EVIL SHOGUN CODE

'Just like warriors anywhere else,' adds Kapur, 'samurai raped and looted and pillaged and were constantly betraying their lords.'

EVIL SHOGUN CODE

'They did not have a single, coherent moral code that defined how they thought and acted.' 'Samurai were not all the moral, noble, well-to-do spiritual swordsmen depicted in film,' Thal says. The word 'bushido' itself wasn't coined until the peaceful Tokugawa Period.īut it's from 'Bushido: The Soul of Japan' that we get some of the most pervasive myths about samurai values and behavior. 'The so-called 'samurai code' of bushido did not exist in the heyday of samurai warfare,' Kapur notes. In 1899, Inazō published an influential book called 'Bushido: The Soul of Japan.' The text presents itself as an introduction to 'bushido.' According to Inazō, this was the traditional, universal code of conduct observed by real-world samurai.Įxcept it wasn't. A diplomat and author, he radically transformed the way future generations would look at samurai. 'In the 1890s, they, their children, and many Japanese began trying to define a 'Way of the Samurai' that operated both as a nostalgia for the supposedly moral, good old days and as a critique of the modernizing trends of the time,' Thal says.Įnter Nitobe Inazō. 'With the abolition of their lords' domains, many former samurai were out of work, unable to get jobs in the new government.

'The official status of samurai was abolished in 1869 and their privileges revoked in the early 1870s,' Thal explains. Historically, the samurai had served feudal lords and enjoyed special privileges. Afterward, Japan entered its reformative Meiji Period, which embraced industry and centralized governance. 'During the long peace of the Tokugawa era, when samurai came to work more as administrators than as fighters, many romanticized the earlier times of war (in the 12th to 16th centuries for instance) when samurai actually fought,' she says in an email. Just ask Sarah Thal, a historian of 'early modern and modern Japan' who teaches at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. Hindsight has a way of glamorizing warfare. With no battles to wage, the samurai were given bureaucratic and administrative roles. By then, the feudal wars that defined the Sengoku Period had long passed. In effect, they laid the groundwork for a rigid, hereditary caste-like system that put samurai above artisans, peasants and merchants. Hideyoshi's reforms carried over into the Tokugawa Period. 'In a lot of cases, it was self-reported and people basically got to choose.' 'Basically, people who were known to have fought in battles recently were considered samurai and were forbidden to go back to farming, and people who were known to be currently farming land had to surrender their weapons,' says historian Nick Kapur of Rutgers University in an email. Under the new rules, only samurai - and samurai alone - could bear arms. This prohibited farmers from owning weapons of any sort. A game-changing warlord, he issued a nationwide ' Sword-Hunt Edict' in 1588. Such ambiguity didn't sit well with General Toyotomi Hideyoshi. Before then, all of society was militarized and there was no distinction between peasants and warriors.' As Thomas Conlan - a professor of East Asian history at Princeton University - told us via email, 'The samurai became an identifiable social status only in the 1590s.

This was also a time when Japan redefined its relationship with samurai. International trade was tightly regulated and the shoguns took pains to discourage political squabbling. But things stayed calm under the Tokugawa regime. Yet in practice, these figures were far more powerful and it was they who truly called the shots.Įarlier centuries had been plagued by constant warfare. Shoguns were hereditary military dictators who'd been ruling the country since 1192. The Tokugawa Period takes its name from a shogun family that assumed control of Japan in 1603. Particularly relevant to our discussion are the Sengoku Period of 1467 to 1603 and the successive Tokugawa (or 'Edo') Period that lasted until 1868. Japanese history is broken down into eras and periods.

Evil shogun