Samurai, Scouts, and Suffragettes, by Prof. Oleg Benesch (York University)

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Yeah, samurai, boy scouts, as they're known in the US, or scouts, and suffragettes evoke thoughts of very different periods of time. Samurai is the warriors of medieval Japan, suffragettes pushing for women's rights to vote in the early 20th century, and the boy scouts as the most famous and probably largest international youth organization, which is still very active today, unlike suffragettes, fortunately, and samurai, yeah, maybe fortunately as well.

But in this talk, I want to use these three groups to examine how the celebration of the medieval past became a global phenomenon at the turn of the 20th century, leaving legacies that endure to the present day. And to do this, I want to start with the Boy Scouts, which were formally or

officially founded in 1907 by the military officer Robert Baden-Powell, a veteran of the Second Boer War, who spent much of his career in India and Africa. And in 1908, Baden-Powell publishes the book Scouting for Boys, which became the core text of the Boy Scouts movement, and has perhaps sold over 100 million copies in dozens of languages. Scouting for Boys is filled with outdoor skills and adventure stories, but it also has a very pronounced moral message and a purpose that is closely

tied to imperial aims, as the cover here on the right suggests. jests. In the opening section of the work, on Scout's work, we find the following lines. The history of the empire has been made by British adventurers and explorers, the scouts of the nation, for hundreds of years past up to the present time. The knights of King Arthur, Richard Cordelian, and the Crusaders carried British chivalry into distant parts of the earth.

Raleigh, Drake, and Captain John Smith, soldiers and sailors of Queen Elizabeth's time, faced unknown dangers of strange seas as well as the known dangers of powerful enemies to take and hold new lands for the expansion of our small kingdom. Now, chivalry and empire are two of the main themes in Scouting for Boys, and Baden-Powell drew a direct line from medieval knights to modern soldiers, gentlemen, and boy scouts.

Many Victorians believed that the unrivaled strength of the British Empire had its origins in the medieval past.

Soldiers and imperial administrators often saw themselves as crusading knights bringing their ideals of civilization to the world these drawings here by baden powell are just some of his many sketches with medievalist theme related to the image on the right here baden powell writes in scouting for boys quote just like saint george of old the boy scouts of today fight against against everything evil and unclean.

Now, the celebration of an idealized medieval past was a national trend in Victorian Britain, exemplified by buildings such as the Palace de Westminster, built in the mid-19th century in a medievalist Gothic style, with an 1850s statue of the aforementioned King Richard in front. There are countless examples of medievalist art and architecture from this period throughout the country and the former colonies.

As we see in Baden-Powell's work, Victorian Chivalric ideals were very much focused on national and imperial glory. However, we also find a different element in scouting for boys that may be surprising at first glance. Baden-Powell writes, Chivalry. In the old days, the knights were the scouts of Britain, and their rules were very much the same as the scout law which we have now, and very much like what the Japanese have too.

We are their descendants, and we ought to keep up their good name and follow in their steps. the knights, not the Japanese. The Japanese have their Bushido, or laws of the old samurai warriors, just as we have chivalry, or the rules of the knights of the Middle Ages. So here, Baden-Powell is drawing comparisons between British chivalry and what he saw as being the Japanese equivalent, Bushido, or the way of the warrior, or the way of the samurai.

And today, Bushido is still commonly found in films, anime, manga, martial arts, and many other types of Japanese popular culture. But in 1908, it was a household word in Britain and many other countries. Anyone reading Scouting for Boys in 1908 would have immediately recognized Bushido and its connection to the samurai. How did we get here, though, and where are those suffragettes?

Now, I'm going to fall into a slightly irritating habit that historians have, which is to take us even further back in time. And I'm not going to go all the way back to the medieval past here, but just the 1850s. And at this point, Japan had been ruled for nearly 700 years by the samurai, who were known as fierce fighters for much of their early history. In 1600, however, Japan was unified under the Tokugawa shoguns and remained at peace for the next 250 years.

