The Samurai were to Japanese feudalism what knights were to European feudalism. They were the high-ranking, professional warriors. There aren't any anymore, but I'll get to that...
The Samurai Museum is a private museum, and rather like the Science Fiction museum in Seattle, most of the artifacts come from one person's private collection. I learned some very cool things there!
- Samurai armor is custom-made, so no two will ever look the same
- It is designed to be intimidating, which is why it sometimes looks impractical
I won't share too many pictures. Instead, I'll just share three things I learned:
The Samurai were the first to come up with "Kamikaze"
The word kamikaze actually means "divine wind", and it goes back to a time when the Samurai were fighting the Mongols - the second-to-last army to ever come near to invading the Japanese homeland.
The first battle went dramatically well for the Mongols, leaving the Samurai struggling to know how to defeat them. They ended up praying for help from the gods. That night (next day? I don't really remember), a massive typhoon swept up the Japanese coast and destroyed the Mongol ships. The Samurai named that storm kamikaze, which means "divine wind".
I'll let you conclude the connection between that and WWII on your own.
I'll let you conclude the connection between that and WWII on your own.
The design for a very famous movie character's armor came from the Samurai
Does this picture remind you of anyone?
Supposedly, that's part of the inspiration for Darth Vader's armor!
End of the Samurai
I kind of knew this before, but this was still somewhat new to me.
In 1853, Commodore Matthew Perry sailed into Tokyo harbor with six mechanized warships. The Industrial Revolution was in full swing in America, but Japan had lived in near-total isolation for the reign of the Shoguns, and there was no industrialization there.
So when Perry's six steam-powered ships sailed into the harbor, the Shogun, the Samurai, and the Japanese people were rather rattled.
The Emperor at the time, Meiji, was only fifteen, but he decided he wanted Japan to industrialize so that it wouldn't be at a technological disadvantage to other countries. The Shogun at the time disagreed; he believed that Japan's ancient traditions would be damaged if the country were industrialized. The two of them disagreed for a time, but in the end, the Shogun decided that it would be better for Japan to industrialize. However, he didn't wan't the Samurai to turn western, so he disbanded all the Samurai. Then he resigned himself. This transferred power back to the Emperor, ending generations of shogun rule. Named after the emperor, this transfer of power is called the Meiji Restoration.
That is the story they told us at this museum, as well as two others. I've been browsing various college websites for the last hour, and none of them tell that story the same way. Some of them say that monetary troubles and unrest in the peasant classes made the Shogun's rule unstable, so he decided to shift the rule off to Meiji to satisfy the people. Something else interesting that I noticed is that at the museum run by foreigners (the Samurai and Ninja museum in Kyoto), they say the westerners forced the young Meiji to go along with them, while the Japanese-owned museums (this one and the Meiji Shrine) claimed that Meiji made that decision himself.
In conclusion...
Anyway, those are some awesome things I learned from the museum. However, because museums are awesome places, they also had a display of Samurai sword skills at the end for us to watch. Once the display was over, we got to have pictures with the swordsman:
The other cool part is that, like a number of other museums, they let you try on a Samurai helmet replica. And, because I'm me...
Anyway--sorry this post took so long to finish. I was trying to research it a lot and back it up with sources, but in the end, both novel-writing and teaching full time just don't leave much room for research-blogging.
In any case--more coming soon!
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