Ninja (19 page)

What happened was this. The head of the Saji family, one of K
o
ga's fifty-three top families, contacted Oda and said he didn't know about the others, but he for one was willing to work with him. That planted the idea of cooperation. So when the others came to discuss it, there was a precedent.

“But why did he do that in the first place?” I asked.

“Because when Nobuo attacked Iga in 1579, Iga unfortunately won, so they thought they would win again. They did not see the real power of Oda's troops. Nobuo also attacked K
o
ga, and K
o
ga lost. Saji could see the future; he could see how powerful the enemy was. So when Oda asked if we would cooperate, we said yes. We also had the idea of not wasting our lives in the face of overwhelming odds.”

Which was, of course, an idea fundamental to ninjas: survival, rather than samurai-style self-sacrifice.

“So you were better ninjas than Iga!” I said, to guffaws of laughter. Iga and K
o
ga may have shared similar systems, and collaborated to solve common problems, and intermarried, but here was a hint of friendly rivalry.

It wasn't quite as clear-cut as that, because the two groups had been so close in the past. There were some who refused to collaborate with Nobunaga and joined Iga instead.

An inhabitant of K
o
ga, Mochizuki Chotar
o
, was a soldier big and strong, and a hot-blooded warrior. He had a large
tachi
[a long, curved sword], which he brandished crosswise as he fought. One person . . . advanced to meet Chotar
o
to cross swords with him. Chotar
o
accepted the challenge, and advanced to kill him. He [Chotar
o
] parried the swordstroke, and then suddenly struck at him and broke both his legs. He [Chotar
o
] killed him without hesitation. He was a splendid master of the Way of the Sword, the model and example of all the samurai in the province.

But one or two K
o
ga men fighting for Iga does not undermine the main point, on which Toshinobu and his fellow historians agreed. Oda Nobunaga's attitude toward Iga “was completely different than toward K
o
ga”—with consequences that almost stopped Oda's revolution in its tracks, as we shall see.

Meanwhile, Iga bore the brunt of Nobunaga's anger. This time, there would be no mistakes, and no mercy. Nobuo, given a chance to avenge the disaster of two years before, commanded a ten-thousand-strong column that entered Iga along the same route as before, down the Aoyama (Blue or Green
²
Mountain) River, except now his force was three times the size. He reached the village of Iseji unmolested, and “burned people's houses to the ground.” A few kilometers to the north, where Nobuo's army had been slaughtered two years before, they burned a monastery, a “sad and sacred place . . . when the smoke died down, inside and outside were dyed with blood. The corpses of priests and laymen were piled high in the courtyard or lay scattered like strange autumn leaves lying deep of a morning.” Farther on down the valley, three warriors “put to the sword their ten children and their wives, and set off with light hearts to be killed in action, knowing that their wives and children would have been captured alive and carried off.”

The Iga defenders, meanwhile, saw they had no chance of repeating their success of two years before. They had gathered their forces in the middle of Ueno village (what is now Iga Ueno) and eight kilometers to the south, near Maruyama. Unable to oppose such overwhelming odds, they scattered into the earthen forts that served as defenses in every village.

The campaign was all over very fast, in either two weeks or a month—sources vary. The end came in two places. The first was a castle on Hijayama, a hill that was part of a long tree-covered ridge a few kilometers west of today's Iga Ueno, beyond the rice fields that once formed the floodplain of the Nabari River. Noriko and I took a cab there one morning to check if there was anything worth seeing. The place is not well known nowadays. The cabdriver had never heard of it. But a priest in long-sleeved white shirt and gray trousers pointed us toward a temple named Sai-ren (West Lotus), the lotus being of great significance in Buddhism. Nearby, two grim Buddhist statues guarded a flight of steps against demons. At the top was an imposing, well-kept building, with an astonishingly large cemetery—a dozen platforms, making several hectares, with thousands of graves. But why here? Another priest, almost catatonic with age and deafness, responded at last to Noriko's shouted questions: Yes, the hill behind the cemetery was Hijayama, and this was where the fort had been. A pillar confirmed it, commemorating the four hundredth anniversary of the campaign known as Iga no Ran (the Iga Revolt).

