Narrated translated letters from the first Japanese embassy to the US.
One thing that always gets me in these sorts of stories is the difference between what other people thing will impress someone vs. what people are actually impressed by. The Americans were showing the Japanese embassy around factories and industrial places, and the Japanese were nonplussed because they knew all about this already and in fact had been working on such things themselves. But the entire floor of a hotel being covered with carpet, which people just walked on with their dirty outside boots like it was nothing, when for them carpet has been a luxury item purchased by the square inch? That is just bonkers.
The guys in chainmail are likely police, probably doshin--of the samurai class, but of low rank. If so, the guy in fancier armor is likely their boss, a yoriki.
Let's talk a little bit about policing in medieval Japan!
Up until the Edo Period (1600 or 1603 - 1867 CE), laws were enforced by soldiers in the employ of either the Imperial family, the shogun (if a shogunal government was in power), or later during the Warring States Period by the local lord (daimyo). Increasingly, and especially once the central government lost all relevance in the mid-1400's, the law became simply whatever the daimyo said it was.
After the end of the Siege of Osaka and the destruction of Osaka Castle, and with no other credible threats to his power, Tokugawa Ieyasu was named shogun by Emperor Gou-Youzei in 1603. This ended the Warring States Period and instituted a military government with the Tokugawa clan at its center. Shrewd warlord that he was, Ieyasu immediately realized that he had a problem: thousands of samurai whose entire history for generations had been warfare. Ieyasu would spend his remaining years, continued by his son and second Tokugawa shogun Hidetada, building a very large, very bureaucratic central government.
This included the important job of maintaining the peace that hundreds of thousands of people had died over the course of two-ish centuries to obtain. And if you asked any daimyo, more especially a Tokugawa, how to accomplish this, the answer was clear: oppression.
A police force was established in each of Japan's largest cities, with special attention paid to the new capital Edo, along with the most populous and most economically powerful city of Osaka. Like everything under the Tokugawa shoguns, the police were organized according to a strict hierarchy, with provisions for each officer's family rank, and specific responsibilities for each station. At the lowest official ranks there were the doshin, samurai of low rank who did typical police activities such as standing around with weapons, breaking up fights, recording complaints and disputes, and so forth. Above them were the yoriki, samurai of middle-to-upper ranks, who supervised the doshin, investigated serious crimes such as murder, and were allowed to ride their horses within the city limits. This was actually a bigger deal than it might sound--outside of yoriki and their superiors, only daimyo and their families were normally permitted to ride. At the top of the police pyramid were the machi-bugyou. These were samurai of upper ranks, and usually hatamoto (personal retainers to the Tokugawa clan, though by the late Edo period, the hatamoto title had lost most of its status). Machi-bugyou were the chiefs of police, and also acted as judges, among other non-police duties.
Importantly, the official police forces also relied very heavily upon non-officers, many of whom were often paid under the table. These included people who existed outside of the class system (eta), such as sex workers and those who operated graveyards. These people were particularly valuable as informants as societal taboos meant that most people literally considered the eta to not exist, giving eta a unique ability to move throughout a city without anyone really paying attention to them. Street gang members were also employed.
Surprisingly as time went on, the police shifted from being soldiers to being people who at least attempted to not murder people they were pretty sure did some crimes. This led to a number of tools being developed to restrain rather than wound. The most famous example, which is occasionally seen in anime to this day, being a set of prongs made of iron attached to a wooden pole, to restrain a person at range. Additionally, police officers began to shed their heavy and cumbersome samurai armor for lighter chain mail, which was often sewn onto blue padded jackets and pants. These would usually be worn unadorned, when visible police presence was beneficial, but could be easily disguised under a kimono when the need arose.
A rooftop battle scene between police and a criminal. Note the weapons the police are armed with, including sword breakers and other devices meant to capture and restrain.
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Shortytouching the meatIntergalactic Cool CourtRegistered Userregular
I would like to know if the intent was to make the criminal look extremely cool and powerful because if so boy howdy mission accomplished
The other thing to keep in mind with Japanese policing is that in general it only arose as a response to the growing urbanization of society.
Historically towns had basically run themselves - local lords expected their rice taxes delivered on time, and they might intervene in particularly disruptive crimes, like a murder, where two families are likely to tear each other apart unless a third party steps in. But the general assumption was that beyond that it was below the government's notice to do much actual governing. If things were running harmoniously and taxes were arriving on time then well and good, and if they weren't then you send a couple of goons to go beat up the village headman until he fixed things. The samurai class did oversee stuff like the creation of road networks, but that was originally for military use, the resulting improving trade efficiency was kind of an after thought. The local villages were administered either through a local headman (if the village was mostly all one family/clan) or a village council (if there were several major families). Government was essentially an extension of family (or vice versa if you like), from the ruling shoguns all the way down to local village administration.
