tablesaw | Warehouse 13: Full Inventory

I'm going to go into a bit more detail about the appropriation and misrepresentation of culture and history by looking at the artifacts mentioned in episodes of Warehouse 13. For a brief overview of what I'm talking about in this series, read "An Extraordinary Rendition of History; Items in Warehouse 13 that Don't Belong in "America's Attic". I won't be going into too great detail of research; if I prove something horribly inaccurate, I do so using only minimal Googling. Corrections and clarifications are thus welcome.

When I first saw the previews for "Implosion" I was really excited. The featured line of dialogue was teasing that the Warehouse had "competition," the artifact in question was a Japanese sword, and I got the slight impression that the mysterious competitor attacking Myka and Pete with another Tesla might have been Asian. "Aha!" I thought, "perhaps Japan will be another nation with a Warehouse 13–like initiative. That could do a little bit to relieve the Americentrism of the show's concept."

It could. But it won't.

I'm not going to go into spoilery detail about the fucked-uppedness of what happened in the show, but here's a bit of casting news. Dennis Akayama, the Asian-Canadian actor featured in this week's episode, will not appear again, while the Welshman that married Kirstie Alley on Cheers will have a recurring role.

So, status quo it shall be.

Artifact: Implosion Grenade
What does it do? "It removes matter from the center of a space and pulls everything directly towards it with violent force."
Is it in any way accurate? It's completely fictional device.
Does it belong in America's Attic? Its creator, Erik Kluger, seems to be (and have been) working in the Washington metro area, so yes.

Artifact: Ice Flower (14th century Chinese firework)
What does it do? "The light pattern triggers a feedback loop in the Optic Nerve that mesmerizes the viewer" for about 10 minutes. The viewers also can't remember anything that happened.
Is it in any way accurate? The Chinese had been using fireworks for hundreds of years by the 14th century. I can't tell if it's depiction is anachronistic. I mean it looked modernish, but I wouldn't be at all surprised to learn that firework technology has remained mostly the same through the centuries.
Chinese? I thought this episode was about Japan? Well, the main artifact is Japanese, but that doesn't mean that everything in the episode has to be. Still, it is a little suspicious that the first time we see an Asian artifact we got two at the same time. I'm sure it has nothing to do with the kind of overarching systemic racism that Samuel R. Delaney addresses in talking about how he always mysteriously ends up paired with the one other black writer in a large field of white writers.
Does it belong in America's Attic? Not only doesn't it belong in America's Attic, U.S. government agents shouldn't get to run around and use them willy-nilly. There are "very few like it left," and Artie doesn't actually have permission to use it ("Don't tell Mrs. Frederic"), but they do anyway.

Artifact: The Honjo Masamune

What does it do? Invisibility ("The blade on this particular sword is said to be so perfect that light splits in its path and goes around the person holding it.")

Is it in any way accurate? The Honjo Masamune is an actual blade. Masamune was a totally awesome smith who made totally awesome and beautiful swords. And the way he's depicted by the show seems to gibe with my brief research into his life and the symbolic reverence of his life's work.

Although you may be more familiar with the Masamune sword that killed Aeris, the Honjo Masamune is definitely the most famous and significant of Masamune's swords. Artie says that it was "owned by the ruling family of Japan for centuries before it disappeared," which is . . . nearly true. The sword was passed down through the Tokugawa Shogunate while it ruled Japan in what's called the Edo Period. That's how it got to be so famous, really. But then things start to go off the rails. As for the full provenance of the real sword, this page has a seemingly good rundown of what happened.

To start with, it's described as an "800-year-old sword" several times in the show. Masamune lived during the turn of the 14th century. We live at the turn of the 21st century. This is the second time that the show has added one hundred years to its reckoning of dates. So I address this brief open letter to Warehouse 13:

Dear Warehouse 13:

While it's odd for a geeky show such as yours to have so few people unable to spend a few minutes researching on the Internet, I understand that's mostly par for the course. However, your show seems to have a desperate need for someone who can do basic arithmetic. I graciously offer my services as someone with decades of experience subtracting numbers accurately. I will, of course, expect an exorbitant consulting fee.

