The Samurai

This is the story of the legendary Samurai - how did they go from provincial bodyguards to revered warriors? Why did they transform from ancestral soldiers to office workers? And will we ever see them again? Dan is joined by Christopher Harding, a cultural historian of Japan, India and East-West connections. Chris explains the long history of the Samurai and the potential renewal of the Samurai spirit in Japan's future. Produced by James Hickmann and edited by Dougal Patmore. If you would like to subscribe to Chris' substack, then it can be found at www. IlluminAsia.org http://www.illuminasia.org/. If you want to hear more about samurai history, check out the Echoes of History podcast here - https://podfollow.com/echoes-of-history/view. You can also find Chris' Substack, IlluminAsia, here - https://www.illuminasia.org/. Sign up to History Hit for hundreds of hours of original documentaries, with a new release every week and ad-free podcasts. Sign up at https://www.historyhit.com/subscribe. We'd love to hear your feedback - you can take part in our podcast survey here - https://insights.historyhit.com/history-hit-podcast-always-on. You can also email the podcast directly at [email protected] mailto:[email protected]. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy https://acast.com/privacy for more information.

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:00Dan Snow?

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• 0:32Speaker 01

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• 1:04Speaker 02

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• 1:47Speaker 02

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• 1:53Speaker 03

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• 2:26Dan Snow?

  Hi everybody, welcome to Dan Snow's History Head. It was April 25th, 1185, and the Great Naval Battle was about to decide the fate of Japan for centuries to come. The Tyra clan had the boy Emperor on their side, who was about six years old. He was decked out in the Imperial Regalia, and they were hoping that his presence at the battle would help to make up for the profound advantage in numbers and experience and resources that their enemy, the Minamoto, enjoyed. In the end, a child dressed in fancy clothes was not enough.

• 3:11Dan Snow?

  The Minamoto arrived with their ships abreast, archers ready. The two fleets crashed into each other. Long-range archery gave way to hand-to-hand combat. Soldiers leapt across to fight it out on the enemy decks. But these weren't just any soldiers. They were warriors whose name has echoed down the centuries, become, in a way, one of history's most celebrated and talked about and copied brands. They were the samurai. Some Minamoto clan ships were able to close with the ship carrying the young Emperor and pounded them at close range with arrows and projectiles.

• 3:56Dan Snow?

  The Emperor and many of his court were killed. Other members of his entourage saw which way the battle was going and committed suicide. The Tyra tried to throw the Imperial Regalia into the sea to deny them to the Minamoto, but they were interrupted before they could do so. A comprehensive victory of the Minamoto samurai.

• 4:17Dan Snow?

  Ensure that the clan chief would become the first shogun, a military dictator of Japan, who would keep the royal family, keep the emperor hostage, but rule in every other sense of the word. And in this episode of the podcast, we're going to be talking samurai. How did this famed warrior cast? How did they come to dominate Japan? What caused their downfall? And then how did they come back in an utterly different world, the world of the industrialized 20th century? And we're going to finish up by asking whether perhaps samurai have a bright future ahead of them. As everyone, we talk about Japan, we've got Christopher Harding on the podcast. He's a cultural historian of Japan, India and East West connections. He's based at the University of Edinburgh. He's fantastic. He's gone on this podcast

• 5:01Dan Snow?

  many times before you'll recognize his voice. So friends, this is the story of the samurai. Enjoy.

• 5:28Dan Snow?

  Chris, great to have you back on the podcast, buddy.

• 5:29Speaker 04

  Hello. Thank you for having me again.

• 5:31Dan Snow?

  Paint a picture for us all of the world into which samurai were born.

