The ruling class were part of the samurai, but not all samurai were part of the ruling class. Samurai were not nobility. The emperor, the imperial household and the court nobility were nominally above the shogun.
If there weren’t an imperial court, one could argue that samurai were nobility, but since the court existed, this is not possible.
This is a difference in cultures, where Japanese don’t have a sense of “fair play” which plays so predominantly in American culture, movies, etc.
As one scholar explains, this can be seen in The Magnificent Seven, based on Akira Kurosawa’s Seven Samurai, and one major difference is that in the Western version a confrontation between the gunmen and the bandits was added before the fight.
Just wondering, how many fights have you actually seen in real life where one person was armed and the other wasn’t (not including police/bouncers subduing someone, where ‘fair fight’ doesn’t apply)?
Knights were part of the nobility, yet the overwhelming majority didn’t rule over much either. Not all nobles are Dukes and Counts and Barons.
I maintain that samurai were nobility for all intensive porpoises.
Special laws applied to them, including special hereditary naming rules (equivalent to “Sir X of Y” - *heimin *only had a given name). They had a whole proprietary heraldry thing going on to boot. They were paid no matter what they did and their salary was extorted from the peasants by force. The justification for this was that samurai had to spend their time fighting, or training for the next fight. Their samurai title, and whatever land claim they managed to stake out by deed or scheme during their lives was passed down to their offspring, even if said offspring never held a sword in their life.
How is any of that different from a Western noble, exactly ?
I’ve always been a little curious about something I’ve seen in kung-fu movies where the good guy is surrounded as in encircled by bad guys who do nothing but stand there in menacing poses until the good guy turns around to face them at which point they attack and the good guy slaughters all of them. What’s the point? If I were a bad guy and my enemy was engaged with another bad guy and had his back to me, I’d sure as hell go after him, fair fight or not.
But you’d be wrong, depending on the period of history we are talking about. There were periods of history in Japan where peasants could (or at least did) carry the two swords and be warriors…and there were periods of history in Japan where there were rigid class/caste systems put in place that allowed ONLY warriors of a certain class to carry the two swords.
Even then, however, samurai weren’t the equivalent of western knights. Not all samurai were nobility at all…they were simply part of a rigid warrior caste.
I’m from the south side of Chicago. A lot sadly. Especially if you count multiple people beating on one, or one huge guy in his 20’s beating an old man on crutches, which is a power disparity on par with being armed vs an unarmed person… but these aren’t what I am talking about because those are attacks, not “matches” or duels where the unarmed person would have full rights to complain.
This is because it’s absolutely impossible for anyone to fight off 4 semi-decent fighters at once, so to make it look like the hero is actually doing so, the fight choreographer has the guys not actively attacking the hero bounce around and change poses so that you don’t notice he’s fighting two guys at a time max.
Hrrrm, interesting.
I have heard this story before about how he made the oar into a sword while being rowed to the island for the fight, but I’ve always heard it that he did it to increase the challenge for himself. I like your version better!
What exactly is the definition of “nobility”, that samurai can fail to meet it? It’s not just that the nobility are the highest class of society, since every culture that’s had some form of nobility has had multiple tiers of it. Nor is it just “the English word “noble” translates to the Japanese word so-and-so”, because that’s a circular argument (why are the samurai left out of that translation?).
At times in Japan’s historical past ANYONE could be ‘samurai’…i.e. wear the two swords and be a warrior. A peasant could be a samurai…in fact, IIRC several of the Japanese warlords at various times came from the peasant classes and basically fought their way to the top.
The word ‘samurai’ simply means ‘servant’. I don’t recall exactly when it happened off the top of my head, but one of the first Shogun’s, having subdued most of Japan, codified the classes into a rigid caste system, and gave people the choice of being either samurai (if they were warriors) or peasants (or artisans or whatever). You’d think it was a no brainer, but for reasons I don’t recall a lot of folks went back to being peasants and gave up the swords (or spears or traditional weapons of war). And that is the system that most people associate with the samurai as noble caste/class.
Asian unarmed martial arts claiming to have come about as a result of oppression and claiming to be effective against armed people are BS and usually very modern in origin.
If you are unarmed and there’s a guy with a sword intending ons ticking you with it, and that guy knows how to use it, you either run away or you will die 99.99999999% of the time.
You’ve got too many nines, there, but I don’t think anyone would deny that the guy with the sword has a definite advantage. It’s just a matter of making that advantage not quite so overwhelming.
I don’t know if I would agree with that 1st point. There certainly have to be reasons why such a stupid weapon as a nunchaku/jool bong would start to be used. And I know that martial arts and weaponry in particular was suppressed in Korea during the Japanese occupation, which tends to give at least a little bit of credence to the idea.
But I do agree, I think the idea of “peasanst rising up against their Samurai/Knightly overlords and thrashing them with their bare hands” smacks a bit to much of wishful thinking.
there was actually a set-up for such a combat --at the roman colliseum. an unarmed man is forced to fight an armed man. when the unarmed man was dead, the armed man was dis-armed and another armed man comes out to kill him. have to google for more details on this but the name of the combat gives you a clue on the mortality rate of the unarmed man: the-duel-without-an-end.
As an avid connoisseur of fine films, I have learned that, when confronted by a sword-wielding nihilist, just throw a bowling ball at him and then bite his ear off.
I’m not buying it. What’s the incentive for the fighters? If you know that you’re just going to get killed yourself as soon as you kill the other poor schmuck, you’re not going to go along with it; you’re going to form a truce with the unarmed guy and fight back against the arena organizers.
Yeah. And what’s the deal with the Christians, anyway ? What’s the incentive for them to go ahead and get mauled by lions. If you know you’re just going to get thrown in the middle of a pack of feral wildcats, you’re not going to go along with it…
Snark aside, while I have no data whatsoever re: the supposed mano-a-swordo fights, you seem to be under the impression that gladiators had a say in the matter. While a precious few were volunteers in it for the fame, the grand majority of people who fought in the arena didn’t have a choice. They were slaves. They did what they were told or they got killed then and there.
ETA: It dawns on me that I may have just been wooshed, considering this is a thread about ridiculous movie premises. If so, well, I’m an idiot.
