History Summarized: Samurai

Long ago in a distant land, I, Ah Blue, the chibi-shaped master of history, unleashed an informative video. But a foolish YouTube troll, wielding a mechanical keyboard, stepped forth to oppose me. Before the final comment was posted, I tore open a portal in time and flung him into the spam box where my content is lore. Now the fool seeks to return to the comments and undo the YouTube that is Ah Blue. Uh, if you couldn't guess from the title of the video, or the thumbnail, or the protracted Samurai Jack reference, this video is about samurai. And I am hyped to talk about them. What I'm not hyped about is how I'm going to spend this video breaking down the image of the samurai you have in your head, which has probably been pretty heavily romanticized. So, um, sorry in advance. I'll start simple and try to explain why Samurai Jack, a noble, honorable paragon seeking to return to the past and vanquish the great evil, isn't even slightly a samurai. First up, samurai had armor. Originally it was made of leather and later out of iron, but all Jack ever wears is his gi, and sometimes less. Second, samurai didn't really go out questing, whether to defeat evil or for whatever other reason. That's mostly a westernization, and it's partly derived from the samurai being analogized with knights, which is itself really problematic. Third, Jack has no master, and a samurai only ever existed because a feudal lord, a daimyo, had hired him. Jack is actually closer to a ronin, someone with the skills and equipment of a samurai, but without a master. Ronin were essentially viewed as highly skilled bandits, and Jack isn't a bandit, so we're 0 for 2 on that. Fourth, while Jack is very righteous and upstanding, most actual samurai were expected to be loyal to their masters before anything else. In real life, samurai were all kinds of deceptive and roguish. So our romanticized portrait of a chiseled cartoon samurai is wide of the mark. But then what about the Bushido Code? Wasn't the entire point of that to guide the way a samurai is supposed to behave, and make sure they're being all respectful, honest, and heroic and stuff? Uh, no. See, the Bushido Code went through tons of variation over the centuries, due to differences in location, time, social status, and more. Above all, the most important thing to Edaimyo was a samurai's loyalty. He could be the scummiest skeezball imaginable, but if he was still loyal and good with the blade, he was a useful samurai. In the early 1700s, our sources paint Bushido as a sort of acceptance of and practice for death. But then during the turn of the 20th century, it was seen as a guide for how to be a respectable person, and then that got co-opted into how to be a good citizen. We can pinpoint those two in part because of our literary sources, but that still leaves several centuries not properly accounted for. So our image of Bushido has changed wildly over the years. And then, in the West, people tried to compare knights and samurai, and make Bushido analogous to chivalry, which is itself mythologized. So it's impossible to know what it was really about, but a samurai's loyalty was definitely the most significant defining trait that we've repeatedly observed historically. Sorry to crush your dreams, but that's how it is. Samurai were essentially high-class, long-term mercenaries who had a code they lived by, but still did a ton of dishonorable stuff. But since they were an entire class of people, at one point making up a tenth of Japan's population, there would have been a lot of internal variety to a samurai's wealth, armaments, and especially behavior. The higher-ups had more going for them, and for those who had families and ancestors to consider, their actions had more consequences, so they'd at least be a little better behaved. Between the 8th and 19th centuries, samurai have been many different things, so trying to nail down a picture of what they were definitively like is near impossible, so you're gonna have to forgive me on this one. The modern western idea of the samurai as a highly disciplined and honorable warrior almost definitely existed, but only at certain points in samurai history and in particular places, so it's unlikely that that would have been the pervasive norm. Since they were under the direct employ of a daimyo, they had relative autonomy and decent immunity to do whatever they wanted, and a lot of samurai took advantage of that. And masterless samurai, the ronin, were equally liable to be total jerkwads, which is evidently the case in the movie 7 Samurai. So since there's so much variance across time, let's jump back and do a run-through of Japanese history to clarify what we're actually talking about. Japan has been inhabited for many thousands of years, and agriculture developed in the first millennium BC. Then, as the centuries passed, people coalesced around sources of food, and kingdoms started popping up. By about 250 AD, Japan was mostly unified and ruled by a line of emperors. In the 500s, Buddhism got introduced, which is always fun. And then in the 8th through 12th centuries, the nobles got so obsessed with themselves and art that they stopped caring about running the government entirely. Preferring to just let local government figure itself out. In this period, the Heian period, to be cultured was to emulate Tang-era Chinese culture, because China had been the big man in charge for hundreds and thousands of years. Now, if we're being super technical, the samurai really started showing up in the early 700s as a result of the Taiho and Yoro reforms. But really, these samurai were more like glorified secretaries, there mostly to help the higher-ups and the nobility and the bureaucracy. These guys didn't have a warrior bone in their whole bodies. In the following centuries, however, the traditional aristocracy and imperial power declined, because remember, they stopped caring. Meanwhile, an alternative, much more militarized aristocracy developed in the outer provinces. In this alternative aristocracy, the samurai, servants, were also expected to be bushi, warriors. Which happens to be why