Date Masamune — The Man Who Played Tough to the End

Both Eyes, Done Right

"If you make a statue of me after I die, make both eyes right."

He gave this order, says a record put together later by his domain. (A domain, or han, was the land ruled by a lord.) People in later times would have plenty to say, the record explains.

His right eye could not see.

When he caught smallpox, the record says, the sickness gathered in his eye, and he lost the sight of the right one. He was always ashamed of that eye. Often he covered the one that could not see. If anyone said even a word about it, it is said, he fell into a bad mood.

Date Masamune. He was born in 1567 in a castle at Yonezawa in Dewa (today's Yamagata Prefecture), the heir of the Date family. His father was Terumune. His mother was Yoshihime. As a child, he was called Bontenmaru.

This boy was given roles, and twice he turned them down.

At ten, in the coming-of-age ceremony that marked the start of adulthood, he was given the name "Masamune," the name of a famous lord who had once rebuilt the Date family. He refused firmly and was pushed through by his father, it is said.

The second time came in 1584, when he was seventeen. His father said he would hand the family over to him.

I'm too young. Masamune refused again and again. But his relatives and his father's old retainers all urged him on. He refused until he could refuse no more, and then he took over the family.

Less than a year after he took over the family, he attacked an enemy castle, Odemori.

The people inside were cornered. They offered to hand over the castle if they could withdraw to Obama, where their allies were. Masamune would not allow it. They could come down into Date land and live, he said, but they could not go to Obama. When they still said they wanted to go to Obama, he ordered an attack at once, the record says.

The castle fell that same day. The han record says that about eight hundred people, men and women, were cut down, and not one was left.

The next day, Masamune wrote a letter to his retainers.

"We took Odemori and cut down more than two hundred, to the last one. There were too many to count. You must be very pleased."

"To the last one" means that nobody was left alive. The number in the letter and the number in the record do not match. But whichever number was true, the eighteen-year-old lord wrote it as news that would please the people reading.

A little over a month later, something happened.

Hatakeyama Yoshitsugu, lord of the neighboring castle at Nihonmatsu, came asking to surrender, through Masamune's father Terumune. Please leave us a little more land. At least enough so my men do not starve. Yoshitsugu begged many times, but Masamune would not listen, it is said. In the end they agreed to leave him five villages and nothing more.

On November 29, 1585, Yoshitsugu came to thank Terumune at his camp. On his way out, when Terumune came to see him off, Yoshitsugu grabbed him by the chest and held a short sword to him. Yoshitsugu's men surrounded Terumune and carried him off toward Nihonmatsu.

The Date retainers ran after them without even putting on armor. But with their lord a hostage, nobody could lay a hand on anyone. When they reached a place called Takadahara, Terumune is said to have cried out:

"Shoot Yoshitsugu dead, quickly! Do not think of me, and leave no shame on our house."

A gun went off, and at that signal everyone rushed in with swords. Yoshitsugu was killed, and so were about fifty of his men. Terumune died there too. He was forty-two, by Japanese counting.

That day, Masamune was out hunting.

Fair Weather

When Masamune heard his father had been carried off, he rode through the night to Takadahara.

He had Yoshitsugu's body found and put up on a cross near the town, with guards set over it, the han record says.

A little over a year later, someone close to Masamune was writing down each day's events. We now call it the Tenshō Diary. After the date, it nearly always starts with the weather.

Here is one day in 1587.

"Fair weather. Furuyama Shinsuke was put to death on the lord's order. Afterward, his mother was run through with a spear on the lord's order."

It does not say why.

In the fourth month of the lunar calendar that same year, Masamune had a pond made inside the castle. On the day the carp to put in it arrived, the diary also lists the heads of two thieves who had been put to death.

And then, the next day.

"Fair weather. The lord had carp put in the pond. Around the hour of the Rooster, he went to Kojūrō's house, fished for carp, and had them made into sliced raw fish, which he ate. He practiced the art of war, then played backgammon, and came home around the hour of the Rat."

The hour of the Rooster is about six in the evening, and the hour of the Rat is about midnight. Kojūrō was a retainer named Katakura Kagetsuna.

The day someone was put to death and the night he fished at a retainer's house begin the same way, with "fair weather." The diary's brush did not change its tone for either.

In 1589, Masamune beat the Ashina family of Aizu. It was three and a half years since his father's death. The Date lands had grown large.

The next year's diary has these two days.

The fifth day of the fourth lunar month, 1590.

"Fair weather. (Part left out.) He went to Ohigashi's. He came home with a stomachache. He was soon better."

"Ohigashi" is his mother, Yoshihime. The word translated as stomachache means an upset stomach.

Two days later.

"Fair weather. A little rain at the hour of the Hare. A little rain again toward evening. Obara Nuinosuke came to the residence and was put to death at once on the lord's order."

According to later han records, Obara Nuinosuke was the guardian of Masamune's younger brother, Kojirō. The diary says only that he was put to death.

But a record put together by the han more than a hundred years later tells these same two days as a completely different story.

At a meal at his mother's residence, the food taster collapsed, dizzy and spitting blood. Masamune realized it was poison, said his stomach hurt, and left the table. His mother, the record says, meant to push Masamune aside and have his brother Kojirō take over the family. Two days later Masamune killed his brother. That night his mother quietly left the castle and moved to her family's home in Yamagata.

The story came from 1686, when the han went around to families who knew the old days and asked them about Kojirō. The answers disagreed on the year of his death, his age, and the place. Among them was a story from one old man.

According to the old man, Masamune called his brother in, gave him a golden folding fan, said he held no grudge against him, and cut him down with his own hand. At that moment, Masamune shed tears too.

What settled it was the diary. After those two days, Kojirō's name never appears in the diary again. So he must have been killed then. That is what the man who compiled the record concluded.

Both of those days in the diary also begin with "fair weather."

At about the same time, at Odawara in the east of Japan, Toyotomi Hideyoshi, who had nearly won all of Japan, had surrounded the castle of the Hōjō family with a huge army. Lords from all over were hurrying in one after another to pay their respects.

Masamune had not gone yet.

On the ninth day of the fifth lunar month, Masamune left Aizu. About a hundred horsemen went with him, Kojūrō among them.

It was a journey on which his men had to prepare for the possibility that their lord would be ordered to kill himself.