Historically High - The Samurai

Episode Date: July 27, 2022

In a time when everybody was literally kung fu fighting, one group holds a special place in culture just on sheer badassness. I'm talking the katana wielding, armor wearing, philosopher warriors known commonly as Samurai. From the birth of Samurai culture to the influences still felt in our modern world, we've got you covered. Support the show Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.

We're up in the hills. And everyone else was, everyone else was a super... But he's his name. It's fine. So we're sitting in the bed of, in lawn chairs in the bed of a truck. And we have a speaker going on. We're just kind of like bullshit and stuff. And so if you were, like, imagine if you were in that situation and you got, like, abducted.

In bed with another man? No. Abducted or abducted? Technically, that is a bed. a bit of a truck. No, if you got abducted, wait, is it? Yeah, abducted.

Abducted, okay. If you got abducted, two of you, like, at the same time. By aliens? Yeah. Okay. And you each had, like, you each had a different experience. Same aliens, different experience.

So that way, when they drop you back down, you can't even, like, corroborate each other's story. There's no consistency. So you're both like, I swear to God, we were both. abducted at the same time. They're like, well, what, they look like? I'm like, well, they look like this.

And he's like, no, they look like this. Okay, so a different thought process on that is if you got abducted, just by yourself, the only thing they did to you was just like anal testing. Like you always are like probing. Yeah. That's all they did to you. That's how they know they don't exist. And then you get put back.

Is that something where do you do, do you, do, tell people that? Fuck no. You're telling me that you could, knowing in your head and your heart, that you have been abducted by aliens. But the only way you're going to be able to tell this story is by providing the only details in the story are that they did anal testing. It's too much of a trope.

Like, it's too, it's just what everybody says. So could you imagine. I don't think you could, I don't think you could hold that in. I think I could. I can swallow a lot. I'm not saying you're going on like the media circuit and doing all this, but. It's not a Springer type deal. But I feel like at least you're telling almost everybody you meet that you're having conversations with.

That's so rare. I think you have to tell you just have to be the person going for the rest of your life being fingered by an alien. I could take that. I could swallow that whole. Because I know nobody's going to believe me. That's the thing. If there are no witnesses and there's a little butt play that happens, all I'm doing is cop into a fantasy that nobody's going to believe was ever real.

Would you lose? It was in your ear. No, not that. The better pen. Not the writing pen, the spoken pen. Oh, the medical pen. The one that gives me my ideas. I'll find a second.

Okay. What? So you would just tell somebody immediately? I don't think I'd tell them immediately, but I think that that's something that I'm like, I don't think that's something I could keep to myself. Because my whole part of the story was like, yeah, I'm having to tell this about me being abducted

and probed and stuff like that, but that would be the part of my story that I'm thinking about. It's just like, that's all people would hear. True. But my part of the story is like, no, like, I, I'm just trying to like convey you that this really happened.

I would leave out the probe part. That would be the one part of the story that I would just leave out. Because like I say, as soon as I hear somebody's experience... I know what are you going to say, though? They abducted me, they ran tests on me, and then when they say test, I don't know,

I was out. All I was doing was looking up to light. Then you're not going to know that they run test on you. You don't have enough detail in your story then. Either way, nobody's going to believe it. But I think just for your own your own satisfaction of you telling that like that's the true story of what happened.

Everybody else on the planet lives with some kind of deep dark secret. And I'm pretty sure I could compartmentalize. Yeah, there we go. Sword in the stone. I, sword in the stone. That's right. I could, I could swallow that. If anything, the only place I would talk about it would be like a therapist or something

like that where I'm going to say enough other shit where they're going to be like, hey, you lived through all this. Maybe aliens did abduct him and rent stuff on his butt. You'd have to like, that's what I'm saying is like, you would be telling this to your therapist and you would be so adamant that this is true that you're like, what do you need for me to believe me? I don't know how you prove that. We, yeah, I don't know. What was Ryan's answer? He told everybody? Yes, I think, I think we both agreed that we wouldn't feel like we would just have to go through life as the people that got. I would just not want to be looked at weird because, like I say, every time somebody gets

to that part of the store and they're like, and they end up the problem. But here's how many people have had something up their ass? Fair amount. Medically for funsies. Yeah, there's all kinds of reasons to have stuff. That right there shouldn't be the stigma anymore. Is that part of the, that shouldn't be the part that people are paying attention to or anything like that in that story.

It shouldn't be about that. Yeah, it's just, it's a bridge too far. They took my blood, they did everything else. I'm not going that far with it. Took my blood, checked my pud. Have you seen the Twitter video? I don't know if it's real or not, but it's the guy that was passed out asleep in his buddy's chair,

and they put a fake dildo in his zipper. Yes. And then they wake him up. Just at the moment when he takes the scissors and cuts it off. There's never been a more panic-stricken human being in the world ever. No, because he was literally wake up. The first thing you're looking at is the scissors held down by what appears to be a dick. I don't know if it even looks like, it didn't even look like the shade would be correct for him.

No, the shade was definitely not correct. But the simple fact that he looked down, saw that there and the scissors. And it wasn't a long freak out because obviously. he came to the realization quickly, but just that initial scream of what he thought was going to happen. Yes. The anger that he had after that is

totally justifiable. I totally get where he's coming from and why he would be that mad. You know what? It's for situations like that that people need to have a code. What do you mean? Like people need to have a code, like a code of ethics,

that they live their life by, a code of honor, Adam, like a Besito code. Oh, God damn it. Okay. Yeah, no, I agree. Code owner. What would you call that? What do you think anybody not white would call that? Is it Bushido? That sounds right to me.

Is it? Yeah. And who lived by the Bushido Code? The Samurai. And a lot of other people now. So tell me about the samurai, Adam. Pretty cool group. Well, there's a lot of, like, one way that they're, were great one way that they were bad they had just the craziest set of circumstances that they came about and they like for lack of a better word i would probably say like mercenaries is kind of the

way that it felt just because they were always sort of hired guns to protect different people or see i was gonna argue that with you until i actually just thought about what you meant that by meant by that and yeah like that's they instead of like how you would think about mercenary today I think where it's just like a gun for hire you were for higher

you were loyal and it was for not just money but it was for you know land and like stability for your family and everything yeah you're getting rice stipends you're getting all sorts of stuff you're being treated better than you would be

and everything about Japan And like we were kind of talking about it last night. Like their culture and just all the different things that they do, it's so cool, but it is so confusing. And like the people traveling on mass transit nowadays and they just don't make eye contact with people. Like in America in big cities, you don't usually make eye contact with people on mass transit. But you do it because you're actively not like acknowledging that you're that there's other people around. Like you're the only one on this way. You're trying to acknowledge that you know that there's other people.

around. Yeah. Like, you just basically want them to not bug you ever to the point to where you're like the only one. But like Japan, when they're walking down the street or they're on subways, everybody always looks at the ground and looks at feet because for some reason, and I don't know what it is, and this could be not great to say, but there's just something about like looking into somebody else's eyes over there. It's kind of disrespectful. And stuff like that, I don't understand and learning more about samurai and kind of seeing where it all comes from, it makes a little bit more sense because there's, it was a pretty war-wittled place for a really long time. Well, any, I think pretty much any place was.

Yeah. I mean, even if you think about like America, you know, prior to the frontier and everything, yeah, it wasn't like the English coming over and fighting against the natives, but it was natives against natives. You had the different tribes fighting. So regardless of who, if it's going to be outsiders or people, people within the same country, you're still going to have finding, it's just over resources. I mean, I think since people have been around even like Neanderthals and everything like that,

you have a better cave than I do. Let's try to go ahead and kick these guys out of their cave. Yeah, and they thrive for a long time under something called feudalism, which is like where you have your own feudal lands and everything's broken up. And that's one reason that Samarais did come around because the people, oh boy, this is going to be the first word. We're going to see if we can nail this first one. The people that ran kind of the areas that were the feudal lords were called the daimyo. Diomyo.

Do you know what's crazy about that too is they use that term in Star Wars. Do they? Yeah, the new Boba Fett series. He's the daimio of the city. So he's like he's the one that like they pay, he's the one that provides protection, but they also pay him for that protection. Okay. So it just kind of goes in like we, you know, we're going to cover later like what. But how much of an inspiration that like this type of stuff had, even on modern culture?

Yeah, there's a lot of these words, like I was saying, you still see, like, Bouchido was the name of a pay-per-view that Pride FC, the Pride Fighting Championships, the Japanese mixed martial arts federation. They used Bouchito, like the Code of Honor as the names of some of their events that they had, just because those were the rules that they wanted. So many video games have been named like Bishito Code and all that kind of stuff. Yeah, it's the staying power is incredible. But these daimyo's would hire, basically hired guns.

And they were the samurai. And I want to say, I don't know exactly if that's what samurai meant. So the daimio were like the, like comparing, I guess, to what we would have in the United States. Like a mayor? No, no, what I'm saying is the daimyo, if you were going to compare it to like early United States, you would almost have it like mob bosses. And then they would have their underlings and they would have like the samurai who would be like their maid men. They kind of watched their area when they were gone and fought for them when they needed to, right? Yeah.

And I don't know if samurai means to serve, but that was a word that they used. There was some translation to serve to make sure that the samurai knew, like, They were still underlings. They were still just paid muscle, basically. The samurai, kind of before that happened, really got off right around the 8th century, I think, is when it was. And they were sent to combat the northeastern, kind of like the, I don't want to say, like, the native people. But they were called the Amishi. And a lot of the people from the south were called the Yeoi.

and there were people that migrated from Korea and China. The Yishi were? The Yiyoi were. Okay. The Imiishi were like the people that were there first. They were up in the northern part, and I don't know what the migration pattern would be from Korea and China. That's actually what I was going to look at right now,

just to kind of see. Because I feel like, and I'm probably wrong on this, but I feel like just kind of in my mind's eye, I'm seeing that Japan is actually more south of Korea so that I would think that people coming from Korea would go into northern Japan first, but I'm about to be proven wrong. Japan and go, let's take a look.

