Everyone loves samurai
Embrace the Medieval (and Early Modern)
No real connection between the song and the topic this time. I just think it rules.
I teach two classes on Japanese history at Centre College, “Age of the Samurai” and “Modern Japan: From Samurai to Sony.” Taken together, the courses basically give you a survey of Japanese history from 794 to 2011. That’s… a lot of time, obviously. In practice the latter class covers modern Japanese history from the Meiji Restoration of 1868 to the Fukushima nuclear disaster of 2011, while the former class is more focused on some specific themes over a longer period of time from roughly the seventh century or so right up to 1868. Those themes include the samurai - both as a military phenomenon and as a socio-political class in medieval and early modern Japan - but honestly it’s a pretty simple trick to get undergraduates to take my classes. “Something something samurai something” will outdo “Institutions and Political Power in Early Modern Japan” every time. And rightly so.
It helps that the samurai need to be discussed frequently anyway, and that the evolution of the samurai as a class serves as a useful motif for understanding larger scale changes in Japanese society from the Heian period (794-1185) through to the end of the Tokugawa Period (1600-1868). It is also true that a LOT of cultural products from those time periods talk about samurai, and we can use ongoing fascination with the samurai in Japan and in the rest of the world as an entry point for thinking about the early modern period.
I bring all this up because our students are currently registering for the classes they will take this fall. I will be teaching my class on modern Japan, though a brief mix-up in the Registrar’s Office meant that “Age of the Samurai” briefly appeared on the schedule. It is time for me to order books for my fall classes, and I have been thinking a little about the differences between the two, particularly in terms of how I might (or might not, depending on how things go) use video games in these courses.
So far, Modern Japan has been a better fit for talking about games, though for the most part I have talked to the students about Nintendo (and Sega… some old 90s rivalries refuse to die) in the context of Japan as an economic superpower and a pioneer in electronic consumer goods internationally. I want to talk about games in a bit more depth in that class this coming fall, and I’m inclined to build on conversations I’ve had with students before; in particular, I’m interested in how Hideo Kojima invokes Japanese memory of urban devastation and nuclear attack in the Metal Gear Solid series. I’m actually not the biggest fan of those games, at least compared to some, but Metal Gear Solid 4 in particular dwells on grim possibilities of a near future dominated by an economic, even social dependence on war that is markedly reminiscent of the hubris of imperial Japan and the apparent inability of postwar Japan to escape a geopolitical context defined by its position under an American security umbrella.
More of that to come, I think. I suspect I’ll talk about my Modern Japan class plenty as the year goes on. Funnily enough, when I’ve taught “Age of the Samurai” we have not really delved into games at all.
Part of the issue has been my reluctance to face up to how I want to use the games. So far, my biggest successes using games in the classroom have been decidedly meta: playing Sid Meier’s Colonization with a group of 30 and voting on whether to trade with or attack the game’s indigenous tribes, with discussion afterwards of the extent to which the game’s design pushed us in that direction; and setting an implausibly enormous section of Asian jungle on fire before returning to the imperial metropole to donate and sell goods to a well dressed benefactor in a large leather armchair in The Curious Expedition.
Those sessions have worked - repeatedly - because they fit very well into how we are talking about historical dynamics such as imperialism or connections between violence in human history and the kind of objective-based gameplay you often find in so many games. I’ve always been a little reluctant to lean too hard into games that depict a specific topic. In my “History and Video Games” class, we move around so much we’re always talking about thematic structures, really. But if I ask my students to play Total War: Shogun II (2011), do I run the risk of getting bogged down in conversations about how many troops fought in the battle of Sekigahara?
In truth, Shogun 2 has potential. As does Paradox Games’ Sengoku (2011). The realities of Daimyo military competition and conflict during the Age of Warring States in Japan (either 1450s or 1467 to a variety of dates just before or after 1600 - your mileage will vary) lend themselves well to a certain type of strategy game. But regardless of our approach we find ourselves talking about Japan primarily as a site of conflict and political competition. And of course, it was that; but it was not only that.
The games aren’t the problem, truthfully. The problem - what to discuss, and how to discuss it - is universal to every class I teach, and how to manage the games becomes a problem extended from that core question. So, rather than worry if asking students to play a game like Shogun 2 or Sengoku, the worry becomes whether or not we will have time to play those games or if they will fit the other conversations we’re having.
Games work extremely well in discussing how we talk about our histories, as I wrote above. But similarly, I have to ask myself how much time I want our class to spend talking about how we understand samurai as a cultural concept today. It’s a fun discussion and we often do spend time on it. But this is, at its heart, an early modern class. We’re supposed to be talking about Atsumori’s flute and the growth of Tokyo in the seventeenth century.
And that’s fine. We can do that and play games. But what will the games bring to the class? I wonder if this is a chance to change things up a little. I have “assigned” games before, but that’s easier to do when something is readily available, easy to run, and cheap. I look at a game like Microprose’s Sword of the Samurai (1989) and I wonder if this is my chance to get a bunch of college students to play something they would typically consider basically prehistoric.
Sword of the Samurai is a good example of how games (and plenty of other media) often portray the samurai, as brash and stylish and outre. Which, as it happens, is how many samurai liked to portray themselves. Maybe it will be a good fit. Maybe not.
One last thing: although it is important not to overdo it, talking about memory, how we record things and how we choose to remember things, can be a powerful thing in a history class. All the games I have mentioned do that, but one recent game offers some fun opportunities: Ghost of Tsushima (2020). Bob and I played a bit of it when it first came out, and I still admire the tone of that game. Transience and melancholy are major components of traditional Japanese literature for a reason, and understanding how Japanese artists chose to talk about their erstwhile heroes is a great way to gain insight into a cultural world that, like all communities, defies simplistic explanations. The more I think of it, the more tempted I am to have my students play Ghost. So maybe I will go and play some of that, and come back…