In the last post I made a comment about how the bushido code wasn’t actually used by the samurai when they were warriors. This is the post where I actually back that up to the best of my ability.
While I am very interested in Japanese history, I am very far from an expert, so please feel free to point out where I got it wrong.
Japanese samurai in armor, 1860s. Photograph by Felice Beato from Wikipedia.
So, my understanding of bushido as the code of bureaucrats rather than warriors was formed through the works of Drs. Karl F. Friday, Mark J. Ravina, and Pierre Souyri, which is a limited pool of sources, so I would be thankful for anyone to expand on this. Also, any correct points come from my sources and any mistakes in understanding and interpretation are my own.
Please read everything as caveated with “to my knowledge” and “as I understand it” so that I don’t have to constantly repeat that.
First, the samurai is a class rather than an occupation. It is not dissimilar to how the “knightly” class became the knight – the medieval noble warrior. To say a king is a knight is both correct and incorrect – the king would not come from the knightly class but might undertake the occupation of knight. We tend to think of the samurai as an occupation rather than a class, but the term is properly applied to to the class.
The samurai-class has its roots in late 12th century Japan as power dispersed from the Imperial capital at Kyoto following a series of clan rivalries and outright conflicts. The samurai evolved from the small, landed gentry called jito.
This was the time of the Minamoto and Ashikaga shogun dynasties (1185-1573). While the samurai were not full-time warriors during this era, there were periods of intense violence and these conflicts were more common than they would be during the Tokugawa shogunate (1603-1868). It was also a time when samurai mostly depended on local lords rather than the central government and the shogun. I think of this period as similar to how the legions of late Republican Rome were loyal to their general – who paid them – rather than the state.
Valour for the early samurai is as we generally understand it – prowess and loyalty. Honour was based on martial ability, yes, but it was also service to one’s lord rather than personal valour – so retreat which might make one appear cowardly might be required as one cannot serve one’s lord in death.
Miyamoto Musashi killing a giant creature, from The Book of Five Rings from Wikipedia
The concept of bushido – or at least writings explicitly discussing it – do not appear before 1603. In my estimation, there are two documents/books that generally provide us with our understanding of bushido – the Book of Five Rings and Hagakure. The Book of Five Rings is written by a renowned swordmaster who was actually involved in warfare and dueling, but it was probably written around 1645, when its author, Miyamoto Musashi, was 60 and long after he was a practicing swordsman. He had become a teacher, yes, but this is a memoir of a time long past at its writing. Hagakure, on the other hand, was written by a courtier born in 1659 who did not have Musashi’s experience.
These texts do not come from the era when the samurai were primarily warriors. The idea of bushido comes from a time when the samurai were basically a bureaucratic class. By the 1700s, daimyo were not looking for perfect warriors, they were looking for bureaucrats who could maximize their tax income. The Tokugawa shogunate was a time of insularity, in which the Japanese neither marched to war outside their borders nor faced large conflicts within. The samurai definitely had the trappings of a warrior elite – with swords and armour and martial training – but that was not their actual role in society. Bushido certainly would make them feel better about themselves, it would lend romance to their role, but would be similar to a member of the House of Lords in the UK claiming that they follow the chivalric code – it’s meaningless because it is supposed to be about conduct during war and they are not warriors.
So while bushido might encapsulate a concept of samurai that would be recognized in the Minamoto and Ashikaga shogunates, it was developed in a period in which samurai were generally not called upon primarily as warriors. It was a romantic vision of a long gone age, not unlike Sir Walter Scott’s Ivanhoe and chivalry.
This was part of a rumination on samurai cinema, known as chanbara, which led to this.
And that leads us to the 47 Ronin, which honestly is about samurai even though it is about ronin. It is about samurai because it is focuses on martial prowess and loyalty to one’s liege. This is – to me – the most pure samurai tale I can think of (with standard caveat that I am not an expert). Forget the recent movie 47 Ronin with Keanu Reeves – though I think it has elements that would be very gameable and is bad because it stole the name 47 Ronin and then did not deliver a movie about the 47 ronin but about 47 other ronin who fight sorcerers and monsters.
Also, I’m examining something that I have identified in myself, and if this doesn’t bother you, it doesn’t mean that you are a bad person or ill-informed or anything else. It’s sad that I have to include that, but GD do I get emails every time I write something like this – which is, therefore, rare.
