not a great company...

"The same quality as in-office therapy" is just a blatant lie.

Please please please never stop making "Voices from the past" they are absolutely captivating and I can't get enough of them.And I know they take a long time to produce especially if there's added animation to it.But your channel to me and thousands more of your viewers would agree with me that you've got one of the best channel's on UKposts.And the extra caveat is you also even give us a "History lesson" and as well..👍😁 Patreon account????

If Ieyasu hadn't driven out Christians, this samurai might have received not only mental help, but everlasting life.

Actual scam company.

This deserves more upvotes

Harsh world to grow up in

Reminds me of my mw2 multiplayer where a certain player told me to hang myself to the ceiling because I had 17 kills lol.

Tbh it be like that sometimes. Especially if you're a kid

Dude was wild. He got in 2 different fights over kites and almost killed 2 people over it: First another child and then himself

Tbf i doubt the whole cliff story, i think its a cover for a more embarrassing one.

​@@mattthorne8419 Good catch. Considering he was too embarrassed to even tell a doctor, it's unlikely he would tell the whole truth for the history books.

😂😂😂😂😂😂😂😂

God. DAMN. I grabbed for my nuts as I've read this! Fucking hell, that sounded like it hurt extremely bad.

Real incident involved peanut butter and a dog

very interesting. thanks for commenting this

this adds alot of context, thanks, awesome story.

Guy was the comedic relief character

Based

The reality that feeds the stigma of adopted kids persists crossculturally. They tend to have this slacker, lost, centerless quality due to a lack of real mother / father. Sorry to say, surrogates and step parents dont come close most of the time. They can, just not the reality of the norm.

True and well put.

Because the common guy is common

​@@user-uf7uq6vc1fThe common guy is the best idea of what life in a given time was. There may be a handful of exceptional people who give an idea of what an extinct culture valued, but the day laborer, the servant, the slave, the peasant, the cook - these are the cross section of what life was actually like outside the walls of affluence, lineage, privilege. Most surviving cuneiform tablets tend to be receipts of sorts leftover from merchants - this is how we understand their number system.

@@Your-Least-Favorite-Stranger But this story is about someone that came from lineage and privilege so your point is kind of moot.

It was once said “if you can’t do great things, then do small things in a great way” For the common person this can sow the seeds of luck for a lifetime.🍀

Feudal people were a different breed they had really strong inmune systems and knew how to survive really well i cant even imagine surviving as a beggar in this modern world and this dude did that shit on feudal japan

​@@I.Love.Porrosmy great grandfather was a POW in WW2. He survived Bataan. I was told the native american way of life is what saved him. Sadly, Marlboro did what the Japanese couldnt.

@@kellyshea92 Your great grandfather was a Native American and used Indian survival lore to get through Japanese captivity in WWII? That’s wild. Do you know anything specific he did to survive?

​@@I.Love.Porros it's the one that survived that got to write a book about it. The others were not so lucky. Childbirth was a likely cause of death for any mother.

Id go with no paternity tests back then.

not everyone can grind like a champ

Not everyone can survive Better Help.

weeb

A lot of Samurai were Pirates and Bandits. Lot of them were not honest or honorable.

🎉 Feliz Jueves 🎉

The best part is no matter what they did: they couldnt stop him once he was up there. Facing up or facing down, gravity is on his side.

It was planned all along and they fell for it

Right! That was so smart!

If Naruto wasn't for kids, I could see him doing is.

Highly legendary.

So true

Yeap. He wised up in the end. So many never do

Mediocre just means average.

Yeah, word to the wise, remember Pearl Harbor

The first step to being wise is to know you have much to learn and far to go.

Agreed

I like the way you wrote this.

Very well said.

While I agree in the novelty of the authenticity…eh😅 that sure sucks to have a mess like that.

