Gone Medieval - Medieval Japan: Myths of the Samurai

Episode Date: June 6, 2023

Medieval Japan - especially its stories of fearless Samurai and Ninja warriors - have an enduring place in our consciousness. But how true are they?In this episode of Gone Medieval, Matt Lewis talks to Joseph Robey, who has made it his mission to make the stories of Medieval Japan more well known.This episode was produced by Rob Weinberg.You can take part in our listener survey here. If you’re enjoying this podcast and are looking for more fascinating Medieval content then subscribe to our Medieval Monday newsletter here.If you'd like to learn even more, we have hundreds of history documentaries, ad free podcasts and audiobooks at History Hit - subscribe today! To download, go to Android or Apple store. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

From long-loss Viking ships and kings buried in unexpected places to tales of murder, power, faith, and the lives of ordinary people across medieval Europe and beyond. Join me, Matt Lewis, Dr. Eleanor Jarniger, and some of the world's leading historians as we bring history's most fascinating stories to life, only on history hit. With your subscription, you'll unlock hundreds of hours of exclusive documentaries

with a brand-new release every week exploring everything from the ancient world, to World War II. Just visit historyhit.com forward slash subscribe. Welcome to this episode of Gone Medieval. I'm Matt Lewis. When I think of medieval Japan, there's one thing that fills my mind. The samurai and samurai swords hold a unique place in the collective consciousness. I have to confess that beyond believing them and their weapons of choice to be uber cool, I don't know very much about medieval Japan or the samurai. Fortunately, though, I do know Joe Roby, who's made it his mission to make the stories of medieval Japan more well known, and today, at least, to explode some of the myths that surround the samurai for us.

Welcome to God Medieval Joe. Oh, happy to be here. To start us off with, can we talk a little bit about how Japanese society was structured during the medieval period? How similar was it to what we know about kind of feudal Europe, or was it a completely different system? To be honest with, there's a lot of similarities. Very much like in medieval Europe around the time, you have a pretty rigid caste system or class system. and whatever you want to call it, with nominally peasants at the bottom rising up through the ranks and so you get what would be your equivalent of the aristocracy and knights,

and then the emperor who'd be like the king at the top. But the big difference is that once you get to the upper echelons of the society, there's a weird split where you have the aristocracy who are part of the emperor's court on the one hand, and then on the other side you have the military side of stuff, commonly referred to as the shogunate. And so on that side of things, you have the samurai who are, if you separated out the military side of the knights from the court life of the knights in Europe, you have the military side, which is the samurai, and then the other side, the aristocratic side, which is the nobility. And then above that you have the shogun who is like the head of the military side of the government effectively. So it's almost like the religious side of the role of the king, as it were, is separated from the military side. that's the big difference. You get some of the weird differences as well. So, for example,

obviously merchants were not particularly well considered in medieval Europe, but in Japanese society, they're really right at the bottom. They're considered the lowest of the low. I think the only people that were considered lower than them were butchers and tanners and undertakers, because there was another part of the way that Buddhist culture worked in Japan, that anyone who dealt with corpses, particularly, were considered right at the bottom of the social order, which is ironic when you consider the people who made a lot of those corpses are right at the top of that social order. Those are the main differences, but you do have a very similar kind of idea of the peasantry, work the land, and they give a tithe of their spoils from their farms to their lords, effectively,

who would be samurai. And do you see much what we might call social mobility, I guess, in Japanese culture? There's obviously not much in Europe, but you do get these instances where families kind of come from nowhere and can become quite wealthy or become ennobled or can get close to the centre of government, is there a similar kind of movement in Japanese society or is it more rigid? That's something that depends on period to period. So for the vast majority of the period of Japanese history where the samurai in particular ruled over, there was very little social mobility. You were born as a peasant, you died as a peasant, you died as a peasant, you

born as a samurai, you died as a samurai. There were instances where within a class you could rise up, service to the emperor or to the shogun in war, could see your family be given more land, for example, very much like with knights in Europe, but generally speaking most of the time that it's pretty restricted. The big exception to that is what we call the Singul Kudai, which is from the late 15th century to the very early 17th century, where you see a rise of peasant foot soldiers called Ashigaru, becoming a real mainstay of the militaries of different samurai armies around the country. And there's a really extreme example of this, which is a chap called Toyotomi Hideyoshi, who started life as a peasant that was so poor,

he didn't have two names. He just had the singular name, which was how peasants were named conventionally, and spent a lot of his youth as a bandit, eventually got picked up by one of the powerful warlords in Japan called Odenubunaga, and became his sandal bearer. And through that, he eventually worked his way up to become one of his retainers, and then from there got put in charge of running the taxes of his domain and then from there this guy happens to be really good at building stuff so let's have him build castles long story short his liege lord odonobunaga was assassinated he took over the whole enterprise reunifying the country and became like the regent of the whole country and so powerful that he actually abolished any mobility within the caste system so what happened

