Samurai: everything you wanted to know - HistoryExtra
"‘The carrying of two swords was a marker of status not only of Samurai but of the occasional commoner who was on some temporary duty on behalf of a warlord or the Shogun itself. But it was pretty easy to distinguish, you know, who was a warrior and who was not a warrior just by looking at them in Tokugawa Japan’
‘What does the wearing of the two swords represent?’
‘It just kind of represents that you're a warrior. I mean, in the Warring States period, swords were a sidearm, you know, they were not the main weapon that you would use in combat, just like you wouldn't go into warfare shooting your pistol or something like that. And so they become the proper military attire for a warrior who is not actively engaged in combat, but could theoretically be attacked or need to engage in combat. And so they were required to carry two swords. In fact, if they weren't carrying their swords, they could be punished. And there are plenty of anecdotes of Samurai during the Tokugawa period who really thought it was a bother to carry swords, because they didn't really need them. They got in the way. There's even a time period when there was a fashion trend among Samurai to straighten their swords, because they looked really cool with very straight lines. And there are complaints by local Lords telling their Samurai: look, don't straighten your swords, because it essentially renders them ineffective and you shouldn't be following these fashion trends. But it just goes to show how distant the samurai had become, from their predecessors who were actually engaged in warfare’...
‘How much of a Samurai’s career was actually spent engaged in conflict?’
‘I think it depends on the time period. So for in the Warring States period, say the 15th or 16th centuries, yeah, warriors are engaged in warfare quite a lot. Same with parts of the 14th century. But the bulk of Japanese history, warriors are engaged in other things. And it really depends on the time period. Sometimes they are doing bureaucratic work. So I mentioned that in the Tokugawa period, when there is no warfare, the samurai are mostly just doing bureaucratic work, depending on their particular status. They might also be engaged in some employments on the side to earn more money. And so there're examples of Samurai making umbrellas or toys. In some places there Samurai who are also doing a bit of farming. There are Samurai who are engaged in trading things. There was this wonderful autobiography called Mitsui’s Story, translated into English, and he's a low ranking Samurai and he talks about, he would buy and sell and appraise swords, he was a gangster sometimes. He did fortune telling to get money out of people. You know, he just did all kinds of other very unnoble things, if you will, in order just to get by, to make a living...
Most of the Samurai are rank and file samurai. And life for them was pretty tough, because they had a certain stipend that was attached to their status, and to their particular duties to the domain. And oftentimes that stipend was not enough. Moreover, even a low ranking Samurai was expected to maintain appearances, which might include having servants, a few servants or something like that. So they were really strapped for cash, you know, to put it metaphorically, and life was tough. And for a rank and file Samurai life could be boring. You know, one of the problems that a lot of domains face is that they have too many Samurai and not enough jobs. So let's say you're a low ranking samurai, and your father's job was to be the guard of the western gate to the castle three months out of the year, that would be your job. And that will be your first son's job, when you have a son, it's a very boring job, it doesn't pay a lot. So what do you do at the rest of your time? You know, you might engage in employments, like I just mentioned on the side, somewhat secretly. You could do things like travel, you, there are a lot of Samurai who, who applied for permission to travel to Edo to study, whether that study is philosophy, or whether it's martial arts. Oftentimes, daimyo were more than happy, say, yeah. Okay, here you go, you know, go to Edo, do what you need to do, right, because it kind of got them out of their hair. And you do have examples of Samurai who are, who are just kind of fed up, their their occupation goes nowhere. And so there are a lot of writers, artists, playwrights, philosophers, physicians, who were originally members of the Samurai status group and essentially just left it to pursue this other occupation. Yeah, so so it was a tough life for from a samurai, I would say. And, in fact, at the end of the Tokugawa period, there are a lot of Samurai who are more than happy to abandon the status completely, because now they had freedom of movement. They had freedom of occupation more so than they did in the Tokugawa period. And they didn't miss being a samurai...