• 5:36Speaker 04

  Hmm. I suppose it's the world that some people will know from Murasaki Shikibu's, The Tale of Genji. So this is, we're thinking about Japan 10th, 11th centuries. The capital is in Kyoto. That's where the emperor is. That's where all these aristocrats are doing things that I think in some cultures look peaceful, but to the point of effeminacy. So you've got a lot of men as well as women interested in high fashion. They're composing poetry. They're doing incense smelling competitions, tea tasting competitions, lovely stuff, but they are pretty much completely unaware of what's going on in rural Japan. And so it's a world that's completely centered on Kyoto as being this capital of culture. And out in the countryside, what they don't really see is that you have these warrior families

• 6:20Speaker 04

  starting to develop. So particular families out in the provinces who get known for their martial skills. And helping each other to protect their properties and things like that. Not aware of them, except that certainly by the early 12th century, you get in families in Kyoto, aristocrats who maybe made one too many enemies and they will employ now and again, some of these warrior families from the provinces to sort of as bodyguards, basically. You know, if you have one too many enemies, you might want a strapping man with a sword outside your bedroom at night, outside your home perhaps. And these bodyguards come to be called samurai. So it comes from this Japanese word saburo, uh, which means to serve or to attend.

• 7:02Speaker 04

  So you start to have some of these warriors creeping into the capital, doing basically these gigs as bodyguards. But by the middle of the 12th century, that's when it starts to change. And it always astonishes me that you go from Japan being a place that makes you think, yeah, Murasaki Shikibu, poetry, fashion, romance, peace, to being a place where bit by bit, being a warrior, being skilled with the sword and the bow, actually becomes something noble, something that you might write poetry about, which would have been unthinkable just before. So I think that's the world. It's a kind of tipping point in the middle of the 12th century.

• 7:38Dan Snow?

  Wow. So I was not expecting this to be a story about an out of touch liberal urban elite. But there we are.

• 7:43Speaker 04

  Quite relatable, isn't it?

• 7:45Dan Snow?

  Yeah, quite relatable. But how fascinating that you go from, and again, challenging to our kind of, perhaps some of our understanding of history, that you go from that world back to a world in which it becomes important to know how to, how to skewer an enemy on the end of your blade. Is that cultural or do big and bad things happen? Is this a sort of fashion? Or is there just disorder, breakdown? It becomes a world in which fighting is more useful than poetry?

• 8:13Speaker 04

  It's a great question. I think it's partly about the falling away of the authority of the emperor. So the kind of the heyday for the power of the emperor in Japan is probably the eighth century through to the early 12th. Gradually that goes away. Kyoto itself actually becomes quite a dangerous place. Certainly by the early 12th century, there's a story of noblemen who, if they were going in their carriages from A to B, they would take off their robes, take off their rings.

• 8:36Speaker 04

  Their jewellery, hide them somewhere in the carriage. So if they got waylaid by robbers, they could say, look, you're too late. I've been robbed already. I've got nothing for you. So it's quite a lawless place. I think that's one of the most important things. So suddenly, if you have these skills, they're more and more valuable. I think the other thing that happens is the imperial family is quite a big family. So there are often, when it comes to the imperial succession, different people vying for that role.

• 9:01Speaker 04

  And what begins to occur in the middle of the 12th century is that warriors will be called in to help settle scores when it's time for a new emperor to be chosen. So Kyoto goes from this place, as we've said, you know, a liberal, peaceful elite, to a place where there's blood in the streets, there are ordinary people being chopped up, houses being burned down, severed heads on the top of stakes to warn other people. It's that crucial few decades in the middle of the 12th century where things really start to change. And I suppose the big important thing that happens in the 1180s is that two of the great, most famous warrior families, the Taira and the Minamoto, go to war with one another. So it's a big civil war that happens in the 1180s, which really is the end for many centuries of imperial power. So the emperor remains in Kyoto, but the people really in charge of Japan after that are the warriors.

• 9:50Speaker 04

  You have Japan's first shogun, based in Kamakura, just near what is now Tokyo. So it's a really big shift, basically, from courtly rule to samurai rule at that point.

• 9:59Dan Snow?