with him could never happen again ironically and managed to organize all the different samurai armies together to invade Korea, which was an absolutely horrible thing that happened, but it just demonstrates how powerfully actually was. So that's something which I don't think you really see anywhere else in a kind of feudal society happening where someone can start at the very bottom of society and rise up to become the top guy in the entire country. It's quite remarkable, but that is a singular example. But you do often see these peasant warriors being noticed by the samurai lords and being raised to kind of samurai peerage, as it were, quite a lot in that period, but it's very much a sort of a 16th century Sangoku Jedi specific thing that happens there.

It doesn't happen very often outside of that, to be honest. You mentioned that this person was good at building castles. How similar or different were Japanese castles to European castles? Very different, actually. They didn't really have the kind of same philosophy around building castles that we have over here. Obviously, they were fortified positions, but you didn't have the kind of ideas of having a stone palisade. and all the fortifications behind that. It's one of the reasons why a lot of siege equipment

that you get in Japan wasn't as high-tech, I guess you could say, as what it was in Europe at the time, because very often castles were like a palace surrounded by the actual town that surrounded it, and then a wall, and it was often built onto kind of like an earthen work. So a lot of the time when you actually see samurai besieging castles,

they'd just climb it without ladders or anything. They'd just climb up the side of it, because you could, which is why when you did actually have Eurozone, European sailors arriving in Japan. One of the big things that they were asking them about was, how do you build castles? It was even rare, for example, of someone's personal house to have a second story. It was incredibly rare for that. You'd obviously have the actual castle forts themselves would do, but the chap I mentioned earlier, Odenobunaga, he had a villa, I guess you could call it,

and it had a second floor. And this sort of, not scandal, but the awe that people had, oh my God, the lavish expensive having a second floor to your house, that's insane. It's very interesting. It's Obviously a lot of that is built around the sort of preceptive Buddhism, which shirked kind of extravagance and that kind of thing. But they were very different, but that's why the castle sieges tended not to be anywhere near as long, with the odd exception here and there. There was one where a fortress monastery managed to withstand a siege for 11 years, for example. But that is a very rare occurrence in Japan.

Typically, most of the sieges last months rather than years, like you get a lot of the time in Europe. Some of these sieges can go on for a long time. It's just funny sometimes how we can use the same word to mean something completely different. We just call it a castle and it would make you think it's the same thing. We try to localise a lot of the language. So we say something, means something, but in reality it's different. My go-to example is that we always say, oh, like Japanese or Chinese dragons,

they're really different to our dragons. Yeah, because to them, they're not just Japanese or Chinese dragons. They're their own thing. They have their own story and they're not called dragons. In Japan, they're called Yu, for example. They don't consider them a Japanese dragon. They just consider them their own thing completely. But we like to contextualize things in a way that helps us to understand them.

And I think that's where a lot of that comes from, really. It's the same way that we have the comparison between the samurai and the knights at the end of the day. It's a good comparison, but it helps people who might not necessarily know a lot about Japanese history to contextualize it and understand it a bit better. So I think there are some words that are kind of synonymous with Japan and medieval Japanese history, at least in my mind, as someone who doesn't know it very well. Starting at the top, we've talked a little bit about the structure of society. At the top, you have the emperor.

Is this someone who is considered a deity in Japanese society? I think the best sort of comparison, really, is rather than comparing to a king and other places, it's very similar to an Egyptian pharaoh, where obviously over here we have the divine rights of kings and the divine lineage, but in Japan it's very literal. So the emperor is said to descend from the emperor Jimu, who was the first emperor of Japan reigning, I think it was about 500 BC, he's more or less a mythological figure, really. There's been a long debate over how much of a historical figure he really was.

But the story goes that he's descended from the Emperor Jimu and by extension the sun goddess Amatarasu. So he has divine blood, as it were. And it's difficult to say whether that's really seen as him actually being a literal god, as it were, or just of divine providence, as it were. So it's a bit like the big debate over the early sort of Christian schism ways. Was Jesus actually God or was he the son of God or was he something else? Or was he both at the same time?

And in a lot of ways, he's all of it. If we were to actually accept the concept that the emperors had descended from the Emperor Jimu, that would basically make them the longest monarchical lineage in the world by quite a significant margin, actually. So it's quite interesting. And there still would be one of the oldest and longest in existence regardless. The way I often look at it as obviously completely an outsider looking in is that a descendance from a god rather than necessarily being a god in and of themselves, as it were. But I guess there's mileage in preserving that kind of mystery around it.

