Original photo by John Benitez/ Unsplash
Samurai seem pretty old-school, a remnant of a feudal past, whereas sound recording feels like a hallmark invention of the modern era. So it’s strange to think that these things actually overlapped — and that sound recording started before the samurai disappeared. When U.S. Navy Commodore Matthew C. Perry’s “black ships” arrived in Edo Bay (now Tokyo Bay) in 1853, the end of the samurai — Japan’s hereditary warrior caste — was close at hand. Perry’s maneuvers opened Japan to the West after centuries of isolation. It would take several more years, but the Meiji Restoration (1868–1889) saw the end of the samurai when feudalism was officially abolished in 1871.
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It's a factHeard at piano recitals everywhere, “Mary Had a Little Lamb” is thought to be based on Mary Elizabeth Sawyer, who in 1815 nursed an injured lamb to health. The lamb then followed Mary everywhere, prompting a fellow student to write the familiar poem.
Thomas Edison’s recording of “Mary Had a Little Lamb” in 1877 is sometimes regarded as the world’s first true sound recording — but that isn’t technically true. In the late 1850s, French inventor Édouard-Léon Scott de Martinville started capturing a series of sounds, including the French folk song “Au clair de la lune” in 1860, using a phonautograph (a machine that captured the image of a sound wave using soot). Scott never designed the phonautograph to play sound back, unlike Edison’s phonograph. But in 2008, scientists from the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory in California successfully recreated some of Scott’s recordings, including the folk song, making the Frenchman’s experiments the first recorded sound in history — and preserved from a time when samurai still roamed the streets of Edo.
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The world’s oldest continuously performed orchestral music, Gagaku, comes from ______.
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The world’s oldest continuously performed orchestral music, Gagaku, comes from Japan.
Women were also samurai warriors.
Women samurai warriors, known as onna-bugeisha or onna-musha, were a part of Japanese history for centuries. Unlike the men they fought alongside, who preferred blades such as the katana and wakizashi, women often used the more nimble naginata, which resembled a staff with a blade at one end. Their story goes back to the semi-legendary Empress Jingū (approximately 169–269 CE), who is said to have led an invasion of present-day Korea. But the most famous of these fatal females was the (perhaps also legendary) 12th-century warrior Tomoe Gozen, who was feared for her fierce fighting ability and reportedly led more than 1,000 men in battle. Today, Tomoe Gozen is the subject of legends and modern adaptations of her story, including Jessica Amanda Salmonson’s The Tomoe Gozen Saga. Other samurai women dot Japanese history until the Battle of Aizu in 1868, when Nakano Takeko led female fighters in fighting against the emperor. However, the emperor prevailed, and Nakano, along with the rest of the samurai, were consigned to history.
Darren Orf lives in Portland, has a cat, and writes about all things science and climate. You can find his previous work at Popular Mechanics, Inverse, Gizmodo, and Paste, among others.
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