The samurai!
As one of the most legendary warrior classes in history, samurai are a staple of pop culture
and high culture alike.
Because of their popularity, we know a lot about the samurai, but some of the more obscure
things are pretty dark.
Here are messed up facts about the samurai.
History explains that seppuku is a ritualistic suicide method where a samurai slices his
stomach open with a small sword.
Ever since it emerged in the 12th century as an honorable method for losing samurai
to die on the battlefield, Japan has wrought all sorts of abdominal-slicing doom upon its
elite warrior class.
According to ThoughtCo, there were two basic ways of doing the deed.
The more awful variation had the performer cut his abdomen open with a vertical and a
horizontal cut, then wait for death in excruciating pain.
However, most opted for the softer variant, where a helper decapitated them immediately
after the first cut.
Outside the battlefield, seppuku was an elaborate process, where the participants made a day
out of it with rituals such as the writing of a "death poem" and having a good drink
of sake before grabbing the blade.
Usually, there were even spectators present.
Samurai warriors could perform seppuku as a political protest, or to show their overwhelming
grief over the death of a beloved leader.
It was also a form of death sentence: Shoguns and daimyos could command their underlings
to perform seppuku for "real or perceived" slights, at which point the person had to
follow through, or else he'd bring shame to himself and his entire family.
Bushido code is one of the first things many people associate with the noble samurai, but
is it really what we think it is?
Not quite, according to Dr. Henry Smith of Columbia University.
The original bushido was just one of the assorted warrior guidelines in Japan's history.
Their values often included things like fighting spirit, skill, duty, honor, loyalty, and self-sacrifice,
but focused on different things and were still pretty martial.
Since bushido is the one we know today, surely it was just the code that won some sort of
samurai ethics tournament to become the one everyone started to follow?
According to Dr. Smith, again, nope.
When the Meiji Restoration of 1868 ended the Edo period and essentially abolished the samurai
class, samurai warrior values steered the loyalty aspect from the samurai's immediate
master to a more generalized appreciation of the emperor and nation.
The 1899 book Bushido: The Soul of Japan is arguably the most influential description
of this reimagined bushido in modern Japan, which is ironic because the book was aimed
at Western readers and retooled bushido as a largely non-militaristic take on Western
chivalry.
Instead of samurai, this new bushido is for everyone in the Japanese society and focuses
on the positive aspects of a loyal, humble, brave, and hard-working citizen.
As Japan Guide notes, the samurai really started flourishing during the Edo Period, between
1603 and 1867, when they rose to the upper echelons of Japan's society and became the
highest caste.
However, their higher-than-ever social status didn't mean they were free to do whatever
they felt like, at least when it came to marriage.
According to Hisako Hata, curator of the Edo-Tokyo museum, marriages of the Edo era were generally
prearranged, and young members of the samurai class had it particularly bad: Apart from
having their parents essentially choose them a spouse from whatever family was deemed socially
appropriate, they also needed the local authorities to consent before they could marry that virtual
stranger in the first place.
This system made love marriages extremely rare, but that didn't mean people didn't still
fall in love.
As a result, some young, desperate lovers would commit suicide together when it became
evident that their parents had other plans for their marital future.
Katana swords are at least as cool and legendary as their historical samurai wielders, and
they've held a lot of ceremonial sway over the years.
However, a katana is still a sword, which means it had to be tested before the swordsmith
presented it to its samurai owner.
According to Vintage News, the testing was an elaborate process called tameshigiri, or
"test cut."
This put both the sword and its user's skill to the test by cutting into materials such
as bamboo, wood, or armor, and if either the katana or the man swinging it weren't up to
the task, the sword could quite easily be ruined.
Tameshigiri is still practiced today, but one dark subsection of the practice has hopefully
gone the way of the dodo: testing swords on actual human bodies.
The bodies were usually those of dead criminals, but using corpses didn't make the process
any less gruesome, especially as the mutilation count was sometimes inscribed on the sword
as a creepy seal of quality.
Apart from the masterless ronin drifters, the samurai class isn't usually associated
with poverty.
However, the fact that they were at the top of feudal Japan's food pyramid didn't necessarily
mean they controlled vast amounts of wealth.
According to Japan Times, the Tokugawa shoguns of the Edo Period felt that having lots of
food and warm clothes would be detrimental to the society, and started pushing toward
stoic attitudes in all Japanese classes.
This push was so effective that many Japanese either couldn't understand or tried to avoid
money, and the samurai in particular took Tokugawa tenets to heart, to the point that
they started seeing money as too "tainted" to mess with.
Historian Kozo Yamamura writes that most scholars agree on the increasing poverty among the
samurai during this era, but the actual extent of their supposed squalor is largely unclear
and may have been influenced by the modern image of the humble, noble samurai.
Yamamura doesn't outright debunk the concept of the impoverished Edo samurai but he does
suggest that the, quote, "increasing poverty" could have been due to any number of economic
reasons.
It could even have been a form of "psychological poverty," where the samurai grew so accustomed
to their power and wealth that their expectations for income rose higher than their actual income.
One of the most terrifying traditions associated with the samurai was tsujigiri.
