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Women weren't actually allowed to be samurai. Samurai is a masculine term, which means women couldn't be samurai. Women became Onna-bugeisha instead. Joshwada ( talk) 01:38, 10 February 2016 (UTC)
Given that samurai in Japan is never, ever used,and bushi is, samurai should redirect to bushi, not vice versa.
Frank (Urashima Tarō) ( talk) 05:39, 12 February 2016 (UTC)
/info/en/?search=Rurouni_Kenshin
I think Rurouni Kenshin should be listed as well, especially since it happens during the transition of the samurai dominated era to the western era, with manga, anime, and live action films. It portrays a stylized view not often seen in most material, and similar to the setting in The Last Samurai. — Preceding unsigned comment added by 64.39.156.254 ( talk) 19:18, 16 December 2016 (UTC)
Samurai are most interesting warriors. With thir battle prowess and capabilities for both ranged and close-assault attacks, they are a formidable force. Their armor is highly useful and even represents their wealth. Samurai were wealthy japanese warriors and therefore had the best training, armor, and weapons. — Preceding unsigned comment added by Josh421 ( talk • contribs) 18:04, 5 November 2018 (UTC)
Officials of and under the sixth rank were called simobito, or "people on the ground", as opposed to tenjoubito, "people in the audience hall", for those fifth rank and above. Samurai seems associated with the verb saburau meaning "to attend". Uses of the word 侍 was not associated with Samurai until the Kamukura period; previously, it referred to a range of attendants including secretaries and notaries, but not samurai as we know it. — Preceding unsigned comment added by Y11971alex ( talk • contribs) 06:58, 21 February 2017 (UTC)
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209.156.232.194 ( talk) 14:15, 5 December 2018 (UTC)
samurai often used the stars to tell when to atack
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Please delete this duplicate word in the section " History" "of all all the classes during the Meiji revolution they were the most affected" 81.96.15.89 ( talk) 10:22, 22 November 2019 (UTC)
At some point, samurai were forbidden from joining the military or serving in government. Has this changed?
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Under section "Women" there is a tense disagreement in the fourth sentence of the second paragraph. The sentence should maintain the past tense of the rest of the article. (i.e. "A woman could divorce her husband if he did not treat her well or if he was a traitor to his wife's family.") Ideally, a citation would also be introduced. 142.118.156.185 ( talk) 16:25, 21 September 2020 (UTC)
{{
citation needed}}
to that paragraph. Thanks, ‑‑
ElHef (
Meep?) 17:22, 21 September 2020 (UTC)according to the guardian the "first samurai" in history was Taira no Masakado: "The tale of the ‘first samurai’ whose severed head still terrorises Tokyoites today is the story of the city itself" & "Eventually those rebels seized power for themselves through victory in combat, and Masakado was anointed the 'first samurai'." where does this source fit in the article? thank you Grandia01 ( talk) 05:44, 4 March 2021 (UTC)
The myth and reality section of the article could use some further elaboration to some points it has already made, and some minor corrections.
Firstly, samurai never followed any sort of stable rigid "honor code" prior to when Bushido was written long after the samurai were gone. Of course there were guidelines as to how a warrior should train, what kind of skills and tactics they should learn, and basic etiquette, but these were far from any sort of ritualized honor code. It should be further emphasized that samurai, especially the earliest samurai clans (particularly during the Heian Period) behaved no better than pillaging bandits. [1] They also functioned as tax collectors, and were hired to routinely squash rebellions. Samurai committed quite a few atrocities as well, like the Enryaku-ji Massacre, and were also quite treacherous/brutal towards one another (Minamoto No Yoritomo executing his brothers Yoshitsune and Noriyori, The battle of Sekigahara, and pretty much any other significant historical event revolved around betrayal or slaughter just like anywhere else.) Samurai were largely self-interested, and their only real motivation was to gain land, power, and income, nevermind "honor" This is a good source for further information ( https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=O6xgz4p2d60) -- MountedSamurai ( talk) 18:22, 7 April 2021 (UTC)
References
Came here to say this. Personal philosophies, either clan or self-imposed, existed — but they were nor universal nor monolithic, as described in the Bushido article itself with 5 different sources. The way the section is currently written is prone to misinterpretations. Queen of Wa, friend of Wei ( talk) 01:32, 21 October 2022 (UTC)
There is an ongoing discussion on the page for Yasuke concerning an inaccurate definition of the word "samurai". The term was repeatedly removed from his article because someone wanted to define the samurai as hereditary, despite it not being in the dictionary definition or any of the cited sources—and despite the fact that virtually every source refers to Yasuke as a samurai.
