The were members of the professional warrior class in pre-industrial Japan, who served as retainers to the lords. These men came from warrior families and trained from a young age in military arts through private instruction. Swordsmanship, archery, and horsemanship were the primary martial skills; and often in Japanese history, only samurai had the right to even possess these weapons.Harald Kleinschmidt. Warfare in Japan, p. 79: "However, the Kamakura bakufu prohibited those of bonge status to ride horses or to carry swords, bows, and arrows within the city limits of Kamakura. [...] In it we can detect the intention of the bakufu to make archery, swordmanship, and horsemanship, the major martial skills of the bushi class, the exclusive attribute of those of bushi status." These weapons required years of training to master, and this commitment made the samurai superior to conscripts and militia, the latter who were typically given only days of training.Louis G. Perez. A History of Japan, p. 34: "One mounted samurai armed with a longbow, a good razor-sharp steel long sword, and protected (as was his horse) by lacquered armor and helmet cost more than 50 ashigaru armed with iron pikes and protected by thick twisted straw rope layered over leather armored vests. A samurai took years to train, an ashigaru, only days." The samurai also studied literature, calligraphy, and Confucian philosophy, befitting their roles as bureaucrats under the shoguns.
The role of the samurai changed over time. In the medieval period, warriors were closely associated with military service, landholding, lord-vassal ties, and local authority. Under the Tokugawa shogunate, prolonged peace and domain government transformed the warrior estate into a hereditary status and administrative class. Many samurai served as officials, police, teachers, or domain administrators while retaining privileges such as stipends, status distinction, access to office, and the right to bear arms. After the Meiji Restoration, the abolition of the domains, conscription, the commutation and abolition of hereditary stipends, and the removal of privileges such as sword-wearing dismantled the institutional basis of samurai status; former samurai feudal lords were reorganized as kazoku (nobility) along with court nobles, while most former warriors became shizoku. These classes remained legally recognized until 1947; in the 1918 census, kazoku and shizoku accounted for approximately 0.01% and 4.06% of the population, respectively.
Terminology The proper Japanese term for a professional warrior is and the word meant "warrior family (or families)".
The word "samurai" is thought to come from the word "saburau" and means "one who serves [their lord]", and therefore the samurai are generally defined as retainers or vassals. The warlords who ruled Japan (the daimyo and the shogun) were members of the bushi class but were not referred to as samurai.
English scholars frequently treat samurai and bushi as synonyms. In translating Japanese texts, often gets translated to samurai.
A ronin was a samurai who had lost his master. He could no longer be properly called a samurai as he served nobody, but he did retain some rights as a warrior such as the right to carry weapons and use a surname.
Rise, transformation, and dissolution
Rise of the warrior clans (700 - 1180 AD)
Up until the late 8th century AD, Japan had a national conscript army. As peace settled in, the imperial court began dismantling the system, eventually ending it by 792 AD. Conscripts were seen as unreliable and poorly trained, to be used only when there were not enough professional warriors to deal with a formidable enemy, such as when the Chinese invaded. Conscript footsoldiers proved to be particularly ineffective in the Japanese' war with the Emishi, an ethnic minority in the north that relied on mounted warriors and were thus highly mobile. The deciding factor in most battles had been professional mounted archers who came from the wealthy families.Paul Varley. Warriors of Japan as Portrayed in the War Tales, p. 3: "In 792, two years before the move to Heian, the court issued an edict ending most conscription and dissolving the gundan, except for those in outlying regions: Mutsu and Dewa provinces in northern Honshu, Sado Island in the Sea of Japan, and northern Kyushu. Conscription had proved difficult to administer and was socially disruptive. Moreover, most peasant conscripts were poor fighters. On those occasions when gundan forces were mobilized for battle in the late sixth and seventh centuries, the horse-riding bowmen of the elite district families provided the decisive fighting power. The government didn't train conscripts to be mounted archers because that took years and conscripts were short-term warriors. So it instead recruited men who already had these skills, acquired through private training funded by their families' wealth.Karl Friday. Hired Swords, p. 39: "...fighting from horseback was an extraordinarily complex skill to master, one that required years of training and practice. It was simply impossible to produce first-rate cavalrymen out of short-term, peasant conscripts. [...] The government expended minimal effort training ordinary conscripts as horsemen, preferring instead to rely on the talents of those who had acquired skills in mounted archery before their induction." Similarly, soldiers in the imperial army were expected to provide most of their own equipment.Clements. A Brief History of the Samurai: "Although Temmu died before his system had been fully implemented, by the early eighth century an organization was in place that was designed to levy a conscript militia from local peasants. Heavy matériel was provided by the state from the district arsenals, but the conscripts were expected to bring their own sword and dagger, armour and a helmet made from wicker or straw, a bow and fifty arrows." Wealthy men who could afford horses and archery training were promoted to elite units, whereas the poor were consigned to being footsoldiers. The poor disliked military service for this reason, and because their farms often fell into decay with their absence, so there was popular support for ending conscription.
