Yashima: A Battle with an Audience

In the Tale of the Heike, the archer Nasu no Yoichi shoots a fan from a Taira boat. Warriors afloat beat the sides of their vessels in appreciation; their opponents ashore strike their quivers. For a moment, the enemies respond to the same accomplishment. Then an older man begins dancing where the fan had stood. Another order reaches the archer. This time his arrow strikes a person. The story gives the spectators different responses: approval from some, condemnation from others.^[1]

The second shot changes the meaning of the first scene without changing its basic arrangement. There is still an archer, a boat and an audience. Accuracy alone no longer explains what the audience has seen.

These episodes belong to the literary history of the battle fought at Yashima in 1185. Around the plateau's eastern foot in present-day Takamatsu, monuments attach that history to particular stretches of ground and water. The sites do not preserve a complete medieval battlefield. They preserve something more selective: places from which an action can be imagined, watched and told again. Following those selections reveals how a dispersed coastal battle became a sequence of close, memorable encounters.

Yashima's military importance began with connections. The plateau stood beside the Seto Inland Sea, with the Takamatsu plain behind it and island routes extending toward the opposite coast. In a lecture on the region's medieval history, Kagawa Museum historian Shibuya Keiichi places Yashima at this junction of maritime movement and the resources of Sanuki, the province occupying northeastern Shikoku.^[2]

The Taira, a warrior house closely connected with the imperial court, used Yashima during their struggle with the Minamoto. Their presence involved an imperial household as well as fighting men. Local traditions place the residence of the child emperor Antoku near the site now marked by Antoku Shrine. A nearby Sōmon tradition identifies a gate associated with the base. Neither is a surviving twelfth-century palace or entrance.^[3]

A shoreline base could receive people from the sea and maintain contact with the settled country inland. Those advantages also created different directions from which it could be approached. The Heike describes Minamoto no Yoshitsune approaching through Awa, the province to the southeast. The historical fighting around Yashima in 1185 forced a Taira withdrawal by sea; it did not destroy their fleet. Their final defeat came later at Dan-no-ura, far to the west beside Shimonoseki.^[4]

This geography can be obscured by two familiar names. Yashima's eastern-foot area also bears the name Dannoura, but it is not the Shimonoseki battlefield. And the ancient fortress called Yashima Castle belongs to the seventh century, not to a castle built for Yoshitsune's opponents. The 1185 battle is associated principally with the foot of the plateau, its shoreline and the adjoining waters.^[3]

Land and sea therefore need to remain in the same account. A retreat into boats could remove people from an immediate land attack without taking them beyond all contact with the shore. The Heike makes extensive use of precisely that interval: close enough for challenges, arrows and recognition, yet divided by water.

The water's present arrangement is itself historical. An official account of the Aibiki channel describes reclamation under Ikoma Takatoshi in 1637, which joined Yashima to the mainland. A decade later, under Matsudaira Yorishige, a channel was cut through the reclaimed ground. The island relationship was altered, then partly restored through engineering.^[5]

These changes occurred centuries after the battle. They help explain why a modern road, riverbank or field cannot simply be inserted into an 1185 scene. Even the apparent certainty offered by two points on opposite banks depends on which shoreline is being used. A distance measured now would measure the transformed landscape, not independently settle the range of an arrow in the Heike.

The memorial geography works differently. Across the channel in Mure, Inori-iwa marks the place where tradition locates Yoichi's prayer. Koma-tate-iwa is associated with his mounted shot. They give two stages of one story separate addresses: first an appeal for help, then the attempt.^[6]

That separation is useful without treating the rocks as archaeological proof of the archer's positions. It allows a listener to move from preparation to action. An episode that passes quickly in a book acquires an interval in the landscape. The approach to the water becomes part of the remembering.

The Heike's scene is exceptionally suited to such treatment. Its participants occupy two sides of a visible division. The fan supplies a small focal point between them. Modern commemoration can attach that arrangement to a shoreline even where reclamation has changed the ground. What is being preserved most securely is a relation among the story's parts, rather than a surveyed diagram of the original shot.