You ever get confused when you look at a flat map and you see the United States and then you see Japan on the other side and don't remember that it circles back around and they're right next to each other? Or that's what you always see when you think of the distance between the United States and Russia

because you're always thinking New York to Moscow. Yeah, you got to cross the Atlantic to get there, but you don't. You don't. You literally look at the Bering Strait and it's literally really really right across from us. But, you know, so, oh, okay, so this explains everything you're saying. So it's almost like Korea and China are closest to South Japan. So that must have been just the easiest way to travel up there.

It was like almost a straight shot across, yeah. So the Yoi coming from, I guess, more adapted cultures and more adapted people started to rule. And obviously, the Amishi didn't like that as they were moving more northeast and started starting to take over their lands. So the samurai, basically, before they were samurai, were just hired muscle to go up and clean up the Amishi. And they kind of started out as soldiers. Did they, were they natives to Japan? Or were they members of the Yoi people that migrated from Korea and China?

They were there before the Yoi people got there. So they were- So they had been, like, locals in the south of Japan. I think they were just more up in the north. So I don't know where they came from as far as, like, how. they got out to the island or anything. Gotcha. But they just kind of occupied that land.

And as the Yoi were moving up north, that's when they started getting into conflicts. And the Amishi were kind of fascinating because they were really good on horses. They knew how to navigate a horse during a war or a fight. And the pre-Samurai samurai were just basically sitting targets for them. And that's kind of what made them want to start training these sort of elite forces. Because they had to learn how to ride horses to.

They had to learn to shoot bows and arrows from there. They'd learn how to throw spears just on the run. They basically saw all the ways that they were deficient militarily. So it was a big learning curve to figure out how to defeat the amici and take over that land. And it changed a lot of their kind of fighting. techniques as far as like when they would change their armor up instead of being dudes that were like in heavily clad metal armor to try to defend. They knew that they had to be able to move faster so they weren't just kind of sitting tin can targets. And excuse me, they changed over more to like a leather kind of armor.

So it would be more flexible. They would be more movable. And one of the things that they would do on their helmets was later on when, samurai were kind of out for their own clout and kind of out to show off. They would literally like a door in their helmets in a special way. So if you were watching the like war, you could see which samurai's were doing the most damage. But they also started to realize that if you were a samurai and you were in a war and you were trying to get away, they would also be able to see that you were the one running away from the action too.

So they started to kind of get more basic with their design. because they didn't want to be the guy that got called out for running away from fighting. So after the yoi happened, samurai culture and kind of the way of the samurai, the training areas that they had, the gyms, came about right around 1185 AD, so a long-ass time ago. Another kind of vocab word that we'll use is a shogun,

and it's a military dictator. Um, they were usually appointed by the empire or, wow, shit, the emperor. It looks up, the empire. Does Japan still have an emperor? I think it's more of a ceremonial thing, kind of like how England still has a queen and royal family. But they still do have an emperor. You know what? I don't know.

Let's learn something. Yeah. Does. So as these shoguns, um, were the head of the military, they basically had all the power in the land. They were the ones that sat above the daimio and they would have basically power over everybody to where they could rule larger factions of land and bigger groups of samurai and fight off all the other warring factions that were coming for them and trying to take them. And there was just change over left and right. I mean, you would be in power for a little while and then somebody bigger, better and batter would show up and whoop your ass and then you would become the new shogun. I wonder if it kind of, and by the way, it does have, Japan does have an emperor still.

This is weird. We're doing this right after Abe got popped. I know. Yeah, that's true. Huh. I wonder if, not intentional. Yeah. In kind of like, you know, ancient, I don't know, do you consider this ancient times?

This doesn't seem ancient to me. A lot of the words that I saw used to describe it were like medieval. Okay. which seems weird to say medieval Japan. Swords and swords and armor. You kind of think of medieval like that. I wonder with a lot of these like medieval places, the reason there was so much turnover is because like,

let's say there was a capital city and that's where the emperor ruled from or whoever it was. Kyoto. Yeah. What's it called? Kyoto. Kyoto. Oh, that's the capital. Yeah.

Yeah. So you would have a strong force of like another country or not country. or not country, but more of like a feudal territory, come in, overthrow the emperor, and then take over. Well, you just battled against somebody. You're weakened from the battle to take over, and now all of a sudden you have all these other feudal areas. The next wave is on its way.

Yeah, the next guy is like, okay, we're at full strength. These guys are at half strength after beating the previous regime. We're going to go in. Same thing happens. So you get all this changeover because no one can stay strong enough to repel an attack. That's what I would do. If I saw someone moving in,

I was like, I'll take on the winner of that fight. Yeah, wait for two weeks. Let them settle their beef. And then if the side coming in to Victoria. Let their men get comfy and kind of relaxed. It's a hell of a strategy. Part of their daily life, just as samurai in these villages that they were around,

this one's going to be tough. the weapons that they just basically carried around with them everywhere they were called Daishos and it was the katana and the Wakazashi Daisha was the word for if you had two swords That's I think what it translates to is just two swords I think what they said is that the only people at a certain point To be allowed to carry two swords were actual samurai

And they had this rule Called the Kiri Souti Gomen Probably got that way wrong But samurai's had the right to kill people for doing anything that they deem like disrespectful. Anybody lower in the cast system than them? Yeah. So if you were like an artist or something like that, you were walking through like the Saturday

market, whatever they had back then, and you touched the samurai sword and he wasn't cool with it or you didn't apologize, he could just whip his sword out and cut your head off. And they were pretty high up in the cast system. Yeah, they were number three. Yeah. So, I mean, they had that ability with a lot of. lot of people. So I don't know if they used it, you know, to their advantage, but that situation now, well,

that situation nowadays, I guess we kind of see it a little bit, but hopefully not as much as we see it on the news. But if you just let like random civilians that carried weapons around, like if you just disrespected them and they would get away with it, that would be a crazy hard place to live because you just have to be like, like we were talking about. They don't make eye contact on the street. Is that something that's been ingrained for so long that you just like don't look at other people?

Somebody did a samurai at some point taking a front to somebody lesser than them or lower in the castes than them looking at them too long, killed them, and all of a sudden, everyone adopted the position of don't look at them. Just stare at feet. Yeah. The two swords that we were talking about,

the katana and the Wakazashi, they carried the Wakazashi just basically in the beginning as a measure of if they disrespected somebody or if they disrespected their family or if they did something terrible, they would use the Wakasashi just to commit suicide. What? Oh, if they did something. Yeah. Sepuku. Sepuku, yeah. So Sapuku was just self-harm. It was basically what it was is, and I might get this a little bit wrong, but the basic just of Sepuku, from my understanding, is that it allows them to at least try to retain part of their honor or gain some of their honor back by performing the act itself.

Which is kind of crazy because in sumo wrestling for a long time now, thankfully, it's just ceremonial. But the referee in a sumo match will actually carry like a Wakazashi now. And the only reason that they carried is just for ceremony. but back in the day if they were to like call a point wrong or call a match wrong or something like that and everybody disagreed with it,

they would walk to the center of the sumo circle and they would commit Sapuku in front of everybody and then just bring in a new new referee. Like they took it that seriously. Do you ever happen to John? He missed that foot outside the ring. He missed the foot outside the ring.

John's dead. What happened? He had a Sapuku. They gave him a Sapporo? No, no, no. No, he committed Sapoku. Sapuku. Sapuku.

The way that they had figured out how to make these swords was just Japanese swordsmithing in the world getting a little outside here. Do you think that the katana, what do you think the most famous kind of sword is? If you had people described to you, do you feel like it's like a medieval, like English sword? Probably. Like as soon as I hear sword, I think sword in the stone, like something that was sort of a bigger.

Draw your sword. Yeah, like a knight's sword. I think. But then as soon as someone shows you, Katana, you're like, that's a sword. Yeah, it's just bad ass. Yeah, that's a sword. Well, it's like it's so cool that it's not known as a sword. It's when you say katana, you're just like, oh, yeah.

The amount of time that they would put into these things. And one of the kind of. kind of cool things that they did learn from being able to ride on horseback because the reason a katana is curved is so you can pull it out of the scabbard easier when you're on horse isn't the other reason too that if you have a curved sword it's the reason I think why arabic swords per or yeah are curved so much what do you call those ones uh there's a few different words for them um oh wow anyway um the reason that those are curved is because when you're fighting on horseback

and you go to slash at somebody, the curve allows the blade to keep kind of traveling along the body. Yeah. Instead of like a straight where it actually might just pull you off the horse, there's the curve that you're going to let the blake give a little bit with the blade, but it's also the curve is going to allow it to pass through the body. Yep. And as a defensive mechanism, if you do have a curve and somebody goes to strike

and catches the back of your blade, you have a little bit more power to be able to pull to see if you can disarm them. Oh, okay. The way that they were made, though, was really cool because like we were talking about, they would take lesser metals and start cutting and folding them in with the actual strong sword steel that they would use. And it would allow them to be more flexible. So if you were out there and you were in a sword fight and somebody hit your sword, it would just bend instead of shatter. And one of the ways that they put the curvature in besides just forging it in is they would run clay up the back.

and then when they would heat treat it to make it strong, they would do it face down, so blade down. And then as they would lift it up, since the back of it wasn't as hot because the clay would stop from being hot, it would actually naturally curve the metal back. So they could curve, I want to say there's some of them

that they found that had like four to five inches of curve, which is just an insane amount of curve to be able to... Just natural. Yeah. Just natural from the heating process. No, I think that's... I mean, that's, what's, how, how often is that the focus of movies or, you know, TV shows or something like that, just, you know, the Kill Bill movies? Yeah. The, besides them with theremin, the Hattano.

