Lions Led By Donkeys Podcast - Episode 109 - Shogun 2, The Last Samurai, and Western Misconceptions Ft. Dr. Nyri Bakkalian

Episode Date: June 22, 2020

Dr. Nyri Bakkalian joins Joe to talk about video games, anime, and all of the things the west misunderstands about Japanese history. Support the show: https://www.patreon.com/lionsledbydonkeys Preorder Dr. Bakkalian's book: https://squareup.com/store/balance-of-seven/item/grey-dawn-preorder

Hey everybody, Joe here from the Lions Led by Donkeys podcast. If you enjoy what we do here on the show and you think it's worth your hard-earned money, you can support the show via Patreon. Just a $1 donation gets you access to bonus episodes, our Discord, and regular episodes before everybody else. If you donate at an elevated level, you get even more bonus content. A digital copy of my book, The Hooligans of Kandahar, and a sticker from our Teespring store. Our show will always be ad-free and is totally supporter-driven. We use that money to pay our bills, buy research materials that make this show possible, and support charities like the Kurdish Red Crescent, the Flint Water Fund, and the Halo Trust. Consider joining the

Legion of the Old Crow by Donkeys podcast. I'm Joe and with me today is Dr. Nairi Balkarian. Did I get that right? Nairi Bakalian. Bakalian! Damn it, I just lost armenian street cred that's okay that's okay uh even worse is that i asked just before we started recording if i was pronouncing it right that's okay that's it's fine yeah if if there's one consistency on this show it said i mispronounce everything um so we have been talking about doing an episode together for seemingly since this podcast started uh just about and you know now that you're on the

show that means we're officially legitimate like we have a phd of history on the show no no longer are we just the the emu emu dick joke people? We're officially past the Rubicon, and we must be taken seriously. Writing the emus to glory. How are you doing today? Oh, not bad, not bad. It's okay as far as the new normal, as it were, is concerned. Parking my ass at home and trying to get work done remotely and trying to not think too much about things beyond my control.

That seems to be a major struggle for me recently as well. Yeah, Yeah. And as Armenians, I mean, this is a, this is a thing I feel like, I feel like more than a few of us are probably struggling with this right now in the United States because shit hitting the fan is something that we tend to be familiar with. And,

you know, it sort of runs in the, runs in the genes. Like this, this, this, this, this feeling in the pit of the stomach,

like, oh, my God. Again? I think one of the things that's pissed me off more than anything outside of, obviously, the reasons for the protests is, like, the amount of incredibly reactionary Armenians. Oh, my God. Oh, my God. Oh my god.

If anybody should understand state oppression and racism and state violence, it would be Armenians. But they're like, no, this is actually fine. This is totally cool. Back in 2016, I lost count of the number of people

like Armenian people in the United States that I heard who voted for the literal Turkish lobby. What? The people in the present administration, you know, the Russia connections are sort of at the top of a lot of people's minds. But General Flynn, as I recall, General Flynn was also a lobbyist for the Turkish government. Oh, yeah, he was. He worked for the AKP party, from my understanding. Yes, he worked for Erdogan's party.

So, like, the number of Armenians who voted for the literal Turkish lobby and who should have fucking known better. But, you know. I mean, to be fair, that tracks. I mean, we are an Ouroboros of fucking ourselves over. Yes, we are. Armenians were like, this Committee of Union Progress sounds cool. Let's listen to what they have to say. Like, oh, no, we should have shot them.

Yeah. Yeah, so, big Armenian energy on the podcast. There's never been two Armenians on this show at the same time. That's true. But the reason why you finally came on or we finally made this work

was we were both obsessed with the Total War series of mostly the Shogun titles. Yeah. And, and also all sorts of other Japanese related pop culture. Like for me, the first Shogun came out, I want to say I was in like middle school and it absolutely like grabbed me. And that among a few other things definitely pointed me into the direction of being obsessed with military history forever.

What was your introduction to it? To the Shogun series? That was the same one. I would have been about midway through high school, living in Beirut. through high school, living in Beirut. From then, I had... So I got to see the... From the periphery in the region, I got to see the invasion of Iraq play out.

And it was right around that time that I decided that no, I don't actually want to be in the U.S. military. Yeah, that's probably a good choice. Yeah, from all I've heard from you. It just seemed like, no, no, this isn't me. And I started to think, okay, well, what else do I want to do? What else is interesting to me? What else do I feel like I can invest myself in?

And what else can I do that can reinvest some of that interest in things military? I thought, okay, let me do Japanese military history. And one of the earliest pop culture points of connection, points of entry that I had was Shogun 1. of entry that I had was Shogun 1. And along with that, the Rurouni Kenshin manga and anime. And the Rurouni Kenshin manga and anime actually have, as characters, historical figures who I started asking questions about once I found out they were real people. And that led me to my BA, and that led me to my MA, and that led me to my MA, and that led me to my PhD. So thank you, anime. I was really disappointed to find out Kenshin Himura could not defy gravity.

Or was, from my understanding, he was even a real person. But, like, it was a real big letdown. Based on a real guy, though. Based on a real guy. Kawakami, I think was his name his name yeah Kawakami Genzai and how loose is that because I know they used they called him like one of the

four of Bakufu or something like that and I knew that was based on something that was real but I was always kind of curious how fast and loose they played with some of the details to make it entertaining, other than obviously, you know, Dragon Ball Z samurai fights. Yeah.

