Long ago in a distant land
I, Ablue, the chibi-shaped master of history
unleashed an informative video
but a foolish YouTube troll
wielding a mechanical keyboard
stepped forth to oppose me.
Before the final comment was posted,
I tore open a portal in time
and flung him into the spam box, where my content is law!
Now the fool seeks to return to the comments
and undo the YouTube that is Ablue
*Ahem*
Uh, if you couldn't guess from the title of the video
or the thumbnail or the protracted Samurai Jack reference
this video's about samurai, and I am hyped
to talk about them.
What I'm not hyped about is
how I'm going to spend this video breaking down
the image of the samurai you have in your head,
which has probably been pretty heavily romanticized.
So, um... sorry in advance.
I'll start simple, and try to explain why Samurai Jack,
a noble, honorable paragon seeking to return to the past
and vanquish the great evil,
isn't even slightly
a samurai.
First up, samurai had armour.
Originally, it was made with leather and later out of iron,
but all Jack ever wears is his gi
and sometimes less.
Second, samurai didn't really go out questing,
whether to defeat evil or for whatever other reason.
That's mostly a westernization
and it's partly derived from the samurai being analogized with knights,
which is itself really problematic.
Third, Jack has no master, and a samurai only ever
existed because a feudal lord– a daimyo– had hired him.
Jack is actually closer to a ronin,
someone with the skills and equipment of a samurai,
but without a master.
Ronin were essentially viewed as highly skilled bandits
and Jack isn't a bandit, so we're oh-for-two on that.
Fourth. While Jack is very righteous and upstanding, most
actual samurai were expected to be loyal to their masters
before anything else. In real life, samurai were all
kinds of deceptive and roguish.
So our romanticized portrait of a chiseled cartoon samurai is wide of the mark–
but then what about the bushido code?
Wasn't the entire point of that to guide the way
a samurai is supposed to behave
and make sure they're being all respectful, honest and heroic and stuff?
Ehhh... (chuckle)
No.
See, the bushido code went through
tons of variation over the centuries
due to differences in location, time, social status and more.
Above all, the most important thing to a daimyo was a
samurai's loyalty. He could be the scummiest skeezeball
imaginable, but if he was still loyal and good with a blade,
he was a useful samurai.
In the early seventeen hundreds, our sources
paint bushido as a sort of acceptance of and
practice for death.
But then during the turn of the twentieth century,
it was seen as a guide for how to be a respectable person
and then that got co-opted into how to be a good citizen.
We can pinpoint those two in part because of our
literary sources but that still leaves several centuries
not properly accounted for
so our image of Bushido
has changed wildly over the years
and then, in the west, people tried to compare knights and samurai
and make Bushido analogous to chivalry, which is itself
mythologized. So it's impossible to know what it was really
about, but a samurai's loyalty was definitely
the most significant defining trait that we've
repeatedly observed historically. Sorry to crush your dreams,
but that's how it is.
Samurai were essentially high-class long-term mercenaries
who had a code they lived by but still did a ton of dishonorable stuff.
But since they were an entire class of people
at one point making up a tenth of Japan's population, there would have been
a lot of internal variety to a samurai's wealth,
armaments, and especially behavior. The higher-ups had more
going for them, and for those who had
families and ancestors to consider, their actions had more
consequences, so they'd at least be a little better-behaved. Between
the 8th and 19th centuries, samurai had been many
different things, so trying to nail down a picture of what they were definitively
like is near impossible, so you're gonna have to forgive me on this one.
The modern western idea of the samurai as a highly disciplined
and honorable warrior almost definitely existed
but only at certain points in samurai history and in particular
places. So it's unlikely that that would have been the pervasive norm.
Since they were under the direct employ of a daimyo
they had relative autonomy and decent immunity to do whatever they wanted
and a lot of samurai took advantage of that. And master-less samurai,
the Ronin, were equally liable to be total jerkwads, which is
evidently the case in the movie The Seven Samurai. So since there's
so much
variance across time, let's jump back and do a
run-through of Japanese history to clarify what we're actually
talking about. Japan has been inhabited for many thousands of
years and agriculture developed in the first milennium BC.
