Samurai Armour

Gusoku: Japanese, 'complete', a full armour with every piece. Summer 1750, in a castle town at peace: a young samurai helps his uncle air the clan's armours in the sun, box by box, from a four-hundred-year-old great armour to the face masks with real moustaches... Inside: a leather panel for the bowstring, ten thousand little plates laced in silk, the coward's plate, a fan shot from a rocking boat at Yashima, helmets shaped like crescents, antlers and cliffs, lacquer that hardens only in damp air, Japanese mail sewn onto cloth, and two armours sent to King James I in 1613. Nasu no Yoichi will be there too. Chapters: The oldest armour · The great armour · Ten thousand little plates · The helmet · The way of horse and bow · Armour for walking · The age of war · The strange helmets · The faces · The lacquer · Putting it on · Mail in Japan · The horses · The long peace · A gift for a king · The end of the samurai · Why the legend? · Evening. Sources: Tokyo National Museum and Metropolitan Museum notes, Royal Armouries (the Saris armours), the Tanegashima account, the Tale of the Heike, Arai Hakuseki. Read by a synthetic voice; script written and fact-checked by the show's team. Additional sounds: Joseph Sardin, BigSoundBank.com (CC0).

The script

Inside a dark storehouse, behind a castle in Japan, there are wooden boxes, stacked in rows, each one with a crest painted on its lid. And in every box, folded carefully, wrapped in cloth, there is a suit of armour.

Some of them are two hundred years old. One of them is much older. And once a year, on the hottest, driest days of summer, they are all taken out into the light.

The Quiet Armoury. Episode four... samurai armour.

This story is read by a synthetic voice. If these stories keep you company at night, follow the show... it helps others find it.

It is the year seventeen fifty, in late July. You are in a castle town in western Japan, in the long peace of the Tokugawa shoguns. There has been no great war in Japan for more than a hundred years.

You are fifteen, the youngest son of a family of samurai who serve the lord of this castle. And this week, you have been given a job by your uncle, who is in charge of the castle's armoury. It is the week of the summer airing.

All over Japan, at this time of year, people do the same thing. In the hottest days of high summer, after the long rains of June have finally ended, they open their storehouses and bring everything out to dry... clothes, books, scrolls, paintings, and armour. The air is hot and dry, the sun is strong, and the damp of the rainy season, and the small insects that come with it, are driven out of everything that has been shut away.

In the courtyard behind the armoury, the servants have laid long mats on the ground, and set up wooden stands, shaped like a man's shoulders. And your uncle, who is old, slow and very careful, opens the first box.

Chapter one. The oldest armour.

Before we look in the boxes, let us go back a very long way... further back than any of them.

The oldest armour in Japan is more than fifteen hundred years old. It comes from great burial mounds, shaped like keyholes, built for chieftains and kings in the three hundreds, four hundreds and five hundreds. In them, archaeologists have found iron armour... cuirasses made of long iron plates, riveted together into a shape like a short, stiff jacket, closing in front on a hinge. And around the mounds, they found clay figures, standing in rows, of warriors wearing exactly that armour, and helmets, and holding swords and shields.

Later in the same centuries, a different kind of armour appears, coming from the mainland of Asia: armour made of small plates, laced together in rows. Lamellar. That kind will last. Everything in your uncle's boxes grows from it.

Chapter two. The great armour.

Your uncle lifts out the oldest armour in the storehouse with both hands, very slowly, as if it were asleep.

It is the great armour... the ō-yoroi. Its family has kept it for more than four hundred years, and it is the most precious thing the clan owns, after its swords. It is not for wearing. It has not been worn by anyone for a very long time. It is for keeping.

And it is the shape of a box.

The great armour was made for the warriors of the eleven hundreds and twelve hundreds, and those warriors were, above all, horsemen and archers. They fought from the saddle, with a long bow, riding past each other and shooting. Their armour was made for that.

Its body is a stiff, square box of small plates, which wraps around the chest, the left side and the back. The right side is left open, and covered with a separate plate, so that the armour can be put on. Hanging from the bottom of the box are four broad, heavy flaps, front, back, and sides... like a skirt, made to hang down around the saddle and protect the thighs.