But with peacetime and rapidly improving agriculture you've suddenly got a very quickly growing urban peasant class, based around samurai castles and administrative centers, but without any sort of village middleman to keep his family in line. So the government - pretty begrudgingly - has to go into the policing and local governance business. There's no sense of like a citizen's due protection from his government, there's no social contract*, but it's also not just about keeping the peasants in line. The government cares a lot about maintaining a social divide between the samurai class and everyone else, and there's a lot of crackdowns and moral panics over activities that samurai and everybody else can enjoy together - stuff like kabuki, prostitution, dancing, drinking, etc. This tension only increased over time as everybody else got richer during peacetime while the samurai were still living on their same little rice stipends, so while they enjoyed cultural and legal superiority, for a lot of samurai they were actually poorer than their supposed lessers. It also ironically means that generally the "under" classes weren't actually all that consumed with resentment against their samurai oppressors - samurai art and epics and dramas and plays were super popular among the non-samurai classes, samurai were cool in pop culture.
The legally enforced separation of the castes ironically also led to a rise in certain stereotypically samurai art forms - in particular, flower arranging and tea ceremony. Both are very self-serious, as befitting of stoic and serious samurai, but there was obviously no legal restriction on who could drink nasty bitter tea or arrange flowers, so they were picked up by the merchant class, a way of showing that they can be samurai-esque as well. And crucially, both of these activities happen in the privacy of the home, which meant you had a prim and proper and not-too-fraternizing excuse to invite those of the samurai class into your home. So if you're a local businessman who wants to build a new brewery, you can't just walk into your local administrators office to ask for a deal supplying the castle. How dare you imply that noble samurai warriors are concerned with merchant shit! But if you invite the guy over for tea ceremony, and then after the ceremony you're all like, hey btw buddy ol' pal lets talk business... Nobody's gonna find out, and that local samurai is probably more than willing to get a cut of the earnings on the down low.
A trap is for fish: when you've got the fish, you can forget the trap. A snare is for rabbits: when you've got the rabbit, you can forget the snare. Words are for meaning: when you've got the meaning, you can forget the words.
There's no sense of like a citizen's due protection from his government, there's no social contract*,
Is this asterisk anything?
oh, whoops. I was gonna add a little bit to that but then I was already rambling and forced myself to stop typing...
It's not ENTIRELY true there was no sense of social contract, there was definitely a certain sense of mutual feudal obligations. In spirit, if maybe not in law, peasants did deserve protection and justice from their lords. In actual, daily practice though... That tended not to be the case. The peasants did still have unofficial ways of making their displeasure felt, and there's certainly cases of families or unions winning disputes with their samurai bosses, but it was the exception to the rule.
In China, which was always the cultural center of E Asia, even for a country like Japan that didn't acknowledge the Chinese emperor's superiority, there's the idea of the Mandate of Heaven, that an emperor or dynasty that doesn't provide for the needs of its people will lose the favor of heaven and get replaced. That's its own messy can of worms, of course, and almost always just used after the fact to justify rebellions while maintaining the idea of a continuous empire... but it was at least an idea the Japanese people were familiar with and might refer to occasionally, even if only in a philosophical sort of way.
Kana on
A trap is for fish: when you've got the fish, you can forget the trap. A snare is for rabbits: when you've got the rabbit, you can forget the snare. Words are for meaning: when you've got the meaning, you can forget the words.
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Librarian's ghostLibrarian, Ghostbuster, and TimSporkRegistered Userregular
So I started going through my World War One equipment to prepare for my lessons this week. I have a first field dressing which all British soldiers carried in a special pocket on the inside hem of their service dress tunic. It is just two cloth bandages in one cloth package. They are identical from WW1 to WW2 and original to one of those, but I put a WW1 paper label on the front of mine.
Today I noticed the seam had opened on the outer package so I opened it up and looked and there are two pristine bandages wrapped up with instructions printed on them and red arrows showing where to rip them open with hardened wax paper on one end to ease in wrapping. The are were both made in Sydney in 1942.
Yea but it also meant they died in battle. Modern senators have figured out how to get rich off military contractors without getting their heads chopped off which is a real shame.
Used to be you could be rich as fuck but you still werent legit until you killed a bunch of people now it doesnt matter how many people you kill if you're broke
Broke as fuck in the style of the times. Gratitude is all that can return on your generosity.
A trap is for fish: when you've got the fish, you can forget the trap. A snare is for rabbits: when you've got the rabbit, you can forget the snare. Words are for meaning: when you've got the meaning, you can forget the words.
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MayabirdPecking at the keyboardRegistered Userregular
(Name was digitally blacked out for privacy.)
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JedocIn the scupperswith the staggers and jagsRegistered Userregular
edited September 2021
So that's where the size comes from. Do you think wallets were just bigger back then or what?