Then as the centuries passed, people coalesced around sources of
food, and kingdoms started popping up. By about
250 AD, Japan was mostly unified and ruled
by a line of emperors. In the 500s, Buddhism got introduced,
which is always fun. And then in the 8th through 12th centuries,
the nobles got so obsessed with themselves and art
that they stopped caring about running the government
entirely, preferring to just let local government figure itself out. In this period, the Heian Period, to be cultured was to emulate Tang-era Chinese culture
because China had been the big man in charge for hundreds and thousands of years. Now if
we're being super technical, the samurai really started showing up
in the early 700s as a result of the Taiho and Yoro reforms, but really, these samurai were more like glorified secretaries,
there mostly to help the higher-ups in the nobility
and the bureaucracy. These guys didn't have a warrior bone in their
whole bodies. In the following centuries,
however, the traditional aristocracy and imperial power
declined, because, remember, they stopped caring.
Meanwhile, an alternative, much more militarized aristocracy developed
in the outer provinces. In this alternative aristocracy,
the samurai (servants) were also expected
to be bushi (warriors),
which happens to be why the bushido code has its name.
Bushi, to be clear, is very different
from bishi, because I know if you've watched any anime ever you're
probably confused on account of there being a very hefty overlap.
Aaanyway, as imperial power kind of fell off the
wagon in the 12th century, a few of these
militarized provincial clans started competing for influence,
and after a brief war, the winners established a military government
in Kamakura in 1192.
This government was ruled by a shogun, because the emperor is still
technically an emperor, but he doesn't really
do anything anymore. The shogun was the one with...
you know... an army.
While the shogun was having fun shogun-ing,
the Mongols tried to invade Japan twice, and were conveniently
scattered by storms (also twice).
After this the Shogunate was a little slim on resources
and had a surprise uprising on its hands. So
it sent along Ashikaga Takeuchi to go step on it, but then
he pulled a 180 and stepped on the shogunate instead,
establishing his own Ashikaga Shogunate in 1336.
So, good for him! So, this Shogunate was all nice
and well and good, but a pesky question about imperial
succession kicked off a civil war. Which, in turn, blew up
into a century-and-a-half-long
warring states period. Oops.
But this is a full-blown samurai war, so
get hyped kiddos. No tract of land was
untouched by the objective badassery that is huge samurai
armies fighting each other. If I had time,
and knew how to draw, I'd go into all kinds
of detail about the incredible and amazing
and interesting stories from this time. But since I, um,
don't have either of those, I will instead direct you to
an excellent six-part series on the Warring States Period
from the YouTube channel Extra Credits, which
tells it much better than I can. If you wanna see samurai in their heyday
doing the coolest samurai stuff ever,
this guy's your guy. What's special about the Warring States Period
is that the samurai were acting as full-on armies,
with numbers in the tens of thousands, rather than
as individuals or small groups. So the stories from this period
are pretty extreme. After about a century and a half
of fighting, the Warring States Period ended when Tokugawa Ieyasu
and his army won a decisive final battle, effectively
taking control of all of Japan by defeating the last remaining opposition.
Tokugawa instituted a new Shogunate and moved the capital
to Edo, which is why the period from 1603 to 1868
is often called the Edo Period.
Tokugawa's Shogunate was rather peaceful, since no one really wanted
another hundred-and-fifty year long samurai war,
as awesome as that may sound to us. The
Edo also saw cultural development, economic growth, and stable bureaucracy.
In this period, the samurai still existed, but they did stuff like
collect taxes, write poetry, and practice Kendo
in lieu of actually fighting wars. So the samurai
have actually sort of gone back to their Heian-era roots of bureaucratic
servitude, as being a warrior became vastly
less important after the century of war gave way
to three centuries of peace. This was all
nice and fine for the more well-to-do samurai, but if a local daimyo needed
to make budget cuts and laid off a handful of samurai, it meant
an increasing amount of rascally Ronin running around causing problems
for everybody. Even a lot of the samurai were causing problems
just on account of being bored. This is really similar
to what happened with Caribbean piracy. When a large army
suddenly becomes unemployed, it just becomes
a self-serving army instead. Although the Shogunate had been
re-established by Tokugawa, Japan was still governed locally
by around 300 daimyo of varying
political and social statuses. The Edo period
ultimately came to an end when the lower-level
daimyo waged a successful civil war against the Shogun
in 1868, and overthrew him in one of the last
big huzzahs of the samurai. What followed
was the four-decade-long Meiji Restoration.
