For 250 years they had almost nobody to fight
In 1600 the Battle of Sekigahara ended more than a century of civil war, and the Tokugawa SHOGUN who won it built a system designed to prevent another. It worked. From 1603 to 1868 JAPAN was largely at peace, and the SAMURAI, a hereditary WARRIOR class making up perhaps six per cent of the population, spent that time mostly not fighting.
They became administrators. Samurai ran the tax offices, the courts and the castle towns, drew stipends measured in rice, and were expected to be literate, to write poetry and to practise the tea ceremony. They still wore two swords as a mark of rank, and most of them never drew one in anger. The famous image of the samurai is largely an image of a small number of generations before 1600.
Archers first, swordsmen later
Early samurai were mounted archers. ARCHERY from horseback was the core skill for centuries, and the old phrase for the warrior's calling translates as the way of the horse and bow. The long asymmetric bow is shot from a point well below the middle, so a rider could handle it.
The KATANA rose as battles changed, and its manufacture is a real feat of metallurgy. The smith folds and hammers the steel repeatedly to drive out impurities, then coats the blade in clay — thick along the back, thin at the edge — before quenching it. The edge cools fast and becomes very hard; the spine stays softer and absorbs shock, and the differing rates of cooling put the curve into the blade. The wavy line visible along a polished edge, the hamon, is the boundary between the two.
Bushido was written down late, and in English
Codes of conduct for warriors existed for centuries, and they varied a great deal by period and clan. BUSHIDO as a single tidy code of HONOR, LOYALTY and DISCIPLINE owes much to a book called Bushido: The Soul of Japan, published in 1900 by Nitobe Inazō — written in English, for Western readers, three decades after the samurai class had been abolished.
That does not make the values invented, but it does mean the neat version is a later explanation of a messier past. The story of the forty-seven RONIN — masterless samurai who waited nearly two years to avenge their lord in 1703 and then gave themselves up — became the great national example of loyalty, and has been retold on stage and screen ever since.
The end of the class, and the rest of the grid
After the EMPEROR was restored to real power in 1868, the samurai were dismantled within a decade: stipends converted to bonds, the class merged into the general population, and in 1876 the wearing of swords in public banned. A rebellion in Satsuma the following year, led by Saigō Takamori, was defeated by a conscript army of farmers' sons with rifles.
The NINJA in the grid were real enough as spies and scouts, but the black suit comes from the theatre, where stagehands dressed in black were conventionally invisible to the audience. The rest is the equipment and hierarchy: the DAIMYO lords, the CASTLE, lacquered ARMOR, the HELMET, the BANNER worn on the back in battle, the short DAGGER, the SWORD, the BATTLE and the DYNASTY of shoguns. Our martial arts page covers the fighting traditions that survived.