Setting the record straight · 4:50pm Mar 13th, 2017
I've had a number of people a little angry with me and even offended for calling Samurai a 'Headhunting Cult' in Dogged Determination. There has been a number of rather heated private messages where people try to explain to me in detail all about the Samurai and their moral purity, the Bushido code, and how no true Samurai would ever do something as savage as lopping off a head. At least one person has blocked me and I suppose has stopped speaking to me because of the subject. It seems to be a subject that has bothered some folk, and earned me some downvotes for a negative portrayal of a proud, noble culture.
This is understandable, I suppose, for a generation of people who learned about Samurai from movies and comic books. The sterilised, clean, noble history that people desperately wish to believe was true.
It is, of course, all a lie.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Headhunting#Japan
My most sincere apologies for shattering your beautiful, persistent delusions.
Dogged Determination will continue despite such objections.
Yeah a lot of what we know is wrong at least with the higher ranking they in fact kept backstabbing one another
It would be nice if people came to realize that not all samurai had honor in fact some actually acted like animals rather than showing honor to their lords and masters. I am not saying they dropped to all fours and barked liked dogs not at all. I am actually saying they showed little to no honor at all. Some however did act with true honor while others preferred to act without honor it is hard at times to accept what we have been taught in school and from movies and video games. I like your story and look forward to reading more of it once you get more chapters up keep up the really awesome work.
People are bound to be butt hurt, good on you for not stooping to their level.
4454330
Even honourable samurai had to pay the bills, and heads were currency.
Very polite and honourable samurai who were soundly beaten in battle would even offer their heads to their opponent, so that a good, clean cut could be made, thus allowing the head to be more recognisable. Samurai helmets and masks were made in such a way that the face and head were as protected as possible so that a clean, recognisable head could be brought in.
It was an odd culture, for sure.
Butthurt people now days.
I would say, to the ones who "complained" to you. Go jump off a bridge. No one in the modern world knows what a so called "Samuraii" was really like back then. It is the same kind of mentality that people today think that Native American's lived in harmony with nature and were peaceful with each other (That is a LOL btw)
Write what you want, it is your story, not theirs.
The samurai portrayed by Miyazaki in Princess Mononoke weren't too flaming honourable, and that's coming straight from a producer who knows Japanese history. Actually a lot of genuine Jap movies show them as mercenary types.
Please ignore them.
There are, for some reason, a lot of people in the West who are strangely obsessed with Japanese culture, and Samurai and Katanas in particular. They can spend hours telling you about the honor of Samurai, about the skills of Ninjas and the superiority of the Katana. And they get really butthurt if you dare to say anything against these things.
To quote a well known cat-person, "M'aiq thinks they are stupid".
4454343
I've watched people go bananas when told that the Spanish made better katanas than the Japanese. Toledo steel was stronger and more flexible than Japanese steel, and wasn't as prone to shattering.
Spanish katanas look weird though. Beautiful, I guess, but weird.
People need to read 'Shogun'. It's a very interesting look into the life of the samurai.
What can you do. People like their fantasies where everything is perfect. A lot of people don't like those fantasies or preconceived notions that they have being shattered, even if it's the truth. You do you Kudz. Don't let them stop you
I don't care whether you call Samurais unhonorable bastards (which they mostly were) or the Welsh (being my native culture) sheep-shagging farmers.
You'd either be wrong, and I'd laugh at your stupidity, or you'd be right, and I'd learn something new.
Samurai are unhonorable. For Honor makes much more sense now.
Kudzu, why are you doing this? God made stupid people to be laughed at, there's no point in trying to combat their argument because they are so far up their own asses, they don't realize their error.
Uh... Japan was a feudal-states-setup kinda place for the longest time. Yeah, there were plenty of carefully designed social requirements and honorable rules to keep the samurai from randomly killing each other and their superiors... but they still murdered the hell out of people they didn't like, had really violent tendencies towards local peasants, and back-stabbed anyone and everyone they thought they could get away with on. As well, and more importantly... they were human beings too, and just as diverse and individualistic as any other group of people in power around the globe throughout history.
