Mary Midgley’s Misleading Essay, “Trying Out One’s New Sword” ©Jordan Sand, 2019 Some years ago, a student in my Japanese history survey brought to my attention a famous essay by philosopher Mary Midgley titled “Trying Out One’s New Sword.” In this essay, Midgley presents the problem of how we should evaluate a custom known in Japanese as tsujigiri, which she describes as practiced by members of Japan’s traditional warrior caste, the samurai. Tsujigiri, she explains, means to test the blade of one’s sword by killing a passerby. As morally abhorrent as it is to contemporary readers, Midgley asserts that tsujigiri was seen as acceptable, even necessary, within samurai culture. She uses this extreme example of a custom contrasting with our own to pursue the argument that moral relativism is an untenable position. Since Midgley was not a scholar of Japan, her essay is not well known among Japanese historians. However, it has been widely anthologized and taught in courses on ethics at Anglophone colleges and universities. It presents a moral conundrum in vivid and accessible form, which doubtless leads to lively discussions in college classrooms. If, however, instructors and students who read this essay grapple with Midgley’s sample case on the presumption that it has grounds in the real history of the samurai, then they are accepting a harmful distortion of Japanese history. Upon learning of Midgley’s essay, I asked colleagues on the Premodern Japanese Studies mailing list about it. Their responses are incorporated in my comments below. My initial question concerned the genealogy of references in European languages to tsujigiri that might have led to a mid-twentieth century British philosopher’s use of it as a case for her essay on moral relativism. I soon learned that in a memoir, Midgley had described hearing the term from Japanese anthropologist Carmen Blacker, apparently when Blacker was an undergraduate. This would have been in the 1940s. At the time, there was plenty in the recent behavior of Japanese soldiers with swords to suggest a cultural tradition of capricious violence, and indeed practices like testing swords on prisoners are documented among the atrocities of the Asia-Pacific War. Since modern Japanese soldiers were not samurai, these cases were probably not what prompted Blacker’s remark, but they would have contributed to the popular perception on which Midgley relies, of a uniquely bloodthirsty Japanese warrior culture, based on an entirely alien morality. Since the last quarter of the twentieth century, we historians of Japan have tended to emphasize the way that the long peace under the Tokugawa shogunate (1600-1868) transformed swordsmen into bureaucrats. After the early Tokugawa period, few samurai until the last years of the regime ever used their swords. This story of tamed samurai would have resonated less at the time that Blacker told Midgley about tsujigiri, when Japanese wartime brutality was commonly understood as rooted in samurai tradition. The difference between Midgley’s image and the one many of us teach today thus shows the way that contemporary context affects what we go looking for in history. And indeed, samurai of the fourteenth through the early seventeenth centuries were a much rougher lot than during most of the Tokugawa period. There were also some violent samurai swordsmen around in the 1860s, who contributed to the collapse of the Tokugawa regime. When Midgley came 1 to write the essay “On Trying Out One’s New Sword” in the 1980s, while most of us Japanese historians were talking about peaceful Tokugawa samurai-bureaucrats, Western popular culture still often presented samurai as lawless swordsmen. Midgley could also readily have confirmed her impression of a samurai cult of violence by reading the work of several historians on the earlier Warring States period or on the radicalism of the final years of the shogunate. Midgley’s essay, however, offers no indication that she in fact read any Japanese history. Without evidence, she takes the phenomenon to be a normal custom among samurai generally. In fact, she treats it as normative—morally necessary in their eyes. “Tests were needed,” she writes, lest the samurai fail in his swordsmanship, which would “injure his honor, offend his ancestors, and even let down his emperor.” She refers to tsujigiri as a “custom” of “ancient Japan” without specifying time period. She takes a single word from an exotic locale, without concern for context or usage, and makes it stand in for a holistically conceived “culture” without historical evolution. This presents a textbook case of Orientalism in the Edward Said’s sense.