, given that Wallace, even in the movie, is basically doing the same thing. Addendum: I love the movie and own a copy but the history and context is excruciatingly bad.
Even if one does something truly extraordinary how long will it last? As an Egyptian example, Pharaoh Akhenaten upset the status quo by imposing a monotheistic religion on the kingdom. That lasted until he died and the priesthood – inextricably intertwined with the nobility – forced Tutankhamun in his minority to return to the old religion and old ways. In any case, none of that helped those who suffered under the political status quo.
I really liked Chadwick Boseman’s turn as Black Panther in Captain America: Civil War, so I’d been following the roll out of the movie with interest. Everything that I saw got me excited. As the date approached, I figured out a crafty way to ensure I saw it in the theatre (my daughters love the Marvel movies, so I told them if they did good on their report cards, we’d see it as a family . . . win-win).
And let us never forget Michael B. Jordan’s Killmonger. This is the best villain since Loki – whom I would count as the villain of Thor and the Avengers. This is a villain with whom one can sympathize. We can condemn his methods and means, but not his intent – free the oppressed. Is not the motto of the Special Forces (Airborne) “de oppresso liber?” I don’t want to get into spoiler territory, but I think his back story explains so much of how the movie turns out – how he achieves what he achieves and why he burns so brightly.
Yes. Yes I have. And there’s a reason for that. It’s called Fallout 4.
My favourite though is the “handmade rifle” from the Nuka World DLC. Modding that can pretty much build something that looks like a Dragunov, and I think that looks pretty awesome. It also does outstanding damage with the proper perks.
I think – and this is, I believe, an issue of technology – the setting in Fallout 4 is the most realized and the best looking. Also, I have a real computer now, so once I’ve finished with Fallout 4 I’m going to go back and try New Vegas again (for like the fourth time) to see how it looks and plays when it’s not on a crappy laptop.
At the end of the first story, ninjas come crashing through the windows of Ji-eun’s martial arts academy (as ninjas are wont to do). The second issue/episode would start with the big fight, again showing that Ji-eun and Iron Fist are in a class all of their own, while among the students, Danny is as far above them as Iron Fist is above him.
The next section takes the team to the very first intersection with Earth, and this should be in Tibet, in keeping with the Iron Fist story from the comics. We’re going to have problems selling this in China considering they are the authoritarian regime, corrupted by Khan. Wu and Danny have to undertake a bunch of secret agent-y stuff to avoid capture (or, in a longer story, Wu, Danny, Colleen, and Misty). The minor reveal of a longer story would be finding the Book of the Iron Fist, a text of techniques lost for hundreds of years. In a shorter story, this can show up at Khan’s academy in Southeast Asia. The techniques in the book will allow Wu to harness her qi in ways now legend in K’un L’un, assuring its supremacy in coming tournaments.
This leaves room for a sequel in which Wu meets Luke Cage – probably through Misty Knight. Master Khan is still out there, and Iron Fist has to stop him. She must also face the fact that so many of her predecessors became corrupt. Is it inherent to the power of an Immortal Weapon?
This is where Iron Fist puts on her mask (maybe a helmet or something else, but the yellow hood is iconic, and would help hide the use of stunt doubles in a live action version) and the two fight. It is epic. These are two perfect weapons. Danny moves to intervene, but Ji-eun orders her students not to interfere.
Back in the present, she says that she’s been waiting for an Immortal Weapon to come and seek revenge. She does not regret what she did, but she did not mean to kill him.
In a discussion about the Marvel series on Netflix, someone asked – since I was very disappointed with Iron Fist – what would I have done. That person obviously had no idea what they were getting into, and while we were discussing the various factors, many of the components and plots that I suggested accreted into something resembling coherence.
The idea of a powerful – but not the most powerful – city-state at the epicentre of an isolated socio-political region could make for some very interesting dynamics. One could well imagine such a place to be quite cosmopolitan, and Thebes reputation as the oldest of the Greek states puts it at the centre of that wheel geographically as well as culturally. Based on the general process of a city’s founding, one might presume that Thebes grew out of a trade nexus, a confluence of routes originating before the rise of the urbis. These trade routes might be supplanted, but at the iron age, without extensive river navigation, one would expect the land routes would continue to dominate and likely wouldn’t change unless there were rather massive geographical changes.