Hansa Hattashi or something like, Hattashi Hanzo sword. And it was like the most well-known, well-reveared swords. And, you see them everywhere. Just the history of what they used was something that is. always just going to go on. I think we'll be watching movies like 50, 60 years from now, and you'll still see the same thing. It'll be, I don't think history in the realm of, like, movies is ever going to stop. No. Because the further you get away from something, it's almost like the more interesting it is. Like, it almost becomes a storyline that you can do something with

that people didn't know or realize. It almost feels to the point, too, like something like this, it gets so sensationalized, too, that it almost feels like, It's not real. Yeah. There's a ton of different just fables. And I think they were called the 47 Ronan were a group of samurai that their master had died. Their diamo or, wow. Daimo.

Daimyo. Dimio. Or their leader had died. And one of the things that they used to do was if your leader had died and you had failed him, they would all commit Sapuku. but there were these 47 samurai that decided not to because they wanted to get revenge on the guy that killed their...

Yeah, he got assassinated. And so their failure technically would be the lack of ability to protect their dime yo. So instead of that dishonor, first they decided to go ahead and kill the guy and then if they lived, then they would do Sepuku.

Well, they actually, instead of doing some puku, they did sneak in, and this is all legend and lore. After they killed the guy, all 47 of them turn themselves in. So they turn themselves into the authorities or the guy's samurai and then they were all led to the square and they were all disemboweled and killed too. Gotcha.

So I don't know how that story would live on without there being like some parts of it being true. I think it's probably like a lot of like myths and legends is that there are, you know, as long as they're not just straight up ridiculous. I think there are inspirations like true inspirations. behind that. All the details might not have been correct or some things might have been, you know, bumped up a little bit to make it more exciting. But how realistic is that? You have a daimyo that has a bunch of samurai, a rival, Daimio kills him. And it's been established. Well, yeah, and it's been established that the Ronan were, that was a real thing with the samurai. It was a samurai without a master. You got these 47 guys. How natural is that going to be to say, hey, they just killed a, our guy, we're just going to go kill their guy. That doesn't seem like a far-fetched story. Yeah, we'll fulfill our duties. We'll turn ourselves in afterwards. We just want to get a little bit of

revenge. Yeah. So, they were all fairly, I don't know, disciplined, which, going into the Bushido code again, this was something, we're going to keep bringing it up, so we might as well just get to it.

It was created by a shogun named Minamoto So Yoritomo, around 16, 16, so later on in their existence. But the Bushido Code basically has eight tenants. The first one's justice, the second one's courage, third one's mercy, fourth one's politeness, fifth one's honesty, honor, loyalty, and character. So kind of like everyday things that you would hope normal people would... You want these guys to be the paragon's of your society.

Yeah. You want them to be able to stand up for justice and to have the courage to fight, but to also have mercy on anybody that they thought was disrespecting them in public, so they didn't chop your head off. Well, these guys are an extension of you. Yeah, they are. Like, if you're the Shogun and you want to, you know, you want people to love you, you're not going to order your, essentially, your special forces units to go out and just act like a bunch of assholes.

which I think they had a decent amount of power just being shoguns and having so many daimyo underneath them and so many other samurai if there was some asshole that was acting up they could probably take care of them pretty quick especially when they enforce the bushelow code and say if you're not living by this we're just going to kill you. They had just some absolutely impressive wars and I don't know if it's fantasy, I don't know if it's fiction

but one of their biggest things that they had was an invasion by the Mongols which was the Yuan dynasty and it was 1274. The Mongols basically came over like, hey, do you want to trade? Do you want to do some work together? We want to also inhabit this area too. So are you going to let us in? And the Japanese are like, nah, we're not doing that.

This is our land. We fought hard enough for it. We're going to make this happen. So the Mongols were like, all right, we'll see how this goes. they ended up sending over 40,000 men and 900 ships, and they were only met by 10,000 samurai, which that's bad numbers. But somehow, magically, the world was on their side,

and in the middle of the fighting, there was a bunch of thunderstorms in an alleged tsunami that came, and as the Mongol ships were all in port, they had tied them all together, just basically to build like a little island out there that they could go back to. the wind, water, everything kicks up. They end up smashing into each other,

and there was only a few boats that survived. And so the Mongols just boarded those boats and went back. So the Japanese people almost felt like they had sort of like... I read like it gave them like almost confirmation that their like home has, you know, their home was protecting them and that their purpose was divine, something like that. Yeah, they had like a divine reason that they could never be defeated because of, it.

So that first one, I'm sure they're just, they have no doubt that they're the king dick around. They could take over anybody or they could take out anybody that comes to try to take them over. They could run through whoever they needed to at that point. Well, after that had happened, didn't, how do you pronounce it, it's Mongol? The Yuan dynasty. So the leader of the Yuan dynasty in that time frame, because that was at 1274 when that happened over the course of the next few years he kept sending emissaries yes this is so awesome like

five at a time and every single time he sent these groups of five guys they would just get their heads chopped off and then sent back and then literally he would just be like all right send five more guys yeah like he did it like two or three times when are you eventually like hey these dudes aren't coming back maybe they're getting beheaded over there maybe we need to actually come into some more conflict. Yeah. Well, then in 1281, they send, they figure, okay, we're going to go ahead and send more men.

They send 140,000 men on 5,000 ships. And at this point, the samurai now that they're able to muster number 40,000. Did you see the wall thing that they built too? It was out in the harbor, yeah. It was like the harbor wall, and it was like 12 miles or something like that. It's like, just land somewhere else, man. Like they spent all this time building this wall. I guess also that because.

none of the Mongols were able to make it back because they kept beheading them all. They didn't know that they were even constructing this. So it was kind of going to be news to whoever you want was sending over. Well, yeah, and you give them less of an area to land around the fighting, or you make them drive further around it in a boat. You have more chance to get off more arrow shots and just start attacking them before they could even make land, which luckily for them somehow again, and there's a word that they'll end up using after this one

that ties into American Japanese. It's kamikaze. It's in wind. So as the Mongols were trying to land, another typhoon comes out of nowhere, which again seems like great timing. I don't know if they just had typhoons every other day or what.

It's an island down in the Pacific, man. I would have mentioned, like, you'd never hear a lot about it, but I would imagine there's a fair bit of like storms or hurricanes. I mean, think of Florida. Like, Florida deals with like... Volcanic activity out there. Something to kind of push that. Yeah.

So another typhoon comes and just wiped out a ton of their ships to the point to where they were only landing so many that the samurai that were there, the 40,000 you were talking about just basically had a field day with them. And so they pushed the Mongols back again. And they started believing in what they called the divine wind, which is what you were talking about, Kamikaze is what that means is just divine. vine wind um that that right there says something to me about that being part of japanese culture that this this is probably very well known in japan is like i i don't know to what degree

or what to compare it to but if this is the point in which the japanese really go ahead and become, you know, the Japanese, this was their kind of test for independence or their big battle test to see if they were going to stand as a nation. This is kind of like their revolution, their revolutionary war. So if, like, people learn about this type of stuff, this Mongol thread in Japan is their kind of like, this is our revolution, our version of the American Revolution, then you would see the samurai being so revered in their country. but you would also see then the divine wind using that phrase kamikaze

to try to inspire these people to just fly bombs into planes and die like does that, am I thinking too deep into that? You're asking because the people that were kamikazis is they've gone back and looked at their journals and their letters they sent home. They didn't

want to do that stuff. Some of them were fanatical enough to want to do it, but a lot of them they had to get them, you know, drugged up, get them drunk, and they still didn't want to do it. So you're trying to do everything you can. You're like, hey, this is kamikaze. This is the divine wind. You're trying to, like, use your culture

and, like, these big moments from your culture to try to inspire these guys to give their lives for their country. I don't think it's overthinking it. I think it's just almost tough to talk about because we've never been to Japan. We've never been around there. I assume that their history classes are a lot like ours where you learn about these certain different things

that happen in ancient times in your country and granted they have a lot more history to go over. Do you think they gloss over stuff that they were on the wrong side of? I don't think they do. You think that's just kind of a... Because I'm not saying we do. We gloss over stuff that we're on.

There's no question we do. But what I'm saying is you think other... I would like to think that other countries have more. What's the word? Is it English? is it integrity? Yeah, Cuth. Yeah, that you,

that if you're willing to go ahead and learn so much about all the good that you've done and everything, that you do need to understand that it's not all good. No. Like, a lot of the successes are things to be proud of

about your country, but you probably have some dark shit in your past, too. I don't doubt that they have a little bit more integrity, but I also do think they do look at things through more rose-colored glasses.

Like, I don't know, how they teach World War II, but there's a good chance that they're like, yeah, you know, we, we did do this, but, like, there's still some justification. I probably could explain what the justification, how they learn about it and be semi-close. I'm sure they don't learn about the, what was it, the Batan death march and all of the horrible shit that happened, like, to the Chinese, the atrocities of the committed against the Chinese and prisoners of war and everything. I could see a lot of that getting glossed over

and I could see the justification, you know, because if that's your country, you're never going to teach. You know, we were just flat out wrong and stupid and everything. You're going to be like, well, we ran into a situation in which we had open trade. And then because of us being on an island, not having as many resources, we had to then reach out and try to conquer new areas

that we could conquer rightfully as part of our, but it was going to be for the good of everybody. We were going to make everyone prosperous, but we maybe just went about it the wrong way. There's sort of justification for the attempt, I think, which in looking at this, too, the fact that if you think World War II times, the 30s and everywhere and there,

they're not too many generations away from the samurai being, like, fixtures in military battles and different things like that. The whole order of the samurai pretty much ended right around 1877. Well, dude, like, have you seen, like, any officers in the Japanese Army in World War II? They all had katanas. Yeah, it was all more ceremonial, and I'm sure if there was hand-in-fighting.

