Everybody who’s ever watched a movie knows who the samurai were, right? Those ancient warriors of Japan with their magical swords, displaced by unscrupulous modernity—led into final battle by an alcoholic American Army Captain who looked an awful lot like Ethan Hunt—who suddenly re-emerged to lead “banzai charges” and crash aircraft into ships during World War II, right? Well . . . not exactly . . . and the reality behind many of the samurai myths Westerners hold dear might actually surprise you.

First let’s start by making clear the samurai were a socio-military class within the larger Japanese population. Though movies and pop culture would have you believe this class made up a significant portion of the citizenry, the actual percentage of the Japanese population who would have been considered samurai never rose above 10% at its height, and generally was much lower, closer to 5%. While across Japan, then, this percentage would have yielded a fairly large number of armed men, the loyalty of this class of warriors was generally directed locally, not necessarily to any of the central governments that ruled Japan. This meant that throughout much of its history, Japan was virtually incapable of assembling and maintaining a large, centrally-controlled army, a fact that complicated the response to Mongol invasions in 1274 and 1281 A.D.

The samurai, as a class, did not truly exist at all in what are considered ancient times, but would be more appropriately characterized as a medieval development. The Asian migrations that created the unique ethnic blend that became the modern Japanese people hadn’t fully run their course until about 400 A.D. To put this into a European perspective, in 410 the Visigoths sacked Rome who then decided to abandon Britain to its fate, a significant step on the road to Europe’s plunge into the Dark Ages roughly 500 to 1500 A.D. Yet in Japan this period marked the beginning of a cohesive Japanese culture under a more-or-less centralized Yamato government. Still, Japan was a long way from the development of the hereditary class of warriors we now know as samurai.

The term “samurai” didn’t come to fully replace the term bushi until about the 12th Century. The bushi—from which the term bushido or “Way of the Warrior” derived—were armed men from powerful families that the loose central governments of the early Japanese state came increasingly to rely upon. These militant families served several important functions, primarily defending against external encroachment and expanding Japanese control over neighboring lands, especially those of the Emishi people occupying Hokkaido and the northern regions of Honshu. These families also acted as a rural constabulary, enforcing the emperor’s edicts far from successive national capitals at first Nara and then Kyoto.

As the bushi accumulated land, however, they began to realize just how much political and military influence they held over the weak central government and by 1192 this phenomenon culminated in the establishment of the first military government—the bakufu—in the form of the Kamakura Shogunate. The shogunates, or military governments, supported rather than supplanted the imperial system that still technically ruled Japan. They rose and fell in a series of steep power arcs as opposing samurai families vied for the privilege of being the martial arm of the emperor. The Kamakura fell in 1333 after a bloody civil war.

The Ashikaga Shogunate reinstated central military control in 1336 A.D. but dissolved in 1573 after another devastating conflict. All the while the imperial family, reduced in financial stature at one point to selling poetry to make ends meet, continued a courtly existence all but isolated from the affairs of state. This state of affairs culminated in the Sengoku Jidai, or “Period of Warring States” from roughly 1467 to 1600 which only ended when Ieyasu Tokugawa militarily achieved national unification. As its name implies, this period was characterized by endemic warfare and rapidly-shifting allegiances that often made the legendary sense of samurai loyalty more the exception than the rule.

Up until the year 1590 A.D., samurai forces were augmented by common troops known collectively as ashigaru, literally “foot soldiers”. This term derives in part from the fact that the original Japanese warriors were mounted. Not only were they mounted, their primary weapon was the bow . . . not the sword. This forces comparison with the contemporary warriors of the Jurchen and Mongols (hailing from Manchuria/Mongolia), Koguryro (the Northern Korean Kingdom at the time), and the Turks (who originated north of China), all of whom fought primarily on horseback with bows, building societies that developed within close proximity to one another in Northeast Asia.

Oda Nobunaga’s army at the battle of Nagashino in 1575 included over 3,000 ashigaru armed with arquebuses—early matchlock firearms copied from a Portuguese model. This force, deployed into three ranks of a thousand gunners each, took position behind a hasty field fortification and conducted what is considered to be the first use of volley fire by firearms in recorded history . . . some eighty years before the concept took hold in Europe. With this concentration of firepower Nobunaga forever broke the power of the rival Takeda Clan, famous until that time for the ferocious cavalry literally shredded at Nagashino.