If you don't clearly define something, it's kind of a mythical, magical miasma around it that nobody really understands. And sometimes that's half the point, isn't it? Oh yeah, 100%. You would have emperors, for example, have never even been seen by the public. there's a real mystery around it that goes on there. It's not like today where the emperor makes public appearances semi-regular and all this kind of stuff. Back in the day, it was like,

if you were a peasant and saw the emperor, that was a remarkably rare thing to happen. They would be seen by their court nobles for the most part and very few other people, really, in reality. So there really was this real mystique around the emperor of them being godlike at the very least, if not an actual deity of themselves. Obviously, that's not particularly unusual in Japan

because they are polytheistic religion and toism. Shinto Buddhism is interesting because of the fact that it combines Buddhism with the native Shinto beliefs which see gods in everything coming. So it's not unusual for a living deity to be around at all. It's very much like with the Romans how very polytheistic and people could be deified after death or even during life. So very similar in that respect in a lot of ways. Yeah. So another word that I had on my list that's come up as well is the Shogun. So who were the shogun? What was their job? Where do they sit? So the shogun, as you said before, is like the head of the military government. But the word does predate what we call the shogunate, so the back of the military government itself.

So origins actually come from before Japan was unified under what we might call the Yamato Japanese, where the north was very much the domain of the Amishi people, who were the actual native Japanese people, as it were, four groups of people from mainland China came over to Japan, very different culturally. And they ruled over effectively the northern parts of Japan, and there was a lot of border conflicts between them. And the term shogun came from the term Sayy Taishogun, which basically means the military leader or conquering leader against the barbarians. So you would appoint a Sayy Thai shogun, so a warrior of particular rank, predating the samurai, would have been, you know, a

nobleman, one of the aristocracy. Later, it was typically held by someone who would be regarded as a samurai. And their job was effectively to lead armies against the Amishi people to pacify them, effectively, and imperial conquest effectively. The best kind of analog you could say in those early days, it's a bit like a consul of Rome or a dictator of Rome, where they're given special powers, political powers, and the ability to raise armies to face a particular threat that was facing Rome, and it'd be very similar kind of thing. But later, on, it became a more established title of a person within the government, which is effectively, like I say, the head of the military government, the Bakufu. And rather than it being an appointed

thing, it was a hereditary thing. So there were three that they went through. There was the Kamakura Shogunate, which was the first true Bakufu, which started in 1185. After the Genpei war, huge civil war that happened. It's very interesting, fascinating. And then followed by the Ashkaga Shogunate, which came along probably about a century or so after the Mongol invasions of Japan. And then finally the last of the Bakufu was the Tokugawa shogunate, which ushered in the Edo period after the Sengoku-Jadai. And they had varying degrees of power and influence, but within those, it became a hereditary thing amongst the different families that ruled it. So the Kamakora shogunate was run by the Minamoto, sort of. It's complicated. The Ashkaga clan and the Tokugawa was the

Tokugawa family, who ruled right up until the Meiji Restoration in the 19th century, which people we might be familiar with the Last Samurai. We'll know that that was what was going on in that. It affected the ramifications of that Meiji restoration period. Potentially to my shame, I absolutely love The Last Samurai. I love The Last Samurai as well. It's my favourite film. It's what really got me interested in the samurai as a kid.

You can start reading about that more as a grown-up. And I think they did a lot of respect to the authenticity of the history. So I do not begrudge you for being a fan because I am myself. Few. And then I guess we get to the real big. famous word around Japanese history, the samurai. So when does the term samurai emerge and who does it describe? It's muddy where it first comes from. The word samurai literally just means servant and the earliest kind of records of the term being used in an official capacity. It's

effectively to refer to people who are in the aristocracy but they were like a level below the nobles and their job was to act as clerks and administrators to the noble class. Effectively do all the government work that they were too busy doing poetry and painting and other more salubrious activities to actually get involved with. And eventually they started becoming the sort of de facto guys that we'd send off to fight your wars for you. And that's when they became very proud of that military heritage. When they really started to become what we really referred to as the samurai now is there was an emperor called Sewergenji and he basically had too many children. I think it was something insane like about

90 children he had. The expense of actually keeping all of these children in the wealth of being an imperial family member was destroying the government and ruining the country's economy. So he just turned around and said to all but about three of them. So right, you're not imperial family members anymore. You're getting deducted down all the way down to samurai. And that's when they became more of an actual established noble class. So that's where you get the Minamoto family and a Tyra family who are the first two what I guess he called true samurai families. Also, the two families that fought in the Gempai War, which we talked a little bit about before. And it started a family tradition, effectively, of becoming warriors, becoming the knights of

