For a little entertainment this Thanksgiving, I read Andrew Rankin’s Seppuku: A History of Samurai Suicide (Kodansha, 2011).¹ Since I’m teaching both Samurai and Early Japan this semester, seemed like a good supplemental read, and this is the first thing resembling a lull I’ve had all semester. This is an attractive little book, substantially researched, but not much of a history. It’s more like a miscellany, a collection of materials in search of a thesis.

Andrew Rankin is a graduate student in literature, specializing in Mishima Yukio: no wonder then, that he has collected materials on extremes of samurai culture, though Mishima is conspicuous by his almost-total absence from this work.² Mishima is the subtext, though, as the entire work is dominated by discourses of aesthetics and authenticity, without the complications of anthropological or historical theory, economics or historical context. Thus you get sentences like: “Their chief aspiration, in its psychological essence, was to realize the perennial samurai fantasy of inviolable rectitude and fearless self-sacrifice culminating in sanguinary apotheosis.” (197) While Rankin acknowledges changes in practice over time, the view of samurai culture is anachronistic and stands little close scrutiny. Too bad, because even within the realm of performative aesthetics, there’s a fascinating set of problems on display here that deserve serious thought.

While academics are often accused of bibliography-dumping on our younger colleagues, that Kodansha would publish a footnoted, bibliography-laden book on samurai culture without references to Eiko Ikegami, Thomas Conlan or Paul Varley — to pick the first three that I looked for and didn’t find — seems a bit haphazard. This book could be an interesting counterpoint to Ikegami, in particular, because of her focus on the tensions between control and individual self-expression around the warrior class, but without any engagement or thesis statement, this work remains frustratingly aloof.

What this book does reasonably well is present nearly-raw materials on the stomach-cutting suicide practice, how it evolved from an exceptional display to a tradition, then to a routinized procedure and finally to a romantic gesture in the Bakumatsu-Meiji era, where it stops. This process is as close as the book comes to a thesis, though “point of view” might be closer. There are two substantive chapters chronicling this evolution. separated by one on the procedure of the mature seppuku ritual of the Tokugawa era. All of these chapters are more episodic than coherently narrative, focusing on individual events selected, as near as I can tell, for cultural impact or typicality: Well over half the book is short prose portraits of seppuku events and their ilk. There’s a great deal of interesting stuff here, details and terminology that will liven up lectures and spur the imaginations of historical novelists. There’s also a sort of epilogue, called “Paradigms” which is a collection of primary source quotations… well, it starts as primary source quotations, chronological, then Westerners and 20th century Japanese views start to slip in, material which was never addressed in the rest of the work. My favorite bit from that section is the “Death poem of Kanzawa Toko (1795)”

Death poems
are a delusion.
You just die.

It feels incomplete. Not just because I’m a scholar and I want analysis and counterarguments. But because the book doesn’t even hold together to the standards of a popular history. Despite the example above, the prose is mostly fine, though the endless progression of stomach-cutting does get to be a bit much: there aren’t enough synonyms, though Rankin doesn’t resort to euphemisms, which is good. While there’s great value in a detailed examination of a powerful social and cultural phenomenon like this, there should be some conclusion, some cohesion, which is just lacking.

1. It helps to have friends who are journal editors: my colleague at Midwest Quarterly passed it on to see if it was worth a review, shortly before the journal gave up reviewing.
2. Three references, mostly directed at the presentation of suicide in his writing, and one brief mention of the Mishima’s own “anachronistic seppuku suicide.” (18) The Satsuma uprising is also missing, except for its role in General Nogi’s own anachronistic death.

Stephen Turnbull, one of the most prolific and controversial writers on Japanese military history, has written a book on the 47 Samurai incident. The Samurai Archives review is quite positive, though Turnbull’s involvement as historical consultant on the upcoming Keanu Reeves version does raise concerns.

