s Haikai Anthology and Sanpei’s Suicide

A Mysterious Tale on the Birth of Two Bamboos

Another Story about Teisa and Akō Men

Gengo’s Encounter with Haikai Master Kikaku

Kikaku’s Letter on the Night of the Raid

A Real Kikaku Letter?

The Great Fire, Daimyo Firefighters

Firefighters’ Uniform

Uncertain Cohesion to the End

The Announcement, the Raid

The Aftermath

The First Full Account

Gengo’s Farewell-to-the-World Hokku

Jūnai’s Last Letter to His Wife, Tan

4Chūshingura as a National Epic

Camouflage, the I-ro-ha Song

Popularity of Chūshingura

Nonfiction Accounts Also Banned

Meiji Emperor’s Word of Approbation

5Disloyal Men

Inoue Hisashi’s Disloyal Men

6A Day in the Life of Ōishi Kuranosuke

by Akutagawa Ryūnosuke

Afterword: A History of Vengeance in Japan

Eye for Eye Banned

Acceptance of Revenge and the Philosophy behind It

Debate on the Forty-Seven Samurai

Vengeance That Took Forty Years

Two Peasant Girls Avenge Their Father

Even When Vengeance Was Done

Vengeance Just before the Forty-Seven Samurai

Revenge Banned

Endnotes

Books Consulted

Japan’s Provinces from 824 to 1868

Index

Preface

In the spring of 1701, a daimyo attacked and wounded a protocol officer during a ceremonial occasion in Edo Castle—the administrative heart of Japan’s shogunate—and was at once condemned to death by seppuku. Within two years, forty-seven of the condemned daimyo’s retainers avenged him to dispel his fury by breaking into the official’s mansion and killing him. All the men were put to death by seppuku (ritual suicide), even as death was what they had expected from the start for their action.

In telling this story again—I did it once, part of it, in Legends of the Samurai—I’ve wondered: What is the attraction of this tale of vengeance? Matsushita Kōnosuke, the founder-chairman of Matsushita Electric (makers of the Panasonic brand), gave one answer: Normally you take on a risky enterprise because, if you succeed, you expect to gain a reward or reputation. But would you do so if you knew that not just a failure but a success would result in your certain death? The Forty-Seven Samurai did, and they did so in a society that sanctioned it—ethically honoring it, politically condemning it.

***

In this book, all Japanese names are given the Japanese/Asian way, surname first. A samurai had at least three names: a surname, a common name, and a formal name that was given when he came of age. For example, the name of the leader of the Forty-Seven avengers consisted of surname Ōishi, common name Kuranosuke, and coming-of-age or formal name Yoshitaka. Likewise, the swordsman Horibe Yasubē had another, formal personal name, Taketsune. Thus his record of the vengeance is called Horibe Taketsune hikki. In this book a samurai is usually mentioned by surname or common name, or by both, the formal name introduced only when necessary.

The dates used here are of the lunar calendar, not the solar (Gregorian) calendar. In the lunar calendar, spring covers First, Second, and Third Months; summer, Fourth, Fifth, and Sixth Months; autumn, Seventh, Eighth, and Ninth Months; and winter, Tenth, Eleventh, and Twelfth Months.

I was partly inspired to write this book by the haiku scholar Fukumoto Ichirō’s Haiku Chūshingura. In his book Fukumoto shows that some of the forty-seven avengers were associated with haikai masters, at least one of them penning a travelogue incorporating hokku (haiku), even as their activities inspired some fanciful tales. Some of them also wrote tanka, though learning Japan’s oldest poetic form in 5-7-5-7-7 syllables was part of a samurai’s education.

I thank the tanka poet Ishii Tatsuhiko for imparting some of his esoteric knowledge. Kai Xie, at Kenyon College, helped me read some kanbun and kanshi, prose and verse composed in classical Chinese. Doris Bargen, the scholar who straddles the world of The Tale of Genji and that of General Nogi Maresuke, passed me several enlightening articles.

My nephew Hirata Shigeru collected all the books I needed in Japan.

Nancy read this manuscript carefully, as she does everything else I write in English.

Hiroaki Sato

1

Grudge and Seppuku under Dog Shogun

In his Chronicle of the Current Rule (Go-tōdai ki), the samurai-turned-poet-critic Toda Mosui wrote this down for Third Month of the fourteenth year of Genroku, 1701:¹

Fourteenth Day, Third Month:² Imperial reply. This day, in the Castle, Chief of Carpentry Asano wounded Lieutenant Governor of Kōzuke Kira with a sword. Someone close by quickly restrained him, allowing no second strike. Chief of Carpentry Asano was placed in [Magistrate of] Ukyō Tamura’s custody, the entertainment of nobles given to Governor of Noto Toda by order. That same night, again by order, seppuku was given to Chief of Carpentry Asano; it was decided that, albeit in the Palace, he was heedless. His second was a lesser inspector, witnesses were two inspectors-general. [Asano’s] younger brother Daigaku was put under house arrest. . . .