  And to drill down on samurai rule, are we being orientalist? Are we being sort of romantic? Because we think the samurai had various codes of conduct. And I mean, is this just what happens in lots of societies around the world? There's a atrophying of central power, and also of civilian, if you like, rule, and then you just get men of action, warriors. They take over, they fill the vacuum. That's quite a familiar tale. Is there something about the samurai that explains the remarkable kind of the cultural, intellectual, military legacy they seem to have had?

• 10:29Speaker 04

  I think there is even as early as the Kamakura Shogunate, so this first period of shoguns ruling Japan from the late 12th century, they have warrior codes which they'll write up and distribute. So it's specific things like you have to revere the gods, revere the Buddhas, you have to pay attention to karma in your own life, and also the karma that you're building up for future generations. The idea of duty, which is gidi in Japanese, is really important, and the idea of absolute loyalty to your commander, to the person who's above you in the ranks. All those sorts of things I think are quite clearly laid out, and they're a really important part of who the samurai are. I think also how they perform on the battlefield, the kind of choreographed nature of samurai warfare is part of how they view themselves

• 11:11Speaker 04

  as special. So often, a battle will begin, you'll have one of the samurai ride out into the middle, he'll fire an arrow into the air, a special arrow that's got a whistle on its tip. So as it comes down, it makes this great whistling noise, which is designed to awaken the gods to the fact that there are these great valorous deeds about to be done. And then he'll call out one single opponent from the other side who will do battle with, literally just one to one. Try and take them out with an arrow first, and if you can't, then get close in, and then that's when the swords start to be used. But it's very choreographed, there's a lot of attention paid to what each samurai manages to do on the battlefield. So if I'm going out fighting in one of these wars, people I defeat on the battlefield, I'll take off their head, or I'll take off their nose, or I'll take off an ear, and I'll

• 11:53Speaker 04

  present that kind of bundle of goodies to my commander at the end, to say, here's what I've done, here's what my family should get in return. You know, if you think about Japan as being a place where agricultural land is in quite short supply, and it's quite mountainous, it's quite forested. So what I'll want in return for my bundle of body parts is a new tract of land to add on to what I've already got. There's one guy we know about who actually employed a painter to be there at the battle, to paint illustrated scrolls of what he'd done, so that he could then present that to his commander and say, there's the proof of what I've accomplished now, please I'll have my reward. So there are all sorts of rules which govern how the samurai behave in peace and how they behave on the battlefield, which I think is part of that image that we've grown up with.

• 12:34Dan Snow?

  And do you think they stuck to those rules? Because in Britain, we had a sort of similar chivalric tradition. Historians have spilt much ink about whether that was actually rooted in real practice on the battlefield and elsewhere. Is your impression that the samurais have held themselves to these standards?

• 12:52Speaker 04

  Very often not, actually. I think probably the most famous period for the samurai in Japan comes after these early centuries of Shogunate rule. When that kind of breaks down by the late 15th century, that's broken down. Japan is a kind of patchwork quilt of feuding terrains. And you have what we call the warring states period, all the way through to the late 16th century. Sen Goku Jida in Japanese. And in that period, it's all about spying, marriage alliances, strategy, great battles. And they sometimes fight quite dirty. I think probably the most famous samurai from that period, someone that everyone in Japan grows up knowing and maybe loving and loathing in equal measure, is a guy called Oda Nogunaga. So he's around in the second half of the 16th century.

• 13:36Speaker 04

  And to get a sense of who he was, he was furious that he had to fight not only samurai enemies, but also Japanese Buddhists. Some of these Buddhist sects were wealthy enough to have huge temple complexes. They trained their own warrior monks. They're a real force to be reckoned with. One of them, the Tenrai sect on Mount Hie, which is just outside Kyoto, decided to go against him. And so in the autumn of 1571, he sent tens of thousands of samurai up the mountain, killing literally everybody they encountered. Women, children, babies, alongside the men and the warrior monks who were fighting. And he burned everything down that he found, just because he simply wouldn't tolerate any kind of opposition. So it's hard to square that, I think, with the samurai code.