And it's at this point that the samurai actually became a distinct and hereditary class for the first time. but for all practical purposes, they were administrators and bureaucrats rather than warriors. And here, the main thing I want to stress is that there was no widely accepted way of the samurai or way of the warrior in pre-modern Japan, and the word bushido was largely unknown. In 1853, an American fleet under Commodore Matthew Perry arrives in Japan,

which has been officially closed to the outside world for over 200 years. years. The inability of the Tokugawa samurai government to face this foreign threat led to considerable unrest and the ultimate collapse of the old order in 1868, when a few regional lords overthrew the government and placed the Meiji emperor in power.

Now, the Meiji period was defined by wholesale modernization and westernization processes that shook the whole country, and we can see these changes reflected in the person of the emperor himself, with these two photos taken just a few months apart. On the left we see him dressed in very traditional garb, imperial garb at that time in Japan, and on the right in kind of a European-style military uniform, which is really how he appears in public from that point onward.

One of the new government's first priorities after 1868 was to establish a modern army, which relied on conscripts rather than samurai, many of whom struggled to adapt to the new order. As many samurai feared, the abolition of the old warrior government was followed by the gradual elimination of samurai stipends and special status in a series of reforms in the 1870s.

Their discontent was a significant factor in a number of disturbances that shook Japan, and the violence of these rebellions further demonstrated the gap that had developed between the samurai and mainstream society. Popular sentiments towards the samurai in the 1880s were generally negative, and the idea that a way of the samurai could benefit the new Japan would certainly have seemed old-fashioned and strange.

Rejection of the past affected many feudal relics in Japan. including not just samurai, but also castles. These obsolete fortifications were similarly seen as symbols of the old order, and hundreds of castle buildings were torn down in the 1870s, with their materials and land reused by civilian and military authorities for more modern purposes suited to the new Japan.

Even as people in Japan rejected the symbols and structures of their supposed medieval past, the increasing number of diplomats and other travelers to the West encountered European medievalism wherever they went.

In many countries, monarchs and other rulers lived in medieval castles, such as here at Windsor, while even modern structures were built in a medieval style, such as the Round Tower at Windsor and many other buildings being expanded and enhanced in a medievalist manner in the 19th century. The most famous Japanese travelers were the Iwakura Mission, a high-level government delegation that traveled to the west in 1871-73 visiting dozens of castles across Europe, including the Tower of London.

The official chronicler of the Iwakura mission admired the tower's armory, with, quote, its huge array of old armor and weapons, each item labeled with its date. The chronicler was especially intrigued by, quote, a set of Japanese armor said to have been sent from Japan as a gift to King James I. There was also a collection of Japanese swords, but they were inferior pieces of the kind found in any antique shop and not worth looking at, end of quote.

The armor in question is still in the collection of the tower today. Japanese visitors were fascinated by the idea of turning an obsolete castle into a military museum for exhibiting the the nation's historic weapons and accounts of great victories, to promote nationalism and a martial spirit.

When the mission returned to Japan, its leaders sought to implement many of the things they had deemed useful in the West, including a national military museum, which they ultimately built in Tokyo in 1881 in the style of a European castle designed by an Italian architect.

Japanese elites were becoming increasingly interested in Europe's medieval past, also through the Victorian history textbooks that formed the basis of much of the new Japanese education system, and which were full of references to knighthood and the Crusades. In the 1870s and 1880s, as many Japanese rejected their own feudal heritage and sought to modernize, the Victorian chivalric revival complicated things.

From the Japanese perspective, on the one hand, the British Empire was the world's most powerful empire and built on the most modern technology. On the other hand, the British were fascinated by medieval culture and traced their own rise to medieval ideals. Above all, the English gentleman, depicted here in Japanese prints, was seen as the heir of medieval knighthood and chivalry, defending national virtues that had been passed down through the centuries.

