The samurai started out as a caste of soldiers. In fact, neither a formalized set of rules nor the word itself were written down until well into the Edo period. There was no single set of rules that defined bushido throughout the existence of the samurai.
The word chivalry derives from the French “chevalier”: “one who owns a horse”. One of the most overarching ways to think of bushido is as a Japanese analog to the knightly code of chivalry. What is Bushido? Tomoe Gozen killing Uchida Saburo Ieyoshi at the Battle of Awazu no Hara, by Ishikawa Toyonobu, 1750, via the MetMuseum In 1854, Commodore Matthew Perry’s show of force in Tokyo Harbor started Japan on the road to modernization, which meant the abolishment of the samurai caste and the feudal system as a whole. The Tokugawa regime completely closed Japan off from the rest of the world, aside from a single port at Nagasaki. Tokugawa Ieyasu effectively ended this period of war by vanquishing Ishida Mitsunari at the Battle of Sekigahara in 1600, solidifying the Tokugawa’s control and resulting in peace for the next 250 years. They repelled both attempted Mongol invasions and things ran relatively smoothly for the next two hundred years.įrom 1467 to 1603 the daimyo, or feudal lords, all fought one another for control over the nation with various levels of trade support from the Portuguese and the Dutch.
The Emperor retained ceremonial and religious power, but the bakufu held all true political power. And survive they must – for perhaps they are the last of their kind.Nobles allied themselves together politically, eventually supplanting the Imperial government with the bakufu, or military government. The Samurai therefore rely on greater skill, greater cunning, and greater devotion to each other in order to survive. They were driven from their ancestral homes, and now in foreign lands they are vastly outnumbered by their neighbors. Now, a millennium later, the nomadic warriors have ceased their wandering, and have rebuilt themselves a new nation under a mighty Emperor.Īs one, they are growing as strong as they have ever been – yet they still remember the bitter taste of exile. Originally from a land far, far to the East, they tell a tale of a homeland and an Emperor that were lost to sea and fire during the last great cataclysm. History has not been kind to the Samurai.