• 14:19Speaker 04

  The idea that literally anybody can be considered a competent and that you can basically murder them. But as far as he was concerned, his motto was rule the realm by force. And probably the unspoken part was warrior code be damned. That was certainly how he behaved.

• 14:33Dan Snow?

  And becoming samurai, are there barriers to entry? Do you have to be affluent? Do you have to afford your own equipment? Are you given the title by your liege lord? How does that work?

• 14:44Speaker 04

  So largely you're born into it. There are various levels of samurai and depending on your own bloodline, your own family, that really decides your place in the ranks. But there are really interesting exceptions. So Oda Nobunaga, who I was just talking about, one of his foot soldiers, actually a guy who used to carry his sandals for him, who was not samurai, later became one of the greatest samurai generals in Japanese history, a guy called Toyotomi Hideyoshi. He was so good, so smart, so loyal, such a great strategist, that he was promoted into the samurai ranks and he did very well for himself. Children in Japan grow up talking about the three great unifiers of Japan. Oda Nobunaga, this bloody man we just talked about, Toyotomi Hideyoshi, who carried his sandals and became his successor, and then finally Tokugawa Ieyasu, who founded the great

• 15:29Speaker 04

  Tokugawa Shogunate. Each man in succession did their bit, basically, to unify Japan. And Toyotomi Hideyoshi, he's that ultimate upstart. Not only does he become a samurai, the most important person in Japan in his lifetime, he also sends troops into Korea. He then was to use his samurai in Korea as kind of treating the Korean peninsula as China's driveway to make their way up to then conquer China, even fantasizes about conquering India. And he writes the Spanish in the Philippines threatening letters about how he's going to come over there and teach them a lesson as well. So you do get these incredible stories of a rise from nothing to top samurai status.

• 16:05Dan Snow?

  And at the same time, the institution of the emperor is still knocking on, but it's been essentially captured by these warriors, by these samurai lords. Why do they let the emperor keep going? Why don't they stick the crown on their own head? What's preventing them?

• 16:22Speaker 04

  I think for any upstart in Japanese history, the emperor is what you absolutely need for legitimacy, to persuade everybody else that what you're doing is right. So the title of shogun, Seiyutai shogun initially, which means barbarian crushing generalissimo. So originally, the shogun was someone who you would send one of your generals up north to sort of battle the barbarous northerners, which the Japanese often worried about. And so to take that title later on, even though you're for all intents and purposes in charge of Japan, you're the political ruler, still you always portray yourself as serving. The emperor and that's where your legitimacy comes from. You know, the imperial family we have now in Japan can trace their line back at least to around 600 AD.

• 17:03Speaker 04

  And they claim descent from the gods. So it's the absolute sine qua non of taking power in Japan is to have these people as your figurehead. Even though you won't listen to them, you'll threaten them, you'll more or less imprison them in their palaces to make sure they can't interfere. Still, you always say that you're serving them and you're looking after their interests.

• 17:22Dan Snow?

  And while we're on the court, are they happy just to be captured? Do they have a nice time? Are they, are they still keeping the flame of poetry alive? Are they just a little mini version of what Kyoto once was?

• 17:32Speaker 04

  I think so. It's funny, isn't it? That you go from this extraordinary high valuation of poetry, romance, et cetera, in kind of the heyday of the imperial court in Japan, to poetry being something of a consolation prize, something you can do because you no longer have real political power. It's actually quite a sad history for the imperial family in Japan, you know, from controlling most of Japan and owning all the land in Japan. Around the year 1000 or so, gradually that gets chipped away at by these other rival families. And then along come the shoguns and take practical power away from you. Your tax revenue then starts to go down. There are stories of emperors who died and their families couldn't even bury them because they didn't have the money for a funeral.

• 18:14Speaker 04

  And of course, when you have a period of warfare in Kyoto, it's often the imperial properties that get burned or otherwise damaged. So the imperial family don't really have much choice, except to keep in with whoever currently holds power so they can basically survive. It's not at all noble, is it? But unfortunately, that's the reality.