​@christopherjannette5863iiiiuuuuuuuuujjjjjjjjjjju

goes to show a bad father inspires their sons to be better

​@@Armored_Ariete very very occasional

Katsu Kaishu? I've heard of him.

I suppose that depends on the son more than anything.@@YourHealthNeeds

​@@Armored_Ariete sometimes. Other times their sons grow up to just smoke meth and steal Harley's with their dad.

In a thousand years this post you wrote my be in a museum

Meanwhile, his older brother, who was praised for being an exemplary samurai, scholar, calligrapher and administrator in his own day, is largely forgotten now. Funny where being a slacker can get you.

You can thank a couple pioneering historians for that.

​@@erichoepelman7764 haha. Unlikely, given how much digital text is now generated every second. And you know, no one is actively saving what is written either. Bigv technology companies simply periodically delete everything without any thought whatsoever.

@@erichoepelman7764this comment too

I do wonder if the innkeeper might've been in on it?

@@CamdenKnightly he probably was, real people aren’t that nice. It’s a nice story though

Ah, finally something redeeming from this man's story...

​@@CamdenKnightlyNotice there is no mention of any inappropriate adult male attention... Some things do no end up in memoirs.

@@Disappointed739 Yeah, a young boy, alone and destitute on the road? Bad times for him.

The battleship CSS Stonewall took part in a civil war, but it wasn't the one that makes sense.

Mediocre samurai, top tier parent.

@@WELLbethere I thought his life was rather extraordinary. It seems the samurais those days basically made money like the Italian mafia does, from a protection racket, hinted at in the video when talking about "hustling the market". Probably asking for money or good from merchants in exchange for nothing bad happening to them from anybody.

It's a wonder he could even have kids after hearing this story lmao

@@mariah5714 Apparently his testicles recovered.

I recently read the autobiography of man named Albert Facey, he was born in 1894 just a few blocks away from where I currently live. There was nothing special about him, he was just a regular working class guy, which is what made it interesting. All the other biographies I’ve read have been about famous historical figures. The only thing of historical significance he was involved in at all was his war service in WW1, he fought at the battle of Gallipoli, but he doesn’t say much about it. Most of the book was focussed on his impoverished childhood and early teen years.

Historiography is the study about WHO/WHAT is chosen as "History" and how that relates in today's society as the "past." More historians have come around to what you state; the common, everyday struggles of average individuals matter as much as the people that are grandiose. A great book about hearing history from the people that aren't in the major education system is Howard Zinn's "A People's History Of The United States: 1492-Present". It deals with American History, but from journals, recollections, and records of the average people that weren't on the winning side of History, the oppressed. It brought a very ample understanding that history is very disgusting and never as clear as some propaganda would have you believe.

They are prone to ignorance, which is much worse.

@@jamjox9922 that sounds cool man, I’ve seen the court document for my Great Pawpaws mark on hogs. It was something like “two notches on left ear” and I think it’s just neater’n a skeeters peeter to see things like that. Very modern/official looking documents from a time we consider to be very far away. He was born in 1898 and I was born in 1998, almost exactly a century apart.

@@whiteskull1067 you’re prone to the same thing and you think you ain’t, which is even worse than that. A lack of knowledge has more genuine thought behind it than a person who thinks he’s knowledgeable and therefor has nothing to learn.

May he be at peace.

Does 2023 shock you or is it just more Waring States?

As a homeless teen I related a lot, up until he met the Samurai and his wife. His poor nads!

Well, I'm somewhat of a mediocre samurai myself. 😅

Who is your lord?

@@0therun1t21 "I must admit there is something special in the friendship of beggars."

yea, thats what i thought too. he must be good looking, clever/smart, or charismatic in some other ways that he goes through life being the center of all that drama (and coming out of it relatively unscathed)

For sure. Not everyone begging in their underwear who gets taken in by a nice family has charisma, but I think it's safe to say most of them do lol@@jazzyj2899

Its cause HE is telling the story. Of course, embellished to his advantage

It has remained the same and WILL remain the same because it is our NATURE, we can not help ourselves.