But it takes, how much of it takes inspiration from those, from samurai culture. Well, and that's what I'm saying, when you're being taught back then and all those people, all those pilots that were in school back then, when they're hearing about history and samurai all that stuff, they're being taught kamikaze. They're being basically told But Kamakazi in this sense The divine meaning like defense of their homeland And everything like that

And then when it pops up again during their military duties They're immediately transported back to learning about all the people that came before them That committed Kamakazi in a way that's sort of Fantasized But sounds good Yeah Yeah So I think that

Not to justify anything that they did But I think that they were probably told so much that kamikaze was a good thing that no matter what they did they were still being divinely protected yeah there were a lot of situations honestly when they would give them like meth and everything before just to kind of dope them up and take him out of their own heads and then me like ships are that way how have we gone this far in society and seen I guess we know that meth is bad but where was the jump from it being used in wars and all these different things because they were using meth, the Nazis were using meth and all that.

Oh, dude. When do you think it got out to the public? Do you think it was like in Vietnam when people would be coming back from Vietnam and have heroin addictions for being over there? So then they started to see that there was a market. Like, do you think that the meth market came from? I'm pretty sure that, I mean, I don't know where it originated. We're going to have to get back on topic after this.

Okay. I'm trying. I just, I know. I think probably what it was is meth, you know, or some various. of it was being supplied by the German military to its soldiers in order to power the Blitzkrieg. That's how they were able to go ahead and

overtake a country in like four days. It's because they weren't fucking sleeping. So, how many of those people, though, that were being given this stimulant, were then addicted to it for the rest of the war, then after the war, then the people

that weren't addicted to it because post-World War II Germany was probably a pretty fucking depressing place. Oh yeah, you needed something to get through the day. So I think it all just, I don't know, it's something that wasn't intended to be used like that, but I think it was just one of those things that people started using as probably as an escape. Again, I don't know if exclusive to Germany or whatever, but. Do you think we could do separation and say if there was ever no war, there would be no methamphetamine? There would probably still be meth. Yeah, we would have found it

somehow. Yeah. All right. So they end up, uh, kick the Mongols out. secure victory. Then in 1967... 14. Oh, sorry. A few years back. 1467.

Yoshimitsu, the Shogun falls sparking decades of clan warfare overruling power. So, Yoshimitsu, or Yoshimisu, sorry, is... So he's the Shogun at this time, right? Mm-hmm.

So at this point, though, what happens if a Shogun dies or something happens? Doesn't a new one get appointed by the emperor? Or does such chaos happen after a Shogun passes that you can actually have the transition of power like between different emperors? This is sort of around the time. And I skipped a little bit of sort of how different things would work with as far as how the emperors came into power because there were a lot of people, or not a lot of people,

but a lot of emperors that realize they didn't want to rule just because it was such a big undertaking to have people taking shots at you all the time to try to knock you off your throne, that they would retire pretty young. And as they would retire, they would try to have their hand in choosing new showguns. So they would be able to live a lavish life but still have like kind of like a control of the area from a far. far. Yeah. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Puppets are a great example. So there were a lot of old emperors that would step into these positions of saying, we want you next, we're going to go chill, we're going to go get rub down with whatever the Japanese equivalent of olive oil was. But we want you to lead. And Yoshimasa had a very large empire and he was basically

held in pretty high regard by the rest of the former shoguns and emper. or not showguns, but he was held in high regard by the other emperors because he was the emperor's choice to be that shogun. So he was basically like their choice by proxy. Okay. So after he falls, it's just back to clan warfare again. So basically he was the one running everything. So if he falls, the emperor's not going to know enough of what's going on to actually hold

everything together. The emperor is going to be overthrown. Everything's going to go back to just banana land again, where everybody's fighting for the throne again. So they go through that for a decent period of time, almost 100 years, and then we end up starting to see kind of the first string to be pulled from the armor of the samurai lore. In 1543, the Portuguese landed on an island that was called Tanigashima, and that was basically like the Japanese first introduction into firearms.

they had a good idea of like blasting powder and gunpowder before that because they were still in contact with China. Yeah and I think the Mongols didn't they use like they use bombs. Yeah, small you like the fuse. I imagine that they would look like a miniature version of like the cartoonish bomb you see like a small black ball with a fuse on the end that you light and just check. Yeah, for some reason I see coconut with a fuse out of it. There you go. And that could be, I have no idea what they were made of. but that would scare the living shit out of me.

I think they'd probably seen at this point, maybe cannons or it hurted cannons. I don't, they were so cut off from everybody. I think they knew like, like I said, gunpowder blow up, do that kind of thing,

but I don't think they'd seen cannons before. Because just in their area, I don't know what the Chinese would be using, but they were never a war with them. They were kind of like China Jr. at that point, because they'd emigrated from there where China wasn't trying to take over them yet. In history.

I don't they hate each other now? Yeah. I think there's a lot of bad blood. It's tough to have like a democracy type that close to a communist country, I think. Yeah. Especially when you're from what is now the communist country. Mm-hmm. So.

But. I think some people in China just look at it and they're like, fuck, party island. I bet they would have so much fun there. Like, that would, I feel like if you sent a bunch of people over to Japan from China and they would come back, they'd start a revolution. which would be squashed out immediately. They were just going to stay here. Yeah. Yeah, they probably would never go back.

But the introduction of guns kind of flails right in the face of the samurai way because the samurai felt that the guns kind of threatened everything that they had built. It would take you 10 years to go through a samurai school to learn horse techniques, to learn hand-to-hand combat. It's a shortcut to winning something. Yeah, you could pull some asshole off the street

and give them a week with a flint-lock pistol and teach him how to shoot, and all of a sudden he's the most important person on the battle. A samurai that's been training his whole life. Yeah. And no matter what you say, a guy with a sword or a guy with a bow and arrow or a sword is never going to be as effective as a guy with a flintlock pistol.

No. Like, it's just the way that it is. Before 1543, they said that the majority of deaths that would happen on a battlefield, bow and arrow. After 1543, the majority deaths that would happen on a battlefield pistol. So just that much of a... a world-changing event for them. Well, isn't that the entire plot of The Last Samurai?

Yeah, I'm just not a big Tom Cruise fan. I think I've seen it all the way through maybe twice, which I actually had a realization too about it, is that at first I thought the movie was called The Last Samurai because it was like Tom Cruise is the last samurai, and I felt that that was really just a stretch. Like, really? You're getting called, this guy's going to be the last samurai.

After rewatching the movie, you're thinking about what it was about, it's about the last samurai. So samurai is one of those words where it's like, or like deer or moose. Yeah. You're like, hey, those are deer, and it can cover a lot of them. So what the, it was saying, it was saying, this is a movie about the last of the samurai. Well, and his character, correct me if I'm wrong, because I think I've only seen it once. But we'll get to it kind of towards the end. But a guy named Saigo Takamori was that.

I can't remember the names I remember his name is like Colonel Williams I don't know Anyway he gets hired over there He's a washout from like the what would they call The Continental Army Oh yeah so not even close then Because Sego was an actual

Japanese guy No so this guy is brought over To teach he's hired by the Japanese government And the emperor to teach his army How to use guns We just whitewash the fuck out of this. I know.

Oh my God. But anyway, he gets brought over to teach the Japanese military how to use guns, cannons. They had, I think, Gatling guns. So this was after, he might have actually been, he actually might have been

someone in the South. And then after the Civil War, they lost. He went over to Japan to earn money and trained soldiers to use the weapons now. Keep getting his bloodlust on. Yeah. So he ends up getting captured, by one of like the last either daimyo's or um or samurai clans in japan and lives with them

and learns their ways of course falling in love along the way and uh he gets to then fight at the end as a samurai yeah that we'll get to kind of what they actually consider the last samurai that show you go guy that i're saigo that i was talking about sorry to dominate you yeah no no Uh, probably fit the same height parameter though. Probably. Yeah, you put it in there. Um, so at that point with the samurai feeling like their jobs are sort of being threatened, um, you still have the clan warfare and the feudalism going on where people are knocking

each other off left and right. And we actually run into another sort of mythical thing that I thought was all bullshit until I've learned about it. But during the Sengoku period, which was just a time after, it's kind of like the time after they had had guns. Okay. There was a new type of soldier that showed up. And that new type of soldier was better than a samurai, in my opinion, at that point.

They were called Shinobes. And that was actually what we consider now ninjas, which is pretty sweet. Yeah, it was kind of cool to read about that, that like, samurai and the ninja actually had like a clan type rivalry. And they weren't real pumped about it because samurai's were very deceptive and worked at night a lot of the times and were sneaking past all these samurai to get to the... You just said the samurai did that. Sorry, the ninjas. Yes, they used a lot of deception so they felt that it wasn't honorable.

Yeah, they didn't think that they were had a position or a place on the battlefield because they were just basically sneaks and spies that would go in. assassins. Yeah. Yep. Which I think is kind of sweet. Like, the fact that ninjas were actually something that existed and not just some overly used phrase that people try to talk about for being sneaky. Like there was... They didn't even about that.

They like they associated with knowing like karate or something. Yeah. Like I'm in like, no, it's like full on the first part of Batman begins. Yeah. That's legit. Okay. Yeah. Yeah.

