Musui's Story: The Autobiography of a Tokugawa Samurai

"This is a wonderful autobiography from the 19th century of a really low-ranking, dirty warrior. He’s essentially recording his ne’er-do-well ways for his son—getting into fights, partying, being arrested. Sometimes he’s a sword seller—non-warriors sometimes liked to imitate the image of the samurai so he would appraise swords for commoners and buy and sell for them—sometimes he’s scamming people out of money by being a fortune teller. This book is assigned in a lot of Japanese history classes so students can understand that warriors were not these noble men we see on TV or in popular culture. Some of the lowest ones had a real rough time of it and were scoundrels, and this book is just a perfect example of that. It’s short and easy to read and regular folks will love reading it as well. It really destroys the noble image of the samurai in wonderful ways. Yes, which is why I liked it at the beginning when you said that the samurai became their own caste. A lot of people would say they became their own class, but they’re not a class in the economic sense. Some of the lords or daimyō might be wealthy, but a lot of samurai were poor and because they’re born into their career, they have a hard time earning money. Sometimes they do it on the sly, and their boss looks the other way. Sometimes they get permission to do something on the side for money and sometimes they get into real gangsta-type stuff, as Musui does. They don’t really own the land they have. It depends on what rank of samurai you are, but if you’re a lowly guy like Musui, you don’t have any connection to land whatsoever. Once we get to mid- and higher-ranking samurai you might have land of which the produce is assigned to you as part of your salary, in some sense. But you would never be able to go out and rule that land directly. The land is not yours as such; you don’t live on it and you have little or no interaction with the village that might be assigned to your family’s income. In a domain, the daimyō owns all the land. All the samurai live in one capital city in each domain, to keep an eye on them. It’s also to keep them out of the countryside where they could get up to no good. The Warring States period was all about local warriors banding together and overthrowing a lord. So the way you avoid that is to put all the warriors in one town and then they can’t plot and plan out in the countryside. Peasants love this as well, because there are no warriors living next to them all the time constantly monitoring them. A warrior might be sent out once in a while to check on them and to assess their produce for tax purposes. Support Five Books Five Books interviews are expensive to produce. If you're enjoying this interview, please support us by donating a small amount . So most of the land is owned by the local daimyō but then a quarter of the total land in Japan is owned by the Tokugawa shogunate. The Tokugawa clan runs the regime and they have lands scattered all around Japan. So in a particular domain, a daimyo might own most of the land, but there might be a little chunk that is assigned to the Tokugawa clan’s own warriors or something like that. Yes, he’s a warrior, but he’s at the top. Those are few in number. Most of the warriors are not daimyō."