The only British PM to be born outside of Britain - Andrew Bonar Law was born in New Brunswick.
#BonarLaw, aside from making schoolboys everywhere giggle, has the distinction of also serving the shortest term of any PM in the 20th c. https://t.co/ahqzOMLCFO
So one of the anecdotes from the book Band of Brothers (that was somewhat depicted in the HBO TV series) is that one of the soldiers was a minor league baseball star or something and fastballed a frag grenade directly into a running Nazi's back and it just blew him up as soon as it hit him.
I wonder how many Germans died to grenades simply because Americans grew up playing baseball and could rip those things.
Probably about as many Americans blew themselves up because they grew up playing baseball in Boston and spent the fuse time sanding down one side of the grenade.
What do you do if a fascist throws a grenade at you
the democratic party will form a committee to discuss the possible options for going forward with how to deal with the aftermath of being attacked by a grenade
Posts
Narrated translated letters from the first Japanese embassy to the US.
One thing that always gets me in these sorts of stories is the difference between what other people thing will impress someone vs. what people are actually impressed by. The Americans were showing the Japanese embassy around factories and industrial places, and the Japanese were nonplussed because they knew all about this already and in fact had been working on such things themselves. But the entire floor of a hotel being covered with carpet, which people just walked on with their dirty outside boots like it was nothing, when for them carpet has been a luxury item purchased by the square inch? That is just bonkers.
https://www.paypal.me/hobnailtaylor
Up until the Edo Period (1600 or 1603 - 1867 CE), laws were enforced by soldiers in the employ of either the Imperial family, the shogun (if a shogunal government was in power), or later during the Warring States Period by the local lord (daimyo). Increasingly, and especially once the central government lost all relevance in the mid-1400's, the law became simply whatever the daimyo said it was.
After the end of the Siege of Osaka and the destruction of Osaka Castle, and with no other credible threats to his power, Tokugawa Ieyasu was named shogun by Emperor Gou-Youzei in 1603. This ended the Warring States Period and instituted a military government with the Tokugawa clan at its center. Shrewd warlord that he was, Ieyasu immediately realized that he had a problem: thousands of samurai whose entire history for generations had been warfare. Ieyasu would spend his remaining years, continued by his son and second Tokugawa shogun Hidetada, building a very large, very bureaucratic central government.
This included the important job of maintaining the peace that hundreds of thousands of people had died over the course of two-ish centuries to obtain. And if you asked any daimyo, more especially a Tokugawa, how to accomplish this, the answer was clear: oppression.
A police force was established in each of Japan's largest cities, with special attention paid to the new capital Edo, along with the most populous and most economically powerful city of Osaka. Like everything under the Tokugawa shoguns, the police were organized according to a strict hierarchy, with provisions for each officer's family rank, and specific responsibilities for each station. At the lowest official ranks there were the doshin, samurai of low rank who did typical police activities such as standing around with weapons, breaking up fights, recording complaints and disputes, and so forth. Above them were the yoriki, samurai of middle-to-upper ranks, who supervised the doshin, investigated serious crimes such as murder, and were allowed to ride their horses within the city limits. This was actually a bigger deal than it might sound--outside of yoriki and their superiors, only daimyo and their families were normally permitted to ride. At the top of the police pyramid were the machi-bugyou. These were samurai of upper ranks, and usually hatamoto (personal retainers to the Tokugawa clan, though by the late Edo period, the hatamoto title had lost most of its status). Machi-bugyou were the chiefs of police, and also acted as judges, among other non-police duties.
Importantly, the official police forces also relied very heavily upon non-officers, many of whom were often paid under the table. These included people who existed outside of the class system (eta), such as sex workers and those who operated graveyards. These people were particularly valuable as informants as societal taboos meant that most people literally considered the eta to not exist, giving eta a unique ability to move throughout a city without anyone really paying attention to them. Street gang members were also employed.
Surprisingly as time went on, the police shifted from being soldiers to being people who at least attempted to not murder people they were pretty sure did some crimes. This led to a number of tools being developed to restrain rather than wound. The most famous example, which is occasionally seen in anime to this day, being a set of prongs made of iron attached to a wooden pole, to restrain a person at range. Additionally, police officers began to shed their heavy and cumbersome samurai armor for lighter chain mail, which was often sewn onto blue padded jackets and pants. These would usually be worn unadorned, when visible police presence was beneficial, but could be easily disguised under a kimono when the need arose.
