Adam Savage Tours Samurai Helmets!

Hey everybody, Adam Savage. I am at the Metropolitan Museum of Art alongside Ted. Ted, how are you? Still good. We've been filming all morning with some beautiful Japanese hardware and right now we're going to talk about samurai helmets. Yeah. This is a surprising layout because the only one that looks super familiar to me is this one. Right. This feels like a classic movie. It is. What I've seen in the movies as a samurai helmet. So there's a lot of different styles and shapes. There's older styles and newer styles and then there's styles that harken back to older styles and it's very complicated. Yeah. But what I can go over here with this group in a kind of our brief time is some of the kind of construction details and some materials and how things are made and then just some neat stuff that you can see here. Whatever this is. Exactly. I can't wait to hear about it. So I want to start with this piece here which is the Hachi. This is the bowl, the metal core of the helmet. This is what protects your head. Really heavy. It's super beefy. This is heavier than like a military, US military like helmet. The M1 helmet for example weighs less than this. Wow. So this is I think a 58 plate helmet. Each one of these is an individual plate and then if we turn it over you can see they're all riveted together. Good lord. And then the outer rim is a separate piece and the brim is a piece and then this shows some older pairs. Oh yeah. And you can see there's a signature there. This is dated in Japanese to what would be roughly equivalent to 1472. It's a very, very old helmet. 20 years before Columbus landed in the Americas. Yeah. And so the style of this kind of construction, it varies in some details, but it remains more or less consistent as a way to make a bowl for a very long time. And they all kind of have similar features. Sometimes they're more lobed or they have little rivets on the outside. Sometimes they have much fancier openings at the top. But the basic layout was quite similar. And you'll see that kind of reflected here and we'll look at some of the other bowls that have differences, but it's essentially the same. So you've got all the plates kind of laminated together and riveted and it brings it together to be this really strong bowl then reinforced with the outer edge, the brim. And so inside that you saw it was red. They would lacquer them to protect it against rust, corrosion. And then there'd be a little bag kind of thing to sit your head's not sitting right. Like a barrier between a pad between you and the helmet. Exactly. But rather than just being padding, which is how the Europeans did it with like a horsehair stuffed pad in there, it's a suspended liner. What? So the helmet kind of hangs over your head. Like modern hard hat technology. Exactly. Probably a lot more comfortable. And then sometimes you would find, because there's a signature, little openings in the lining so that you could see the signature of the armor. So that you could read it even through the, oh wow. Yeah. This is also a very old bowl. This is 14th century, but has been remounted, which was I think also not uncommon. So the bowl is 14th century, which is another hundred years older than this. Yeah. But the rest of it was added later. 18th century. Oh, okay. And so this is one of those modern helmets. Well, modern, 18th century, right? But that harkens back. You're using an older bowl. You're doing the older styles. And would that have been apparent at the time you have repurposed this older piece and you are expressing the breadth of the craftsmanship over hundreds of years? To the connoisseur, certainly. To anyone who was inexperienced with armor. I imagine many people would be like, oh, samurai. And I'm not going to ask too many questions. But other people would be like, ah, I see you have a very fine armor there, that sort of thing. But I think this is a really neat piece because the shikoro here, which is the neck defense, you can see on this helmet, it's shallow. It rides right over the shoulders. It's compact. The older styles flared out, as does this one here. The purpose being to protect the neck. Yeah. But in combination with shoulder armor to protect you from arrows. So it would make a kind of a uniform shield across you. Yeah. So arrows are coming. You can kind of do that. Your neck and shoulders all protected from arrows. So these wide, flaring shikoro. And they're all convex surfaces. So they're going to repel. They'll bounce off or they get snagged and they catch rather than penetrate. And they flex, absorbing impact. Now, one of the cool things about these is what they're made out of. Yeah. Sometimes, like we think of armor as metal, right? Iron. Dink. The magnet sticks. Not too hard to imagine. The camera can see that. Believe that that's all iron. Magnet sticks to that. Yeah. Magnet sticks to that. These are leather. What? That's hardened rawhide that's then lacquered. But sometimes, you can find they've interlaced plates of iron with plates of leather to reduce weight. No way. On the outside, you can't see the difference. But on the inside, you'll find. Oh, you certainly can. You can feel it. You can feel it running up the middle of each of these lines of leather. A little added protection. That is so cool. Now, the older styles, which is what you see here in terms of construction. Each one of these is an individual piece. Of metal. Or of leather. Oh. Or sometimes, they alternate. In this particular case, they're all 100% leather. What you would do is, whether it's iron or leather, you'd make an iron piece or a leather piece. And you'd lacquer it. Yeah. And then, you'd lay a bunch along. And you'd lace them together to make a full circuit. Right. And then, you'd lacquer that. And now, you have the piece. Right. And then, you'd lace them again. Right. So, the outer layers were often leather to keep the weight down. The higher ones were often all iron. They could