By the late 1880s, Japanese attitudes towards the past had begun to shift, and a symbolic rehabilitation of the samurai and other feudal symbols began to gather momentum. Japanese thinkers proposed that, like Britain, Japan had also had a feudal knighthood, the samurai, which could serve as a reference for native chivalry, which they called Bushido, and portrayed as the soul of Japan.

Bushido was popularly outlined as an ethic of honesty, integrity, and self-sacrifice, echoing some of the key values of idealized English gentlemen. This was part of a process by which people in Japan rediscovered their own medieval past as a source for modern national identity. Pre-modern castles, which had been destroyed as feudal relics in the 1870s, were increasingly preserved and celebrated, and dozens were converted to modern army bases.

Through bushido and castles, medieval symbols were linked to the modern state, especially the modern military that was seen as the heirs of the samurai warriors. This connection developed rapidly after Japan's victory in the Sino-Japanese War in 1895, which also rapidly changed British views towards Japan and the samurai, raising the profile of both in a very positive light.

Idealistic views of the samurai and Japan spread even more widely throughout British society following the signing of the Anglo-Japanese Alliance in 1902, and Bushido became a household word in Britain and around the world during and after Japan's defeat of Russia in the Russo-Japanese War of 1904-05. It's also around this time that the women's suffrage movement became enamored with aspects of Japan's idealized martial culture.

Like many aspects of society and culture, as we have seen, suffragettes also borrowed liberally from medieval symbols, and activists dressed up as Joan of Arc were common at parades and rallies, a powerful symbol of a female martial hero.

Medievalist imagery was also used by activists in the United States. In Britain, amidst the Japan boom of the 1900s, members of the women's suffrage movement were especially intrigued by Japanese martial arts, which are popularly linked to the samurai. The martial art of jiu-jitsu was a global phenomenon at the time, with even U.S. President Teddy Roosevelt and his daughter Alice receiving instruction.

For the British suffragettes, who were often physically attacked by the police, jiu-jitsu seemed ideal. It was portrayed as a defensive method that allowed a physically smaller or weaker person to overcome and disable a stronger opponent, and many jiu-jitsu instructors advertised specifically to women. As this Japanese instructor explained jiu-jitsu, quote, superior size and weight are of no account as they are in your British boxing. That is why I am teaching it to British women.

It is all balance and quickness. These qualities will always win, and women are always quick. Many women suffrage activists trained in jiu-jitsu, and there were concerns among policemen that they could be seriously injured by these women if they tried to arrest them, as reflected in some headlines from the time.

Things like tiny girl masters big cop suffragists at jujitsu course london in fear of sylvia's army in reference to sylvia pankhurst and from an american newspaper swell london dames practicing art of jujitsu the police and media concern with these seemingly dangerous women is encapsulated in this comic the suffragette who knew jujitsu and we see her standing there the votes for women sign and kind of policemen thrown over the fence and cowering

behind one another now many people in Britain came to see Japan as a model for Britain's future due to its supposed emphasis on collectivism and the subordination of the individual good to that of the nation. A major diplomatic mission in 1906 made the Meiji Emperor a member of the Order of the Garter, itself supposedly dating back to the Crusades. And it's in this context that we should see Robert Baden-Powell's celebration of the samurai in Bushido in his 1908 book Scouting for Boys.

Historians of the Victorian chivalric revival have argued that chivalry died in the trenches of the First World War, when mechanized warfare and poison gas put paid to fantasies of nightly duels and the romance of the battlefield. In Japan as well, popular interest in Bushido and the samurai saw a sharp decline from around 1914, although they would experience a resurgence in the militaristic propaganda of the 1930s.

Ultimately, the turn of the 20th century was a historical moment when soldiers, suffragettes, and Boy Scouts, all drew on similar medievalist ideals, and knights and samurai became global icons, and they retain some of that glory today. Music.