Kawakami Gensai, to my knowledge, only killed one person whose name escapes me right now. And beyond that, the rest of his reputation is built on hearsay and the school of swordsmanship in which he trained. It's a tradition called Jigenryu. It comes from southern Japan, where he came from. It strongly emphasizes ending the fight with one blow. All of the energy, all of the momentum goes into the first strike, and beyond that, you kind of get lost. So it's really good for a hit-and-run attack,

but it's not really something that's going to make for something that's going to be a useful sword technique in a long, drawn-out, knock-down, drag-out fight. So they took sort of the myth of Kawakami Genzai and some of the hearsay that surrounds his story and reshaped it into this Dragon Ball Z with samurai kind of story. But it was a good story. I guess that makes sense why they made so much they made such a big deal of when he drew his sword because then it would be a one-shot knockout. Hypothetically. Hypothetically, yeah.

It's actually the maxim, the not motto, but the phrase that's associated with Jigenryu is to strike down with one blow. And, yeah, yeah, they made a big deal out of that for that reason. I guess they could have made an anime based off of, like, worse things. I love it so much. I actually, when we started talking about when

we were planning this episode i started watching it again but apparently so i i have it on hulu which is apparently the worst translation known to man uh because i always watch everything in the background uh so i always generally watch anime dubbed uh and i watched, you know, Rurouni Kenshin, I don't even know how many times on Cartoon Network growing up. And along with the OVAs that came out later on, Samurai Axe. And then there was a movie as well. But I remember when the movie came out, I was shocked because it actually showed people getting killed. I was like, what? That's new?

And from my understanding, that's also based on something kind of realistic. I think it's supposed to be based on the Setsuma Rebellion, but not really. Yeah, what was it? 1876. 1875-1876 uprising in southern Japan. And really, I have opinions there. But anyway, Kenshin started out, as I recall,

the chronology for Kenshin, the episode starts out in 1877 in the wake of the rebellion. And the rebellion itself, like in real life, was led by people who were on the winning side in the Boshin War of 1868 and then didn't like how things played out and decided that they were going to up and change their government again.

And they were going to like, oh yeah, we're going to march on Tokyo. Okay, fine. And then they got to Kumamoto and they got bogged down into, I think it was trench warfare at that point. That's something that's always kind of bothered me about the Setsuma Rebellion.

At least the popular narrative of the Setsuma Rebellion is that it was sword-wielding and bow-wielding samurai against European-trained lion infantry. That's what it shows in The Last Samurai. And it shows it in Rurouni Kenshin as well in the movie.

But they totally had guns. Yeah, they did. They were not above shooting people. No. This is a thing with depictions of the Bolshin War too. That was my focus in my dissertation.

This idea that the people who won were the European trained lion infantry and the forward thinking men of the future who wanted to replace the decrepit and unfair regime and everybody else was just hidebound traditionalist samurai with their heads up their asses wielding

bows and arrows and swords and spears is bullshit. I focused on the Northern Alliance and drew together the clans of Northern Hunshu. And sure, they had their share of swords and spears and bows and arrows, but they also had

Gatling guns and Enfield rifles. You know? And if you think about it, like, okay, why would they still use swords and spears and bows and arrows if they had Gatling guns and Enfield rifles? Well, did it ever occur to anyone that there weren't enough Gatling guns

and Enfield rifles to go around, so you might as well use what you have there? Yeah, they're in rebellion and nobody's trading with them. Right. Right. It's the same thing with the Satsuma Rebellion. Like why – especially – come on.

It's the guys – in the Satsuma Rebellion, it's the guys who won the Boshin War. So theoretically, if we're thinking – if we're starting out with talking about the Boshin War, they're supposed to be the quote-unquote good guys in the popular history, the European-trained line infantry. Why would they suddenly decide, no, I'm going to use a sword? the thing in america's mind that i could be completely wrong uh that pops their head because i'm completely talking on my ass right now is like this last samurai uh where they effectively make the samurai of the north the noble savages right like that they they treat them like the like the magical pixie dream girls of samurai like no no they don't want to use guns because it's dishonorable like no they totally wanted to shoot people. They had no ammo.

Yeah, yeah, yeah. You know, they started out with guns, but yeah, supply is going to run out if you're cut off. And, you know, you're not exactly going to, you're not exactly going to be able to resupply easily. Not to mention also just the depictions of, in the Satsuma Rebellion, it's sort of mixed, depending on who was doing the woodblock print, but Saigo Takamori was wearing a Western-style uniform, for goodness sake. Was he really?

Yeah, his statues depict him in, I think it's a French-style uniform. So, like, what gives? French-style uniform. So, like, what gives? That would make a lot of sense because wasn't his one Western ally in real life was a group of French people, right? So Saigo Takamori would

have been, his allies were British, the shogunate, the French guys were on the shogunate side in 1868, but there was a second French military mission in the 1870s, and that may be the source of some of that. I might be thinking of the Izzo Republic. Yes, the Izzo Republic, yeah.

