ABSTRACT
Walter Benjamin’s reading of Charles Baudelaire as the archetypal modern poet, trash-picking through the refuse of modernity in an attempt to salvage the language of the new urban experience, is a powerful example of the former’s archivist materialism. As one of the most powerful and influential warlords of the late sixteenth century, and as the founder of the Tokugawa military government that would endure for more than 250 years, Ieyasu’s access to valuable things was perhaps unmatched in his day. Regional conflicts and new religious uprisings were not the only ingredients in the relative instability of the mid-sixteenth century. The year of Ieyasu’s birth, 1543, also marked the arrival of the first Europeans in Japan, Portuguese traders who brought new goods to sell, access to new markets overseas, a new worldview in the form of Christianity, and perhaps most significant for warriors of the period, a new and powerful weapon: the musket or arquebus.
