A couple of weeks ago, it was Hawaii. Now the British Museum is putting on an even bigger exhibition on the samurai, and Japanese warrior culture. One of the pleasures of shows like this is that you almost always come across something small that captures your attention and won’t go away. In the Stonehenge exhibition in 2022, it was for me (and for many others) the single leaf on display that had fallen thousands of years ago from a prehistoric tree. In this case it was the miniature samurai set of a bow and arrow for indoor use. It was somehow easier to take in such weapons in the safety of the samurai living room, rather than in the baffling expanse of battle.
But on a grander scale I ended up with a completely new view of the image of samurai in the west. Naively, I had always imagined that their popular representations had started in the 1950s, with Akira Kurosawa’s film Seven Samurai (poster above). And after that came the videogames, Netflix, and the samurai-style Darth Vader from Star Wars – all of which feature heavily in the last section of the British Museum exhibition. I quickly realized that this view is completely wrong. Links between the samurai (and the image of the samurai) and western culture go much further back.
I was particularly surprised by two pieces in the exhibition. The first was a portrait from the 1880s of an Italian nobleman, Henry of Bourbon, Count of Bardi, dressed from head to toe in a samurai outfit (you can see a picture on this page). It reminded me a bit of the early nineteenth-century portrait of Lord Byron in Albanian dress (cultural appropriation vying with cultural tribute?). But Bardi did more than dress up. If I remember the label in the museum correctly, he brought 1,500 crates of samurai material back from Japan to Italy. It was not necessarily loot. Special samurai status had been abolished in 1876 and there were many Japanese keen to raise some ready cash putting “the samurai brand” on the market. Henry was a particularly keen buyer.
The second piece is even earlier. It is a suit of very fearsome samurai armour sent from Japan as a gift to James I in 1613 by a member of the ruling Tokugawa dynasty (you can find the story of this diplomatic exchange here). One powerful way of reading this (as Jonathan Jones stresses in his review of the show) is as a diplomatic threat, whatever the apparent generosity: “mess with us at your peril”, as Jones puts it. But it is also a hint that outside the world of geopolitics and functional military hardware, samurai memorabilia could already in the seventeenth century be just that: memorabilia, souvenirs and “exotic” presents.
That’s several centuries before Darth Vader, who I hadn’t realized was only a latecomer in a very long line of the “samurai brand” in the west.
(Full disclosure, I am a Trustee of the British Museum, so may have a particular interest here!)
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