Love in the Valley of Death

Meeting Your Opponent

One of the most belligerent and successful warlords, Takeda Shingen, called "the Tiger," grew up in and reigned over the Japanese prefecture where I met my wife 400 years later. Shingen's car-sized bronze statue at Kofu City's train station hovered over my three years as an English teacher in the countryside west of Tokyo. He perched on a battle stool, bullhorn-capped, mustachioed, ever-snarling. He glowered over the platform, greeting our first dates.

A battle reenactment had helped Yumiko and me meet. Later, our wedding took place where his line was obliterated. And we once consummated and then nearly destroyed our relationship near Shingen's first conquest. I resisted the parallels for years, but it's uncanny how samurai ambition coincided with our romance. The proximity led me to question the ties between attraction and violence. Love is elevated to the art of poetry and epic, as is often war, but the two are rooted in the worminess of death, the grubby snuffing out of light, and I wonder, is it all instinctual, romance and violence?

I didn't want to be fascinated by samurai (bushi they're called in Japan). Few westerner journeys in Japan are more trampled than warrior worship. Samurai are twisted into a false, projected image of exotic integrity. But their loyalties changed hands like yen coins. Murdering young innocents was the samurais' trade. I don't want to revere them while I recount parallels, but I suppose I have to, a little.

Warming the Camp Tents

Japan is 75 percent mountains, a country wrinkled by volcanism with farmland at a premium. Samurai wars were fought not for honor but for food. Shingen and his archnemesis, Uesugi Kenshin, a self-made warlord from the North, met on a single mountain farm five times. Their battles wiped out 65 percent of the men fighting.

In 1561, Kenshin besieged a small outpost castle, hoping to bait Shingen. The Tiger recognized the ruse but marched north anyway. Shingen traveled on horse, sporting iron, cotton, and leather battle armor, from the shins to the palms. His helmet was famous for its golden antlers and the cloud-white wisps of horsehair that flowed behind him like breath.

After night maneuvers, the morning fog lifted, and the two opposing armies realized they were staring at each other. The battlefield swam in swords, viscera, chaos. Soldier lines broke, re-formed. Heads were lopped off. The Tiger's command post lay exposed, Shingen perched on his battle stool, clad in crimson, wooden signal fan in hand. He tried to wave order to his lines, his helmet's breath blowing in consternation. A masked horseman broke through his guards, sword slashing. It was Kenshin. In one of the rarest combats recorded in history, the two generals fought hand to hand.

Shingen parried with his fan. Kenshin circled with his horse, cutting down in calligraphic strokes. The blade dug into the Tiger's fan eight times, nicking his armor three times; we know because the fan and armor are preserved in a museum. Finally, a retainer speared Kenshin's horse, which dumped its rider. The guards closed in on Kenshin, and he withdrew. His army would then be caught in a crunch as the Tiger's forces charged downhill, pancaking the northern invaders.

Somewhere in my research, I realized the man garrisoning the small castle, which lured Shingen north and caused him to risk his entire life and clan in hand-to-hand combat, was Shingen's lover, Danjo Masanobu.

Samurai heterosexual marriages, like English royal weddings, were political, loveless. But the samurai camped, bathed, fought, and slept with men. They could choose a man in a way they couldn't pick wives. The list of famous Japanese emperors and warlords thought to have been gay or bisexual reads like a Who's Who of Japanese history. They include 13 shoguns, Japan's unifier Tokugawa Ieyasu, and the Tiger's rival, Kenshin. A samurai's code word for these relationships was "beloved retainer." For isn't that...