It’s nice to see Turnbull stepping up his game a bit, using front-line scholarship and taking a critical approach, rather than the mish-mash of his earlier books. It seems unlikely to me, though, that the debunking scholarship which has advanced over the last decade or so will have a significant impact on popular versions of the incident. It’s possible, I suppose, that Turnbull’s involvement in the new movie means that it will be a thoroughly revisionist statement¹ but the entrenched romantic version is going to remain authoritative until the revisionist history starts to get traction in Japan.

Even then, there’s the Shakespeare problem. We know that his portrayals of English kings and other historical moments were partisan and/or heavily fictionalized, but they remain some of the most enduring images and themes in historical fiction and movies, so that historians are still forced to routinely debunk these myths.² Chushingura and its ilk created a solid mythology by the dawn of the modern age, and the imperialist valorization of the Ako Roshi and other self-destructive samurai tendencies reinforced a vision of the samurai as abstemious, effective, principled, selfless and frequently violent. It would take a dramatic cultural shift to wipe out this tradition, one that seems unlikely given Japan’s rightward tendencies these days.³

I was screening movies for my Samurai course and came across recommendations (on twitter, I think) for The Twilight Samurai. I was very impressed: the portrayal of samurai poverty, bureaucracy, domainal politics, bakumatsu confusion, and the diversity (and, generally speaking, irrelevance) of fighting styles (and illegality of dueling) was very nicely done. The romantic side was a little over-generous, perhaps, but more realistic that an awful lot of other historical pieces. If you’re looking for a solid historical movie, one that will educate more than it will obscure, it’s very good.

1. assuming that all the pre-release publicity is wrong
2. It doesn’t help that “most historically accurate portrayal ever” in movie advertising usually means precisely the opposite, as the most recent Robin Hood versions demonstrate
3. more likely you’d see something like the American transformation of cowboy films: more internal focus and diversity, and an obscuring of the historically undeniable negative sides (i.e., Dances with Wolves and the death of the cowboy-and-indian film) with perhaps some culturally acceptable complications. Frankly, a good Brokeback Mountain treatment would go a long way, plus being historically credible.

What makes Louise Young’s Japan’s Total Empire: Manchuria and the Culture of Wartime Imperialism such a fascinating, troubling work is that she details the way in which the Manchurian experience, and the strategic vulnerability of the Manchurian adventure, rebound into the politics and culture of Japan itself. It reverses, in a way, the traditional narratives of colonialism which see influence flowing from the metropole to the periphery rather than the other way around. And as consciousness of Manchuria became increasingly central to Japanese political and cultural identity, Japanese politics became increasingly radical: nationalist, racialist, expansionist, militarist; in a word, imperialist. Not that Japan wasn’t an empire before that — Taiwan, Korea, Liaodong, and a large swath of the South Pacific attest to Japan’s willingness to take control of other peoples — or that the cultural elements weren’t in place. But under the influence of the ongoing crisis in Manchuria, a crisis experienced by many who travelled there, worked there, and seen and heard through music, movies and other outlets, liberal alternatives like internationalism became unpalatable, even unacceptable. If you’re tied to the usual nation-bound histories of culture and politics, and the one-way influence of the standard metropole-periphery model, this is a paradigm-shifting piece of scholarship. As Albert Szent-Gyorgyi said, “Research is to see what everybody else has seen, and to think what nobody else has thought.”

I thought of Young’s work when I read this NYT profile of David Yerushalmi, one of the architects and driving forces behind the anti-Shariah movement in the United States. Yerushalmi’s radically political and hostile view of Islam have become common-place opinions in certain segments of the US political spectrum — primarily Republican, Tea Party, Buchananite Isolationist, Dominionist and similar groups — and have been put into legislative form in Oklahoma, as well as as other states. Especially in the context of US involvement in the Middle East, the specific focus of the xenophobia against the very kinds of people who are the target of US policy, the anxiety about subversion by global networks of muslims based on the statements and actions of a radicalized few, really does remind me of the Japanese turn in the 1920s and 1930s against communism, socialism and anarchism, against the Korean and Chinese activists, and their Japanese allies, who were the strongest proponents of those theories.