Across the front of the box, there is a smooth panel of printed leather, with no lacing at all. That is for the bowstring. When the archer draws and releases, the string sweeps across his chest. It must not catch on anything.

And on the shoulders are the most striking parts of all: two great flat shields, rectangular, almost as large as a book cover held open, hanging from the shoulders on cords. They are the great sleeves. A mounted archer had no hand free for a shield. So his shields were hung on him, and moved as he moved, and could be swung forward to cover him as he leaned out to shoot.

The great armour weighs, your uncle says, as much as a child of nine or ten. Around thirty kilograms. On a horse, the horse carried most of it. On foot, it was very heavy indeed.

Chapter three. Ten thousand little plates.

Look closely at the great armour, and you see that it is made of thousands of small pieces.

They are called scales... though they are not round like a fish's scales. Each one is a narrow strip of iron, or of hardened leather, about the length of a finger, pierced with two or three rows of tiny holes. The strips are laid side by side, each overlapping the next, and laced together into a long row. Then the rows are laced one above the other with silk cords, the lower row hanging from the upper. So the whole armour is a kind of fabric, of stiff little plates, held together by braid.

A great armour may have many thousands of these plates in it. Every one was made, pierced, lacquered and laced by hand.

The lacing is what makes these armours so beautiful.

It is flat braid of silk, and on the great armour it is laced closely, every row touching the next, so that the whole surface is covered in colour, and the plates hardly show at all. And the colours have names, and so do the patterns.

Your uncle shows you. This one is laced with deep indigo blue, all over. That one, which belonged to a younger son, is laced in bands of colour that shade slowly from one tone into another, like a mountain at dusk. Another is laced in pure white, and it is named after a small white flower of early summer. Another is scarlet. Another, light green, the colour of young leaves.

On a battlefield, when the colours of an armour could be seen from far away, they told everyone who you were... and they told you who was beside you.

Lacing also had its weaknesses, and your uncle, who is honest, tells you those too.

When it rained, the silk soaked up water, and the armour grew heavy and stayed heavy. In winter, it could freeze stiff. In summer, it held sweat and dirt, and lice and insects moved into it. And when a spear or an arrow struck, the silk cords could catch the point, instead of letting it slide off. That is one reason why, later, armourers began to use less lacing, and more solid plate.

But on a summer morning, in the courtyard, with the sun on it, it is the most beautiful thing you have ever seen.

Chapter four. The helmet.

The helmet of the great armour is round, low and heavy. It is made of many curved iron plates, joined together in a bowl, and riveted... and the heads of the rivets are left standing up from the surface in rows, like little studs, catching the light.

At the very top, there is a hole. It is not to let air in. In the old days, the warrior wore his long hair tied up in a knot, and the knot came up through the hole. Later, the hole stayed, but it became a decoration, ringed in gilt metal, and it was said that a god of war sat on the helmet at that spot.

Hanging from the back and sides of the bowl is a deep neck guard, made of several rows of lacquered plates, laced like the body, flaring out like a bell. At the front, on each side, the top of the neck guard is folded back in two large flat ears, turned outward. They kept the sword strokes of an opponent from sliding down into the neck. They also look very much like the swept-back ears of an animal.

And on the front of the helmet, rising from the brow, there are two tall, flat, gilded horns, curved outward like a pair of leaves. They are not for fighting. They are for being seen.

Chapter five. The way of horse and bow.

While the great armour sits in the sun, your uncle tells you a story that every boy in Japan knows. It comes from a long tale of the great war of the eleven eighties, when two warrior clans, the Taira and the Minamoto, fought for the country. The warriors of that war wore armour like the one in the first box.

Late in the war, the two armies faced each other at a place called Yashima, on the shore of the Inland Sea. The Taira had taken to their boats, and the Minamoto were on the beach. It was evening, the fighting had paused for the day, and the light was going.

From the Taira boats, one small boat rowed out toward the shore. In it stood a young lady of the court, in robes of many colours. She set up a pole at the bow of the boat, and on top of it, she fixed an open fan... a red fan, with a golden sun painted on it. And she beckoned to the shore. It was a challenge. Who among you can hit it?