It was probably one of the weirdest things that I learned that nobody ever – I mean, I grew up in Michigan. There's no Japanese history classes there. And I probably would have studied Japanese history in college if that was an option. But it's something that's completely left out is that they tried to form their own country. Yeah. Not that it was just like some people

in a couple village that Tom Cruise visited that started to wage war like no they tried to start their own country it just didn't pan out yeah yeah yeah uh they they took the they took the remnants of the of the shogunate army and the northern alliance and they went up to hokkaido and they said okay this is a republic now oh yeah sure um the the thing that really gets me about that is again, there's this image that people seem to

have of the people of the functionaries, the officers, the politicians of the old shogunate not having any interest in getting with the times, but if they did, then why did they why were they the only people to elect somebody president in all of japanese history i mean for god's sake something that boggles my mind yeah

it's like the main thing that like as someone who didn't major in and i and i'm an outsider i've been mostly educated by myself on the subject which is never a good sign. It was that they won in the Boshin War, and then they didn't like how they were, they expected to continue to be treated like kings when everybody else didn't want that anymore, or something like that. Saigo Takamori and the guys who won the Boshin War, particularly from Satsuma,

yeah, that's actually spot on. They beat the Shogunate and the guys who won the Boshin War, particularly from Satsuma, yeah, that's actually spot on. They beat the Shogunate and the Northern Alliance and the Ezo Republic and they're like, yeah, sure, we're going to get to run the show and get to still have privilege as samurai. the guys who were running the

government, who themselves, some of them were from Satsuma and some of them were from Chosh themselves, some of them were from Satsuma, and some of them were from Choshu, and some of them were from Tosa, said, no, that's not how we're going to do things anymore. that he'd set up and said, okay, fine, let's go and, I don't know, let's fuck around and change the government again because we don't want to give up this privilege. And, yeah, that's a pretty good summary. Was he a daimyo or some other kind of level of local noble that gave him that kind of power? Oh, man, Saigo Takamori.

Saigo Takamori was one of these people in Satsuma who was born so they were born into the samurai caste but they were at the bottom end of the samurai caste and they were like poor enough that I think it was Saigo

and Admiral Togo who goes on to fame at the Battle of Tsushima in 1905, were born on Cat Piss Alley, is what the name translates to. It's unfortunate. Yeah, yeah. Oh, no, it was Cat Shit Alley, Neko Kusodoro. Suddenly being born in Detroit sounds pretty goddamn good. Yeah, yeah. So these guys are born really, really poor.

But because they're part of the young, idealistic, drawn into nationalist ideology, Koteri and Satsuma, they make the right connections with the right people and they have this meteoric rise from the 1850s to the end of the 1860s until Saigo Takamori wound up being one of the leading men in the Satsuma domain under the nominal leadership of the daimyo who was a Shimazu something or other.

I think it was shimazu this gets into this gets into weird like old blue-blooded samurai lineage stuff but like um shimazu like date in the north has is a family that's like big enough and old enough that it has like 12 plus major branches and if the daimyo's line died out somebody got adopted in from one of the branches so the daimyo's line died out in the 1850s and then the son of one of the branch lineages uh was adopted in, and because he was like five, his father, Hisamitsu, Shimazu Hisamitsu, was in charge of governing affairs,

and in Hisamitsu's circle was Saigo Takamori and these other guys. Okay. The only thing I'm picturing in my head is I'm a huge Seven Samurai nerd, so I can just think like Kimichio rolling out the fake thing,

like, no, no, really, I should be in charge yeah exactly exactly yeah yeah uh like with a nominal claim of legitimacy like oh no really i should be in charge shut up kid so it's and that's something those are all things that are actually in shogun 2 which is that's why why it shocked me and why i think that you came on the show. It's like, wow, this game's actually kind of historically accurate. Yes, it is. Like, all those things happen. Yes, it is.

Shogun 1 was okay. Like, it got some of it, but it got like a really sort of postage stamp, blurry rendition, if you will. But Shogun 2, first of all, the maps are much bigger. Yes, they are. And you can't just put your unit wherever the hell you want on the province, on the

nationwide map. So you have to be mindful of logistics. You have to be mindful of economics. You have to be mindful of internal clan politics. You have to be mindful of logistics. You have to be mindful of economics. You have to be mindful of internal clan politics. You have to be mindful of, do I have an heir to replace me? What lineages, what branches of my family have produced heirs that can replace my daimyo? That's like all real world stuff that they've worked into this sequel. And that's why it's so hard.

It's so hard because it's so realistic. Yeah, and you can marry into each other's families. And then when it comes to like Realm Divide, which at this point, I'm assuming people listening have played the game. If not, what are you doing? Yeah, it's good. It's good.

Yeah. But also like, you know, realm divides when you choose if you're going to be, you know, allied with the imperial side or allied with the shogunate side. Or in Fall of the Samurai, you can do your own thing and start a republic, which is a terrible idea. It does not work. But yeah, marriages and everything totally matter in in a micro set or in a macro sense it's not like crusader kings or any paradox game or anything like that but it yeah it it's it's a completely different universe i mean you say i mean i don't know

how many total war games you've played but if you play the old medieval ones um they did the same thing where it's like oh this france is three whole regions okay this is easy but now you know everything is everywhere and you actually have to plan stuff like you have to plan like uh naval lanes and you have to plan trade routes because then they can trade routes and then you end up like me as uh satsuma trapped on my one providence and being strangled to death by everybody else. Yeah, yeah. Yeah, it's got that very real back-to-the-wall sense of urgency

in moments like that in particular, because you have to not just worry about your own clan and the people who are on your immediate borders, but you have to keep the nationwide view of politics in mind. Particularly in the original Shogun 2, you can't go about what you do without bearing in mind what the Shogun thinks and how that's going to impact

who's going to start shooting at you it's really I am deeply impressed having started out playing the original Shogun and then only played Shogun 2 a few weeks ago when it was for free on Steam

I am deeply impressed and then only played Shogun 2 a few weeks ago when it was for free on Steam. I am deeply impressed. They've done well. They've done well. Did you want to talk about how exactly they did so well? I know you have some takes on that. Well, I mean, some of it is what we were just talking about in terms of the complexity and level of difficulty. Some of it – and I haven't played the Fall of the Samurai expansion just yet, so I can't speak directly on that.

