The year 2009 yielded a bumper crop of exhibitions about the art of the Japanese “samurai.” In addition to those documented in the three catalogues reviewed here, the Pacific Asia Museum in Pasadena, CA, mounted The Samurai Re-Imagined: From Ukiyo-e to Anime, showing Edo-period woodblock prints alongside contemporary manga comics and anime cels and drawings (but issuing no catalogue). Although the latter catered wholly to popular culture, the other three were far more conventional. But their evident success was surely abetted by the general fascination with the mystique of the “samurai” that is perpetuated precisely by movies, the martial arts, and the continuing boom in Japanese pop visual culture. In a rather obvious effort to play on the allure of the word, in much of the San Francisco show’s publicity the word “SAMURAI” appeared twice as large as the rest of the show’s title, Lords of the Samurai (a somewhat confusing phrase to begin with, since the daimyo “lords” whose household treasures were on exhibition were themselves samurai).

But what actually is the “art of the samurai,” so prominently featured in the exhibition titles? Both in the past and in the exhibitions at hand, “art of the samurai” has become a convenient tag to refer not to art produced by the members of the samurai estate, but to the diverse artifacts included in the family collections of its most powerful elite, above all the daimyo warlords who controlled regional domains after the Tokugawa unification in 1600. Following the dissolution of the Tokugawa system in the course of the Meiji Restoration after 1868, the daimyo lost their provincial lands (including the castles in which they resided) and were moved to Tokyo, where they were provided with land that at least for the greatest lords was a major asset. But most of them quickly squandered it and were forced over time to sell most of their moveable treasures as well, which passed into the market and then into the collections of modern museums, first those of the Meiji state and, after World War II, those of local governments (primarily prefectural) and the private collections of the modern capitalist class that took shape from late Meiji onwards.

It was primarily in the great collections of the former Imperial museums in Tokyo, Kyoto, and Nara, all of which had good access to the remnants of former daimyo collections, that there emerged over time a customary classification of the objects in those collections. The categorization, which remains dominant today, begins with arms (mostly blades and fittings) and armor (including horse mountings), the so-called “public implements” (omote-dôgu, literally “front tools”) of the warrior class. The classification next moves to the “private accoutrements” (oku-dôgu, or “inner tools”) that include fine lacquered utensils for cosmetics (the rare appearance of a female component), food utensils, and aristocratic court games (incense-smelling, seasonal ceremonial games, and so forth). Finally come the paraphernalia of the two great ceremonial preoccupations of daimyo in the Tokugawa period, the Noh drama (represented by robes and masks) and the tea ceremony (featuring a diverse array of utensils).

These categories are deeply indebted to the bureaucracies within daimyo households that had held custody over their physical artifacts, and they were perpetuated as well within the handful of daimyo collections that remained to any degree intact into the twentieth century. These few survivors managed to convert their treasures into modern private museums and foundations, paramount among which was the Tokugawa branch family in Owari (now Nagoya Prefecture), one of the powerful “Three Families” (Go-Sanke) descended from the sons of the first shogun, Ieyasu (1543–1616). The Owari branch survived the Meiji Restoration with enough wealth and power to found the Tokugawa Museum in Nagoya in 1935, controlled by the Tokugawa Reimeikai Foundation. The Owari Tokugawa treasures were exhibited in a celebrated traveling show The Shogun Age Exhibition in 1983–85, with a reprise of much the same content at the Montreal Museum of Fine Arts in 1989 (including an improved catalogue with specialized essays by leading North American art historians).

The next great landmark in the exhibition of daimyo art outside of Japan was Japan: The Shaping of Daimyo Culture, 1185–1868 of 1988–89 at the National Gallery in Washington, DC. This pioneering exhibition, curated by Yoshiaki Shimizu, went far beyond the focus on the collection of a single daimyo that was seen in the Shogun Age, and aimed to demonstrate the way in which arts and crafts served as powerful reflections of the core culture of the daimyo class as it emerged from the sixteenth century and on through the Tokugawa period. Although the exhibition, receiving powerful support from the official Japanese government art establishment, remained indebted to the fixed official categories of daimyo art described above, it was at the same time much broader in context, and the exhibition catalogue’s essays—particularly the fine synthetic article by Martin Collcutt—offered new perspectives on the connections between the history of the daimyo class and its art-collecting instincts.

