Sometimes, violence is the answer. Who was the First Samurai: ru-vid.com/video/%D0%B2%D0%B8%D0%B4%D0%B5%D0%BE--AzWbE4h0fw.html Karl Friday's Hired Swords: amzn.to/37VsAKg Please consider supporting the channel =) 🔸PATREON (blog, art): www.patreon.com/Linfamy 🔸MERCH: teespring.com/stores/linfamy (shirts, stickers, phone cases, and more!) 🔸DONATE: www.paypal.me/Linfamy
Anytime you give up your weapons and hire someone else to use weapons for you, you risk a coup. (Or if you give your people no rights and they are starving to death ala French Revolution & Arab Spring)
Karl Friday is an amazing historian. He is one of the few English language historians who put so much work into pre-Heian and Heian military history. Although those are his specialty, he is very knowledgeable about Japanese history in general. He is also a licensed teacher of a classical samurai martial art dating back to the 16th century. I would highly recommend his work for anyone interested in Japanese history, especially military history. And the answer is it was a lack of vitamin B1.
I think they first thought it was a lack of protein, but later ppl found out it was a lack of vitamin B1 causing Beriberi. Gotta thank you btw! A few days ago, my little girl cried and I tried to find a way of distracting her (and myself xD). My phone was close and I thought "not gonna let her watch anything ofc, but some sound might do the trick". I opened RU-vid and there was one of your videos still opened. I started it and your voice actually calmed her down! Either that or she was just really interested in the Jomon.. xD
I'm really happy I finally won. I've never won anything from something on RU-vid before. I will finally get one like the ancient Japanese got there Pokemon. So this is how the samurai started. I'm very happy. My day has been made amazing.
They thought it was Protein But today we know more and it's been narrowed down to Thiamine or Vitamine B1 Either way, more protein helped to prevent the men from getting sick.
@@randomasgray of course. Those who have little are bound to indulge indulge in the delicacies of the rich given the chance especially if they are being given free food.
The cause of Edo sickness was dietary in nature. The primary cause was the over use of white rice in the military and the lack of “nitrogenous elements”. The reality is they cured the issue indirectly. The increased variety in the soldiers meals helped them overcome the issue in the same way the English beat Scurvy a century earlier. Because they added barley to the diet, it reintroduced necessary vitamins like thiamine and edo sickness stopped becoming an issue.
I’m currently studying on samurai (this is on my own and not for school), and each story and fact about this warrior class just amazes me in so many ways. Ever since I was a boy, I took in interest in samurai. And videos about these guys are so entertaining and so informative. Thank you. Also, any chance you’ll be doin an origin video on the Shinobi aka...the Ninja?
@@usvidragonslayer3091 Very good taste. Tiki is my top waifu. I actually draw art and post it online, especially a lot of Tiki. My Twitter/DeviantArt is @kalacakra108 if you want to check it out :D
Great history lesson as always Linfamy! It seems like all knight-errant types (I.e.European knights, Russian Cossacks, Samurai etc) all have the same origin story; hired thugs who lucky enough to get status and great PR agents.
In fairness if you can manage to reliably kill people with the BLUNT end of a spear you're probably a very useful person have on one's side on a battlefield.
@@alex_zetsu I love maces! They're my favourites among ancient weaponry. 😊 But yeah, they're also usually heavily weighted to make killing/injuring people with them easier. A spear haft wouldn't necessarily be in the same way. It'd be more like a quarter staff, which is a useful weapon in your regular brawls; very good for knocking people about and controlling the space around you in a fight. A good weapon for self-defense, but lacking the immediate lethality of a stabby stabby end unless you really bludgeon the poor sod. This is why European peasants and clergy in the middle ages were permitted to carry them when they were denied swords etc. Though once you get into the weighted weaponry like maces that becomes pretty ridiculous pretty quickly. The effect of a heavy weight smashing up your bones is both more horrible and more likely to kill you than a simple stab wound in a non-vital area. Though obviously medically speaking both are very ill advised. I just meant though that if you can figure out how to reliably and quickly kill someone (in armour) with either end of your spear without breaking it, as opposed to just say knocking them back and away from you, then you have a pretty huge advantage over people sneaking up behind you with a sword or knife or another close combat weapon. You can dispatch them pretty quickly without the cumbersome task of turning your spear around, leaving you free to go back to skewering the unlucky folks in front of you before they can get any funny ideas about sticking it to you while you're distracted. AND you also don't have to worry about Sneaky McBackstabber picking himself up and coming in for round two, because he's too dead for that. I think some fancier spears did have smaller metal points on the haft end for this reason, but in general the extra metalwork's more expense than most lords would like for a mass-produced weapon you're handing over to peasant soldiers. Plus there's always the risk of your badly trained troops hurting themselves by accident. My original point was just that it does sound like a pretty decent battle tactic if you can make it work for you. I'm not sure how though without some "pressure point" magic or spending far too much time trying to choke or bludgeon one of your assailants, when what you should be doing is knocking the enemy to the rear back with your haft and then (assuming you're not armed with a dagger or something to quickly slash their throat while they're on the ground/you've not got time to do that) retreating to a point where you can once again use the full arch of your spear to control the area of the battlefield around you and attack ALL your opponents, not just those one one side. It wasn't so much about the weapon being blunt as the breaking the constraints of reality involved and frankly I'd always advocate for being on the side of the person who can do magic. It's just good common sense.
You're asking me a science question. As far as I know, beriberi is caused by lack of vitamin B1, something I learnt in high school. What I didn't know was that it was called Edo sickness, or that it was widespread in Japan and Southeast Asia (I'm from Malaysia, by the way).
