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.

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)

It’s been a while since I did some syllabus blogging, but the most interesting course I was going to teach last semester didn’t come through,¹ so it’s been a little while since I taught a heavily revised or new course on Japan.

Next semester I’ll be teaching my “Japan since 1700” course, and I’m doing a substantial shuffle of the readings. One shift is that I’m increasing my focus on Japanese women: the course includes Recreating Japanese Women for the Tokugawa-Imperial period, Haruko’s World for the post-war, and Robin LeBlanc’s Bicycle Citizens for the post-post-war. I’ve used RJW before, but never for the survey; Bicycle Citizens replaces Bumiller’s Mariko’s Secrets which I’ve been using practically since it was published twenty years ago. It’s still a good book, for the end-of-bubble era, but I want something closer to the present for my end-of-course reading and this is the best looking candidate in a while. Japanese men get their due, I think: Chushingura for Tokugawa; Fukuzawa’s Autobiography for the Meiji; and the Cook&Cook Japan at War collection for the 20th century; something else for post-war might be good, but I might actually show a movie this time. The last three are all books I’ve used before, but again not in this configuration. I’ll probably have them doing reports and reviews on literature in translation, mostly, which will also fill in some of that.

One thing I discovered, when putting my orders together, is that my library is much better equipped than it used to be. Not only did it get a Nippon Foundation library grant, but it’s also a subscriber to the ACLS Humanities E-Book Collection, which has a small but nicely curated Japan collection. Both Bernsteins and Bicycle Citizens are in the collection, which means that some students will not have to purchase them. I have slightly mixed feelings about the e-books, though: while the collection is very good, the interface is inconsistent, like a JSTOR knock-off that didn’t quite make the cut. I’m not sure I’d assign whole books to be read that way without another option available. I will, however, be using it heavily for selected readings in my World History seminar.

The title of my graduate seminar is “World History as Discipline”: it’s awkward, but I had to indicate that the course was not just in the World History category – we offer graduate seminars in “American” and “World” history – but was about World History as such.² The readings are a mix. There are some relatively early classics of the field – Bailyn on Atlantic history, Mintz on sugar, Dunn on Ibn Battuta, and McNeill on disease and demographics – and some very new work – Burbank&Cooper on empires, Richards on evironmental history – and some stuff that’s there because I think it’s interesting – Ichioka on diaspora, Iriye on internationalism. There’s some theory in the Dunn collection The New World History, which also provides an entree into the necessary discussion of translating global history into local classrooms, and there will be some journal articles on that topic as well. I’m going to have them read an issue or two of the Journal of World History, to get the flavor of the field, as well, and their research project – more of a historiographical survey in this case – will be an extended investigation into a region or theme. I could teach the course twice more without repeating books, there’s so much good stuff on different aspects of these. I’d like to have more world systems theory in there than the bits in TNWH, for example, but that would push out Burbank&Cooper which, I’ve been assured, is the bleeding edge on the empire theory, and is at least as ambitious as any of the World Systems work I’ve read. I could do a whole other version of the class on Asia in regional and world history – Louise Young on empire, and Kuhn on diaspora, material on manga and cinema, the Mongols and Silk Road as global history, comparative feudalisms and environmental histories, the Early Modern question, more Iriye on regional diplomacy – and still not cover it in a semester, even with graduate students.

For better or worse, the seminar is an online course – our graduate program serves students across a broad swath of Kansas and beyond, not to mention a lot of full-time teachers – so the discussions will be slower, more focused. But that’s not a bad thing: I’m fairly sure that the vast majority of this is going to be very new material for my students, most of whom haven’t taken a history course that actually spanned multiple regions or nationalities since Hist 101 and 102. Much of this is relatively new to me, and I’m really looking forward to this semester.

