What is a samurai?

Japan is just another name for Japan. In Japanese, the word samurai means waiter and personal waiter. A samurai should abide by the principles of fearlessness, loyalty, ability and courage. But this principle only represents the ideal. A warrior's loyalty and bravery are based on the master-slave system in which his loyal lords can reward the samurai for their contributions.

Samurai originated in heian period. From the mid-9th century, some local lords began to build private armed forces to defend themselves, and used their expanding power. This armed force has gradually matured into an institutionalized professional military organization, based on clan and master-slave relationship. By the tenth century, the imperial court was unable to suppress the rebellion of local forces, so it had to rely on the strength of samurai from all over the world, and the samurai was further recognized by the central government and became the privileged ruling class in Japan.

Japan's Kamakura shogunate is the birthplace of Japanese Bushido, but it did not take shape, but was finally formed by absorbing Confucianism in the Edo period. At the beginning of the establishment of the Kamakura shogunate Bushido, loyalty, faithfulness, sincerity and martial arts were regarded as the main ideas. However, Bushido, as a political product of the feudal shogunate era, could not absorb the true meaning of Confucianism, Buddhism and Taoism at all, but was the inherent Shinto of the Japanese nation, which made up for some shortcomings that Confucianism, Buddhism and Taoism could not satisfy Bushido.