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Samurai

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This is The Confusion's page which addresses what samurai meant.

Stephensonia

Samurai means to serve.

Authored entries

Evolution of Samurai Culture during Feudal-era Japan

The Taira and the Minamoto once again clashed in 1180 beginning the Gempei War which ended in 1185. The victorious Minamoto no Yoritomo once again established the superiority of the samurai and in 1190 visited Kyoto and in 1192 became Seii Taishogun, establishing the Kamakura Shogunate.

Over time, powerful samurai clans became warrior nobility (buke) who were only nominally under court aristocracy (kuge). When samurai begun to adopt aristocratic customs like calligraphy, poetry and music, some court aristocrats also began to adopt samurai skills. In spite of various machinations and brief periods of rule by various emperors, the real power was in the hands of the shogun and warriors.

Various samurai clans struggled for power over Kamakura and Ashikaga Shogunates. During the 14th century the practice of 'seppuku', or ritual suicide, became more common.

In the 13th century, Yuan, a Chinese state of the Mongolian Empire, invaded Japan two times, and the weakness of Japanese sword and fighting tactics at the time was foucused on as a lesson. An innovation on Japanese sword was accomplished by a blacksmith called Masamune in the 14th century; the two-layer structure of soft and hard iron was adopted and the style spreaded rapidly with its amazing cutting power and endurance in continuous use. Since then, Japanese swords had been recognized as one of the invincible carry weapons during the pre-industrial era of East Asia. (Even China imported them.)

The Sengoku jidai ("warring-states period") was marked by the loosening of samurai culture, in a sense. Those born into other social strata could sometimes make names for themselves as warriors and become de facto samurai. In this turbulent period, formal bushido ethics held diminished importance in the face of constant warfare.

However, Japanse war tactics and technologies were greatly sophisticated and evolved in the 15th and 16th centuries.Use of large infantry troop called Ashigaru , which was formed by the humble warriors or populace, with fauchard or long lance was introduced and combined with cavalry in maneuvers; the numbers of people mobilized in warfare were generally in the thousands to the over ten-thousands.

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The issues of inheritance firstly caused family infighting because primogeniture became common while division of succession was designated by law before the 14th century.To avoid infighting, continuous invasion against neighboring Samurais' territories was rather favored.

The social mobility of human resources was flexible, as the ancient regime began to collapse and emerging Samurais needed to maintain large military and administrative organizations in their areas of infulence. Most of the Samurai families that survived to the 19th century originated in this era. They decleared themselves to be the blood of one of the four ancient noble clans, Minamoto, Taira, Fujiwara and Tachibana. In most cases, however, it is hard to prove. They were the blood of inferiors overthrowing their superiors.

Harquebus, a matchlock gun, was introduced by Lusitanians on a Chinese pirate ship in 1543. Japanese succeeded nationalization of it within a decade. Groups of mercenary with harquebus played a critical role, likewise the specialized agents called Ninzya that engaged intelligence activity.

Oda and Toyotomi

Oda Nobunaga was the well-known lord of the Nagoya area (once called Ohwari) and a good representative example of Samurai of the Sengoku Period. He did almost all of the things to prepare the reunification of Japan.

He made innovations on organizations and war tactics, heavily used harquebus, developed commerce and industry and loved things Western ; the consecutive victories enabled him to realise the termination of the Ashikaga Shogunate and disarmament of the military powers of the Buddhists, which had inflamed futile struggles among the populace for centuries. Even the emperor was to give him the authority. He died in 1582 by the assault of one of his follower Akechi Mitsuhide. Importantly, Toyotomi Hideyoshi (see below) and Tokugawa Ieyasu, who made Tokugawa Shogunate, were Nobunaga's loyal followers. Hideyoshi defeated Mitsuhide within months and was regarded as the rightful successor of Nobunaga. The two were gifted with Nobunaga's achievements. So there was a saying: "The reunification is a rice cake; Oda made it. Hashiba shaped it. At last, only Ieyasu tastes it." (Hashiba is the family name that Toyotomi Hideyoshi used while he was a follower of Nobunaga.)

The life style and the war tactics shown in the movie Last Samurai are those of out-country Samurais of the Sengoku jidai, precisely of the era before 1543; Not those in the 19th century.

Toyotomi Hideyoshi, who became a grand minister in 1586, himself the son of a poor peasant family, created a law that the samurai caste became codified as permanent and heritable, and that non-samurai were forbidden to carry weapons.

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Tokugawa Shogunate

During the Tokugawa era, samurai increasingly became courtiers, bureaucrats and administrators rather than warriors. The daisho, the paired long and short swords of the samurai (cf. 'katana' and wakizashi) became more of a symbolic emblem of power rather than a weapon used in daily life. They still had the legal right to cut down any commoner who did not show proper respect; in what extent this right was used, however, is unknown. When the central government forced daimyos to cut the size of their armies, unemployed ronin actually became a social problem.

Scholars codified the final form of the bushido during the Tokugawa era. Also, the most famous book of kenjutsu, or sword fighting, dates from this period (Miyamoto Musashi’s The Book of Five Rings, 1643). Still, the incident of 47 Ronin (a murder of an official followed by the suicide of the samurai who killed him) caused some debate about the righteousness of their actions. Hagakure: The Book of the Samurai by Yamamoto Tsunetomo is a manual of instruction into the way of the samurai. It illuminates one of the core practices of that way, known as shudo, or the way of the young. Shudo involved a young samurai choosing an older warrior as lover and mentor, a relationship so intense it often conflicted with a samurai's devotion to his daimyo.