Overthinking the apocalypse

In the realm of learning the katana, a lot of bullshidō caters to the desire of becoming a master samurai. In kendō proper, the first thing you'll be told is that there has been no samurai since 1876, and there won't ever be. “Samurai” does not mean “badass swordsmaster”; it means a specific caste in an hereditary caste system, and that system was, thankfully, abolished. In kendō circles, the whole “code of the samurai” stuff is kinda cringe if you say it out loud. Kendō people are more likely to know that the Hagakure is itself LARPing by some nerdy blowhard who never saw as much as a scuffle in his historical period, that Eugen Herrigel had no idea what the fuck he was talking about, and so on.

Yet like in all repudiations of “cringe”, that longing still remains. The dude who posts selfies as UrbanSamurai108 wearing purple Shein hakama and tactical katana feels so painful to look at because you recognise the purple hakama inside your ~heart~. It used to be that most people into kendō came to it after reading “Musashi”, or watching samurai movies; these days that's still true, plus we added anime and samurai games to the list. Lots of kenshi still want to be like a samurai, even if they won't admit it to themselves. Like not hereditary nobility, but this fantasy of competency and stoicism, of being unafraid, of a devotion to the blade that elevates it to art, somehow, like nobody says that it's “art” if you get so good with a rocket launcher that you always blow up your target, but with the sword there's a certain mystery… Is it only because, buried in the past, centuries after the time when samurai could murder any of us peasants at a whim, it stopped being scary? I’m unsure but it's natural to want to be powerful, resilient, skilled, unphased by adversity. Films about kung fu masters or cowboys or supersoldiers have the same effect on audiences.

(My father once saw some action movie in the theatre where the tough soldier hero toughens his own knuckles over a fire, in order to condition them for punching bare-handed. Back at home, my father tried it himself. It was a bad idea. Next day at the company, he spotted a conspicuous number of male employees with bandages around their knuckles.)

In kendō circles, wanting to be a samurai comes out discreetly, in little things; nobody will say it outright, but like, maybe one day you're feeling kinda ill and pondering if you go to training, and a voice in your mind will say, “a samurai will fight resolutely in the face of discomfort...” Maybe you consider visiting a few gyms for guest training in your vacations, and the words “musha-shūgyō” pop up irresistibly. Stuff like that.

And I mean kendō is full of little allusions when you look up closely, like how many other martial arts give this much importance to your outfit’s neatness, presentation and manners to achieve rank? How many sports will outright remove a point if you get caught celebrating or expressing emotion about your victory? Kendō people will at one moment tell you that the shinai is not a sword, we tap more than slash, the technique is different, don't think you're learning the sword with this, it’s a modern sport; then ten minutes later they’ll remind you that the new bokutō kata have the explicit goal of reminding you that the shinai is a sword and must be respected as such. They will tell you we're not learning actual combat, it's just a game, then the next moment say that each kote should be decisive enough that the hands of the enemy hit the ground. “20 kote suburi, and I want to see 20 hands hitting the ground”. The kendō hakama has exactly 5 pleats and each symbolises one Confucian virtue; duty, propriety, all that. (For context, and contra the 20th-century Japoniste genre of books of the form “Zen and the art of X”, the Japanese social order in general, and the samurai class in particular, are shaped by Confucianism more than anything. Zen is by comparison a footnote.)

Myself, I profoundly hate Confucian values in general and the samurai in particular; a class of hereditary nobility who are also military cops is about the worst idea I can imagine. I too, of course, secretly want to be a baddass swordsmistress, but my inner LARPer oscillates to role models poorly represented in Japanese historical materials, and entirely absent in martial arts culture—especially the sword, a weapon historically forbidden to anyone outside the samurai caste; my role models are rebels, weirdos, foreigners, indigenous “barbarians”, mountain bandits and pirate queens, peasants in uprising, anarchists who plotted to assassinate the Emperor, sukeban gangs and bōsōzoku squads… The only way I can survive the samurai-philia of kendō is if I think of myself as an infiltrator, a sort of thief stealing their techniques to reclaim them for the people; I have to put on the hakama thinking to myself, ufufu nobody knows I'm actually against devotion to one's feudal lord (I grin goofily, as if that was a secret, nevermind the big anarchist flag tattooed on my neck)…

I can’t be like, “a true samurai would wake up 5am in winter to practice the sword”. I have to be like, if the goddamn samurai could do that then so can I. I'm not gonna lose to a cop.

Of course nobody really cares about your inner philosophical commitments, as long as you're willing to follow dōjo etiquette and interact with the other kenshi the same way everyone does. In the end this is all games of the mind, we're neither samurai nor mountain bandits, we're modern dorks drawn to some nameless thing that lives inside the sword. I guess we all have our own approaches to LARPing, our own limits of cringe, and our own copes.