Samurai
The samurai were members of the elite warrior class in pre-industrial Japan, who served as retainers to the feudal lords. They were men for whom warfare was their way of life, and usually a family tradition. From a young age, they spent years training in various martial arts, with swordsmanship, archery, and horsemanship being the major skills. Often in Japanese history, only samurai had the right to even possess these weapons. This commitment made them superior warriors to conscripts and militia, as it took years of training to master those weapons. Their training was funded not by the state but by their families, who hired instructors or sent them to warrior schools.
Violence has always been inextricably tied to power. Because the samurai were dangerous, indispensable, and hard to replace, they commanded great respect and power. During the Heian period, the provincial samurai clans grew immensely powerful thanks in part to regressive tax policies, and in 1185 they effectively overthrew the emperor, establishing a military government headed by a shogun, that lasted nearly seven hundred years.
In 1853, the United States forced Japan to open its borders to foreign trade, dragging the insular country into the industrial age. The adoption of modern firearms rendered the traditional weapons of the samurai obsolete. Firearms require only a few weeks of training to master as opposed to years for the sword or bow, which now meant that commoners of any profession could be turned into effective soldiers on an as-needed basis. Japan therefore had no more need for a specialized warrior class whose men dedicated their lives to martial training. By 1876 the special rights and privileges of the samurai had all been abolished.
Terminology
The proper Japanese term for a warrior is bushi and the word buke meant "warrior family". Bushi was not applied to just any kind of fighter. For those who called themselves bushi, war was their way of life and often a family tradition, as opposed to conscripts or militia. It was also a term for elite warriors, particularly those who fought on horseback as cavalry was the backbone of Japanese armies. During the early Edo period, a warrior was only considered a member of the bushi class if he was a public servant, which among other things entitled him to a stipend.In the Japanese language, the word samurai was colloquial and its meaning varied over the centuries. The word samurai is thought to come from the word saburau and means "one who serves ", and therefore the samurai are often thought of as warrior retainers. The warlords who ruled Japan were members of the bushi class but were generally not referred to as samurai, except perhaps when discussing their relationship with the emperor since in principle they all served the emperor.
During the Heian period, it was not necessary for a bushi to serve a master to be considered a bushi. But during the Kamakura shogunate, a bushi's status was contingent on having a master. If a bushi lost his master, he lost his land and honor.
As the term gained military connotations in the 12th century, it referred to landless footsoldiers who served the gokenin. The gokenin were warrior vassals to the shogun. According to Michael Wert, "a warrior of elite stature in pre-seventeenth-century Japan would have been insulted to be called a samurai". According to Morillo, during the Sengoku period, the term "marks social function and not class, It means a retainer of a lord - usually, in the sixteenth century, the retainer of a daimyo", and was used to refer to "all sorts of soldiers, including pikemen, bowmen, musketeers and horsemen". In the Tokugawa period, the terms were roughly interchangeable, as the military class was legally limited to the retainers of the shogun or daimyo. However, strictly speaking samurai referred to higher ranking retainers, although the cutoff between samurai and other military retainers varied from domain to domain. Also usage varied by class, with commoners referring to all sword carrying men as samurai, regardless of rank.
During the Kamakura shogunate, it was expected for a member of the bushi class to own land where he had his ancestral home and from which he made a living, although this was not required by law. But during the Edo period, the bushi were redefined in law as a caste, a status one inherited regardless of whether one owned land, and most bushi in the Edo period were in fact not allowed to own land. If a bushi served a daimyo, he was called a samurai and received a stipend. If the bushi lost his master, he would lose his stipend as it was paid by the master. He could no longer properly be called a samurai because he served nobody, so he was instead referred to as a ronin. A ronin was still a member of the bushi class and so had the right to carry weapons and use his family name.
Rise, transformation, and dissolution
Rise of the warrior clans (700 - 1180 AD)
At the start of the 8th century AD, Japan's government was highly centralized at the imperial court, whose bureaucracy was inspired by T'ang dynasty China. All land at first belonged to the emperor, i.e. in the public domain, but in the middle of the 8th century, the government instituted a major reform which allowed individuals to claim private ownership of new farmland that they had reclaimed from the wilderness. This spurred wealthy people to start reclaiming farmland, which was necessary to feed Japan's growing population. During the 11th and 12th centuries, samurai became conspicuously involved in land reclamation, thereby becoming a landowning class.Taxation during the 8th century was high but temples, monasteries, shrines, and certain aristocrats obtained tax exemptions through their connections to the imperial court. To evade taxes, many landowners in the countryside donated their lands to these tax-exempt entities. The land would be registered in the name of said noble or temple and would become part of their tax-exempt estate but would still be used by the same person who originally owned it. The former owner, now a steward on his lord's estate, had to pay his lord an annual tribute that was less than what he would have had to pay the emperor in tax had he been the landowner. There was usually an agreement that when the steward died, his children would inherit his position. If the temple or lord cheated the steward somehow, the farmer could retaliate by exposing the scheme, which might have cost the temple or noble its tax-exempt privilege. The growth of the shōen led to a loss of tax revenue for the imperial court, and a heavier tax burden on those farmers who worked the remaining taxable land. These farmers often could not cope and abandoned their lands, which were bought up by the landowning magnates.