This article includes him in the "Foreign Samurai" section, but there were similar (unsourced) edits added there to cast doubt on his status, and the main intro to the article also included the word "hereditary"—again without citation.
I've removed these erroneous additions. natemup ( talk) 11:54, 5 May 2021 (UTC)
The Sengoku jidai ("warring states period") was marked by the loosening of samurai culture, with people born into other social strata sometimes making a name for themselves as warriors and thus becoming de facto samurai.
@ Natemup: Would you mind explaining this? I Ctrl+Fed both Edo and Edo period for "Duus" and "hereditary" and couldn't find what you were referring to: are you talking about a different article? Anyway, if you have not actually consulted the cited source but are instead copying information from within Wikipedia, it is inappropriate to include an inline citation of a separate source: you have been citing Wikipedia, not Duus. Courtesy pinging @ Goszei and Nishidani: What do you two make of this? (Sorry for bothering you with this, Nishidani; you're the one experienced Japanese history editor who I trust to disagree with me if you think that I'm wrong. Others might just assume that I'm right given my "qualifications" in this area, agree with me without looking into the matter carefully, and thus cause a concern of canvassing.) Hijiri 88 ( 聖 やや) 02:17, 26 May 2021 (UTC)
Positions within the samurai class were largely hereditary(emphasis added). This appears (to me as someone with a general awareness of pre-modern Japanese history but who has not read Duus) to refer to posts like chamberlain, master of arms, etc., not to shi status itself (which is referred to as being hereditary several times throughout the article). Do you understand how this is different from what your edit says? Anyway, citing a poorly-sourced article based almost exclusively on a source discussing a different period of history is even worse than citing just the average Wikipedia article. I will revert you in nine hours if you do not provide a source that actually supports your claim. Hijiri 88 ( 聖 やや) 02:31, 26 May 2021 (UTC)
It appears to be the case to me that idiosyncratic edits have damaged this and other articlesI could not agree more. [1] [2] [3] In all seriousness, the first "samurai" of which we have record are members of warrior clans of imperial ancestry, primarily the Minamoto and Taira. Later various figures of uncertain origin who may have originally been commoner peasants emerged and claimed to be of Minamoto or Taira ancestry, and if they managed to gain and hold on to political/military power, they invariably passed this down to their descendants. The fact that some or most of such individuals almost certainly were not of imperial or noble ancestry is irrelevant, since they claimed to be and they passed their status to their descendants. You have not cited a single reliably-sourced instance of someone possessing non-hereditary "samurai" status. Hijiri 88 ( 聖 やや) 02:54, 26 May 2021 (UTC)
[has] not publicly retreat[ed] from the initial, falsified assertionthat "samurai" status was not hereditary, he has now
offer[ed] a modified assertion that [the "samurai" status was only "sometimes" or "often" hereditary](I admit I'm fudging a bit here: the burden is not on me to demonstrate that Natemup is himself completely guilty of the exact logical fallacy he has baselessly accused me of), and the "no true Scotsman" thing is itself
using rhetoric. Yeah, there's a lot of fudging there, but I'm not the one making the positive claim here: none of this applies to my assertion, backed up by all reliable sources that address the matter, that in pre-modern Japan social class and occupation were, with few exceptions, hereditary, and that "samurai" status should be presumed to be the same pending at least one source that indicates otherwise. (I am not, mind you, presuming anything: I've read hundreds of sources supporting this assertion, and cited four inline [4] that I had to cherry-pick because Natemup was rejecting any source that didn't explicitly use the exact words "hereditary military aristocracy".) Hijiri 88 ( 聖 やや) 03:57, 26 May 2021 (UTC)
The WP:LEDECITEs seem to still be necessary, so I've restored them, moved slightly to follow "nobility", since most of them also explicitly support not only "hereditary" but also "military nobility". I personally hate LEDECITEs in general, especially in cases like this where they expose, to this article's roughly 3,000 daily visitors, the fact that there is a dispute among Wikipedians (or, rather, between one Wikipedian and everyone else) regarding a fact that is uncontroversial outside of Wikipedia and was even uncontroversial here until a few weeks ago. The formatting is largely a result of me not wanting to format four templates for an ultimately temporary solution, but it also serves the purpose of keeping the lead "clean" of any more than one number and two square brackets; I would like to see this "dispute" resolved as quickly and cleanly as possible and the LEDECITEs (which I have formatted as a single citation of four ELs) removed or WP:COMMENTed out. Hijiri 88 ( 聖 やや) 04:13, 26 May 2021 (UTC)
The word “predecessor” is misspelled in the first paragraph, but I don’t have the ability to edit it. Kashmirton ( talk) 00:51, 22 October 2021 (UTC)
The English Wikipedia article here and the Japanese Wikipedia articles at ja:侍 and ja:武士 diverge in worrisome ways. The English article starts off by conflating "samurai" and "bushi", two distinct groups in Japanese history, and claiming that this munged-together group has been around since the 1100s. The Japanese sources I've looked at instead describe the "samurai" as a hereditary nobility class, and the "bushi" as a warrior or soldier class. There was apparently overlap, but these were distinct groups.
