What do Japanese samurai do? Why are they called samurai?

Japanese samurai

The original meaning of the word samurai in Japanese is waiter, personal attendant.

A warrior must obey without fear of hardship, be loyal to his duties, be capable and brave.

However, this code only represents an ideal. The loyalty and bravery of the warrior are based on the master-slave system in which the lord to whom he is loyal can reward the warrior for his contribution.

Origin

The emergence of samurai was in the Heian period. Starting from the middle of the ninth century, some local lords began to establish private armed forces to defend themselves and use them to expand their power.

This kind of armed force gradually matured into an institutionalized professional military organization based on clan and master-slave relationships.

By the tenth century, the imperial court was unable to suppress the rebellion of local forces and had to rely on the strength of samurai from various places. The samurai were further recognized by the central government and became Japan's privileged ruling class.

Some historians believe that one of the important reasons for the decline of Chinese dynasties is the long-term conflict between civil servants and military generals. The two sides rejected each other and belittled each other, resulting in serious internal strife.

This situation does not seem to exist in Japan. Samurai, as professional soldiers, are also administrators in peacetime.

Therefore, samurai were required to learn culture, know how to appreciate art, and be arty in tea ceremony, chess, etc.

Until the Meiji Restoration, samurai were the dominant force in Japanese society. In terms of their system and functions, they were more similar to Western feudal lords and knights, and were different from ordinary Asian countries.

This situation changed after the Meiji Restoration. 1871 was the most important year. In June, civilians were allowed to ride horses. In September, samurai were allowed to "distribute" and "discard swords." In October , allowing intermarriage between warriors and commoners.

According to statistics at that time (1972), there were 425,872 nobles in Japan, and a total of 1,941,286 people including their family members. The annual salary they received consumed one-third of Japan's government fiscal revenue.

Meiji *** adopted gradual measures to gradually cancel salaries and eliminate the samurai class by issuing bonds or redeeming them.

Some high-ranking samurai received titles in the process and became the Chinese class second only to the royal family. However, with the defeat in World War II, Japan was forced to accept democratic reforms, and the Chinese class became history.

Today, some Japanese people still remember the samurai status of their ancestors, but it does not have any real meaning.

Near the author's residence, there is a stone tablet at the door of a house that reads "The place where a certain swordsman of the Bakumatsu period practiced martial arts." It is just a historical relic.

However, the intellectual legacy of the samurai, such as bushido, remains an important part of Japanese culture.

Life

The complete symbol of the samurai system is the Tokugawa shogunate system. The ruling class of the entire Japanese society ranges from high-ranking samurai represented by generals and daimyo to the lowest level ashigaru. (Infantry) consists of low-level samurai, and from the time of Toyotomi Hideyoshi, the system of separation of soldiers and peasants has been implemented.

Samurai is completely out of production.

However, the living standards between samurai are very different. Even if they are both feudal lords, those in Nagasaki are completely different from those in Yamagata.

The majority of samurai are middle- and lower-level people. If they cannot rely on a rich and powerful lord, their lives are often eked out in poverty.

A joke in the Edo period said: "In addition to quilts and pots, the little samurai's home also has a big stone, because when he feels cold, he can lift the stone to keep warm." If the attached master If they committed a crime and were fired, or the lord's financial difficulties required a reduction in manpower, low-level samurai could only become ronin, and some went to work as thugs for forces such as the underworld and became "yojimbo".

Although "ronin" in modern Japanese refers to students who did not enter a suitable college, at that time, ronin was an important factor of instability in Japanese society.

In order to avoid the intensification of domestic conflicts, officials often acquiesce or encourage foreign armed aggression by prodigals.

The ronin were full of ambitions for foreign wars. In order to fight against the Qing Dynasty and restore the Ming Dynasty, Zheng Chenggong sent people to Japan to borrow troops. Although the shogunate refused, the ronin below asked for war.

In film and television works that reflect the late Qing Dynasty and the early Republic of China, Japanese ronin are shown wandering around China, which is the result of the Meiji Restoration's reform of the hierarchical system.

In "Seihebei at Dusk", the lower-level samurai Seibei wipes his soup bowl with rice balls when eating, which shows the poverty of his life.