The fan episode begins with interpretation. A woman aboard the approaching boat raises the target and gestures toward shore. Yoshitsune asks what the gesture means. His adviser understands it as a challenge, while also suggesting that it could conceal a trap. Before anyone shoots, the narrative has made the opposing boat something to be read.^[7]

Yoichi is then summoned. The command is to hit the fan and give the enemy something to see. He initially objects that a miss would disgrace his side; Yoshitsune insists. The archer's task is consequently larger than striking an object. He is being asked to produce a public result for people who have not agreed to judge him favorably.

The scene narrows as he approaches the water. His own men are behind him, the target ahead, the Taira watching from their vessels. In the narrative, the boat rocks and the fan moves. Yoichi prays to Hachiman and deities of his home region before taking the shot. The story gives this moment an inward voice that neither of the two watching armies could have heard.^[7]

That movement between outer spectacle and private prayer is part of the episode's construction. The reader can attend to the archer's fear, then return to the action available to everyone. The fan rises after the arrow strikes it and falls toward the water. The response passes back across the same space: sounds from the boats answered by sounds from the shore.

The later shooting of the dancer interrupts this shared response. On the Taira side, the sound stops; approval and disapproval appear in the narration. The text does not present an undivided audience merely cheering every successful arrow.^[8]

A shortened retelling that ends with the fan preserves the accomplishment and removes this change. The longer sequence lets the same shoreline host a different reaction to the same skill. It is one reason Yashima's literary history cannot be reduced to a catalogue of remarkable feats. The stories are also occupied with how an act appears, who is made to witness it, and what happens when their responses cease to coincide.

Other episodes shift attention from an arrow's target to objects that can change hands. In one encounter, the Taira warrior Kagekiyo seizes the protective neck guard attached to an opponent's helmet. The guard tears away and the man escapes. Kagekiyo holds up what he has taken and announces himself, calling on those nearby to see and those farther away to hear.^[8]

The damaged piece becomes a means of showing an encounter to people who did not stand within reach of it. The escape and the capture of the object are different results; the narrative allows Kagekiyo to present the second publicly. A small fragment of equipment carries a story beyond the instant in which it was torn off.

Yoshitsune's fallen bow raises the reverse problem. During fighting in the shallows, he loses it into the water and persists in recovering it despite calls to abandon it. Afterward, the text gives him an explanation: he feared that enemies would exhibit his relatively slight bow and ridicule the commander who used it.^[9]

The bow's value in this explanation lies in the story that could be attached to it. Its loss would place an identifiable possession in someone else's hands. Recovering it prevents an opposing audience from acquiring that prop. The danger of the attempt and its justification remain the narrative's account; the speech is not a transcript establishing the historical commander's private motive.

The two objects create a revealing contrast within the Yashima sequence. Kagekiyo wants an object seen. Yoshitsune wants an object kept from view. The shoreline is the setting for both because combat here repeatedly brings people and equipment between firm ground, shallow water and boats. Something lost need not disappear; it can be retrieved by the other side.

The fan, neck guard and bow thus do different work. One invites a display of skill. Another supplies a visible remnant of a struggle. The third threatens to support an opponent's description of its owner. The objects make the battle narratable at a human scale without supplying a comprehensive explanation of why the Taira lost their base.

The eastern-foot memorial landscape also retains the names of Satō Tsugunobu and Kikuōmaru, men remembered on opposing sides. Their linked deaths receive a sustained episode in the Heike.^[3]

In that account, Tsugunobu falls while protecting Yoshitsune from arrows. Kikuōmaru, serving the Taira warrior Noritsune, advances to take his head. Tsugunobu's brother shoots the approaching retainer. Noritsune retrieves Kikuōmaru into a boat, but the wound proves fatal. The narrative then returns to Tsugunobu, who speaks of the future remembrance of dying in his lord's service.^[10]

The story repeatedly changes where attention rests. The fallen man is first a protector, then the object of an enemy's advance; the advancing enemy becomes a casualty whom his own superior recovers. Boat and shore divide the parties without making only one side capable of attending to a wounded follower.

