Chapter 845: The Strategy of Xinzhang

The seventh year of Shaoming, the ninth day of the sixth month, Naniwa-kyo (Osaka).

Blood stained this land crisscrossed by waterways; on the hill beside the West Palace, the great banner symbolizing the Minister of the Left and the Fujiwara house crashed to the ground.

Under the red sun blazing at high noon, the main force of the Wa kingdom, caught by surprise, had completely collapsed.

As far as the eye could see, the ground was covered with the prostrate corpses of soldiers in Wa dress, while pained groans and drifting smoke and flame still wafted everywhere.

Okura Haruzane, short sword in hand, walked up to Minister of the Left Fujiwara no Saneyori, who stood on the hilltop.

Fujiwara no Saneyori stared at Okura Haruzane in terror, wanting to speak, but a warrior behind him suddenly clamped a hand over his mouth.

Okura Haruzane drew closer step by step, his eyes blazing with fury and unwillingness.

"Young lord of the Left Bureau, do you see it now? This realm must in the end be guarded by warriors. It is not by useless court nobles singing a few waka that this country can be passed down forever.

We are all sinners. Please descend to hell together with your servant!"

With that, Okura Haruzane let out a great shout and drove the blade into the heart of the struggling Minister of the Left, Fujiwara no Saneyori.

Then this hero of the Johei-Tengyo campaigns, who had won his place among famed generals by suppressing Fujiwara no Sumitomo, turned the Kenukigata-tachi toward his own chest.

"My lord, please do not do this!" A warrior in bamboo-slat armor threw himself beside Okura Haruzane and, looking at him with tears streaming down his face, cried out.

"My son means to say that we can surrender to the Yan people, is that right?" Okura Haruzane asked with a smile, not at all looking like a man about to take his own life.

A look of hope flashed across the young warrior's face, and he nodded hard. "The court has mistreated warriors, which is why we have come to this defeat. We have already fought to the death; if our strength fails and we then ask to surrender, that too can be forgiven."

"Hahahaha!" Okura Haruzane laughed loudly, then said to his son:

"My son, do not feel ashamed. You may absolutely ask the Yan people to accept your surrender, because our Okura house are descendants of Achi no Omi. We were originally Han people, and of Han imperial bloodline besides.

The Wa court suppressed warriors and so brought on this disaster of collapse, but this is our Okura house's opportunity. If the Son of Heaven of Zhou wishes to annex this land, he cannot do without the cooperation of the descendants of us who came here first."

But as he spoke, Okura Haruzane's voice dropped low. "I am old, and I have received great favor from the Tenno. I expect there will be things I cannot bear to witness afterward, so I will not watch. My son is in the prime of life; go and return to the identity of our ancestors!"

With that, this ancestor from whom Japan's later Harada, Takahashi, and other surnames descend — this descendant of Han people who crossed the sea, whose descendants would still return to the mainland to pay respects at their ancestral graves more than a thousand years later — raised his sword and calmly took his own life.

After his son and household retainers gathered up his remains, they dipped white silk in blood and wrote five great characters: "Han Family, the Liu Clan," then waited on high ground for a chance to switch allegiance.

And with Okura Haruzane's suicide, the Wa army at the West Palace collapsed completely. Moreover, they could not run far at all; an almost entirely infantry force, once defeated, thinking of escaping under cavalry pursuit was pure wishful thinking.

On the eleventh of the sixth month, just after the Wa army's defeat at the West Palace, the Wa troops on Mount Takarazuka also met their doom.

The main force remaining here was over a thousand of the Tenno's Heian Palace guards plus two or three thousand defeated soldiers.

If even a man like Okura Haruzane, who barely counted as a famed general, could not turn the tide, they certainly could not block the Yan army's assault.

The battle lasted less than half a shichen before the Wa army on Mount Takarazuka collapsed entirely. The Six-Sun Prince Tsunemoto and his son — the historical Minamoto no Tsunemoto and Minamoto no Mitsunaka, father and son — were both killed, and the entire Wa force of four thousand was annihilated.

