I've always found the Samurai and their culture to be fascinating. Very uncompromising on one hand (almost unimaginably so to the Western mind), and yet diverse. A complete samurai needed to be not only competent with weapons and conversant with the theory of warfare, but also had to be proficient in the tea ceremony, matters of protocol, calligraphy, flower arranging, and a host of non-martial activities.
I was reminded of some of this yesterday went I went to see The Last Samurai.
Quite an entertaining movie, even if it did take liberties with history. (The samurai certainly weren't anywhere near as benevolent toward the peasants who provided them with rice and money as the movie portrays.) But I suppose the movie-going public would have found it hard to "identify" with them if they were portrayed as exploiters of down-trodden peasants.
There are numerous accounts of them using peasants necks to test the quality of their swords and after the founding of the Shogunate the relationship with the peasantry became pure out and out exploitation rather than the feudal relationship it had been for centuries.
I've got both Miyamoto Musashi's "The Book of Five Rings" and Yamamoto Tsunetome's "The Hagakure" on my Palm and am working my way through Hagakure. Fascinating stuff. Jim Jarmusch quoted Hagakure quite a few times in his movie "Ghost Dog". While BOFR is more about how to develop the necessary attitudes to win a sword fight (and survive in the war-torn Japan of the 16th century), Hagakure is more about the philosophy of what it means to be a samurai. Sort of a textbook of how a proper Samurai should behave and even how he should think.
Would that our lives were so simple that we could pick up an instruction manual. But then they would probably have to be just as uncompromising as that of the Samurai.
Posted by artandscience at December 16, 2003 05:26 PM