But some of it is that they have really delved – like beyond what they had in the original one, They have really delved beyond what they had in the original one. They've really delved into what was the lineage of this clan? What were the names in this clan? What are the broad characteristics of the famous people in this clan? And then worked them into the game as bits of the game that have impact on how the game turns out. bits of the game that have impact on how the game turns out. They also don't neglect things like naval warfare.

They also don't neglect things like there being border regions, you know, little blurry regions on the edges of Japan where there was more international trade. Like in Shogun 2, you can go up to, it's not called Hokkaido at that point, but you can go up to the southern tip of Ezo and trade with the Ainu. You can go to Tsushima and trade with Korea. These are legit middle ground regions where that happened. Something that I'm a little bit confused at is why they felt the need to use modern prefecture names for some of the provinces.

So I play it as Date, who I wrote a whole ass dissertation about. Whenever I say that, people tell me, well, better to write a whole ass dissertation than a half ass dissertation. Well, I mean, how do you think I feel? My degree would disagree. Built upon half ass dissertations. I mean, you know, what matters is that it's done. That is very true.

What matters is that it's done. But, like, so I had to play as the Date, but they start out in, and the game calls it Iwate. Iwate is the modern prefecture name, which is sort of two-thirds in the Tohoku region, so those of your listeners

who follow me on Twitter will hear me very often talking and waxing poetic about the Tohoku region, so that's basically everything from Fukushima all the way up to Aomori at the northern tip of the main island. So Iwate is about two-thirds of the way up on the Pacific

coast side, but it wasn't called Iwate until like 1878, I think. And if we're starting out in like 1530, why are we calling it Iwate? That should be Rikuchu. And the date shouldn't be

coming from there. That's not where they come from! The date come from... It's weird that they... No, go ahead. The date come from... This game has Miyagi, which is the region... So, modern Miyagi Prefecture,

roughly the boundaries of modern Miyagi Prefecture were the boundaries of the Date territory when the Date territory was abolished in the 1870s. And that was I think a third reduced from what it was at its extent. So that's a little bit further south from Iwate.

But the date themselves come from what in the game is called Fukushima, which in period... Unfortunate. I know, right? Which in period, it should be called... Depending on what part of it you're looking at, it should be called Iwaki or Iwashiro. You know, that's the,

Fukushima and Miyagi and Iwate are all modern names. Same goes for Aomori. But then, on the Sea of Japan side, you have the period names, Uzen and Ugo. So what gives? That's like a small

thing to nitpick, but like, come on, come on. Yeah, that I think says something to like some pretty uneven research, because like if they had in-person Japanese researchers or like primary researchers, they would have figured that out, right? Yeah, they would have. They would have. It would have been very obvious. Like they didn't even need to do any Japanese research.

Like, you can open up, like, samuraiarchives.com, and it's there. Like, you can look at Wikipedia. And this was 2011 that this was made, as I recall. So, you know, it's not like they didn't have a plethora of internet sources at their disposal in English. They certainly used some sources in English, though. Certainly. That did the researches for them, it sounds like, right? Certainly.

I mean, I was part of a community since the early 2000s of fans of the 1860s in Japanese history. And we pioneered a lot of the conversation that happened on the English language side of the internet about Japan in the 1860s, because it's not really a topic that the academic world in English has any interest in. Like, it's considered, I guess guess I feel like it's considered passé. Everybody's either in a hurry to wrap up their discussion of what came before or they're in a hurry to start

their discussion of what came afterwards, but nobody wants to talk about this really important period where the empire was born. So I was one of quite a few people who wrote about that, and some of the clans, I don't want to, I'm not,

just in my opinion, I'm going to preface it that way, in my opinion, some of the clans in the DLC seem awfully specific for clans that there really wasn't much on in English in the

time when this game was, in the lead up to when this game came out. So I feel like I had an indirect hand in this game, even though I didn't even become aware of it until later. And they're, of course, not going to cite that at all. No, no, no, no, no. Do they cite any of the research? I mean, I would be hard-pressed.

I haven't looked deeply enough into the credits to see if they do. That would be worth looking at. I mean, I imagine some of their starting research was on Wikipedia, but hell, I was writing some of this stuff on Wikipedia, particularly circa 2008. Right. Actually, there's content on the Bos Bushian War that's still up on Wikipedia that's essentially unchanged from what I wrote in 2008

that I'm pretty sure they would have had to rely on. So, again, in my opinion. Allegedly. Allegedly. We do not have a lawyer on retainer. We do not have, you and I do not have lawyers on retainer. So allegedly, this is my opinion that this is how it seems to me. But I mean, hey, you know, they made a nice game. So fine by me. You know, if somebody took my research none of which is super super unique i'm

sure uh because i don't have a phd uh but um and they and they didn't cite me i'd i guess i'd be fine with it because that happens all the time um if you read it if you write enough papers they will be submitted into databases and somebody will definitely steal from it. That's just how the world works. I've done it. Exactly. Exactly. You know, so I'm not going to I'm not going to complain too much. Besides, that was that it was after I was I was active in in history writing in that way that I thought, OK, if I'm going to keep doing this and people are going to be able to take advantage of my work without citing it because some of it is on Wikipedia, why don't I go to grad school and get an MA and a PhD so that I can be able to write this, you know, have credentials that are going to shut people up was how I rationalized it when I was going in. was how I rationalized it when I was going in.

So, I mean, obviously, you don't need, like, I don't want to be misunderstood here. You don't need a graduate degree to write about history. Some of the most important work that I relied on in writing my dissertation actually was from local scholars in Japan who had no degrees at all. This is legit. Public history is a thing. Local history is a thing. But in 2008, 2009, my rationale was that if I want to be writing history and I want to be putting my name on it, let's go to grad school and get a degree.