The incident mentioned matter-of-factly in this entry would lead, in less than two years, to the most famous act of vengeance in Japanese history, one carried out by a group of forty-seven samurai.

But before going any further, let’s take a brief look at the historical background of the era.

The Land Is Full of Light

The current rule in the title of Mosui’s chronicle refers to that of the fifth Tokugawa shogun, Tsunayoshi, so the account begins in the year he succeeded his older brother Ietsuna as shogun, on the eighth of Fifth Month 1680. The country had been at peace for decades. It had been nearly seven decades since Ieyasu, founder of the Tokugawa dynasty,³ destroyed the remnants of the allies and sympathizers of the country’s unifier Toyotomi Hideyoshi in the Battles of Osaka, fought during the winter of 1614 and the summer of 1615, completely putting an end to Japan’s Age of Warring States. And it had been four decades since the biggest civilian rebellion took 37,000 lives, a slaughter that necessitated the painstaking process of repopulating a whole region.

That rebellion, in Shimabara, Nagasaki, from the end of 1637 to early 1638, is often thought to have been a Christian revolt. There are some reasons for this. A great many persecuted Christians joined it, with the sixteen-year-old Masuda Shirō (whose baptismal name was Francisco) at the head, à la Jeanne d’Arc. Holland—by then more or less the only European country allowed to trade with Japan, on a strict pledge not to proselytize Christianity—bombarded the rebels’ stronghold from its ships to solidify its own position and symbolically brought to an end Japan’s Christian Century. But the main cause of the uprising was the heavy taxation and the unrest among the peasantry and the samurai who had lost their jobs under Tokugawa rule.

And so, when Matsuo Bashō traveled north from Edo, today’s Tokyo, in 1689 to make a cross-country journey and first reached Nikkō (Sunlight) where Ieyasu’s mausoleum lay, he came up with the following hokku—part of the haikai genre, today called haiku—to express his gratitude, metaphorically, to the founder of the Tokugawa shogunate for bringing peace to the land:

Look, so holy: green leaves young leaves in the light of the sun

Ara tōto aoba wakaba no hi no hikari

Bashō’s gratitude was much clearer in the initial version of this 5-7-5-syllable verse, with the mid-seven saying, ki no shita yami mo, even the darkness under the trees; ki no shita, under the trees, directly pointed to Toyotomi Hideyoshi, who had started out with the surname Kinoshita.⁴ In his original version, Bashō must have thought he was unnecessarily denigrating Hideyoshi.⁵ After all, Hideyoshi had unified the Japanese archipelago in 1590, a grand accomplishment that one might say Ieyasu usurped. Before his death, Hideyoshi had formed a coalition cabinet by appointing five daimyo as senior administrators (go-tairō) to govern the country and another five as magistrates (go-bugyō)⁶ to manage day-to-day affairs. But after Hideyoshi’s death in 1598, Ieyasu, the most powerful of the administrators, moved to break up the coalition system to his advantage.⁷ One of the Five Magistrates, Ishida Mitsunari, resisted the move. This led to the Battle of Sekigahara in 1600, a one-day clash between Ieyasu and his allies and Mitsunari and his. The former trounced the latter.

Here, an international perspective may be worthwhile on the isolationism that makes the Tokugawa period stand out in Japan, although, to be exact, the semi-isolationism: Japan maintained its trade relations with Holland, China, Korea, and Lewchew (Ryūkyū), today’s Okinawa.⁸ Engelbert Kaempfer, a German physician and naturalist who went to Japan in 1690 as the Dutch East India Company’s chief surgeon and stayed there for almost three years, found Japan’s seclusionist policy sensible, even while it went against the Supreme Will of the All-wise Creator. Kaempfer had been born after the Thirty Years War (1618–48), which had reduced the German population from twenty-one million to thirteen million through slaughter, famine, and pestilence. So many European countries had turned Germany into a bloody playground; the manly exploits, as Norman Davies puts it, of Spanish, Swedish, Italian, Croat, Flemish, and French soldiers had changed the racial composition of the people.⁹ And wars, religious or otherwise, continued to rage in Europe well into the next century. Little wonder Kaempfer was relieved to find a society functioning far away from all that havoc by largely cutting off involvements with other countries as it could.

