General Japanese Culture Thread

Date Masamune apparently suffered from bad relations with his mother due to losing his eye to smallpox as a child. These are very heavily ingrained attitudes in some places, especially in more stratified places like schools.

Edited by TerminusEst on Feb 11th 2019 at 10:24:23 AM

That is so weird, for a warrior society, or at least a warrior-class like the samurai. I mean, what warrior worth the name doesn't have a scar or two?

Samurai were big on aesthetic, and having a missing eye was "ugly". Plus, there were religious reasons for it as some Taoist/Buddhist beliefs claim that the body needs to be intact for the future steps of incarnation.

It doesn't help that Masamune didn't lose his eye in battle, but essentially to smallpox.

This is a useful article on the spiritual significance of bodily integrity in Shinto, although most of what you need to know is that Japanese uses the exact same word for 'wound' and '(spiritual) impurity'.

Yagyu Munenori was Demonized for similar reasons as a result of missing an eye (Hell, he's demonized almost as much as Nobunaga is).

Now I'm starting to realize why Christianity could be seen as "disruptive" for the cultural order of Japan.

Right, right. I knew some of that. There was this one Oscar-nominated (winner?) Japanese film about this guy taking a job as an undertaker. Seeing his girlfriend's reaction was... most bizarre.

And again, the whole "warrior class" bit. If death is unclean, surely one ones that deal it are the most unclean of all, rather than the clean-up crew?

If it sounds like I'm ragging on this concept, I'm really not. I'm just kinda confused by it.

Yah mean aside from the usual "Vanguard of the Spanish/Portugese invasion"?

Edited by Kayeka on Feb 11th 2019 at 8:37:12 PM

Explains a lot about the burakumin who are the invisible "Untouchables" of Japan due to the jobs they historically took.

To be fair, the Spanish and the Portuguese were already stretched thin and wouldn't do anything as they had the Dutch and the English to worry about.

Oh, I'm sure there were some logistical issues regarding actual conquest, but the Jesuit playbook was still pretty much "convert some of the populace, and have them stir up rebellion to spread the good word".

There are a lot of ways to understand Christianity that are very disruptive to the status quo.

Japan is finally starting to show some progress in these areas. They have their own version of the Me Too! movement, and many Japanese objected to the treatment of the idol who was assaulted in her home.

I'd rather the idol industry dissapeared completely, but this is a step on the right direction.

Mind you, that even warrior monks existed as temple militia and even fully formed armies. War calls for extreme pragmatism, so it's not that weird if a person behaves as expected in society and takes thirty heads in a war. Warriors were intimately aware of possible bad karma and spiritual grudges, developing various ways to avoid them (spells, certain finishing strikes etc.).

An important thing to remember is that it is always your fault, especially when it isn't your fault.... Its much easier to accept that and just move on then it is to try and fight it.

Yes, and if you think this is bad you should hear about what goes on with those that suffer debilitating injuries....

A fun part about that is that it wasn't always purifying yourself after the death of your enemy either.....

Rituals were taken BEFORE battle as well, to try and mitigate the impurity that your enemy would suffer when they killed you.

Edited by Imca on Feb 11th 2019 at 12:45:11 PM

Ableism is pretty deeply rooted in Asia, I believe.

I don't know how mentally diseased people are treated, but I'm going to take a wild guess and say "not well".

Basically, Samurai were a class of Combat Aestheticist types trying to make death as "sanitized" and "poetic" as possible. The whole ceremony of harikiri is the key example of Samurai going to ridiculous lengths to make sure death is aesthetically pleasing rather than "unclean".

This would depend on the era and the situation. Accounts from the Heian to the Sengoku period have pretty blatant cases of treachery and cold-blooded murder, meant for general consumption of the literate classes. Brutality was largely expected, deception was the norm and a seppuku could be done pretty messily in field conditions.

There has always been a dissonace between what the samurai were, as opposed to what they wanted to portray themselves as. Especially during a time of enforced peace like the Edo period.

That is very interesting, I wonder if the same is true for European warriors?

Which is a constant amongst warrior cultures throughout history: all the fancyness about honor and glory was just to hide the fact the vast majority of them are a bunch of thugs for hire.

I think it's mostly later audiences projecting ideal values on earlier people (this happened a lot during the Edo period). Honour and glory is in the exceptional feats of war, not in the relatively routine fighting, raping and pillaging.

I suspect that the veterans of warfare would find the later descriptions of their methods and conduct divorced from actual reality.

Edited by TerminusEst on Feb 11th 2019 at 2:02:06 AM

In fact, bushido as we presently understand it was largely invented by one Nitobe Inazō in 1899, roughly three centuries after the Sengoku era and a couple of decades after the samurai class had been abolished due to the Satsuma rebellion. It's a very politically interesting concept.

@GAP, about differences between ideals and reality: I think the closest parallel you're going to find there is the body of writing about courtly love and related ideals for knights - as noted on the page, it's a Dead Unicorn Trope. There probably weren't any square-jawed aristocratic heroes sallying forth bravely for the sexless love of maiden fair, just like some of the most lionized heroes of the samurai - even during the Sengoku Period, which was where most of the samurai saw their heyday - died in undignified or even embarrassing ways (Sanada Yukimura was killed sitting down on a camp stool, Uesugi Kenshin died either of esophageal cancer, uterine cancer, or being stabbed in the ass with a spear, and Takeda Shingen, by all accounts, just kind of keeled over in camp).

Ideals and reality are fundamentally incompatible. It's just that Japan tends to take out its annoyance at that fact on the victims.

@Demongodofchaos: How did Munenori lose his eye? In battle? Because all these times, I thought the one that started the 'eyepatch Yagyu' thing was Mitsuyoshi. Granted, Munenori had a hand in doing so, accident or not, but Mitsuyoshi was not demonized, it was the other way around instead, similar to Miyamoto Musashi. I think Munenori's demonization was more because "Politicians are evil Acceptable Targets, fuck politics and glory to those who dislike politics that always makes commonfolk suffer!" CMIIW though.

Also I have a question about Japanese Name Order Confusion thing. See, we all believed that the Japanese held the belief that 'anyone who was born before Meiji Restoration are spelled with last name-first name order'. Yet, there are many times that Japanese media itself violated this rule. Most commonly the Samurai Warriors series. But here's one thing: When playing Fate/Grand Order (or looking at Japanese screenshots), I noticed that Tristan (a British Knight of the Round Table) said 'Shikibu Murasaki' (Heian era author), written in katakana too. Then in the game Nioh, even when the game text was written in English, the Japanese people still spoke in correct order (and written that way too!), but the British/Scottish Edward Kelley used first name-last name order on Oda Nobunaga (resulting 'Nobunaga Oda'... this is the same thing with Samurai Warriors)

So from this, I felt that the rule of 'anyone who was born before Meiji Restoration are spelled with last name-first name order' didn't tell the complete story (or it's not the full form). I had a guess that the addition was "That only applies to us native speakers. But foreigners will probably break the rule anyway, so we'll excuse that for them when portraying foreigners/gaijins." Is that really the case?

Edited by ChrisX on Feb 11th 2019 at 10:45:40 PM

I always thought that the family name first - personal name last was more of a widespread cultural phenomenon in East Asia, with China being the other notable example and most likely the origin for such custom due to the cultural influence of Imperial China across the centuries.