Yeah. Yeah. So it's, in a way they. still served a purpose because they were going through and they were assassinating all these different leaders, these different factions. And I don't know, I think everybody probably

kind of had them in their groups and in their clans because they did serve a good purpose. I don't think it was just the ruling class of the actual shogun that had them that was going out and knocking people off. Well, and one thing too about like the samurai is that kind of part of the

samurai culture was being well-rounded in everything. And that was one of the things that they were so respected for and that they held in such high esteem is that they weren't just warriors, you know, masters of the sword and everything. They were taught to be, you know, statesmen or what you would consider statesmen.

They were well-educated and very literate. Bureaucrats. Yep, they learned about farming and, like, working the land. They learned about the arts. like a lot of things about they would like practice like calligraphy and like do rock gardens and all of this they they had a belief that to be you know the best samurai you had to be you had to have no weaknesses yep like in your game you have to be well rounded and everything worked in harmony to where your ability to work in the rock garden balanced your you know whatever you would consider zen or chi because it wasn't the religion at this point it was a like one of the religions that they really followed was it Buddhism? Buddhism showed up and it kind of snuck around or stuck around but kind of ended up being quashed out too. It was kind of like Buddhism and Confuciism and it was trying to think kind of what.

Yeah, this is going to get to me because Shinto. Okay. Coexists between various sects of Buddhism, Christianity and some ancient shamanistic practices, nailed shamanistic. So they took a little bit of everything About those three or four things And kind of made it their own But still kind of polytheistic Instead of just believing in one god

Because if you're going to believe The divine winds came from somewhere But I mean The samurai had been around for so long It was such an ingrained Part of Japanese culture Like from the inception Of like when Japan was just kind of getting its legs under it

That You know These people that were from these And again These samurai family Aren't they hereditary? A lot of them are. There were a lot of people that were down below in the caste system that tried to move their way up to try to get into some of the upper echelons.

Because it sounds like if you were kind of below that, like if you were below a samurai, shit started getting real bad real quick. Like they, peasants were considered more noble than fucking artisans. Luckily, magicians were down at the bottom of the totem pole, which. which they should be in really any aspect of life, because it's just disgusting. They're just like ninjas, they're receptive. Yeah, true. But, like, artisans, like, ceramics work.

The only way that you would get any kind of shine if you were, like, somebody that made pottery or anything like that, would be if the emperor's family would take a liking to the designs that you made. That would be the only way that you would be able to, like, really make a living. Yeah. It's like when you see fucking influence or wearing, like, a boutique. shirt and they're like oh my god look at this and it gets somehow gets popular like that yeah all you need is one dumb tween talking shit about how great your stuff is and then you blow up but like the samurai

were very revered as like sources of wisdom as well they were very well respected and so kind of a lot of them were even like politicians or like politicians to a degree where they would have influence over whoever was ruling you know in that area a lot of the uh emperors would have certain, you know, samurai within, not within their core, but that they would go to for advice, like well-respected people. And during this time, a lot of what we're talking about comes kind of right around the corner from where we are in the timeline. There were three guys that showed up as they were considered the three great unifiers of

Japan, and these are just their last names. Nobunaga, Hideyoshi, and... Leasu? Yeah. Iasio, I think is, and it's shitty because that's the most important one. But they really tried to push the envelope to start to unify Japan and to get away from feudalism. And that happened right around 1568. And their main goal was just to basically subdue all the daimios that were causing the trouble and the issues.

So they could have kind of one ruling class. And I want to say Nobunaga ended up becoming the Shogun. and then Adiyasu and Iesa or his kind of two right-hand men. Once they finally did become unified, it started to cause issues again with the samurai. This was kind of like the next string to get pulled because they started getting away from samurai being able to carry weapons out on the street. They started to put that stuff away. They started to put the guns away. They tried to basically sort of push back on, we don't need this violence in our culture.

We want everybody to be harmonious. We don't want people carrying swords around that could potentially cut your head off for doing something stupid. And they weren't really big fans of that. And then we run into 1600 right on the nuts somewhere around October. There was a battle of the Psykegara, which broke out between the Toyotomi loyalists and the Yasu forces, which the Yassu forces, which the Yassu forces basically. the first two guys Nobunaga and Hayyoshi

Hideyoshi Who was Tokugawa I believe he was just a daimyo that had had enough He wanted to go back To the old ways

He wanted to be Basically someone Someone that's against the current regime Yeah Whatever you call me Yeah it was just a military government That wanted basically

To get their power Gotcha okay Wanted to bring it back to what it was before the great unifiers were about. And so that was just another battle that was huge to the point to where there were 40,000 samurai that were killed on the first day. 40,000 casualties in a day is just insane. Well, and you figure it with the firearm weapons. had evolved to at this point because again if you know the portuguese are have access to firearms back in 1543 and now this is 1600 on the dot yeah so they they bought a few of them from the

portuguese and then basically reverse engineered them and started making them left and right because they knew the Portuguese showing up the mongos showing up there was going to be an invasion that just kept coming they kind of saw that knocking on the door um oh wow that's embarrassing Yeah, so Tokugawa Iyasu, the guy that was in charge of it, ended up winning and he was just basically took over as the ruling class from the guys that they were fighting against because some of them, the Toyotami were sort of holdouts from the first two. So as soon as Ayashi Wow, God damn it Are you starting to go ahead

And have these words blend together? Yeah, yeah There's a lot of vowels in Japanese words And they pop up Next to each other And just everywhere Right, so Iyasu His forces end up winning

Now does he actually become At this point Like do they reinstate an emperor Or is the Shogun Pretty much just Going to be considered the emperor? at this point. The Shogun is the emperor,

or not the emperor, the emperors basically are just in name now. They don't do anything. They're kind of just fanciful. It's the queen, it's the queen mother at this point. Exactly, yeah, it's Queen Elizabeth at this point. Okay.

So to try to get this back on track because I just completely fucked up and butchered that last little bit. Once Ayasu finally gets in charge, like we were talking, about the show or not the shogun. Fuck this is off the rails for me. Okay, I think I can put this together for you.

Yeah, give me like 30 seconds here to bring it back. So Iyasu's name was Tokugawa. Yeah. The opposing forces that challenged them were the Toyotomi loyalists. And Toyotomi was one of the other unifiers? No, the other unit, the unifiers were no. Nobunaga and Hayidoshi. Heidi Yoshi.

So Toyotomi is just this other guy causing trouble. Okay. I think we're back on. So the Toyotomi lawyers. Do you ever just blank? Yes. Completely just gone zoh? Several times that are on this podcast in which I just pause and go, wait, how did I get here?

Or like, where am I at? Or I forgot my thought. So trust me, yours will come back to you in about three. minutes. This is all going to come back around. You're just going to go, wait, stop. This is one of the great pitfalls of doing a high podcast that sometimes you just blank out. Occupational hazard, man. That's what it is. This is the price of the podcast. Yeah, the rigors that we put ourselves through to give you guys a semi-listable podcast is. See, the error that was made here is on the board. Toyotomi and Tokugawa are right above and below each other.

So when you're reading the lines, it looks like your eyes can kind of get drawn to it. So there were 40,000 soldiers did on the first day. So Tokughey. Yasu's forces there. They end up beating back Toyotomi's loyalists and the Yossu kind of dynasty or his kind of time begins then at that point. And at that point, yeah, yeah, now we're back. We're online again. So the Tokugawa Shogun of Japan, it ruled from like 1603 until 1868.

Yeah, just a long-ass rule. And during that rule, the samurai sort of became more like you were talking about, like more governmental officials. They weren't involved in fighting anymore because Ayasu had taken over everything that took. I mean, it makes sense too, because if you have an empire that you're making or creating and you need to have somebody in these areas who knows how to rule subjects on your behalf. half kind of ruling as your representative, there's not going to be anyone better than the samurai to do this because they're already, you know, trained as statesmen. They already know the lands in which they're going to be looking over. They're in position to... People have already probably look up to them in those areas. So you just have, you know,

it's kind of an automatic built-in, almost form of government for, you know, like, representational government without being representational government. You have people in place, like an infrastructure of ruling, I guess is what I'm trying to say. And at this point in time is when a lot of the samurai start to dabble, like we were talking about in other things, as far as like they would start martial arts schools, it would be times of teaching instead of times of war because they still had all of their training and everything. And they were still being trained the way that they were.

Part of their culture was to pass on that knowledge. Now they could just pass it on in almost different ways, whether than having to worry about wartime. They had this, you know, pretty extensive period of peace. I mean, I'm sure there were insurrections during this time that had to be squash and everything, but it seems like... Nothing can be stuffed out there was no type of, like, there was no type of change to the ruling class.

Yeah. So while all that is happening, we finally get to 1852 and Matthew Perry, not the... Not the guy. Not our Matthew. Not Chandler? No. Okay. Is that, was he Chandler?

Yeah. Okay. See, I know him as Luke Perry's dad and Luke Perry's a preferred. Is that right? No. No, no, no. Okay. So I was way wrong because Luke Perry is the wrestler's dad.

Luke Perry is... Jack Perry. Okay. Jungle boy. Yes. Okay. So, yeah, not Luke Perry, Matthew Perry. Matthew Perry, no relation.

Okay, so it's not a Wilson situation. It's not Owen and Luke? No. Okay. that's right Matthew Perry was in almost heroes huh yes

with Chris Farley him and Farley yeah he was the I think he was like the Lewis to Farley's Clark or some crap like that's right

so Matthew Perry shows up with an American steamship and the Japanese see them coming off the coast and they automatically

just think that the steamship is on fire because all they see is this black smoke billowing from these ships in their defense any time they'd ever seen a ship with smoke around it previously, it was on fire. It was a wooden ship on fire. It wasn't good.