• 18:31Dan Snow?

  Well, they're still here.

• 18:33Speaker 04

  Yeah, they've done all right. They played the long game, didn't they? Yeah.

• 18:39Dan Snow?

  You're listening to Dan's history of talking about samurai, we're coming up.

• 18:49Dan Snow?

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• 19:33Speaker 01

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• 21:33Dan Snow?

  And so the myths about the samurais, they were somehow, I mean, were they any better trained? I mean, is there an element to this that like the, say, Spartans in the fifth century B.C., the economics of warfare meant that you could keep large amounts of very highly trained warriors at hand all the time? Or are they actually just part timers like any other nations got who are sort of occasionally called to the colors when their lord and master calls them? What's the sort of nature of their lives?

• 22:01Speaker 04

  So that the samurai are absolutely full timers. The way of the horse and the bow, as they originally describe it, later Bushido, you know, the way of the warrior. It's a vocation and it's what they're absolutely born to. There are part timers in their armies, the foot soldiers, peasants, some of them not considered important enough even to be given any armor. They can just go and take a bullet. Once you get firearms being used on Japanese battlefields, considered pretty much expendable. And they will go back until they're land, you know, in times of peace. But the samurai are absolutely full time. And this becomes a really big problem, actually. So after Tokugawa Ieyasu inaugurates this period of peace, two and a half centuries of peace from 1600 to the middle of the 1800s, which if you think about what's happening in Europe in the same period is an extraordinary achievement for Japan. But that's not great for the samurai.

• 22:45Speaker 04

  They go really from warrior work to office work, basically. They're kind of bureaucrats in the castle towns, never really doing much that's very romantic. Now and again, they might go out and hassle the peasants if they're not paying up to their, their taxes. But bullying sort of unarmed people is not really the kind of thing about which great tales are written. And they're very expensive. As time goes on, across the 1600s into the 1700s, having to pay samurai stipends becomes more or less impossible. So as they move from warrior work to office work, they're really confined to these great castle towns, Osaka, Edo, which is now Tokyo, not really Doing very much that's impressive but being paid for it. And some of them actually end up quite poor, quite impoverished. So they've got these great noble names.

• 23:28Speaker 04

  But merchants who are making the real money are living much better, bigger houses, nicer clothes, better food. And life becomes quite embarrassing for the samurai. Some of them are selling off their armour. Some of them are selling off their daughters to merchants who might want to marry samurai blood if they can. It's really quite ignoble, even to the point where there's a lovely sketch. People will have heard of Hokusai, famous artist. This lovely sketch he does of a samurai sitting on a toilet, doing his business while his retainers outside are kind of holding their noses to protect themselves from the stink. The idea that you could draw something like that about the samurai and expect to live a few centuries ago would just be absolutely for the birds. But there's a sense in which the samurai basically just sit around and talk.

• 24:10Speaker 04

  Or they kind of write bad poetry or short stories or they go shopping or they're basically doing nothing that's useful. And yet they're hoovering up peasant taxes. I think that's one of the things that really sets Japan in the middle of the 19th century on the road to what's more or less a revolution in the 1860s. It's just a completely unsustainable, top-heavy system with all these samurai doing nothing and yet costing a lot of money.

• 24:35Dan Snow?

  The reason they're all doing nothing presumably is because of the Tokugawa Shogunate you and I've talked about before. And is that the end of hundreds of years of instability, if you like, when somebody does actually manage to, like using samurai effectively, sort of unify Japan?

• 24:51Speaker 04

  Yeah, absolutely. I think the clever thing about the Tokugawa Shogunate is not that they are able to completely pacify the country by force of arms. No one has ever had an army up until probably the modern era, which is big enough to do that for Japan. Instead, they managed to shuffle around their enemies to different parts of the country. Take them away from their own power bases, their own basis of loyalty that they had in the past, so that they can't threaten them. So there's kind of a balance of power. They let some of these big regional lords, these top samurai, effectively govern their own domains. As long as they don't cause too much trouble for Edo at the absolute centre. They use something like a, we would call it a hostage system. So every year, either the big samurai from all the domains. Is living in Edo, under the watchful eye of the Shogunate, all members of their family are doing the same.