The Minamoto general chose a young archer named Nasu no Yoichi, who was barely twenty. He rode his horse out into the sea, up to its belly in the water. The wind was strong. The waves were rising. The boat was rocking up and down, and the fan was swinging on its pole.

Yoichi closed his eyes and prayed. When he opened them, the wind had dropped a little. He drew his bow, and shot.

The arrow struck the fan just at its rivet, where the ribs meet. The fan leapt into the air, turned over and over in the evening light, and fell onto the waves, where it floated, red and gold, rising and falling on the water.

And from both sides... from the Taira in their boats, and from the Minamoto on the shore... the warriors beat on the sides of their quivers and cheered.

The warriors of that time called their whole life the way of the horse and the bow. Not the sword... that came later. The bow. And the great armour was made for exactly that moment: a man on a horse, in the sea, drawing a long bow, with nothing in the way of the string.

Chapter six. Armour for walking.

Your uncle lays the great armour on its stand and covers it with a thin cloth against the sun. Then he opens the next box, and lifts out something quite different.

It is softer, and closer-fitting. It wraps around the body, and fastens on the right side. Its skirt is made of more, smaller flaps, so that a man can walk and run in it. Its shoulders have only small guards.

This is the kind of armour first worn by soldiers who fought on foot... the men who followed the mounted warriors into battle. It was lighter, cheaper and far more comfortable. And as warfare changed, and more of the fighting was done on foot, the samurai themselves began to wear it too, adding the great shoulder shields and a fine helmet when they wanted to look their best.

There was also a version that opened at the back instead of the side. It was easier to put on, and fitted closely. And there is a story about it, which your uncle tells you with a small smile. The back opening was covered with a narrow separate plate. And because a warrior who turned his back on the enemy was a coward, that plate was sometimes called the coward's plate. Some men, it is said, refused to wear it at all.

Chapter seven. The age of war.

Now your uncle opens a box that is very different again.

The armour inside is dark, almost black, and plain. It is made, not of thousands of little laced plates, but of broad solid bands of iron, riveted together, so that the body is smooth and hard, like the side of a barrel. The lacing has been reduced to a few cords, in pairs, here and there, just enough to hold the pieces together. There are pieces for the thighs, for the shins, for the arms, for the hands. It covers almost the whole body.

This armour was made about a hundred and seventy years ago, in the last great age of war in Japan.

For more than a hundred years, from the late fourteen hundreds until about sixteen hundred, Japan was torn apart by war. Great lords fought each other for land and power, in battles with tens of thousands of men. The Japanese call it the age of the country at war.

Armies grew enormous. Most of the soldiers were now foot soldiers, not samurai on horseback. And they needed armour quickly, cheaply, and in great numbers.

So the armourers changed everything. They made armour of larger solid plates instead of thousands of small ones. They used less lacing, because lacing took time, and held rain. They made simple helmets, and simple armour, in thousands, to be lent out to foot soldiers before a battle and handed back afterward.

It was the armour of a new age. Its name meant, simply, modern armour.

And then, in the middle of all this, something arrived from the sea.

In the year fifteen forty-three, a Chinese ship was blown onto the small island of Tanegashima, off the south of Japan. On board were a few Portuguese traders... the first Europeans to reach Japan. They carried guns. The lord of the island bought two of them, and set his swordsmiths to copy them. Within a few years, Japanese smiths were making guns of their own, and within a few decades, there were tens of thousands of them in Japan.

Armour had to answer.

The armourers made breastplates thick enough to stop a musket ball fired from some distance. And they tested them, just as the European armourers did, by firing at them. If the ball only dented the plate, the armour was proved. Your uncle shows you, on the front of the dark armour, a small round dent, smooth and shallow, about the size of a fingertip.

And some great lords wore armour built around a real European breastplate, bought from the Portuguese or copied from one... with a ridge down the middle, and a Japanese skirt and shoulders added. The Japanese called them southern barbarian armours, after the foreigners who brought them.