I can see the value in that. I mean, I run this show and I have a bachelor's degree. And has it helped me in the show? Maybe. I know how to write research papers. That's it. I mean, that's all it is. Yeah.

It's not going to, it doesn't mean, and this is something that I wish I could go back in time to 2009 and tell my younger self. Having the fancy letters after your name doesn't mean that people owe you respect. of, you know, behind doing the due diligence in the proper kind of research work and synthesis. And like, you're not doing the, you know, you're going a little bit deeper than first this happened, then this happened, then this happened. And, you know, it's the difference between what happened and why did it happen. Why do you think it happened? But it doesn't mean anybody owes me any respect. In fact, it doesn't mean that I'm going to even be employed

because I can tell you right now that having a PhD has probably done more than anything else to harm my chances of getting full-time employment. It's only recently that I've gotten part-time employment after three freaking years. So. Yeah. This podcast is currently my job.

So I feel your pain. Yeah. Yeah. You know, between, between the PhD and being a queer woman, it's like, you know, it's complicated lately, being able to make ends meet.

The world of academia being unfair? No! What the hell you say? If only you were a white man that graduated from Yale. If only you were a white man that graduated from Yale. Yeah, yeah, yeah, that's, yeah. Honestly, Twitter is a pile of shit and I believe is actively bad for humanity by existing. I say as I'm on it, but it has done one thing to history graduates

everywhere and maybe you'll agree with me it's really shown that Ivy League schools are fucking bullshit because every single terrible history take I see almost every time in like their bios like Yale to the 2016 or like fucking

Harvard grad like really I went to a shitty state school and i'm like i still understand that the civil war is about slavery yeah yeah i yeah i i haven't seen too much of that but i've seen a bit of it and yeah i would have to agree it's like wow you you went to somewhere that expensive and you didn't get this stuff come on i think a good example that that, I think, is Ben Sass, the congressman. Literal

PhD in history, right? I don't think he has a PhD, but I know he has a history degree from an Ivy League school. He was one of those guys, yeah. It's absolutely astounding. And I'm sure a lot of that is how much you're willing to sell your soul to get into politics. But I also think that a lot of that is how much you're willing to sell your soul to get into an Ivy League college.

It's a gateway drug into fucking yourself over. Yeah. I mean, once upon a time, I had dreams of going to Penn. But yeah, that wasn't going to pan out, even if there was somebody there who I could have worked with. I think one of the biggest saving graces for me is I got into Oxford and I did not go. Because, I mean, it's prohibitively expensive for someone just getting out of the military to go overseas to go to college yeah the GA bill ain't covered all that and I did not feel like working

which I ended up working anyway but and I'm like you know maybe I don't want to do that and then I'm later finding out that like seemingly everyone from a higher level of education from the UK is a fucking smooth brain turf and I am like woo dodge that bullet

mhm mhm yeah um I wasn't personally I wasn't planning on attending Pitt but you know I was trying to get to Seattle and uh

things fell through over there and um things fell through with Ohio State and Pitt Pitt took me, and here I am a decade later getting by somehow. I mean, mind you, I have plenty of hot takes as far as the Pitt history department itself, but I'll save those for another time. Yeah, I have problems with my history department as well, but I'll save those for another time. Yeah, I have problems with my history department as well, and I'm sure I will. I plan on going to graduate or finishing graduate school

at the University of Hawaii. So we'll see. I'm sure it'll be interesting, but I'll save my comments on UH when I get there. It's, I think one of the things that my history education has taught me more than anything else

is like how to look at, how to look at dumb, bad, ahistorical films but still enjoy them. And it's been, it's been really hard. The Last Samurai,

when we did our bonus episode, I think I had to keep repeating, I really do like this movie, but it's really fucking dumb. And that's fine. This is okay. I mean, I imagine you find yourself doing the same thing. It can be a good story and be ahistorical. Yeah, I mean, it's a

dumb action movie, but also Tom Cruise uses two samurai swords to cut a man's head off. I mean, like... I mean, I don't even like Tom Cruise. You could make that Vin Diesel. I'm still going to think it's cool. Yeah, yeah. Like Kenshin.

Like Kenshin. I mean, come on. Yeah. It can be over the top. It's just... But we can also appreciate that it's a historical. Yeah, and I think that's something that... I think Paul Mooney made a joke that

they should make uh the last black person on earth starring tom hanks it's like fuck uh but it's it has made it hard to enjoy some things um it's made it a lot harder to deal with like stupid criticisms of of good things um but i imagine you run into that a little bit less when you, I mean, cause every once in a while popular Japanese history doesn't really crop up all that much in America, right?

Like we get Shogun 2, we get Shogun 1, you know, Rurouni Kenshin was famous in what the late nineties. And then it's just nothing. Yeah. It's not that, it's not that much.

I mean, people know their Kurosawa and, and, and what have you, but when you, when you talk about, when you talk about, well, but as far as these things go, I mean people know they're Kurosawa and what have you. Guilty. Guilty. When you talk about – well, as far as these things go, Kurosawa is honestly on the better end. But popular culture-wise, oh, god, as far as Japanese history goes, The Last Samurai is the one that I hear about most recently.

