Samurai

Origins

The samurai were Japan's hereditary warrior class. They grew up in the provinces during the Heian period (794-1185) as mounted archers who served the court nobility and the great temples as guards, tax collectors and local strongmen. The word samurai comes from a verb meaning "to serve", and they were also called bushi, "warriors". Their rise to power came in the Genpei War of 1180-1185 between the Taira and Minamoto clans. The winner, Minamoto no Yoritomo, set up a military government at Kamakura and in 1192 took the title of shōgun. From then until the Meiji Restoration of 1868, almost seven centuries, warriors ruled Japan while the emperor reigned in Kyoto. The samurai were soldiers, landholders and administrators, and eventually a legally closed caste whose two swords were a birthright and a badge.

Organization & Training

A samurai was bound to his lord by service and reward, usually land or a stipend paid in rice. In the early centuries a warrior fought with a small band of his own followers, and battles often opened with archery duels between champions. The long civil wars of the Sengoku period, roughly 1467 to 1615, changed this. Regional lords, the daimyō, raised armies of tens of thousands, and most of the fighting men were ashigaru, lightly armored foot soldiers with spears, bows and guns. Samurai increasingly served as officers and mounted troops. Toyotomi Hideyoshi's "sword hunt" of 1588 disarmed the peasants, and his edicts of the early 1590s fixed the line between warriors and commoners. Under the Tokugawa shogunate (1603-1868) Japan was at peace for more than two centuries. Samurai trained in schools of swordsmanship, archery and horsemanship, but most worked as officials. (See Feudal Japan.)

Weapons & Equipment

The arms tradition ran deeper than the blade. The early samurai followed "the way of horse and bow", and mounted archery with the tall, asymmetric Yumi defined elite combat. For close fighting they used the long tachi sword and the Naginata, and in the Sengoku wars the straight spear, the yari, became the main weapon of massed infantry. Portuguese traders brought the matchlock to the island of Tanegashima in 1543, and Japanese smiths soon made it in large numbers. The Matchlock Musket changed tactics within a generation. The Katana, worn edge-up through the sash with the shorter wakizashi, became the symbol of the class, alongside the Tanto dagger and the huge Nodachi. Armor began as the lamellar ō-yoroi, made of small lacquered scales laced together, and developed into the lighter dō-maru and then the plate armor of the gunpowder age.

Notable Actions

The Genpei War ended with the sea battle of Dan-no-ura in 1185. In 1274 and 1281 samurai fought the Mongol Horde when Kublai Khan's fleets invaded Kyushu, and both invasions failed, helped by storms that later Japanese called kamikaze, "divine wind". At Nagashino in 1575, Oda Nobunaga and Tokugawa Ieyasu used massed matchlock fire from behind wooden palisades to break the Takeda army, though the size of the volleys is disputed. Hideyoshi's armies invaded Korea in 1592 and 1597. At Sekigahara in 1600, Tokugawa Ieyasu defeated his rivals and founded the shogunate that lasted until 1868. The last great samurai revolt, the Satsuma Rebellion of 1877, was crushed by the new conscript army.

Legacy

Bushidō, the code of loyalty, honor and death before disgrace, was as much Edo-period writing as battlefield fact, but the class's discipline was real. The Meiji government abolished samurai privileges in the 1870s and banned the wearing of swords in public in 1876, yet the samurai ethos soaked into Japanese institutions long afterward. From Kurosawa's films to the collecting market for papered blades and armor, no warrior aristocracy has projected its image further beyond its own end.

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