Wondering if any of those people even looked at something like the Usagi YoJimbo comics. I know even that white washes stuff but its rare that someone doesn't die in an issue. We romanticize a lot of history
I didn't know there were headhunter samurai. But it doesn't surprise me. From what I hear they were the arm of or straight up were the militant overclass, that were often as much a disciplined brute squad as the romanticized version we think of them now.
Beyond that, honor codes are methods of controlling the violent. They are a way of telling a person who is good at violence and happy to solve all their problems, even stupid petty ones, with violence, which things they are allowed to be violent over.
You get in a lot of big arguments, don'tcha kudz? Even over things I would not suspect are controversial.
Maybe I'm not one to cast aspersions.
Usagi Yojimbo did a bit of setting the record straight for me, but I didn't realise the whole head thing until now. Makes sense, they did a lot of bounty hunting.
My pet peeve is how people go about thinking ninja's were elite warriors trained from birth to be perfect killing machines. Most of the time they were peasant assassins. Yes there were several "ninja villages" that came about after the 15th century, but considering ninja had been recorded in use from the 4th century and onwards (even if it is pretty spotty) those can be safely said to be exceptions to the rule, rather than the rule itself.
The other hilarious piece of folklore/legend is Kusanagi-no-tsurugi, and how it's this unbreakable holy katana that can cut the heavens, this attitude even persists in Japanese culture. The sword dates back to before katanas were a thing.
4454405
Usagi Yojimbo is an underrated gem, and I wish I could find any volumes from 3 and beyond, got the space in my bookcases all ready for 'em.
For a second there I was about to be offended that you apologized. gslconline.org/application/files/5414/4538/8109/whew-close-call-lolcat.jpg
4454409
I attract readers who are very passionate about what they believe in. Samurai, history, race, class, and culture... and also the care and treatment of Spike the Dragon.
For some things, such as Spike, I do try to take a great deal of care in how I deal with it... people are right to have strong feelings, because some fucked up shit has gone down on poor Spike. For other things, I am prone to telling it like it is, and that makes people angry. I understand it, I do, I just wish that some people would deal with it better. This recent spat about Samurai just rubbed me the wrong way, enough so that I felt the need to make a public statement. When there is room to debate, debate should be had, but when somebody is just flat out wrong... ugh.
Thanks for doing a blog post on this, I guess I forgot to hit the 'tracking' button and missed all but the first chapter! I gotta run and get caught up real quick.
Same about the knights of Europe. Not the headhunting, but rather the romantization. Knights were just well-armed mercs... with all that implies. The 'Code of Chivalry' was only off the field. On the field, you did whatever you needed to to win. Dirty pool was the order of the day... as was the saying of to the victor go the spoils.
Hey now, you can be a proud and noble warrior AND collect heads.
Haven't started reading Dogged Determination yet but reading your post reminded me of something: tsujigiri. From Wikipedia: Japanese term for a practice when a samurai, after receiving a new katana or developing a new fighting style or weapon, tests its effectiveness by attacking a human opponent, usually a random defenseless passer-by, in many cases during nighttime.
>insert obligatory weaboo joke here<
Wait, seriously? No bueno dude, I guess that wasn't as common knowledge as I thought. I mean, even as late as the Japanese occupation (read: rape) of Nanking there were competitions amongst military officers to see how many heads one could cut off with a katana in one swing.
Ancient samurai didn't follow the code of boshido. Boshido was created in the early 1900's in novels, long after the samurai were gone.
... I suppose you could at least take some solace that people are invested enough in your writing that they approach you personally?
</sarcasm>
I think I missed something, did a new chapter come out? Because I can't seem to find it
4454803
Hahaha... AhahahahahaHAHAHAHA!
Of all the things going on now, they complain about this? I bet these people aren't even Japanese talk less of being Oriental in general.
Seriously, hand them some diapers and pacifiers. This is ridiculous.
