Samurai at the British Museum

 I finally managed to make it to the Samurai exhibition which has been on for a while at the British Museum.  I have a bad habit of failing to remember when exhibitions are due to close and end up missing them (The recent Hiroshige exhibition at the BM was a case in point)... the other day I checked the details of this on thinking it had ages to run and discovered it closes at the beginning of May!  So I sneaked off work for the afternoon and popped along, nabbing one of the few remaining tickets. 

It's a great exhibition charting the rise and changing nature of the Samurai, from the early middle ages (in European terms) through the late 19thC decline of the Class and the opening up of Japan to the West.  The end of the exhibition looks at the impact and depiction of Samurai largely from the end of WW2 both in Japan and in other countries.  From a wargamey perspective there's a lot to see with numerous suits of armour, swords and other weapons etc.  I'm always reminded when I see 'proper' Japanese armour that the colourful variants that you often see on the table are less common and a lot of it is black or very dark shades... certainly from a distance it would be hard to make out the fine detail.

To be honest while I always enjoy looking at militaria, it was the art and more mundane objects that I really enjoyed... lots of embroidered or printed scrolls, ceramics, small items like tobacco pouches etc.  These were really interesting and well presented.  The last section on Samurai in more recent art and media was also fascinating.  

So here's a selection of photos from the exhibition.  There are also a few from the Assyrian galleries at the BM.  Although this is a period I know very little about, I'm always drawn to it whenever I visit the museum.  I've just ordered a (hopefully) accessible introduction to this period to try and educate myself 

(Google decided to upload the photos in reverse order and I can't be bothered re-doing it, so these are going from the most modern to the oldest historical periods!)

No idea... but I love it!

The ultimate samurai!

Illustrations from fighting in China

The Perry expedition arrives on Japan

Tobacco pouches

Lovely painting of a cat

Good example of kintsuge which coincidentally my wife had been doing the week before at a ceramics workshop

A rather OTT hand cannon

And the Assyrian photos...

Lovely Assyrian hunting dog

Teutoburg Wald

 This week we had a great game of Commands and Colours using Anthony's lovely 54mm Romans and Germans.  The game is one that suits adapting to different scales.  I like the blocks from the original game but it definitely looks good with figures in different scales.  Small scale bases give it that epic look, while going grand scale has a very old school feel.

This scenario is from the earlier stages of the battle and sees the Romans being attacked while hemmed in by marshland to their rear (spoiler... this is a bad thing and the Romans paid the price for it).  The Germans are deployed on and around a central hill and my first instinct was to hold this and defend the high ground, but more sensible thoughts prevailed and I decided to do what the tribesmen do best and charge straight at the enemy, preventing them throwing pila and pushing the back against the marsh.

No subtlety... CHAAARGE!!!

My first combat was pretty spectacular and set the tone for the game... wiping out a Roman unit and killing one of their leaders!  This was followed up by wiping out both the Roman cavalry units before they could advance (we kept forgetting about the Evade rule which might have spared them but to be fair they could only evade into the marsh which wouldn't have been great.  It wasn't all one-sided though.  The Romans did wipe out several German units but there were always more to replace them.

There's a big hole where the Roman centre used to be!!

Great fun and looking forward t trying the scenario based around the end of the battle at some point.