• 25:36Speaker 04

  And so if anything kicks off in their domain, you can either execute the feudal lord or you can execute members of their family. So they're quite successful in all those ways at keeping Japan at peace. And although the warrior caste, yeah, it carries on for two and a half centuries, writing a lot, mythologising itself, talking still about the warrior code of honour, but actually not having to do all that much fighting.

• 25:57Dan Snow?

  And because as it happens, there's not much fighting going on in the Japanese islands. They're not trying to invade China or not being invaded in turn.

• 26:05Speaker 04

  They're not. And also, I think luckily for them, Japan is of not much interest to the big powers of the day. You know, the reason the Tokugawa Shogunate lasts as long as it did, I would say, is that the big powers in the Western world are much more interested in places like India, in the Americas, they're interested in China. Japan doesn't have much in terms of raw materials. It's not thought to be a particularly interesting market. The only Europeans trading with Japan in this whole two and a half centuries are the Dutch, who are confined to a tiny little portion of Nagasaki in the south of Japan and are allowed to do a really limited trade with Japan. If you think about it, I suppose the modern parallel is immigration control, border control. The Tokugawa Shogunate decide basically that if they want peace, they need to keep foreigners out.

• 26:47Speaker 04

  And so they're extraordinarily strict for two and a half centuries about who can come in. And that partly works, but as I say, the main reason it works, I think, is Japan. Until the US extends across to California and then they've just got the Pacific between them and Japan. And the Russian Empire extends across also towards Japan. Until that happens, I think in the middle of the 19th century, Japan is of not much interest. And so the samurai aren't called upon to do anything particularly valiant.

• 27:13Dan Snow?

  Speaking of particularly valiant, we're jumping around a bit here, but we should probably mention the great Mongol invasions of Japan. That's squarely in the samurai period. In fact, did the Mongols get quite unlucky? Is that they happened to invade Japan just at a time when the Japanese have been fighting amongst themselves and developed this class of superhero soldiers?

• 27:32Speaker 04

  In that sense, they were quite unlucky. I think some in Japan would still say that great story of the divine winds, the kamikaze is part of that picture. But I think what's funny about those Mongol invasions, you know, they were, of course, two successive invasions, which Japan managed to resist, partly, I think, out of luck with the weather, whether you're not, you know, believe in the gods is up to you. But otherwise, the Mongols were actually having the best of it now and again. If you think of the way the samurai fought, as I said, in this really choreographed way, the Mongols didn't do that. They just threw bodies at the enemy and they had gunpowder, they had all this extraordinary noise that we hear written about in the accounts of this period. They were quite frightening and it was a very different kind of warfare. So until I think the samurai got used to what they were doing, the Mongols

• 28:16Speaker 04

  were quite a serious threat. Although that said, you do get some lovely samurai daring do. There are reports of the Mongols when they had their warships moored off Japan. Some of the samurai wouldn't even wait for the Mongols to land. You've got samurai in their full armour, jumping into the water, swimming over to these ships, managing not to sink, and then clambering onto the ships and chopping people up. So there is a justified element, I think, to the romance of the samurai here. They really saw themselves as having a calling, as having a vocation. And I think that did now and again tell on the battlefield.

• 28:49Dan Snow?

  So the fact that Japan was sort of at peace and not very warlike, and these samurai classes were sort of warriors in name only, did that make it easier to formally abolish? What were they formally abolished?

