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Comment by RangerScience | Hacker News Reader

TL;DR - Amateur historian connects the dots between some Australians (who escaped from Tasmania as pirates) and a bunch of Japanese records of what appeared to be a British ship, by realizing the Japanese records indicated the ship was probably a pirate vessel, and (literally) googling "mutiny 1829" (since most pirate vessels were from mutinies).

What's really neat is how detailed the Japanese records were, and that they were made by Samurai, and incorporated watercolor illustrations. I didn't realize (or, it never sunk in) the variety of work they were responsible and trained for.

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By that time, the samurai were the administrative and bureaucratic class. They were doing pretty much everything you would expect government officials to be doing.

Most samurai who lived between the mid-1600s and the mid-1800s never experienced combat, except for practicing sword fighting.

If you haven't yet, read some of James Clavell's novels. Shogun was fascinating, as was Tai-Pan - I've been meaning to get through the rest.

The shogunate and the Meiji period are very, very interesting periods of history, and under-represented.

For a Japanese twist, read Eiji Yoshikawa's novels - he fictionalized historical accounts into novels, Taiko is set before Shogun and is about the rise of Oda Nobunaga, who was succeeded by Clavell's Tokugawa Ieyasu. Musashi is about the famous swordsman's life.

I read Shogun whilst traveling all over Japan at the beginning of last year, amazing book and really added to the experience?

The obvious analogy is knights. We have a lot of iconic depictions of circa 13th century knights from works in later periods. Small feudal chiefs or mounted warriors. That depiction is a particular fictionalization of a particular periods from a particular period.

Knights actually date back to early roman times where they were a mounted warrior class and other European predecessors. Today, they still exist in some form. In between, they were all sorts of things. Even during that iconic late medieval period, knightly orders were responsible for a lot of unexpected stuff. Knights ran an international bank service, for example.

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