Who Were the Samurai? Japan's Warrior Class From Rise to Abolition

In the eighth and ninth centuries the imperial court at Kyoto governed the provinces through appointed officials and stopped bothering to maintain an army. The provinces armed themselves. Local landholders raised mounted warriors, skilled above all with the bow, to defend estates and collect taxes, and the great clans that grew from them, the Taira and the Minamoto, were at first the court's instruments and then its masters. In 1185 the Minamoto destroyed the Taira in a naval battle and their leader Yoritomo had himself named shogun, the emperor's military deputy, and set up a government in Kamakura that ruled in the emperor's name while the emperor did nothing. That arrangement, a powerless emperor and a warrior government, lasted with interruptions until 1868.

The samurai came into their own in the century and a half of civil war from 1467, when the shogunate collapsed and every provincial lord, the daimyo, fought every other. This was the era of the castles, the mounted charges, the massed spearmen and, from 1543, the muskets that the Portuguese brought and that Japan was soon making in greater numbers than any country in Europe. Three warlords in succession ended it: Oda Nobunaga by conquest, Toyotomi Hideyoshi by finishing his work and disarming the peasants, and Tokugawa Ieyasu by winning the battle of Sekigahara in 1600 and establishing a shogunate at Edo, now Tokyo, that kept Japan closed and at peace until the Americans arrived in 1853. Hideyoshi's sword hunt of 1588 fixed the class: only samurai might bear arms, and only samurai were samurai, by birth.

Two and a half centuries of peace left a warrior class with nothing to fight. The Tokugawa turned the samurai into administrators, paid stipends in rice to live in castle towns, and required them to study as well as train, so that the samurai of 1750 was typically a clerk with two swords. It was in this idle century that the code called bushido, the way of the warrior, was written down, largely by men who had never seen a battle and were anxious about what their class was for. Its elements, as later systematised:

• •Loyalty to one's lord above life, family and, in theory, the emperor
• •Honour, and its defence through ritual suicide by disembowelment, seppuku, when honour was lost or a lord commanded it
• •Courage, frugality, and indifference to death, expressed in the saying that the way of the warrior is found in dying
• •Learning, calligraphy, poetry and the tea ceremony, as the marks of a cultivated man
• •The two swords, long and short, worn as the badge of rank and forbidden to everyone else

The samurai destroyed themselves. When American warships forced Japan open in 1853 and the shogunate proved unable to resist, it was young samurai from the outer domains who overthrew it in 1868 in the emperor's name, and then, as ministers of the new Meiji government, dismantled their own class in the interests of a modern state. Between 1871 and 1876 the domains were abolished, the stipends commuted to bonds, the wearing of swords banned, and a conscript army of peasants created that could not be told from a samurai one. The last samurai rising, in 1877, was led by Saigo Takamori, one of the men who had made the revolution, and it was crushed by the conscripts he had helped create; he died on a hillside near Kagoshima and was pardoned by the emperor within a decade. Former samurai went into the army, the police, business and government, where they ran the country for another two generations.

Bushido as most people know it was assembled in 1900 by Nitobe Inazo, a Japanese Christian writing in English for a Western audience, who presented the samurai ethic as Japan's equivalent of chivalry. The book was translated back into Japanese and adopted by a militarising state that used it to teach conscripts to die rather than surrender, with consequences in the Pacific War that the Tokugawa clerks would not have recognised. After 1945 the samurai returned as entertainment, in the films of Akira Kurosawa, whose Seven Samurai of 1954 gave the world the image of the masterless swordsman with his own code, and from there in Westerns, comics and games. The real samurai were, for most of their existence, a hereditary class of landed officials whose swords were a privilege they rarely drew.

The samurai were Japan's hereditary warrior class, who rose from provincial mounted archers in the ninth century to rule the country through the shoguns from 1185, fought the civil wars of the sixteenth century, and spent the two and a half centuries of Tokugawa peace as a caste of stipended administrators who wrote down a code of loyalty and honour. They abolished themselves after 1868 to build a modern state, and the lone swordsman of legend is largely a creation of the twentieth century.