![]() ![]() Edo-period samurai started assuming the values of the court-aristocracy, while simultaneously resurrecting centuries-disused aspects of the samurai honor code from before the Mongol invasion, and didn't like to talk about actual warfare-they also pretended they were primarily swordsmen, while the main roles of the samurai in war were actually Horse Archers, archers and spearmen. The idea that the ninja were something separate from the rest of Japanese society came about during the Edo period (a 250 year long period of peace), after Tokugawa Ieyasu became shogun and unified the country. In Real Life, while some ninjas were mercenaries, most ninjas were actually samurai themselves. However, the aforementioned depiction is not historically accurate. This is commonly seen in works featuring ninjas, in which samurai and ninja were either depicted as mortal enemies, or ninjas being mercenaries hired by the samurai to do the unsavory wetwork honorable samurai would not do. Although women could be and frequently were warriors, the social and military rules for them were somewhat different than for men.Ī popular misconception holds that the samurai were the counter-culture to the Ninja that is, whereas samurai tend to came from the upper classes and were honorable warriors who fight face to face and use no "dirty" tricks, ninjas tend to be from the lower classes, were skilled at unorthodox warfare and would not hesitate to use backstabbing, poison, or spying to gain the upper hand. ![]() However, the degree to which individual samurai actually adhered to bushido (which as a formal concept may be Newer Than They Think, according to historians, though patterns and traditions in common with the concept certainly existed throughout the centuries) varied about as much as the degree to which individual knights in Europe adhered to the code of chivalry - which is to say, you could find everything from bandits in armor to saints of the battlefield. Theoretically, samurai were supposed to follow the bushido code of honor, which stressed loyalty to one's master, self discipline and respectful, ethical behavior. Members of the military class in feudal Japan, they had considerable social status, and after the end of the 16th century until the mid-19th century, they were the only Japanese citizens legally allowed to own swords (with the exception of swords having blades less than 24 inches, which were legally considered wakizashi and legal for non-samurai to own), causing wearing both a long and short sword (called the daishō, literally "big-little") to become a symbol of the samurai.
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