Not been to the British Museum fort a while. And feel the need to make the most of my membership. So I got up one morning to see the Samurai exhibition. Which was very good. A lot of sets of samurai armour
And some very gory scrolls. Yes this is a decapitated warrior
..and this is a Samurai wandering off with a decapitated head in his hand
They devoted a wall to rather atmospheric silhouetted samurai soldiers riding on horseback
They were massive show offs - look at the se helmets!
It had never occurred to me before, but Darth Vader was based on a samurai warrior, although fairly obvious when you see them together
I also went to the Hawaii exhibition. This is centered upon the relationship between Britain and Hawaii, both island monarchies. The Hawaiian royalty did indeed make a visit to Georgian England, but a disastrous one in the the Hawaiian king and queen contracted measles on the journey and died.
As an exhibition it does suffer from being overly woke, making a great play on the collaboration between the BM and the Hawaiian community, although being exceedingly vague on the Hawaiian input (one imagines in practice nothing at all apart from translating captions into the "local" tongue, for absolutely no one to read it...)
Unfortunately there is also an unintended comic element to it all. The fearsome Hawaiian deities look rather like children's comic book characters
It is difficult to read blub about the sacred nature of these gods when (a) they can't be identified (their culture is so important that they have forgotten it) and (b) they look like something out of themuppet show.
So after two exhibitions it was just a matter of ambling back through Russell Square, prettily decorated with spring flowers
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