Almost simultaneously, Wang Jing and Li Hanqiong, northwest of Kobe, commanded a great host in a fierce assault on Ono no Yoshifuru, who was trapped there.

Ono no Yoshifuru led more than ten thousand Wa troops in a desperate defense of the fortified camp. On the third day of fierce fighting, Li Hanqiong personally led armored soldiers in a charge into the stronghold; the Wa army was routed, with more than three thousand killed.

Relying on his familiarity with the terrain, Ono no Yoshifuru fled toward Osaka with over a thousand remnant troops, only to have the terrible misfortune of running head-on into the cavalry force Li Hanqiong had sent to shadow the Wa main force.

On a nameless beach, Ono no Yoshifuru and his men were utterly crushed by seven hundred Tuyuhun iron cavalry, and his head became the trophy of a shaven-headed Tuyuhun giant — worth at least a viscount's rank for that stout fellow.

Naniwa-kyo (Osaka), Heijo-kyo (Nara), and Heian-kyo (Kyoto) are extremely close to one another; in later ages they would even be connected into one.

So Tachibana no Tohoyasu, trapped in Naniwa-kyo with the advantage of home ground and familiarity with the terrain, made a very bold and wise decision.

Before Murong Xinzhang's great army could complete its encirclement of Naniwa-kyo, he broke out from Morinomiya with over two thousand elite troops and headed straight for Heijo-kyo.

For Murong Xinzhang, the advantage was that Naniwa-kyo (Osaka) fell without a fight, but the drawback was that Heijo-kyo (Nara) was a strong fortress, not something Naniwa-kyo (Osaka) could compare to.

Moreover, with Tachibana no Tohoyasu fled to Heijo-kyo (Nara), in all likelihood Emperor Murakami would not remain in the easier-to-attack Heian-kyo either; he would surely also go to Heijo-kyo.

It was not that Murong Xinzhang had not thought of going first to Heian-kyo to seize the Wa emperor, but he was a stranger in this land, with too few men and no command of the language, so he simply could not strike straight at the heart as he would have in the Central Plains.

But since things had already come to this, Murong Xinzhang was in no hurry. In any case, with the Wa main force dealt with, he might as well wait a little longer.

Wait for the Wa kingdom's would-be resisters to show themselves, then give them one more hard blow.

So Murong Xinzhang immediately quartered his great army in Naniwa-kyo, and based on the local people's name for the place, formally renamed it Osaka.

"Saka" means a slope, which perfectly describes Naniwa-kyo, high in the northeast and low in the southwest, sloping from the interior down to the sea.

After securing a firm foothold in Osaka, Murong Xinzhang at once began rounding up the common people of Osaka and building the port of Osaka, and sent orders back to Kyushu and Korea, commanding Zhao Pu, Zhao Yanjin, and the others left behind to send personnel and supplies to Osaka at once.

By this time, the Tuyuhun, Qiang, Tangut, Khitan, Han, and other households that Zhang Zhao had allotted to his good eldest son had basically all entered Korea.

Upon receiving word of Murong Xinzhang's great victory at Osaka, Zhao Pu immediately reported it to Cao Yuanzhong, who, uneasy about his grandson's enterprise, had remained in Hanseong and not left.

Ah, this good maternal grandfather of Murong Xinzhang, good father-in-law and good elder cousin of Sage Zhang, had a big enough head — one could say he had been tested through repeated rebellions, and no matter how big the blame, he could bear it.

So by Cao Yuanzhong's decision, Zhao Kuangyin conscripted another three thousand men from the various peoples who had reached Korea, and together with part of the Heng hai Fleet sailors left on garrison duty, five thousand men in all, set out at once for Osaka with fifty thousand shi of grain and a hundred ships.

Before Zhao Kuangyin departed, Cao Yuanzhong hurriedly rose and took a fast boat to Dengzhou, to ask the Prince of Lu, Qian Hongchu, to send another fifty ships from the Wu-Yue region, carrying thirty thousand shi of grain and all manner of logistical supplies, to Osaka.