* Orientalist logic aside, she could have found a better example for her purposes in something like Aztec human sacrifice or perhaps in some cases of headhunting—cases where indeed the killing was understood (at least by some of the killers) as integral to sanctioned and necessary religious and social practices. In fact, even in the way she understands it, tsujigiri actually makes her case rather poorly, since it is ludicrous to think that Japanese society as a whole could have accepted this samurai “custom”: the victims could hardly have acquiesced, since they were purportedly assaulted at random. But this is unrelated to the historical problem I am discussing. Let me now turn to the history of usage of the term tsujigiri, whose presumed normativity forms the crux of Midgley’s argument. More work needs to be done to document the term, but I will show here at least that it has evolved in usage and that in no actual case for which I can find reliable contemporaneous reference was it used to describe an act deemed normal or socially acceptable. Before learning the Carmen Blacker story, I had thought there might be a longer history of references in Western texts or some nineteenth-century locus classicus on tsujigiri. But I have turned up little in the common early Western writing on Japan. Neither Engelbert Kaempfer nor Franz Siebold appears to mention it. Kaempfer and Siebold provide us the two most detailed accounts of Tokugawa Japan by European visitors. A googlebooks search for instances of the Romanized tsujigiri or tsuji-giri before 1900 yielded five hits: * Her ignorance of samurai history is further attested by several things in the essay, including the fact that she imagines that the samurai would be trying a “new sword,” when old swords were much more prized; by her reference to the samurai’s fear he would “let down…his emperor” (only a few samurai at certain revolutionary moments in history understood their loyalty as directed to the emperor); and by her use of the phrase “ancient Japan” itself, since standard practice in the field is to reserve this term for the period before the rise of the samurai. 2 definitions in two editions of the Hepburn Japanese-English dictionary (1874 and 1894) and three references in German works. Two of these German works were translations of a Tokugawa-period legal compendium. The third, an article on the Japanese sword published in a journal of ethnology by George Müller-Beeck in 1882, relates of the swords of famous sixteenth-century swordsmith Muramasa that samurai would try them out through tsujigiri, slashing beggars or animals in the street, or have the executioner test them (F. George Müller-Beeck, “die japanischen Schwerter,” Zeitschrift für Ethnologie, 1882; googlebooks). This is the earliest instance I have found of tsujigiri referring specifically to trying out a blade. It is intriguing that the word appears here in particular connection with Muramasa swords, since these swords were widely believed in the Tokugawa period to be cursed, and were particularly sought by anti-Tokugawa swordsmen at the end of the period for precisely this reason. The 1874 Hepburn dictionary gives “killed or murdered in the streets.” The 1894 Hepburn dictionary gives “killing or murdering in the streets to try one’s sword or skill.” I can’t be sure of the significance of this amendment in Hepburn’s later edition but it seems worth noting that the German ethnological work, which coupled the killing and the sword-testing, appeared in the period between the two editions. More investigation would be needed to determine whether there is a larger lineage of Western texts discussing tsujigiri.* It is easy to imagine the word gaining some currency among foreigners in bakumatsu, the last years of the shogunate, when sword-happy shishi (anti-Tokugawa imperial loyalists) were cutting foreigners and officials down in the streets. The historical encyclopedia Kokushi daijiten relates that Kumamoto samurai and imperial loyalist Kawakami Gensai was known as “Tsujigiri Gensai” because he did lots of slashing while in Kyoto. The entry also refers to him as a terorisuto. This was a time of terrorism, so the label is doubtless warranted. There is nothing to indicate that Tsujigiri Gensai cut anyone down in order to test his sword or that his behavior was sanctioned by custom. On the contrary, his violence served quite modern political goals. Carmen Blacker may have had some older precedent in mind. All she is reported to have told Midgley is that classical Japanese had a word meaning “to try out one’s new sword on a chance wayfarer.” Blacker/Midgley’s definition matches the one in the modern dictionary Nihon kokugo daijiten and other standard reference works that I viewed in the JapanKnowledge database. Just to be clear, we must note that this definition has two elements: (1) to cut down a passerby in the street and (2) to do it in order to test a sword or one’s swordsmanship. Literally translated, tsuji-giri is “street-crossing-cut,” which should simply mean only element (1), so at some point the definition acquired additional specificity, which included the motive in the attack. * I have found one earlier example in a Western dictionary: the Portuguese-Japanese dictionary Vocabvlario da Lingoa de Iapam, published in Nagasaki in 1603, of which I have a later French translation. This dictionary gives the definition: “Those who run by night and kill at crossroads.” Here, as in the 1874 Hepburn dictionary, there is no indication of the motive for killing. 