I Don't Remember This in the Tom Cruise Movie

Mark Ravina's The Last Samurai is not a novel and not a movie, but it is a fascinating account of the life and death of Saigo Takamori, who gained his moment of fame in1877 via his doomed effort to turn back Japan's Meiji Restoration. Not least of its virtues is an account of the world that produced Saigo, including his years as a student in a goju. Goju itself is a remarkable story: apparently in the 1590s, the local potentate mobilized all the available manpower for an invasion of Korea. The mobilizaiton "left the castle town with thousands of unsupervised samurai boys." The town responded by organized a system whereby boys "taught" boys--an institution, as can easily be imagined, somewhere between a Boy Scout picnic and Lord of the Flies.

It was not all rough and tumble. Goju boys learned to play the biwa, a Japanese lute. But they also practiced hiemontori, "a competition for aspiring swordsmen:"

The prize was the right to practice swordsmanship on a human cadaver ... the first slice at the body of an executed criminal In common practice the [competitors] would assemble t the domain prison ... . The boys waitd for the exeutioner to sever the head of the condemned and then rush forward to seize the corpse. The first to bite off an ear or finger and show it to his companions was deemed the winner and was awarded the first round of practice on the cadaver.

--Mark Ravina, The Last Samurai 32 (2004)

Whew, like to know what the merit badge looked like for that one. Years later, at the end of his rebellion, Saigo himself was beheaded. The search for and recovery of the head becomes the framing narrative for Ravina's compelling biography.