Class Schedule for Fall 2023

Japans warriors, the samurai, represent one of the distinct elements of pre-20th century Japanese society, culture, and government. They are still with us as a ready-reference in a number of contexts: anime samurai from outer space; samurai businessman; Last Samurai; samurai spirit that infuses the martial arts; practitioners of the samurai ethos of bushido (self-immolation, death before defeat, self-sacrifice, etc); and exponents of hara-kiri (hari-kari in English use).

But the phenomenon of the samurai was far more nuanced. Strikingly, while a specific warrior class can be identified from at least the 900s and continuing through the late 1800s that is, for a period of about 1000 years for the vast bulk of this time Japan was at peace, and warriors only rarely died while fighting. There was also a shift in the political position of the warrior class: prominent in rural areas in the 900s, to monopolizing national government from the 1600s. The social composition of the warrior class also changed, from rural land-managers and administrators, to members of a warrior government in the 1180s, to major cultural patrons from the 1300s, from hereditary families through the 1400s to being drawn from any social background by the late 1500s, to hereditary bureaucrats from the 1600s. And at all times some were wandering swords for hire, ronin (a term appropriated in a Robert de Niro film about guns for hire in France).

Samurai as they are recalled in film reflect not just the historical samurai. The choice of samurai type in films has also been influenced by concerns, social criticisms, valorizations, and the formation of historical memory. That is, when we see samurai, we sometimes see something of the shifting cultural and political currents of modern Japan (as well as entertainment!). Thus, the course will present different opportunities for learning about the samurai. As ¿they were, as we think about some of them.

One last comment: one thing we probably will not find is a glorification of war. And this, while being heavily influenced by the horrible experience of World War II, is perhaps a key point to remember about the historical samurai class their task was to keep the peace in a society that they knew exploded violently when destabilized.

Group II: Social Science

The samurai or warrior class is one of the quintessential identifying markers of Japanese culture. HIST 393 Samurai in Film examines the perceptions, definitions, and self-images of the samurai from roughly the fourteenth to the late nineteenth centuries. During this period this samurai class was the single most important group in Japanese society, whether engaged in the warfare that transformed the medieval era, or as a wielder of monopoly political and military power in the peaceful early modern era after 1600. The warriors, and the attitudes towards authority and individuals that they had incorporated into their self-image by the nineteenth century (which included their own valorized notion of the samurai tradition) were the basis from which modern Japan engaged and ultimately embraced the notion of democracy. Japanese democracy and its institutions (parliament, legal assumptions, judicial systems) have evolved from an intellectual (and religious) background distinct from that of American democracy. Accordingly, the course educates students about worldviews that are substantially different from those of the contemporary United States. Multicultural Requirement, Category C, International Cultures

HIST 393 Samurai in Film fulfills the Social Science requirement in the following way: HIST 393 familiarizes students with the manner in which historians approach the issue of understanding a social class over time, even as the terminology applied to that class (samurai, warrior) remains constant. We thus examine historical evolution of a class: how its composition changed over time; how its social and political functions differed in periods of upheaval and in periods of peace; how the normative values and self-perceptions of the class reflected changed historical circumstance. Ultimately, we see that the notion of an unchanged and monolithic warrior class with an unchanging ethos ¿ that is, the ¿Japanese warrior/samurai tradition¿ ¿ is an unnuanced stereotype, revealed by placing the ¿warrior¿ in historical context.