Turning to the three recent exhibition catalogues at hand, we can find a perfect example of the conventional classification of daimyo art in Art of the Samurai: Selections from the Tokyo National Museum that catalogues a loan of objects to the Bowers Museum in Santa Ana, California. The only new twist is that daimyo art is now called the “art of the samurai,” clearly catering to a new popular audience. As Japan’s largest national museum, the Tokyo National Museum (TNM) has a huge range of such objects to draw from, so could easily dispatch such an exhibition to smaller provincial museums in other countries (the Santa Ana show, for example, appeared earlier in Russia), while retaining complete control over both the content and the catalogue copy, as was clearly the case here. It is of course good to widen global public access to such treasures, but the price is minimal accommodation to the audiences on the receiving end, or to local curatorial initiative, since the catalogue seems to have been written entirely by the staff of the Tokyo National Museum.

The one introductory article in the catalogue, “History and Culture of Samurai,” by TNM senior research chair Kazutoshi Harada, provides only a very general political history, not of the samurai estate as such, but of the shogun and daimyo families that were its elite. The bulk of the article is effectively an outline of those categories of objects as outlined above, from arms and armor (the tools of trade of the warrior class) to the “private accoutrements” and the requisite Noh robes and tea utensils. The catalogue entries for the separate objects are clear and informed, but similarly conventional and purely descriptive. Looking over the catalogue of the Bowers Museum exhibition, we are reminded that what is now called “the art of the samurai” consists overwhelmingly of craft objects made for the samurai elite, but rarely by them. It is all the work of highly skilled craftsmen, some of such standing that they actually have personal names inscribed on their work, most notably the swordmakers.

A second feature becomes obvious only when one looks closely at the dating of all the objects, namely that extant “samurai art” is largely limited to the Tokugawa period, an era of peace. We must remember also that the vast majority of daimyo families that survived into modern times were upstarts from the sixteenth-century period of intensive warfare that led to national unification first under the peasant-born hegemon Hideyoshi and then finally under Ieyasu. So most of these “early modern” (kinsei) daimyo had to hustle both to create proper genealogies and to accumulate conspicuous collections of “ancient” (that is, medieval) family treasures that were not theirs to begin with. The simple reality of this sort of “samurai art” is thus that it was either acquired retrospectively as a mark of status, or it was manufactured on order from the large industry of daimyo-oriented crafts production that thrived until the end of the Edo period. Some of this fearsome-looking armory is the real thing, to be sure, but far more of it is ceremonial ware of fairly recent vintage that was never put to real military use. The only ones who can tell the difference are true connoisseurs, very few of whom will be found among U.S. museum audiences.

This is perhaps the best context in which to consider the catalogue of the exhibition Art of the Samurai: Japanese Arms and Armor, 1156–1868 that was held at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York in the winter of 2009–10. This was a show of more special importance than was probably apparent to most of the almost 200,000 visitors reported to have attended. I do not have all the figures at hand, but surely no loan exhibition from Japan has ever had such an impressive array of designated objects, a total of 34 National Treasures and 64 Important Cultural Properties. By comparison, the vastly more wide-ranging exhibition The Shaping of Daimyo Culture, even with its similarly powerful Japanese institutional support, had only 9 National Treasures and 105 Important Cultural Properties. The simple explanation is that a disproportionately large number of swords are designated National Treasures, probably because that distinction favors age (and steel survives much better than paper, wood, or silk) and pedigree (since the best blades are engraved with the makers’ names).