be interlaced. What's the word? Interchanged. Opposite. Alternating. There we go. We're slow, but we get there. In this case, I think they've added little strips of iron. Because this is probably a single piece of leather. Yeah. That they've cut out and shaped. And then, they've added little iron backing in there to give it extra strength. More than most other cultures, Japanese making, frequently, I have no idea what it could be made out of at all. You know what I mean? It's a problem for me. The materials were so plastic to them in a really abiding way. It's just amazing how much detail. I thought this might even be like wood, given how crisp the textures and carvings are in the leather. Yeah. Well, because it's hammered rawhide and then lacquered, you can actually kind of carve it. Right. And carve the lacquer as well. So, they've done a lot of texturing on this. And then, you can shape it with things like this. And then, you reinforce the edges with brass or iron. It's all laced together with silk. We have lovely silk tassels. These are brass. These are Kuwagata that come out. They're little crest forms that are reminiscent of horns, tendrils on a dragon's eyebrow things. And then, you'd have a crest mounted right here. Typically, it's a heraldic in form. That's where it would go right here as well. I was looking at this beautiful piece earlier off camera. And this little leaf spring catch is such a modern convention. It just clips in there. It would have a crest mounted on the front of it. They are one of the things that, as these things move through the market, like crests and Kuwagata and the little clips, they get interchanged and stuff. I'll find records of a helmet in our storage that the original photo in 1914 is not what's displayed there now. Somebody has been messing around with it. Generally, I leave it alone. I'm not the Japanese curator. I'm the armorer. So, I'm here to worry about condition and storage and materials and what's it made out of and stuff. And I'll let someone else worry about what crest it gets. But occasionally, it's obvious that someone has swapped it out. No, I will fix it. So, you can see the difference between these and yet the similarities. This is a 14th century bowl. This is an 18th century bowl. This is much later. Much later. Entirely intended to appear to be an older form of armor. I'm glad because it looks to me like a much older form of armor. But it's just a nostalgia thing. We're into the Edo period here. We're not wearing armor for battle anymore. We're wearing armor for show. Harkening back to the glory days of the samurai is kind of a big deal. Sure. Like a dandy dressing in 1920s. Bow, brummel, garmel. I'm getting all my references wrong, but you know what I mean. I know exactly what you mean, just with sharper edges. That's what we've got here. So, as we go from the warring periods into the Edo period, we talked about that with Tsuba and things get fancy. The same thing is happening with armor. But there's also some really fun, interesting things that are happening during the wars. And one of those things is the need for samurai to be very recognizable on the field. Recognizable by their men? By their men and, in fact, by your opponents. You know, if you're a high-ranking samurai, there's a lot of honor to be gained, I think, from not looking just like all your guys, but being up on a horse and everyone can see you. And you invite yourself as a target by being a bold figure. And European armor was exactly the same kind of thing. One of the ways that you could be distinctive on the battlefield were called kawari kabuto, strange helmets. This is a strange helmet. This was the thing I saw when I first walked into this room, and I was like, whatever could this be? Yeah, so we've got examples in our collection of helmets with dragonflies on top, with waves coming up, helmets that are in the shape of a priest's hat. This particular one has been decorated with some lovely bear fur. Bear fur! Bear fur. Not American grizzlies or kodiaks, but Japanese bears. And they're very distinctive texture and coloring, bear fur. It's kind of glued on with resin and so on. Sometimes we have one upstairs, actually, with long, flowing, kind of wild horse hair. And these are intended partly to be visible. Like, you've got a hat. Everyone recognizes your hat. This guy is recognizable on the field. So you've got a sea of men, all with their spears and guns, and the guy on the horseback with the fuzzy head. He's your guy. Or the fist with a religious symbol held in the fist. Or a dragonfly or an alligator. At this point, as I mentioned, the shikoro has narrowed and tightened up. So have the, I've forgotten the word for them, these little flare things, which are intended to be protecting the face. You have them just molded into the brow brim, which is similar in function, but a slightly different shape. And now I'm just sitting around. I'm curious. Let's put the magnet iron all the way up. So that's gold lacquer, probably over regular urushi. And that's right over the iron. And then they're laced together. This is iron. There's an iron bowl in there. So what did you get? Strange helmets. Kawari Kabuto. I love this so much. Finally, this one is another kawari. You can see it's very different in shape. It's actually intended to look like a Korean helmet. Why that was considered strange or desirable, I don't know why the fashion would be. But you have this conical point. It has the same kinds of features. Essentially the same construction, but it's tall and pointy. A little clip here, too. A little clip. It's missing its shikoro, of course. Oh, it would have had that. Yeah. But it's beautifully inlaid with these dragons. This is all metal inlay, yes? Yeah. And I selected this one because this is another one that I did the conservation on. So most of our helmets don't really need a lot of conservation. They're all in pretty good shape. Or what they need is a textile conservator