1. For reasons passing understanding, “US-East Asia Relations: Migration, Trade and War” failed to garner a single registrant. We have a strong military history component to our program, though, so I’m considering breaking it down further, and just doing a course on 20th century US-East Asian wars. It would be really fun if I could co-teach it with my US military historian colleague, but that’s new administrative territory for me.
2. “Seminar in World History: World History” just didn’t seem like it would get my point across. “World History Theory and Practice” is closer, but sounds like an intro historiography course.

The inestimable Rob MacDougall is running a course on Digital History, and even better, he’s running it more or less publicly! I’m getting all kinds of ideas here. On the other hand, it sometimes raises surprising problems. The unit on Data Visualization includes an assigned reading that looked like something I might use for historiography, David Staley, Computers, Visualization, and History: How New Technology Will Transform Our Understanding of the Past (M.E. Sharpe, 2003). But when I started looking through it, the first ‘data visualization’ presented was an illustration of Japanese history from William McNeill’s 1963 The Rise of the West that made my teeth clench. Rob asked me to explain what’s wrong with it, which is fair.

The caption reads

In addition to information about costume, architecture, and other forms of material culture, the figures in the diagram convey meaningful information through gesture and body language, the shading of figures, their relative sizes, and their location in the diagram

That’s all true, as far as it goes. The problem, of course, is whether the diagram is conveying accurate and clear information, and on both accounts it fails. I realize that I’m being a little unfair: the McNeill book was a survey text written almost a half-century ago, and the diagram is being used as an example of potential; it’s not being cited as an up-to-date description of Japanese history that would be acceptable today. Still, it’s worth talking about.

Here’s the image:

It turns out that the McNeill book was chock-full of these little gems, and there is a substantial section – given that the book is Western-oriented – devoted to Japanese history. Even for 1963, there are clear errors and overstatements – “the vigorous vulgarity of Hideyoshi’s age” (649) is probably my favorite line, especially as McNeill blames it for the later development of Kabuki, Geisha, Bunraku and Genroku culture – and this diagram does not really help. The focus is on European influence in the world, so the political structure of Japan in this period is really secondary: the diagram is, I think, intended to fill in some of the structural gaps left by the text, which seems like a very weak use of a complex diagram. It probably also should be viewed in the context of the other diagrams of the book: there’s a visual vocabulary here that I’m not going to be able to read the way that McNeill’s readers do.

Still, flaws in the diagram jump out at me, and here’s a short list, in no particular order, of problems

• The headgear. The Emperor wears a papal mitre, probably because of the early (incorrect) descriptions of the Emperor as being a sort of religious potentate, in contrast to the secular authority of shoguns. The samurai and pirates (!) wear courtiers’ hats, and the Buddhist monks have hair (and beards, I think) which are more Fu Manchu than … well, Buddhist monks were bald and samurai rarely wore hats over their topknots.
• The Villages. First, why do the Tokugawa villages have trees (and mountains in the background, I think) and pre-Tokugawa villages have only houses (on flat plains)? Even if there’s a real distinction being made here, it’s completely obscure. Second, the lines of authority in the Tokugawa period are questionable — there’s no visual distinction between the trade/migration links with towns on the one hand, and the authority lines from the samurai, unless those arrows mean more to McNeill’s readers than they do to me — but at least the villages are actually connected to something, whereas the pre-Tokugawa villages appear to be ahistorically independent, or irrelevant.
• Buddhist Monks. The pre-Tokugawa diagram casts them as a fundamentally disruptive element, equal in weight to samurai – though Samurai appear twice in the diagram, perhaps to emphasize those who borrowed technology and religion from the West (though those weren’t either identical nor exclusive categories). It also puts their label in a place where it could apply to either the Buddhist Monk figure or the Emperor. The Tokugawa diagram eliminates them entirely when, in fact, Buddhism remained integral to Japan’s religious culture after it’s political/military defeats and, more importantly, Buddhist temples’ family and religious registration systems were a critical institution of rule connecting the Shogunate to localities (mediated through the daimyo)
• Civil War. Aside from the problems above, though the diagram does suggest hierarchy in Tokugawa-era samurai (by size, as the caption says), there’s no indication in the pre-Tokugawa diagram that the samurai were fighting against each other: all the forces at work in the Civil War era appear to be attacking the Emperor, including the pirates who didn’t even participate in the civil wars at all, primarily being focused (as the text says, actually) on attacking Chinese shipping. There doesn’t seem to be a distinction between the dancing pirates and the towns, either, which is exceedingly odd.
• Towns. Aside from being pirate havens (not!), Japan appears to have no actual cities in this period, but they did have city walls (not!). Also, towns come under direct control of the Shogun in the Tokugawa era, represented oddly by their appearing on one side of a balance scale held by the Shogun along with the samurai, rather than distinguishing between world-class cities under shogunal authority (Edo, Osaka, Kyoto) and the hundreds of other castle towns and other urban areas under daimyo control.
• Jesuits. In this diagram, Jesuits stand in for all Westerners – at least the Spanish and Portuguese, Jesuits and Franciscans expelled from Japan by the Shogunal exclusion edicts of the 1630s.

