Fascinated by the halo of the samurai, the German businessman Peter Janssen bought a sword in a Berlin flea market in 1985. He thus undertook a collection on this Japanese warrior caste that now comprises almost 4,000 pieces. A thousand of them are available to the public in the new Samurai Museum in the German capital, opened in May.
Originally soldiers serving the emperor and noble families, the samurai rose to become Japan’s ruling class in the 12th century. “In Western countries it is often believed that the samurai only fought and that the rest of the Japanese arts are something separate, but they are a unit; these men also generated culture –explains Peter Janssen, 72, in a recent visit of the foreign press to the museum–. The samurai influence in Japanese culture is similar to that of the European nobility in the culture of Europe.”
Thus, the new museum explores the rise of the samurai as a warrior elite, owner of a strict code of honor and its own culture, which decisively influenced the forging of Japanese culture from the Kofun period, around the year 500, until the Meiji period, in the 19th century.
Located at number 68 August Street, not far from the famous Museum Island, this new private facility exhibits a thousand pieces in an exhibition area of ??1,500 square meters. There are 70 armors, 200 helmets, 200 masks, and 160 sword blades and accessories, but also Buddhist paintings, costumes, woodcuts, woodcuts, tea utensils, and sculptures. In terms of variety, this collection, with pieces from the 6th to the 19th centuries, is probably exceptional outside of Japan and the United States, a country where collections were already born in the 19th century.
Samurai armor, recalls Janssen, are usually very refined. Unlike European armor, that of the samurai is a complex structure of pieces of metal, leather, silk, and lacquer, all painstakingly crafted. In the 18th and 19th centuries, a time of peace, armor became a status symbol, which is why in the museum we see some so decorated with precious materials and with helmets so ornate that they could hardly have been used on the battlefield. “The presence of the Jesuits brought some Christian and European artistic influences to Japan,” says Peter Janssen, pointing to a Spanish-inspired breastplate.
A singular piece of the museum is a N? theater stage, a type of classical Japanese theater from the end of the 14th century, with masked actors – they used to be the samurai themselves, acting for other samurai, and also assuming the feminine roles – who execute ritualized movements , with musical accompaniment. On this stage, made for the museum by carpenters in Japan, theatrical performances recorded on purpose are projected.
Two other architectural elements present in the museum are a tea house and a torii, the traditional Japanese arch that indicates the entrance to a Shinto shrine, thus symbolically marking the transition from the profane to the sacred.
In the rooms, the historical objects of the collection coexist with virtual reality technology to narrate the samurai universe. “Popular culture discourses continue, with classic films about samurai and connection points with current developments in Japanese culture such as manga in comics or anime in cartoons,” says the center’s director, Alexander Jöchl.
“I started buying the sword because when I was young I had practiced karate and had Japanese friends,” says Peter Janssen about his Japanese passion, who made his fortune as a businessman in real estate and nursing homes, and whose second relevant purchase at the beginning was armor ” to decorate a corner of the office”. Since 2017, some pieces from his collection were exhibited in a building on the outskirts of Berlin, until this May the Samurai Museum was created in the center of the city.