Up until the late 8th century AD, Japan had a national conscript army. As peace settled in, the imperial court began dismantling the system, eventually ending it by 792 AD. Conscripts were seen as unreliable and poorly trained, to be used only in emergencies such as when the Chinese invaded. Conscript footsoldiers proved to be particularly ineffective in the Japanese' war with the Emishi, an ethnic minority in the north that relied on mounted warriors and were thus highly mobile. The deciding factor in most battles had been professional mounted archers who came from the wealthy families. The government didn't train conscripts to be mounted archers because that took years and conscripts were short-term warriors. So it instead recruited men who already had these skills, acquired through private training funded by their families' wealth. Similarly, soldiers in the imperial army were expected to provide most of their own equipment. Wealthy men who could afford horses and archery training were promoted to elite units, whereas the poor were consigned to being footsoldiers. The poor disliked military service for this reason, and because their farms often fell into decay with their absence, so there was popular support for ending conscription.
In the Heian period it was the habit of emperors to keep harems, and consequently the imperial family got so large, it burdened the treasury. In the early 9th century AD, Emperor Saga expelled several dozen members from the imperial family, who formed two new clans: the Minamoto clan and the Taira clan. Many wealthy provincial families married into the Minamotos and Tairas in order to acquire aristocratic status, gaining prestige and often tax exemptions. And so the Tairas and Minamotos became big and wealthy clans with lots of warrior retainers.
Thus with the downsizing of the national army and the decline in tax revenue, the emperors delegated the matter of security in the countryside to the burgeoning class of landed warriors. They had a personal incentive to suppress lawlessness in their own lands as it directly impacted their revenue. War and law enforcement became increasingly privatized affairs.
Kamakura shogunate
Two leading warrior clans, the Minamoto clan and the Taira clan, had both gained court positions and became rivals.In 1156, the former emperor Sutoku attempted to take back the throne from his brother, Emperor Go-Shirakawa, in what is remembered as the Hōgen rebellion. It failed and Sutoku was exiled. Members of the Minamoto and Taira clans had fought on both sides of the rebellion, but the Minamoto loyalists received smaller rewards than the Taira loyalists, and the Minamoto rebels received worse punishments than the Taira rebels. All this angered the Minamotos, and consequently political factions in the imperial court began to reform around clan affiliations rather than personal allegiances. The next rebellion would be a direct Taira/Minamoto clash.
The Minamotos took part in the Heiji Rebellion of 1160 in the hopes that they could have the Taira leader Taira no Kiyomori banished. This rebellion also failed, and in the aftermath the Tairas ended up with even more influence in the imperial court. Their leader, Taira no Kiyomori, became the first samurai ever to be given a senior rank in the imperial court.
In 1180, Taira no Kiyomori installed his two-year-old grandson on the throne, pushing aside older male heirs whose mothers were from the Minamoto family. This sparked a rebellion by the Minamotos, leading to the Gempei War. Minamoto no Yoritomo promised lands and administrative rights to warriors who swore allegiance to him. The Minamotos won the war and the Taira clan was effectively destroyed. In April 1185, the controversial child emperor was drowned by his own grandmother, who then committed suicide.
The new emperor, Emperor Go-Toba, was of Fujiwara lineage on his mother's side, which Minamoto no Yoritomo found acceptable. But Yoritomo took over most of his authority, reducing the emperor to a figurehead. Previous emperors had been figurehead rulers too, with the real power being wielded by a regent, often the previous emperor. But Yoritomo went further: he didn't take over the imperial bureaucracy, he instead established a parallel military government staffed by the warriors who had fought for him. That was the reward they were promised and due, lest they turn on him. So began the first shogunate. Whereas the imperial court was in Kyoto, Yorimoto chose to base the shogunate in Kamakura.
Japan under the shogunate became a feudal state. Samurai who served the shogun and owned reclaimed land were called gokenin. Samurai who did not serve the shogun nor manage reclaimed land were called higokenin. They were formally granted a great deal of autonomy, and the shogun was more of a mediator and coordinator than a true ruler. In the early 1190s, the shogun began appointing military governors to the provinces. Only warriors from the Kantō region could become shugo. These military governors eventually displaced the authority of the civilian governors which had been appointed by the imperial court. A shugo's main duties were coordinating his area's gokenin in military matters, suppressing rebellions, and enforcing the law.
During the Gempei War, many warriors had seized control of the private estates of the courtiers in Kyoto. They presumptuously declared themselves the stewards of these estates. The shogunate now had a responsibility to restrain this lawlessness. It was decreed that all stewards had to be appointed by the shogun. Most stewards were chosen from warrior families. Appointing warrior stewards undermined the authority of the courtiers in Kyoto who owned the shōen. Warrior stewards would surely be loyal to the shogun, not the imperial court. The title of jitō was heritable. A steward could not bequeath his office to someone outside his family. Under the Kamakura shogunate, a jitō could not be punished for misconduct by his landlord. The landlord had to appeal to the shogunate for justice.
The title of shogun was supposed to be hereditary. In 1203, the shogun Minamoto no Yoriie died and his son was only 11 years old, so the leader of the Hōjō clan, Hōjō Tokimasa, declared himself regent. The Hōjō clan refused to return power to the Minamotos when the young son came of age, but out of respect for the tradition of hereditary titles, they did not declare themselves shogun but kept the title of shikken.