That’s most of it, I think. The diagram, in the end, conveys almost no true information that isn’t better handled in the text. There’s a reason why history textbooks, once the technology allowed cheaper reproduction at higher quality, have gotten away from these kind of pseudo-artistic schematics and replaced them with maps, artwork and photographs: the danger of interposing inauthentic material is less. Not nonexistent, obviously, but at least students have a chance to see the evidence for themselves, instead of having it filtered through an artist who may or may not know anything about the history or culture being portrayed at the behest of an historian who many not have a strong sense of the visual aspects of the history or culture being portrayed. It’s actually very hard to convey a lot of accurate information visually without a great deal of textual background and explanation. Don’t get me wrong: I love good visuals. One of my prize possessions is a Japanese book of historical diagrams and images for Japanese history: it’s intended as a supplement to a middle-school or high-school history text, but many of the diagrams have never been reproduced in English as far as I know. It covers economic, military and cultural history, and I use it in my Japanese history classes quite regularly, but (aside from the fact that the labels are in Japanese) what makes the diagrams work is that they don’t try to convey everything in a single image. It’s too much.

I was going to post about it here, but Another Damned Medievalist raised the question of how to deal with primary sources in a class where students lack important background concepts, and so I’m going to share the comment I made over there and then expand on it a bit:

I’m not sure if I’d call it a ‘brilliant’ idea, but I faced a similar dilemma in my Early Japan course: rich primary sources, but weak general knowledge. The way I handled it this time was to break the semester up into two units: in the first, we went through the textbook and political/economic source reader, covering the basic narrative, political and economic and religious history in a fairly traditional fashion; in the second half of the course, I went back over the same history through the primary sources — Genji, Heike, etc. — with a big secondary work on mentalite at the end. The goal, obviously, was to give the students the context first, along with some basic skill-building, then to delve deeper into the material that they were now more comfortable with, without all the “you don’t know it yet, but this is important because…” stuff that drove me crazy. The class size wasn’t big enough for a definitive result, but I think it worked pretty well. Our second-half discussions, in particular, were much better informed than I’d gotten in the past.

As a side benefit, by the way, we’d gone through the entire history before students got into their end-of-semester research projects, so they actually could pick topics they were interested in with some level of informed judgement and without a bias towards the early stuff (or pop culture-privileged topics in the later stuff).

This is something which I’ve considered doing for a long time, but not all of my courses break down quite so neatly in terms of the material I use. On the whole, as I said, I think it was quite successful. One of my students suggested a change which makes a great deal of sense: instead of putting Mary Beth Berry’s Japan in Print at the end, after the primary sources — I was using it instead of any particular 17th century reading — she pointed out that it would be a good transition reading. That made a great deal of sense: it introduces a great deal of theory about reading and audiences, and the argument creates a tension between classical/medieval and early modern culture which would be give more focus to the primary source discussions. I would have to add another 17th century reading: Given the rumors of a Chushingura movie in the works, maybe it’s time to bring that back into my syllabi!