"The Last Samurai" director Edward Zwick said that his favorite thing to read is the biography of Saigo Takamori, one of the "Three Heroes of the Restoration". To supplement the family income, he had to do odd jobs like copying.

His hometown, Satsuma, was a famous powerful feudal lord in Japan. Among the 700,000 people, samurai families accounted for more than 200,000, and the finances were always tight.

After the door of Japan was opened, the lives of these low-level samurai worsened, and their poverty worsened, and they finally became the main force of the Restoration.

After the Restoration, some upper-class samurai transformed into the bourgeoisie or communist bureaucrats, while the lower-class samurai declined day by day and created a series of riots, in which even Saigo was involved.

Therefore, after Japan achieved initial results in its modernization process, it immediately launched external expansion.

It is worth mentioning that many lower-level samurai in life have no money to find wives, and their military system and patriarchal traditional culture make solving the sexual problems of many samurai a social crux.

As a result, the shogunate who promoted Confucianism bypassed some family ethics advocated by Confucianism, especially the concept of female chastity.

Until the generation of Yamamoto Isoroku and even today, samurai (men) fooling around with geishas (***) in pornographic places have been acquiesced, and even tolerated by their wives.

Thoughts

The core of Japanese samurai’s ideology is naturally “Bushido”.

After decades of anti-Japanese aggression struggle, this word is "notorious" to the Chinese, but it is still necessary to conduct necessary analysis and dissection.

"The Last Samurai" summarizes Bushido into a series of abstract good moral norms such as "brave, benevolence, loyalty...", but this is just an appearance, otherwise it cannot be explained. More often, What the samurai embodies is cruelty, ignorance and even madness.

This reason must be found in the ideological roots of Bushido, which is actually a hodgepodge of complex ingredients.

In the early days of Bushido, the main theoretical background was Zhu Xi’s Neo-Confucianism, which had long been criticized by Chinese intellectuals.

Since the late Kamakura shogunate, samurai must abide by virtues such as "loyalty, integrity, trustworthiness, and frugality." By the Tokugawa shogunate, some famous Confucianists systematized and standardized the bushido theory, and finally it became A model of conduct for the entire samurai society.

The "Thongchenzang" incident that has been repeatedly reproduced in movies happened during this period and was the "perfect embodiment" of the samurai's moral ideal of "all loyalties and deaths".

It is generally believed that although Japan has introduced Confucianism from China, it has a distinct independent selectivity just like it absorbs any foreign civilization.

Zhou Zuoren also pointed out that Japan did not accept all the dross of Chinese culture in history, such as eunuchs, foot binding, etc.

For Confucianism, Japan places more emphasis on "loyalty", while China emphasizes "benevolence".

Therefore, Japanese samurai can do things that violate humanity for the sake of "loyalty".

As role models for bushido behavior, the national heroes of China’s Southern Song Dynasty, Wen Tianxiang, Lu Xiufu and others.

During the Edo period, these characters were called "the lessons for the samurai of this dynasty". Their spirit of being indifferent to life and death for the sake of "righteousness" was enthusiastically praised by samurai.

In the battles for Okinawa and many islands in the Pacific battlefield, the Japanese army and even civilians launched suicide charges again and again despite being extremely hungry and thirsty. When defeated, they committed seppuku and jumped into the sea. It was Lu Xiufu, A replica of Zhang Shijie and others after they were defeated by the Yuan army in Yashan.

After the Meiji Restoration, Japanese militarism created a discriminatory and derogatory approach to China in order to invade. Therefore, the heroes who praised "killing oneself to become a benevolent" gradually came from their own country. However, Wen Tianxiang's story was Japanese until the end of World War II. Textbook content.

Another important core of Bushido thought is Zen.

Samurai lived in wars and were about to die for their lord at any time. Japan’s geographical environment was harsh and disasters were frequent. This gave samurai a strong sense of precariousness and crisis. Therefore, they needed the enlightenment of life and death through Zen Buddhism. reconcile.

At the same time, the mystical tendency and aesthetic taste of Zen Buddhism also had a huge impact on samurai and Japanese culture.

However, in the hands of samurai, Zen Buddhism magnified the empty outlook on life and became an excuse to ignore the lives of others and to act contrary to human nature.

