Samurai

Since the links to the right, expanding on or illustrating the comments here, can go to anywhere on the site (sometimes to whole sections with dozens of pages) they each open in a new window, so that this page can be retained as master context when you have finished exploring.

Samurai, Japan's warrior class, ran the country from the late 12th to late 19th Centuries. They therefore have a huge place in the national psyche, for good and ill, and play a big part in the history of its arts, as consumers, tastemakers, artists and subjects of stories and paintings. Their modern place in the culture has been compared to that of cowboys in the US, and while there is some validity in this, it's worth remembering that they dominated the country for seven hundred years, which means their actual place in Japan's history is incomparably larger than that of cowboys in America.

Early History

Suicide by disembowelment, seppuku, started around now (hara-kiri is the vulgar term). Warriors killed themselves to avoid capture/surrender, to mitigate disgrace, but also as a criticism of their lord. Note that capture and surrender were not only dishonourable, but led to terrible torture, so it can be seen as a pragmatic step as much as noble one. Since seppuku led to slow, painful death, a second was soon added to behead the person - as well as finishing them off, this was also done at the first sign of hesitation or fear, to avoid a shameful death.

Taking Control

Civil wars in the 12th Century ended with Minamoto Yoritomo becoming the first shogun, military commander, from 1185. From then on, power resided largely with the shogun, and on a local level with the daimyo, regional samurai lords, rather than the emperor and his court, who for most of the next seven centuries were figureheads, though very important ones. Whenever there was conflict, each side would claim to be acting in the interests of the emperor.

It's worth noting that Zen arrived in Japan about six years after the samurai took control, and Zen was adopted by this class, a tie that remained for centuries to come. The link is discussed on another page (loads in a separate window, so you can continue here).

Zen and Samurai

The place of the samurai in the national culture was cemented by two attempts by China's Mongol rulers, then led by Khubilai Khan and dominating most of Asia and part of Europe, to invade Japan. In 1274, China sent something like 40,000 troops. A third were lost in storms at sea, and the rest were driven off by 10,000 samurai. Seven years later, China sent a far larger force - I've seen 100,000 and even 140,000 quoted. Again, they suffered huge losses from typhoons at sea - this was termed the kami-no-kaze, wind of the gods - and the Japanese had 40,000 warriors ready this time, and won again. The Chinese, as well as the numerical majority, had gunpowder and cannon, so these were remarkable victories, the stuff of legend ever since.

This first shogunate, the Kamakura period, ended in civil war and a very brief restoration of imperial rule, but this didn't last. The next shogun moved the capital to Muromachi, and times changed. Before this, most samurai were illiterate and totally uncultured - they were soldiers only. From the Muromachi period, the idea that samurai should be cultured began. It was an ideal, and it's unclear what proportion of the samurai had any cultural accomplishments, but there were some notable samurai artists, many in styles consciously opposed to the effete arts of the Heian aristocracy.

The Edo period

Many of the great samurai stories are based at the end of a Century of decaying control and local war, which started late in the 15th Century. The country had no central rule, and in a few decades at the end of the 16th Century, three great leaders changed this. Oda Nobunaga reunited over half of the country; Toyotomi Hideyoshi finished the job; he was succeeded by Tokugawa Ieyasu, who started what is among the most stable periods of peace and central rule that any government has ever achieved anywhere in the world. The Edo period saw a few highly original devices to achieve this.

The trouble had always come from local daimyo gathering power and armies. In the Edo period, every daimyo was obliged to maintain one residence at home and another in Edo, the new capital (nowadays called Tokyo), which quickly grew from a fishing village to the biggest city in the world within a century - then doubled in population over the following century. The Edo household had to include the family, making them convenient hostages in case of any trouble. The daimyo were obliged to alternate their attendance, spending half the year in Edo, half in their home area, which limited their ability to build plots. In addition, moving a big household across the country and maintaining a second lavish home - it had to be expensive, to impress - crippled their financial ability to build armies.

So there was peace, but there was also the odd situation of the warrior caste being in charge, but having no one to fight (Japan showed no real signs of ambitions abroad until the 20th Century, bar one expedition to Korea which didn't seem to be about taking over). They became administrators more than soldiers, adopting many Confucian ideas. They were also more cultured in this period, taking part in more artistic activities: calligraphy, painting, flower arranging, the tea ceremony, poetry and so on. Some of the old martial ways decayed to symbols - seppuku still existed, but it was sufficient to simply scratch the stomach before the beheading.

Japan also went into seclusion for most of this period. Relations with China had often been turbulent, but the arrival in the 16th Century of Europeans brought major changes. Christianity's impact was always limited, but the arrival of guns made huge changes to the samurai - a bunch of recruits with guns were more than a match for samurai with swords. The wars that led up to the Edo period involved hundreds of thousands of guns. From the 17th Century, Japan closed its borders, with a couple of tightly policed exceptions.

This isolation was very successful for two and a half centuries, until American gunships arrived. The culture had stagnated, and it was very quickly clear that the fighting technology of late 19th Century America outclassed that of the samurai. The shogunate fell, the emperor took charge again, and the samurai quickly vanished. Some of the ideas survived. The divine wind that helped repel the Mongol invaders was invoked again in the kamikaze pilots of World War II. Perhaps the last gasp, outside fictional representations, was the novelist Yukio Mishima's public seppuku in 1970, in protest against the weakness of the post-war Japanese state.

Samurai in the arts

There have been a few notable artists of samurai caste, such as Musashi, Gyokudo and Hiroshige. For a long time, samurai played a fairly small part in stories and visual arts. There were plenty of stories, but most were histories, or fictionalised versions of history. They became a major subject in the Edo period, particularly in the kabuki theatre. In turn, kabuki was a major subject for print artists, and this spun off into a strand of samurai prints, but many were explicitly tied to kabuki plays. Later on, samurai became a major subject in the movies, most notably in a series of magnificent films by Akira Kurosawa - returning to the cowboy comparisons in my opening paragraph, it's worth noting that he was a big fan and student of John Ford's cowboy movies, and of course Seven Samurai and Yojimbo were both remade as major westerns, the latter by Sergio Leone, who derived much of his sense of pace from Kurosawa. Apart from some post-war years when samurai comics were banned, they were also one of the great genres in manga, and one can learn more about samurai from reading the comics by the team of Kazuo Koike and Goseki Kojima than from most history books.

Samurai attitudes to women and sex

Samurai, especially in the Kamakura period, thought women very inferior. They were needed for having children, but love was for other males. There are similarities here with Sparta and Prussia, where the warrior class similarly believed that lovers would fight hardest for each other, so homosexual relationships were positively encouraged. This was arguably the closest you will find in Japanese culture to the west's ideas of romantic love - this idea barely features at all in stories of men and women. These relationships were most commonly between a samurai and an 'apprentice', so they were also a way of passing on skills.

sources