This was hardly 200 years ago. Thats only a handful of generations

It's not because the poverty, but the absence of greediness and jealousy that people nowadays lack more than ever.

Unfortunately for most of them it’s a simple but sad case of substance abuse.

While I don't recall ever begging during my homeless months the uncertainty of where to sleep each night was a constant source of stress. Many people asked me about this, and I often had no answer.

​@Axle-F which is because of prohibition making it so expensive. If it was legal opium would be viewed as one of the least benign addictions one could have. No actual opium for sale its all fake nitazenes and xylazine

​@@user-hq8wg7dg2h this is why I wish schools would teach how to construct shelters from wood. And how to make a fire and fish. If you got all those you'll never be homeless. Home is where one thinks of you or where you set up camp! God bless!

Time stamp please.

@@fifthofascalante7311 6:21

@@fifthofascalante7311 6:35

@@fifthofascalante73116:27

@@fifthofascalante7311 6.40

I enjoyed this conversation...in english.

​@@magnusdiridianNice Ken Watanabe / Last Samurai reference

you did not have a conversation with anyone

@@Teo-uw7mh He did, actually. He used a time machine. Obviously.

​@Teo-uw7mh thanks, buzz Killington von capitan obvious

Dude was a DnD bard

from what i can tell he seemed to make most of his money as something of a merchant, buying and selling in the night markets,so he must have been atleast good at bartering

He's clearly very self deprecating, hinting at a more impressive figure in real life.

It often seems like my life has only gone as well as it has because I am just a little more charismatic than average and thus get free passes when I do not deserve them

It says in the book that he was adopted by the Katsu family mainly because they are going to marry him off with their only daughter. Basically he was adopted to ensure the Katsu lineage will not end with the daughter. They eventually had a son.

勝 小吉の息子、勝海舟には沢山の子供が産まれました。 その内の１人は、アメリカ人の女性と結婚しました。 その女性と子供達はアメリカに戻ったという記録があります。 勝 小吉の子孫は、今もアメリカにいる可能性が高いと思います。

@@GRA5S I think he meant the couple who brought him to their place when they discovered he run away from home.

They are better off without him. He is a handful, a disappointment (from a parent's perspective), and unloyal.

Takes one to know one

Yeah

Humans never change no matter what time period

And he was practicing Judo, that was invented in 1882?

@@AlkoMHHe also had a GameCube

​​@@methanedirigible That's sick! Playing Samurai Jack probably..

@@AlkoMHthought something similar, it may have been jujitsu and this is a translation error

@@Robiig-tf1owHow would you translate judo or jujitsu? 😜

The mediocre nature of the story is what makes it great. Who cares about how the entitled lived or felt?

From what I got he didn't do much samurai-ing, did he? Other than getting into some brawls. At least he descrives himself as an above-average rider.

@@Rodrigo_VegaBy this time in history there simply isn’t much “Samurai”-ing to be done. There was no internal or external conflicts, society in general were prosperous and stable. Being a Samurai back then mean no more than a private security guard or something of that nature to their respective masters. It wasn’t until after a decade of this guy’s death that thing’s started to get interesting again with the arrival of Com. Perry.

@@sio2ch.168 right, still under that definition it sounds more like a guy that needed to be samurai-ed more often that he had the chance to samurai xD

In the Edo period, Samurai were essentially bureaucrats with swords. Which was why he was so distraught on not getting a position, he was essentially unemployed. Also, he brought further dishonor on himself by selling swords, he was engaging in activities not appropriate to his social class.@@Rodrigo_Vega

Xd

Imagine ‘going down in history’ PERIOD

​@@fifthofascalante7311Yea, atleast he made it into history unlike most people could ever nowdays.

That would be over 99% of all samurai. This one just happened to also be a mediocre wordsmith, and his journal somehow survived the age.

