geekbot

The Taira and the Minamoto once again clashed in 1180 beginning the Gempei War which ended in 1185. The victorious Minamoto no Yoritomo once again established the superiority of the samurai and in 1190 visited Kyoto and in 1192 became Seii Taishogun, establishing the Kamakura Shogunate.

Over time, powerful samurai clans became warrior nobility (buke) who were only nominally under court aristocracy (kuge). When samurai begun to adopt aristocratic customs like calligraphy, poetry and music, some kuge also begun to adopt samurai skills. In spite of various machinations and brief periods of rule by various emperors, the real power was in the hands of the shogun and warriors.

Various samurai clans struggled for power over Kamakura and Ashikaga Shogunates. During the 14th century seppuku, the ritual suicide, became more common.

Sengoku jidai (”warring-states period”) was marked by the fact that caste was still somewhat flexible. Those born into other social strata could sometimes make name for themselves as warriors and become de facto samurai. Formal bushido did not count for much when 150 warlords fought for dominance.

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.

During the Tokugawa era, samurai increasingly became courtiers, bureaucrats and administrators rather than warriors and the daisho, the paired swords of samurai (katana and wakizashi) became more of a symbolic emblem of power rather than a weapon used in daily life. They still had the legal right to cut down any commoner who did not show proper respect; in what extent this right was used, is unknown. When the central government forced daimyos to cut the size of their armies, unemployed ronin actually became a social problem.

Scholars codified the bushido in its eventual form in the Tokugawa era. Also, the most famous book of kenjutsu, Miyamoto Musashi’s The Book of Five Rings, is from this period (1643). Still, the incident of 47 samurai caused some debate about the righteousness of their actions. Hagakure: The Book of the Samurai by Yamamoto Tsunetomo is a manual of instruction into the way of the samurai. It illuminates one of the core practices of that way, known as shudo, or the way of the young. Shudo involved a young samurai choosing an older warrior as lover and mentor, a relationship so intense it often conflicted with a samurai’s devotion to his daimyo.