What really fascinated me about the profile, though, was Yerushalmi’s background. Or rather, a combination of his background and the way in which the article glided over the interesting bits.

His interest in Islamic law began with the Sept. 11 attacks, he said, when he was living in Ma’ale Adumim, a large Jewish settlement in the Israeli-occupied West Bank.

At the time, Mr. Yerushalmi, a native of South Florida, divided his energies between a commercial litigation practice in the United States and a conservative research institute based in Jerusalem, where he worked to promote free-market reform in Israel.

After moving to Brooklyn the following year, Mr. Yerushalmi said he began studying Arabic and Shariah under two Islamic scholars, whom he declined to name.

He is an American Hasidic Jew — literally the third thing we learn about him after his name and age — and lawyer, hostile to the secular socialist roots of Israel¹ who suddenly became troubled by the nature of Islam after the 9/11 attacks.

Maybe. But I don’t think that it’s coincidental that Yerushalmi was an American living in Israel — a state often described as an agent of American power in the Middle East² and in particular living in an areas which is easily (and I think fairly) described as an Israeli colonial territory. I think it’s more likely that the experience of living in occupied territory radicalized him, hardened his views on Islam. He was engaged in a struggle at the frontier of civilization, in his own mind, when members of a group he already percieved as the enemy struck at his homeland, to which he returned to share his hard-won perspective on the issues. And because of the shock of that attack, compounded by the ongoing challenge of war overseas and economic troubles, he found people receptive to his message of a subversive force at work in the world, an existential conflict.

Being an empire means having peripheries, and those peripheries are going to have troubles, in no small part because of their relationship with the metropole. But mistaking the tensions of the periphery for an existential crisis is the kind of lack of perspective which signals weak leadership, a distorted public sphere, and a high probability of escalating sunken cost fallacies driving policy.

1. Note that the “conservative research institute” isn’t named, begging the question of whose definition of “conservative” the reporter is using in this description.
2. though I think “stalking horse” or “scapegoat” might be more precise

Mary Pope Osborne’s Magic Tree House series is intended to educate and entertain by taking its protagonists to different times and places, real and mythical. These Scholastic books are mainstays of schools, libraries, and primary curricula, and some of the books have companion “Research Guide” publications for kids who want to know more about the historical, cultural or scientific background. Some of these books are aimed at early readers: the first 28 in the series are short, with short, simple sentences appropriate to 1st or 2nd graders; after that the series shifts into the slightly more fantastical “Merlin Mission” mode, longer stories with more complex writing suitable for 2nd or 3rd grade students; the research guides seem to be aimed at 2nd through 4th graders.¹ In these stories, Jack and Annie are given a book which, combined with the magic of the tree house, takes them to a time and place where they can carry out a mission of some kind, while learning about the site of their adventure. The whole thing is supposed to be an encouragement to learning, so to speak, showing the value of book reading. Twice in the series, Jack and Annie have visited Japanese history: in the earlier, shorter work, we get nature-loving ninja and threatening samurai; in the later adventure, we get the nature-loving poet Basho, a magical dragon, and threatening samurai.²

The text that Jack and Annie work from — more Jack than Annie: he’s the cautious, bookish one, and she’s the impulsive, intuitive one — gives an explicit frame to the story, and the book is never wrong. Because of Annie’s impulsiveness, they never get to read through the book carefully, but look up facts as they become relevant: the facts are short, context-free chunks of information that usually explain what the characters are seeing, and remembering these bits often comes in handy at critical moments. In addition to the books they read, they often get guidance from people they meet: many of the adventures feature a “local informant” who helps them navigate local custom and landscape and often is critical to their larger mission; usually they are supposed to return to the Magic Tree House with a specific item or piece of information.³ As with the books that bring them to these times and places, their local informants are never wrong, either, though sometimes they misjudge Jack or, more often, Annie.⁴