In his analysis, An Enquiry, whether it be conducive for the good of the Japanese Empire, to keep it shut up, as it now is, and not to suffer its inhabitants to have any Commerce with foreign nations, either at home or abroad, Kaempfer also noted that Tokugawa Tsunayoshi was a Prince of great prudence and conduct, and heir of the virtues and good qualities of his predecessors, and withal eminent for his singular clemency and mildness, though a strict maintainer of the Laws of the Country. In fact, he regarded the fifth Tokugawa shogun as far preferable to the self-claimed Sun King, Louis XIV.¹⁰

Kaempfer visited Tsunayoshi in Edo Castle twice, in 1691 and 1692. He may have had a benign view of him not only because the country was unravaged by foreign powers, but also because, on both occasions, the shogun behaved like a curious boy, though fifty years old.

The shogun had first been seated next to the women at some distance in front of us, but now he moved to the side, as close to us as he could behind the blind.¹¹ He had us [Kaempfer and the visiting Dutchmen] take off our kappa, or ceremonious robes, and sit upright so that he could inspect us, had us now stand up and walk, now pay compliments to each other, then again dance, jump, pretend to be drunk, speak Japanese, read Dutch, draw, sing, put on our coats, then take them off again. During this process I broke into the following song. . . . ¹²

Shogun Tsunayoshi and the Genroku Era

Tsunayoshi’s rule is often equated with the Genroku era, which, in turn, is sometimes called Japan’s Renaissance, even as his rule lasted almost thirty years while the era itself lasted about half as long, from 1688 to 1704. Culture flourished as agriculture and commerce expanded. Among the names readily recognizable today to those interested in Japanese art and literature are the just-mentioned Matsuo Bashō in poetry as well as Ihara Saikaku in fiction and Chikamatsu Monzaemon in drama. There were Tosa Mitsuoki and Hanabusa Itchō in painting, and Ogata Kōrin in crafts, painting, and design. Of these, Kōrin, a kimono dealer’s son in Kyoto, has left an episode as charming as some of his designs.

Once Kōrin went with his friends to see cherry blossoms on Arashiyama. His friends brought beautiful boxes packed with rare, delicious foods from mountain and sea, but Kōrin came with rice balls simply wrapped in bamboo skin—albeit decorated with the glorious yet delicate inlays¹³ on it of flower, bird, mountain, and water that he made himself. When he was done with his food, he casually tossed the bamboo skin into the flow of the Ōi River.¹⁴

In pottery, Kōrin’s younger brother, Kanzan, distinguished himself, along with Nonomura Ninsei. There was the painter and illustrator Hishikawa Moronobu, the father of ukiyo-e. If you extend the period somewhat earlier, you may include Hon’ami Kōetsu in calligraphy, pottery, and design as well as Tawaraya Sōtatsu in painting. Far outside the fine arts, there was the Buddhist priest Enkū who traveled as far north as Hokkaidō and left at least 12,000 wooden Buddha sculptures he carved himself.

Knowledge and learning in various fields also advanced, partly encouraged by Tsunayoshi, who promoted Chinese studies by initiating a program with himself as a regular lecturer. Historiography, which the deputy-shogun Tokugawa Mitsukuni of Mito¹⁵ strongly pushed, made great strides. The scholar-cum-shogunate advisor Arai Hakuseki wrote books in a range of fields, including foreign affairs. He wrote What I Have Heard about the West (Seiyō kibun) based on his interviews with Italian Father Giovanni Battista Sidotti, who, having slipped into Japan to proselytize, had been captured, tortured, and, after apostatizing, put under house arrest.¹⁶ Hakuseki interviewed members of the Korean embassies and wrote books about Korean-Japanese relations.

Among the contemporary students of classical Japanese literature was Toda Mosui, quoted at the outset, who criticized traditional tanka poetry. Interest in natural history also increased, spawning people like Kaibara Ekiken, whose listing of Japanese plants by a taxonomy of his own device, accompanied by his own drawings, was the best of its kind in Japan until the Japanese were exposed to Western scientists like Carl Linnaeus from the late nineteenth to twentieth century.

