The Taming of the Samurai: Honorific Individualism and the Making of Modern Japan

"This is an older book. I don’t necessarily agree with everything in it, but it’s a book that tries to do a lot of very broad things that are very bold and ambitious in a good way. Again, she’s looking at the Tokugawa period from the 17th through the 19th centuries and asking, how does the warrior regime function? What does it mean to be a warrior? And how do we go from having warriors who were very violent in warfare during the Warring States period of the 16th century into the not-so-violent types of this later period? How do we tame them, essentially? How do we do that by changing the ethos and the notions of what it means to be a samurai? She does this by looking at notions of honour. Essentially, what it means to be a samurai is that, sure, you learn how to use weapons and that kind of thing, but really a true warrior is someone who has self-restraint and holds himself back, who doesn’t take an insult and just fly off the handle and get into a fight. That’s one of the big things that she’s looking at. That is part of the book, but I’m not sure it’s the strongest part. Usually, when people read it, it’s more for the samurai ethos and the taming part, rather than the ‘this is how we get to the 20th century.’"