"To be, or not to be a samurai!” That is the question that my brother heard me utter one day when he came into my room and found me hacking away at my pillow with a short wooden pole. No no…my actions weren’t those of an angry, angsty girl. Instead, they were the actions of a future samurai in training. I explained to him, with probably more drama than was necessary, that I wanted to be just like the samurai Okita Soujiro of Shinsengumi fame and he just stared, and then laughed. He laughed because he could never picture little ol’ me fighting Japanese assassins in the 1900s like Okita Soujiro did. After his chuckles subsided (and after I hit him on the head with my wooden pole in anger), he said, “Alright, I suppose we’ll have to do something about this current obsession of yours.” And thus did our journey to become samurai begin.