Considering the subject matter, I find the Japanese content more credible. Notably, the Japanese article at ja:武士 explicitly states that the word "samurai" is not synonymous with "bushi".
As additional evidence of the distinction between the two terms, the 1603 Nippo Jisho entry for "saburai" (archaic form of modern samurai; see here, left column, halfway down) defines the term as follows:
Distinct from any "warrior" or "soldier" sense. I cannot find any instance of the term guerreiro ("warrior") in the Nippo Jisho, but it does have other entries defined as soldado, Portuguese for "soldier". I've copied the Nippo Jisho entry headline on each bullet point, with my transliterations, translations, and comments on the following two lines.
It would appear that our English-language article is in need of an overhaul. ‑‑ Eiríkr Útlendi │ Tala við mig 02:08, 6 January 2022 (UTC)
Under the heading
"Foreign samurai" the lede states "Several people born in foreign countries were granted the title of samurai." What follow are five paragraphs with one or more persons described in each.
William Adams and
Jan Joosten van Lodensteijn are both well attested-to by contemporaneous documentation. But the two names mentioned after them --
Yasuke and
Giuseppe Chiara are decidedly not. The claim made for Chiara is rather fanciful -- that he married the widow of a samurai and thereby assumed her late husband's status as such. That is completely ahistorical. I have never been able to find any evidence that such a profound ascension in a person's caste status could automatically occur through marriage. As a vassal-at-arms to a daimyo, being a samurai was a position of great responsibility and considerable power, and one could not simply "marry into it". More often, things went in the opposite direction; a samurai could be disgraced and his entire family could lose their status.
The second claim -- that of Yasuke -- is no less problematic, since there is absolutely no contemporaneous record of him having been a samurai. He was a weapons-bearer to the daimyo, but he was not permitted to carry the daishō, nor is there mention of him having any of the other privileges that went with being a samurai (such as kiri-sute gomen -- the legal right to kill a commoner who insulted them). According to the article on Yasuke, he "was given his own residence and a short, ceremonial katana [dubious – discuss] by Nobunaga. Nobunaga also assigned him the duty of weapon bearer." The source cited for this is "...a variant text of the Shinchō-ki (信長記) owned by Sonkeikaku Bunko (尊経閣文庫), the archives of the Maeda clan" -- something not accessible via the internet, and therefore not possible to verify. I am not interested in disputing whatever claims are made in inaccessible sources, but even taking them as gospel, the source conspicuously does not claim that Yasuke was a samurai; it describes him as a "weapon bearer" who was granted a residence and possibly a short sword.
As it is dubious that these last two persons were actually samurai, they would not belong under a heading which describes "people born in foreign countries...granted the title of samurai". If they must be listed at all, they should be below a sub-heading labeled "Claimed foreign samurai" or some similar distinction from verified ones.
Bricology (
talk) 03:19, 6 July 2022 (UTC)
...そのまま岡本三右衛門の名を受け継いだ。幕府からは十人扶持を与えられたが、 切支丹屋敷から出ることは許されなかった。
... and thus he took on the name of Okamoto San'emon. The bakufu granted him a stipend of ten person's-worth of rice, but he was not allowed to leave the Christian yashiki [a specific manor or enclave in Edo where various Christians were effectively imprisoned].
