On June 24 the second of the volumes dedicated to the culture and suggestions of the Asian country will be on sale. Here we talk about the caste born in the Middle Ages looking at the model of China and which has shaped a tradition and a culture. Then the pop decline and rebirth
A sharp story, that of Japan. A story in balance between apparently irreconcilable contradictions. The blade of the katanathe deadly sword of the Japanese warrior, offers a fitting metaphor of the ridge along which many aspects of the archipelago’s culture unfold. And to wield the metaphor is the samurai. Because the destiny of the samurai is the tension of opposites.
The origin of an absurd figure, even outside Japan itself, as an example of the warrior endowed with morality sinks into the body of a turbulent Middle Ages. The fighting man who seems to symbolize the aesthetic universe and values of the country constitutes – and in our eyes it already seems a paradox – one of the decisive points of the relationship between Japan and China. It was on the model of the Tang court and institutions, even looking at the urban conformation of the capital Chang’an (today’s Xi’an), that at the turn of the seventh and eighth centuries AD, the emperor of Japan initiated reforms that shaped the nation . Scripture, Buddhist faith, Japanese bureaucracy followed the illustrious Chinese example. The army, too. With the start of a “professionalization” of the arms trade that led to the establishment of warrior clans in the service of the lords, the shogunwho in turn were both vassals and adversaries of the emperor.
It is here, during the Kamakura shogunate (between the end of the twelfth century and the beginning of the fourteenth century) that the story of the samurai began, an adventure that lasted seven centuries until the dissolution of the institution in the second half of the nineteenth century, when the Meiji Restoration and early modernizing momentum tried to chase the successes of Europe and the United States. Not a simple epic, that of the samurai, therefore, but a crowding of elements and details that hold together the whole of medieval and modern Japanese society, as illustrated by Leonardo Vittorio Arena in Samurai. Rise and decline of a great warrior caste, second title of «Japan. History, culture, lifestyle “, the series of” Corriere della Sera “in collaboration with” Io Donna “. The volume follows the affirmation, consolidation and decline of a tradition finally forced to deal with the “black ships” of the American Admiral Matthew Perry, in 1853. Yet the end of the samurai era coincided with the start of a legend that, inevitably simplified if not trivialized, would be however landed everywhere. Until the entry of the word samurai in language dictionaries all over the world.
The ease with which the figure – the icon, the mask – of the samurai has taken root here and there is perhaps to be traced precisely to his ability to harmonize values that are dissonant elsewhere. The determination – the ferocity, too, as evidenced by the iconography and literature – in the fighting coexisted with the adherence to moral codes borrowed from the classics of Chinese thought. The prosaic immersion in the things of the world, however, had an edge in adhering to the rarefied spheres of Zen Buddhism (also of Chinese origin) or to the practice of poetry. Loyalty to the lord was not disconnected from the sense of community. The good, the beautiful, the just: an analogue, if you like, of kalokagathía of ancient Greece. With a contemporary tail: with the defeat of Japan in World War II after the double nuclear apocalypse of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, after the demolition of the divine status of the emperor, the samurai as the proud keeper of honor, ready to sacrifice himself by wetting the blade in the own blood, becomes the ultimate refuge of tradition and nationalism. An interpretation that the writer Mishima Yukio in 1970 embraced with his spectacular suicide in the name of the lost purity of his country.
The constellation of values that dominates the samurai fertilizes the popular imagination. If a master of cinema like Kurosawa Akira draws on an immense heritage of stories and images to tell The seven samurai (1954), Hollywood quickly grabs the plot – the warriors siding with the people harassed against the bad guys – and in 1960 The magnificent seven by John Sturges transform the katana by Mifune Toshiro & C in the Colt by Yul Brynner & C. From there a rich film production, which not even Tom Cruise (The last samurai, 2003). Generations of literary and non-literary gangsters mix righteousness and abominations, the criminal ecosystem of the yakuza emulates chivalrous codes worthy of a better cause and even the universe of the seventies robots – Grendizer and his brothers – is in debt to the samurai. There katana does not lose the thread. It is the umpteenth contradiction and also the proof of the vitality of the myth: the aristocratic aura of the samurai becomes pop, and by becoming pop he survives his own death.
The series: every Friday for € 7.90. Next title: Japanese thought
The second issue of the series «Japan. History, culture, lifestyle “, a new initiative by” Corriere della sera “in collaboration with” Io Donna “, out every Friday: it is a selection of twenty essays chosen to approach Japanese culture and understand the thousand facets of a world as enigmatic as it is fascinating. After starting with Enigmatic Japanessay by anthropologist and historian Alan Macfarlane, now it’s up to
Samurai. Rise and decline of a great warrior caste, available at newsstands for € 7.90 in addition to the price of the newspaper. This second volume penetrates the world of warriors and is signed by Leonardo Vittorio Arena (Ripatransone, Ascoli Piceno, 1953), professor of Religions and Philosophies of East Asia and History of Modern and Contemporary Philosophy at the University of Urbino. In his essay he tells of the caste of warriors who kept an entire people in subjection with weapons, even though they were also poets, philosophers, lovers of Zen thought. The author writes: “I give them the floor in this book so that they will be able to defend their cause against the most predictable accusations and clichés that don’t do them justice. I retrace his public and private life, made up of intrigues, betrayals and lust for power “but also” sword fetishism, fratricide, sexual perversion accompany its vicissitudes, but also spirituality, aestheticism and, why not? , compassion. They were warriors and servants ». On 1 July, we proceed with the third issue, dedicated to Japanese thought by the writer Le Yen Mai, of Vietnamese origin but born and raised in German-speaking Switzerland.
June 22, 2022 (change June 22, 2022 | 20:46)
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