As well, in 1592, the Japanese force dispatched to invade China—by way of the mountainous Korean Peninsula—contained a large number of ashigaru carrying spears and pikes, bows, and most importantly, arquebuses. The prominence of firearms used by the samurai armies throughout that campaign is reflected in a letter written by a samurai already in Korea, to family about to cross over from Japan. In it he encourages the latter to bring with him only guns, powder, and ammunition as all other forms of weaponry were useless there.

This is not exactly the popular image we have of samurai warfare, but before you point out that the ashigaru were not of the samurai class, take note that there are many reports of samurai wielding firearms throughout that campaign, often prominently so. We don’t think of the samurai as wielding firearms and yet nearly a quarter of Hideyoshi’s invasion force were, in fact, arquebusers. The story of the invasion of Korea is replete with tales of massive volleys of small-arms fire on the Japanese side and the widespread use of cannon and mortars by the Koreans. This was, in a very real sense, a modern military campaign—at least tactically—and yet in the West precious little is known of it.

Moving on, the steady growth of Buddhism in Japan, coupled with imperial and intermittent bakufu support to strategically-placed temples and sects, created additional points of friction. These sects began accumulating lands in a manner similar to the samurai families, gaining in imperial favor as the samurai became less reliable in the provision of support to the emperor. Eventually, however, these Buddhist sects and the warriors they sponsored would become a real threat, enforcing their will upon both the imperial family and the bakufu. Whole armies of armed monks and samurai devotees descended with alarming frequency upon the capital, a primary reason for the movement of Japan’s titular head of government from Nara to Kyoto in 784.

While the popular impression of the samurai is one of tea-drinking, flower-arranging, calligraphy-writing, Zen Buddhists, reality is not quite so straight-forward. Zen became popular among the samurai due in large part to a core tenet that insisted repetitive physical activity complemented traditional methods in the pursuit of the Buddhist version of paradise. This meant that the essential samurai practice of martial arts kata ushered the practitioner toward paradise in the same way as meditation, chanting, circumambulation, and other established Buddhist practices. In other words, becoming a better warrior now made one a better Buddhist as well . . . bonus! As well, Zen’s strong admonition to face death without fear greatly appealed to warriors and their families involved in near-constant warfare.

Buddhism had been introduced to Japan in 552 A.D., and by the 9th Century A.D., the original Japanese Shinto religion had already been syncretized by the encroaching and now dominant Buddhist sects, with Shinto concepts and deities co-opted by Buddhist theology. Japan had become a Buddhist nation, top-to-bottom, but one that had wrapped itself around the enduring, shamanistic native religion. Zen arrived much later, around 1190, and took centuries to become the dominant form of Buddhism practiced by samurai families. Until it did, and even after, the samurai pursued many other forms of Buddhism to include, but certainly not limited to, Shingon, Pure-land, and Nichiren. This religious landscape was about to get even more complicated.

Toyotomi Hideyoshi’s ascension to power, following Nobonaga’s assassination in 1582, led to two critically important developments in Japanese and, in fact, Northeast Asian history. The first was really a continuation of his predecessor’s crackdowns on the powerful Buddhist militant sects. These campaigns culminated in the wrecking of the huge Enryaku Temple complex in 1571 with a similar act of destruction in 1580 at Ishiyama Hongan Temple following an incredible 11-year siege, Japan’s longest. A desire to reduce the number of peasant rebellions and limit the use of force to governmental organizations resulted in the infamous “sword hunts” of 1588 whereby Hideyoshi systematically disarmed all but the samurai class. From this point on, only the samurai could legally bear arms, an interesting move by the son of an ashigaru.

The introduction of Christianity to Japan in 1549 by Portuguese catholic missionaries significantly altered the religious dynamic and added yet another line of friction between and amongst the samurai. It can be argued the second major development resulting from Hideyoshi’s rise to power was related to this change in the religious landscape. The Kwampaku or Imperial Regent—Hideyoshi was common-born and so could not be named shogun—launched his invasion of Joseon Korea in 1592. Officially, the insertion of 160,000 troops through the southeastern Korean port of Busan was intended to traverse that Confucian nation, conquer Ming China, India, and the Philippines, bringing all under Hideyoshi’s rule. The laughably small number of troops dispatched to conquer such a tremendous swath of land, however, argues for a more nuanced interpretation than that claimed by the Japanese ruler.