Chapter eight. The strange helmets.

Now your uncle smiles, and opens a long, tall box.

The helmet inside is not round at all. It rises, tall and smooth, into a shape like a great tall cap, lacquered silver. Another box holds a helmet shaped like a seashell. Another, one with a pair of buffalo horns. Another, with a gilded rabbit's ears.

These are the strange helmets... the changed helmets... of the age of war.

When armies grow large, and every soldier wears dark iron armour, how do you find your lord on a battlefield? How does he make sure everyone knows where he is?

The great commanders of the age of war answered that with their helmets. They wore helmets in the shape of anything they liked... fish, shells, waves, mountains, catfish tails, folded paper, a monk's cowl, a cliff. Made of lacquered paper and wood, built up over a plain iron bowl underneath. Light, tall, and impossible to miss.

Some of them became famous.

One great lord of the north, who had lost an eye as a child, wore a black helmet with a single enormous golden crescent moon across its front, wide and thin, like a blade of light. It is still the best-known helmet in Japan.

Another commander, a famous general who was said never to have been wounded in more than fifty battles, wore a helmet with a great pair of deer's antlers, carved and lacquered black.

Another wore a helmet shaped like a steep cliff... the cliff down which, four hundred years earlier, a famous general had led his horsemen in a surprise attack.

And one family, the Ii, dressed their whole army in red. Red armour, red helmets, red banners. On the field, they were called the red devils.

And on their backs, many soldiers wore a tall flag, a narrow banner on a pole, fixed into a holder on the back of the armour, with the badge of their lord. In the dust and the noise, it was how a commander saw where his men were, and how they found each other.

Chapter nine. The faces.

There is one more part of the armour that your uncle takes out last, from a small box of its own. A face.

It is a mask, made of iron, lacquered dark red. It covers the face below the eyes... the cheeks, the nose, the mouth and the chin. Hanging below it, a little curtain of laced plates protects the throat.

The face has an expression. A scowl. Deep wrinkles across the cheeks. A mouth slightly open, as if about to shout. And on the upper lip, a moustache made of real hair, white and bristling. Some masks have teeth, of silver or gold. Some are smooth and calm, like the face of a young man. Some are the faces of demons.

The masks were useful. They protected the face from blows and arrows. And the helmet's cords could be tied to little hooks on their cheeks, so the helmet sat firmly and could not be knocked off.

But they were also meant to be looked at. In battle, the man in front of you had no face of his own. He had this one.

Inside the mask, under the chin, there is a small hole. Your uncle tells you what it is for. Sweat. On a summer day, in full armour, a man sweated so much that it would run down the inside of the mask and pool under the chin. So the armourers left it a way out.

Chapter ten. The lacquer.

By now, the courtyard is full. Armour on stands in rows, under thin cloths, like a crowd of people waiting in the sun.

You ask your uncle why the plates are so smooth and dark and glossy, and why they have lasted so long. He tells you about the lacquer.

It is made from the sap of a tree. When the bark is cut, a milky grey juice runs out, and is collected drop by drop. Raw, that sap is dangerous. Touch it, and your skin breaks out in a fierce, burning rash... the tree is a cousin of poison ivy. Lacquer workers get used to it, slowly, over years.

The sap is filtered, mixed with colours... black from iron, red from cinnabar... and painted on in thin layers. And here is the strange thing. Lacquer does not dry in dry air. It hardens only in damp, warm air. So the lacquerer puts each freshly painted plate into a closed cupboard, lined with damp cloths, and leaves it there for days. Then he polishes it, and paints the next layer. A good piece might take twenty or thirty layers.

When it is finished, the lacquer is hard, glossy, and almost completely waterproof. It does not rust. It protects the iron and leather underneath from the damp air of Japan for centuries. That is why these armours have lasted.

One armour, your uncle says, is the work of dozens of craftsmen. An armourer, who makes the plates and the helmet. A lacquerer. A braid-maker, who weaves the silk cords. A leather worker. A metalworker for the gilded fittings. A dyer. And the famous armourers' families, who signed their helmets, and were proud of their lines going back many generations, sometimes further back than anyone could check.

