M Murata

Interesting, Needs More Careful Review of East Asian Elements

Reviewed: 07-22-21

While I have no real background in Hyperborea or Norse Paganism, what I paid attention to while knitting seemed to be at least logically presented and intriguing. However, the chapter on the Vikings as Samurai needs further review.

Should one decide to compare the Vikings with the samurai, why not further compare how the two came to rise as a warrior class that grew to include not only warfare, but also things like philosophy and poetry? Additionally, if one is going to compare death poetry, I would think that using a comparative example from when the samurai were an actual class in Japan would make a more compelling argument than an anachronistic use of the poetry of Kuribayashi Tadamichi, general of the Imperial Army at Iwo Jima during World War 2. There were no samurai in the 1900’s, the class being more or less eradicated by the Meiji Restoration in the late 1860’s and the Japanese government’s subsequent legislation regarding swords, among other things. While some samurai survived the change to become one of the significantly economically powerful zaibatsu groups, most did not. Any person looking at a Japanese history textbook (and not an American movie by a similar name) can easily find that the person consider by many to be the last samurai is Saigo Takamori. He died in 1877.

My review for this story is three stars due to my lack of background in the main topics of this book and the fact that it was overall quite enjoyable. However, it seems incredibly short-sighted and ill-advised to be so, if not careless, then unconcerned with the specifics of comparisons to other cultures in the East. This is particularly true when the central argument of a book focuses on the spread of people, language, and culture and the similarities that linger.

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