The first Japan adventure is Night of the Ninjas⁵ in which Jack and Annie return to an unidentified moment in Japan’s medieval period. Here’s what their book has to say about it:

• “Very little is known about the shadowy warriors called ninjas. Historians believe that ninjas lived in Japan between the 14th and 17th centuries. Both men and women were ninjas. Sometimes they fought to protect their families. Sometimes warlords hired them to be spies.” (15-16)
• “Sometimes ninjas held meetings in hidden mountain caves to plan secret missions.” (31)
• “Ninjas took orders from a ninja master. The master was a mysterious wise person who knew many secrets of nature.” (31)
• “The samurai were fierce Japanese fighters. They carried two swords to cut down their enemies.” (45)

This is the most authoritative information Jack and Annie have available, and the vast majority of it is entirely incorrect. Ninja — the black-suited nemesis of samurai living an independent existence in the hills, etc. — are a figment of early modern imaginations built on a sliver of truth, reified by modern martial artists’ pseudo-historical self-justifications and entertainment industries more than willing to dramatize and amplify the mythologies for fun and profit.⁶ The myth of hostility between ninja and samurai, though, runs through a lot of Japanese historical fiction.⁷ (38) The idea of the ninja as a kind of eco-warrior seems to be a relatively new addition to the mythology: it’s an interesting way of working “harmony with nature” into this Japanese narrative:

“Remember three things,” said the master…”Use nature. Be nature. Follow nature.” (38)

The nature-ninja turns the samurai into a kind of modernist nightmare.⁸ But samurai, described in the book as “fierce,” are all bark and no bite: their armor is made of “bamboo” (45), they wander around the woods at night with torches looking for ninja (37, 58), and they can be fooled by a kid in a hoodie pretending to be a rock. (48-49)

In Dragon of the Red Dawn⁹ samurai are also a threat, again in a distinctly modernist mode, because of the ban on foreigners. As their guidebook “A Journey to Old Japan” (7)¹⁰ says,

• “The late 1600s in Japan were years of peace and prosperity. Art and culture thrived. But it was a time when the country was completely closed to the outside world. No one was allowed to come in. The citizens of Edo were frequently checked to make sure they had passports.” (15-16)
• “Anyone who did not have a passport was considered a spy and punished severely.” (16)

All samurai, in this version of Genroku Japan, are police agents: the only samurai who are mentioned are either former samurai, like the poet Basho, or some form of patrolling security who are quick to draw their swords and challenge people who are out of place. (21, 42, passim) Basho tells Jack and Annie that “You must remember, seek harmony with your surroundings. … Observe the people of Edo and do as they do. If you do not stand out, you will not be noticed by the samurai.” (25-26) Jack and Annie have to learn how to use chopsticks — while eating makizushi, which it’s a little early for — under the gaze of samurai who are on the lookout for foreigners. (42) Oddly, the samurai they face suspect them because of where they are but not how they look, whereas Basho can tell immediately that they are foreigners; this may be part of the magic of the tree house, which also gives them appropriate clothing and gear and skips right over language issues. (25, etc.) In spite of the fact that Jack and Annie repeatedly come under suspicion of being spies, the samurai questioning them are thrice convinced that they are merely poetry apprentices (22, 48-52, 96-98) who do not need to show their passports, twice by extemporizing poetry.¹¹

In addition to their simple duties and simple-mindedness, samurai are part of a very simple political system. As often happens, Osborne has conflated the past and present, Shogunal and Imperial institutions. Here’s what “A Journey to Old Japan” says:

• “In the 1600s, the Imperial Garden surrounded the Imperial Palace in the capital city of Japan. The city was called Edo (Say EE-doh). In the mid-1800s, its name was changed to Tokyo (Say TOH-kee-oh.)” (14)
• “In the 1600s, the military ruler known as the shogun (say SHOW-gun) lived in the center of the Imperial Garden in a palace that had hundreds of rooms.” (17)
• “Often the shogun’s warriors traveled with him. They were called samurai (Say SAM-uh-rye).” … “Samurai were excellent horsemen well trained in the arts of fighting. The code of the samurai was strict. Samurai did not show their feelings. They had great powers of concentration.” (18)

There’s a pronunciation error, the elimination of daimyo from the political picture, the bushido stoicism and assumption that all samurai are the same, and the confusion engendered by referring to the Shogunal keep by its modern title. Osborne carefully refers to the Shogun as “the military ruler” but doesn’t explain the distinction between the Shogunal and Imperial institutions or note that the castle and grounds were not considered “Imperial” until the 1860s.

But the samurai are just an obstacle: the heart of the story is poetry, fire and magic. Despite their failings, Basho admits “Yes, the samurai greatly honor the art of poetry. Poetry helps focus the mind. The samurai believe a truly brave warrior should be able to compose a poem even in the midst of an earthquake, or while facing an enemy on the battlefield.” (61) Basho instructs the children in the art of haiku¹² and shares the frog pond verse which he wrote just yesterday, even giving Jack the piece of paper on which the world’s most famous haiku is written. (62) The guide book tells us that “Basho is one of Japan’s greatest poets. He wrote short, beautiful poems that speak to people as clearly today as they did during the Edo period of Japan.” (59) Some of them certainly do: Basho has about the same linguistic issues as Shakespeare, namely that he’s one of the writers whose work shaped the early modern language, but idiom and usage have changed over time.

Unlike Night of the Ninjas, this book has a precise historical moment. Or, rather, several precise moments: the frog poem was written in 1686, but the main action of the book focuses on the fire that destroyed Basho’s home in 1682, after which he embarked on his famous travels. Also, the cherry blossoms are blooming. Aren’t they always? Anyway, on their first walk through the city, Basho notes the drought-like conditions and remembers the 1657 Meireki Fire.¹³

“When the weather is very dry, the people of Edo worry about fire. … Twenty-five years ago, during a dry spell, half our city was destroyed by a terrible fire. Thousands died.” (30)

Probably a hundred thousand or more. But there’s an up-side to fires, he says later:

“I suppose that is why the ancients called our fires ‘the flowers of Edo.’ … After something is destroyed by fire, a good new thing often takes its place. Just as after the bleakest winter, beautiful flowers return with the spring.” (89)

This is not, of course, the actual source of the “flowers of Edo” idiom, which is both relatively recent at that time instead of “ancient”, and sarcastic rather than heartening. But Basho himself endured several fires that destroyed his home, and did take the opportunity to travel, producing some of his greatest work (including the above-mentioned poem) as a result.

When the fire breaks out, Jack and Annie join the citizens of Edo fighting the fires – no mention of the competitive firefighting teams, their uniforms or equipment, just people with buckets – and then draw on their magic to invoke the Cloud Dragon, “one of the guardian animals of the four directions. She has the power of flight and commands the rain clouds.” (37) Though a very minor figure in Japanese astrology, the Cloud Dragon answers their call with a drenching rain.

There are a few interesting touches: yo-yos, which are a long-standing Japanese toy; hot towels at meals; sumo wrestling as entertainment, though it’s unlikely that Genroku-era wrestlers would have been 400+ pounds. (38, 39, 46)

But as educational materials, these books represent a huge step backwards, a terribly wasted opportunity. According to the Wikipedia page, these books have been translated, along with most of the series, into Japanese. I can only imagine what the Japanese thought of them.