Beats being a Good Samurai who doesn't live to 25

How did he die?

Oh yes, this is very smart, thank you friend.

@@ChrisHeart-kr1uqI had a stroke trying to understand who you are talking to

@@ChrisHeart-kr1uq I have a hunch you are struggling with your mental health as well. Maybe it's time for you to make a move and talk to someone who understands your pain. You can start with consulting your GP. Good luck and best wishes to you.

It's simple most people's lives can be compared to a boring screenplay or rough draft of a story that gets thrown in the garbage and is never read by anyone. The man in the story considered himself a mediocre samurai, but at the end of the day he was a samurai in a society where samurai were near the top of the social hierarchy.

He wasn't judging it as a story. He was judging it as an experience and, hopefully, as a chance to contribute to society. Ordinary people contribute to society. Soldiers and paladins CAN contribute to society. This fellow handn't contribued much at 40, but he seemed to have a change of heart and perhaps he ended well.

Apparently he was surrounded by exceptional individuals, making him mediocre by comparison. There's another comment from @BanzaiKen explaining Katsu's backstory which I'll copy here: "For those that don't know Katsu's background before he started his story. He's a LEGENDARY slacker. He was adopted into his family so his "sister" could marry him without giving up her independence. His "brother" Otani by the time he was 25 was a famous calligrapher and philosopher. His father was a shogunate official. Katsu more or less survived on NEET allowance (43 koku = 43 x $800) for his entire life as a death benefit from his adopted father. Katsu was so notoriously inept that he begged his son at FIFTEEN to take over the entire household because the family was falling apart and Otani couldn't handle it anymore. His son Rintaro would go on to become one of the best naval commanders in Japanese history, driven by his fear of turning into his father and the wise guidance of Otani making him so charismatic he talked the legendarily hardcore ronin rebel Sakamoto Ryoma into quitting his terror campaign and becoming his assistant."

⁠@@faerlabaermarsounds like an entrepreneur to me. Many of the most successful people have the most mishaps. His son went to be great the “traditional” way and thus traditional society respected him more. Both of them are dope depending on what side youre looking at it from. Id rather be this dude than his son. His life was an adventure.

You have to keep in mind that he is being judged by the standards of a samurai, who was expected to attain a position in the government of the shogunate and live up to samurai ideals. In other words, his life was considered a failure by the standards of the samurai class. His life is not neccesarily mediocre by the standards of other people.

The samurai has fallen, millions must commit seppuku

it was joever... were barack now

@@ChrisHeart-kr1uq HOOOOOLY

Don't we all though? Anytime I feel like ending it all there eventually comes a point where I feel like everything is great and figured out, like enlightenment. Only for it to all repeat again soon enough. But I guess that's life, soul crushing lows, soul elevating highs, and then nothing for eternity.

Don't forget that Kim Jong Un having a smoke with this banger of a quote as a voiceover.

Easily amused, are we?

Lolz exactly. It was amazing.

Dionysus

He was the bully...

@@ChrisHeart-kr1uq Da fuq???? That's the most unique quote I've run across in a while.

@@ChrisHeart-kr1uq lmfao

Great summary. It definitely was unpredictable. The jumping around part helped with that as well. At one point it was just randomly mentioned that he had a wife and child.

Refusing to apply yourself, indulging vices, being irresponsible. Dude ends up likeable by the end, but he was a fairly major screw-up for a long time. That he ended up recognizing there was a better way to be...wait, is this guy ME??

Everybody is flawed so it's interesting to hear the true stories. In fiction I absolutely love flawed heroes. That's why I liked the hunger games so much. They certainly didn't try to glorify the main character.

History is never far away. You are living in it!

I like mine better, and I was a factory worker. But his makes a better story.

@@digitalnomad9985 Factory workers now days aint so bad, factory workers back during the industrial revolution had a short life span of 35

​@@epope98 And before that many of the same "class" passed the time starving to death. Let's hear it for progress.