• 29:01Speaker 04

  They were, yes. So Japan went through this civil war, eighteen sixty-eight to nine. At the end of that, the winners, basically, once again, as people have always done in the past in Japan, they take the emperor as their figurehead. They ship him from Kyoto into Edo, Tokyo it becomes, and he's their figurehead. And they basically say, we can't afford to pay stipends anymore. The idea of a warrior class is an anachronism in this day and age. They're also worried, I think, that if they try and employ samurai in their new army, once these modernising leaders have taken power, some of these samurai, harking back to their great family backgrounds, will behave actually quite selfishly on the battlefield, because they'll be much more about their own personal honour than they will be as, as it were, a kind of team. And so what they do in the eighteen seventies is they get rid of samurai status.

• 29:46Speaker 04

  It becomes illegal to wear swords. These people are returned to ordinary life, given a stipend, a one off payment and told to go away and find jobs of their own. And it's funny, there's a period actually where the newspapers love to talk about warrior business strategy. Because some of these guys have got no idea about how to run a business and yet that's what they spend their money on. And you have all these fabulous samurai businesses which go bust within years because they've got absolutely no idea what they're doing. Some of them run restaurants and they buy meat that's well past its sell by date because they're only serving it to commoners anyway, you know, so who cares? And very quickly, that all goes very badly wrong. So yeah, the samurai status has completely disappeared and instead you've got a conscript army. Which is much easier to basically, you know, you give them a gun, tell them what to do and they're not going to make a fuss.

• 30:31Speaker 04

  They don't really have much concept of their own honour. They're being sort of paid a fee for it. It's something I think the Japanese learn on their travels abroad. There is fascinating stories of early Japanese leaders going to places like the US and Europe in the eighteen sixties and eighteen seventies. And being really surprised by how things are done there. They can't believe when they get to America that the Washington family no longer runs the place. And that the president has to bid for his own job every four years. It seems so ignominious. But one of their big learnings is in the modern era, you want a conscript army under civilian control. And so, yeah, it's good night for the samurai.

• 31:04Dan Snow?

  Yeah, you want the officers obeying orders and working as units and outflanking when they're told to flank rather than just racing ahead and presenting themselves for a glorious death.

• 31:14Speaker 04

  Absolutely, but you know what's funny is in the dying days of the war, um, World War Two. You still find in Burma and in the Philippines, the occasional rogue Japanese general who says, I'm in the best possible situation because the war is going against us. If I can possibly turn the course myself with this kind of crazy strategy. Maybe to take northeast India, which is what one of them tries to do, then I can make a great name for myself. So there's still this sort of old maybe samurai ideal lingering that you'll get your name in the history books. If you somehow do something crazy and valiant.

• 31:44Dan Snow?

  That's because in the twentieth century, samurai is back or certainly some sort of romantic notion of it.

• 31:53Speaker 04

  Yeah, I think a couple of things happened. First, in the early 20th century, because Japan is importing so much culture from the West, you know, from democracy to post offices, factories, universities, there are those in Japan who say, well, actually, what is it that we're going to give back here? We've got a kind of cultural trade deficit with the West that we need to restore, which is why you get Zen Buddhism being exported, tea ceremony being exported, and the samurai tradition becomes part of that, partly as a way of saying to Europeans, we've got our own chivalric tradition, which is worthy of respect. And so you get quite a romanticized version of the samurai being offered to Europeans for that sort of reason. Then you get a much darker Renaissance in the 1930s. So by the 1930s, you've got an imperial

• 32:34Speaker 04

  Japanese army again, so it's almost full circle to how it was many, many centuries before. But you've got young officers who come through to that army who don't remember Japan ever being vulnerable. They remember Japan only as already being quite strong, like a famous victory over Russia in 1905, for example, a victory 10 years earlier against the Chinese. And they say, look, we really should assert ourselves much more in Asia and in the Asia Pacific. And they try to find a real kind of romantic touchstone for how the Imperial Japanese Army ought to be. And so some of them, they go back to the samurai period, because mostly in the Imperial Japanese Army, you'll have these French sabers, and they say, look, they're flimsy, they're unromantic, and they have Kamakura era samurai swords made for themselves instead as part of this. Some of them

• 33:17Speaker 04

  will even say, we don't need to worry about having the latest military hardware, because the Japanese fighting spirit, centuries old, will tell on the battlefield. And there's a genuine belief that you can organize the economics of your army and organize your strategy on the basis that Japanese soldiers compared to European or American ones will simply fight differently. And so if you think about the stories that Allies or POWs tell in the Second World War, these terrifying banzai charges or the no surrender policy, there are elements of that which have been consciously taken from an imagined samurai past and fed into this completely different scenario in the middle of the 20th century.