Chapter eleven. Putting it on.

Late in the afternoon, your uncle does something he has never done before. He opens a smaller box, and lifts out a light, plain armour, lacquered black and laced with dark blue... and tells you to put it on.

It was made for a boy. Your grandfather wore it, once, for his coming-of-age. It has been waiting in its box ever since.

You begin, as everyone begins, with clothes. A loincloth. A short, close-fitting robe. Loose trousers, tied below the knee. Cloth wrappings around the shins, and on the feet, soft socks, and straw sandals, tied tight.

Then the armour, from the bottom up. First the shin guards... curved plates of lacquered iron, tied behind the calf. Then a kind of divided apron of small plates, tied at the waist, that hangs down over the thighs. Then the sleeves. They are not solid arm pieces, as in Europe, but tight sleeves of cloth, with small plates and patches of mail sewn onto them, tied around the chest and under the opposite arm, so that they stay on even without the body armour. The backs of the hands are covered by small plates too. The palms are bare. You need your fingers.

Then the body. Your uncle holds it open on its hinge, and you step into it, and he closes it around you and ties it on the right side. He lifts the shoulder guards onto your shoulders and ties their cords to the body. He hands you the mask, and shows you how it sits under the eyes and how the helmet's cords hook onto the little pegs on its cheeks. Last of all, the helmet, its cords crossed under the chin and tied in a careful knot that will not slip.

It takes a long time. You stand in the evening sun, sweating, the mask making your breath warm against your face, and look out through the narrow gap between the helmet's brim and the mask's cheeks.

The armour is lighter than you expected, and closer. It moves when you move. Your uncle walks once around you, looks at you for a long moment, and says nothing at all. Then he begins, very carefully, to untie it again.

Chapter twelve. Mail in Japan.

On the sleeves of the boy's armour, between the small plates, there is mail. Japanese mail.

It is quite different from the mail of Europe. European mail is a fabric of rings, each linked through four others, and it hangs by itself, like heavy cloth. Japanese mail is made of smaller rings, of several shapes... round ones and oval ones, often linked in patterns of four around one, or six around one... lacquered black against rust, and always sewn onto a backing of cloth. It cannot stand alone. It is a part of the garment.

And there is another kind of armour, sewn into cloth in the same way: little hexagons of iron or hardened leather, the shape of a tortoise's shell, set side by side between two layers of fabric. It could be folded. It could be packed into a small bundle. A samurai on a journey could carry it in a box on his back, or wear a jacket of it under his ordinary clothes, and nobody would know.

Chapter thirteen. The horses.

The great armours were made for riders, and there is one more thing about the riders that surprises people.

Their horses were small. The native horses of Japan were sturdy, hardy and strong, but short... most of them about the height of a modern pony, or a little more. Pictures and films often show samurai on tall, elegant horses. In fact, a man in a great armour, with his great shoulder shields and his long bow, sat on a horse whose back was about as high as his own chest.

Horses sometimes wore armour too. It was rare, and late, and made of small plates of lacquered leather, sewn onto cloth, covering the head, neck and body. On the head, often, there was a mask... a fierce dragon's face, with flaring nostrils, for the horse.

Chapter fourteen. The long peace.

In the year sixteen hundred, a great battle was fought in the middle of Japan, in a narrow valley, in fog. It decided who would rule the country. The winner, three years later, became shogun. His family would rule Japan for more than two hundred and fifty years. And in all that time, there would be almost no war.

So what happens to armour, in a land at peace?

It becomes a treasure. A family's history. Something to be kept, aired, displayed at the new year, worn at a procession, or at the shogun's court on a great occasion. A boy of a samurai family, when he came of age, around thirteen or fourteen, put on armour for the first time in a little ceremony... not to go to war, but to show that he had become a man.

And something curious happened. In the long peace, people began to look back with longing at the old days... the age of the great archers on horseback, four and five hundred years earlier. A scholar named Arai Hakuseki wrote a careful study of the old armours, early in this century, praising them. Lords began to order new armours made in the old style... great box-shaped armours, laced in bright silk, with great shoulder shields... that no one had worn in battle for hundreds of years.

