Wednesday, October 25, 2006

Samurai's Daughter

Samurai's Daughter


Until the 1870s, Japan had been a feudal society in which farmers accounted for 85 percent of the population and samurai for seven percent.

Tokyo meaning the east capital (then called Edo meaning an entrace to the sea) had a million population among which samurai accounted for 50 percent, since it was the capital of the Tokugawa samurai regime (called Bakuhu), and every samurai feudal lord all over Japan was obliged to have an official residence in Edo in addition to the one in a castle in their own feud or territory called Han.

Samurai can be easily known from farmers, merchants, and craftsmen, for they wear garments particular about formalities as well as a pair of swords, a large and a small one, or outwardly a long and a short one.
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Once a samurai took his son and his daughter, in ages of schoolchildren in the lower grades of today, to an exhibition of a tiger. Though tigers had never made their habitats in Japan, the animal was always popular among Japanese, since it actually lived in the Korean Peninsula and it was the strongest kind of animals in North East Asia.

The samurai found that his little daughter was not frightened by the tiger exhibited alive for that certain occasion.

So, he decided to give her a dirk or a dagger, or a very small knife that could be hidden even in the hilt of a large sword.

Usually, when a woman of a samurai clan was given a dirk, it was meant that she should use it not only in fight but also for committing a suicide to protect the honor of herself and her family.

But, the samurai did not tell anything about such a samurai code; he just simply said to her, "As you are a strong girl, you could keep it."

Later when she got old, and the samurai era had gone through a civil war and modernization of Japan had begun, she recalled the memory and just wondered what her father, who had also served his lord as a scholar, had thought of when he had given her the dirk.
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If you have a strong soldier, you could trust him with a mighty weapon. But, applying the paradigm to a girl at a playful age of today is unthinkable.

Anyway, the more you are given, the more you are requested of.

Yes, the stronger you are, the stronger companion you might need in case.
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The glorious Meiji Restoration, crowned with the victory of the Japanese-Russo War, has been left behind in history so far away from the Japanese of today.

Then, the materially simple but culturally deep and abundant Samurai Era has been left further away from today's Japanese.

Yet, in the age of globalization, some people might love to hear this kind of report on the samurai era.



"BUILDS ITSELF UP THROUGH LOVE"