The British Museum, London
In recent years, the British Museum has curated several excellent Japan-related exhibitions, such as those dedicated to the woodblock masters Hokusai and Hiroshige and shunga (pictorial erotica). Sadly, the current show, "Samurai," is nothing like as good.
Indeed, there was a point during my 90-minute tour of the exhibits that I began to think I was in Madame Tussaud's rather than the British Museum. For there in front of me was an enormous figure of Darth Vader ー in fact, the largest object on display. Where are Hans Solo and the Wookies, I wondered.
Disney-Heavy Influences
I should not have been surprised, as I had already been subjected to non-stop movie footage from Disney's remake of the "Shogun" miniseries. Not coincidentally, Disney owns the "Star Wars" franchise, having paid George Lucas $4 billion USD for the privilege. In the shop adjacent to the exhibition, you could buy not only a Kimekomi Lucky Cat Ornament for £99 ($133) but also a Darth Vader pewter figurine for £199 ($268).
Of course, the British Museum has access to a plethora of remarkable objects to show the world. And several fine pieces were on display, such as medieval samurai armour laden with Buddhist iconography and the touching portrait of a young Japanese visitor to the Vatican in 1584.
Unfortunately, these treasures were outnumbered by feeble and/or dubious exhibits. Large panels celebrate the bravery of female warrior Tomoe Gozen without noting that her existence is not confirmed in any primary sources.
Worse was an execrable piece of contemporary art, consisting of a samurai on the back of a rubber duck that a six-year-old might play with in the bath.
Selective Interweave with Modern Sports
I'm a fan of the Japanese football team and believe they have the talent to reach the quarterfinals of this year's 2026 World Cup. Even so, I don't see why their "Samurai Blue" strip is worthy of exhibition in the British Museum.
Over in the United States, baseball phenomenon Shohei Ohtani of the Los Angeles Dodgers has gone one step further. He has incorporated a samurai helmet into his home run celebration. It's just a piece of sporting ballyhoo, nothing profound. When the Pittsburgh Pirates guys hit homers, they wave a sword. It doesn't mean they aspire to be pirates.
Medieval Standouts Mixed with 'Woke'
The exhibition catalogue contains many wonderful pictures from Japanese history. Among the standouts are a hanging scroll depicting the bushy-browed, long-eared Daruma, the pioneer of Zen Buddhism, and a portrait of Japan's first shogun, Minamoto no Yoritomo, which was done, amazingly, in the 14th century.
Strangely, though, there are some phrases in the introduction which almost suggest that the samurai were a nasty lot and Japan should be ashamed of them. "Why do we celebrate the heroes and role models that display hyper-masculine martial values?" we are asked. "Does this reinforce the 'toxic masculinity' that… underpins societal issues such as mental health conditions among men and violence against women?"
In another attempt to shoehorn the zeitgeist, the editors refer to the adolescent boys who had sexual and pedagogical relationships with older men as "a third sex." But that is seriously misleading. As with catamites of ancient Greece, their homosexual interludes generally ended with maturity. After that, they would have families of their own. The past has its own rules.
An exception is the medieval period, which is dealt with very well, with interesting contributions about hunting and tea bowls. Samurai were expected to be courageous and violent in war, but sophisticated in artistic pursuits too. As the catalogue notes, many of what we consider iconic examples of Japanese culture ー such as the tea ceremony, Zen and Noh theatre ー were closely associated with the samurai.
Weakest Sections
However, "The End of the Samurai" and "Global Samurai" are the weakest sections of the exhibition. They feature a strange smorgasbord of characters who have some tangential relation to Japan and samurai, such as HG Wells, fashion designer John Galliano, and ill-fated comedian John Belushi, who parodied the great actor Toshiro Mifune on American TV 50 years ago. There is also far too much about World War II and the possible influence of the samurai, the last of whom were long dead by then.
The samurai were one of the few examples anywhere of a ruling class voluntarily bringing about its own demise. It would have been much more interesting had the exhibit focused on how that happened, using the lens of a key individual such as Ryoma Sakamoto. He was the brilliant, low-born samurai who brokered the alliance between two previously hostile clans, thereby sealing the fate of the shogunate.
Uniquely among the shishi, "men of high purpose," meaning anti-shogun activists, Ryoma envisaged a Japan with no classes, samurai included. It was a political system similar to America's, with a large merchant marine to take advantage of opportunities in global trade.
Ryoma was hacked to death by a group of shogunate sympathizers on the eve of the Meiji Restoration, having left his customary Smith and Wesson revolver elsewhere. He was 31. Japan's path in subsequent decades could have been very different if he had lived.
Sadly, there is no mention of Ryoma in the museum's catalogue.
Samurai of the 20th Century
Another brilliant figure, Yukio Mishima, gets about as much space as John Belushi's nonsense. That is a mistake. Many great Japanese novelists have committed suicide. But only one has done it by hara-kiri, the traditional honourable death chosen by samurai.
Mishima also had a lot to say about the samurai tradition, going as far as to gloss and republish the 17th-century book, Hagakure.
The original text was written by a samurai called Tsunetomo Yamamoto. His most famous line is "the way of the samurai is death". Yet Yamamoto also said this. "Human life lasts but an instant. One should spend it doing what one pleases. In this world, fleeting as a dream, to live in misery doing only what one dislikes is foolishness."
Mishima even finds humor in Hagakure, claiming that Yamamoto's recipe for stifling a yawn ー stroke your forehead upwards or lick the inside of your lips ー was invaluable when he had to suffer boring propaganda lectures during the war.
Yamamoto himself lived into his 60s. It was a time of peace, and therefore limited chances to find yourself in the "fifty-fifty situation" in which he recommended "choosing death."
According to Mishima, the knowledge that he was braced for death gave him freedom and energy. In some ways, the idea has similarities with the French existentialists Jean-Paul Sartre and Albert Camus.
Getting it Right Next Time
Philip Shabecoff of the New York Times interviewed Mishima in 1970, some months before the sensational piece of performance art that ended Mishima's life. Looking back, the journalist said this. "Although his private army led many Westerners to believe that he sought to revive Japanese militarism, he actually loathed the militarism represented by the Japanese Army of the pre-World War II years. He regarded that [prewar] militarism as a foreign import, alien to the Japanese spirit. What he was really seeking was a return to the samurai tradition."
That is spot on, as is demonstrated in a newly translated Mishima short story, Voices of the Fallen Heroes. In it, the militarists are described as warmongers and "fascists," and Emperor Hirohito is portrayed in a far from flattering light.
Despite some marvelous objects on display and superlative graphics in the British Museum catalogue, the Samurai exhibition as a whole was flawed by trying to satisfy too many different constituents, from gamers to fashionistas to history buffs. Perhaps the sweep of 10 centuries was just too much. Next time around, a deeper and more focused remit would work better.
RELATED:
- Is the British Museum Rewriting Samurai History?
- The British in Bakumatsu Japan: The Bizen Incident
- Yukio Mishima: 'Voices of the Fallen Heroes and Other Stories'
Author: Peter Tasker, Arcus Research
Find other essays and analyses by the author on JAPAN Forward.