They didn't know what steam power was. They didn't know about steel ships or anything like that. So the Americans roll into town as we have a tendency to do. I think like the Americans got a steamship to Japan. Like over open ocean. Yeah. At 1852. So like not real.

deep into America. No. They were just kind of, we'd figured it out. I assume that they probably had to have sailed from California. We already had a ton. I meant, like, yeah, 1852. 1852, California had to be a part of America.

I would imagine, but still, that would mean, like, let's see, Matthew Perry and I know it's going to pull up the fucking care. You have to go deep. Let's see, I need to do when they say it's different, uh, go to Matthew Perry Disambiguous Disambiguation. What is that?

It's when you like put in something on Wikipedia and yeah I am using Wikipedia you put in something and like Matthew Perry. The first thing it pulls up is Friends Matthew Perry because it's all popular.

You can then click under and it says Matthew Perry Disambiguation and basically what it means is it's going to show you then all the forms of Matthew Perry. No shit. So it'll show Matthew Perry. So this is Matthew C. Perry

American Naval Officer who forcibly opened Japan to trade with the West boom. Oh, he is not a handsome man. He would have been frightening. Hey, and we're out of Pride Month so you can say that. He would have been frightening to look at, and his uniform was very ill-fitting. No, but I'm wondering, so if his expedition to, he was assigned in 1852, a mission by Millard Fillmore.

God, that is... Millie. It's a bad name. I was going to say Millie-Filly. He was actually going to force the opening of Japanese forts to American trade. Like, hey, we're going to send in a gunboat because you're going to trade with us. Yeah, well, and these people hadn't seen a steel ship. They thought it was fucking on fire.

No, but does that sound like the way you get someone to trade with you? That's how you go take shit. You just like, you know, blow through it with a steel boat. You don't like break through and be like, we have stuff for you. You have stuff for us. Let's do business. You don't think they had a bunch of like, shit on the ship.

They Kool-Aid manned the freaking harbor with the ship. And then they were like, oh yeah, let's trade. So let's see, where did he? He would have had to have left from California. There's no other way, because I don't know if the Panama Canal

was a thing yet. I don't know. He embarked from Norfolk, Virginia. What the fuck? in command of the East India Squadron in pursuit of a Japanese trade treaty. So we're learning in real time. He chose the paddle wheel steam frigate, Mississippi, as his flagship.

Made ports of calls in Madeira, St. Helena, Cape Town. Dude, he went the other direction. So he went around South Africa to get there? Yes. Holy shit. God, he went the other way. What does the Mississippi look like?

It's a paddle wheel steamship. So it's basically Oh, okay, I like this. Looks like a riverboat? No, remember, like, you don't see them at all that often, but when you do see them, it's the paddle wheels on the side. It's a sailboat with the paddle wheels on the side of it. It's like a seat? Like a...

So it looks like a cellboat. A boat plane, almost. Not really, I mean, the paddle wheels aren't huge, but, I mean, here, you can kind of see. No shit. So, like, just imagine, like, a big cellboat that you're familiar with, like, you know, and on each side of it, you have like a skinnier paddle wheel like you would see on the back of a river boat,

but they're on both sides. I wonder what the purpose of the paddle wheel, I guess it was just another form of power instead of a propeller, because that's what it was, right? Yeah, it's the only form of power that they had back at that point. So they used a combination of wind

and the paddle wheels to get him over there. But anyway, so he ends up getting over there to force a trade treaty. To force a trade treaty. To force a, a treaty sounds like that. Sign this shit. That's the American way.

So at that point, one of the old kind of OG not super far back, but one of the guys that really longed for the samurai way, Saigo Takamori, who during his time, instead of

sticking around in the Capitol, went back and was kind of a a sword maker of sorts is what he called himself. Basically was anti, like, I don't want to deal with any sort of trade. I don't want, basically, you're fucking things up at this point. Like, we're going to attack. We're going to try to bring this back to where we were before.

He wanted to go back in time, basically, to... He wanted more of a Japanese traditionalist, I guess, is what you would try to call it. That's a good way to put it. Thought that probably, especially after the, situation involving opening out trade with, you know, trade treaties and everything, he probably thought that they were straying too far from tradition. Yeah. Tradition.

I think they had been, there was some talk about how there had been like this 250-year-old policy of national seclusion the Japan had had. The Yon era or something. Yeah, but it was 250 years in which they were, you know, seclusionist. Which would have been 1600 to, to, to, when this was happening right around then. So he led something that was called the Satsuma Rebellion,

which just did not last very long at all because it was traditionalist samurai against a group of people in the Miyishi Empire that ruled Japan that was very happy to use

guns in a fight against a bunch of fellas of swords. And just completely wiped him out. and um... Takamori is basically like the... what they considered the last samurai. That's last samurai for being in Japan was Takamori.

So that basically effectively ended. The samurai was the last Setsuma rebellion. So at that point it kind of gets relegated to what they considered the last, probably like what, like true hereditary, type samurai, like trying to... The last stand of the soldier. There are still samurai families, but they had probably

let that heritage kind of fall into the past. In name more than in practice. Yeah. Well, especially as like, you know, now that there's not really a purpose of the samurai at this point, how often do things stay relevant when there's not really a purpose to them?

At this point now, Japan has started to open up trade. All of these jobs are now, available you know to make a ton of money and I wouldn't be surprised if some of these like samurai families being higher standing families like if you go and you look at some of the more wealthier high class like Japanese families I bet a lot of them can probably tie their ancestry back to families that have them rooted in samurai well you could assume too that a lot of the Japanese military

nowadays probably formed from samurai families or were trained or word or you know, the policy in which the military follows or the, you know, the way that they're structured was based upon, command structure was based upon samurai, whatnot. It, like I'm saying, like, back in World War II, officers carried samurai swords and committed Sepuku if, you know, if they dishonored or they failed in their missions. There was a huge, huge emphasis on, on, I don't know if you would call it pride of country, loyalty, or, like, honor. that if they felt they dishonored themselves, the emperor of their country at all, really the only option was to take their own lives.

Would you consider having a self-defense force, like a standing army? I don't know. Do you, is the term army exclusive to being able to both wage, like, offensive and defensive capabilities? Is that what an army is considered? I feel like it would be, because just to have basically, like, defense is trained at home if you're not on the offensive. kind of what we talked about

on a previous podcast so like the Trojans the Trojans during the whole Trojan War weren't an offensive army but they were considered an army What? This is something Under the post-war constitution of World War II

Japan is not allowed to have an offensive military force In Article 9 declared the Japanese people Forever renounce war is a sovereign right Of the nation in the threat or use of force as means of settling international disputes. So Japan technically doesn't have a standing army. They just have defense forces.

So they're probably allowed in a lot of those treaties, the ones that are actually withheld now or like upheld now. They allow you based on land size population to have a certain number of ships. You can have like just kind of an example. post, I think World War won Germany. They were able to do certain things militarily.

Like they could, actually, maybe they couldn't do anything militarily. There was something that they could do is they could have like air clubs for pilots, but they couldn't be military. So they would like train on like civilian aircraft. They could have a certain number of ships.

I want to say tonnage. Like you could have one aircraft carrier, two battleships. And I don't think that was, I'm probably wrong in saying that that was after World War I. That might have been something to wear like that was part of a different treaty. I would assume it would have had to have been World War I because they realized that... Yeah, but after World War I, I don't think that the Treaty of Versailles was after World War II. No treaty of Versailles was after World War I.

That's the one that Hitler was just like, what is this? No, fuck it. Yeah, that they kept just letting him get away with. Yeah, so I don't think that one allowed Germany to have any type of military, and then they just started rebuilding it and never went to sat around on their thumbs. And we're like, hey, don't do that. Please, please stop building tanks. Okay. It's so funny to me to think about that.

And just think about like you're having a, after you lose a war, you have to sit there and have a discussion like you're a child near the parents. Dude, that was just, I'm almost completely. convinced that that was just like global denial. Like they had just come off of literally the worst world conflict that anybody could ever remember the history of the world. Millions and millions of people dead.

Famine. Families torn. Like Lance just completely destroyed. They're literally coming off of World War I and all of a sudden they see some like fucking crazy person again in Germany. Didn't learn their lesson.

And it's not even that. It's just I think at the point that like everyone that was trying to uphold the Treaty of Versailles and force it, we're just like, this can't be happening. We can't do this right now. There's no way we're doing this again. Come on. This guy's not serious.

And so it was just almost a denial of being like, we just literally got done with something like this. There's no way someone's doing this again. So that's why they just let it happen and happen and then surprise. Well, in Japan after World War II, when everybody in all the access of power were like, Hey, no military for you. They were probably like, okay, we realized that we might have overstepped our boundaries

and the first time that we tried this, we're okay with just not having a standing army. Like, yeah, you're right. They don't need to even have an army at this point because they're so relied upon for technology and other like types of services that only they are like extremely good at. They got big brothers. Yeah, they got, they not only have big brothers, but people won't fuck with them just for the simple fact that they need them. that's a good thing to have. To have loyalty based on not on fear,

but because people need you. I'd rather have that. Yeah, yeah, because you're not going to be relied upon to do the fighting. You're going to be relied upon to make the things. Make the things that they put the explosives in and then travel over and kill everybody. You're the ones that designed that tiny little microchip

that tell this bomb where to go to make sure it hits it to its target. You're the most important part. You're still pulling your weight. So some things that, I was kind of thinking about were, I think I was talking to you last night about this, I thought that Catana's weighed like quite a bit more. Swords in general just weighed quite a bit more,

but two to three pounds, I don't know if I just like don't understand how swinging around two to three pounds, how like tiring that might be. Because I mean it's two, three pounds stretched over the course of lengthwise. So you're getting, you know, you're holding onto one side of it. You've got, you know, most of the weight above your hands trying to control that.

