Wrong About Japan Read Online Free PDF

unless you understand its function. By the time I came across this apparent inconsistency, it was too late to ask the author if the “function” of the sword could be anything other than death.
One can guess that the romance of the sword relates to the samurai, men who fought fiercely for their lord’s honour as well as their own, who lived each day in a state of preparation for death, so proud that rather than surrender to an enemy, or in atonement for their own failure, or because their lord was dying in battle, would use their swords to disembowel themselves.
Of course, the Japanese sword is no longer used in war. Forbidden to be worn in public, it is instead collected, the subject of connoisseurship, although one cannot help but imagine that its deadly power lends an essential frisson to its icy beauty.
An untested instrument of death must always carry with it a certain tension, and in the case of the Japanese sword this is by no means a modern issue. During the long, peaceful reign of the Tokugawa Shogunate, which began more than four centuries ago, the power of the sword and its esteemed owner was already problematic. The samurai retained the right to cut down anyone of lower rank who offended them, and as they were the upper class in a society which valued nothing more than honour, surely offence was easily found. But there was no war, so what could a warrior do? By the eighteenth century most samurai had never seen a battle.
In The Taming of the Samurai , Eiko Ikegami discusses the diary of one Edo-period samurai, Bunzaemon, who had become, in the midst of this long peace, a habitué of the theatre and a student of the formerly aristocratic arts of No and flower arranging. There were many like him. He was an unremarkable man, a conformist who, Ikegami reports, “liked to reenact the older traditions of samurai valour…. [He] entered a school of martial arts when he was eighteen. He participated in the sword-testing session, in which samurai tried out new swords during the execution of prisoners sentenced to death, or cut their bodies into smaller pieces afterward. Bunzaemon was excited about cuttinginto a human body something he believed every true samurai should experience.”
I asked Yoshihara-san what made the sword so important to the Japanese people, so important that its artisans might, in the year 2003, still be declared National Living Treasures. He said he could not explain it to me.
In the two hundred and thirty peaceful years before the arrival of Commodore Perry’s “black ships,” the samurai entered the bureaucracy of the shogunate, and by the seventeenth century they had become bureaucrats, known by military titles and organised along military lines. Reading of their lives, one sees them slowly metamorphose into an antecedent of today’s sarariman . Being samurai, of course, Bushido was their code of honour.
In June 2002 The Way of Bushido was a bestseller in Tokyo. Japanese businessmen apparently found this book very useful. As with the secret fascination with the sword, this “useful” quality appears difficult to explain to Westerners.
The swords of World War II stay with us not because they were finely made—they were not—but because of how enthusiastically these essentially medieval weapons were wielded by their owners. It was not too many weeks after my visit to Tokyo that I was in Penang talking to a retired schoolteacherwho was a boy at the time of the Japanese invasion. He recalled, in chilling detail, the terror of rolling heads, fluttering eyelids, blood spurting to the level of the roofs. I would also suggest that the Japanese themselves understand exactly why the sword might be repulsive.
Yoshihara-san’s grandfather Kuni-ie was a legendary sword maker who had forged swords for the emperor himself, a fact that Yoshihara-san modestly never mentioned. When the making of swords was outlawed in 1945, Yoshihara-san’s father abandoned the craft forever. However, Kuni-ie continued,