Some of these revival armours are very beautiful. Some of them get the old details a little wrong. Collectors today sometimes have to look carefully to tell a real old armour from a loving copy made centuries later.

Your uncle, if you asked him, would say that the old one in the first box is real. And he would be right... or very nearly.

Chapter fifteen. A gift for a king.

There is one more story your uncle tells you, as the afternoon goes on. He heard it from his grandfather.

In the year sixteen thirteen, an English ship came to Japan, the first ever. Its captain carried letters from the King of England, James the First, and asked for permission to trade. The shogun agreed. And as a gift for the faraway king, he sent back with the captain two suits of Japanese armour.

They crossed the oceans, and arrived in London. Your uncle does not know what became of them. Nobody in Japan does.

But we can. They are still there. They were kept with the royal armours of England, and one of them can still be seen today, in the Royal Armouries... a dark, laced Japanese armour, standing among the steel harnesses of English kings. For many English people, over the centuries, it was the first samurai armour they ever saw.

Chapter sixteen. The end of the samurai.

Your uncle cannot know it, but the peace he lives in will last more than another hundred years. And then, quite suddenly, the world will come to Japan.

In the eighteen fifties, foreign warships arrive, and Japan is forced to open its ports. In eighteen sixty-eight, the rule of the shoguns ends, and the emperor is restored. The new government sets out, as fast as it can, to build a modern country, with railways, factories, a modern army in uniforms, and rifles.

There is no place in it for samurai. Within a few years, their special rank is abolished. In eighteen seventy-six, they are forbidden even to wear swords in the street. Many old families, poor now, sell what they have. And armour, that nobody needs any more, is sold too... to dealers, to collectors, to visitors from Europe and America, for very little.

So the boxes are opened one last time, and the armours go out across the sea, to London, Paris, Berlin, New York. Some are broken up, and sold piece by piece. Many are kept whole. Today, some of the finest Japanese armours in the world stand in museums far from Japan, in glass cases, in quiet halls.

Chapter seventeen. Why the legend?

What made samurai armour so famous?

It was not, by itself, stronger than European armour. A good European plate harness and a good Japanese armour of the same time were both very well made, for the wars they were made for, and they were made for different wars.

But some things about Japanese armour are almost unique.

First, it is beautiful in a way that is hard to forget. The colours of the silk. The gloss of the lacquer. The strange, bold helmets. The faces. It was always meant to be seen, and to say who you were.

Second, it was made by so many hands. An armour was a meeting of a dozen crafts, each of them carried to the edge of what was possible.

Third, the long peace kept it. In most of the world, old armour was worn out, melted down, or thrown away when it stopped being useful. In Japan, for two hundred and fifty years, armour was kept, aired, mended, inherited and honoured. So there is more old armour in Japan, in good condition, than almost anywhere.

And fourth, when Japan opened to the world in the eighteen hundreds, and its old way of life ended, those armours went out into museums all over the world. And everywhere they went, people stopped in front of them, and stared.

Chapter eighteen. Evening.

The sun is low now. The heat has gone out of the courtyard. The cicadas in the castle trees have quietened, and the evening birds are calling instead.

Your uncle begins to put the armours away, in the reverse order. The faces first, into their small boxes. Then the helmets. Then the bodies, folded carefully, each plate in its place, with sheets of soft paper between them, so that the silk does not rub. Each box is closed, tied with its cord, and carried back into the dark storehouse.

Last of all, he folds the great armour. It takes him a long time. He does not let you help with that one... not yet. Next year, perhaps.

The storehouse door is closed, and barred. The boxes are in their rows, in the dark, in the dry air. They will not be opened again until next summer.

Inside a dark storehouse, behind a castle in Japan, there are wooden boxes, stacked in rows, each one with a crest painted on its lid. In each, folded carefully, a suit of armour.

The Japanese have a word for what is inside. Not armour in general, but this: a full harness, every piece, ready to be put on. Gusoku. It means, very simply, complete... everything that is needed, and nothing missing.

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