Samurai

• 1. Introduction

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  Samurai were members of a professional warrior class who served as retainers to lords in pre-industrial Japan. In the 1918 census, descendants still categorized as shizoku made up approximately 4.06% of Japan's population. That figure speaks to centuries of hereditary status, military privilege, and cultural weight. Who were these men and women, and how did their world grow, change, and finally dissolve? Those are the questions this documentary will pursue.

  The word "samurai" is thought to come from "saburau," meaning "one who serves their lord." That definition contains a built-in vulnerability: a warrior who loses his master loses his title. Such a man was called a ronin. He kept the right to carry weapons and use a surname, but he could no longer be properly called a samurai, because he served nobody. This tension between service and identity would shape the entire history of the class.

• 2. How Warriors Rose

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  By 792 AD, the imperial court had ended Japan's national conscript army. The decision was partly practical. Conscript footsoldiers had proved particularly ineffective during Japan's wars against the Emishi, an ethnic minority in the north who relied on mounted warriors and were therefore highly mobile. The deciding factor in most battles had been professional mounted archers from wealthy families.

  The government could not afford to train conscripts as mounted archers. That skill required years of practice. Instead, the court began recruiting men who already had those abilities, acquired through private training funded by family wealth. Soldiers were expected to provide most of their own equipment, so wealthy men who could afford horses and archery training were promoted to elite units.

  The poor disliked military service because their farms often fell into decay during their absence, so there was popular support for ending conscription. As the imperial army shrank and tax revenues declined through the growth of shoen estates, emperors increasingly delegated security in the countryside to the burgeoning class of landed warriors. In the early 9th century, Emperor Saga expelled several dozen members from the imperial family, who formed two new clans: the Minamoto clan in 814 AD and the Taira clan in 825 AD. Many wealthy provincial families married into both clans to acquire aristocratic status, and by the 11th and 12th centuries, bushi had become conspicuously involved in land reclamation, transforming them into a landowning class with enormous regional power.

• 3. War Between Clans

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  In 1156, the former emperor Sutoku attempted to take back the throne from his brother, Emperor Go-Shirakawa, in what is remembered as the Hogen rebellion. The Minamoto and Taira clans had fought on both sides of that conflict, but Minamoto loyalists received smaller rewards than their Taira counterparts. The resentment reshaped political factions, and personal allegiances gave way to clan affiliations.

  The Taira leader Taira no Kiyomori became the first bushi ever given a senior rank in the imperial court, appointed chief minister in 1167. In 1180, he installed his two-year-old grandson, Emperor Antoku, on the throne, pushing aside older male heirs whose mothers were from the Minamoto family. Minamoto no Yoritomo responded by promising lands and administrative rights to warriors who swore allegiance to him. The resulting Gempei War lasted from 1180 to 1185 and ended with the Taira clan effectively destroyed. In April 1185, the child emperor was drowned by his own grandmother, who then committed suicide.

  Yoritomo chose not to rule through the imperial court. He established a parallel military government headquartered in Kamakura, staffed by warriors who had served the Minamotos during the war. In 1192, appointed sei-i taishogun, he created the gokenin class: warrior vassals who owed the shogun military service, including guard duty and the apprehension of criminals, in exchange for various privileges. The samurai class during the Kamakura period was the warrior subclass below the gokenin. Below them in turn were the chūgen, footsoldiers who had no surname.

• 4. The Sengoku Crucible

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  The Onin War, which began in 1467 and lasted about ten years, devastated Kyoto and brought down the power of the Ashikaga shogunate. Japan fractured into warring states. This period corresponds to the late Muromachi period, though historians count at least nine theories about when it ended, the earliest being 1568, when Oda Nobunaga marched on Kyoto.

  In 1543, Portuguese explorers taught the Japanese how to make matchlock muskets. Certain daimyo quickly noticed that muskets required only a week or two of training to master. By the end of the Sengoku period, there were hundreds of thousands of arquebuses in Japan. The weapon the Japanese called tanegashima, named after the island where it was first introduced, had transformed the battlefield. Infantry fighting in close formation with yari and tanegashima became dominant. The naginata and the long, heavy tachi fell into disuse, gradually replaced by the nagamaki and the shorter, lighter katana.

  Hojo Soon was the first samurai to rise to the rank of sengoku daimyo. Toyotomi Hideyoshi rose from a peasant background to become a samurai, sengoku daimyo, and kampaku, or Imperial Regent. His trajectory illustrated how fluid social boundaries had become. Social mobility was high, and most samurai families that survived to the 19th century traced their origins to this era, though their claims of descent from ancient noble clans such as the Minamoto, Taira, Fujiwara, or Tachibana were often impossible to verify.

  Hideyoshi eventually moved to close those doors. As grand minister from 1586, he created a law barring non-samurai from carrying weapons. The status of samurai became permanent and hereditary. A popular saying captured how power actually moved: "The reunification is a rice cake; Oda made it. Hashiba shaped it. In the end, only Ieyasu tastes it." Hashiba was the family name Toyotomi Hideyoshi used while a follower of Nobunaga.

• 5. Peace and Transformation

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  After the Battle of Sekigahara, Tokugawa Ieyasu was declared shogun in 1603. Following the siege of Osaka in 1615, Japan entered a period of peace that lasted roughly 250 years. With no warfare since the early 17th century, samurai gradually lost their military function. Many served as officials, police, teachers, or domain administrators, and after a law passed in 1629 required samurai on official duty to wear two swords, that daishō became more of a symbolic emblem than a weapon in daily life.