What ultimately turned Bushido into a tool of militarism was Shintoism, which, together with Confucianism and Buddhism, was known as the three pillars of the shogunate system. During the Meiji Restoration, Japan's populist ideas were rampant and would The emperor was deified and Shinto, which advocated the supremacy of the Japanese nation, was established as the state religion. This formed the transformation into a modern nation-state and an industrialized and militarized empire. It also absorbed German nationalist philosophy and finally completed the fascism of Bushido.

Combat

As a professional military group.

Combat is the first mission of a samurai.

The biggest fighting characteristic of Japanese samurai is that they wear unique armor and have unique fighting skills.

Due to his bravery and tenacity in combat, he is a professional soldier who is extremely difficult to deal with.

At the end of the shogunate period, the British navy, which easily defeated the Qing Dynasty in the Opium War, engaged in the "Saying War" with the Satsuma Domain. Although the Japanese samurai suffered heavy losses with backward military equipment, they had to admit that the other party was "good at fighting". ".

Earlier, the Yuan army went on an expedition to Japan and landed to fight the Japanese army. They used dense firearms to cause great suffering to the samurai who at that time respected single-riding duels. However, they still could not break through the desperate interception of the Japanese army and were unable to gain consolidation. In the absence of a bridgehead, they had to board the ship to rest, but encountered a typhoon.

In the age of cold weapons, Japanese samurai possessed sophisticated swords on the one hand, and on the other hand they attached great importance to combat training and had rich experience, so they were powerful enemies that could not be ignored.

In the Ming Dynasty's aid to Korea and the anti-Japanese war, the individual and small group combat capabilities of Japanese samurai were significantly higher than those of the ordinary Ming army.

In particular, the samurai's sharp long swords and strange sword skills were often able to defeat the Ming army with a large number of people.

Only Qi Jiguang invented the "Mandarin Duck Formation", combined with the comprehensive power of long and short weapons and firearms, and well-trained elite soldiers, could the Japanese pirates be restrained.

The late great director Hu Jinquan's "Loyalty and Martyrs" depicts the Anti-Japanese War, including a series of fights, which is worth watching.

Although the samurai class no longer exists in Japan today, high-quality samurai swords are still popular among collectors around the world. Together with the Damascus sword and the Malay sword, they are known as "the three most famous swords in the world".

As early as the Song Dynasty, the writer Ouyang Xiu wrote "Japanese Sword Song", which said that "the precious sword comes from Japan, and it can be obtained by crossing the sea and east."

In fact, the manufacturing technology of Japanese swords originally originated from the steel pattern swords of the Han Dynasty in China. However, after continuous improvement and processing, it has become "second to none in the Far East" in terms of appearance and practicality.

However, China's sword manufacturing technology continues to decline and disappear. Even the original Tang swords that had a great influence on Japanese sword styles have been lost, but are preserved in Japan.

In Japanese period dramas, samurai sword fights are commonplace, and a professional fighting group called the "killing formation" has also been formed.

Since Japan attaches great importance to fighting skills such as kendo, judo, and karate in school education, many Japanese actors have basic skills and can act decently in actual fights in movies.

Those "killing formation" designers are indeed experts in various schools of Japanese swordsmanship. For example, in "Twilight of Seibei", the person responsible for guiding Hiroyuki Sanada is the Kodachi master.

Kodachi (ribashi) refers to a short sword other than the long sword commonly worn by Japanese samurai. It is also a tool for disembowelment.

The master swordsman Miyamoto Musashi is famous for creating the two-handed style of swordsmanship, the long sword and the small sword. However, Japanese swordsmanship is still dominated by two-handed swords.

According to some expert research, the two-handed sword technique was introduced to Japan during the Han and Tang Dynasties, and then gradually disappeared in China. However, Japanese samurai gradually perfected their own two-handed sword technique on this basis, and formed the art of kendo. The main feature of the system is that it abandons the shortcomings of China's pursuit of beautiful routines and emphasizes "simple and rigorous techniques, full and smooth power" in actual combat.

Of course, under the guidance of this kind of thinking, the sword fights in Japanese movies are far less beautiful than those in Chinese movies.