Samurai and Ijuin Town

About a month or so ago, I was in the teacher`s room of one of my middle schools. Throughout the day, there was an ongoing discussion about a poster that a couple of the students made to put up in the halls.

I could tell that the teachers were trying to figure out whether it was appropriate, but I could not figure out exactly what was so controversial about it.

The poster had a man who appeared to be a samurai on it and I heard the word samurai used a lot. So, I figured that maybe the problem with the poster was that it was disrespectful to the samurai in the local history.

It made sense when I thought about it. There is a big statue of a samurai warrior in front of the train station, a giant samurai statue-type-thing that you pass to get to the train platform, the sewer covers here have samurai helmet designs on them, many of my schools have some sort of samurai suit of armor or something on display, and part of the town`s biggest festival is a procession of people in samurai armor who walk to this town from Kagoshima city.

It would make sense that the people in this town might get offended if there was something insulting samurai posted.

I asked and BOY was my thinking wrong.

The Japanese teacher of English I asked, Mr. Matsumoto, told me that many students who go to the school`s ancestors were the poor peasants back in the samurai era, and to them the samurai poster would be offensive because it refers to the old class system where their families were at the bottom and warlords were at the top.

It makes sense that descendants of people who were at the unfortunate end of social hierarchy to think a little less of samurai symbolism. However, I was surprised that the town seems to still really hang onto it`s samurai history while there are such negative sentiments and concerns about that going around town.

In the end, the students were allowed to use their poster after the word "samurai" was erased.

Clearly there are so many things that I do not understand.