  Neo-Confucianism became very influential in this era. The leading figures who introduced Confucianism in Japan in the early Tokugawa period were Fujiwara Seika (1561-1619), Hayashi Razan (1583-1657), and Matsunaga Sekigo (1592-1657). They helped cement the theoretical obligations between a samurai and his lord, obligations already deeply rooted in required reading: Confucius and Mencius were standard texts for the educated warrior class.

  The domain of Choshu had forty strata for the military class. The highest-ranking Tokugawa vassals were the daimyo, who held at least 10,000 koku. Most ordinary samurai were hizamurai with an average stipend of 100 koku. Below them were the kachi, who were on foot and were sometimes not considered samurai at all. Landed samurai had to choose between giving up their lands to become stipend samurai or keeping their lands and becoming peasants.

  From the mid-Edo period, wealthy merchants and farmers could join the samurai class by giving a large sum of money to an impoverished gokenin, to be adopted into a samurai family and inherit its position and stipend. The price varied: 1,000 ryo for one rank, 500 ryo for another.

• 6. Dissolution and Rebellion

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  By the mid-nineteenth century, the Tokugawa shogunate faced increasing pressure from Western powers. American Commodore Matthew C. Perry's expedition of 1853-54 exposed weaknesses in Japan's coastal defense and diplomatic position. Military reform had already begun in the 1840s, when the shogunate and several domains, including Saga, Choshu, and Satsuma, had experimented with Western-style gunnery, drill, and coastal defense.

  In 1867, Tokugawa Yoshinobu, the 15th Tokugawa shogun, returned governing authority to the emperor. The Meiji Restoration that followed did not immediately abolish the samurai. Many of the men who led the new government were themselves former samurai from domains such as Satsuma, Choshu, Tosa, and Saga.

  The institutional dismantling came through legislation. In 1869, samurai feudal lords and court nobles were reorganized as kazoku, while most former warriors became shizoku. The introduction of conscription in 1873 separated military service from hereditary warrior status. Economic hardship and alienation contributed to uprisings across the 1870s: the Saga Rebellion of 1874, the Shinpuren, Akizuki, and Hagi rebellions of 1876, and finally the Satsuma Rebellion of 1877, led by Saigo Takamori. That last uprising was the largest and the final major armed revolt by former samurai. Its defeat confirmed the military and political authority of the central government.

  The status category of shizoku remained in official use until 1947, long after the practical privileges of the samurai had disappeared, a quiet administrative echo of a class that had once defined Japanese political life.

• 7. Women and Household

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  Maintaining the household was the main duty of women of the samurai class, a role that carried more weight than it might appear. Warrior husbands were frequently traveling or fighting, so wives managed all household affairs, cared for children, and were expected to defend the home if necessary. For this reason, many women of the samurai class were trained in wielding a naginata or a small knife called the kaiken, in an art called tantojutsu.

  The political dimension of these women's lives was concentrated in marriage. A samurai's daughter's greatest duty was a political marriage, often to members of enemy clans to forge diplomatic relationships. A famous case involved Oda Tokuhime, daughter of Oda Nobunaga. Irritated by her mother-in-law Lady Tsukiyama, the wife of Tokugawa Ieyasu, Tokuhime had Lady Tsukiyama arrested on suspicion of communicating with the Takeda clan. Ieyasu then had Lady Tsukiyama executed in 1579 and ordered his own son, Matsudaira Nobuyasu, to commit seppuku that same year.

  Some women wielded power far beyond what their formal status allowed. After Ashikaga Yoshimasa, the 8th shogun of the Muromachi shogunate, lost interest in politics, his wife Hino Tomiko largely ruled in his place. Yodo-dono, concubine of Toyotomi Hideyoshi, became the de facto master of Osaka Castle and the Toyotomi clan after Hideyoshi's death. Tachibana Ginchiyo was chosen to lead the Tachibana clan after her father's death. Nearly all women of the samurai class were literate by the end of the Tokugawa period, and in a letter dated the 29th of January 1552, St Francis Xavier remarked on the ease with which Japanese people understood prayers, citing the country's high level of literacy.

• 8. Samurai Beyond Japan

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  In 1582, three Kirishitan daimyo, Otomo Sōrin, Omura Sumitada, and Arima Harunobu, sent a group of boys, their own blood relatives and retainers, to Europe as Japan's first diplomatic mission. These envoys had audiences with King Philip II of Spain, Pope Gregory XIII, and Pope Sixtus V. The mission returned to Japan in 1590, but its members were forced to renounce Christianity, be exiled, or be executed, due to the Tokugawa shogunate's suppression of the faith.

  In 1612, Hasekura Tsunenaga, a vassal of the daimyo Date Masamune, led a diplomatic mission and presented King Philip III of Spain with a letter requesting trade. He also had an audience with Pope Paul V in Rome. He returned to Japan in 1620, but trade did not take place because news of Japan's suppression of Christianity had reached Europe. In the Spanish town of Coria del Rio, where the diplomatic mission stopped, there were 600 people with the surnames Japon or Xapon as of 2021, who carry the folk tale that they descend from samurai who remained.

  Samurai also traveled as mercenaries. When the Tokugawa shogunate was established in the early 1600s, trade between Japan and Southeast Asia accelerated. Many ronin who had lost their masters after the Battle of Sekigahara settled in Japanese towns in Thailand, the Philippines, Vietnam, and Cambodia. The most famous of these mercenaries was Yamada Nagamasa, originally a palanquin bearer from the lowest end of the samurai class, who rose to become governor of the Nakhon Si Thammarat Kingdom in what is now southern Thailand. When the policy of national isolation known as sakoku was established in 1639, that world closed, and records of Japanese activities in Southeast Asia were lost for many years after 1688.