It honestly depended on their rank and the people they served. Compelte bastard lords would thus have complete bastard samurai. Somewhat bastard lords would have more restrained smaurai, to at least keep on an illusion that he was not a complete bsatard.
Still taking the heads of their enemies would be a ocmmon either way. Especially in wartime.
Also people seem ot not have remembered that a samurai's katana was often tested via execution. Seeing if it was so sharp it could bisect a man.
Nobility is subjective honestly. It may be noble to spare you enemy's children and wives, but equally noble to display their heads to your master.
People where complaining about beheading? Didn't they test out new Katanas by having a Samuri behead like 12 convicts in one swing? If they couldn't than it wasn't good enough.
And beheading is also a legitimate source of killing, why would'nt they do it?
As a follow-up to my previous post, I would also like to mention that the idea of headhunting and even just super-abusive nobility and warrior classes has been a part of every single civilization anyone could care to list. Humanity only ever falls into the idealized ranges on an individual level, and even then it's only for short periods of time, never indefinitely.
4454417 do you even read kudzu?
The thing about codes of honour, and this is as true of the European Chivalric Codes as it is of Bushido, is this: rules don't get made to stop people from doing things that they're not doing.
In California, in (I believe) the 1990s, there was a funeral attendant arrested for having sex with corpses. They had to let him go, because there was no law against it. Why was there no law? Because, generally speaking, it is not something that people were doing. (There is a law now, by the way.)
If the code was written, you should take it as meaning that the code was needed because that's not the way that they were otherwise behaving.
4454916 I think the "12 heads in one swing" was actually a Celtic thing (testing a broadsword), but don't quote me on that.
However, when samurai were presented with a new blade, they would test how many strokes (which is the proper way a katana works, using both hands on the handle with the bottom hand to pull the handle towards the warrior like a fulcrum for extra strength in the cut) it would take to bisect a convicted criminal: 2-stroke swords were considered excellentally crafted, 3-strokes was average, and any higher number was considered a failure of a blade; there was never a 1-stroke blade ever made though (like Excalibur) to ever find one was to become the stuff of legends!
the glorification of samurai and bushido is similar to knights and the chivalric code, nice ideas on paper, but basically guidelines that can be ignored without much, if any punishment. both cases they tended to be assholes, with people following the letter and the spirit of the codes few and far between.
Samurai were huge assholes to peasants. For all their rules and honor, their rules also were pretty explicit about "if somebody lower ranked on the socal ladder than you fucks with you or makes you mad, you can kill them with impunity."
Weebs, man. They don't know the culture they revere, just the glory-to-japan propaganda that fills their anime. There were honorable samurai, but that honor only needed to apply to those of equal or higher social ranking.
4455521
The most honourable Samurai I had ever read about was a woman. She took her husband's place on the battlefield, wore his armor, carried his sword, and she defended some shrine that was filled with children.
She was killed with arrows and bullets fired from muskets. She was so fierce and so deadly... after slaying several skilled warriors, none dared approach her, so she was killed from afar. The shrine still exists into the modern day, and there is a statue of her outside the shrine.
She was a BAMF.
4455531 Her name please, if you have it handy?
4455553
I don't remember that. It was decades ago when I read this.
I just remember that the shrine has a big penis shaped bell that is very, very old.
4455555 Can't find anything immediately, would be curious to see the shrine though. Someday~
4455050 Of course! I'm still working on that long monstrosity, The Chase
4455842
I'm so proud of you.
Hightide has just started the Chase as well, y'all might enjoy discussing.
Have to agree with you Kudz Not all samurai were noble men, it has been shown they have cut off others heads and even taken them as gifts for their masters or to show them off. Sure not everyone of them did this but there are cases that show that taking a head was something to be proud of, mostly being it required a bit of skill to get a clean cut with out screwing up your sword.
Wow, looks like I missed a shitstorm over there. I suppose I'll avoid the comment section when I eventually read that story.
Besides, everyone knows that modern-day samurai live in California and defend us from the evil Nighlok. You might have a hard time recognizing them, as none of them have any apparent Japanese ancestry.