If you're a younger brother, essentially, one of the options is you could serve your older brother, and who wants to do that, right. So what you would try to do is maybe find another Samurai family that has daughters, but no sons, and then you would marry into that family, and you would change your last name, and you'd become the heir to that family. And one of the things to note here is that happened quite a lot. There's no notion of blood being important…
For the most part, there wasn't a lot of social mobility for Samurai and this was a source of frustration for a lot of Samurai that's where we get the, you know, kind of mini riots and protests by Samurai throughout the Tokugawa period is they're frustrated, you know, some of them are quite intelligent. They have ideas about how they think the domain should be reformed. But they have no vehicle for having those ideas known, and for reforms to be put in place. Now there are some domains, there's some daimyo, who are smart, and they realize, well, you know, here's this low ranking Samurai who's good at something, and maybe I should promote him upwards or put him in a position that allows him to help us engage in reforms. So there was some social mobility, but for the most part, no, you were pretty much stuck in whatever rank you were as a samurai...
Before the [Tokugawa] period, Samurai are not seen as a good thing. They're described as beasts. There's one nobleman who wrote about how warriors were no better than dogs. Right. So being a samurai was not seen as a good thing, you were seen as a as a murderous person, which in a country where Buddhism was very influential, being engaged in a profession where you're killing, theoretically, was not a good thing. Once we get into the Tokugawa period, there's this notion that Samurai should be much more cultured, they should be able to read and write. And they are seen as, or at least they depict themselves as morally and ethically superior to other members in the country, and therefore they have the right to be the rulers...
Tokugawa Ieyasu was a warlord who was supposed to help Hideyoshi’s son ruled Japan, but then decided to just you know, work for himself, which was often what happened among Samurai. You know, Samurai weren't loyal unto death, necessarily all the time, that's really a part of modern wartime propaganda rather than how Samurai actually were...
William Adams is in fact not allowed to leave Japan. And he and also Yasuke the the African man that he spoke of. And there's an Italian guy, there's another Dutch guy who become, they become Samurai in the sense that they're officially employed by either Tokugawa Ieyasu in the case of Bill Adams, or Nobunaga… they're employed by these military hegemons, and so they're given a stipend. In the case of Bill Adams, he's actually given a plot of land as well and some servants. And he's given two swords. And so he becomes a samurai in the sense that he is an employee of Shogun. They were not Samurai in the sense that we typically think of Samurai In popular culture, that is to say, they're not going out and fighting in wars, and you know, on horseback wielding swords and stuff like that. But in fact, they're more like the historical samurai, the historically accurate samurai, which is, you know, the bureaucrat who has various, you know, functions that have nothing to do with warfare. But they're Samurai because they're in the service of a military hegemon. So in that sense, we see a handful of European and also some Korean samurai...
[During the Tokugawa shogunate] certainly elite warriors tried to style themselves like nobility, they tried to bring in notions of behavior and ethics and virtue, from the nobility themselves, who in turn, were taking a lot of their ideas from Chinese philosophy. So there was an attempt by certain types of samurai, especially Samurai leaders, to make the samurai into a morally and ethically superior group of people, similar to the literati of China, with the difference being that a samurai is nonetheless a person who can engage in warfare, right? That's the big difference. So once we get into the Tokugawa period, there's a lot of emphasis on yes, you should be capable at the military arts. But you should also have a lot of cultured learning, you should tame yourself, there's in fact, that's the title of a book, The Taming of the samurai, where the samurai are not supposed to be engaging in fights, they're supposed to withhold their machismo, they're supposed to not be offended by other people and draw their sword and just fight someone. And in order to pitch that, or at least promote that idea, there's an emphasis on again, you know, studying Confucianism, or the commentary by Neo Confucian scholars. So there's this attempt to make them noble in some broad sense. But again, the reality is that especially lower ranking Samurai engaged in drinking, gambling, the example of our guy in the autobiography of Mitsui story, he's a gangster, sometimes he's tricking people out of money by being a fortune teller. So it would only be a very, very small group of Samurai who were diehards or zealots, if you will the extremists who really bought into the idealized version of the samurai, who might have actually been virtuous...