It actually is kind of divided along generational lines. So certain age and below, it'll be Last Samurai. Certain age and above, it'll be Shogun, like the James Clavel miniseries. I have heard mixed things about the miniseries. Well, it was originally like a super long book. I have not read it. And I try to be gracious about that book and be like okay yeah i read it too it was entertaining but like he didn't do his legwork at all at all it was it was painful was it from my understanding it's just a whole bunch of people getting beheaded all the

time like people commented about that a lot is like yeah there's someone getting their head cut off like every 10 pages yeah it's it's people getting their heads cut off and people fucking. And the thing that really gets... I'm not here to kink shame anybody in Japan. Right, right. That's your thing, man. The thing that really gets me about James Clavel's Shogun

is that he doesn't seem to have done his homework with basic Japanese. That's a low fucking bar. Just basic greetings and just basic elementary conversation that Anjin and the Japanese people

he's usually around tend to have. Like, in the novel, like, that was so bad. That was such broken Japanese. Like, what are you even doing here? Like, why are you... And, you know, Anjin, of course, based on a real historical figure, you know, that's legit, fine. But why did Clavel have to make up an entire shogun

and make up an entire... Like, he took, like, Japan roughly 1598 to 1603 and ran it through a blender. Like, it was... That is how Western audiences consume, like, Eastern history, though. That's how they consume most things um yeah like i i think most people would at least my generation again um would think that they understood most chinese history from like the dynasty warriors games or like maybe if we're

lucky the romance of the three kingdoms novels which I highly doubt they've read them. And those are, I mean, they're not true. I mean, the people in them did exist, but again, it's mystical history thrown into a blender and then made into a Mizzou video game. Yeah. God. When it comes to Last Samurai, I did a live tweet as I watched it before my appearance on the Outlaw History podcast last year. And I remember the way I described it was history sausage. Like I hadn't seen it since it was in theaters in the early 2000s, and then I watched it again last year and with the benefit of all those years and all that academic training and you know having done a dissertation focused on that period it was like okay why no no no what are you doing why no no like not even like okay fine it was pretty the soundtrack was gorgeous but

it was so monumentally historically irresponsible like it took 1867 to 1876 and squished it into a year and a half and made an American guy the focus. When we really wanted to be – if we really wanted to do this justice, it would have better been a Prussian or a French guy. French guy. Like, there was this real world person named, actually, brothers, Heinrich and Edvard Schnell, who ran guns for the Northern Alliance during the Boshin War, and

they became vassals of Lord Matsudaira of Aizu, and they were allowed to wear the lord's crest, and they had the two swords, and they had vassals and houses in the castle town of Wakamatsu. They ran Gatling guns up north from Shanghai. This is two Prussian guys?

It's two Prussian guys, yeah. That's amazing. Yeah, two Prussian gunrunners, yeah. The real white samurai dudes were Germans. Yeah, they were Prussian German dudes who, after the war ended, took a number of the local former samurai and went to California to set up a tea and silk farm. And there's a monument. I think the California – whatever it's called, like the Historical Society or whatever, has a plaque there. The first Japanese woman to be buried in North America is buried

there. And me and a couple of friends who sort of did a lot of this research on the side just as a passion, we managed to put the right people into contact

and in the end, one of these Prussian guys' sword, like his legit samurai sword, turned up in some warehouse in Sacramento. So... Yeah, it's upsetting that they decided to go with the Tom Cruise gets kidnapped and magically turns into

a samurai angle because two random germans becoming japanese nobility and then fucking fucking off to california is way more entertaining yeah i certainly think so fucking off to california starting a starting a farm failing at the farm uh i think, as I recall, at least one of them died near Los Angeles or San Diego selling moonshine. Got taken out by Armenian gunrunners. I actually, I've met

the descendants of some Armenian gunrunners from the pre-genocide days. Oh, man. That's a whole other story. Oh god. Anyway, so Last Samurai. It didn't even do justice to the seasons. I have lived in Japan in winter.

They didn't have... There's the bit of the story where it's the dead of winter, and there's snow on the ground, and the mountain passes are closed off, and nobody's wearing overboots, straw overboots, nobody's wearing overcoats, nobody's wearing padded kimono.

Like, what the fuck? No, we all just sit out here in our robes and freeze to death. That's the noble thing to do. Yes, stoically, yes um the imperial army in the opening scene like the imperial army supposedly of 1875 is dressed like the shogunate army of 1864 that's oh that's always bothered me as they went for he was in captivity for what six months yeah so they they went from a backwards-ass army that did not exist at the time, made of conscripts and straw hats and couldn't fire a weapon, and within six months they're like, yep, Raiden, invade France now.

Yep. That's not how that works. That's not how that worked at all. Military modernization under the shogunate is something that I'm trying to, you know, it's harder now without an academic affiliation. But I'm trying to explore and write about. And a couple of the podcasts that have been on this year so far, I've actually been able to talk about that a little bit. But there's a lot of attention paid to the imperial army and imperial navy and what they did in the early to mid-Meiji period. navy and what they did in the early to mid um meiji period you know uh and it it's as if it's as if it appears out of thin air and if we actually did our due diligence and talked about the shogunate

the modern shogunate army and navy founded in the 1850s which existed until 1869 and how that was like the core of both installations and equipment, but also trained personnel from which the Imperial Army and Navy drew and made all of those other later things possible. Like we would have a better appreciation for where they come from. I mean, for goodness sakes, the Imperial Japanese Navy Academy was founded on the grounds of the Shogunate Navy Academy. And most people aren't really familiar with the Shogunate Navy Academy. But if I say the name Tsukiji, those of your listeners who have been to Tokyo might know what I'm talking about. Tsukiji, as in the fish market, is where the Shogunate Naval Academy was. So, you know, we're losing a lot by not really studying this period. In Japanese, there's really no problem because there's all kinds of writing on this period. But in English, it's like,

you know, in the academe, nobody really seems to care. There's a few people who write about it, but because in academe, you have to be a generalist, you have to be able to teach a hundred survey courses on absolutely anything they throw at you, nobody's got the time to focus on anything. So, you know, we all lose out that way.