Genroku was also the age of luxury, ostentation, and a flamboyant display of sex, male, female, homosexual—for those who could afford it, of course. Just as Kōrin had shown off the bamboo skin with his own inlays, well-to-do merchants’ wives and daughters competed in wearing expensively designed kimono, today generally known as Genroku kosode, in stylish combination with other garments, sashes, and various adornments. Ihara Saikaku, who turned from prolific hokku writing to prose writing, described the attire of various women. In Five Women Who Loved Love (Kōshoku gonin onna), for example, he presents a young woman of thirteen or fourteen this way:

. . . Her long hair was combed out in back, turned slightly up at the ends and secured with a scarlet band. Her forelock stood out and was parted like a young boy’s, the coiffure being tied with a paper cord of gold and decorated with a half-inch comb of immaculate beauty—all of which displayed such perfect grace that it would be idle to catalogue her charms one by one. Her under-kimono was of white satin relieved with a black-and-white design; the outer garment was a silken veil of Chinese lace, elegantly contrived so that beneath it one could perceive the iridescent stain of the middle kimono on which had been sewn a peacock pattern. All this was fastened with an unpadded sash of many colours. . . . ¹⁷

Women themselves couldn’t help thinking their life depended on their face and figure, let alone their getup, in a world where men spent half a year to learn to scrutinize their own clothes, hair styles, and swords, but also the way they walked, just to go to pleasure quarters, or so observed the historian Kodama Kōta in The Genroku Age (Genroku jidai). For that matter, what is given as young boy above is wakashu, a catamite, the object of male love; a great deal of care and money was spent on such young men to make them prettier, more enchanting. There were, in addition, kabukimono, date-otoko, yakko, yarō, etc.—many among them rowdy, tough men who galivanted while outlandishly decked out, often provoking quarrels and fights. Some of these figures later became the subjects of kabuki plays and one-man storytelling (kōdan). Among them, for example, was Banzui-in Chōbē, said to have beat up Mizuno Jūrōzaemon, a hatamoto¹⁸ with a stipend of 3,000 koku, who, in retaliation, entrapped Chōbē and killed him. The point of the story is that Chōbē, knowing what was up, went to Jūrōzaemon’s house as invited.¹⁹

In truth, you may say the country was peaceful only in that it was free from military clashes, for rambunctious men still prowled the streets.

In the midst of all this luxury and flamboyance, marked by the imposition of sumptuary laws, most citizens’ lives were poor and quiet. Bashō, for one, was a perennial pauper who relied on the largess of his friends and haikai disciples to live. On the eighth of Second Month in the sixth year of Genroku, 1693, for example, he wrote to one disciple, the samurai Suganuma Kyokusui: An unexpected event has arisen that requires me to beg for money. If you have extra money with you, I would be most grateful if you could make 1 ryō and 2 bu available to me. I am firmly resolved to return it to you.²⁰

According to Saikaku in one of his novels about moneymaking, for the amount of money Bashō requested you could buy 2.25 koku of rice, when the average adult ate 1 koku of rice annually. In Edo, there was only one person Bashō could mooch on for that much money, and that was another disciple, Sugiyama Sanpū, a supplier of live fish to the shogunate who gave Bashō among other things a house in Fukagawa, later called the Bashō Hut. But Bashō must have felt he had relied too much on him; so he turned to Kyokusui.

Kyokusui was a high-ranking vassal of the Honda House, in Zeze, today’s Ōtsu, at the southern end of Lake Biwa. It was at his uncle’s retreat in a temple that Bashō wrote The Hut of the Phantom Dwelling. Bashō thought highly of Kyokusui’s character. In 1717, or twenty-three years after Bashō died, Kyokusui killed the corrupt house administrator of his fiefdom with a single stab of his spear and disemboweled himself shortly afterward. One of his hokku reads:

With much thought you keep silent: toad

Omō koto damatteiru ka hikigaeru

Showing Who’s Boss?

All these impressive advances in the arts and disparate fields of studies and the flourishing culture aside, Tsunayoshi began his rule by taking several actions to show who’s boss, partly perhaps because he had not expected to ever become shogun.²¹ Among his first decisions involving daimyo was an unusual one: taking up a case already settled and giving it his own different judgment. Matsudaira Mitsunaga, one of Ieyasu’s great-grandsons and a daimyo with a revenue of 260,000 koku, of the Takada fiefdom in Echigo, was unable to control his vassals regarding a complicated problem of an heir. Sakai Tadakiyo, fourth shogun Ietsuna’s grand administrator, had already arbitrated and settled it. But Tsunayoshi reopened the case and meted out harsh punishments in Sixth Month 1681—condemning, among other things, Mitsunaga’s house administrator Oguri Mimasaku and his son Dairoku to seppuku, exiling two dozen officials, and placing the daimyo Matsudaira Mitsunaga himself and others in some other houses’ custody. This was in effect a retrial, which was rare, but a shogun’s open, direct intervention in such cases was also extraordinary.²²