Even after World War Two, there's this notion promoted by companies and also the Japanese government that the modern businessman who is loyal to his company and will work unto death will work long hours, is the modern samurai...
Bushido is, for the most part, it is a creation of the modern period. The guy who popularized the term Bushido, Nitobe, who wrote in English. First, he lived in the United States in Pennsylvania. And he was trying to describe what are what makes Japan unique? What are the characteristics of the Japanese. And so he wrote this book that was heavily edited by a friend of his, American friend. And so he actually thought that he had invented the term Bushido. The term Bushido actually exists in the Tokugawa period, but it was so rare that he thought he had invented it. And so what he wrote and how intellectuals back in Japan reacted to that writing when it was translated into Japanese created this vision that there was some kind of accepted code or accepted practice among the warriors. There's a wonderful book about this written by my friend Oleg Benesch, called inventing the warrior way or something like this. And he talks a lot about he essentially traces how Bushido becomes a thing in the modern period. Now. The word Bushido does exist in the Tokugawa period. But it doesn't mean Bushido as a code of behavior for the samurai, it usually means like, the way of being a samurai in terms of you know, here's your occupation. And here's some of the occupational things. It's a very basic view of Bushido. Having said that, during the Tokugawa period, there are Samurai writers who do write works, that suggest here the things that warriors should and should not be doing...
Tokugawa Japan [had] suspicion of Catholicism, which was seen as a foreign religion with loyalties to a foreign God and a foreign institution in Rome. And there was also this notion that Catholicism was too exclusionary, that is to say, Tokugawa, he also had a lot of different religious advisors. But the only ones that he kind of punished were the the Catholics who were very, you know, it's our way or the highway. And there was also one type of Buddhism, that was also kind of expelled from Ieyasu’s inner circle, because they also believed you know, it's our way or the highway, like no other type of religion...
The new Meiji oligarchy, which is dominated by young, oftentimes unmarried, once low ranking samurai, they're the ones who are responsible for abolishing their own status. Because they understand that the samurai status is holding them back, it's holding Japan back in some sense, because it is seen as anachronistic, it is seen as something that is backwards, it is seen as something that is unmodern. And the Meiji oligarchs want to have a government, they want to have a bureaucracy, they want to have a military that looks like the West, essentially. And just as you don't see people walking around with swords in, you know, London in the late 19th century, or at least I don't think so, I'm not an expert. But you, likewise, the major oligarchs didn't want Europeans seeing that in Japan, so they actively in 1871, abolish the samurai status. And that brings an end to the samurai. Now, there were a lot of Samurai who were perfectly fine with this. And they were more than happy to give up the swords and the, and the hairstyle and just trying to figure out how to live in a new world. But then there were a lot of Samurai who were really invested in the idealization of the samurai, they were invested in the kind of elevated social status that the samurai had enjoyed. And they resisted. And in fact, the movie The Last Samurai, depicts a, one of the most famous rebellions against the Meiji oligarchy...
In the Tokugawa period, between six to 8% of the population in total was samurai. So that's not a lot... I have met people in Japan who were descended from samurai. For the most part, people don't go around really bragging about that, because they understand that most Samurai are the low ranking samurai... They might have family heirlooms. In fact, one of the guys that I used to train alongside in swordsmanship, who was also my mechanic, was descended from a samurai family. And he actually, before I left Japan, he said, look, I've got a whole bunch of swords that my family had. So I'm going to give you this one short sword that belonged to my family, you know, as kind of like a token of our friendship… Now there are descendants of like the Tokugawa family. So there are descendants of major famous warrior clans. And sometimes they will use that as you know, a talking point, you know, like, there'll be a speaker, you know, and it's, you know, giving talks about their family heritage or something like that. But that's quite rare. I would say...
The one thing to remember about the samurai is that they're so diverse in terms of their culture, in terms of their occupation, and that they change over time.’"