Japan effectively, fighting internal wars, and of course when the Mongols invaded as well, all sorts of different battles like that. What's interesting is that they originally, they were mounted archers. Their fame as being sword-wielding warriors is a much, much later kind of creation. But they started off as archers who would ride on horseback, similar to the Parthians. or the Mongols. And that's why in Japan, archery is more considered a nobleman's pursuit, whereas over here it's more of a kind of like a middle-class tradesman's job, more than anything else, because it was incredibly difficult to do. Riding on horseback and shooting behind you

whilst you're riding past is a remarkably difficult skill. I can't remember the actual term, I think something like Yabosame, which basically means the art of the horse and the bow, was what they used to refer to samurai warfare as. So that was where it originally started off, in all honesty. It's an interesting parallel there. You say samurai refers to being a servant, or it literally means a servant. And I think in Europe, there's a tradition that knights would be associated with riding on a horse. And it's only really in English that the word knight doesn't mean a person who rides a horse, specifically, you know, in French it's a chevalier, a horse rider. A knight in English has much more of a connotation and an undertone of being a servant,

which is an odd parallel to the Japanese idea of a samurai. It's quite interesting how those things crop up. And there's one other word I want to get into a little bit, again, because it has a bit of coolness around it, I think, sometimes. And that's the idea of the Ronin. So I've always understood the Ronin to be this masterless samurai, this noble warrior out for vengeance or something like that. They always seem to be that kind of thing in the films. Is a Ronan a real thing and what is it? So the Ronin is 100% a real thing. But to be blunt, the kind of romanticized version of it is a bit off. In terms of film portrayals, have you ever seen the masterpiece

Hadakidi from the 1950s? I would highly recommend it as an excellent film. That film is probably the most accurate depiction of what being a Ronan was like, certainly in the Edo period. So after the times of war were over. A Ronin was a master of a samurai, but before the kind of

codifying or codification of a lot of these terms in the sort of early modern period, it could actually just also refer to it as just a homeless guy in a lot of ways. It literally translates to, if I recall correctly, wandering wave and it did just mean someone without purpose in life effectively. And depending on the period that you're in, being a ronin could be advantageous or it could be really bad. So times of war, Sengoku-Jadai, being a ronin could have its perks because particularly if you're a ronin who

had established himself as a capable warrior, you could effectively sell your services as a warrior to the highest bidder. So there was the opportunity to make some money there or earn a better title than you had before. But not always, you could end up just falling on hard times. But in the Edo period, if you were a ronin, you were just a vagrant, effectively. And it was a really rotten life to live. You were homeless, effectively. You had no money. Basically, a peasant who wasn't allowed to be a peasant is the best way to describe it. So you were expected to be this warrior, but you had no wars to fight, you had no way of actually becoming a true samurai again

because no one was dying in wars and there were no wars to fight, so therefore you couldn't turn around. So, you need warriors, right? They were like, no, we don't need warriors. So a lot of them would just fall into poverty, have to sell their swords even, for example, and a lot of them would commit Sepaku,

take their own lives. It was a really rotten fate to be made into a ronin, which is why when, particularly in the eddoer period, where if certain samurai did something really rotten and were ordered to commit Sepaku, a lot of the time their samurai retainers would actually follow suit because in reality it was a better fate than being made into a homeless vagrant,

possibly dying slowly of starvation instead. It's a horrible thing to happen to a lot of people and something people really wanted to avoid. So the kind of image that you see in a lot of media of this, like you say the noble warrior who goes round but he has his own code and all this kind of thing, a lot of the time, that's not the... the case. Again, it can depend on period to period. So, for example, one of the most famous

samurai ever, Miyamoto Muzashi, is considered one of the greatest swordsmen of all time and is a revered warrior. He was a ronin, but again, a ronin during the Sengoku Jedi, where he could make a living by being a mercenary from time to time, as well as honing his swordsmanship skills. But, yeah, it was not something you would choose to be as a samurai in reality. What period was he around in? So Musashi was in the 16th century, very widely renowned swordsman. More so after his death, but he wrote a series of works called The Book of Five Rings, which is like the Japanese answer to The Art of War by Sun Su. And very similarly to how Sun Su is particularly taught to like businessmen now,

the Book of Five Rings is often read by businessmen as a way to apply that kind of thinking to the business environment. I've read it myself. It gives you some really good pointers on swordplay as well, some really basic tips that that can help you improve your grip, for example, on the first page. There's some great stuff there. I'm going to have to look that out. That sounds really interesting. Join me, Dallas Campbell, on Patented, a podcast by History Hit,

where we bring you the fascinating histories of the world's most impactful inventions. We uncover the exceptional stories behind everyday objects. Snakes and Ladders is really a game about a karmic journey through stages of existence towards liberation. Look back in time to understand technologies of the future. One of the really interesting things about it is that it showed just how hard AI in the real world really is. And we examine unexpected origins. Who or what invented sex? Yeah, fish.

