Samurai and the Culture of Japan’s Great Peace Lecture Series
The Satsuma Rebellion of 1877, and the rebels who died in it, have been romanticized in the Japanese imagination almost from the moment of the first battle. On this side of the Pacific, the conflict was freely reimagined on the big screen in The Last Samurai, with Tom Cruise portraying a fictional American veteran who throws in his lot with the cause. But fighting alongside rebel leader Saigō Takamori was a real-life commander fresh from the United States whose forgotten story is every bit as remarkable as the one dreamed up by Hollywood—all the more so for being true. Relying on previously...
A few years ago, Professor of History Daniel Botsman stumbled across a set of old Japanese documents in Yale’s East Asia Library. On closer examination, they turned out to be records kept by the official executioner for the great city of Edo (now Tokyo) during the final years of the Tokugawa shogunate. Taking these records as a starting point, this talk will introduce the career of this remarkable individual and consider its significance for our understanding of various aspects of samurai culture–swords, violence, the penal system, and even medical care.
Like the cowboy in the modern American imagination, the samurai has remained a potent image in Japan long after actual warriors disappeared. Throughout 20th and 21st century Japan, notions of the samurai have been used to exhort everyone from soldiers to students, from corporate workers to athletes. Join Professor William Kelly to discover who these samurai of modern Japan are and how we can connect them to the historical samurai depcted in the Peabody’s Samurai and the Culture of Japan’s Great Peace exhibition.
