The identity of the Japanese samurai is more of a hereditary legacy than a profession. Both men as samurai and women as samurai dependents belonged to the military class, whether or not they had ever wielded a sword. However, samurai were not limited to purely military roles. Some samurai were very prestigious scholars. Samurai could serve as civil and military administrators, clergy, painters, and aestheticians. There are also some samurai who are merely members of the samurai family. However, in theory, all samurai should be skilled in bow horses. Female family members of samurai were also trained to use the short daggers they carried in their belts. The daggers, which are stored in brocade boxes wrapped in fabric, are like the samurai swords worn by men, a sign of their identity. Upper-class women are also trained to use a specific weapon, the knife (a halberd), a woman's weapon used to use as the last line of defense in the house. At night, the feudal lord-level samurai usually had hordes of women armed with swords patrol the inner courtyard.
▲ On this unusual but informative scroll of paintings, we can see a group of high-ranking samurai resting. One of them is doing a massage, while the next person is waiting for his companion to drink sake (a kind of rice wine).
Many Buddhist monks—at least from most classes—became samurai at birth. The religious world is a field that places less emphasis on the origin of its members (after all, one should abandon the secular way of life after ordination), but this is not the case. There were some wealthy and powerful lords who, after accepting the Buddhist precepts, would continue to administer their territories and command their own armies. Takeda Shingen (1521-1573) and Uesugi Kenshin (1530-1578) are two famous examples of this. For most footlight, the level that allows them to live a real life is only enough for people to maintain their glorious dreams. Ironically, it was Toyotomi Hideyoshi himself, a peasant-born man who rose from the position of giving slippers to the ruler of all of Japan, who made it more difficult to realize those glorious dreams, because his decree on the separation of soldiers and peasants restricted those who were born like him.
For a long time, the strict Confucian concept of social hierarchy was not officially recognized by the Japanese government, and by the time of the Tokugawa shogunate, the Japanese government began to formally encourage the spread of this concept in order to firmly control society. In fact, there has always been a strong Confucian undercurrent in Japanese samurai culture, and everyone has more or less embraced a lot of Confucianism. The samurai concept of hierarchy is also related to the fatalistic Buddhist worldview.
There was a strong fear of losing their masters among the Japanese samurai, and the social structure corresponded to the intrinsic spiritual dependence between servants and lords. Losing a lord and becoming a ronin (a samurai without a lord) means losing the support and protection of any family power. If the lord dies and there is no heir, his vassals will become ronin. Subjects may also be expelled from the family for committing crimes, such as fighting or violating family rules.
Sometimes, a ceremony called the Yuanfu Ceremony is held for would-be samurai between the ages of thirteen and fifteen. For men from some aristocratic families, this usually happened before the first official entry into the war. Yuanfu is a rite of passage. From then on, boys' hair is trimmed in the same way as an adult: the hair on the top of the head is shaved off, and the rest of the hair is pulled into an adult-style bun. In addition, adult-style hats are also worn, called crowns. In some cases, if the samurai family to which the time belonged happened to be during a war, the hat-changing ceremony would turn into a change of armor. For women in samurai families, at least in higher-ranking families, the rite of passage they experience is called dressing. For the first time, they shaved off their eyebrows and blackened their teeth. The latter, which needed to be achieved through the use of iron oxide dyes, belonged to a court tradition of women in ancient Japanese high society. It also means they are ready to get married. At the time, their marriages were mostly political marriages used to consolidate family ties.
All samurai were responsible and paid a salary, which they used to buy all the equipment they needed and decorate their own houses (if they had one). The basis of the samurai economy was rice, and the amount of rice capable of feeding a person for a year was used as a unit of measurement, known as "stone". Stone is a universal measure of samurai wealth, and one stone is equivalent to 120 liters. The lowest samurai earned slightly less than a stone (assuming that their meal consumption was recorded in the accounts of the lord of the house).
A medium lord or fort lord, who may have a salary of several hundred stones, needs to use these salaries to support the samurai who serve him, to repair the castle, to raise horses, to raise servants, and so on. Cash was used for convenience, but the samurai economy was essentially a rice-based economy. Even the Takeda family of Kai, where japan's most valuable gold mines were located, needed rice to feed its soldiers. Rice is so important that many rice farmers cannot eat rice exclusive to the samurai, but only millet. The harvested rice was sent to the lord's castle for measurement, which was then stored or distributed.
Within the samurai clan, various official positions were arranged to assume various duties. In some ways, it's similar to what modern military practices are: all are soldiers, some cook, some are secretaries, some are in charge of transportation, and some are responsible for other, more confidential matters.
Samurai stationed in castles were free to move their jobs—if their rank was high enough. After a promotion, you may not always work in one area. If a samurai is given a higher rank, he needs to know the full details of the castle or even the entire territory needed to command and maintain an army.
▲ Go is a game that is clearly related to strategic planning. While playing, on a heavy wooden board, the game is played using black and white stone pieces placed in wooden bowls. The samurai in the middle wore a standard style of tunic, which consisted of culottes and epaulettes, the latter being a short sleeveless tunic that protruded to the sides at the shoulder position. On his head, he wore a black hat, which was a kind of hard hat. The samurai on the left wear a more casual, everyday-style robe. The standing samurai wore a pair of short culottes.
(The full text is adapted and excerpted from the book "Samurai Legend: The World of Chrysanthemum and Sword")
▼ Coming soon, stay tuned
Samurai Legends: The World of Chrysanthemum and Sword
Author: Stephen Turnbull
Translator: Xia Guoxiang
Publisher: Zhejiang University Press
The medieval Japanese samurai, as an elite professional military class, had a strong sense of honor and a high sense of loyalty, and were the most terrifying and respectable warriors of all ages. But making the Japanese samurai their own was not just war. This book, illustrated with a wealth of illustrations, shows us the vibrant and exciting world of Japanese samurai, and gives us a multiculturalism that is not only iron-blooded, but also poetic. The book also leads us through the history of Japanese samurai from the stages of its origins, including the Genpei War, the Mongol invasion, and the Sengoku period, until the tragic end of the Satsuma Domain Rebellion in 1877, which marked its tragic end. In this book, the author examines aspects of the daily life of Japanese samurai, their homes and castles, their beliefs and precepts, as well as the cultivation of martial arts and combat equipment, dispelling the myths imposed on these legendary warriors and providing us with a complete picture of the culture of these most iconic military aristocrats in history.