3 The Kokushi daijiten encyclopedia’s entry for tsujigiri was written by distinguished Tokugawa scholar Yoshiwara Ken’ichirō. Yoshiwara first gives the definition containing both elements, then says that tsujigiri sometimes also occurred as part of a robbery (which would suggest something different from merely “testing” a sword). The earliest citation he presents is from the Taiheiki, a military epic chronicling events in the first half of the fourteenth century and probably authored sometime late in that century. This text describes the followers of an evil shogun cutting down young and old in the streets of the capital. The author of the epic refers to tsujigiri in this passage to demonstrate the horrific immorality of the time. No mention is made of testing swords. Yoshiwara next lists a prohibition of tsujigiri in 1597, in which tsujigiri is grouped with robbery. He then describes a period of frequent incidents of tsujigiri in the shogunal capital of Edo while Shogun Iemitsu was away visiting Kyoto in 1648, another incident that was punished, and finally the record of the official sentence for committing tsujigiri in the classic compendium of shogunal criminal law, Osadamegaki hyakkajō (1748), which called for the offender to be carried around the capital in chains before being executed. Yoshiwara’s encyclopedia article points us to the large historical document collection Koji ruien (also available in JapanKnowledge), which has a one-page entry on tsujigiri. Excerpting a work called Setsuya kandan, that entry tells the story of the rash of tsujigiri in Edo while Shogun Iemitsu was in Kyoto in 1648. I could not identify the publication date of Setsuya kandan. It relates that during Iemitsu’s absence, night after night there were incidents in the Banchō Ogawa-chō area in which hatamoto (shogunal bannermen) cut down townspeople in the street. The town magistrate struggled to stop the violence. Troubled, the shogunal counselors sent messengers repeatedly to the shogun in Kyoto. Sakai Tadakatsu, who was accompanying the shogun, told him it could easily be stopped. Sakai had Itakura Shigenori tell the hatamoto that the shogun had heard about the incidents around the hatamoto district and said that this was because the hatamoto were ignorant of the proper way of samurai (budō no kokorogake utoki), that they should examine one another, and if these incidents were repeated, it would be considered the fault of all the hatamoto. The incidents reportedly stopped immediately. This account mentions no motive for the slashings. It does not indicate that the hatamoto were trying out their swords, although they may have been doing so. The entry in the same Kokushi daijiten for a different term, tameshigiri (lit. “test-cutting”), authored by Shigematsu Kazuyoshi, meanwhile, begins with this definition: “to cut the body of an executed prisoner in order to test the edge of a sword. In the early Edo period it was done by tsujigiri.” It then indicates that tameshigiri was officially performed by machi dōshin (shogunal police), then became the special work of the executioner Yamada Asaemon, whose clan inherited the practice of testing the swords of elite samurai on the corpses of executed criminals. In a work entitled Ō-Edo shitai kō (A Study of the Place of Corpses in the Edo Capital, 1999), Tokugawa historian Ujiie Mikito has examined references to the practice of tameshigiri in seventeenth and eighteenth-period texts. He finds that many samurai witnessed the cutting of corpses for sword practice, particularly at the execution grounds, and describes accounts from early in the period of elite samurai who took relish in showing their sword skills on prisoners’ bodies (in some instances possibly living prisoners, 4 although he does not clarify this). However, he mentions only one case in which a samurai intentionally killed someone in the street to try out his sword. The swordsman in this case, Tokugawa Mitsukuni, describes having killed an outcaste under a bridge to test his sword (tameshigiri), prompted by a dare from a companion. The episode is recorded in Mitsukuni’s memoir as a shameful incident of his youth. Mitsukuni was born in 1628, so the incident would probably have occurred in the 1640s or early 1650s. Ujiie’s main finding is that during the extended peace following this time, most samurai became repulsed by the testing of swords not only on living humans but on prisoners’ corpses as well. In light of all this, I propose the following hypothesis: that at some point after the lawlessness of the sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries, the words tsujigiri (“slashing in