Japan
Female Samurai: Warriors and Otherwise
Female samurais are stock figures in modern anime, manga, western comic books, and fantasy novels: hard-fighting, often hard-drinking, badasses with swords and bows. The key word is fantasy. In medieval Japan, samurai was a class distinction as well as a job description. Women who were born into the samurai class were samurais whether or not…
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Daughters of the Samurai
In Daughters of the Samurai: A Journey From East to West, Janice P. Nimura tells the story of three young girls, ages eleven, ten and six, whom the Japanese government sent to the United States in 1871 as part of the westernizing reforms of the Meiji Restoration that transformed Japan in the mid-nineteenth century. The…
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“Opening” Japan–The Meiji Restoration
As I’ve mentioned before, in 1853 the United States government forced Japan to open its ports to United States merchants in a literal display of gunboat diplomacy. Commodore Perry’s act of military aggression against Japan is often given credit for dragging Japan into the nineteenth century. In fact, the real credit for Japan’s transformation belongs…
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