Even so, the arms and armor exhibition at the Met was surely a landmark in its own narrow field, limited as it was to the professional “omote dôgu” of the warrior class. The catalogue offers a thorough technical description of the almost two hundred items of military gear in this most technical of fields. All of the entries are written by Japanese experts and competently translated by Victor Harris, keeper emeritus of Japanese antiquities at the British Museum and a leading Western scholar of Japanese arms and armor. The detailed introduction by the editor, Mitsuhiro Ogawa, consists mostly of a bland and conventional political history of Japan, which will be of little interest either to general readers or to specialists, plus a section describing some of the key technical details of Japanese swords.

Entirely missing here and in the other catalogues under review is any real history of the sword in Japan either as a weapon or a symbol. We hear little mention, for example, of what has always been known in Japan and is now routinely emphasized by U.S. historians of Japanese warfare (one thinks specifically of Harold Bolitho, Cameron Hurst, Karl Friday, and Thomas Conlon, among others): that for most of the time before the Tokugawa peace, the sword was a relatively minor weapon in comparison with the bow, the lance, and the gun. Its status was rooted more in its deep religious symbolism and in the quality of its craftsmanship, and it was only in the seventeenth century that the status of the sword soared when the bearing of long swords was legally restricted to the samurai estate. The widely touted “cult” of the sword was already in the making in the sixteenth century, but that cult as it is widely propagated today is ironically the product of a status-ridden era of peace, not an anything-goes time of war.

Let me now turn finally to the Lords of the Samurai exhibition at the Asian Art Museum in San Francisco, which is in precisely the same mold as the Shogun Age exhibition a quarter of a century earlier, namely that of a single daimyo collection. This is apparent only in the subtitle, The Legacy of a Daimyo Family, which, however, fails to identify the family itself. The implication that this is just any old daimyo family is misleading, since the Hosokawa family treasures are second in importance among surviving daimyo collections only to the Tokugawa collection of Owari mentioned above. The Hosokawa collection is housed both in the private Eisei Bunko museum in Tokyo (founded in 1950), and in the private family collection in Kumamoto. The San Francisco showing of outstanding highlights of the collection was the first ever outside Japan, and was greatly facilitated by the strong support of the current family head, Hosokawa Morihiro, who served as prime minister of Japan from August 1993 until April 1994. Hosokawa is an ardent amateur potter, and nine of his recent works (plus three works of porcelain with designs painted by his father, Morisada, in the 1960s) were on display at the San Francisco exhibition.

The importance of the Hosokawa collection, beyond its size and quality, lies in the long history of the Hosokawa family, longer than almost all other daimyo families of the Tokugawa period. It was a leading daimyo family in the medieval period, and although the main line declined in the early sixteenth century, a parallel line revived the family and went on to become one of the great daimyo clans of the Sengoku period from the 1570s. Of particular importance was the literary and cultural distinction of Hosokawa Yûsai (1534–1610), a leading scholar of waka poetry and patron of the tea ceremony, and a genuine practitioner of the “unity of bun and bu” (of which more below).

The exhibition catalogue itself is adequate but uninspired. Yoko Woodson’s essay on the broad historical background shows only modest acquaintance with recent scholarship, either in Japanese or English, about the history of the daimyo class or its collection habits; one would do better to turn back to Martin Collcutt’s essay in the Shaping of Daimyo Culture catalogue. Deborah Clearwater’s essay on the Hosokawa collection is competent and useful but heavily reliant on English-language materials. The catalogue entries are also competent, but with few original insights. More could have been done with such an important exhibition of such a distinguished collection of daimyo art.

Wholly apart from the exhibition content and its accompanying catalogue, the art history and museum curatorial profession must also take account of the storm of controversy that was wholly unintended by the curators when the show became the object of a skillful propagation of a “guerrilla art collective” that calls itself the “Asians Art Museum,” distinguished on the surface only by the plural “s” but promoting a radical political stance opposing the stereotyping of things “Asian” (reflected in the parodic slogan “Where Asian still means Oriental”). The attack came in the form of a parody website titled “Lord It’s the Samurai” (still accessible at www.asiansart.org, as is the official exhibition site at www.asianart.org/Samurai.htm), and it provoked considerable discussion in the autumn of 2009 among bloggers and on Japan-related email lists.

