Who the Samurai Were
The word samurai comes from a verb meaning to serve, and it described people who served as armed retainers, first of the court and nobility and later of regional lords. A warrior class emerged gradually during the Heian period. By the end of the twelfth century, the warrior leader Minamoto no Yoritomo had established a military government at Kamakura, and from then until the nineteenth century, military families held political power under the title of shogun or, at times, alongside regents and the court.
“Samurai” covered a wide range, from powerful provincial lords to low-ranking retainers with modest incomes. Their lives changed enormously across seven centuries, so general statements about “the samurai” usually fit only a particular period.
War, Then Peace
In the Kamakura, Muromachi and Sengoku periods, warriors were involved in repeated conflict. Battles were violent and costly, and ordinary people often suffered most. It is important to remember this when reading romantic accounts, which tend to dwell on honor and elegance while leaving out the destruction.
After the early seventeenth century, under the Tokugawa government, Japan entered a long period of relative peace. Many samurai became administrators, bureaucrats and scholars, living on stipends in castle towns. Formal martial training continued, but daily work was increasingly civil. The ideals associated with the samurai, loyalty, discipline and self-control, were expressed in writings of that peaceful age, often by authors who had never fought in a war. This helps explain why much of the “samurai ethic” known today was described and idealized long after actual medieval fighting.
The term bushido, “the way of the warrior,” is a good example. Some warrior house codes and later writings discuss proper conduct, but the idea of bushido as a single fixed code is mostly a later construct, strongly shaped by writers of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. It is better to treat it as an evolving set of ideas than as a rulebook that earlier warriors all followed.
Patronage: How Warriors Shaped the Arts
The most direct influence of the warrior class on aesthetics was as patrons. Rulers and powerful families commissioned buildings, paintings and performances, and they had the means to support artists and craftspeople.
- Zen temples. Warrior leaders in the Kamakura and Muromachi periods supported Zen monasteries, which provided religious practice, Chinese learning and political advice. This support helped Zen temples become cultural centers.
- Noh theatre. Noh developed in the fourteenth century, aided by the patronage of the Ashikaga shoguns, especially the third shogun, Yoshimitsu, who supported the performers Kan’ami and his son Zeami. Zeami wrote influential treatises about the art. Later, the Tokugawa government treated Noh as a formal ceremonial art. Many plays involve ghosts, including warriors who suffer after death, so the genre is not simple praise of war; noh theatre is covered in its own article.
- Tea. Tea gatherings were practiced by warlords and merchants alike. In the Momoyama period, powerful leaders collected tea utensils and employed tea masters, and tea became a stage for both display and diplomacy. Sen no Rikyu, a tea master who served leading warlords, is associated with a plainer ideal, and his relationship with his patron ended tragically. The Japanese tea ceremony developed through this meeting of rulers, merchants and monks.
- Castles and screens. Castles, with their painted sliding doors and folding screens, were designed to display authority. The Kano school of painters worked for such patrons, as discussed in the article on the Kano school.
Values and Everyday Culture
Warrior households valued practical skills such as horsemanship and archery, along with literacy and, increasingly, cultural accomplishments including poetry, calligraphy and tea. The ideal of combining martial and literary training (“bun and bu”) appears often in Edo-period discussions. Whether individual samurai lived up to it varied widely.
Martial arts also changed. In peacetime, the practice of swordsmanship and other disciplines became more reflective and more about personal training, a shift that fed into the modern martial ways described in the article on budo.
The End of the Class
In the Meiji era, the class system was abolished, stipends were ended and wearing swords in public was prohibited. Former samurai entered government, business, education and the army. After this, the image of the samurai moved into literature, theater and later film, where it was often romanticized. These portrayals say more about later hopes and anxieties than about the actual lives of earlier warriors.
Balanced Conclusions
- Warriors were important patrons, and their support helped sustain Zen temples, Noh, tea and castle painting.
- They were not the only shapers of taste. Court nobles, monks, merchants and townspeople all mattered, and the Edo townspeople developed lively tastes of their own.
- Violence was a real part of warrior history and should not be ignored or ornamented. Much of the refined culture associated with the class grew in periods of peace.
- Popular ideas such as bushido are largely later formulations, so they should be read with some caution.