Reviewed by: Samurai: An Encyclopedia of Japan's Cultured Warriors by Constantine Nomikos Vaporis Karl Friday Samurai: An Encyclopedia of Japan's Cultured Warriors. By Constantine Nomikos Vaporis. Santa Barbara, CA: ABC-Clio, 2019. 419 pages. Hardcover, $94.00. The figure of the samurai occupies a prominent place in Japanese culture—and an even larger place in perceptions thereof. For more than half its recorded history, the archipelago was politically and socially dominated by its warrior order. And while the samurai were officially abolished in 1871, the influence of these warriors and their traditions on popular and political culture has continued to grow and evolve. For Japanese and foreign audiences alike, the role of the samurai has become iconic, analogous to that of the cowboy in contemporary America: he is at once an entertaining, romantic figure and a fundamental symbol of the national character. Martial arts and sports derived from samurai traditions are practiced around the globe. Samurai are the heroes of films, television series, advertisements, manga, and anime. Corporate executives in the West look to samurai texts, such as Miyamoto Musashi's Gorin no sho (The Book of Five Rings; ca. 1645), as tools for understanding their Japanese counterparts. And politicians—particularly those on the right—continue to invoke samurai imagery for their causes. Yet, as historians of premodern and early modern Japan are only too painfully aware, popular perceptions of samurai customs, institutions, and behaviors are overwhelmingly dominated by misconceptions, misinformation, and outright fabrications. Some of this stems from deliberate attempts at distortion and the invention of tradition, such as the efforts by pundits in the Meiji, Taishō, and early Shōwa eras to manufacture an ostensibly ancient bushidō (Way of the Warrior) code and marshal it in the service of nationalism. But far more of it is a product of the relative paucity—especially in Western languages—of books for general readers by qualified historians. The resulting gap between the public appetite for information and scholars' efforts to address it has been filled largely by aficionados lacking in formal academic training on the subject and often even in the ability to read Japanese sources. The consequences of this situation can be amusing: years ago, for instance, a karate instructor in Japan related to me that a New Zealand man who came to train with him was utterly convinced that samurai were still living on some sort of reservation on the far side of a nearby mountain. They can also, however, be profoundly frustrating for those of us who spend semester after semester laboring to correct canards and caricatures deeply ingrained in the hearts and minds of our students. Constantine Vaporis's new volume represents a welcome, and exceedingly helpful, addition to the scholarly assault on the citadel of stereotypes and misinformation. As its title suggests, the book is a compendium rather than a research monograph. Addressing primarily general rather than scholarly audiences, Vaporis offers up 105 essays along with new translations of fifteen short texts, an extensive bibliography, and a [End Page 350] very useful timeline of samurai history from the mid-sixteenth to the late nineteenth centuries. The entries that form the core of the volume are based on primary sources—literary texts, government edicts and publications, personal diaries, and the like—as well as the best available scholarship in Japanese and English, all filtered through Vaporis's three decades of experience as a scholar and teacher. They are arranged in alphabetical order in addition to being listed at the front of the book under six topical headings: People, Material Culture and Samurai Practices, Social Organizations/Groups, Events, Texts, and Institutions and Systems. Vaporis also includes dozens of tables, photographs, and other illustrative material and concludes each entry with a short list of suggestions for further reading (all in English). The volume focuses on the Tokugawa period, albeit with a few excursions into late sixteenth-century and late nineteenth-century topics. In that light one might argue that the title misleads readers into expecting wider coverage, but no single volume could address the full, millennium-long history of Japanese warriors in the kind of depth that Vaporis demonstrates here. Moreover, the early modern period constituted a...
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May 27, 2021
Shizhen Bai + 1
Open Access