1. Check the Scholastic web site for official suitability levels. Also if you have any doubt about the fact that these are aimed at an education audience….
2. I could put a spoiler alert here, but how many 2nd-4th graders are reading this blog, who haven’t already moved beyond Jack and Annie adventures? Well, my son wants to read this post when I’m finished with it, but other than him?
3. Missions are part of larger projects: the series is built around four-book units which share a problem and theme. Jack and Annie accumulate skills and credentials over the series. This makes up for the fact that the individual books are very short, and acculturates young readers to longer works. That’s the general idea, anyway.
4. I suspect that most of my readers at this point are either familiar with the series, or have stopped reading. But I want to establish the authority of the voices: readers of the series are acculturated, if they read more than one or two, to accept the authority of the guiding book and teachers.
5. Book 5, published in 1995 by Random House, with illustrations by Sal Murdocca.
6. And, as with most Japanese nouns, the plural of “ninja” is “ninja” not “ninjas”
7. And is almost certainly based on self-serving mythologies of post-pacification samurai
8. The picture on p. 46 is the only time they are depicted visually
9. Book 37, Scholastic, 2007
10. Complete with pseudo-bamboo typography
11. including, I regret to inform you, “Twinkle, twinkle, little star.” Basho likes it.
12. though without any of that picky stuff like syllables or turning words, or seasonal indicators
13. They also see puppet plays on “a row of stages built along the riverbank” (36)

The third installment of Chris Bradford’s Young Samurai series shifts modes mid-book, when the action moves from the original Harry Potter-esque bildungsroman mode to the tragic — Young Jack is on the side of the Toyotomi, as it turns out — Battle of Osaka.

[More Spoilers Ahead]¹

The book is considerably longer than the first two installments, a common feature of end-of-series climaxes, and continues with the cultural and historical bad habits noted in the first two works.² At least, being a climactic moment, many of the historical alterations are clarified — if not well justified. There are two substantial changes to the historical record, which explain most of the other distortions: postponing the Tokugawa dominion of Japan until after the Battle of Osaka, and transforming the banning of Christianity into xenophobic nationalism and a popular movement, rather than a geo-political calculation.³ And ninja. Lots of ninja. I’m going to focus on the historiographical oddities this time, though I reserve the right to note new contextual and literary failings.

The action in this book runs from 1613 through the end of the Battle of Osaka, though the two campaigns are collapsed into a single sequence of battles mostly focused on the Battle of Tennōji,⁴ a little Winter Truce interlude,⁵ and the subsequent fall of Himeji Castle. The historical timeline leading up to this point is still a little murky in my mind, but it seems that the Battle of Sekigahara⁶ was the final battle in Toyotomi Hideyoshi’s unification campaign, after which he died, resulting in a surprisingly stable Council of Regents.⁷ (166-168) The Toyotomi⁸ house is the Imperial house, suggesting either that the imperial institution had a continuous martial tradition⁹ or that Hideyoshi actually took that last step¹⁰ and supplanted the Imperial house.¹¹ The Battle of Osaka, then, is the real Sekigahara,¹² though with the added element of having the Hideyoshi house actually participating. In this rendition, the Hideyoshi/Imperial heir is the “good guy” (also Christian): the Tokugawa house is a usurper whose forces are made up of opportunists, racists and ronin.¹³ Also, it was Tokugawa/Lord Kamakura’s decision to switch sides which determined the result of the Nakasendo battle, and we all know that switching sides is something that honorable samurai warlords never did. (82, 168) A literary rendition of the early 1600s from the Toyotomi perspective could be powerful stuff, exploration of still-unstable political and ethical ethos and real tragedy. Needless to say, that’s not what we’ve got here.

