[Dr. Boogie]

The truth about samurai is somewhere between Tadao and MM: they weren't actually any good at swordplay, but that was because they could chop people in half with a single strike. As such, little effort was put into developing a followup in case the target avoided the attack.

The real trouble came when explorers from the west arrived. At that time, the samurai were still experimenting with ways to add a second strike to their arsenal, and they were worried that they wouldn't be able to come up with one before the Europeans came in force. That's when they all decided, as a people, to start acting as though the samurai were the most feared swordsmen not just in the land, but in the entire world. The Europeans were inclined to believe them after a handful of Japanese took them to a bamboo grove to watch samurai chop down several bamboo trees with a single slash (the Europeans didn't realize that the trees were actually hollow).

But here's the most interesting part of that story: years later, Taigong Shin, the man who first proposed the idea of fooling the Europeans, left Japan to live in America. In his remaining years, he compiled his disinformation tactics into a discipline he called "PR" and passed them down to his sole disciple: Will Rogers.