The Last (French) Samurai
This is episode 12 of The French Tech Comedy.
Episode 1: The Science of Sakura
Episode 2: Lost in Telomere Translation
Episode 3: Feel Flee to Donate
Episode 4: Pasteurising Tech With the French Touch
Episode 5: The Newborn Symphony Project
Episode 6: The Unknown 9% of the Human Genome
Episode 7: The Apple Tech Specs Conference
Episode 8: religA.I.on
Episode 9: Hiroshima is Japan’s World Trade Center
Episode 10: Mao’s Robots
Episode 11: Zazen in the Shinkansen
Leaving Hiroshima, Yuki is taking the French tech tribe on a tour to Miyajima Island. One-hour tram ride, plus eight minutes on the ferry boat. Then, sea, ryokans and… does. The place was even accessible by wheelchair from Hiroshima train station, so Thomas thought this might be fun. Instead of staying at his rBnB apartment, he decided he would join the rest of the group.
They had been there for 10 minutes when Yuki saw a poster. “Friendship between Mount Saint-Michel, France, and Miyajima Island, Japan.”
She started daydreaming. Maybe some tech event, involving French and Japanese girls working in tech, could be organised in both places? She started taking pictures of the magic scenery and wondered how many women were working in tech and writing about it on social network, both in Japan and France. “We have listed 19 women who are active on Twitter in France and who talk about new technologies and digital life in an interesting, funny and passionate way, retweet news, have a view on current affairs, support pro-diversity initiatives in tech and are speaking their mind.” She started wondering if she could raise funds to build a bridge between both worlds, and have a manga artist work on a book project. She started reading the article about those 19 women her V.I.P. list should include.
“But I have no narrative to tell, no objective to be achieved.” She kept looking for the missing unifying thread. She knew there was this awesome conference in Paris, Hello Tomorrow, allowing people in Paris to get familiar with cutting-edge technology projects, most of them made in the US. “Forget about yesterday, remember tomorrow” was the mantra. She liked this conference about the future, Nono had brought her there last year. Nono… The French engineer working at her brother’s lab was now spending most of his time in Shanghai, but he was also travelling to Palo Alto, as Facebook was always trying to conduct more agreements in China and Japan. Indeed, it was kind of funny she had a dream about Nono in California the other night, as he was actually spending some time there. Yuki was worried about Taka. He was leaving for work at 6:00 in the morning and on most nights he was back home after midnight.
“ — It’s nonsense.”
Then her thoughts went back to that French Tech conference she wanted to organise. She heard a girl in the group say:
“ — Did you know that the last samurai was actually French?”
“ — I thought it was Tom Cruise and he was from Hollywood,” answered someone.
“ — His name was actually Jules Brunet. There’s a Wikipedia article about him.”
“ — Napoleon III sent a group of military advisors to Japan to help modernize the Shogun’s army. Brunet was sent as an artillery instructor, selected in September 1866. The mission arrived in early 1867 and trained the Shogun’s troops for about a year. While in Japan, he was promoted to captain (August 1867). Then in 1868 the Shogun was overthrown in the Boshin War, and Emperor Meiji was nominally restored to full power. The French military mission was then ordered to leave Japan by Imperial decree.
However, Brunet chose to remain. A revolution is forcing the Military Mission to return to France. Alone I stay, alone I wish to continue, under new conditions: the results obtained by the Mission, together with the Party of the North, which is the party favorable to France in Japan. Soon a reaction will take place, and the Daimyos of the North have offered me to be its soul. I have accepted, because with the help of one thousand Japanese officers and non-commissioned officers, our students, I can direct the 50,000 men of the Confederation.”
“ — He sort of helped the last Edo Emperor or Shogun. Fought for him. The fun part is that Japan rewarded him later for that, though technically he had fought for the enemy of Emperor Meiji, the Shogun. French authorities got him back kind of last minute, and he got punished, but in a symbolic way more than anything else, actually. Nothing serious. And the Japanese government said he deserved the (symbolic) punishment. Let’s remember the primary need not to lose face or one’s credibility, right? So technically, this guy, Jules Brunet, fought as a soldier for the Shogun, who was defeated by other Japanese armies. Soldiers from this period were called samurais. When this Emperor won and the Shogun was defeated, the Edo period ended, I guess…”
“ — Is Edo a war of some kind?”
“ — Actually, I believe Edo is the old name for Tokyo,” said someone in the group.
“ — Yes, it is. The Edo period, from 1603 to 1868 in Japan, was a time of great peace. This is my favorite period in history,” answered Yuki. Her mind was racing. Nono was still helping raise funds for her brother Taka, a bioinformatician and oncologist working in Tokyo. Nono was French, and seemed to travel a lot between China, Japan and Israel, where Chinese biotech iGeneX had their head of R&D. The French engineer and his trademark grin… Despite his charming exterior, an enormously tough character. He certainly was a samurai of some kind. Maybe she would be able to tell a story about the French tech in France and in Japan, after all? But who was Nono, and how about her role in this story? and Taka’s? Shoguns could possibly be pre-Renaissance startups, and samurais salary men in modern Japan. The Universal Basic Income would be the world of post-Renaissance startups, but who knew, maybe for us to transition to a new era, samurais from a special kind would be needed? Who is today’s last samurai? And do we really need one? Or is Nono a cowboy of some kind, ending up working full time with Facebook California? Or maybe Facebook Japan? Why was it so important for Nono to carry on helping her brother Taka, now that he was well established and very busy in China? Could Jules Brunet’s role in the Boshin War be compared to Nono’s role in her brother’s lab? Taka was on a mission, after all. Genomic precision medicine was not something that had gone mainstream. Things haven’t gone that far yet. In the strange remake of the Boshin War that was happening in Yuki’s head, science was the only news, since history was always repeating itself. Edo kimonos and computer coding, here on Miyajima Island… 19 French girls in a Japanese manga about tech… She wasn’t sure she knew the equivalent of these French girls in Japan, but she definitely knew some guys funding startups in Fukuoka. Try connecting both spheres looked like a good place to start…
As she was enjoying the sunset on Miyajima, she got a message on Line. A new book about CRISPR-Cas9 had been translated into Japanese and was available for her to read…
A new era was coming, our DNA, even our genome (the entirety of our genetic material) would have to face selection. Yuki looked around her. Some of the women working in the French tech were here today. They were in their late twenties or their early thirties. Most of them knew one, or even several, computer programming language(s). Yuki was eager to start a discussion with them about what the scientific news — the CRISPR revolution — meant for them. There was a lot of hype, but there was also this change that was coming, maybe even faster than we thought…