I doubt a mediocre samurai would be able to take down 30 people armed with hooked spears. he is either being humble or outright lying.

Nothing holding back these historical guys from embellishing their lives. They knew it was a great read though.

To people yes, modern historians...no.

I wouldn’t say he want famous, search him up, he’s quite a famous person.

Samurai are not common folk

@@hicknopunkthis is considered a great document by modern historians lol, what’re you even trying to say

​​@@BirdTurdMemesThe equivalent of a gentleman/minor lord in England at the time

Yeah his wikipedia page says he was "adopted by the Katsu family in order to marry the only Katsu daughter, Nobuko." so he probably had no choice in the matter, and so really no courting.

Romance became a priority in the 1940s when the slogan “Diamonds are a woman’s best friend” became popular in Broadway. Love then became business when Disney and romance novels started picking up. Cinderella in 1950 etc.. Romance became a priority and now look at the dating market today. Culturally, it’s a western thing. Husband’s obviously cared for their wives in other cultures but this just wasn’t the everyday mindset in eastern cultures.

@@CrownxMe7 Authors in the 18th and 19th centuries churned out romance novels by the hundreds. Romance plays were very popular in Ancient Rome as well.

@@nicholashaney278 the concept has always existed, but it certainly wasn’t the main genre people were reading. There was no mass market for romance until the 1970s and then we have the second wave of feminism. Ancient Romans still didn’t primarily marry for love either.

​@@nicholashaney278yes, and that is a good point. Romance, love, passion, these things have always been around and have obviously always been popular themes. But the idea of a gentile courtship and the romance of it being an essential part of marriage came from the culture of Chivalry in Medieval Europe, and the idea marriage itself being centered around that very romance is a very modern thing. Like it or not, marriage is about duty and care, but when done right, can contain a lot of romance. Those things have always been a part of it, but romance and the feeling of being in love is not what's the most important part of it in most cultures.

YES, all the garbage remakes and sequels being made these days and great original ideas like this just waiting around. Hollywood producers need to take note.

This guy doesn't say the n word once :(

Downvote for saying methinks but agree with everything you said

You couldn't write stories like this today.because of political correctness cancel culture censorship and LGBTQ propaganda in the media

I likes this comment until I read the word lowkey ... like ,super,actually, like, really ... But low key I lie your comment 😂

W w w w w w

At that time Samurai held a relatively privilege position in Japanese society compared to the work they did, also Samurai cultural ideals valued Zen Buddhism and introspection so you'd often see older samurai write reflections on their lives. Definitely interesting to hear the different perspectives of samurai living during wartime and in this post-war period.

@@greenbrickbox3392 yup, being higher up in the hierarchy certainly made life somewhat more comfortable for them.

He's a mediocre samurai. Even the most mediocre samurai's life is probably more adventurous than that of modern day normies.

I guess it is very difficult to compare him to anything, would be unfair to compare him with the current times, also there is no such thing as a comparison chart with the samurais of his era. Think the title of the video is misleading , either clickbait or poor choice. @@lorenzomizushal3980

@@lorenzomizushal3980 modern day normie here, can confirm. Far more interesting than anything I've ever done. Glad my nuts never got smashed on a rock though.

@@lorenzomizushal3980are you thinking about romance samurais? No, dude. Even Musashi was a fairy tale with few things anchored in reality. This “mediocre” dude was probably average in that time

its not exactly "full" though, this story is in the span of 4 decades, pretty sure anyone who live for 4 decade had an interesting story or two with sprinkle of exaggeration, even i could recall some wild thing i experience, i've fap racing for cigarette for example. getting chased by loads of people at plaza for stealing meatballs running away behind a prison only to get chased by guard dogs crash into parked motorcycle because i was distracted by bunch of scantly dressed lady on a graveyard, only to find out they're cross-dresser and they laugh at me because my horny ass was distracted by femboy and crash see? its adventurous, just imagine your story as few surviving records of this century, whole lot of people in the future would find it interesting

Same

I don't know what kind "heroically badass shit" could samurai achieve at end of 1700s when Tokugawa Clan had ruled Japan easily over a century so there was little need for trained fighters. As much as this story says he was much more of a conman and occasionally lucky fraud.

