Sarah Thal
Position title: UW–Madison open-topic Senior Fellow (2025–2026)
Pronouns: she/her
Address:
David Kuenzi and Mary Wyman Professor of History, Department of History, UW–Madison
Ways of the Samurai: Masculinity, Violence, and National Character in Turn-of-the-Century Japan
Japan’s “Way of the Samurai” is usually seen as a traditional, indigenous code of honor embodying the “spirit” of Japan. My work shows that even the most basic formulations of this “Way of the Samurai”—value statements concerning morality, manliness, and suicide, revenge, and swordsmanship—were shaped by crises of the 1890s and informed by Japan’s deep engagement with ideas in the United States and Europe. I explain how, as part of an international conversation about personal and national character, particular forms of violence, misogyny, and self-improvement became integral to an increasingly martial sense of Japanese national and racial identity.
Sarah Thal is the David Kuenzi and Mary Wyman Professor of History at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. Her research focuses on the intellectual and religious history of nineteenth-century Japan, with an emphasis on the modern origins and transformations of two traditions often deemed central to Japanese identity: Shinto and bushido (the Way of the Samurai). Her first book, Rearranging the Landscape of the Gods: The Politics of a Pilgrimage Site in Japan, 1573-1912 (University of Chicago Press, 2005), explored the political, cultural, and institutional development of a popular religious site and, ultimately, modern Shinto through an examination of a popular deity and its Buddhist temple-turned-Shinto shrine. The first article from her current research project on bushido appeared as “Chivalry Without Women: The Way of the Samurai and Swinton’s World History In 1890s Japan,” American Historical Review (June 2024).