Warrior Graveyard
Samurai Back from the Dead
National Geographic & Discovery Channel
WARNING: Graphic Content
Viewer Discretion Advised
A Samurai mass grave was discovered while clearing ground for a car park in the coastal town of Kamakura, Japan, south of Tokyo, in 1953.
"Investigators have unearthed a gruesome mass grave along the beaches of Kamakura, Japan. The grave is filled with thousands of skeletons that date back to 1333 a time when the people there incurred the wrath of the emperor and fought in a series of bloody battles. With new forensic examination, Warrior Graveyard examines the remains of six people killed at the beaches of Kamakura to gain insight into the secrets of the samurai." [1]
"The 1333 siege of Kamakura was a battle of the Genkō War, and marked the end of the power of the Hōjō clan, which had dominated the regency of the Kamakura shogunate for over a century. Forces loyal to Emperor Go-Daigo and led by Nitta Yoshisada entered the city from multiple directions and destroyed it; in the end, the Hōjō leaders retreated to Tōshō-ji, the Hōjō family temple, where they committed suicide with the rest of the clan." [2]
The Samurai
"Samurai (侍?), usually referred to in Japanese as bushi (武士?, [bu͍ꜜ.ɕi̥])
or buke (武家?), were the military nobility of medieval and early-modern
Japan. According to translator William Scott Wilson: "In Chinese, the
character 侍 was originally a verb meaning to wait upon or accompany
persons in the upper ranks of society, and this is also true of the
original term in Japanese, saburau. In both countries the terms were
nominalized to mean "those who serve in close attendance to the
nobility," the pronunciation in Japanese changing to saburai. According
to Wilson, an early reference to the word "samurai" appears in the Kokin
Wakashū (905–914), the first imperial anthology of poems, completed in
the first part of the 10th century.
By the end of the 12th century, samurai became almost entirely synonymous with bushi, and the word was closely associated with the middle and upper echelons of the warrior class. The samurai followed a set of rules that came to be known as bushidō. While the samurai numbered less than 10% of Japan's population, their teachings can still be found today in both everyday life and in modern Japanese martial arts." [3]
References
[1] National Geographic. 1/31/15 <http://documentaryaddict.com/warrior+graveyard+samurai+back+from+the+dead-10031-doc.html>
[2] Wikipedia: "The Siege of Kamakura" 1/31/15 <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Siege_of_Kamakura_%281333%29>
[3] Youtube: 1/31/15 <https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uiy1-vgWPQE>