One could say that for the sake of his most beloved eldest maternal grandson, Cao Yuanzhong had thrown caution to the winds, not even considering the need to avoid suspicion.

At the same time, Zhao Yanjin at Dazaifu ordered the Jinghai Garrison General Yao Yanhong to set out at once for Osaka with four thousand Jinghai Fleet marines and twenty thousand shi of grain.

And having settled on the plan of using stillness to counter movement, Murong Xinzhang began to devote himself to consolidating Osaka and the adjacent Kobe, Wakayama, and Awaji Island.

On the twenty-third of the sixth month, after his troops had rested and the soldiers and warhorses had largely acclimated to the climate of the Wa kingdom, Murong Xinzhang ordered Wang Jing to lead fifteen thousand infantry and cavalry to attack Heian-kyo.

The result was just as Murong Xinzhang had expected: the Wa kingdom had long since abandoned Heian-kyo. Wang Jing's troops arrived, and before they even began the assault, great fires broke out within Heian-kyo.

The Wa people themselves set fire to the palaces of Heian-kyo. The great fire then spread to the residential districts, the flames lighting up the sky and burning for more than ten days; most of the city of Heian-kyo, built with such painstaking effort by the Wa people, was reduced to ashes.

Murong Xinzhang was greatly enraged. He knew this was the Wa people's way of refusing to leave Heian-kyo to him, and also an expression of their determination to resist to the death.

After this, Heijo-kyo, built earlier and harder to take, would be the place of the final decisive battle.

On the twenty-seventh of the sixth month, while the great fire in Heian-kyo was still burning, Wang Jing, following Murong Xinzhang's orders, turned his army to attack Heijo-kyo.

This was of course a probing attack; if it were a true large-scale assault, the entire army would certainly be committed.

So the objective Wang Jing was to achieve was simply to keep the Wa people's nerves stretched to the breaking point, to force them to bring out all their strength.

Sure enough, faced with Wang Jing's arriving force of over ten thousand infantry and cavalry, Tachibana no Tohoyasu, who had been hastily appointed Great General Who Subdues the Invaders, drew several thousand elite troops from the two capitals and conscripted large numbers of retainers and so-called righteous volunteers, while Emperor Murakami granted them greater power and higher status than ever before.

Seeing that Heijo-kyo was too vast for him to surround, Wang Jing began seizing Kofuku-ji on the earthen hill northeast of Heijo-kyo as a commanding height, and by the way tested whether this was a weak point in Heijo-kyo's defense.

And with one test, he found out.

Kofuku-ji had been the cultural center of Japan in the Nara period; at its height it was said to have tens of thousands of warrior-monks, and even the imperial house had to rely on it.

When Emperor Kanmu moved the capital to Heian-kyo, one of the most important reasons was precisely to escape the grip of the great temples such as Kofuku-ji and Todai-ji.

Yet even though Kofuku-ji was weakened in the Heian period, it was still one of the largest temples in the land of Wa.

Wang Jing's probe not only revealed that Kofuku-ji occupied a key geographical position and was a suitable point from which to break Heijo-kyo, it also revealed the attitude of the Wa Buddhist establishment.

Indeed, the unfaithful may still be saved, but heretics must die — the Wa Buddhist establishment was extremely wary of the Six Dharma Sect, which had come to steal their livelihood.

Wang Jing led his troops to attack Kofuku-ji, and as a result all the temple warrior-monks of Wa came to its rescue, while Tachibana no Toyasu also dispatched several thousand samurai along the base of the city wall to support them.

Wang Jing attacked for several days at half strength, and indeed could not break in, so he simply chose to withdraw for the time being.

At this, the whole of Wa was greatly stirred, and at once came to regard Tachibana no Toyasu as a savior; the royal summonses sent out to the provinces and districts were now issued with far greater confidence.

