Samuria

Samurai

When I think of Japan I think of the skills and fighting ability of the Samurai warriors. It is amazing all of the different things that a Samurai has to know to be able to become a true Samurai warrior. Samurai also reminds me of the movie Last Samurai with Tom Cruise. In this paper I am going to tell some of the things about the way of a Samurai.

The Japanese samurai warriors came into existence in the 12th century when two powerful Japanese clans fought bitter wars against each other. The Japanese clans were the Taira and the Minamato. At that time the Japanese shogunate, a system of a military ruler, called the shogun was formed. Under the shogun the next person in rule was the daimyo, local rulers comparable to dukes in Europe. The Japanese samurai were the military holds. Ronin are samurai without a master.

According to historians the fierce fights between hostile clans and warlords was mainly a battle for land. Only 20 percent of Japan's rugged and mountainous area can be used for agriculture.

Samurai warriors had several privileges. They were allowed to wear two swords; a long one and a short one. Commoners were not allowed to wear any weapons at all. At a certain period samurai warriors were even allowed to behead a commoner who had offended them.

The Japanese samurai caste itself had different ranks with different privileges. A basic ranking system from the twelfth century distinguished three major ranks

The first was kenin, which meant housemen; these people were the administrators or vassals. The second is mounted samurai, which is only high-ranking samurai warriors were allowed to fight on horseback. The third was foot soldiers, which were soldiers that walked the front line.

During the end of the 15th century, the Ashikaga had lost control over the country. Powerful lords had ravaged Japan in a series of civil wars lasting for roughly 100 years. When Toyotomi could finally unify Japan, he introduced a series of reforms thus changing the life of the samurai class. He made the samurai live permanently in castles. Until then they were farming their own land during peacetime. It was like the change from an army of nothing but warrior to an army of professionals. To finance the system, Toyotomi introduced a rice taxation system under which every samurai warrior received a certain amount of rice depending on his rank.

The samurai warriors had an ethic code of behavior called bushido, meaning "way of the warrior". The central point of the bushido was complete loyalty towards the lord, the daimyo.

Wikipedia.com talks about two famous Samurai by saying, “Toyotomi Hideyoshi, who became a grand minister in 1586, himself the son of a poor peasant family, created a law that the samurai caste became codified as permanent and heritable, and that non-samurai were forbidden to carry weapons,