The term means "roadside killing," and though the practice had its roots in honorable dueling,
it eventually twisted into a popular practice where members of the samurai class sneaked
around to unexpectedly slash at passing merchants and peasants.
Sometimes, there were vague excuses for these gruesome slayings, such as testing out a new
weapon or practicing a strike.
Other times, it was done simply because the samurai just happened to feel like it.
There was even a legend floating around that performing 1,000 tsujigiri killings could
cure illness.
All in all, it was not a great time to walk out at night if you were a merchant or peasant.
Encyclopedia of Japanese Swords says that tsujigiri ultimately became such a massive
problem that the newly empowered Tokugawa officials prohibited it in 1602.
Even then, the custom didn't exactly go away overnight.
Regular instances of tsujigiri were reported well into the Edo period, to the point that
even the third Tokugawa shogun was rumored to often sneak out of the Edo castle to chop
up passersby on the dark streets of his city.
All things must come to an end, and HistoryNet says Japan's feudal system sang its swan song
on a battlefield near Kagoshima on September 25, 1877.
The country had been moving toward modern times, aided in no small part by none-too-subtle
hints from the superior military might of the U.S. Traditional samurai had resisted
change because it stripped them of their previous power, and there had been several unsuccessful
revolts.
Now only the Satsuma clan samurai and their leader Takamori Saigo remained, and Saigo's
initial attempts at peaceful negotiations with the government had descended into violence.
This was a problem because the government had sent 30,000 soldiers to face him.
Saigo had 500 men who were so short on supplies that they had to melt trinkets into bullets,
and their only medical supplies were a carpenter's saw and some rags.
As the imperial army was hammering his positions with lethal artillery fire, Saigo resigned
himself to his fate and had a final sake party with his closest friends.
Early in the morning of September 25, the imperials stormed the samurai positions.
Three hours later, only 40 of Saigo's men were alive and the samurai leader himself
was mortally wounded.
Saigo had his follower Shinsuke Beppu take him to an appropriately nice hilltop spot
and behead him.
After this, Beppu and the remaining samurai drew their swords and charged the enemy gunfire.
None survived.
Nowadays we talk about adding insult to injury, but the samurai liked to approach this concept
the other way around.
As the Encyclopedia of Japanese Swords tells us, a practice known as kirisute-gomen allowed
them to legally kill people who they felt were disrespecting them, as long as they did
it immediately after the supposed insult happened and the victim was of a lower social class.
The insult and retaliation needed to be seen by a witness who could recount the events
in front of a court, though the samurai were allowed to use their own servants and friends
as witnesses.
So did every samurai have a blank check to kill almost any merchant or peasant who looked
at them in a funny way, or made fun of their socks-and-sandals combo?
"Such a mild insult!"
Well, not exactly.
There were actually serious repercussions for anyone caught abusing this system.
A samurai who was found to misuse his kirisute-gomen privileges was given a "severe" punishment,
which could be a shameful death by beheading, and his house being abolished so his sons
couldn't inherit his title and position.
Ouch.
What does a warrior do during a period of peace?
Well, if he's a samurai, he might start wearing outlandish clothing, get a rebel haircut,
and join a themed street gang to terrorize common folks and clash with other gangs.
You know, like in the movie Warriors.
"Warriors, come out to playay."
According to Law and Order in the Age of the Samurai, the lack of respect and also the
lack of wars to fight drove some bored and unemployed Edo-period samurai out on the streets,
where they joined with other highborn kids to form gangs such as the kabukimono and the
kyokaku.
Kabukimono were a flamboyant group that eschewed traditional samurai behavior in favor of strange
clothes, deliberately debauched behavior, and strange slang.
Their behavior was that of a stereotypical 1980s movie gang, in that they roamed the
streets harassing townspeople, wreaking havoc, and brawling with other gangs.
Kyokaku, or "street knights," were one of those other gangs and the natural enemy of
the kabukimono.
They were vigilantes who were comprised of samurai and lower-class townspeople alike,
and were nominally protecting the people.
The kyokaku carried extra-long swords, shaved their traditional sideburns all the way up
to the temple, and marked their allegiance with expensive fabrics worn draped over the
shoulder or as neckerchiefs.
Cool and mysterious as their vigilante antics might have seemed, kyokaku were basically
just another group of street thugs, and the violent clashes between them, kabukimono,
and other factions provided the Edo period with a hefty helping of bloody gang violence.
Everything must end eventually, and as Japan Times attests, the samurai faced the music
during a period known as Meiji restoration.
When the last Tokugawa shogun died in 1853 with no follower in sight, Japan plunged into
a long period of turmoil that destroyed the shogunate and gave rise to Emperor Meiji,
who took the throne in 1868.
Meiji's government started steering the country toward modern times by opening up to industrialization
and Western influences … and stripping away the samurais' powers.
The Meiji restoration left an estimated two-thirds of the samurai class without a job.
The remaining samurai were somewhat more fortunate, as they were hired in new bureaucratic positions
and found a new purpose as facilitators of Japan's social change.
Check out one of our newest videos right here!
Plus, even more Grunge videos about your favorite stuff are coming soon.
Subscribe to our YouTube channel and hit the bell so you don't miss a single one.