on rank.
Taken from ANN:
Plot Summary: Rikugou Tokidoki, a common Japanese high school student, has failed his last history test. So to make up for it he has to study at a museum that uses state of the art virtual technology to place you right in the middle of the Edo period. However, when he runs into a being called a nue, a masked man riding an enormous monster, he loses the sight in his right eye. After realizing that he is no longer wearing his goggles, he discovers that he is trapped in the Edo period, where he meets Shinonome Kon, another person in a similar position as him, and Kuchiha a female samurai who saved his life.
This is the summary I've been seeing everywhere since the anime adaptation has been announced. And! While I don't disagree that Kuchiha is a bad ass sword fighter! I don't think she's a samurai!
"But wait," you say. "It's just a word, why does this bug you so much?"
Because samurai is a rank, as much as it is anything else. It's rather like the knight class, either below the landed gentry or part of the landed gentry. And Kuchiha is not part of that rank. In fact, given her reaction to a inadvertent fight that Toki got into with some in volume two, where she backs down and tries her best to get out of it without getting violent, I'd say she's two or three steps down. She's part of the religious classes--which, given the nature of the Japanese class system, can go fairly high--but she's down there with the wandering monks and nuns, because she was adopted by one, even if he's since settled down. Moreover, she's a girl, which is a step down from the boys, even in modern Japan. And then she's got the dog god, which makes her not-human, and an extra step apart.
If I was going to classify her rank myself, I'd say she's more like a temple guard. Yeah, those poor bastard sons who go to the temple because their families can't afford to raise them, and work their asses off? That would be her.
...tl:dr, I DON'T DISAGREE WITH ANYTHING EXCEPT THE RANK AND PRIVILEGE PART carry on.
Plot Summary: Rikugou Tokidoki, a common Japanese high school student, has failed his last history test. So to make up for it he has to study at a museum that uses state of the art virtual technology to place you right in the middle of the Edo period. However, when he runs into a being called a nue, a masked man riding an enormous monster, he loses the sight in his right eye. After realizing that he is no longer wearing his goggles, he discovers that he is trapped in the Edo period, where he meets Shinonome Kon, another person in a similar position as him, and Kuchiha a female samurai who saved his life.
This is the summary I've been seeing everywhere since the anime adaptation has been announced. And! While I don't disagree that Kuchiha is a bad ass sword fighter! I don't think she's a samurai!
"But wait," you say. "It's just a word, why does this bug you so much?"
Because samurai is a rank, as much as it is anything else. It's rather like the knight class, either below the landed gentry or part of the landed gentry. And Kuchiha is not part of that rank. In fact, given her reaction to a inadvertent fight that Toki got into with some in volume two, where she backs down and tries her best to get out of it without getting violent, I'd say she's two or three steps down. She's part of the religious classes--which, given the nature of the Japanese class system, can go fairly high--but she's down there with the wandering monks and nuns, because she was adopted by one, even if he's since settled down. Moreover, she's a girl, which is a step down from the boys, even in modern Japan. And then she's got the dog god, which makes her not-human, and an extra step apart.
If I was going to classify her rank myself, I'd say she's more like a temple guard. Yeah, those poor bastard sons who go to the temple because their families can't afford to raise them, and work their asses off? That would be her.
...tl:dr, I DON'T DISAGREE WITH ANYTHING EXCEPT THE RANK AND PRIVILEGE PART carry on.