Samurai

They were brought to prominence by the long duration of military governments in Japanese history. For the first and ultimate fact about this calling is that the possibility of death is always present. But as the author of the Code of the Samurai writes, "knights on the highest order are rare, even in a group of a hundred or a thousand warriors" (Cleary, 22). , until the Mongol invasions that started in 1274, the samurai dominated the aristocrats, who still held sway in their traditional fiefdoms. Civil war ensued, resulting in the Era of Warring States, a hundred-year period during which rival warlords and factions battled for power. The Tokugawa regime came to power in 1603, and proceeded to shut off Japan from the rest of the world for the next two-and-a-half centuries in a policy of national isolation called sakoku. The Bushido Shoshinshu, or Code of the Samurai, was written to educate young samurai in the early 18th century. As the interests of the samurai and the aristocracy began to diverge, the former took over both military and administrative functions in the society, while the latter tended tofocus on cultural development. The samurai had their origin as an offshoot of the aristocracy. ys second or third sons who had no other way of gaining their fortune, or social status, than by becoming samurai _ or monks. A samurai warrior was expected to undergo all manner of physical privation without complaint, abstain from worldly pleasures such as sex and alcohol, and maintain a finely tuned ability to discriminate between when not to get involved in a conflict or when to make the ultimate sacrifice of his life. By 1574 Oda Nobunaga had finally united Japan under military rule. It’s no accident that The Seven Samurai was remade in Hollywood as The Magnificent Seven, a gang of cowboys almost as violent as the samurai of the Japanese screen, who at the same time are groping for a moral code of sorts. There was nothing tentative about the moral code of the samurai.