Japan’s famous warrior order arose during the early part of the Heian period (a.d. 794-1185), a product of the same trend toward the privatization of government functions and the delegation of administrative responsibility that distinguished the Heian polity from the Nara-era (710-794) predecessor. Its roots came from a shift in imperial court military policy that began in the middle decades of the eighth century and picked up momentum in the ninth.
Around the turn of the eighth century, the imperial house and its supporters had created an elaborate battery of military institutions modeled in large measure on those of Tang China. Contrary to popular belief, these institutions were not simply adopted wholesale, they were carefully adapted to meet Japanese needs. The various goals and requirements of the state, however, were often in conflict with one another, with the result that the imperial state military apparatus incorporated a number of unhappy compromises. Problems inherent in the system at its inception, moreover, were made worse by changing conditions as the principal threats the state armies were designed to meet—invasion from the continent and regional challenges to the new, centralized polity—dwindled rapidly.
By the mid-700s, the court had begun to reevaluate its martial needs and to restructure its armed forces, tinkering and experimenting with mechanisms for using and directing a new and different kind of soldiery, until a workable system was achieved around the late tenth century. Bit by bit, the government ceased trying to draft and drill the population at large and concentrated instead on co-opting the privately acquired skills of martially talented elites through a series of new military posts and titles that legitimized the use of the personal martial resources of this group on behalf of the state. In essence, the court moved from a conscripted, publicly trained military force to one composed of privately trained, privately equipped professional mercenaries.
As it happened, government interest in the martial talents of provincial elites and the scions of lower-ranked central noble families dovetailed with growing private demands for these same resources spawned by competition for wealth and influence among the premier noble houses of the court. State and private needs served to create continually expanding opportunities for advancement for those with military talent. Increasingly, from the late eighth century onward, skill at arms offered a means for an ambitious young man to get his foot in the door for a career in government service or in the service of some powerful aristocrat in the capital—or both. The greater such opportunities became, the more enthusiastically and the more seriously such young men committed themselves to the profession of arms. The result was the gradual emergence of an order of professional fighting men in the countryside and the capital.
A portrait of three men in Japan dressed as samurai warriors, wearing armor and carrying naginata (halberds) and katanas (long swords), ca. 1890.
Superficial similarities between the samurai and the knights of northern Europe make it tempting to equate the birth of the samurai with the onset of “feudalism” in the Japanese countryside, but such was not the case. While the descendants—both genealogical and institutional—of the professional warriors of Heian times did indeed become the masters of Japan’s medieval and early modern epochs, until the very end of the twelfth century the samurai remained the servants, not the adversaries, of the court and the state.
This situation, so enigmatic in hindsight, seems much less so when considered in the context of the times. For the nascent warrior order of the tenth, eleventh, and twelfth centuries was constrained from without by the same public (state) and private (court noble) policies that encouraged its development, and from within by the inability of its own members to forge secure and enduring bonds among themselves. Like the landholding and governing systems of the same era, the Heian military and police system readily responded and adapted to changing circumstances in the capital and the provinces, while the court jealously guarded its exclusive right to oversee and direct it. Then, in 1180, Minamoto Yoritomo, a dispossessed heir to a leading samurai house, adeptly parlayed his own pedigree, the localized ambitions of provincial warriors, and a series of upheavals within the imperial court into the creation of a new institution—called the shogu-nate, or bakufu, by historians—in the eastern village of Kamakura.
The first shogunate was in essence a government within a government, at once a part of and distinct from the imperial court in Kyoto. Its principal functions were to oversee eastern Japan and the samurai class, based on authority delegated to it by the court. But the establishment of this new institution set rolling a snowball that expanded until it bowled over and completely destroyed Japan’s classical polity. In the twelfth century, shogunal vassals across the country discovered that they could manipulate the insulation from direct court supervision offered them by the Kamakura regime to lay ever stronger and more personal claims to the lands (and the people on them) they ostensibly administered on behalf of the powers-that-were in the capital. Through gradual advance by fait accompli, a new warrior-dominated system of authority absorbed the older, courtier-dominated one, and real power over the countryside spun off steadily from the center to the hands of local figures.
By the second quarter of the fourteenth century, this evolution had progressed to the point where the most successful of the shogunate’s provincial vassals had begun to question the value of continued submission to the Kamakura regime. Thus when a deposed emperor, posthumously known as Godaigo, issued a call to arms against the shogunate, among those who answered him were Ashikaga Takauji and Nitta Yoshisada, both descendants of Minamoto Yoritomo and sometime commanders of Kamakura armies. In 1333 Yoshisada captured Kamakura and destroyed the shogunate. Two years later Takauji broke with Godaigo and drove him from the capital. In 1336, after annihilating Yoshisada’s army in the Battle of Minatogawa, he established a new shogunate, under himself, headquartered in the Muro-machi district of Kyoto. Under the new regime, warriors not only dominated the countryside, but overshadowed the imperial court as well. Yorit-omo’s snowball was not, however, done rolling or growing yet.
Fifteen Ashikaga shogun reigned between 1336 and 1573, when the last, Yoshiaki, was deposed; but only the first six could lay claim to have actually ruled the country. By the late 1400s, while both the court and the shogunate remained nominally in authority, real power in Japan had devolved to a few score feudal barons called daimyo, whose authority rested first and foremost on their ability to hold lands by military force. There followed a century and a half of nearly continuous warfare, as daimyo contested with one another, and with those below them, to maintain and expand their domains. The spirit of this Sengoku (literally, “country at war”) age is captured in two expressions current at the time: gekokujo (the low overthrow the high) and jakuniku kyoshoku (the weak become meat; the strong eat).
But the instability of gekokujo could not continue indefinitely. Daimyo quickly discovered that the corollary cliche to “might makes right” is “he who lives by the sword, dies by the sword,” and that many were spending as much time and energy defending themselves from their own ambitious vassals as from other daimyo. During the late sixteenth century, the most able among them began searching for ways to reduce vassal independence. This in turn made possible the creation of ever larger domains and hegemonic alliances extending across entire regions. At length, the successive efforts of three men—Oda Nobunaga, Toyotomi Hideyoshi, and Tokugawa Ieyasu—eliminated many of the smaller daimyo and unified the rest into a nationwide coalition. In 1603 Ieyasu assumed the title of shogun and established Japan’s third military regime. The new polity, a kind of centralized feudalism, left most of the country divided into great domains ruled by hereditary daimyo, who were in turn closely watched and regulated by the shogunate.
The advent of this new polity and the ensuing Pax Tokugawa marked the transition from medieval to early modern Japan, which brought with it profound changes for the samurai. In the medieval age, warriors had constituted a flexible and permeable order defined primarily by their activities as fighting men. At the top of this order stood the daimyo, some of whom 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 shogun 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 shogun 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.
