Samurai

As the centralised state of the Nara and early Heian periods weakened, provincial landholders armed themselves and their followers to protect their estates, collect taxes and suppress bandits. Bands of warriors (bushidan) formed around leaders who were often descended from minor branches of the imperial family – above all the Taira (Heike) and Minamoto (Genji). The court used these warriors to suppress rebellions such as those of Taira no Masakado and Fujiwara no Sumitomo in 939–941 and to fight wars in the northeast.

Early warriors fought primarily as mounted archers; the phrase 'the way of bow and horse' (kyūba no michi) described their calling long before the sword became its symbol.

In the Hōgen and Heiji disturbances of the 1150s warriors became arbiters of court politics, and Taira no Kiyomori dominated the government. The Minamoto victory in the Genpei War (1180–1185) led Minamoto no Yoritomo to set up the first warrior government at Kamakura, establishing the shogunate as the real centre of power. For the next seven centuries – through the Kamakura, Muromachi and Tokugawa shogunates – warriors governed Japan while the emperor reigned in Kyoto.

The bond between lord and vassal, in which land and protection were exchanged for military service, was the foundation of this order. In the civil wars of the Sengoku period, lower-ranking warriors often overthrew their masters, and the great regional lords (daimyō) built armies that included large numbers of foot soldiers (ashigaru). The unifiers of the late sixteenth century separated warriors from farmers and moved them into castle towns, creating the fixed samurai class of the Edo period.

The bow (yumi) remained the most important weapon for centuries. The curved sword (tachi, later katana), forged by laminating steels of different hardness, developed its classic form in the Heian and Kamakura periods and became the emblem of samurai status; in the Edo period only samurai were permitted to wear the pair of long and short swords (daishō). Spears (yari) dominated the battlefields of the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, and after 1543 firearms transformed warfare.

Armour evolved from the boxlike ō-yoroi of mounted archers to lighter suits for fighting on foot and, in the sixteenth century, to plate armour (tōsei gusoku) able to resist bullets. Helmets with crests and face masks served both protection and display. Many swords and armours survive as National Treasures, and traditional sword-making continues at centres such as Seki in Gifu and Bizen in Okayama.

After 1615 there were no major wars for two and a half centuries. The samurai, about six to seven per cent of the population, became a hereditary class of administrators, officials, guards and scholars, living in castle towns on stipends paid in rice by their lords. Their rank determined their office, income, dress and even marriage. Many were poor; lower-ranking samurai often supplemented their income with crafts such as making umbrellas or lanterns.

Samurai education combined Confucian learning with martial arts. Domain schools (hankō) trained young men for government service, and schools of swordsmanship, archery and horsemanship flourished as disciplines of self-cultivation. Masterless samurai (rōnin) lived precariously outside this order; the vendetta of the 47 rōnin of Akō in 1703, who avenged their lord and were then ordered to commit seppuku, became the most celebrated story of loyalty in Japanese drama.

Warrior values changed over time. Medieval war tales praise courage, fame and loyalty, but also show frequent changes of side for reward. In the Edo period, writers reinterpreted the warrior's role in Confucian terms of duty and moral example. The best-known text, Hagakure (1716), recorded by Yamamoto Tsunetomo of the Saga domain, stresses absolute devotion and readiness to die – but it circulated little before the twentieth century.

The term bushidō, 'the way of the warrior', was rare before the modern era. It became widely known through Nitobe Inazō's English-language book Bushido: The Soul of Japan (1899), which presented samurai ethics to Western readers, and it was then used by the state to promote loyalty and self-sacrifice in the army and schools up to 1945. Historians therefore treat bushidō as largely a modern construction drawing selectively on older ideals. Ritual suicide by disembowelment (seppuku) existed from the medieval period and was formalised in the Edo period as an honourable form of death or punishment for samurai.

Warriors worshipped Hachiman, the kami of war and patron of the Minamoto, and many were devoted followers of Pure Land Buddhism. Zen Buddhism, favoured by the Kamakura and Ashikaga shōguns, offered a discipline of meditation that later writers linked to swordsmanship. Samurai were also great patrons of culture: they sponsored Noh theatre, ink painting, gardens and above all the tea ceremony, whose masters served the warlords of the sixteenth century. Many samurai wrote poetry, and in the Edo period some of Japan's leading scholars, painters and writers were of samurai birth.

Lower-ranking samurai from the domains of Satsuma, Chōshū and Tosa were the driving force of the Meiji Restoration of 1868 – which then abolished their own class. Domains were abolished in 1871, conscription of commoners from 1873 removed the samurai monopoly on arms, stipends were converted into government bonds in 1876 and the wearing of swords in public was banned the same year. Former samurai became shizoku, a status without privileges, until it too was abolished in 1947.

Some resisted. The Satsuma Rebellion of 1877, led by Saigō Takamori, was crushed by the new conscript army – the end of the samurai as a military force. Many former samurai became officials, officers, teachers, entrepreneurs and journalists of the new Japan.

Original castles, samurai residences and museums preserve the material world of the samurai across Japan. Twelve castle keeps survive from the Edo period or earlier; the finest is Himeji Castle.

The samurai remain one of the most powerful images of Japan, at home and abroad, through kabuki, historical novels, the films of Kurosawa Akira, manga, anime and video games. Martial arts such as kendō, kyūdō and iaidō preserve techniques and etiquette descended from samurai training. Historians caution that the popular image – incorruptible loyalty, a unified code of bushidō, the katana as the main weapon – simplifies a class whose values and roles changed greatly over seven centuries.