The Samurai

For most of Japan's early history, real power lay with the imperial court and its nobles. But from around the tenth and eleventh centuries, provincial families began raising private armies of skilled fighters to protect their land and enforce their will. These were the first samurai — a warrior class that would rise, over the next few centuries, from hired muscle to the true masters of Japan.

Their moment came in the late twelfth century. After years of war between rival clans, a victorious general established a new kind of government, led not by the emperor but by a supreme military commander: the shogun. The emperor remained on his throne and was honoured as a sacred figure — but it was the shogun who actually ruled. Below him stood the great lords, the daimyo, each controlling his own territory; and below them, the samurai who served as their warriors. Loyalty bound the whole pyramid together, flowing upward from samurai to lord, and from lord to shogun.

What set the samurai apart was not only the sword but the way they were expected to live. Over time their values hardened into an unwritten code known as bushido — "the way of the warrior" — built on loyalty, courage, honour, discipline and self-control. A samurai was meant to serve his lord absolutely, to face death without flinching, and to guard his good name above everything. The most famous symbol of all this was the katana, the elegant curved sword that a samurai was said to carry as if it held a piece of his own soul.

For long stretches, the samurai's world was one of almost constant war. The most violent era came in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries — the Sengoku period, the "age of warring states" — when central authority collapsed and dozens of daimyo fought one another for survival and supremacy. It was a brutal, unstable time, but also the age that produced the most legendary warlords and the sharpest test of a samurai's skill and nerve.

Out of that chaos came unity. By the early seventeenth century, one family — the Tokugawa — had defeated its rivals and seized the shogunate, ushering in the Edo period: more than two centuries of strict, enforced peace. And here lay a strange irony. The samurai were a warrior class, yet now there were few wars to fight. Many became administrators, officials and teachers, fighting with brushes and ledgers rather than swords. Their code, bushido, was studied and written down more carefully than ever, precisely as the fighting that had created it faded away.

Honour, in this world, could be merciless. A samurai who failed his lord, suffered a deep disgrace, or wished to avoid capture might be expected to take his own life through a painful, formal ritual called seppuku — a way of restoring honour through unflinching self-discipline. And a samurai whose lord died or fell from power could become a ronin: a masterless warrior, adrift in a society built on service, with no place and no purpose. The figure of the lone, wandering ronin — proud, dangerous and free — became one of the most haunting images in all of Japanese culture.

The peace could not last forever. In the mid-nineteenth century, foreign warships arrived and forced Japan, after centuries of near-isolation, to open itself to the outside world. The shock exposed how far the country had fallen behind the industrial powers, and it shattered confidence in the old order. In 1868, in the upheaval known as the Meiji Restoration, the shogunate was swept away and power was returned, at least in name, to a young emperor and the modernising reformers around him.

The new government was determined to build a modern nation-state, and the samurai did not fit into it. A country with a Western-style conscript army had no need for a hereditary warrior caste — and, just as importantly, paying the samurai their traditional incomes was draining the treasury. Within a few years, their special privileges were stripped away: their stipends were ended, and they were even forbidden to carry their swords in public. The warrior class that had ruled Japan for seven hundred years was, quite deliberately, abolished.

Some samurai rose in rebellion against the loss of their world, but they could not stop it; the most famous revolt was crushed in 1877. And yet the samurai never truly vanished. Many former warriors became the soldiers, officials, teachers and businessmen who built modern Japan, carrying their discipline into a new age. More than that, the ideal of bushido — loyalty, honour, self-mastery — lived on in the national imagination and travelled around the world through films, books and legend. The men were gone; the image of the samurai has proved far harder to bury.