Pas de deux: Lucinda's Commission: Objects and legality

These images deal with a person’s public persona, and their private one. The story and image describe two Samurai sisters avenging the death of their father in the most ‘proper’ fashion possible. Here, there is a tension between the intention to act violently and the desire to adhere to the law. These look like typical Japanese ladies, when in fact they are something else entirely. This illustrates the idea that an object could be made to look like one thing, but act like another. The Prevention of Crime Act 1953 is an Act of Parliament of the UK restricting the carrying of offensive weapons in public. The Act defines an offensive weapon by indicating three categories, the last of which is “articles intended for use for causing injury to the person”. This would cover normal items such as scissors and (potentially) any item of jewellery that was intended for use as a weapon: even a brooch pin.

Miyago and Shinobu practice before taking revenge upon their father's killer

"One of the most dramatic accounts of women wielding swords in anger concerns a revenge killing where the avengers were the man’s two daughters: Miyagino and Shinobu, who carried out their vendetta with exemplary attention to the legal processes required by the Tokugawa shogunate. Popular accounts of the affair exist in many versions. The factual basis of the story concerns a samurai, called Shiga Daishichi, who was on the run because of a misdemeanour and hid in a paddy field in a village near Shiroshi in Mutsu province. By chance, a farmer, Yomosaku, who had been transplanting rice seedlings, observed him and in his surprise Shiga Daishichi panicked and killed the farmer. Yomosaku had two daughters, the eldest of whom, Miyagino, had (according to the more romantic versions of the tale) been engaged to be married, but through poverty had been sold into prostitution and become a courtesan of the highest status in Yoshiwara, in Edo. The younger daughter, Shinobu, intending to tell her elder sister about her father’s death, went to Edo, where she tracked down her sister. They then secretly slipped away from Yoshiwara in order to seek revenge for their father’s death, and began to study the martial arts under the guidance of Miagino’s samurai fiancé. They were eager in their pursuit of knowledge, and the result was the vengeance on their father’s enemy, Shiga Daishichi, in 1649.

The girls were determined to carry out the revenge themselves, and the details are largely historical. When the time was ripe, they went through the formalities of asking their daimyo for authorization to avenge the death of their father. There was, in this case, no need for a long search for the enemy, as he had remained in the daimyo’s service. The lord accordingly ordered the man to be brought before him to face the girls in combat. Miyagino was armed with a naginata while Shinobu wielded a kusari gama, the sharpened sickle to which was attached along weighted chain. Shiga Daishichi’s sword was rendered ineffectual with the aid of the chain, and the other sister finished him off with her naginata."