On the twentieth day of the seventh month, a little over a month after the Battle of Osaka.

The five provinces of the Hokurikudo: Echizen, Echigo, Kaga, Etchu, and Noto.

The three provinces of the Tosando: Mino, Shinano, and Hida.

The three provinces of the Tokaido: Owari, Mikawa, and Totomi — the provincial armies of eleven provinces in all.

That is, the equivalent of the Central Plains' prefectural and county levied soldiers, who under the command of each province's governor and defense commissioner entered Heijo-kyo from several directions, including Lake Biwa.

With their arrival, counting the conscripted household servants and righteous volunteers of the Heijo-kyo nobility, the number of troops under Tachibana no Toyasu swelled once more to fifty thousand.

It seemed as though banners blotted out the sky, as though every hero in Wa had assembled — except that the Kanto warriors of Kozuke, Shimotsuke, Musashi, Kazusa, and other places had suffered heavy losses at Osaka and sent few men.

Driven by this feverish atmosphere, many court nobles and ministers urged Tachibana no Toyasu to march out and do battle with the Yan bandits occupying Osaka.

But only Tachibana no Toyasu knew that although there appeared to be fifty thousand men here, if one added the able-bodied farmers of the three capitals, even a hundred thousand could be raised.

Yet such a hastily assembled rabble, who could not even be given one iron sword per man, was utterly incapable of fighting, let alone of defeating the Yan bandits.

Moreover, Tachibana no Toyasu knew his own abilities: he could command a few thousand or ten thousand men well enough, but to truly command fifty or eighty thousand troops was beyond him.

And these provincial armies from the various provinces had been brought by their own governors, many of whom far outranked Tachibana no Toyasu in both office and lineage; he could not possibly wield them as his own limbs. In such circumstances, to go out and seek a decisive battle with the Yan bandits would be nothing short of suicide.

Under pressure from within and without, Tachibana no Toyasu resolved to enter the Heijo Palace and seek an audience with Emperor Murakami.

He even prepared to urge Emperor Murakami to abandon Heijo-kyo and withdraw to the Kanto, to the provinces of Kai, Musashi, and the like, and rely on the Kanto warriors to contend with the Yan bandits.

However, Tachibana no Toyasu's idea was sound, but once he entered the inner palace of Heijo-kyo, he did not find Emperor Murakami in the Jijuden; instead he met the Emperor's mother, the Empress Dowager Yasuko, directly in the Joneiden.

Although Emperor Murakami was no enlightened ruler, and although he had basically never held real power, as a man — a sovereign in the age of cold steel — he still understood something of what a gap in equipment meant, better than Yasuko did.

At least, from Tachibana no Toyasu's descriptions, he knew that the Yan army's cloth-faced iron armor and fine steel hengdao sabers were not things that Wa's current hanging armor, short armor, and kenukigata tachi could stand against.

But Yasuko knew nothing of these things. She had no interest in weapons or armor; in her mind, even if the Yan bandits' equipment was somewhat better, the gap could not possibly be as vast as between heaven and earth.

Instead, here was Tachibana no Toyasu, holding the military power of the entire realm, not thinking of suppressing the bandits, yet endlessly claiming his troops were too few — what was he scheming?

The instincts born of long political struggle erupted at that moment. Empress Dowager Yasuko simply refused to listen to Tachibana no Toyasu's explanations, declaring that the capital's grain stores would last only two months, that the righteous volunteers of every province had already assembled, and that the Yan bandits must be dealt with as quickly as possible.

In her view, the Yan bandits at Osaka numbered only around twenty thousand; even if there was an equipment gap, did they not hold the advantage of terrain?

And last time the Yan bandits attacked Heijo-kyo, had they not retreated in disarray? They were not so formidable after all!

Now, on their own doorstep, with four men to their one, how could they possibly lose?

Tachibana no Toyasu was both furious and despairing. At a time like this, the great figures above were still putting on airs of lofty superiority, utterly disregarding the actual situation.