The present monuments give these names durable locations. They do not preserve the sequence of arrows or authenticate every final word. Their more direct effect is selection: amid a dispersed field of fighting, these two deaths can still be approached separately and connected through a story.

That connection keeps the named sites from becoming interchangeable markers of generalized bravery. The men occupy different positions in the episode, and one action brings the next about. Remembering them together restores this relationship. It also leaves the larger, unnamed population of the battle outside the frame. A narrative can make two people unusually distinct without becoming an account of everyone who fought nearby.

A seventeenth-century folding screen in the Kagawa Museum gathers several Yashima episodes onto one surface. The museum dates the anonymous painting approximately to the Kan'ei era, 1624–1644. Its catalogue identifies the death of Tsugunobu, the fan shot, Kagekiyo's struggle and Yoshitsune's retrieval of his bow, distributed across the composition.^[11]

The screen offers a kind of access unavailable to a participant. Instead of remaining on one patch of shore or aboard one vessel, the viewer can move between separate episodes. Golden land and dark water keep the two environments legible while the painter brings different moments into the same field of vision.

The boats at the lower right make the change especially clear. Their roofed compartments open toward the viewer. The catalogue identifies Antoku, his grandmother and Taira leaders within them. The painting supplies visual access to the household carried by the fleet, alongside actions taking place outside it.

This is not simply an enlargement of the fan episode's audience. It is a new position for looking. The painted fleet's occupants can themselves be inspected, and the viewer can compare incidents separated by the narrative's sequence. The screen holds together a court, combatants and selected gestures without requiring them all to have been visible from a single historical lookout.

Its date belongs in that understanding. The picture was made more than four centuries after the battle. It records an established repertoire of Yashima stories and a painter's means of arranging them, rather than a recovered eyewitness panorama. The Kagawa Museum similarly explains that war tales and their pictorial descendants contain creative additions to historical events.^[12]

At the local monuments, separate places spread the episodes out. On the screen, a single object brings them together. Both arrangements give the familiar actions another setting in which they can be encountered.

The Noh play Yashima, attributed to Zeami, creates a different audience again. Noh is a form of drama combining chant, music and highly controlled movement. Here a traveling priest seeks shelter near the old battlefield and encounters an elderly fisherman whose knowledge of the fighting becomes increasingly personal. The fisherman is eventually revealed as Yoshitsune's ghost.^[13]

The second half returns the warrior to combat, including the struggle to recover his bow. The audience is now watching someone who cannot leave the battle behind. Yoshitsune belonged to the victorious side at Yashima; the play nevertheless places him within the Buddhist realm of fighting spirits, where conflict continues after death.^[14]

The location performs a double role. For the priest, it is a shore reached on a journey. For the ghost, it becomes the battle again. The drama lets these different experiences occupy the same place without making the priest a participant in the original fighting. The landscape receives another act of narration rather than another military campaign.

At dawn, the martial vision gives way to coastal sounds and forms: seabirds in place of the enemy, the wind in place of the battle cries. The shore remains when the reenacted combat withdraws. This ending depends on the difference between an enduring place and an event repeatedly returned to it.

Yashima's modern memorial ground offers a quieter version of that difference. The channel has been remade; the twelfth-century base has vanished; the named sites remain available to stories. A rock can locate a prayer in tradition, a screen can arrange several encounters at once, and a stage can make the victor return as a ghost. Each gives the battle a new audience under different conditions.

The lasting connection is therefore specific. Yashima's shore allows these accounts to separate people while keeping them within sight, hearing or reach of one another. What survives in the best-known episodes is not only what a fighter does. It is what someone else is placed to see—and how another telling changes that position.