Samurai

Samurai began as hired muscle. Rich landowners in the provinces needed men to guard their estates. By the 900s, these fighters had become a class of their own. In 1185, one of them, Minamoto no Yoritomo, won a long civil war. He set up a warrior government in Kamakura. From then until 1868, a shogun and his samurai ruled Japan. The emperor stayed in Kyoto as a respected figurehead without real power. The samurai were never a majority. At their peak, they made up only about five to seven percent of the population.

The strange part of samurai history is how little of it they spent fighting. After 1603, the Tokugawa shoguns imposed peace on the country, and the peace held for over 250 years. A warrior class with no wars turned into something closer to a civil service. Samurai became officials, clerks and teachers. They kept their two swords as a sign of rank. Alongside swordsmanship, they studied poetry and the tea ceremony. The code that people later called bushidō, "the way of the warrior," took written form mostly in this peaceful time. Men wrote it down as they looked back on a life their grandfathers had really lived. In 1876 the new government banned the wearing of swords and stopped the samurai's state pay. With that, the class lost the last of its privileges.