Another notable case had to do with a wealthy merchant named Ishikawa Rokubē and his wife. The word date in Toda Mosui’s entry below on the twenty-seventh of Third Month 1681 means showy, stylish, flamboyant, headstrong. Some say it derived from the way the warrior-commander Date Masamune’s men strutted around showily dressed, though others say it came from otoko-date, making a man stand out.²³

A townsman named Ishikawa Rokubē and his wife were ordered to prison. The wealthy man had his lower mansion built at the edge of Mt. Asakusa Lodge by the Asakusa River, a large house made splendidly, and had invited many daimyo and officials to it and entertained them extravagantly. This had reached the high officials.

Now, Rokubē’s wife, being unmistakably date, having heard a few years earlier that the wife of one named Kobeni-ya Genbē was date, had taken the trouble of traveling to Kamigata,²⁴ even as she declared that she had heard that Zenbē’s wife in Edo was date so had gone to see her, but found the woman hardly compared with herself. Being like that, she must have decided she’d put her date self forward to the current shogun himself to make her name known throughout the world. So, on the eighth of Fifth Month, when the shogun was expected to go to Ueno to pay respects at Kan’ei Temple, she borrowed a townhouse in Shita-machi, in Ueno, had herself surrounded by standing screens, and had two maids clad in kimono with long sleeves stand by them, like flowers. More important, she had six shinmyō²⁵ dress up admirably, had a great deal of aloewood²⁶ incense burned in the ceremonial utensil stands (daisu) and made two of her maids face the front as the shogun’s palanquin passed and fan the aloewood incense smoke with golden fans toward it. Thus, Whose wife is that? the shogun inquired, etc.²⁷

Mosui says Rokubē and his wife were sent to prison; actually the couple were exiled, stripped of their properties and money.

Now, Mosui doesn’t mention it, but we may assume that Rokubē’s wife was glitteringly, expensively clad, flaunting the utmost elegance and sophistication her wealth could buy, her dresses abundantly laden with gold and silver thread, stitches, and tie-dyed fabric.²⁸ Hers was an audacious act of defiance under the prevailing sumptuary laws, the first severe set of which had been promulgated in 1667 and which would continue to the end of Tokugawa rule. Although people privately ridiculed such economizing measures, at times with satiric versions of them,²⁹ Mosui goes on to detail how oppressive the government policies became under Tsunayoshi. For example, townspeople’s attempts to make their houses more presentable, such as by planting trees and using sizable stones in their gardens—a customary practice—were punished; the trees were ordered to be cut down and the stones removed.

The popular disquiet created by all this fuss was aggravated by the violent storms and floods on the sixth of intercalary Eighth Month of the previous year that had destroyed paddies and cultivated fields, bringing crop failures and famine to Edo and the surrounding areas.³⁰

Pitying the Sentient and Dog Shogun

These actions may not make Tsunayoshi a particularly bad ruler, though his treatment of daimyo was twice as harsh as his immediate predecessor Ietsuna’s: during his rule of less than twenty-nine years Tsunayoshi punished forty-six daimyo, escheating an average of 55,600 koku a head, while Ietsuna, ruling about the same length of time, punished twenty-six daimyo, escheating an average of 27,600 koku a head.³¹ What seriously marred Tsunayoshi as ruler is that he was, according to the British diplomat and historian George Sansom, mentally unbalanced.

Under the influence of his mother, who appears to have been afflicted with religious mania, Sansom wrote, he spent great sums on building or enlarging sacred edifices of the Shingon sect of Buddhism to please her and her spiritual advisors.³² Such squandering helped worsen the shogunate financing that may have been in the red in the preceding administration, but it was what people may have expected from any autocrat. What won Tsunayoshi notoriety was a series of prohibitions that he started introducing not long after he became shogun, the Pitying the Sentient Edicts (Shōrui awaremi no rei). Dazai Shundai, who famously asserted that shogun were Japan’s kings (ō), wrote in An Unofficial Record on Three Kings (San’nō gaiki):³³

After the King [Tsunayoshi] lost his Crown Prince, his harem did not produce any other child, so he tried many other ways seeking an heir, to no avail. Then the monk Ryūkō stepped forward and said, Sire, you have few heirs as a retribution for having killed living things in your previous life. If you want an heir, the best thing to do would be to love creatures and not to kill them. If Your Majesty truly wants an heir, I think you must forbid the killing of living things. At the same time, because you were born in the year of hi-no-e inu,³⁴ and inu belongs to dogs, you had best