The vast majority of troops deployed to Korea came from the provinces of Kyushu. These domains had been the last that Hideyoshi brought, against their will, fully under control in 1587. The warriors from this region were historically considered tough, tactically proficient, well-led troops. Hideyoshi’s armies had fought hard to bring Kyushu to heel and he’d replaced many of the recalcitrant samurai clans there with those who’d proven more supportive. The majority of Japanese Christian samurai, however, remained in Kyushu, including one of the Korean campaign’s most celebrated and successful Generals, Konishi Yukinaga. The obedience of the Christian samurai to a power other than the emperor often made their loyalty suspect in the minds of their countrymen. This was a state of affairs that would lead to multiple brutal crackdowns against Christians in Japan over the next three hundred years.

Taken together, then, it is not beyond the realm of possibility that Hideyoshi really saw the invasion of Korea as a means to limit the power of these troublesome Kyushu—often Christian—samurai, directing their martial attentions toward the continent while he further solidified his power base back in Japan. The noticeable scarcity of members of Hideyoshi’s inner circle among the generals and troops who invaded Korea lends some credence to this interpretation.

Regardless of Hideyoshi’s true intent, however, the invasion would have been seen by him as a win-win. Either his armies secured new lands for him to distribute among loyal retainers, or the troublesome Kyushu samurai bled themselves white fighting armies of Chinese, fleets of cannon-armed Koreans, and a wholly unexpected guerrilla war in the countryside. Upon Hideyoshi’s death in 1598, the armies were immediately recalled to Japan, further supporting the supposition that there never had been a real, long-term plan for conquest on the continent. That said, Hideyoshi’s passing, leaving only a very young boy as his heir, meant the final chapter of the Sengoku Jidai was about to commence and so maybe everyone just really wanted their troops closer to home.

Hideyoshi’s death, and the subsequent establishment of the Tokugawa Shogunate, spelled the end of the samurai class. Emperors had tried to influence them, successive military strongmen had tried to control them, Hideyoshi may have attempted to distract them, and yet the problem of what to do with so many armed and warlike men remained, virtually ensuring the cycle of violence and war would continue. Ieyasu Tokugawa finally solved the problem once and for all, essentially bureaucratizing the samurai families into impotence.

Tokugawa edicts directing travel to and from the capital at Edo (modern Tokyo) kept the powerful families moving and spending money that might otherwise have gone to planning rebellion. The reduction of all but approved fortifications decreased the number of sites that could serve as military bases of operation. And the bestowal of bureaucratic titles and responsibilities upon the samurai ensured they were essentially too busy carrying out their assigned duties to rebel.

As the wars tapered off and peace reigned—the first extended peace in nearly a millennium—the samurai became a liability. They were, in effect, an entire class dedicated to something that just never happened anymore . . . war. The samurai consumed food and other resources, but seemingly provided society nothing of value in return—at least nothing that society valued at the time. This led inexorably to a steady decline in the way these warriors were viewed by their countrymen. In this way, then, the Japanese people were ready for the samurai to be legislated away and, after Japan’s last bakufu was abolished in 1869 during the Meiji Restoration, this is essentially what happened. While several rebellions remained to be stamped out by the rapidly modernizing Imperial Army, the end was never in doubt and the samurai faded into history.

Today, Japan seems to have a split mind when considering the historical warrior class that once dominated their ancestors’ world. Unlike in the West where fact and fiction weave together to form a cinematic, idealized picture, here the vast majority of modern Japanese hail from non-samurai families. You know, the poor folks who worked the fields, fished the seas, chopped the wood, and dug the ore for their samurai masters. To most of them, the samurai were brutal overlords with the unfettered power of life and death over their subjects. There was simply no court of appeals once an individual’s head had been severed, and most people seem to feel those bloody days are happily past.

This is especially true for most of the WWII generation who felt first-hand what it meant to have the military once again running the country. This collective memory continues to affect Japan in the overwhelming popular support for a constitution that prohibits war as a means to resolve international disputes. That popularity persists in spite of the fact the document was written by U.S. occupation authorities and essentially forced upon Japan.

On the other hand, there remains a certain romantic attachment to the samurai, and the sub-culture they embodied, that survives the test of time. This attachment persists in spite of the abolishment of the class by the Meiji Emperor, the rebellions which ravaged the country during the late 19th Century, and the ultimate destruction of their nation at the conclusion of World War II. The romance survives in the dedicated maintenance of samurai villages across the country, more museums than can easily be counted, and a love of historical mimicry such as Yabusame, samurai parades, re-enactments of famous battles, and yes, the martial arts of Kyudo, Kenjutsu, and Kendo.

M. G. Haynes