Emperor Kanmu: relying on warlords for military purposes is a great idea that has never backfired spectacularly before! Emperor Ling of Han, in heaven: *repeatedly bashing his head against a wall*
@@shanedoesyoutube8001 Massive religious uprising called the Yellow Turban Rebellion threatened to overthrow the Han dynasty. The Ling Emperor’s armies weren’t up to the task so he called on local government officials and generals to raise their own forces and fight them off, which they did. But this destabilized the central government eventually leading to the collapse of the Han and the beginning of the Three Kingdoms Period
A lack of well balanced diet, protein (nitrogen) The doctor studied a similar case that the british navy had in their ranks and replicated the result in the Japanese navy
They thought it was protein but now we know its thiamine or vitamin b1 (this was my favorite video you made very factual and interesting) love your content keep up :3!!
Are there surviving sets of armor belonging to the Japanese Emperors? Can’t seem to find reference or pictures of any... Or did they just not have armor?
It's funny, I actually had a biology test last fall that asked the exact same question as you: "What is beriberi caused by?" And, getting it right on the test, I should know that it's caused by the lack of vitamin B1, also known as thiamine deficiency.
Edo Sickness or beriberi was caused by bingeeating white rice and nothing else! We all know that white rice is just the pure carbohydrates of the rice and best consumed with tons of tasty other stuff to give it taste and sustenance... like soy sauce and vegetables that have all the stuff that got lost in peeling the rice. Sadly, soy sauce prettty much is the only thing the soldiers had to spice their meals, and soy sauce lacks one thing that riche also lacks: VITAMINS, especially B1 aka thiamine... Mr. Barley Baron had an easy solution: Supplement the rice by adding the same thing they named him for into the diet: Barley. Because it wasn't peeled enough to get rid of the B1, it prevented the disease. In 1880, the Navy had reported that serving meat, fish and vegetables did not only eradicate the ilness, but also made the food much more tasty! The Army were snobs though that had to be told by the emperor to feed the soldier with navy-food, and voila! Berriberry vanished there too. Oh, and in 1912 a Casimir Funk had the genius idea to take all the peels from peeling the rice and cook them into goop to extract the thiamine from it. He also called thiamine a "vitamine" together with the stuff that was in lemons - which removed scurvy - because clearly, "vitamine" were the stuff that was always lacking when people ate only one kind of stuff. So now people could binge eat white rice and white rice only and also get their berriberri cured! Odd side fact: Beriberi can also be caused by being a chronic alcoholic with a defect liver. It's called Wernicke-Korsakoff syndrome then.
It's really interesting how Japan had a problem with centralizing it's government authority in those early days, especially when it came to martial affairs.
Intresting, and I can see how climbing the political structure in ancient Japan is different from climbing the political structure in ancient China and ancient Korea.
Edo Sickness was caused by the lack of vitamins of the group B in the nutritions of the population. However it was identified as lack of proteins (meal with a lot of proteins often came with a lot of vitamins). Either that, either it was a lack of Fujiwara's daughters in the emperial family ;P
What about the origin of Ninjas? If there's more videos about Samurai, I'll Watch it Protein! Lack of protein or vitamin B. They're both found in meat and also, I'm hungry
Well, it's hard work but I'm sure if you pole the employees, they'd say it fills the hole in their hearts. There have been some cutbacks lately tho, you really need a large staff for this profession.
6:22 - "Well, the main reason to follow a warlord was not honor, but personal gain. It's hard to get someone to risk death for you if all they get in return is honor." **sad Zuko noises**
Beri-Beri is caused by the lack of B1 vitamin. It's still a very important disease in some poor countrys, mostly in Africa. And also there is a difference between two types of BeriBeri: A cardiac ("wet") and a Nervous-system ("dry") beriberi. The cause in both is the lack of the vitamin, but the symptoms are really different.
Edo sickness (or Beriberi, as we know it today) was caused by too much white rice and not enough of anything else. Meaning one became vitamin-deficient. More specifically, they were lacking in vitamine B1, or Thiamine, something easily found in brown rice and protein-rich meals. Fun fact, a Zen-Buddhist abbot who runs a temple where I live told me he suffered from Beriberi more than once during his 22-year stay in Japan. Apparently low-ranking Buddhist monks still eat a bit too much white rice...
@@Linfamy Pretty much that! Mokugen-san told me that the higher their rank, the more them monks eat and drink everything they can get their monastic hands on, including tons of sake
Great video, makes me want to go and play Shogun 2 again and load up a load of ashigaru :D I just read about Edo Sickness yesterday!! It was caused by a lack of something called Thiamine and caused havoc in Japanese navies/armies. Although they originally thought it was lack of protein, but the change in diet to counter this (more meat) provided people with the necessary vitamins anyway :) I love the Susanoo one!
probably too late for this but: an exess of white Rice being it didn't have the nutritional value of things like brown rice or wheat or barley and so it stopped or slowed many military actions.
It started as personal emperor Body guards called Tsuwamono or mononofu, that's basically a worrier 兵者, hei-san a little more modern, but still the first mention of worrier class in Native Japanese.
Edo sickness was caused by a lack of vitamin B. The other day when I was offered a second helping of rice, I answered, "are you *trying* to give me beriberi!?". My joke went unappreciated.
Lack of Vitamin B but according with the doctor Takaki was lack of protein so.... he added barely to the white rice. :) I like you channel that was one of my favourite videos so far but for the record I also love your mythologi / religion videos :) .