Sincerely,
Tablesaw

Also, the show says that the sword was "unearthed a few weeks ago in a dig site in Okinawa." The first reason this is weird is the phrase "dig site." This suggests, to me, that it was an archaeological expedition, which would mean that the sword had been lost (in the W13 universe) for several centuries. But the Tokugawa Shogunate began in 1603 and continued until the Meiji Restoration in 1868. So if the sword was in the family for centuries and then lost, the earliest that could happen would be in 1804, which seems a little recent for something to be found in a "dig site." It gives the impression that the sword (and much of Japanese history) happened a long time ago.

And here I must confess that I have a horrible sense of the continuity of human history. I have a few major areas covered in detail, but I didn't get a good sense of synthesis between them. And I get the sense that my never-really-thought-about-it "common knowledge" about Edo Japan lines up with many other Americans. I know that they had swords and that it was a feudal society ("Fuedal Japan" is one of the most common descriptions) and that they walked around with swords, and so I end up thinking that it's of a piece with the European Middle Ages, which was also feudal and also involved guys waving swords around. And when I see that the dates lined up, I get a sense that Japan was backwards because they were still in a feudal system with swords in the 19th century while the United States had guns and democracy.

Of course, that sense of superiority can only be maintained by carefully forgetting that in the United States, we practiced widespread slavery and also ran around with swords, we just did so with more guns, which isn't that much of an improvement, when you think about it.

Anyway, the real Honjo Masamune is currently lost, but it happened very differently from the way the show implies. The sword stayed in the Tokugawa family after the restoration of the emperor, and through Second World War. And then this:

[T]he American occupation forces had begun to confiscate any sword they could find after the war in 1945. These seizures were indiscriminate—family heirlooms and masterpieces were commandeered just as quickly as military blades. Japanese people were uncertain about what role the swords were to play, and what they should do with them. The Americans went door to door with the Japanese police to ask people to surrender any swords they had, and most people turned them over. Many of the swords ended up in warehouses, and, as noted earlier, any occupation soldier who wanted a Japanese sword as a souvenir could have one for the asking.

The process of collecting Japanese swords by the occupation forces went on for almost a year and during this time many military blades, as well as many fine quality older swords, were destroyed.

— Leon Kapp, Hiroko Kapp & Yoshindo Yoshihara, Modern Japanese Swords and Swordsmiths: From 1868 to the Present (emphasis mine).

Eventually the confiscations and destructions were halted, and a procedure was put into place to ensure that no historically or artistically significant swords were destroyed, but by that time, the Honjo Masamune was nowhere to be found, most likely melted down to base elements.

Of course, there's the slight (and growing slighter as time passes) chance that some unwitting American soldier took it back to the States as pillage. Personally, I think that would have made for a much cooler story of finding the sword after it being actually lost to history, but I suppose the show felt it hit too close to home and was a bit shy about dealing with the fact that the United States destroyed another nation's national treasures. And speaking of national treasures . . .

Does it belong in America's Attic? In the context of the show, the answer is, surprisingly, yes. The sword (in two parts) is presented to the President of the United States, so it makes sense that the understand that it will be held in the United States. But that simply raises the question, "How accurate is it to portray the government of Japan as offering the most famous sword in its history as a gift to the United States?"

In one sense, it is accurate, since the Honjo Masamune was offered to the United States (which promptly destroyed it because it was considered a dangerous weapon). Still, that offering wasn't so much of a requirement by fiat of occupying forces. Wikipedia also mentions that there is a Masamune at the Harry S Truman Presidential Museum, but it's got a big old Citation Needed banner above it, and the museum's website doesn't mention it. And that sword is not, obviously, the Honjo Masamune. And in our world, while the sword was busy not being somehow buried far from the capital, the sword was recognized as a national treasure.

Ultimately, it just seems that, although the show made an attempt to demonstrate why, in its internal world, the sword could be held in the United States, that attempt was itself so inaccurate as to add to the distortion of history already surrounding their representation of an important part of Japanese culture and history.

As a final note, it only just occurred to me, in thinking about this episode, that "samurai sword" is something said in English, but "knight sword" is not.

Next week: I look at the word missing from my icon and grapple with a form of oppression that I'm not very good with.

Also, Gloria Gaynor.

Warehouse 13: Full Inventory—"Implosion"