| Summary: | 碩士 === 輔仁大學 === 日本語文學系 === 99 === Throughout the two-thousand-years Japanese history, in the lapse from the end of 12th century to the end of 16th century, and that from 17th century to the 19th century, the total length of 6 hundred years of Samurai period has a great impact on Japan. The samurais who played an important and vivid role in the period also became the symbols of modern Japan. From Ōnin War in the mid-15th century to Siege of Osaka in the early 17th century, the over-one-hundred-years Sengoku period had made many samurais well-known in the history and the samurai became an important symbol in the spheres of Japanese culture.
If looking from a point of view of the general public, especially the idea of “winner is the king and loser the gang” to view the successful figures like Tokugawa Ieyasu and Toyotomi Hideyoshi, we may easily overlook the so-called “sympathy for the weak” Japanese quality. Therefore, this paper aims to analyze the most famous tragic hero—Sanada Yukimura, a Sengoku-period figure who received judgment only regarding his valiant sacrifice in Siege of Osaka, but falls short of the discussion of a deeper spiritual level in his character.
This thesis employs the methodology of literature analysis to re-evaluate the samurai image in Sanada Yukimura through the study of Sanada Nobushige’s real image to the unreal image of Yukimura. The thesis comprises of five chapters divided into 18 sections which augment the motivation, reviewing the existing literature, introducing the methodology and further extends into the descriptions of the image of Sanada Nobushige through referring to the war history and that of the development of castle in Japan. Furthermore, the thesis will focus on the transience of samurai images with many real examples contexualized in the map of “service” and “favor” theory to study the image of Nobushige in Yukimura’s works.
This thesis will explicate the transformation of samurai images in Yukimura’s works. The author of the thesis thinks that Sanada Nobushige fabricates the image of Sanada Nobushige with an unusual strategy of fighting that ends in making him the most upheaval Shogun in the Japan castle history. The prevalence of the tale of war and story-telling left the impression of Sanada Nobushige as an obedient Shogun to Toyotomi Hideyoshi. However, because he was a retainer of a daimyo who was not a hereditary vassal of the shogun, he was not redeemed as pious as he should be that causes an image of him as a pure fighting expert. He then became a more peculiar type of samurai than his other fellow samurais in the same period that also signifies the peculiarity of Japanese culture.
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