The Samurai

Wolfgang Schwentker’s book describes origins, rise and fall of the Samurai over the course of more than a thousand years. We learn about the history of the legendary warrior rank in the context of the political and cultural history of Japan. The narrative moves from the early warriors of the fifth and sixth centuries to the formal abolition of Samurais as a social rank after the Meiji Restoration in 1868. After the dissolution of the Samurai as a ruling class, the older ideology of the bushidô (‘the way of the warrior’) yet lives on in politics and economy of modern Japan.