So here I am as a voice on the outside, yelling about the Boschian War and about Northern Honshu over Twitter. That's like, I've run into that to the point, like, I majored in European history. We talk about European history a lot on the show. Obviously, I like it.

But I did not study all of European history. So it's like, oh, you don't know about this one minute thing in this bumfuck Egypt ass town in the ass end of England or something at the turn of the century you're faking it oh god fuck off

yeah yeah I literally wrote my my capstone on Napoleon's logistics system that's it that's what I studied was wagons I studied fucking wagons leave me alone. Yeah.

Yeah. I mean, I did, I did my dissertation on the, on the Tohoku, on the Northern Alliance and the, the, the, the Northern, the roots of Northern semi-autonomy. Like, why are you asking me, what does this have to do with China? Or how about we talk about aircraft carriers from World War II? Like, wrong era! Leave me alone! Yeah!

For fuck's sake! It's just like, I have these... When I get that, I have this... I have this inclination to do like my Armenian... My late lamented Armenian grandmothers. And be like, oh, famanamanaman. Just, fuck. Like, really, fa-ma-na-ma-na-man. Just, fuck. Like, really?

Really? Not everybody's going to know absolutely every... Like, there's this idea that if you're a professional in any capacity on history, you know absolutely everything that happened ever, everywhere. Yeah, you're the doctorate of all of history. Right. That's what you are. Yes, I arrived in my blue phone booth-shaped spaceship of time and space, and here's my sonic screwdriver. Like, really?

Really? I run into that all the time, mostly because I talk about American history an awful lot. I mean, Confederates are a low-hanging fruit, and it's easy content. I'm going to be straight up front. I just like laughing at Confederates, especially neo-Confederates and racists. But they're like, well, how about this one battle in the back ass where George, I'm like, I don't fucking know. I took literally one college-level American history class because I had to.

Everything I talk about. It's common fucking sense. Yeah. Yeah. I mean, I, I only got into American history because I came, I came to it from Japanese history. Like when I was living in Japan, I was blown away by how people my age didn't really know their history. And I thought, okay, I don't want to be, I don't want to be this over there. Let me start learning American history. And then when I did my grad school work, I started noticing points of connection

over and over and over between American history of the 1860s and Japanese history of the 1860s. And that, just via backdoor, made me a scholar of the American Civil War. And that, just via backdoor, made me a scholar of the American Civil War. But it comes down to the Japanese Civil War. I call it the Civil War because to use the term Meiji Restoration sounds peaceful, and that's bullshit. And I want people to square with this. So the Japanese Civil War of 1868 to 1869 was fought with surplus equipment from the American Civil War.

Literally samurai with Gatling guns. Like old Gatling guns. There was also – I saw – one of the most amazing things I saw in my research was a photo of a handwritten receipt for Enfield rifles and knapsacks formerly used by the U.S. Army that were sold to the Date clan of Sendai.

That's a strong tradition that we carry on to this day. Don't need this anymore? Dump it in a different country and let them kill each other with it. Yeah, yeah. Yeah, that's... This goes back all the way to the beginning in US history.

It turns out we're just American history's proxy wars all the way down forever. Yeah, yeah. That's a good descriptor. Although the Bushing War, really, if you're going to position it as a proxy war of anybody, it's going to be the French against the British. I mean, that makes sense. of American, particularly Navy personnel who were there at the time,

they're very clearly on the side of the Northern Coalition. They're like, yeah, no, we don't like these Southern guys. They're assholes. So, we do a thing on this show called Questions from the Legion. Ah, yes.

And if you want to ask a question from the Legion, you can download it to the show and ask us in discord um that's the plug uh so this is actually an incredibly interesting question to me because i've studied it quite a bit but i want other people to hear it from someone who's significantly more qualified than myself um when did japanese bushido warrior culture start and when and how did it become a thing oh man this concept of bushido truly it's an ancient art right

okay so the thing that most people are most people are thinking of when they talk about bushido today is from this book that was written by this guy named nitobe inazo in late 19th century i think now nitobe came from a samurai family from northern Honshu, from my part of Japan. But he was born in the very late 1860s, and he wouldn't have had any memory of it himself, like the old samurai days. He grew up with stories in his family.

So Nitobe became a Quaker. And while he was in Pennsylvania, where I am sitting as I talk to you now, in Malvern, Pennsylvania, outside of Philadelphia, he wrote this book called Bushido, the Soul of Japan.

And so the way that he characterized the ethos and the mentalities of the Japanese warrior caste Japan. And so the way that he characterized the ethos and the mentalities of the Japanese warrior caste and called it Bushido, became most Westerners' idea of

Bushido. And this is a book that even Teddy Roosevelt read and praised, apparently. But before that, it wasn't that there was any one code that the Japanese warrior caste would have followed. Every clan,

every daimyo, every fiefdom had its own internal domain constitution and code of conduct for everybody who was a vassal. The code of the Matsudaira clan of Aizu is the one that I studied most closely, but I've read a little bit of the Date one,

and I've read a little bit of the Tokugawa one, and then there's the modern Tokugawa army and navy code of military justice, which gets weird, and it's significantly copied from the French, and basically everything is punishable by death. Fucking Warhammer justice in Japan. Pretty much. They had a discipline problem that was that gigantic

that they made just about everything like, yeah, you will be shot. You will be shot. And if it's not shot, it's exile. It was bad. Talking about street fighting and riots that burn down

theaters is kind of bad discipline. But yeah, so each clan, each local government, or in the Shogunate's case, a loose central government, has its own rules for how its warriors should act. So there isn't any one code of conduct for how a person in the warrior caste should act. And I should add to this that we shorthand it as samurai today, but in Japanese, particularly in the 1860s, to say samurai would refer to the bottom of the warrior caste.