Japan, which had been newly reopened to the world
after centuries of isolation under Tokugawa, became much more
Westernized, which meant a Westernized army, which meant the samurai
needed to shuffle out. And... that was it.
The samurai began as glorified secretaries, became
the coolest mercenaries ever, fought in huge armies
and then worked as high-class bureaucrats. It's a massive span of
roles and responsibilities over the course of nearly a thousand
years. And now that I've talked general misconceptions and
history, let's talk some weaponry. Yes, the samurai had
the katana, but that was only one of two swords the samurai typically
carried. They also often had a short sword as well, either
a wakazashi or a tonto. But still, there were a bunch
of different sword types used across the centuries. It just
happens to be the katana that everybody got obsessed with. And honestly,
I mean, yeah, why not? It's gorgeous!
But it's important to know that they used way more than just the katana.
For one, samurai were master archers, and then they also used all manner
of weapons on horseback, too. And they definitely
weren't cheap, but samurai were often wealthy enough to afford the combat advantage.
Horses are expensive, yo. And on the flipside,
if you're a samurai on the ground fighting a samurai on a horse,
a spear would be really handy for taking down that horse,
so samurai also carried spears,
like the naginata. And finally after the Portuguese showed up
in 1453, Samurai regularly used long guns,
too. Essentially, we need to recognize
that these guys were highly versatile. And since
we're on the subject of the katana, I'm going to summarize an excellent
five-part series by a channel named Shadiversity on
"The Truth about the Katana." Because as I'm sure you can imagine,
this weapon has been mythologized like crazy,
and he does a really good job of systematically debunking all of these myths.
First off:
katanas are not the best swords in the world.
They're great at what they're meant to do, just not the best.
The metal that they used could have notable variance in quality, but
it was generally comparable to any other metal anywhere else.
Whether you think katanas are God's gift to mankind
or the most overrated thing ever, there are examples
of swords out there that support your view, seeing as
the quality of each katana varied, like any type of sword.
Second: yes, katanas are made of folded steel, but
the folding itself doesn't make the blade physically stronger, like if you
were to fold paper. What it actually does is help get rid of chemical
impurities left over from smelting, since the tatara furnace
can't fully liquefy the iron. This causes an un-uniform
distribution of carbon and slag, which necessitates
the folding of the steel in order to homogenize the carbon
distribution and remove some of those impurities.
Third: the phrase "differential hardening" also gets thrown around
a lot, but all that really means is that the blade is less springy than
European swords and has a harder edge.
Having a soft back spine doesn't strengthen the cutting edge,
since the blade will chip as much as normal. The main benefit is that
a katana will usually only chip at that hardened edge,
rather than fully snap in half.
Finally, a katana's design, being a wide single-edged sword,
emphasizes stiffness, and therefore cutting.
Also, its weight distribution is rather high on the blade,
improving leverage, and therefore cutting. But the
curve, however, is so small that it doesn't actually improve cutting
at all, but instead actively makes thrusting more difficult
because it offsets the tip from the point of thrust.
That was a brief run-down, but if you wanna hear it from the source, I
highly recommend that you watch his series for a much
clearer and more detailed explanation. While you're
over there, please also consider subscribing, too, because his other videos are
really interesting and informative. Links to his katana series
are in the description so check 'em out. So, that's
the samurai for you: misconceptions, history,
weapons, and all. So, if you ask me,
in my opinion, I think that the core of the samurai's mythical aura
is derived from two factors: One, they were
around for just so long and fulfilled so many different
cultural and military roles that nailing down what the samurai were
actually like is especially tricky. And two,
the West's pervasive desire to equate the samurai
to the knight has implied all sorts of incorrect assumptions.
The truth, of course, is always more complicated.
What's not complicated is that the samurai are still pretty damn cool,
amazing warriors, and, according to
Ablue, foooolish!