Fish were the ones that invented copulation and made sex intimate for the first time. For the answer to those questions and a whole lot more, subscribe to patented on Apple, Spotify or wherever you can. at your podcast. Join me for new episodes every Wednesday and Sunday. I'm going to hand you over the floor completely now because I want you to tell me what is the biggest myth that surrounds a samurai that you really wish people would stop believing. Okay, so I think the first big one is the general kind of idea of the samurai being this really honourable, noble class of warriors who lived by this strict code known as Bushido and they would never betray that and all this kind of stuff. they were powerful warriors but kind to the people that they protected and all this kind of stuff.

It's really not true. I hate to say it. I don't know I'm smashing loads of people's long-held beliefs about the samurai and revering them as these kind of noble warriors. But the reality is that they were really horrible people a lot of the time. Don't really wrong, there were certainly great examples of really loyal samurai who would never, ever betray their masters. But that was generally more so the lower-ranking samurai. So I'd normally draw on the Sengoku Jedi as the main period.

And that's really because that's, I guess, what you call the heyday of the samurai. It was when there was constant warfare. So there was all these times for samurai to prove their loyalty or disloyalty. What kind of period are we talking about there, sorry? This is late 15th century. So from about 1477, all the way through to about 1615 is the last official battle of the Sengoku Jedi, which is the siege of Osaka. So in that mix, you will get Honda Tadakatsu, who is the ancestor of the current

the CEO of Honda Car Company. Remarkable warrior, he was often referred to by friend and foal as the warrior who was beyond death itself. He fought in about 70 battles and was never injured in a single one because he was just too good. No point did he ever betray his master, Tokugawa Iyasu. He stayed loyal to him from his first battle all the way through to his retirement from battle when he was in his 60s. Remarkable warrior, very loyal. One time marched against an army of 40,000 men with only 500 men at his command to try and hold this army off for his master. It's quite an amusing story, actually, because the other army was being led by that chat we mentioned earlier, Toy Tomahilioshi, and he basically just stood on the opposite side

of the riverbank from the army, raised his spear aloft and just, I'm Honda Tatakatsu, you know who I am, fight me. It said one of two things happened, either Toyotomi Hideyoshi turned around and knew what a great warrior who was and didn't want him to waste his life in such a pointless act of defiance, or he was so scared of him that he was like, even if we win this, we're going to take a lot of casualties from this guy, and so they went the long way round,

which basically saved his master's life. But on the other hand, you get someone like Oda Nobunaga, who I mentioned earlier as well, who was, by all accounts, a monster. Even during his life, he got the moniker, the demon king. There are incidences where, for example, the Buddhist monastery of Mount Hia rebelled against him,

which is a fortress monastery north of Kyoto. and he was so angry about this that he went to the fortress monastery with an army of about 50,000 men surrounded it and set alight the entire forest that surrounded it and turned around to his men and said any man, woman and child that comes out of that fortress

put them to death, all of them. And I think it was about 11,000 people were put to death in a single day from that. Also, when his brother-in-law and father-in-law rebelled against him, he had their heads turned into sake cups to make his loyal generals drink from just to reassert their loyalty.

So, yeah, really unpleasant guy. Or someone like Datea Masamune, who is one of the most sort of celebrated samurai in Japanese history. It's very popular over here because he had a single eye and used a sword guard as an eye patch, which is really cool.

Very popular. But this is the guy who, when he thought his own men weren't fighting hard enough, he got a group of arcupus ears to shoot them in the back, the back ranks to kill them all to try and inspire the chaps

in the front to fight a bit harder. An interesting motivational technique. Yeah. It seemed to work, apparently, but he wasn't very popular with his men for the rest of his career after that, to be fair. The other one is the notion that the samurai were always renowned as the great swordsmen

that we think of them as, is that, you know, the katana's their soul and all this kind of stuff. But we already mentioned their originally mounted archers, but it was only really in the Edo period that the sword became their main weapon, which was the period

after they'd stopped fighting wars. and it gained that kind of same symbolism that swords have in the West. It's a prestigious weapon that only the very wealthy can afford to own, and so it became more of a status symbol. And that's why they latched onto the weapon as their main weapon, because it really represented their status in society. But after the bow stopped being their main weapon, they switched to pole arms like the Naginata,

which is effectively like a glave by European standards, long pole arm with a curved blade on the end. And then later on, switch to the Yadi, which is effectively the Japanese word for spear. But the Yadi could come in a variety of different forms, some even resembling a European bill hook, for example. And then later on, the Yadi and the gun. The whole thing in the last samurai, where they're like, oh yeah, they don't dishonoured themselves by using guns. There's complete hogwash. When Jesuit missionaries first introduced samurai to guns in 1542, I think it was, they were on all of them.

