The samurai and the rise of the shogunate
Warrior clans take real power from the court; Minamoto no Yoritomo founds the first shogunate, and centuries of warrior rule culminate in the civil wars of the Sengoku era.
- Samurai, Warfare and the State in Early Medieval Japan — Karl F. Friday, Routledge (2004)
- The Taming of the Samurai: Honorific Individualism and the Making of Modern Japan — Eiko Ikegami, Harvard University Press (1995)
- A History of Japan (2nd edition) — Conrad Totman, Blackwell (2005)
By the twelfth century, provincial warriors, the bushi or samurai (“those who serve”), had become indispensable to the court. In the Genpei War (1180–85) the Minamoto clan destroyed their rivals the Taira, and Minamoto no Yoritomo set up a military government at Kamakura. In 1192 he received the title shōgun. Emperors remained in Kyoto, sacred but largely powerless, a split between symbolic and real authority that would last almost seven centuries.
- Samurai, Warfare and the State in Early Medieval Japan — Karl F. Friday, Routledge (2004)
- A History of Japan (2nd edition) — Conrad Totman, Blackwell (2005)
The Kamakura regime repelled two Mongol invasions, in 1274 and 1281, helped by storms remembered as kamikaze, “divine winds”. Zen Buddhism spread among warriors. After the Ōnin War (1467–77), central authority collapsed into the Sengoku, “warring states”, period, a century of fighting among regional lords (daimyō).
- A History of Japan (2nd edition) — Conrad Totman, Blackwell (2005)
- Samurai, Warfare and the State in Early Medieval Japan — Karl F. Friday, Routledge (2004)
Three men reunified the country: Oda Nobunaga, who used firearms introduced by the Portuguese in 1543; Toyotomi Hideyoshi, who also invaded Korea in the 1590s, a devastating war still remembered there; and Tokugawa Ieyasu.
- A History of Japan (2nd edition) — Conrad Totman, Blackwell (2005)
- The Taming of the Samurai: Honorific Individualism and the Making of Modern Japan — Eiko Ikegami, Harvard University Press (1995)
Why it matters today
The samurai are Japan's best-known export image, and ideals linked to them, loyalty, discipline, self-control, are still invoked in business and sport. Historians stress that "bushidō" as a code was largely codified much later, in peacetime and in the Meiji era.