- | Kuge Lord (公家領主) | Buke Lord (武家領主) | |||||
---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
- | Emperor and his Court | (Various Daimyo) 諸侯・諸大名 | Head Tokugawa Daimyo (Shogun and Bakufu) | ||||
- | Sekkanke (摂関家) | Outsider Daimyo (外様) | Insider Daimyo (譜代) | Tokugawa family Daimyo (親藩) | Hatamoto (旗本) | Bugyō | |
- | Upper class Kuge Houses | Upper class Bushi (上士, Jōshi) | Upper class Bushi | Upper class Gokenin | Yoriki | ||
- | Lower class Kuge Houses | Lower class Bushi (下士, Kashi) | Lower class Bushi | Lower class Gokenin | Dōshin | ||
- | (Komono - Servants) | (Komono 小者 - Servants of Buke) | (Komono) | (Komono) |
- | Gun-bu (郡部) - Kōri area | Toshi-bu (都市部) - Machi (Town area) | ||
---|---|---|---|---|
(Lord) | Nanushi (名主) | Machi-Nanushi (町名主) | ||
(Officers) | Mura Yakunin | Machi Yakunin (町役人) | ||
Occupation | Farmers (農民) | Merchants (商人) | Craftsmen (職人・工人) | Special* |
Chief | Shōya (庄屋) | Shōka no Aruji (主人) | Oyakata, Kashira, Tōryō etc. | (various titles) |
Upper class | Jikanō (自家農)# | Bantō (番頭), Tedai (手代) | Hira Shokunin (平職人) | |
Lower class | Kosakunō (小作農)# | Minarai (見習い), Decchi (丁稚) | Minarai Shokunin (見習い) | |
Non-registered | Mushuku (無宿)* | |||
Lowest, Untouchable | Hinin (非人) |
Ultimately this comes down to, what do multiple reliable sources say? If multiple reliable sources say they're samurai, then they're samurai. If the reliable sources disagree on this then we can say that. At the end of the day our interpretation and research is not relevant to the topic only what the reliable sources state. Canterbury Tail talk 12:22, 7 July 2022 (UTC)
Comments needed concerning the historical figure Yasuke. /info/en/?search=Talk:Yasuke#Request_for_comment_on_samurai_terminology natemup ( talk) 03:38, 28 October 2022 (UTC)
I have edited this page some, and I think it could use some fixing. Especially with the small section I put about ninja leaders being samurai.
The creator of the video does claim to have a history PhD, but I would like sources from a book about this and for the section to be expanded.
I also have a question. Did I cite the video correctly? I would like to know what the way to in-text cite a video, TV show, or film is for future edits on other pages. I could not find it. GoutComplex ( talk) 17:39, 13 March 2023 (UTC)
In the arts section of this article, the first paragraph is of St Francis Xavier. Besides being initially unclear who “Francis” is, this should be moved to the religion section and updated with a full name reference. Thoughts? I did not want to arbitrarily edit this article as I have no connection to it other than as a reader. Fax10 ( talk) 15:42, 17 June 2023 (UTC)
In the weapons section there is a photograph captioned 'antique Japanese Katana'. The image is almost certainly of a Tanto, a dagger length blade. As per the main page on Japanese swords, a Tanto is any blade under 1 shaku (about 30cm) long. A Katana is over 2 shaku (60cm) long. The blade in the image is undoubtedly not 60cm long, although it is not impossible it is marginally over 30cm long which would make it a wakizashi. But its far too thick for a wakizashi so I am certain it is a Tanto.
Either way, it is definately not a Katana. Can someone with edit power fix this, or find a different image of a Katana from the main page. 82.21.177.242 ( talk) 21:52, 28 February 2024 (UTC)
I have removed the hierarchy chart, which is completely wrong. Such a hierarchical chart dividing peasants, craftsmen, and merchants into classes is based on an old academic theory from decades ago, and it has become clear in recent years that peasants (hyakushō), craftsmen, and merchants (chōnin) were equal in Japan. Such hierarchical charts have already been removed from Japanese textbooks. [5] [6] [7] [8]-- SLIMHANNYA ( talk) 08:28, 7 March 2024 (UTC)
Removed statements that have nothing to do with samurai culture. In addition, these descriptions give inappropriate weight to the actions of some samurai at one time and their evaluation, and the source and the explanation based on it are quite inaccurate. For example, the explanation based on this source is inappropriate because it synthesizes information about tsuji-giri, a crime committed during the Sengoku period, and kiriste-gomen, a right of samurai in the Edo period that required various conditions for its execution. In addition, the description of "commoners and their village cultures, where pacifist movements flourished" is a strange explanation when it comes to historical facts. Furthermore, there is no source for the statement that the general public compared the actions of ninja and samurai and judged both as dishonorable. The general public's cultural views of the ninja were formed in the Edo period, beginning in the 17th century, and to describe them in combination with the behavior of the samurai during the Sengoku period is an inappropriate synthesis of information. In any case, this is not something that should be written in the section on samurai culture, so it has been deleted.-- SLIMHANNYA ( talk) 18:41, 26 April 2024 (UTC)