A lively and approachable introduction to the samurai class and its influence on Japan
Samurai: A Concise History traces the samurai throughout this history, exploring their roles in watershed events such as Japan’s invasions of Korea at the close of the sixteenth century and the Satsuma Rebellion of 1877. Coming alive in this excerpt are the samurai, both famed and ordinary, who shaped Japanese history and continue to dominate popular culture today.
In the climactic battle scene at the end of the movie The Last Samurai (2003), the protagonist, a samurai rebel, leads his army of warriors as they charge to certain death against the newly formed, modern government army. Wearing only their traditional clothing and armed with bows, swords, and spears, they are mowed down by Gatling guns and howitzers as the government’s general, himself an ex- samurai, looks on anxiously. This scene has all the familiar tropes in the global fantasy about samurai: tradition versus modernity, hand- to- hand fighting versus guns, and a celebration of honorable death. The event depicted in the film is a historical one, the rebellion of the Southwest in Japan in 1877, when ex- samurai refused to follow a series of laws that stripped all samurai of their privileged status and accompanying symbols; no more wearing swords in public or maintaining topknot hairstyles. A more accurate description of the battle scene flips the cinematic one — the modernized government army took shelter in a castle, the most traditional of defenses, while ex- samurai rebels bombarded them with cannon from outside. As with anything else, the historical depiction is more interesting than the popularized one.
Samurai seem ubiquitous in popular culture; from the novel and television show Shogun (1980) to The Last Samurai and the animated series Samurai Champloo (2004– 2005), audiences never seem to tire of them. They even appear in the most unlikely places; the corporate name of a local coffee shop chain in Milwaukee, Wisconsin, is Giri, which the founder claims “comes from the Samurai code of honor, Bushido, and can be translated to mean ‘social obligation.’ ” It sounds nice, but “obligation” was simply a way to convince samurai to obey their lords no matter the danger or, more likely, the drudgery.
There is no shortage of websites on samurai, and one can hardly throw a rock without hitting some martial art instructor with a distinctive view on the samurai. There are plenty of glossy books that give an overview of some aspect of samurai battles, warfare, castles, and the like, but sifting through what is reliable and what is not can be a chore. On the other hand, scholarly books tend to require too much background information, familiarity with not only Japanese but also Chinese history, religion, and art, disciplinary jargon, and, for some older history books, significant language commitment.
I will describe how samurai changed from, roughly, the eighth to the mid- nineteenth centuries, impart a sense of warrior diversity, and dispel common myths, such as the so- called bushido samurai code, swords as the “soul of the samurai,” and supposed fighting prowess. Not all periods of warrior history are covered equally; there are more details of samurai life from the seventeenth through nineteenth centuries, the early modern period. The reasons are because most depictions of samurai in the West coincide with warriors from that period, and scholars know more about early modern Japan than about the medieval period (ninth through fifteenth centuries). There are so many documents from the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries that one can buy them on internet auction sites for tens of dollars. A recent auction for a collection of hundreds of documents from the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, belonging to a single family, sold on Yahoo Auction for 73,000 yen, about $660. Some texts from early modern Japan even end up in the trash. After the earthquake, tsunami, and Fukushima nuclear disaster on March 11, 2011, local historians scrambled to photograph historical documents found in dilapidated houses slated for destruction and rebuilding. There were so many documents that local museums and universities did not have room to keep those deemed unimportant; the rest were thrown out. Documents from before the seventeenth century are occasionally discovered but in ever fewer numbers, and they are treated with greater care.
Michael Wert is Associate Professor of East Asian History at Marquette University. Specializing in early modern and modern Japan, he is the author of Meiji Restoration Losers: Memory and Tokugawa Supporters in Modern Japan.