So maybe it is a little tougher than, tougher than I'm thinking. But just saying two to three pounds does not sound like much. It's, when you're talking about swords, the best way that I can relate it to is like when you hold onto a softball bat, like that softball bat, like that softball bat right there, it's 27 ounces. Yeah. So it's going to be under two pounds. But when you are dealing with swords and the length coming out, part of the factor in is what's called the pommel, which is underneath the handle. Yeah.

And to have a balanced sword, you're going to want to have a pommel that's heavy enough for when you swing it and you recoil to come back. You have enough weight underneath to where you're not going to swing all the way through something

and lose control because it's heavier at the tip. So because it's kind of like a counterweight. So your hand is a little ways up on the palm but you want enough weight essentially below your hand that it's helping to move that. Kind of like the train thing, how it's got the weight on the back, but the train thing.

Or like a crane. Yes. Okay, that makes sense. So when you have that, you're going to have one to two pounds at the front, but when you have handles, which on katanas initially before they really figured out that you could have two swords out at the same time, it was a two-handed weapon. So you had enough in the handle to where it was heavy enough when you would slash through something to recoil to pull it back.

It wouldn't be as heavy in the tip because there was still weight in the handle. So two to three pounds You're thinking of maybe one to two pounds of actual steel in front And then enough counterbalance with the handle on the back To be able to move quickly through things And like we were talking about last night When you look at like a Claymore or something that's bigger That was a two-handed weapon

They always have fat pommels at the bottom Because they have to figure out how to counterweight All the mass that's in the blade I can't remember the name of it But the samurai had an equivalent to the Claymore It was just a big fucking katana. Yeah. So some of the other stuff that, you know, just from samurai culture kind of backtracking a little bit,

is that, you know, it wasn't just for these men. Women didn't necessarily fight on the front lines with the samurai, but they were also taught to defend themselves and to defend their families and all of these skills because you would have the men... Otakachi. Gone fighting for these daimyo and everything. Otakachi was the big dog. Otokachi was the big dog.

What was it? the women used that the, um, it was the stick with almost like the blade on the end of it. It wasn't a spear. Naginata. Yes. Which is where Naginta comes from. Yes. From the league.

Yeah. Yeah. I just remember what it was. A naginata was a weapon that they would use mostly from horseback just because you would have the range to be able to use it. But it was a weapon where basically it's still hand-to-hand combat, but you had a range to where it was going to be longer than a... That's why when they would teach women to fight, they would teach them with that because it kept them out of swiping range with an actual katana.

And they were able to go ahead and have that advantage of a little bit of a reach to depending on who they were going to be fighting against. Well, in the earlier days, too, they actually did, like when they go through and they see these old ancient battle sites, they were finding remains of females that were in armor out on the battlefield. So they were still, they sent women out to fight on the front lines in a way, but not in the same. same numbers that they would send the men out. Yeah. And a lot of the samurai wives that were in the families would be trained as a home defense in case somebody were to attack the home while the samurai's were away. So there was still an understanding that the females did have a role in kind of like the

samurai order sort of, but they weren't considered samurai. It's a different word. So why you're looking at up. So probably the most famous samurai. that's known. His name is Miyamoto Masashi. This guy is a bad ass.

Dude. So basically he's considered a swordsman and not just a swordsman. He's considered a Kensai. They have a thing called the Sword Saint. So he's considered a Kensai, a sword saint of Japan.

That's just so bad. You're so good at something. You're the saint of this country. This was the dude that was killing people with the wooden practice swords, wasn't it? Yes. So he was a swordsman philosopher, strategist, writer, and Ronan, who became renowned through stories. He had this unique double-bladed swordsmanship, and an undefeated record in his 61 duels.

The next closest to him is 33. So he was the first guy to introduce using two swords on the battlefields. He used a Wakazashi along with his katana. So to take both hands off of the katana and know that he's going to have a second weapon that nobody's going to. going to be able to defend against. He wrote a book called The Book of Five Rings, which is kind of, it's kind of an art of war type type book, a lot of philosophy about, you know, strategy, using your weaknesses, is your strengths, things like that.

And I think the last match that he had was against, like, his, like, arch rival. And it was... It was the guy that killed his dad. Was it really? Yeah. And he had... It was with wooden, wooden swords. So it wasn't like, a lot of his victories when I say like his duels,

these duels were like with wooden swords. Into submission. But there were times when he was cracking people in the head with the wooden practice swords and still killing them. Yeah. Yeah, these things aren't like soft. Like you could like. It's like getting hit with a smaller baseball bat.

This is the, this is a sword saint of Japan. He could kill you with anything. Yep. He'll kill you with a pine cone. But yeah, I'm trying to think of what his, what the guy's name was that was his, his rival. Yeah. It was like his greatest,

it was the greatest duel that he had, and I can't remember what it was. Well, you're looking that up earlier on in his career. He had run into a guy that was basically like the head samurai, this other clan, and ended up smoking him and killing him with just a single blow to the basically top of the head with a wooden sword and killed him. And the guy that he killed, his younger brother, steps up and says,

you're not going to go ahead and defeat our clan. You took out our guy. I'm going to take you out. He steps up. And he cared so little about this fight. The guy that you're talking about the sort of name. Yeah, Masashi. Masashi showed up late to the duel and basically said, hey, you're waste of my time.

Let's just get this over with. I'm going to show up. So he ends up killing Masashi with an actual blade because they were going to fight to the death. And after Masashi wins that one, the third family member, the third brother steps up. This kid was like 12 years old. A 12 year old and they say he wants to fight you, we're going to duel to the death. You're going to show up at night to do this. And Masashi realizes that normally duels don't happen at night.

So he thinks that there's something kind of up and funky. and this is where the story gets kind of fanatical. But Masashi actually showed up a few hours early to kind of scope things out and see what was going on because he thought there was some fishy stuff going on. Oh, you want to mean tonight? Okay. Yeah. So he shows up and sees that this 12-year-old

is surrounded by a bunch of archers and a bunch of other samurai that were hiding. Masashi supposedly sneaks down out of the mountains, cuts the 12-year-old's head off, then continues to fight the other samurai and gets out unscathed from the archers that were standing around so he didn't get shot by one arrow but just completely wiped out this entire samurai family.

The guy is just the stuff of legends. A lot of this seems like it's stretched but Masashi is a guy who he's kind of like their Achilles. He's just their champion. So I think this guy's name is Sasaki Kojiro And he is

So he was Miyamoto Masashi's Arch rival And The guy that killed his dad Let's see So There's battle with me

Some I'll show Masashii was killed Yep It's The stories are so cool So what would I was trying to figure out

What the American equivalent Of Samai would be And the only thing To come up with is the Cowboys but like, yeah. Like what would you think would be, you know, something in our past that is, and I'm not thinking I've been comparing them like their roles in our culture or society.

What I'm saying is their relevance. So like when people think, if you really just think of like Japan, what's one of the first things if people were to think about Japan and you were to show them images of Japan, samurai would have to be top three images. If you're trying to go and explain Okay, or if you're showing someone Images and you're asking them what country Identify this country You show someone to samurai You're like that's Japan

You show someone to cowboy You're American But what I'm trying to like get out here is Look how much like history and culture Like the samurai have The cowboys were just like A bunch of freaking like bandits with syphilis Just riding around on fucking horses

is robbing everything. I think it's just an element of time. I mean, the samurai started building in the 8th century. It is, but isn't that like a, that is like a perfect representation of kind of,

it feels like the two countries. One of them feels like the Wild Wild West with all these cowboys running around doing just whatever the fuck they want, then you have, you know, that's the big thing that people always think about with Japan anyway is it's very structured.

It's a very structured. very about the, I feel like especially with their, you know, you always see like in Japan like people wearing like masks. They wear them when they're sick as like an unselfish way to keep other people from getting sick. Yeah. They, it's disrespectful in their culture. It's a very courteous culture. I don't think we have a courteous culture. No, the closest I think I can get just with like the fact that they were kind of hired guns would be like the Secret Service. I think the Secret Service is a highly trained group of individuals meant to defend

higher, like a daimiao, like a a politician. I would think maybe... In more of an independent kind of thought process, maybe like a private military contractor. Yeah. Because you're you know, like you were saying with the samurai, they're not unnecessarily guns for hire, but they're loyal to a daimyo. The loyal to who pays them. Correct. And so it doesn't necessarily have to be the emperor or the Shogun because you had other daimyo's that tried to go and overthrow them. They had samurai with them.

There's not really a national presence to that. I don't think there's a comparison. I just think it's just crazy that that's all I could think of was just the freaking cowboys. Well, and they were just kind of lawless too. They had their own, the Bushido that they had to stay loyal to. But beyond that, they could do whatever they wanted. That's one thing, too, that I read is it's like, you know, there is the, you know, like with everything, there's a romanticized version of this kind of stuff where

people see samurai and they think, you know, the honor, the code and everything, but they do realize that with anything, there is going to be bad apples. You know, you're going to have outliers that are criminals, that are samurai or that are ruthless, that are samurai and kill just because they have the ability to kill. Well, and unfortunately, what I was thinking earlier that I stopped myself from saying was like the police force. Yeah. Not all of them are bad. They have power over the public.

They serve their purpose. Some of them. They're meant to inspire people. Yeah. To be, you know, to be the, I know I said this before, but to be the paragonal society, you want to feel safe and everything, but they still do have this weird kind of control over you that does make you, can make you fearful. Absolutely.

