Welcome to brain Stuff production of I Heart Radio, Hey brain Stuff, Lauren Bogelbaum here. Japanese samurai movies are a century old tradition, and their tropes have been picked up in stories all over the world. George Lucas has said that one of his inspirations for the original Star Wars movie was at eight samurai film called The Hidden Fortress. Another classic samurai picture, Jimbo, was loosely adapted into Sergio Leone Western a fistful of dollars. Pop culture frames samurai
as near mythic figures. We're told samurai belonged to an elite class of Japanese warriors who always fought fair, loyally defended their medieval lords, and hued to a unifying honor code known as bushido. Filmmakers sometimes pit them against dark robed ninja assassins fearsome mercenary. The classic movie Ninja carries razor sharp throwing stars and has mastered a martial art
called ninjatsu. Many more modern tellings even give one or both of these characters supernatural powers like flight or invisibility, but magical talents aside. Just how accurate is our modern outlook on samurai and ninja. To find out, we interviewed three historians. Japanese history is broken down into eras and periods.
Particularly relevant to our discussion here are the Sengoku period of fourteen sixty seven to sixteen o three c and the successive Tokugawa period or Edo period that lasted until eighteen sixty eight. The ladder Tokugawa period takes its name from a shogun family that assumed control of Japan in
sixteen o three. Shogun were hereditary military dictators who had been running the country since eleven ninety two c E. On paper, they served Japan's emperors, but in practice these figures were far more powerful, and it was they who truly called the shots. Earlier centuries had been played by constant warfare, but things stayed calm under the Tokugawa regime. International trade was tightly regulated, and the shogun took pains to discourage political squabbles. This was also a time when
Japan redefined its relationship with samurai. But we spoke with Thomas Conlin, a professor of East Asian history at Princeton University, via email. He explained the samurai became an identifiable social status only in the fifteen nineties. Before then, all of society was militarized and there was no distinction between peasants and warriors. Such ambiguity didn't sit well with one game changing warlord, General Toyotomi Hideyoshi. He issued a nationwide sword
hunt edict in eight during these Angoku period. This prohibited farmers from owning weapons of any sort. Under these new rules, only samurai and samurai alone could bear arms. We also spoke with historian Nick Kapoor of Rutgers University via al. He said, basically, people who were known to have fought in battles recently were considered samurai and were forbidden to go back to farming, and people who were known to
be currently farming land had to surrender their weapons. In a lot of cases, it was self reported and people basically got to choose. Toyotomi's reforms carried over into the Tokugawa period. In effect, they laid the groundwork for a rigid, hereditary caste like system that put samurai above artisans, merchants and peasants. By then, the feudal wars that defined the single Ku period had long passed, with no battles to wage.
The samurai were given bureaucratic and administrative roles. Hindsight sometimes has a way of glamorizing warfare. We also spoke by email with Sarah Paul, a historian of early modern and modern Japan who teaches at the University of Wisconsin, Madison. She said, during the long piece of the Tokugawa era, when samurai came to work more as administrators than as fighters, any romanticized the earlier times of war in the twelfth
to sixteenth centuries, for instance, when samurai actually fought. The last showgun was overthrown in eighteen sixty eight, ending the Tokugawa period. Afterward, Japan entered its reformative Meiji period, which embraced industry and centralized governance. Historically, the samurai had served feudal lords and enjoyed special privileges, but all that soon changed. Paul explained. The official status of samurai was abolished in eighteen sixty nine, and their privileges were voked in the
early eighteen seventies. With the abolition of their lord's domains, many former samurai were out of work, unable to get jobs in the new government. In the eighteen nineties, they their children, and many Japanese began trying to define a way of the samurai. The operated both as a nostalgia for the supposedly moral good old days and as a critique of the modernizing trends of the time. Enter nicobay Idazo, a diplomat and author. He radically transformed the way future
generations would look at samurai. In eight nine, nat the Bay published an influential book called Bushido The Soul of Japan. The text presents itself as an introduction to bushido. According to nitle Bay, this was the traditional universal code of conduct observed by real world samurai, except it wasn't. Kapor noted the so called samurai code of Bushido did not exist in the single co hey day of samurai warfare. Indeed, the word bushido itself wasn't coined until the peaceful Tokugawa period.
But it is from Bushido the Soul of Japan that we get some of the most pervasive myths about samurai values and behavior. Thal said Samurai were not all the moral, noble, well to do spiritual swordsmen depicted in film. They did not have a single coherent moral code that defined how they thought and acted, and Kapoor said, just like warrior, as anywhere else, samurai raped and looted and pillaged, and we're constantly betraying their lords. Speaking of misconceptions, it's time
to talk Ninja. Supposedly, they were cell swords who performed covert operations, gathered intelligence, and assassinated people in the cover of darkness. Ega and Coca, two neighboring regions in southeastern Japan, are usually cited as the training grounds where Ninja honed their deadly skills. Sometimes you'll even hear that Ninja formed a hereditary class or cast not unlike the samurai. The
lore is pervasive in pop culture every year. Some enthusiasts even dress up to celebrate Ninja Day on February twenty two. Not to rain on anyone's parade, but these storied mercenaries are kind of fabricated, Kapoor said, Ninja as we know them today did not actually exist. He explained that the word ninja comes from two Chinese characters meaning stealth and man, which is pronounced shinobi by the way, by most Japanese language speakers. Medieval Japan had its share of folks who
snuck into castles, and embraced undercover warfare. Historical records show samurai weren't above such tactics, Kapor said, we have a lot of documents about these activities, but they were carried out by a variety of people. There was never any specialized class of assassins living in hereditary clans and selling their services for hire. This is pure myth, which, liked the myths about the samurai, was created during the long and peaceful Ido period. Despite this, ninja fables are nothing new,
Paul said. Even by the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, ninja had become a pop culture phenomenon in Japan, so there were all sorts of fantastic fictional depictions in art, literature, drama, and the light. Today's episode was written by Mark Mancini and produced by Tyler Clang. For more on this and lots of other mythical topics, visit how stuff works dot com.
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