Who were the samurai, really?

The samurai were Japan's professional warriors: men from warrior families who trained from childhood with the sword, the bow and the horse, and who served as retainers to lords. Even the word says it. "Samurai" is thought to come from a verb meaning "to serve", so a samurai was, at heart, someone who served a master. The great warlords at the top, the daimyo and the shogun, belonged to the same warrior class but were not usually called samurai themselves. A samurai who lost his master became a ronin.

How did such a class appear? Until the late 8th century, Japan had a national army of conscripts, ordinary men called up for short service. They were seen as unreliable and poorly trained, and in most battles of the time the deciding force was professional mounted archers from wealthy families, who had spent years on their skills. As peace settled in and tax revenue fell, the court dismantled the conscript army. It handed the job of keeping order in the countryside to landed warriors, who had every reason to protect their own estates.

The samurai were never frozen in one mould, though. In the long peace of the Tokugawa shogunate, which lasted about 250 years after 1615, they became a hereditary class of officials and administrators who studied literature, calligraphy and philosophy as well as fighting. And the line between samurai and everyone else was blurrier than the legend suggests: Toyotomi Hideyoshi rose from a peasant background to rule Japan as imperial regent, and in the later Edo period wealthy townsmen could buy their way in by being adopted into a samurai family.

The samurai did not vanish in a day. After the Meiji Restoration, the government abolished the domains, introduced conscription and ended their hereditary stipends and their right to wear swords. That took apart the system that had made them samurai.