All the guns you've got now. As soon as they saw, they could teach a peasant in a single day to kill a samurai at 50 yards away, they were like, give me all of them. So that's another big one. I think the final one I'll just quickly touch upon is the concept of the ninja as well. And this one will definitely upset people. I know this for sure. Oh, yeah, ninja is a word I didn't have in my list.

I never miss. I was a bit surprised. Don't explode my misdemeanor. Don't expose my misrepresent. I want to keep the... So the ninja, for one thing, the term ninja doesn't exist historically. I know, I know. So the origins of it have been debated.

So Stephen Turnbull, who is a British historian who talks about the samurai a lot, he came with a theory that it comes from Kabuki Theatre. And the idea was that in Kabuki Theatre, you often have stagehans who are dressed in black, and the idea is meant to be you ignore them. It's part of the magic of the stage play. You just remove them from your mind. But then every now and again, one of them would attack and kill one of the main characters and then would shout ninja.

But it turns out that's not actually the case. It's a much more simple explanation than that. And the term ninja, the kanji for it, reads the same as the kanji for the phrase Shinobinomono, which is what we would call effectively espionage work. So spying and subterfuge and that kind of thing. And the reality is that it was a job or it was a task that your lord could task you with. So you could be an Ashigaru, a peasant warrior, you could be a samurai itself, and you would be asked to do Shinobinomono work. There wasn't like a set regimen of how you get that job.

It was effectively, you go to this town and you spy on these people, tell me what you can find out about, the fortifications they have there, how many soldiers do they have, etc, etc. So this idea that we often hear this ninja with a sworn enemy of the samurai, it's not a thing. The ninja wasn't a class in society like the samurai was. It was just a job, and you could be a samurai and do that job. And interestingly, a lot of the people who were renowned for doing that work

were amongst the most loyal and honorable samurai of the lot. A lot of people hear the name Hattori Hanzo, and they associate it with being a swordmaster, swordmaker, because of the film Kill Bill. He wasn't. He was actually a samurai, and he was one of the samurai who was charged by Tokugawa Iyasu as being, he's kind of like spymasters, effectively. His job was to do espionage work. And he was unbelievably loyal to Tokugawa Iasu. It was a point where Iyasu's army was thoroughly routed at a battle, and he only had about five men left with him, including Hattori Hanzo. And at this point, most of the samurai would have just turned around, so I'm just going to hand him over,

because this guy might bring me into his service if I hand over my liege lord to him and just be like, here you go, have some land, have some money, you can be a commander in my army. But he actually stayed with him and orchestrated a plan to get him out and manage him about. Tokugawa Yasu, of course, eventually became the final unifier of Japan and started the Tokugawa Shogunate that ran for 250 years. So pretty big deal. a lot of the stuff that we often associate as ninja weapons, so the Shudokin, the throwing star, that was basically a policeman's

weapon, and it wasn't really a weapon, it was a distraction tool. You see someone who's got a weapon, you throw it at them, and just the kind of image of this sharp spinning object flying at you, makes you go, and jump, and that's the point where you strike into whilst they're distracted, and a lot

of those policemen would have been samurai as well. And of course they didn't all dress in black, because the absolute worst disguise you can have as a spy is to dress like a spy. They would often dress like peasants or Buddhist monks, someone who wouldn't be unusual to see a new face coming into town and then leaving shortly afterwards. So unfortunately, a lot of the stuff we know about the ninja is not really true.

Sad to say. Now I know why I left it off my list. I'm just going to wipe the tears from my eyes. Yeah, it's very upsetting to a lot of people when they hear that one, unfortunately. I'm just going to sink into some childhood memories of ninjas being cool and everything else and ignore everything you just told me. They are cool, but they're just largely fictional characters. They are cool, they just didn't ever exist.

Yeah. And to end on, I guess, in the British history, at least, we tend to end the medieval period around the Battle of Bosworth in 1485, and across Europe there's this whole sense of change around that period with the coming of the Renaissance and brewing Protestantism and all of that kind of thing. Is there a similar break or a change of period in Japan, or is that very much just a Western European view? Yeah, there really was.