A rooftop battle scene between police and a criminal. Note the weapons the police are armed with, including sword breakers and other devices meant to capture and restrain.
the shinsengumi served a pretty different and very specific function as compared to standard policing, also they only lasted like 6 years
the various weapons intended to restrain rather than disable originated before them though
Historically towns had basically run themselves - local lords expected their rice taxes delivered on time, and they might intervene in particularly disruptive crimes, like a murder, where two families are likely to tear each other apart unless a third party steps in. But the general assumption was that beyond that it was below the government's notice to do much actual governing. If things were running harmoniously and taxes were arriving on time then well and good, and if they weren't then you send a couple of goons to go beat up the village headman until he fixed things. The samurai class did oversee stuff like the creation of road networks, but that was originally for military use, the resulting improving trade efficiency was kind of an after thought. The local villages were administered either through a local headman (if the village was mostly all one family/clan) or a village council (if there were several major families). Government was essentially an extension of family (or vice versa if you like), from the ruling shoguns all the way down to local village administration.
But with peacetime and rapidly improving agriculture you've suddenly got a very quickly growing urban peasant class, based around samurai castles and administrative centers, but without any sort of village middleman to keep his family in line. So the government - pretty begrudgingly - has to go into the policing and local governance business. There's no sense of like a citizen's due protection from his government, there's no social contract*, but it's also not just about keeping the peasants in line. The government cares a lot about maintaining a social divide between the samurai class and everyone else, and there's a lot of crackdowns and moral panics over activities that samurai and everybody else can enjoy together - stuff like kabuki, prostitution, dancing, drinking, etc. This tension only increased over time as everybody else got richer during peacetime while the samurai were still living on their same little rice stipends, so while they enjoyed cultural and legal superiority, for a lot of samurai they were actually poorer than their supposed lessers. It also ironically means that generally the "under" classes weren't actually all that consumed with resentment against their samurai oppressors - samurai art and epics and dramas and plays were super popular among the non-samurai classes, samurai were cool in pop culture.
The legally enforced separation of the castes ironically also led to a rise in certain stereotypically samurai art forms - in particular, flower arranging and tea ceremony. Both are very self-serious, as befitting of stoic and serious samurai, but there was obviously no legal restriction on who could drink nasty bitter tea or arrange flowers, so they were picked up by the merchant class, a way of showing that they can be samurai-esque as well. And crucially, both of these activities happen in the privacy of the home, which meant you had a prim and proper and not-too-fraternizing excuse to invite those of the samurai class into your home. So if you're a local businessman who wants to build a new brewery, you can't just walk into your local administrators office to ask for a deal supplying the castle. How dare you imply that noble samurai warriors are concerned with merchant shit! But if you invite the guy over for tea ceremony, and then after the ceremony you're all like, hey btw buddy ol' pal lets talk business... Nobody's gonna find out, and that local samurai is probably more than willing to get a cut of the earnings on the down low.
the social contract
Alesia? Me?
Wasn't there!
oh, whoops. I was gonna add a little bit to that but then I was already rambling and forced myself to stop typing...
It's not ENTIRELY true there was no sense of social contract, there was definitely a certain sense of mutual feudal obligations. In spirit, if maybe not in law, peasants did deserve protection and justice from their lords. In actual, daily practice though... That tended not to be the case. The peasants did still have unofficial ways of making their displeasure felt, and there's certainly cases of families or unions winning disputes with their samurai bosses, but it was the exception to the rule.
In China, which was always the cultural center of E Asia, even for a country like Japan that didn't acknowledge the Chinese emperor's superiority, there's the idea of the Mandate of Heaven, that an emperor or dynasty that doesn't provide for the needs of its people will lose the favor of heaven and get replaced. That's its own messy can of worms, of course, and almost always just used after the fact to justify rebellions while maintaining the idea of a continuous empire... but it was at least an idea the Japanese people were familiar with and might refer to occasionally, even if only in a philosophical sort of way.
Today I noticed the seam had opened on the outer package so I opened it up and looked and there are two pristine bandages wrapped up with instructions printed on them and red arrows showing where to rip them open with hardened wax paper on one end to ease in wrapping. The are were both made in Sydney in 1942.
Pretty neat.
You got me watching this channel
Say what will will about Roman politics, I respect senators a lot more when they join the army after voting to go to war.
https://www.paypal.me/hobnailtaylor
get appointed governor of syria and then get owned super hard
Writing in the last year well into February of the new year.
#OnThisDay in history on 16th September 1858
The only British PM to be born outside of Britain - Andrew Bonar Law was born in New Brunswick.
#BonarLaw, aside from making schoolboys everywhere giggle, has the distinction of also serving the shortest term of any PM in the 20th c. https://t.co/ahqzOMLCFO
https://www.paypal.me/hobnailtaylor
Probably about as many Americans blew themselves up because they grew up playing baseball in Boston and spent the fuse time sanding down one side of the grenade.
https://www.paypal.me/hobnailtaylor
Catch and throw it back. Either I get them or at least I die relatively quickly being in the center of the blast radius
the democratic party will form a committee to discuss the possible options for going forward with how to deal with the aftermath of being attacked by a grenade