Dawn of the Samurai: The Shadow of the Sword (Part 1)

**SPEAKER_1** (0:01)
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**SPEAKER_2** (0:42)
The Mongol Empire is invading our home. They are brutal, relentless, unstoppable. We are 80 samurai against an army, fighting to slow the invasion. Today, I die for my people. There must be thousands of the enemy. We will face death and defend our home.
Tradition, courage, honor, they are what make us. We are the warriors of Tsushima. We are samurai.

**Dominic Sandbrook** (1:25)
Konnichiwa everybody. So that is the opening to the excellent video game Ghost of Tsushima, which was developed by an American company, Sucker Punch Productions for Sony in 2020 And as anyone who's played the game will know, we're in the 13th century in 1274 So the antagonists are the Mongols who are ruling a mighty empire, stretching all the way from the Danube to the peninsula of Korea. And their next target is Japan. And a huge Mongol armada is on the way. And the first stop in its sights is Tsushima, which is the island that lies midway between Korea and Western Japan.
And in the game, you are playing as Jin Sakai. So your task is to resist the Mongol assault. And you are a young nobleman of Tsushima. And you've been instructed in the way of the samurai by your uncle Lord Shimura, who is the person speaking in that prologue. And in fact, one of the things you have to do in the game is to slightly ignore Shimura's advice, because you're playing as a ghost, a kind of assassin. Because Shimura says to you at the beginning, Jin, when we fight, we face our enemy head on.

**SPEAKER_2** (2:40)
And when we take their life, we look them in the eye with courage and respect. This is what makes us samurai.

**Dominic Sandbrook** (2:47)
But whether Jin heeds that advice, whether he goes his own way, is what the game is about, isn't it, Tom? You're such a big video games fan. I'm amazed you started this with such a long discussion about Ghost of Tsushima. I mean, it's an excellent choice. But I'm guessing you've never played it?

**Tom Holland** (3:03)
I looked at this on YouTube. I thought it looked quite good, quite exciting. And I wanted to do that partly because the samurai are such a part of video game culture. Am I right in saying that? I think I am. Yeah.

**Dominic Sandbrook** (3:17)
I mean, there's lots of samurai video games.

**Tom Holland** (3:18)
But it's also because that opening that you gave, it's expressive of a very distinctive take, a very distinctive understanding of the samurai. The actual reality, the historical context, what actually happened when the Mongols landed at Tsushima. They then go on to attack mainland Japan. We will be coming to that later in this year. We're not going to be doing that in this series, because in this series, we're going back to look at the beginnings of the samurai, the origins of this extraordinary warrior cast. And it's a story that will be taking us to the heart of medieval Japan. So we'll be going to the 10th, the 11th centuries, when this very distinctive class of warrior starts to emerge on the Japanese archipelago. We'll be looking particularly at the eruption in the late 12th century of this massive civil war between rival samurai clans. And this is a conflict that inspired the great epic of medieval Japan, the kind of the Iliad of Japan, which is a work called The Tale of the Heike. And we will also be exploring the way in which the rise of military rule, the rise of this warrior cast results in the eclipse of the traditional court life focused in Kyoto, the great imperial capital. So it's a series about a cast of warriors who rank, I would say, as perhaps the most glamorous and mythologized warriors of all time.

**Dominic Sandbrook** (4:49)
Yeah. Let's have our listeners have a vague impression of the samurai. I would imagine they'll imagine the sort of the drawn swords and the tremendous armor and stuff. But I'm guessing a lot of people have only the very flimsiest idea of exactly when they were around and where they came from.

**Tom Holland** (5:06)