the Bushido code has its name. Bushi, to be clear, is very different from bishi, because I know if you've watched any anime ever, you're probably confused on account of there being a very hefty overlap. Anyway, as imperial power kind of fell off the wagon in the 12th century, a few of these militarized provincial clans started competing for influence, and after a brief war, the winners established a military government in Kamakura in 1192. This government was ruled by a shogun, because the emperor is still technically an emperor, but he doesn't really do anything anymore. The shogun was the one with, you know, an army. While the shogun was having fun shogunning, the Mongols tried to invade Japan twice, and were conveniently scattered by storms. Also twice. After this, the shogunate was a little slim on resources, and had a surprise uprising on its hands. So it sent along Ashikaga Takauji to go step on it, but then he pulled a 180 and stepped on the shogunate instead, establishing his own Ashikaga shogunate in 1336. So, good for him. So this shogunate was all nice and well and good when a pesky question about imperial succession kicked off the civil war, which in turn blew up into a century-and-a-half-long warring states period. Oops. But this is a full-blown samurai war. So get hype, kiddos. No tract of land was untouched by the objective badassery that is huge samurai armies fighting each other. If I had time and knew how to draw, I'd go into all kinds of detail about the incredible and amazing and interesting stories from this time. But since I, um, don't have either of those, I will instead direct you to an excellent six-part series on the warring states period from the YouTube channel Extra Credits, who tells it much better than I can. If you want to see samurai in their heyday doing the coolest samurai stuff ever, this guy's your guy. What's special about the warring states period is that the samurai were acting as full-on armies with numbers in the tens of thousands rather than as individuals or small groups. So the stories from this period are pretty extreme. After about a century-and-a-half of fighting, the warring states period ended when Tokugawa Ieyasu and his army won a decisive final battle, effectively taking control of all of Japan by defeating the last remaining opposition. Tokugawa instituted a new shogunate and moved the capital to Edo, which is why the period from 1603 to 1868 is often called the Edo period. Tokugawa's shogunate was rather peaceful since no one really wanted another 150-year-long samurai war, as awesome as that may sound to us. The era also saw cultural growth, economic development, and stable bureaucracy. In this period, the samurai still existed, but they did stuff like collect taxes, write poetry, and practice kendo in lieu of actually fighting wars. So the samurai have actually sort of gone back to their Heian-era roots of bureaucratic servitude, as being a warrior became vastly less important after the century of war gave way to three centuries of peace. This was all nice and fine for the more well-to-do samurai, but if a local daimyo needed to make budget cuts and laid off a handful of samurai, it meant an increasing amount of rascally ronin running around causing problems for everybody. Even a lot of the samurai were causing problems just on account of being bored. This is really similar to what happened with Caribbean piracy, when a large army suddenly becomes unemployed, it just becomes a self-serving army instead. Although the shogunate had been re-established by Tokugawa, Japan was still governed locally by around 300 daimyo of varying political and social statuses. The Edo period ultimately came to an end when the lower-level daimyo waged a successful civil war against the shogun in 1868, and overthrew him in one of the last big huzzahs of the samurai. What followed was the four-decade-long Meiji Restoration, where Japan, which had been newly reopened to the world after centuries of isolation under Tokugawa, became much more westernized, which meant a westernized army, which meant the samurai needed to shuffle out. And that was it. The samurai began as glorified secretaries, became the coolest mercenaries ever, fought in huge armies, and then worked as high-class bureaucrats. It's a massive span of roles and responsibilities over the course of nearly a thousand years. And now that I've talked general misconceptions in history, let's talk some weaponry. Yes, the samurai had the katana, but that was only one of two swords a samurai typically carried. They often also had a short sword as well, either a wakizashi or a tanto. But still, there were a bunch of different sword types used across the centuries. It just happens to be the katana that everybody got obsessed with. And honestly, I mean, yeah, why not? It's gorgeous. But it's important to know that they used way more than just the katana. For one, samurai were master archers, and then they also used all manner of weapons on horseback too. And they definitely weren't cheap, but samurai were often wealthy enough to afford the combat advantage. Horses are expensive, yo. And on the flip side, if you're a samurai on the ground fighting a samurai on a horse, a spear would be really handy for taking down that horse. So samurai also carried spears, like the naginata. And finally, after the Portuguese showed up in 1453, samurai regularly used long guns too. Essentially, we need to recognize that these guys were highly versatile. So that's the samurai for you. Misconceptions, history, weapons, and all. So if you ask me, in my opinion, I think that the core of the samurai's mythical aura is derived from two factors. One, they were around for just so long and fulfilled so many different cultural and military roles that nailing down what the samurai were actually like is especially tricky. And two, the West's pervasive desire to equate the samurai to the knight has implied all sorts of incorrect assumptions. The truth, of course, is always more complicated. What's not complicated is that the samurai are still pretty damn cool, amazing warriors, and, according to Oblue, FOOLISH.