• 33:59Dan Snow?

  So was absolute defeat catastrophic setbacks in the Second World War? Was that the end of samurai revivalism, a Bushido? Or if I go to Japan today, is it part of the manis fit?

• 34:15Speaker 04

  There are, and I suppose the name we absolutely have to throw in here would be Yukio Mishima, this great Japanese novelist who developed towards the end of his life a real taste for ultra-right wing politics. He hated the idea, basically, that after the war Japan had become a vassal state of America. All Japanese people seemed to want to do was to make lots of money and go on holidays. And he thought the whole thing had become rather unromantic. And so very famously, he went into an army barracks in Tokyo, or the Self-Defense Forces as they were called, tried to get everyone there to rise up in a great coup d'etat. And then when that failed, he went back into the building and he actually disemboweled himself in the old samurai style. And he had one of his militiamen take off his head right at the end.

• 34:57Speaker 04

  So that samurai ideal, especially amongst those who want to push back against the Americanization of Japanese culture, I think does survive. I'd have to say it's rather a kind of niche interest. I think where you find it instead, actually, is when Japanese businesses really start to do well. In the 1960s, early 70s, you know, Japan has this very, very successful economy. They start to say, you know, why is it that the Japanese labor force is much more pliant than these Western labor forces? Why is it the Japanese businesses like Sony and Toyota and Panasonic are doing so well? And they actually start to hark back to the past. And they'll say there is something in the selflessness of Japanese people.

• 35:38Speaker 04

  They have this spirit that will encourage them to work crazy hours if necessary and to do so for a greater cause. And so there actually is that interest still in that samurai past. And what it might be contributing to Japan's successful economic present that still seems to carry on. Has to be said, a lot of Westerners fall in love with Kurosawa films. And they also fall in love, especially American businessmen, with how successful Japanese businesses are. And so you do start to get these books coming out on kind of warrior business, et cetera. How to Do Business Like a Japanese Samurai or something, these awful titles come out in the 70s and 80s. So, yeah, it still has an afterlife. And I suppose now, people my children's age who are really into manga and anime, still, that period of Japanese history when the samurai were in charge and when their values held sway,

• 36:24Speaker 04

  is still tremendously attractive, I think.

• 36:26Dan Snow?

  So actually, the story of the samurai is not yet over.

• 36:30Speaker 04

  No, I think there are still chapters to be told for the samurai. I think the next few decades in Japan, pressure from China, potentially the loss of the United States as a reliable ally, and the pressure for Japan to build up its spending on the military, and also to do away with parts of its constitution, which have been called the kind of pacifist parts, which say that it can't, you know, declare war on people of its own accord. I think all that is going to be changing, and who knows what role the samurai might have in that. There's always this question, I think, for Britain as well as Japan. Would young people fight? Do they have any sense of their nation as being a single unit that they would be prepared

• 37:12Speaker 04

  to make sacrifices for, as opposed to just being a place where they can buy things and go to school and, and work and find someone to marry? If Japan gets to that point where it needs to conjure Japan as a place that you might sacrifice for, I can imagine them reaching back into the past and pulling out this concept of the samurai and doing something ultra-modern with it.

• 37:31Dan Snow?

  Really nice. Thanks so much, Chris. As ever, what a legend. Thank you for coming back on the podcast.

• 37:35Speaker 04

  Lovely. Thank you for having me.

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• 39:08Dan Snow?

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