Evan. Evan... wake up.
(groggy) Oh, there's no way it is morning. Are you kidding me?
We gotta' go make videos, man.
Oh my god... (laughter) This jet lag is sick...
Okay. Okay... two minutes. Give me two minutes, and we will go —
We will go learn a little bit about Japan. I promise, just two minutes. (inaudible)
And now we're here at Sengaku-ji, an incredibly important place in tokyo.
It's important, not just for the temple, but the graveyard that's attached to it.
The graveyard that contains the 47 Ronin and their leader Asano Naganori.
And this story, it's kind of about Asano
it's kind of about his struggle
but it's really more about the 47 Ronin who followed him into death.
And to explain this, I think it's best to first explain what a Ronin is
and the role of the Ronin, or the samurai, in society.
so
every year in the early 1700s when this story begins
The leaders from the countryside — they call them Daimyo, we would call them lords —
they come here to tokyo to meet with the Emperor, and sort of...
grease the wheels of society a little bit. To sort of tell the Emperor
"We still one-hundred percent support you unto death; we have loyalty; we have honor; and we have duty."
And so the Emperor, he takes all of these people in and he sort of gives them his fatherly duty in return
society's cohesive, everybody goes home, and they wait for the next year.
But sometimes, if you're not really used to coming to Edo
well, you don't really understand the language, the nuance, the social order that allows you to talk to the Emperor
so the emperor will give you someone, a magistrate, or tax collector
or someone who knows a lot about the city, to sort of teach you how life goes, and then when you meet the
Emperor you don't make a fool of yourself, and you're more able to maybe
get the most out of your experience here.
But our hero, or antihero depending on how you look at him
he doesn't really get Tokyo, and on top of that, the magistrate who's assigned to him
is asking for a bribe to teach him what he should be teaching for free.
And Asano, he doesn't like this. He's sort of a hot-headed guy from the countryside
he doesn't like this city guy telling him that he's got to pay him money just to learn what he's supposed to learn.
So he gets a little bit riled up
and this makes the magistrate sort of, ah
I don't know, laugh at him because the magistrate has all the power in the world here in the city.
So when he actually ends up in the Imperial Palace, the Magistrate sort of under his breath
calls him a country bumpkin, or the equivalent of something like that. Just a, just a little prick of an insult.
And Asano, he...
He's not exactly a calm man, shall we say, so he pulls out his sword and slices the face of this magistrate
and the magistrate, ah... survives the slash but the place that Asano does the slicing?
You're not allowed to have your sword out. In fact, if you pull your sword out... it condemns you to death.
So Asano is pretty much immediately told, "well, you've broken the law, and
the punishment is death so you
come to this temple here at Sengaku-ji and commit Seppuku", ritual suicide.
So this man here, Asano Naganori; he comes here, and he says
"Okay, well, I will do my duty unto death." But, as we mentioned before
duty is sort of leveled. He owes duty to the emperor, but people owe duty to him. He has three-hundred
samurai who owe him duty to death.
And now they don't have a master. He's dead. So what do they do?
Well, two-hundred and fifty-three of them or so, decide that they're just going to go on on their lives
they become Ronin or masterless samurai, but they head off into the countryside and
do whatever it is a masterless samurai ends up doing living out their lives, but 47 of those Ronin?
They don't like this. They can't handle the fact that Asano was punished, but this
magistrate who in many respects broke the law just as poorly was given absolutely no punishment.
That's unfair. It's not unfair to the civil law
but it is certainly unfair to the Neo-Confucian religious laws that underpin society; the unspoken rules
of being Japanese.
And so these 47 Ronin
they feel like they still owe their master the duty of death, and they haven't fulfilled their duty.
So they're sort of in limbo. So these 47 Ronin, they spend over a year preparing to come here, to Tokyo
to meet the man who killed their master.
And after that year-and-a-half, the 47 of them quietly come here into town.
They come to the house of that magistrate
they kill twenty of his house guards, go up into his bedroom
find him hiding in the closet, pull him out of the closet, throw him on the ground
and chop off his head.
And so now with the local magistrate's head, they walk across town to this temple where their master has been
slain and buried, and they bring that head up this pathway that we're about to walk
one of the most important walkways in the country.
And they carry that head with them, letting everyone in town know
"We have fulfilled our duty, we have honored our master, and we are willing to die for this."
And they walk up this alleyway
carrying this head before them
all 47 - well, 46 as one messenger had run off to go let the local government know what they've done
because they didn't want this to be a secret.