Me too, instead of landing on my feet tho I find myself strapped to ceilings peeing on peoples dinners

white cisgender male? 🤣

​@@Davao420Resilient individual.

@@No-bs4um great answer

I always land on my head so as not to damage anything important

Ok, well i never stole from my mother so I'm feeling a bit better about how much of a shit head I was lol

@@tiggytheimpaler5483 I'm sure we all would have loved to piss on the snacks of our young rivals.

What would you change?

Everyday you get a chance to do better

Just work at being better than you were yesterday. It's never too late to improve yourself.

I was once reading a book about Japanese business and they explained their confrontational attitude by saying "in China they will defer judgement and avoid things they do not want to face because their warriors could always run away from battles that were too much. Japan is an island, trouble would always find you if you do not deal with it. In some ways this has persisted into modern culture."

Thank you both for these little bits of wisdom.

In the woods tripping and I highly recommend

I’m only 24, and yet I found myself very emotionally moved by his story just the same. I can’t imagine the level of physical and emotional pain this man must have endured over the course of his lifetime the way he’s described it, but then, who could blame him for falling into a life of self-gratification after that? Furthermore, to hear him shun his past conduct and leave a lesson for his descendants is cathartic.

Not 99% more something like 99.999%

I think Kokichi Katsu (author) spotted it and because he had not achieved anything big worth doocumenting in his life he decided to do documenting himself.

I think about that a lot too. What you said about each one of those people having entire lifetime’s worth of experiences and memories, that we’ll never know about is quite…haunting?

@@watts18269 right? It makes you think of your own mortality. Of course since we live in the information era, our records will exist, but the internet is so flooded that most people will still end up totally forgotten, just another number on a system. I find it so chilling that something complicated as a human being with thoughts, memories, relationships with inside jokes and little things nobody but a few will ever know, that all of that can just... disappear forever. It's hard to comprehend that all those endless rows of seemingly endless names each represent an entire human being not too unlike ourselves.

Same as today. No big deal

"charismatic" is today's equivalent of "sociopath"

@@PaladinMika And you know what neither of those words mean.

@@PaladinMika While he does seem violently unhinged by today's standards, this guy was born into a family of soldiers. He was probably raised with a sense of superiority and taught that violence can be justified. His father was right to punish him for maiming that boy with a rock, but the punishment was to bash his skull in with a wooden clog. And his boss wanted to wipe out his family because one teenager ran away. His society was violent.

@@calamitysangfroid2407 The specific phrasing is "taken measures to end the family line," not that he'd execute the family. More likely, what this would mean is that they'd be side-lined or stripped of their title. That is, the father may be kept in employment, but if there are no heirs, because the prodigal son doesn't come back, then the family line just naturally ends itself. He could adopt a replacement, but the implied statement is that they wouldn't ratify the adoption as a legitimate heir.

​@@calamitysangfroid2407I believe he meant the family would not be allowed to keep their official samurai title with no heir to continue. However, all the other things you said are correct. It was a life that was a bit too much of a disheartening struggle, always treated as a black sheep, but he seems to have mellowed and appreciated whatever good fortune he had, especially his family.

In this case however, the "mediocre" samurai raised a fine future admiral.

some people in 3rd world countries have to put family in cages because they have no access to mental health care and they are a danger to themselves and people around them it's sad

That's old school rehab.

In a way, unruly relatives who are just given a guest room/shed in the house to recide in would be the modern day version of that.

the sons of concubines, nephews with machinations, and the insane or unruly often would have experienced this in feudal societies