You wouldn't call the shogun a samurai. The warrior caste were bushi or buke, warrior knights or warrior families. But the samurai were the bottom. They were the foot soldiers, the hereditary infantry privates. It sucks to enlist as that job, but man, it must suck even worse to be born into it. Yeah, born into it

and have it be hereditary. There are clans, like with Date, there are clans where the samurai, also known as Ashigaru, a name that might be familiar to people who've played Shogun. I always equate them to shitty spearmen now. Thanks a lot, Shogun. They were paid so poorly, and basically across the Edo period, there was a freeze on pay raises. period, there was a freeze on pay raises.

They basically became like they had another job that was their mainstay for income and they would get a nominal stipend from the lord. So this one group, this one unit of Ashigaru that was assigned with hereditary guard duty

of some of the bridges that run east out of the Sendai castle town, their way of making money was they were pastry cooks, and they made the Japanese version of a Rice Krispie Street. I'm the bridge security guard, but also would you like a Rice Krispie Street as you walk across my bridge? Yeah.

I'm really glad that soldiers don't do that today because they would just be trying to make shit in a rice cooker in the barracks. Hey, I got some of this rice and hot dogs from the shopette. You want some? No, man, I'm good. Keep guarding that bridge. Yes, I have the Overwatch and the snacks. Yeah, that's something that Bushido code thing has always interested me because obviously

most people know about it from world war ii yes they're like no they're following the way of the warrior like that shit came out like 50 years ago yeah it did you know this idea that that surrender was not a concept that japanese warriors understood is also patently false. Like if surrender and defeat were not concepts that they understood, then Tokugawa Ieyasu, the first shogun, would have died in 1573. They ransomed each other off all the time. Yeah, they did. They did. God, Ieyasu in particular, like the reason part of the reason that he became shogun was because he knew how to learn from defeat. To the point that 1573, when the Takeda clan kicked his ass at Mikata-gahara,

as soon as he got back to his castle, he had his clan's, like, combat artists or painters or whatever, come out and paint him still in his gear with his chin in his hand sort of looking dejected. The point was so that he would never forget what he looked like at his lowest. And, you know, if he was supposed to commit seppuku after

losing once, he wouldn't have gotten anywhere. Ye olde combat camera guys, someone with a bottle of paint, like, oh man, I hope he's't have gotten anywhere. Ye olde combat camera guys, someone with a bottle of paint, like, oh man, I hope he's going to kill himself, I don't want to paint that. The story that I've heard, and I don't know if this is true, but the story

that I've heard is that Ieyasu shot himself in the saddle as he was riding back. So, like, imagine the smell in this painting uh is what i always tell people just sitting there covered in like sweat shit and like probably he'd been campaigning for weeks months yeah yeah i mean yeah if the whole concept of killing yourself um if you lose i mean it's gonna sound kind of ironic it's self-defeating

because that means like nobody's ever gonna get promoted nobody's ever gonna advance right i also think that um i mean wessners believe that i believe because the japanese imperial government wanted them to believe that because they wanted their people to believe that i mean it was like official state policy to teach that school and stuff. Yeah, yeah. And mostly because, we've talked about it a little bit before on the show, but the Minister of Education was a nationalist,

and that was his whole plan. So it's like, yeah, that tracks. This isn't some ancient warfare shit. This is just like, he's just kind of a dick. Yeah. So thank you so much for coming on the show um i'm glad we finally did this uh and this is absolutely this is what we call our plug zone do you have anything you want i know you have a book coming out i got it uh and it's fucking

outstanding uh it's honestly the best thing about being an author is that other people send you really good books before anybody else. So I am spoiled. Plug away. So I have a book coming out in early August called Grey Dawn. And it's kind of hard to describe genre-wise because it's at the intersection of a bunch of different genres, but it's basically a time travel romance involving a cis lesbian from the 1860s who joined the Union Army to fight for abolition, getting thrown forward in time to the 21st century, and meeting and growing close with a modern-day trans lesbian who is newly out of the Army after 17 years, and the two of them finding common ground, but also trying to cope with trauma and loss and finding new purpose and finding new things to fight for in the present day.

And so pre-orders go up July 6th, and I'm really excited about this. Between being broke and contending with ADD, finishing a novel is something kind of on the order of having finished a dissertation. Like I'm – I don't know. I'm looking forward to seeing what people have to say about it, but for my part, I think I'm proud of myself for having put it together. And here's a little hint, but a little note that I might offer to people who read this. My mental framework for how I built this story is in the form of a Japanese gnoll play. So if you're familiar with gnoll, there's some things about the narrative structure that might be familiar to you.

And if you want to follow me on social media, I would love to hear from you. Riverside Wings at Twitter, Facebook, Patreon, and sponsors. Thank you. And as soon as that pre-order link goes up, I'll make sure I share it so people can buy this awesome book. goes up i'll make sure i share it so people can buy this awesome book um so normally we close this out with like in the meantime don't do this from something stupid in our series so i guess until next time don't shit in your armor and get a painting done and we'll see you next time see you next time