They could not win to begin with, and now the trade winds had risen, allowing the Yan bandits to receive a steady stream of aid from the Central Plains. Choosing to clash head-on with them was simply courting death.

It was only a pity that he was no more than a warrior-born provincial governor of the junior fifth rank, lower grade — and it seemed that Emperor Murakami, who had granted him the office of General Who Pacifies the Bandits and placed trust in him, had once again been confined deep within the palace.

As for the only possibility Tachibana no Toyasu could imagine for contending with the Yan bandits — the proposal to withdraw to the Kanto and plan for the future — he never even managed to voice it.

On the fifth day of the eighth month, Heijo-kyo received another wave of over three thousand righteous volunteers: the Jiumadang, who operated east of Osaka.

"Jiu" means to rent or hire; the Jiumadang had originally been an armed horse-trading band formed by wealthy men of the provinces east of Osaka.

Later it evolved into a group similar to the Nianzi of the Huai River region in China. In recent years it had declined somewhat, but no one expected it still to number in the thousands.

These Jiumadang were tough by nature, swift in movement, all had warhorses, and excelled at small-unit combat — a fine supplement of light cavalry.

And the arrival of the Jiumadang further spurred Empress Dowager Yasuko and the court nobles and ministers in their desire to give battle.

Heijo-kyo already had a large population, and now with sixty or seventy thousand outside warriors suddenly arrived, food, clothing, and lodging all had to be supplied by the great figures of Heijo-kyo.

Watching money and grain consumed as though by a landslide, and fearing that too great a concentration of these warriors might turn against them, the entire Wa court, high and low, incessantly urged Tachibana no Toyasu to march out and seek a decisive battle with the Yan bandits.

And seeing that Emperor Murakami would not issue the decree, Yasuko and the other court nobles and ministers brought out the former emperor, the Cloistered Emperor Suzaku, whose mind was already no longer very clear, and had him ascend the altar to appoint the commander — the intent being to force Tachibana no Toyasu to march.

On the seventeenth day of the eighth month, Tachibana no Toyasu, truly unable to withstand the censure from above and below, could only accept the Cloistered Emperor Suzaku's command.

As if in a fit of pique, he marched out with everything: three thousand men of the Heijo Palace guard and noble and aristocratic warriors, forty-five thousand provincial troops from the various provinces, ten thousand warrior-monks of the three capitals' Buddhist temples, nine thousand righteous volunteers from the provinces, and over four thousand former members of violent bands such as the Jiumadang — in all some seventy-two or seventy-three thousand men. They left Heijo-kyo westward, heading for Osaka in Naniwa-kyo.

Between Heijo-kyo at Nara and Naniwa-kyo at Osaka lay only the Kongo Mountains, the not especially broad remnant range of the Katsuragi mountain system — a distance of no more than fifteen or twenty li in all.

To attack the Yan army at Osaka in Naniwa-kyo from Heijo-kyo at Nara, there were only two roads to choose from.

One was to go northwest from Saidai-ji toward Heian-kyo, then follow the Yodo River downstream to Naniwa-kyo.

But Tachibana no Toyasu did not dare take this road, because over the past few months Murong Xinzhang had ordered his naval forces to bring their warships into the Yodo River.

And Wa's own navy had long since been wiped out by Ono no Yoshifuru. To go down the Yodo River would be suicide.

Thus Tachibana no Toyasu could only choose to go out through the Rajomon (the prototype of the Rashomon), cross the Kongo Mountains, and arrive directly at Morinomiya in Osaka.

When Tachibana no Toyasu had broken out of Osaka Castle, it was by this very route that he had fled back to Heijo-kyo; moreover, the main pass on the Kongo Mountains, Myojin-yama Pass, was still in Wa hands.

The plan settled, Tachibana no Toyasu moved quickly. He had also underestimated himself — in truth, he did possess the ability to command an army of tens of thousands.

On the twenty-second day of the eighth month, the Wa vanguard appeared north of Morinomiya in Osaka, and within a day the main force began arriving in succession to form battle lines below the Kongo Mountains.

