450-Year-Old Book Reveals What to Name a Baby Samurai

From Live Science:

What should you name a baby samurai? What food should a samurai bring to a battle? What is a samurai's most treasured possession? A newly translated 450-year-old book supposedly written by a renowned samurai provides answers to these and many other questions about the Japanese swordsmen.

Called "The Hundred Rules of War," the book is a series of songs that could be sung by samurai, who had never gone into battle. It was supposedly written in Japanese in 1571 by a famous samurai named Tsukahara Bokuden, who lived from 1489 to 1571, during a war-ridden time in Japan. Stories told about Bokuden claim that he fought in over 100 battles and slew hundreds of swordsmen.

The book was recently translated into English by Eric Shahan, who specializes in translating Japanese martial-arts texts. The book was first printed in Japanese in 1840, and has been republished in Japanese several times since then, Shahan told Live Science.

read more here @ Live Science

Japanese Warrior Women

From Archaeology News Network:

'The archaeological evidence, meager though it is," writes historian Stephen Turnbull in "Samurai Women 1184-1877" (2010), "tantalizingly suggests a wider female involvement in battle than is implied by written accounts alone."

Armor and weapons have been found in the tombs of 4th-century female rulers. Do they support the historicity of the legendary Empress Jingu? They might — or might not; scholars disagree.

Samurai Mothers & Lead Poisoning

From Live Science:

Lead poisoning isn't just a problem for post-industrial city kids — the children of samurai suffered from it too, a new study suggests. An analysis of bones of children who lived as many as 400 years ago showed sky-high lead levels, which scientists now think came from their mothers' makeup.

At the castle town of Kokura, in the modern city of Kitakyushu, samurai and their families were buried in large clay pots at a local Zen Buddhist temple. A team lead by Tamiji Nakashima, an anatomist at the University of Occupational and Environmental Health in Kitakyushu, studied the remains of 70 samurai men, their wives and children. The researchers sampled the lead in rib bones, and X-rayed some of the children's long arm and leg bones looking for signs of lead poisoning.