I suppose the vision of the Tokugawa house as religious and racial chauvinists could also be a matter of perspective: it’s true that the expulsion of Christianity from Japan was a violent process, though I don’t remember any sources that describe it as any sort of popular movement.¹⁴ In fact, in Bradford’s Japan, the Buddhist and Shinto religious leadership whom you’d expect to be at the forefront of an anti-foreign movement are largely agnostic on the question of Christianity. Also, oddly, the Tokugawa-ish Kamakura house never rhetorically connects the anti-foreign and anti-Toyotomi movements, though the fact that the “heir apparent” is a Christian (308) and working closely with the subversive Jesuits (320) would make it eminently sensible for them to use it as leverage; really, they’re just mean.¹⁵ The descriptions of the anti-Christian movement resemble the Boxer Rebellion or 1930s Germany more than the actual historical events which left non-Catholic foreigners alone. (253) I’ve said it before, and I’ll say it again here: the actual historical events are more than sufficiently dramatic to be interesting; distorting them through a modern pseudo-fascist lens is gilding the lily, at best. Curiously, the anti-foreign Tokugawa forces are much better equipped with firearms and cannon than the Jesuit-supported Toyotomi side. (335, 392, etc.)¹⁶

The identity of the über-ninja Dokuganryu is revealed early on in the book (50-51), and while I’m sure this was intentional from the beginning, I still think that Bradford both missed an opportunity and did great damage to the biography of historical figures. Actually, the identity would have been obvious if I had paid more attention to the common nicknames of daimyo, because the “One-Eyed Dragon” moniker is associated with smallpox-scarred Date Masamune, whose disfigurement and family history the character share. However, Bradford changes the name to Hattori, a name associated in real life with both ninja and the Tokugawa house, taking Date’s life in a very strange direction at the time of Sekigahara,¹⁷ and ignoring the real history and character of Date Masamune himself, who lived and served the Tokugawa ably into the 1630s. In this version, the ninja pulls the strings, using the xenophobia of the Kamakura/Tokugawa as leverage to take vengeance on the Toyotomi/Hasegawa and Masamoto/Miyamoto.

In the end, the vast majority of the characters die in battle, which is likely to be somewhat emotionally wrenching given the Harry Potterish way in which nobody important dies (after the initial onslaught that orphans Jack) despite spending two and a half books playing with weapons, attempting deadly challenges and fighting off ninja. Even the super-ninja Dokuganryu appears to die, though Jack doesn’t have time to verify the ninja’s death, which takes the combined effort of both a ninja-trained young woman¹⁸ and a number of other of Jack’s colleagues. However, the survival of Jack (plus his romantic interest, of course) means sequels,¹⁹ and sequels means that Jack needs a worthy enemy. Jack’s chief student nemesis also survives; like Gollum, due to the mercy of the protagonist (473). In an amusingly implausible bit of historical preservation, Masamoto/Miyamoto survives his Horatio-at-the-bridge last stand and is forced into retirement by the Tokugawa/Kamakura: he takes the tonsure, which will allow him to do the writing he’s always wanted.²⁰

There are two new cultural themes which are bad enough to deserve note. First, swords get seriously weird. Swords in Bradford’s milieu have the makers’ names stamped on the blade, rather than hidden on the tang. (29-30, 75) Swords have characters which affect their wielders, and evil ones demand blood before resheathing. (29, 35-38, 48, 375) Finally, the sharper the blade, the more effective: in some ways that’s true, certainly, but a sharper blade doesn’t make you a better fighter. (433) Second, poetry is a running theme, and while Bradford uses some actual works from the period,²¹ the poetry competition is themeless and the poems prepared beforehand. (234, etc.) And at one point a Japanese character turns Aesop’s Tortoise and Hare into a haiku. (143) Poetry is associated with women (100, 147) and with the “soft, cultured features of a nobleman” (83-85) though most of the major (and minor) poets of the age were samurai-born men.²²

Finally, for a work written by a martial artist, the descriptions of combat and battle are still oddly bad. Early on, an arrow passes “within a hair’s-breadth of his heart” (18) though clearly Jack doesn’t get a near-fatal chest wound at that point, not even a scratch. At one point “A cold steel blade was pressed against Jack’s throat” (150) though he had a cloth sack over his head which usually makes this sort of thing difficult. In a climactic scene, an arrow is shot through a hand which is holding a sword handle (473), an unlikely shot, at best. The elite Red Guard of the Kamakura/Tokugawa, vicious and effective warriors who give no quarter, are described late in the battle as “mean-looking.” (447) There are other little things: siege engines which are never described or used (405), the inexplicable explanatory chat break in the middle of a raging battle (377), the kiai shout as a mystical attack speciality of sohei warrior-monks (177), distinction between ashigaru, ronin and samurai (151, 159).²³

