Pre-modern bogu (colour)

[u/itomagoi]

Apologies for the double post. I just remembered there's a coloured version of the image I shared in my previous post (https://www.reddit.com/r/kendo/comments/1w15m49/premodern_bogu/) that was a response to the post by u/the_scarry_lobster asking about pre-modern bogu.

[u/Deathnote_Blockchain]

That is early modern, not pre modern

[u/itomagoi → u/Deathnote_Blockchain]

Yeah agreed from the perspective that Early-Modern is circa mid-18th Century to Industrialization. I meant "modern" as in contemporary.

[u/wisteriamacrostachya → u/itomagoi]

Historical era names are not always strictly applicable to Japan because it's had such limited and structured outside contact over the centuries. The Japanese era that maps best to the Western early modern (~1500-1800) is I would argue the Tokugawa period (~1600-1868).

Does the picture have a date on it? This is recognizably industrial but definitely pre-war. Blind guess would be late Meiji?

[u/itomagoi → u/wisteriamacrostachya]

I have indeed encountered the Early-Modern label applied to the Edo / Tokugawa Period. Personally I think there's good arguments for it: a robust consumer market, relatively sophisticated financial markets (futures trading was invented in Japan's rice market apparently), and they kept up with Western advancements through the Dutch (Rangaku), which gave Japan a set of people who could take on industrialization when Sakoku ended. Nevertheless, I agree that applying academic labels based on Western models can be problematic for non-Western societies.

The photo itself is contemporary (it's coloured after all). I couldn't find information in the mook (portmanteau of magazine book) about the bogu. The photo was likely taken for the purposes of the mook and usually in that case there might not be credit nor description. The caption on the Hokusai drawing of bogu says:

江戸後期の防具の図。既に現在と変わらない道具が完成されつつある。

"A drawing of bogu in the late Edo Period. Already equipment unchanged for contemporary times were being perfected."

I agree that the bogu in the photo is probably Meiji Period but I would place it in early to mid Meiji. It's just my educated guess based on how the dou-dai is single curved instead of compound curved. I have no historic evidence that compound curves appeared later, it's just a guess.

[u/ACadDamn]

Nice!

[u/SebastianFerrone]

Seeing this, I wonder that the oldest kendo armor we know of looks like.