They wanted everyone to know that they had fulfilled their duty.
And so they walked, and continued to walk up this, up to this point just ahead
where there is a small well of water
and to make sure that it was truly honorable, they washed his head here in this pool.
And so they took the head, they dunked it down in the water
they lifted it back up again, and continued up to the grave of Asano Naganori.
And carrying that head, full of pride, but still a little...
Well you have to imagine how they must have felt, right? This is a year and a half of
preparing, and knowing that the end result is your own death.
Knowing that when you fulfill this task, all 47 of you are undoubtedly going to be condemned to die.
This must have been an emotionally charged moment.
The local townspeople were coming out to see them knowing what they had done
knowing what was happening here, and knowing what, what these 47 were about to face.
So carrying that head, they turn this corner
they come up through the gate, and they see the graveyard of their master, their leader
their hero
Asano Naganori.
And so they come here. They set the head just here on this gravestone.
Boom.
And they bow before their lord. And they say, "we have finished it. We're done."
But then what? What, what happens when you've fulfilled your role? Well, they don't really know what to do.
I mean, they don't really... they haven't thought it through, what happens next.
So they sort of wait.
The locals come and give them sake, they give them some food
and they just sort of wait, and the local government eventually catches wind of what's happening and they send some police
or the equivalent at that time to come and arrest these 47 Ronin.
And the 47 Ronin, they're not going to fight it because this is what they've been
waiting to do for the last year and a half, so they go to the local government
and now the local government's kind of in a bind.
Because technically, these 47 Ronin have completely broken the law. They've gone and they've
committed retribution in a way that was unacceptable by law, but on the other hand, they've upheld that deeper
Neo-Confucian law that, that almost feels like the core, the soul
of what drives the samurai code, the bushido code.
So the government's in this bind of, "well how do we punish them?"
Because certainly law still must matter, civil law must matter, but religious law drives the nation
so if you punish too hard...
well the locals won't like that
the people will think that you've actually gone beyond what you were supposed to do
but you absolutely must punish them. So local government comes up with this agreement.
"We'll kill them all, or force them to kill themselves.
But then we'll bury them here, at the right hand of their lord, in a truly honorable way."
They still have monks who come and pray for them, they take on almost a role within Japanese society.
This moment in which these 47 men decided that it was more important to them to fulfill the act of duty
than survive... well that's kind of... I mean that's kind of a big deal, right?
This is a group of people who are saying, "we are more committed to our duty than ourselves."
And as a westerner, as a Canadian, as an Italian,
it doesn't really resonate with us the same way that it resonates here, with this idea that
these 47 men...
They did something incredible, in that
they committed themselves beyond themselves. They committed themselves to
something greater, and as Japan unified as a nation, they were looking for a story that said
"But what are we? You know, now that the west has come, now that we've seen what other peoples are
what are we, and how do we define ourselves? To both ourselves, and to these new peoples?"
And so about a hundred years after these men die
The government sort of turns their story...
It popularizes it. It turns it into the foundation myth, of the Japanese state, of the Japanese mindset.
And so therefore this, this graveyard here almost becomes the soul of Japan
it almost becomes the Kokoro, the spirit of the people, and in doing so
venerates and turns these into almost
demigod-like people, people who are more than themselves
they are a symbol of what the Japanese people would like for their nation, would like for their society.
And I think it's really useful for us to see this
if we're going to go see other things in the nation, because almost anything else we talk about
almost every other story is going to contain
hugely important elements of this story, the idea of duty, the idea of honor, and the idea of
sacrificing your own life
for this
this
grander theory, this grander society, these, these Japanese people
and at the time that this happens, Japan is still somewhat splitting the clans.
They certainly wouldn't consider themselves, you know nationally Japanese
they would consider themselves from Tohoku, or Aomori, or even Tokyo, but eventually
particularly after this story starts becoming popular
it's pretty easy for people to start to see themselves as unified.
Because there are the types of people who are the 47 Ronin,
there are the types of people who would commit themselves to death.
For duty. For honor. For loyalty, and for the nation.
And to me, that's why this place is so important and, if you look around you'll see it's barely touristed.
Everywhere we went today is covered in people, but you come here, and it's almost like a secret.
It's almost like this is, this is the hidden reality of the nation
not the flashy, Disneyfied version
but the truth. The truth of Japan. And that's why I love it here
and that's why I think it makes a great opening video.
It's not tourism, it's history.
It's society, its culture. And in truth, in my opinion, it couldn't be more Japanese.