for the silk. But to have one where I actually needed to intervene as a metals conservator. What was the issue that was occurring? Gross. It was filthy. It was so much silver tarnish on there. And you remember we were talking about the turban helmets. Yeah. And how I had to clean and be careful on the silver. This one was one of the cases where the silver tarnish was so thick I cut it off with a scalpel rather than polishing it. Oh, that must have been scary. Well, when I finally decided that was the technique, I was like, okay, here goes. And I tried it, and it worked perfectly. And I said, oh, that's not so bad. Got under the microscope, got to work. Sliced off all the old corrosion. And this was the result. I mean, there was some polishing involved once I'd done that. How long were you working on this? A couple of weeks of work on that. I mean, I keep on saying this, but I imagine that over those couple of weeks, you end up feeling a kinship to the maker. Or you end up getting to know them just a little bit. I do. I do like the idea of the hand of the maker on these. Someone cut this plate, and I'm imagining them fitting them together. And maybe they're sitting on the floor, and they've got this in their lap, and a piece of string around it. And they're trying to make sure everything fits. And they've got a piece of chalk. File it, cut it, shape it. Got it. Okay. Rivet it together. And then give it to the guy who's going to start chiseling it away. Maybe different people on each plate as it's going around the shop. Who knows? The apprentice kid banging out the little brass cap at the top. And then it all goes off to whoever's going to lace it. It may have been one person. Or it may have been a whole shop. A whole shop. But I do like to think about that for sure. Particularly with something as old as the 14th century. Because the tools available, the technology available is considerably different. This is very labor-intensive. They seem to pride themselves on labor-intensive, tedious executions. Yeah. Well, I mean, just weaving that. Come on. And there's so much lacework on here, and it's all hand-woven lacework from silk. Which is about the most tedious textile you can imagine. I find myself really, really surprised by the breadth of different excursions into the aesthetics of what these helmets can mean. Oh, yeah. There's, you know, when you do these quarries, sometimes it's purely like, it's an alligator on your head. That's great. And sometimes it's harkening back to a mythology or a particular, you know, Hachiman or something like that. Or sometimes it's just, you know, it was good enough for great-great-grandpa, it's good enough for me kind of thing. But I can also see, whoever's wearing this, I can see them talking to their best friend one day and be like, dude, you've got to see the new helmet I'm having made. Oh, yeah. It's gonna bonkers. We have one upstairs that, it's on display right now. I think it's exactly that kind of thing. You know, if you're showing off your watch, here's my cool new watch. So this armor has secret compartments. It has hidden pockets. It has all the refinements and features. It's got accessories. It is over the top. And it's made at a time when it never would have been used for war, except that it is entirely made of a weight and quality that you absolutely would have fought in it if you had to. So this is like a rich man's folly in the best way. We're speculating it's probably, like, commissioned maybe for someone becoming daimyo or a very important wedding or, you know, diplomatic event as a gift, something like that. No expense was spared. It's top of the line. And it has, like, the secret compartment opens up, and there's an inkstone and a brush hiding. And on this side, it's little silver compartments and a spoon. I mean, I don't know what you're keeping. You know, there's a thing about craft, which is it can reach such a high level that it eliminates the maker. Like, you can't see the maker through the perfection. Yes. And I don't see that ever happening in any of the Japanese art that I see. I see a tremendous commitment to precision, but that the maker is always visible, that there's always—they're not trying to hide the manufacturing. I don't know. I'm not sure I'm composing my thought correctly. No, no. I get it. Like, this is obviously not a bear head. It's apparent that someone glued bear hair onto a hat. Yes. You know? There's a hand there. Yeah. I think I see what you're saying. We were talking about the subos and about the sense of humor inherent. And I still feel like there's a bit of a sense of humor about craft going on here at the same time as this marvelous celebration of the precision that's possible. Ted, I've just—every time we do a video, man, I am more educated and less dumb. Thank you so much. That's good. That's a great way to be. Thanks for coming. Thank you guys so much for watching. One of my favorite things we make in our tested store are demerit badges. These are like scout badges but for screwing stuff up because screwing up is not just a part of the making process. It is intrinsic to it, and we like to celebrate that. We've got 27 so far in the supervisor's bundle that you can go buy right now by clicking on the link in the description. But we also have a booster pack of some brand new patches. This is the demerit badge for burning off your eyebrow. I am proudly sewing that to all of my clothes. This is the demerit badge for having a messy workbench, which I do not get today. My workbench is super clean. And we have new octagonal patches that are, yep, merit badges. This is the merit badge for sweeping up your shop. Congratulations. I'm so proud of you. And this—oh, my God, this is great. This is the merit badge for creating a clean space on your bench. Hey, we got to take our successes where they come and meet them there. Go to thetested-store.com or adamsavage.com to buy any of these or click on a link in the description.