Murong Xinzhang had of course deliberately let the Wa forces come. The intent from the start had been to make them commit all their elite troops, to sweep up every man fit to fight in one net — naturally he would not hold the Kongo Mountains.

Still, Murong Xinzhang intended to let them stew for a while. After the Wa army arrived north of Morinomiya, the Yan army held its position and did not move, not even coming out of the city to fight in the open field — it too presented the appearance of intending to defend the city.

This drove Tachibana no Toyasu frantic. Their fighting strength was already inferior to the enemy's; if they also had to assault a strong fortress like Morinomiya, he might as well just kill himself.

So Tachibana no Toyasu, left with no choice, could only decide to do nothing. The seventy-odd thousand Wa troops likewise held their positions below the Kongo Mountains, as though they had come all this way merely to stand off against the Yan army.

Once both sides settled into this standoff, it lasted nearly ten days. During that time it rained for two days, and the air was stifling and humid.

This was brutal on the Wa troops. They endured the rain in the open field, and the sick among them increased day by day, while the Yan army rested and refitted inside Osaka Castle.

At the same time, the messages from the court nobles and ministers of Heijo-kyo urging battle arrived at the camp one after another.

At that very moment, seeing that the time was ripe, Murong Xinzhang personally led a great army of twenty-three thousand out of the Palace of Forests and drew up a grand, imposing formation, making a show of seeking a decisive battle.

Tachibana no Tomoyasu was overjoyed. Fearing that the Yan army would shrink back into its shell again, he did not even wait for his own side to finish forming ranks before ordering his great army to charge.

The seventh year of Shaoming, 952 CE, the first day of the ninth month. The rising sun had just appeared, and the weather was clear.

The Wa army struck first, hurling its elite troops at the Yan army's central grand formation. The two sides fought for about half a shichen, and under the absolute gap in equipment and training, the Wa were beaten with terrible casualties.

On the two wings, the white-robed, silver-saddled Zhaoyi youths also easily routed the several thousand Wa cavalry made up of horse-bandits of the Jiuma faction.

In an instant, the center pressed forward on the momentum, and the cavalry on both wings struck in a pincer. In barely a shichen from start to finish, the left wing, right wing, and center of the Wa army of more than seventy thousand collapsed one after another.

The so-called decisive battle became a pressure-free steamroll.

Below Mount Kongo, defeat spread like a collapsing mountain in an instant. Countless men died trampling one another as the Wa army fled in panic into Mount Kongo and retreated toward Heijo-kyo, while the Yan army pursued at their heels, giving them no chance to catch their breath.

Along the stretch from the Palace of Forests to Heijo-kyo, a mere twenty or thirty li of ground, corpses lay piled layer upon layer. Everywhere were slain Wa soldiers.

On the fifth day of the ninth month, Murong Xinzhang led his great army to the outer gate of Heijo-kyo and once more routed the thirty thousand Wa remnants that had barely managed to regroup.

The Wa Great General Who Pacifies the Barbarians, Tachibana no Tomoyasu, died in battle. The army supervisor and Middle Counselor Oe no Koretoki and others swallowed gold and took their own lives. Dozens of officers — provincial governors, vice-governors, guard envoys, and pursuit envoys from the various provinces — were killed in battle, and the soldiers' dead and wounded were beyond counting.

At the same moment that he destroyed this last defeated force, Murong Xinzhang ordered Wang Jing to make another detour and attack Kofuku-ji.

This time, with no warrior-monks left to protect it, Kofuku-ji was finally taken. Wang Jing ordered his eldest son Wang Tingyi, the fierce general Helian Hailong, Yuan Yanchao, and others to lead two thousand elite cavalry in breaking into the city from there.

Then they galloped several li through the city, reached the outer gate, killed and scattered the Wa garrison holding it, and opened the great gate to let the main army enter the city.

Heijo-kyo fell.

(End of chapter)

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