Martial Arts Of The World - Webs

518 Samurai
were inheritors of family warrior legacies dating back centuries, while others
had clawed their way to this status from far humbler beginnings. Below
these were multiple layers of lesser lords, enfeoffed vassals, and yeoman
farmers, whose numbers and service as samurai waxed and waned with the
fortunes of war and the resources and military needs of the great barons.
The early modern regime froze the social order, drawing for the first time
a clear line between peasants, who were registered with and bound to their
fields, and samurai, who were removed from their lands and gathered into
garrisons in the castle towns of the shôgun and the daimyo. The samurai
thus became a legally defined, legally privileged, hereditary class, consisting
of a very few feudal lords and a much larger body of retainers on
stipend, whose numbers were now fixed by law. Moreover, without wars
to fight, the military skills and culture of this class inevitably atrophied.
The samurai rapidly evolved from sword-wielding warriors to sword-bearing
bureaucrats descended from warriors.
The Tokugawa regime kept the peace in Japan for the better part of
three centuries before at last succumbing to a combination of foreign pressure,
evolution of the nation’s social and economic structure, and decay of
the government itself. In 1868, combined armies from four domains forced
the resignation of the last shôgun and declared a restoration of all powers
of governance to the emperor. This event, known as the Meiji Restoration
(a name given to the calendar era 1868–1912), marked the beginning of the
end for the samurai as a class. Over the next decade, they were stripped
first of their monopoly of military service, and then, one by one, of the rest
of their privileges and badges of status: their special hairstyle, their way of
dress, their exclusive right to surnames, their hereditary stipends, and the
right to wear swords in public. By the 1890s Japan was a modernized, industrialized
nation ruled by a constitutional government and defended by
a Westernized conscript army and navy. The samurai were no more.
Karl Friday
See also Budô, Bujutsu, and Bugei; Japan; Sword, Japanese; Swordsmanship,
Japanese; Written Texts: Japan
References
Berry, Mary Elizabeth. 1982. Hideyoshi. Cambridge: Harvard University
Press.
Elison, George, and Bardwell L. Smith, eds. 1981. Warlords, Artists and
Commoners: Japan in the 16th Century. Honolulu: University of Hawai’i
Press.
Farris, William Wayne. 1992. Heavenly Warriors: The Evolution of Japan’s
Military, 500–1700. Cambridge: Harvard University Press.
Friday, Karl. 1992. Hired Swords: The Rise of Private Warrior Power in
Early Japan. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press.
Jansen, Marius B. 1995. Warrior Rule in Japan. New York: Cambridge
University Press.