Obviously we mentioned the Onan War, which started in 1467. That led to the Sengoku Judai. So you basically have, if you'll humor me for a moment, I'll explain what that actually means. So the Oniom War was very much like the Wars of the Roses, in that you had two rival sort of factions within the military government, who both picked a different claimant to the Shogun position. Once I basically backed the Shogun's brother, who was the person that the Shogun had actually declared to be the next Shogun.

and the other one declared for his baby son who'd just been born. And even though the Shogun had actually said, no, it's going to be my brother. And after his son was born, he was so like, no, it's still going to marry my brother, because I told him he would be. The two factions go to war. It's absolutely bonkers.

The opening battle of it, the Battle of Kyoto sees a large part of Kyoto burned down, and there's about 150,000 warriors fighting there in a series of sporadic skirmishes across the province, so it's not one big battle, but it's huge. And eventually all these different clans, from across the country get brought into fighting this, and the two initial factions that are involved, the actual claimants for each side, they switch sides.

So they're actually not even fighting for the same claimant anymore, which just goes to show that it's nothing to do with who is actually in charge. They just wanted some more influence. And eventually those two major clans, the Hosokawa and the Amana, pretty much fight themselves into extinction. There's no one left at the end of it to reap the spoils of the final victor, which is just bonkers, really.

But because it just spirals out of control and there's more and more, and it's very central government, the shogunate can't actually keep control of the situation. Everybody just ignores them and starts declaring their own sort of provincial rulership, effectively. You get the rise of what's called the Daimyo, which literally just means strong man. So the heads of powerful clans who just declare themselves as the rulers of certain provinces. And you get smaller clans becoming more powerful and conquering, more established older clans, which means the weak conquers.

the Strong, also the name of the talk that I'm giving in October. And in that as well, you obviously get the introduction of firearms, so the changing of the way that armies are composed and fight, the rise of the Ashigaro foot soldier, which is very similar to the rise of pike-wielding footmen over here, because they were often equipped with very long yari spears. You also get the introduction of Christianity as well, alongside guns is the other thing, and Christianity becomes quite popular for a while. They reckon about 300,000 Christians in Japan at the height of its spread, with a lot of powerful daimyo even wearing crucifixes as a kind of fashion statement to say, hey, I'm with the Jesuits, so therefore I have more guns than everyone else. It's really

interesting. Thrown into that, you also get the thing I find the most fascinating, possibly even more than the samurai during the period, is something called Ikoiki, which means a league of one mind, which were a series of peasant revolts led by dissatisfying, low-ranking samurai who were just fed up with the whole situation, and a particularly zealous group of Buddhist monks who follow something called Jodos Shinsho Buddhism, which rejected materialism completely, and believed that the only way to actually get into Nirvana was through action, not through just paying loads of money to your priest, effectively,

and actually rebelled in two provinces, Kaga and Achezen, and threw the samurai out of the entire provinces. So for several decades, you had two provinces that were just completely ruled by a Theocracy effectively, a religious government that was very egalitarian. And the samurai didn't like that, obviously. But they became very powerful. Invaded Kyoto and burned all the temples down, for example. And that siege I mentioned earlier that lasted 11 years,

that was actually against their fortress monastery, Ishiama Honganji. They became very powerful. Obviously, eventually crushed and wiped out. So you get this real changing of it. And then, of course, that ends with the establishment of a new regime, which sees the change of the role of the samurai in society. But the difference you really really, see is that you don't really get that kind of change in the way that society in general is

organized. So obviously feudalism in Europe remained throughout the Renaissance period. I think that's one of the misconceptions we often get is that, oh, the Renaissance came along and then everyone's lives got better. It's not, the lives of the very, very wealthy got better because there was more money, but peasants would see a very minimal change in their day-to-day life. But obviously, eventually you see the rise of cottage industries and a switch away from the feudal system. You don't really get that in Japan until the 19th century with the Meiji restoration where it all changes. But you do get very much like here with the rise of the Tudor dynasty, this sort of changing of the guard from an old regime to a new one. So yes, there is this real change to it and

the social mobility as well during that period. But a lot of those changes and that social mobility just stops with the end of the Sengoku-Jedai. And a lot of that kind of changes almost brought back and they just pull it back a little bit and try and bring it back to something that was a bit more like how it was before with the more rigid caste system and all that kind of stuff. So it definitely is a transitionary period, but in a different way, for sure, to how it is in Europe. It's just interesting. I think that that kind of big change, that kind of wave of new ideas and things is happening at a similar time to it's happening in Western Europe as well. A lot of the reason is because a lot of those ideas were being brought over by Jesuit missionaries

and Dutch missionaries. During the Edo period, you actually have, I think it's the Sakoku period, which is basically where they completely shut off foreign trade and interaction. Foreigners are just completely banned from coming into Japan, except for the Dutch, and to a lesser extent, some English traders are allowed to come as well. And they bring with them books and manuscripts about modern technology, so electricity and anatomy and all this kind of stuff. So the point where I can't actually remember the Japanese term for it, but the phrase of new information coming from abroad just becomes known as Dutch studies.