Taxation during the 8th century was high but temples, monasteries, shrines, and certain aristocrats obtained tax exemptions through their connections to the imperial court. To evade taxes, many landowners in the countryside donated their lands to these tax-exempt entities. The land would be registered in the name of said noble or temple and would become part of their tax-exempt estate (shōen) but would still be used by the same person who originally owned it. The former owner, now a steward on his lord's estate, had to pay his lord an annual tribute that was less than what he would have had to pay the emperor in tax had he been the landowner. There was usually an agreement that when the steward died, his children would inherit his position. If the temple or lord cheated the steward somehow, the farmer could retaliate by exposing the scheme, which might have cost the temple or noble its tax-exempt privilege.Stephen Turnbull. The Samurai: A Military HistoryEiko Ikegami. The Taming of the Samurai. p. 52: "Because local reclamation landownership at this stage was still unstable, and restricted by the framework of the ancient codes, local reclamation landowners sometimes sought the protection of the power-holders in Kyoto by “commending” their own land to them. Thus the actual local owners were able to secure not only their control over land but also immunity from the local government." The growth of the shōen led to a loss of tax revenue for the imperial court, and a heavier tax burden on those farmers who worked the remaining taxable land. These farmers often could not cope and abandoned their lands, which were bought up by the landowning magnates.Mikiso Hane. Premodern Japan, p. 57: "The rise of the shōen meant a steady decline in the authority of the central government. Taxes collected by the government decreased, and police and military power in the provinces fell increasingly into the hands of the local magnates. [...] The deterioration of the peasantry resulted in part from the fact that, as tax-free estates proliferated, the tax burden grew heavier upon those who worked the little-remaining taxable land. [...] Unable to pay their debts and unable to bear the burden of heavy taxes, they left the land and joined the ranks of vagrants. The land they abandoned was taken over the rising local landowning magnates."
In the middle of the 8th century, the imperial government instituted a major reform which allowed individuals to claim private ownership of new farmland that they had reclaimed from the wilderness. This spurred wealthy people to start reclaiming farmland, which was necessary to feed Japan's growing population. During the 11th and 12th centuries, bushi became conspicuously involved in land reclamation, thereby becoming a landowning class.Eiko Ikegami. The Taming of the Samurai, pp. 52-53: "During the eleventh and twelfth centuries, however, the level of samurai activity in land reclamation became conspicuous. With their active participation in the process of land reclamation, the samurai clearly emerged as a class of landed lords." And like many landowners, the bushi often donated their lands to a shōen to avoid taxes. This had the effect of enriching the bushi while simultaneously depriving the imperial treasury.
In the Heian period it was the habit of emperors to keep harems, and consequently the imperial family got so large, it burdened the treasury. In the early 9th century AD, Emperor Saga expelled several dozen members from the imperial family, who formed two new clans: the Minamoto clan (814 AD) and the Taira clan (825 AD). Many wealthy provincial families married into the Minamotos and Tairas in order to acquire aristocratic status, gaining prestige and often tax exemptions. And so the Tairas and Minamotos became big and wealthy clans with lots of warrior retainers.Jonathan Clements. A Brief History of the Samurai: "Sons of the Taira and Minamoto were promising matches for the daughters of provincial strongmen, adding a noble cachet to outer clans. The daughters were similarly highly thought of, and many husbands took on the surname of their wives in recognition. Even those Taira and Minamoto fallen on hard times still had their name to trade; numerous noble-born debtors adopted their provincial creditors as their heirs as a form of payment in kind, ensuring that the Taira and Minamoto names were soon firmly ingrained in provincial landholdings."
Thus with the downsizing of the national army and the decline in tax revenue, the emperors delegated the matter of security in the countryside to the burgeoning class of landed warriors. They had a personal incentive to suppress lawlessness in their own lands as it directly impacted their revenue.
The Genpei War (1180–1185)
Two leading warrior clans, the Minamoto clan and the Taira clan, had both gained court positions and became rivals.