It turns out that the popular image of the samurai is just that: largely myth.
MOTIVATING THE MYTH
Where did the myth come from? Like most, it began as a highly motivated selective exaggeration and
censorship of actual history. In terms of relative influence on the image of
samurai that we're familiar with today, it can be traced to a couple of important texts:
Hagakure [view|download] (1720), (aka Book of the Samurai), and Bushidō: Soul of Japan (1899).
The former was written by an undistinguished career secretary who himself never raised a sword in combat,
at a time when samurai felt a need to justify their own privileged existence, well over a century after fighting had ceased.
In that sense, the real meaning of the text comes after the fact: it's less about actual warrior conduct
than it is about ideology.
Both texts went on to become instrumental in the totalitarian state militarism of the 1930s and '40s, which ultimately culminated in
the disaster of the Asia-Pacific War (WWII) and the loss of tens of millions of human lives.
This exhibit not only fails to address or even acknowledge the dangerous history of samurai myth/bushido ideology,
but instead by romanticizing the so-called "softer side" of cultural refinement while
censoring the historical context of abject violence, takes it even further by aestheticizing it, at a time of war no less.
MYTH DURING WARTIME
It's not hard to come up with other examples of military cultures that were also highly aestheticized.
But it's unthinkable that a museum today would choose to showcase the weaponry and uniforms of, say for example,
the Nazi Wehrmacht, without putting them in the historical context of what they were actually used for.
Why does the samurai get a pass? And why now to celebrate a culture of violence?
Our country has been at war for more than eight years now—over twice as long as our involvement in WWII—with no end in sight.
On one hand daily life is business as usual, and yet the inhumanity of war denied by this exhibit is all too evident in the very real toll it's taking on our own returning troops:
Record high suicide rates
(120 vets a week in 2005, and only rising since then),
soaring rates of desertion
(up 42% between 2006 and 2007), mental illness
(almost 40% of vets from the ongoing wars receiving VA care have one or more mental disorders), and
violent behavior (in one brigade
in Colorado, the murder rate is more than 100 times that of the surrounding population).
Misogynist violence is
similarly epidemic (a 2004 study of vets found that 71% of the women said they were assaulted or raped while serving)
and rarely brought to justice
(court martial in less than 7% of reported cases in 2007, with an estimated 80% of cases going unreported).
No myth here, and it hasn't changed since the times of the samurai: it's universal and real, how war dehumanizes everyone.
Okakura Kakuzo's Book of Tea
(1906) sought to define for an American audience an essential core of Japanese culture, untouched by modernization, through a discourse of cultural uniqueness. Having less to do with actual formal practices than with strategic articulation of ideology,
it invoked nostalgia for a romanticized premodern past, timeless and unchanging, in order to put forth a nationalist myth of cultural unity and continuity.
The misogyny implied by the homosociality of this age-structured
form of domination was profound, with those exclusively devoted to shudō referred to literally as onna-girai or "woman-haters."
See shudō on-screen: Gohatto (Taboo), 1999, directed by Nagisa Oshima and featuring Beat Takeshi, Ryuhei Matsuda, and Tadanobu Asano.
Orientalism has always been about Western colonialist hegemony,
and Japanese nationalism has been complicit in the same on behalf of US exceptionalism in East Asia ever since Japan became our "junior partner" after World War II.