Much of the responsibility for this brouhaha lies with the way in which the Lords of the Samurai exhibition was publicized, particularly on the website of the Asian Art Museum, which under the slogan “Brilliant warriors, artistic masters” tended to suggest that “SAMURAI” (always in large capital letters in the PR) were not only “professional warriors” but “also visionaries who strove to master artistic, cultural, and spiritual pursuits.” This reflects what is undeniably a long and deep strand in elite warrior ideology, condensed in the classic admonition to honor equally the military arts of “bu” and the literary arts of “bun.” The problem was the conflation of this high ideal with the reality of the long and complex history of the Japanese warrior class, leaving the impression that all “samurai” throughout Japanese history were gifted artists engaged in profound spiritual practice. No room is left for the brutal realities of samurai warfare, cruelty, and betrayal.

In the exhibition catalogue, this simplistic image is eagerly promoted by Thomas Cleary’s long (far exceeding the length of the four other introductory essays combined) and abstract essay, “Bushido: The Culture of the Samurai.” Here and elsewhere, Cleary has propagated a spiritualistic and somewhat ahistorical notion of “Bushido,” a term frequently bandied about in the modern period to mean whatever a given writer wishes it to mean. It was particularly abused within the ideology of the modern emperor-state that took shape from the late nineteenth into the early twentieth centuries, and was then further distorted from the late 1960s when Cleary and others took to translating abstruse and idealistic Edo-period texts to promote a notion of “Bushido” that often lacks historical context. Collcutt had already provided precisely this context in his essay for the Shaping of the Daimyo exhibition two decades earlier, demonstrating that the “unity” of bun and bu emerged not as an abstract philosophical proposition (as Cleary wants to depict it), but as an overarching political and social necessity for the warrior elite to take on the cultural pursuits of the civil court aristocracy as their own in order to legitimate their radically new form of rule.

Stereotypical conceptions of the samurai became an easy target for the attack by the “Asians Art Museum,” which is unfortunate, because the exhibition itself, and sections of the catalogue text, offered a much more nuanced and concrete demonstration of the ways in which “bun” and “bu” were blended in the history of the Hosokawa family and its collection, above all in the remarkable accomplishments of the first two daimyo of the Tokugawa era, Hosokawa Fujitaka (Yûsai) and his heir, Tadaoki (Sansai, 1564–1646), particularly in waka studies and the tea ceremony. The catalogue includes a charming introductory essay by the well-known scholar Takeuchi Jun’ichi, and the exhibition itself has some memorable items related to these early Hosokawa lords, including portraits of both Yûsai and Sansai, and actual works (a painted fan and two tea scoops) from the hand of Yûsai.

It is not the place of this review to engage in any detail the Asians Art Museum’s highly political intervention. I would note only that my own critique meshes well with the argument that the Asian Art Museum’s publicity (if not always the catalogue copy, and certainly not the actual exhibition contents) tended to reinforce Orientalist stereotypes about the exotic and mystical “Samurai” as widely perpetuated in both contemporary Japanese and Western culture alike.

In the end, this flowering of “art of the samurai” exhibitions in 2009 did not in itself open up much new ground, falling into established conventions, but thanks largely to the “Lord It’s the Samurai” intervention (a work of art in itself), it certainly provided new food for thought both about “samurai” and about the way that we represent its “art” in our museums. This recent boom should force us to reflect first on the fact that the historical “samurai” estate was not a figment of contemporary popular culture, but rather hugely stratified and changeable over time, and that only the tiny elite daimyo class had the capacity to create coherent collections of art, all of which undercuts the very idea of “the art of the samurai.” The “Lord It’s the Samurai” perspective also obliges us to see the exhibition of the art of other cultures not only in historical, but also in contemporary, perspectives. These are serious challenges both for art historians and museum curators.