Yeah. It's not a great example, but I think it's kind of the most on the nose because they are, you have municipal police forces, you have city police forces, you have sheriff's offices, there's people that are given a higher platform to serve under a daimio type mayor, something like that. One of the, one of the craziest things about this is that they came from, you know, Japan geographically is not large. No, not at all. No. It's shockingly small. So the fact that this part of their culture has had such like a huge impact in some ways that people don't even know about, you know, on the outside world. And how many things that we kind of look at that are inspired essentially by either the samurai themselves or samurai culture, you know, how many of our just going to the Bushito?

That's basically a code of conduct. every military now has a code of conduct Yeah Yeah they have their own courts for it Yeah they're not militias They're they're not lawless or anything like that There are rules and there is a code of conduct So that in itself right there

Any military that has a code of conduct worldwide It's gonna owe some type of like inspiration To the samurai for that As far as just like even in even like pop culture and everything So you know Star Wars was inspired by the samurai So there was a movie essentially made called the Hidden Fortress, and it was about, I don't know if it was brothers,

but they are hired to, like, escort this princess along this dangerous road. And this is Star Wars? No, this is the Hidden Fortress. Okay. But it's confusing because now you explain that, like, yes, you have two heroes. You have Luke Skywalker and Han Solo,

two guys escorting a princess down on dangerous road, rescuing Princess Leia, taking her off the Death Star and taking her. Okay. So the Secret Fortress is Japanese Lord? Yes, so the Hidden Fortress was a Japanese movie inspired by Samurai because the characters in that movie are samurai, samurai being hired to escort this princess. So the inspiration from that is what George Lucas took and made into Star Wars.

And then you have, you know, the lightsaber, which is essentially a laser, laser katana. Slices through anything. Good recoil. the Jedi are a cast of basically warrior monks It isn't Jedi Japanese Isn't the actual word? It sounds like it

If you're gonna If you were to say that word And it had no actual meaning There wasn't any connotation or meaning to it I would say that's a Japanese word But I mean you had this entire You know Now when you look back on it

And you look watch those movies You're like oh yeah that's definitely have you ever heard of a movie a lot of people make reference to it The Seven Samurai That's an old one isn't it Yeah so the original Seven Samurai

Was Was pretty old But what it basically established was It was like the first Like team up Like assemble a crew For like a mission type movie Kind of like the 47 Ronin you're talking about

How they were together to The Seven Samurai is basically a movie about these seven samurai that go I believe they're like hired by a village that is being terrorized like another group and these seven samurai I believe they're seven Ronan are collected together to form a team to protect these people and so think of any movie

The Magnificent Seven that's based on the seventh samurai any movie that you see having like a team up was inadvertently inspired by this legend in Japan about these, you know, seven samurai in this movie. So there's just a lot of stuff that gets pulled from this culture.

And I'm really trying to think if, can you think of, okay, so think of like how often you see like, of course it's going to stand up to you right now because you literally just spent, like you said, you feel like you spent two, like two weeks in Japan because you've been watching so much stuff. But put that excluded, think of how much you do see, I think, like, Japanese or like samurai influence stuff,

either on TV or, you know, if you're reading a magazine or looking online or something like that. Is there anything like that kind of exists in that same way? I mean, we still see cowboy culture here because it's part of our culture. You still see cowboy hats, cowboy boots, all that kind of stuff, but not like traditional, like, wild, wild, West Cowboys, but I'm just trying to think if there's been like a group of individuals or kind of like a sect of people in a country that have had like, because there's something very just like appealing about. What is it? What's so appealing? Like what's so cool about samurai?

Is it is it a combination of everything? Is it the fucking swords, the martial arts, the fact they're smart, the cool armor, the battle, like what is it? I think it's a lore. It's just the the abilities that they have and the stories that we hear about them. I think a little bit of it is kind of like, you know, you heard about like the ghost of Kiev. And I don't know or care to find out if it was true or not because it's an awesome story that I think brought a lot of hope to Ukrainian people. The ghost of Kiev. Yeah. Yeah.

It was taking down motherfuckers left and right. And I think it's that kind of thought process of these legends that come out of it. And a shitty version of it today that I would say would probably be all the people that don't want to serve in the military but still want to wear like military themed shit. Like you get to people that wear the shirts that have the flags on the arms and have all these catchy sayings about don't touch my guns and all that shit. I think there's an air of the side of people that want. wanted to be like in the military, but couldn't be, but still wanted to make it sort of... They don't want the obligation to do it. They just want all the benefits of being like, oh, I just want the fun part of it without

anyone telling me what to do. Yeah. And I think that that's a probably not the same thing when you talk about samurai because the discipline culture that they were in and just kind of that, I don't think there's a lot of misappropriation to like job titles in Japan. Like there's not a lot of people. Stolen valor, I don't think is a thing in Japan. No.

So I don't think that it's that It's too honorable of a society Yeah you just wouldn't think of Like shame of family It's so crazy to me how much like I I guess like if I If I was to go ahead and shame somebody

I wouldn't be worried about like my lineage Like my family life No I'd be worried about the shame that I brought to those people That I care about that are close to me That being even inside and outside of my family But like Family prestige and

honor, like in those Japanese cult, you know, those Japanese families is just, it's huge. Well, and I think part of it is we have this weird thing where we are a large country, but we're a large country that's so spread out that... We're not spread enough someplace. No, not enough. But you're talking about a small island that has 125 million people on it in that dense of an area. Yeah.

So family and lineage is going to be a lot more when you're living in a village that only has a certain amount of people That's true In it that all live so close Whereas us, I mean if we fuck up Bad enough you probably just move to another state and like it wouldn't bring shame and honor or wouldn't be Dishonored your family You could move just a couple cities away most likely and never run into anybody or never have that shame follow you No, yeah, there's

There's so many options for us to go to whereas a hundred and twenty five million people on an island And you have to, it's going to follow you wherever you go. They're just, they seem like they're just good. It's so many things like, like, like, like wagoo. Yeah. Yeah. It's, you've got it down to the science where you're just breeding the most delicious. You can't eat a ton of it.

No. But just the most delicious. And it's horrible how they get the cows like that. Well, is it delicious. I mean, they let them graze whenever they want. Yeah, but like really think about it. Like, they massage them. I know.

No, but really think about, like, how much, like, if you look at a piece of, like, prime, prime, like, crazy expensive wagyu, it almost looks more fat than muscle. It's so beautifully. I know it is, but, like, to me, looking at it not from a standpoint of getting ready to eat that steak, but from a standpoint of, like, is that animal, like, functional? Like, you have that much fat within the muscle. Like, if you, imagine if you cut into a person and you saw that much fat and that little muscle, you'd be like, this motherfucker is. fat. That guy lived a Cush life. That guy didn't do shit. I know, but

that, that, if it was anything else, that would not be appealing. It's something about, they figured out that cow, that they were just like, we can somehow just get this thing fat and fucking delicious. Well, and you're not thinking about the end get, you're not thinking

about like a geriatric cow. You're not thinking about an old cow, because he's got an expiration date all the time. I guess not. A human. Plus, if you think about it too the fact that the Japanese want to go that extra mile to create something so delicious

by painstakingly taking care of such animals sushi's fucking awesome you don't like sushi raw meat just isn't appealing to me I guess it depends I have my levels of sushi I like you know there's probably people out there that like

the strips what do you call that like sushi where it's actually the strips of fish like I'm a role person like I don't mind the raw fish I'm a roll person But I guess that's what I mean. But like, it's delicious. You're not looking for the uni, the, the row, the eggs that are sitting on top of things? I don't mind that on a little bit on top of rule.

I'm not like an eel sauce person. Like the names of some of the stuff, I'm sure it's delicious, but you got to make it more appealing for the name. That's Americanizing that shit. I know, but like figure out a different name, like eel sauce. Like, do you think an eel sounds appetizing? And I definitely don't want, I don't want wherever the sauce is coming out. out of it. You're also, America is such a culture of, to put it bluntly and probably not really well waste. Like over there, when you're creating a ramen and you're trying to build a broth or anything,

this has gone into food talk real quick. Raman over there isn't ramen here. That there's a completely different thing. When you're constructing a broth, you're using bones, you're using tendons, you're putting everything that we don't eat into that broth to make it flavorful. And the culture's over there more in Chinese food culture than Japanese food culture, but you're eating like tendons and you're eating the grisly parts that we throw away and that we discard here. You're eating that because. Yeah, but at the same time, like you say that, like it's just like the tendons and everything like that might gristle might be disgusting. How much of that shit actually gets processed into what we're shoved in our faces every day?

Oh, if it's a sausage, it's fine. because it's eatable. Or a processed patty of something. True. Yeah, but they just, it's a culture where they don't waste everything. They take so much pride in everything that they don't waste it. When you're, like, I cook a lot of my beef in tallow because it's just beef fat. Yeah.

So it's going to be, to me, in my brain, I think what's going to be the best way to cook this? Probably with everything else that was in the cow. But I'm not going to think about intestines or anything like that. because those are things that don't seem not a not a real nose to tail no yeah no me neither all right well what do you think uh i think samurai's been been going over i think we're samuraied out yeah a little bit all right well guys thanks for listening again and uh we'll catch on the next one please all right guys hey thank you so much for making it through another episode and uh sticking with us if uh you want to kind follow up on the next upcoming episodes, get some teasers. Adam, can they get us on the Twitter?

You can get us on the Twitter. Our Twitter handle is historically high. That's historically H-I. Nice. And on the Instagram? Our Instagram is historically high pod. That's historically high P-O-D. And what happens if your social media inept? If you have any issues where you can't figure out social media. Our email is historically high podcast at gmail.com. We set up a landline. Just in case. You guys can go ahead and shoot us any question, comments, or even maybe suggestions for future episodes, something you guys want to hear. Yeah, high thoughts, questions, anything like that. We're always open. We'll always get back to you. Hell yeah, guys. See you on the next episode. Peace.