And interestingly, the reason why the Dutch and the English are seen as okay, is because they're Protestants. And the reasoning behind this is because Catholicism is really disliked in Japan for several reasons. One is that they'd heard of what had happened in the Philippines, with Jesuit missionaries coming over, converting the populace to Christianity, and then Spain comes after that to take over the country. So they didn't like that. They thought they saw Catholics as being agents of foreign influence.

And they also really didn't like the idea that the Pope would therefore be higher up in the hierarchy than the emperor. that wasn't cool. They weren't okay with that at all. And one of the ways that they would actually root out Catholics or Christians was a process called the fumie, which is trying to force people to apostise. And the way they would do that is take an image of a saint and demand that the person's step on them. And of course, in Catholic faith, that would be blasphemy. But Protestants don't care. So they would just go up to these Dutch traders, are you Catholic, which is the term that I actually heard. No, we're not Catholic. And I'm not prove it. And they'd just go, yeah, sure, and just step on this picture of a saint, because as Protestants, they just didn't care. So to them, they weren't proper Christians, as it were. So they were still allowed to come and go and trade. Ironically, a lot of Dutch traders actually helped to suppress a Christian rebellion in the 17th century, known as the Shimabara rebellion, where they were really struggling to put down this Christian revolt, led by low-ranking samurai and peasants, who had become ostracized from society because of the end of the Sengoku Jedi.

A lot of Ronin, for example, who had nothing and were... angry about it. They put up this rebellion where they held off the samurai government for months and months. And in the end they asked the Dutch traders to come along with their ships and broadside, the fortress. Ask, can we borrow some of your cannons? And they were like,

we don't really want to get involved with this. We're like, if you don't, then we won't trade with you anymore. And they're like, fine, okay, we'll fire one broadside and then we're gone. So yeah, it's really interesting where that came about. So a lot of those new ideas are coming from what effectively was early modern Europe and of course developing their own

ideas at the same time. It's not pretend that they weren't. So I think that you do get that kind of bleeding in of a lot of that influence from Europe which slows down dramatically when the trade decreases of course. Well that's been absolutely fascinating Jay. Thank you so much for something that I just knew absolutely nothing about. It's been great to hear a bit

more information about Japan and the way it was structured and to explode some of those myths around the samurai in particular I'm still holding on to ninjas. I'm going to get them to cut out the bit about ninja so that everybody still believes in ninjas. Ninjas are real. Ninja's real. Ninjas are real. But thank you

so much for joining us, Joe. It's been fantastic. It's been an absolute pleasure. I love talking about the samurai, so yeah. Where can people follow your work, particularly catch that talk you were mentioning in October? I'm on Instagram and the Facebook as History with Joe. You'll recognise

my page in particular because the logo is History Joe with a little plague Dr. Mask coming off the side because I talk about the Black Death a lot. I'm full of fun and light-hearted subjects like that. But I'm going to be giving a talk on the 22nd of October at the Guildhall in Leicester at about 2pm. I'll be in full samurai armour, presenting it with a bunch of my weapons and kit and things like that, maybe some antique woodblock prints as well, which would be fun to see.

Interestingly, the day after the anniversary of the Battle of Sekhiahara, which was the last sort of real major battle of the Sengoku Jedi as well, but we'll be talking about similar things, so dispelling some myths, talking a bit more in depth about some of the stuff we chatted about today. Yeah, people will get a chance to hold some samurai armor and weapons, which would be good fun. Very cool. And keep an eye out for me. I'll be at the back of the room, dressed all in black, with my throwing stars, ready to jump out and convince everyone that ninja's are real. Fantastic. You won't see you, though, will I? You'll be in the shadows. Ninja's are real. Thank you so much for Joe. I've absolutely loved talking to you about

medieval Japan. It's been brilliant. You can listen to brand new episodes of Gone Medieval every Tuesday and Friday, so please join us next time for more on the finest millennium in human history. Don't forget to also subscribe or follow us wherever you get your podcast from and to tell all of your friends and family that you've gone medieval. If you have a moment, please do rate us or review us anywhere that you listen to podcasts. It does help new listeners to find their way to us. And if you're enjoying this and looking for a bit more medieval goodness in your life, you can subscribe to History Hits Medieval Monday's newsletter by following the links in the show notes below. Anyway, I better let you go. I've been Matt Lewis and we've been.

just gone medieval with history hits.