the street”) and tameshigiri (“slashing to test”) somehow became conflated. There seem to me two possible explanations for the conflation. The first is that the shogunate caused the semantic slippage by introducing formalized tameshigiri in part as a response to hatamoto violence. Early Edo-period cases like the hatamoto slashings of 1648 could have been caused by any number of things apart from the desire to test swords. This was a period of gang warfare between hatamoto and non-samurai gangs called machi yakko. The slashings might have been acts of revenge, part of drunken brawling or robberies, or pure sadism. Since the practice of tameshigiri on corpses at the execution grounds was formalized after this time, and Shigematsu’s entry for tameshigiri states flatly that it replaced tsujigiri, it is easy to imagine formalized tameshigiri being presented by the authorities as a substitute for tsujigiri at the same time that they cracked down on slashing in the streets. This would have retrospectively conferred a small degree of martial honor on the outlaw behavior of their own retainers by saying, in effect, “we recognize that a samurai must test his sword; here is the proper means to do it.” My point is that the idea that one must “slash a person in the street” for the purpose of maintaining the blade and one’s skills, could well be a retrospective justification, regardless of the original reasons for the street killings. This would explain why the term tsujigiri subsequently, perhaps during the comparatively peaceful mid-Tokugawa period, came to refer specifically to killing to “test one’s sword.” The second possible explanation is that the conflation is even later, dating to the late nineteenth century, and derives from a new reading of samurai tradition based in part on the swashbuckling bravado of late Tokugawa imperial loyalists. For a brief period in the tumultuous 1860s, skill with the sword was suddenly important again for samurai, and some hotheaded men among them became genuinely eager to test theirs out, having never used them before. Over the two decades following the Meiji Restoration of 1868, these men’s impulses were eventually suppressed, and legitimate use of swords came to be monopolized by the modern police and military. By the 1880s, the “way of the sword” was beginning to be mythologized as part of the national past, and Japanese antiquarians, together with European ethnologists, might readily—if, perhaps, mistakenly—have conjoined “street-slashing” and “test-cutting” as part of a portrait of the samurai as a man whose loyalty to his weapon and his lord exceeded conventional morality. Even if in fact there were historical cases among samurai in which desire to test one’s sword was the only reason for a murder, I have found no evidence that it was ever accepted practice. At least in terms of word usage, the addition of the explanatory element, “in order to test a sword,” to the merely descriptive “slash in the street” may be entirely apocryphal. 5 The true lineage of ways of imagining and defining the act of tsujigiri has yet to be fully traced. Mary Midgley heard a one-line definition that conflated it with tameshigiri. The conflation had indeed become standard at some point before she heard it, as it appears in modern Japanese dictionaries. Perhaps the young Carmen Blacker, who would go on to become an erudite scholar of Japan, knew a reason to describe it as an ancient practice in Japan. But more likely she was just relating to Midgley the modern dictionary definition, which Midgley then conjured into the evidence of an alien and disturbing Japanese martial ethic for purposes of her thought experiment. Although it is certain that some samurai slashed down people in the street during particularly lawless times in history, Midgley is surely mistaken to imagine that it was ever normal and accepted, let alone that it was a moral imperative. I should add that despite its being ahistorical, I actually like Midgley’s essay. I am in fundamental agreement with her rejection of absolute moral relativism. We cannot allow the claim of cultural difference to trump all moral judgment. But to make this point she invented a “samurai culture.” This fictional system of customs and morals serves her point well, so perhaps she should be allowed to have it for the sake of argument, even if it is purely imaginary. But as with everything else claimed casually for the sake of an argument, it comes at a cost. The cost in this instance is that students in college classrooms, as they debate the question of moral relativism that Midgley poses so artfully, also struggle with the question of how Japan’s traditional military elite could have valorized such inhuman cruelty. They should not be struggling with this second question, since it is not based in historical reality. ** Someone’s scan of a reprint of Midgley’s full essay is available here: http://www.ghandchi.com/IONA/newsword.pdf 6