The Iga defenders put up a terrific fight, some defending the fort, others setting up an ambush below it, allowing Nobunaga's forces to advance uphill, then attacking from behind earthworks with swords and guns, and throwing rocks and branches. For a while, it worked. As the garrison recorded, “today the reputation of our army binds us all together in joy when we consider the bravery of our soldiers.” The bravest of the brave were nominated as the Seven Spears of Hijayama, and a decision was made for a night attack that would end in the taking of the general's head, “which will be amazing to the eyes of the enemy and will add to the glory of the province.”

Early on October 1, as the attack opened, Nobunaga's forces “raised an uproar like a kettle coming to the boil, and, as might be expected, in the army many otherwise experienced and brave soldiers had no time to put their armour on and tied it round their waists. They grabbed swords and spears, went down in haste and stood there to fight desperately.” Then all became chaos, because “an intense mountain wind quickly extinguished many of the pine torches, and friend and foe alike went astray in the dark paths. They could not distinguish between friend and foe in the direction of their arrows, so the samurai of the province [i.e., the Iga warriors] made their way by using passwords, while the enemy furiously killed each other by mistake.”

It was no use. With thirty thousand ranged against them, the Iga men retreated into Hijayama. “On top of the mountain there was silence. They did not give a war-cry. More and more their colour faded. The tide of war was moving to the enemy samurai. They took great rocks and large trees carefully, and waited for an attack. . . . Each man who remained had the appearance of a wooden Buddha.” In the end, the weather was against them. It was dry, with a strong wind, which favored fire. Nobunaga's men set fire to local temples, which spread to the whole complex. “The flames blazed and were seen in the sky like an omen. The inferno eventually died out, but it was many months before the black ashes disappeared.”

The last stand came in the south, where the ninjas had their backs to the wall of mountains from which flowed the old Shugend
o
training ground of the Forty-Eight Waterfalls. A few kilometers north of here stood Kashihara
³
Castle, which today is, like so many old forts, a tree-covered mound. Once, it was the center of a little community: castle, lord's house, Shinto shrine. There's still an active shrine, built and rebuilt over centuries to honor the souls of those who lived and died here. Today's version, with its simple gray-tiled roof and a porch, looks more like a house than a temple.

“A
shrine
,” Noriko corrected me. “A Shinto
shrine.
Buddhism has
temples.
”

“Okay. What's Shinto about it?”

“The stone columns.”

On the porch were two little towers of flat stones, half a dozen stone memorials, two stone lanterns, and two vases of fresh flowers, this was a well-kept working shrine. Working in more ways than one. Inside was a room of historical memorabilia, where I knelt shoeless and with painful kneejoints while the mayor, Tomimori Kazuya, explained Kashihara's significance as the place where the Iga Revolt was finally crushed.

The local hero is the lord at the time of the revolt, Takino Jurobei. Tomimori led the way out of the shrine, uphill toward the castle mound, along a path edged by an electric fence between two rice fields. In one, a man wearing remarkably thick clothing—boots, jacket, hat with earflaps—was cutting rice flattened by the recent typhoon. “Be careful of the fence,” said Tomimori. “It's live, to keep the animals out.”

We reached the edge of the castle mound and its thick covering of trees. Behind the site was a proper hill, the Dragon God Mountain. Why not build up there? I wondered. No, that was too far and too high. The mound in front of us was perfect: raised above the valley floor, with a good view, and protected on the other side by the mountain. But of the castle there was nothing visible beneath the covering of trees. Could we explore further? Well, as long as we remembered it was the time for the
mamushi
, the pit viper, to lay its eggs. Tomimori led the way over a ditch along a path at the base of a steep bank, while to our left the ground fell away. A wall, no doubt, and perhaps the remains of a moat. It was all earth now, rich with spiders and, for all I knew,
mamushi.
Was it earth back then? Yes, all earth, said Tomimori. No stones, no solid foundations, no roofs.