Works like the Young Samurai series claim to be originalist, purist representations of a fine culture, but really they are presentist projections of ahistorical apologia which apparently require not just revisionism, but wholesale historical reorganization to be credible. Some of these changes are probably justified, in Bradford’s mind, as simplifications: the dual Emperor/Shogun system is a little counter-intuitive, and having the greatest samurai of the age participate in a civil war for less than pure, honorable reasons would obviate the martial culture Bradford is promoting. These are, at best, excuses and rationalizations, rather than adequate reasons. As I said before, no disclaimer can excuse a presentation this far removed from reality claiming educational value. At least, having read the books, I feel a little more prepared for the onslaught of error I’m going to be seeing in my students’ work and the popular press.

1. I don’t really consider that a spoiler; it’s an actual event. Knowing how things turn out is fundamental to historical work. Though I must concede that Bradford’s willingness to mess with the timeline does raise some doubt.
2. The Way of the Warrior and The Way of the Sword. Also, the book jacket copy is unchanged.
3. Needless to say, the historical changes require substantial alterations to the characters of many historical figures. One can only hope that the bad pseudonyms shield young readers from connecting these caricatures with real people. At one point, the Miyamoto Musashi stand-in orders Jack to commit seppuku, then retracts it and calls it a “little joke.” (72)
4. very simplified, minus cavalry, with the addition of super-soldier elite troops
5. So the Tokugawa side can be made to look even more treacherous (350)
6. called Nakasendo here, after the highway
7. And no invasion of Korea!
8. called “Hasegawa”
9. And Hideyoshi, then wasn’t a commoner.
10. and given his pretensions to divinity, why not? It’s always a little tricky explaining to students why and how the imperial institution survived this era
11. Oddly, the living Hasegawa, Toyotomi Hideyori’s stand-in, is referred to as the “heir apparent” (167) which would mean that the throne is empty, which never happened. Child emperors with regencies were SOP. Also, “royal geisha.” (126)
12. Or Dan-no-ura, given the echoes of the Gempei war created by conflating the samurai and aristocratic traditions. (217, 308, etc.)
13. In the actual war of 1614-15, it’s the Toyotomi forces which were miscellaneous odds and ends, including ronin who, if they weren’t samurai, we’d more properly call mercenaries.
14. A lot of people outside of the xenophobic movement spend a lot of time being mildly racist (47, 55, 158) and apparently there’s a neutral term for foreigner — gaijin is considered derogatory — but we’re never told what it is. (129)
15. Their children are thuggish punks; their elite forces are implacable, nameless; and they don’t respect culture. Also, they use legalistic tactics. (350)
16. And Jack, who is supposed to be more experienced in these matters, apparently doesn’t realize that well-trained military forces know how to keep their powder dry in wet conditions and can keep using firearms and cannon in the rain. (390)
17. using the kagemusha dodge to allow him to appear dead while he joins the ninja (424), becomes an undefeatable assassin who somehow keeps losing.
18. among the least-surprising reveals of the book
19. at least three, apparently detailing Jack’s attempt to get to Nagasaki and escape Japan
20. Oddly, however, his home is not under surveillance after the battle, which allows Jack an avenue of escape that really wouldn’t exist if the Tokugawa were as effective and powerful as they’re portrayed here.
21. Historical poet Saigyo is called on to judge the contest. (197)
22. Since the imperial institution is conflated with the warlords, I’m not sure where these “soft” noblemen come from, either.
23. My favorite example is when one character challenges another to action with “Are you ashigaru or samurai?” (361)