Pre WWII

Pre-war Samurai (1930s Manchuria, Kwantung Army)

I decided that I would use my time machine to visit a random samurai era. I cannot wait to find out what civilization I will end up visiting. Tokugawa? Heian? Nara? It doesn’t matter I just want to view some samurai. The loyal and honorable warriors of legend are what I want to see.

After jumping through time it appeared that I had not been deposited in japan at all but. I appeared to be in Manchuria at a military base. It must have been where the Kwantung Army was stationed. But I had set the machine to go to a samurai time period. Surely there are no samurai here?

As I walked through the army encampment there seemed to be a great deal of excitement. It appeared that there was an assassination today, and the army was in high hopes that it would allow them to finally go to war. More importantly as I listened I was shocked to learn that this assassination was of a Manchurian warlord who was an ally of the Japanese, but that the assassins were actually Japanese themselves!  Surely these modern men cannot be samurai? The fabled men who held to a strict code of conduct would never kill their own allies like some villain.

This revelation put my understanding of the samurai, and their very name into question. Although I was quite disturbed I also found myself quite intrigued. I decided that I would go a bit further through time in order to find out more about these so called modern samurai, and hopefully find one among them worthy of the name.

Once again I found myself on the outskirts of the army base. This time however it was clear that the army was mobilizing. From what I learned as I traveled through the camp was that a Japanese train had been bombed. To my horror I discovered that much like the assassination the Japanese military was also to blame for this horrendous act. I could not believe that men who believed themselves to be samurai could commit such an act. Men who were sworn to defend their subjects from all enemies, not bomb those subjects just so that war could be declared. I was starting to become troubled. Would I find a true samurai in this time period?

Again I ventured forward in time. This time I am on the outskirts of a ruined city. The vantage point that I stood upon allowed me to see the fires and carnage that had swept through the city. It appears that also in war these modern samurai were nothing like their ancestor’s. The samurai’s honor that allowed them to treat an enemy fairly and respectfully was nowhere to be found in this cities smoking ruin. I saw firsthand the horrors that these modern samurai committed in the beginning, now I wanted to see their end of their long bloody road.