That made sense of the story Tomimori told about Lord Takino and the castle beside which we were now wandering, brushing away spiders' webs, scuffing through fallen leaves, wary of
mamushi.
Surrounded by Nobunaga's forces, Takino was besieged, along with his three top officers, Momochi Sandayu, Hattori Hanz
o
, and Nagato no Kami. (Of Nagato, little is known, but the other two are famous. Momochi had a house nearby, which still exists, along with his descendants; and Hattori, whose house and castle were a few kilometers west of Iga, was soon to become the staunchest ally of Nobunaga's heir.)

After a few days, Takino used a tactic first tried by the great fourteenth-century general Kusunoki Masashige. One dark night, when clouds hid the moon and stars, he ordered women and children to join the men in lighting two or three torches each. “It gave the impression there were more than a thousand in here, but the clouds disappeared, and the moon came out, and Nobunaga's troops could clearly see just how many were holding the torches. Then, as conditions got worse and food low, he had his people use grinding stones to give the impression they had more than enough food.”

Meanwhile, Takino found other ways to fight back, as a contemporary source describes.

From the skilled men of Iga, twenty men who had mastered
shinobi no jutsu
[the art of being a
shinobi
, or ninja] set fire to various places outside the castle and reconnoitred among the smouldering camp fires. Night after night they made frequent excursions in secret, and made night raids on the camps of all the generals and set fire to them using various tactics. . . . Over a hundred men were killed, and because of this the enemy were placed in fear and trembling. Their alertness decreased because they could not rest at all.

It was no use. There was no way to win. Takino surrendered the fort and fled with his officers and half those in the castle. Then came the destruction, though there was nothing much to destroy in the fort. Its earthen ramparts were abandoned and soon overgrown. Many were killed. How many? Some sources say between three hundred and five hundred, which would indeed be half of the original one thousand. “We cannot tell,” said Tomimori. “But there's a story that in this area of the village, people here used to make a particular sort of sweet using bamboo leaves, which are very sharp and often cut your fingers when you work with them. After Takino fled, the people stopped making the sweet, because they had seen so much blood. That's what they say. So from this story, I guess there was some sort of a massacre, even though the castle was surrendered peacefully.” One thing is certain. There used to be eight temples around here, and all were burned, because the temples—with their tide of monks, and travelers, and entertainers—were centers for the flow of information from all over the country and so were at the heart of the opposition to Nobunaga's rule.

Now, of course, archaeologists were interested. But—Tomimori explained—the hill was owned by several families, and no one could agree on cutting the trees and opening it up for research. But surely it would be worth it for the tourists? There were no tourists, he said. That was a surprise, for did not everyone agree that this was where the ninjas made their last stand? Wasn't that why the local authority had placed a monument here, commemorating the four hundredth anniversary of the Iga Revolt? One day, perhaps. And then, surely, there would be a big change: Takino's fort stripped of its trees, its walls and gateway revealed, the escape path made clear, a signposted walk in place directing curious crowds to the route taken by Takino, Hattori Hanz
o
, and their surviving ninjas.

Their escape route led south, following today's narrow road above the fast-flowing Taki Gawa (Waterfall River), the steep valley of the Forty-Eight Waterfalls where for centuries Shugend
o
students and ninjas had put themselves through their arduous physical and mental courses. So they knew exactly what to do. Pursued by Nobunaga's troops, they followed the river up to the fourth waterfall. Here, where the water from above falls into a cliff-lined pool, the old trail ended. In fine weather, it is a gorgeous spot, with the thirty-meter cliffs topped by trees and the white water roaring into a pool, which, when I was there, was not translucent but a soft emerald green, the color of minerals and algae stripped from the mountain by the recent typhoon. No way up the river, then. But up the other side of the ravine, cutting through the trees, rose a near-vertical wall of boulders, which in downpours turned into a torrent of water and loosened rocks. It still does today. This was the unstable route
shugenja
and ninjas took to reach the upper falls, where they could find themselves yet greater challenges. So this was the way by which the fugitives vanished.