Term · Japanese culture
Samurai
A hereditary class whose defining right was carrying two swords, and whose defining century involved almost no fighting.
In Otakana the clue reads: Warrior class that served a feudal lord
- Type
- Term
- Series
- Japanese culture
- Letters
- 7 · Easy
The word comes from a verb meaning to serve, and service is the whole design. A samurai held land or a rice stipend from a lord and owed loyalty back. Rank ran from great regional daimyo down to men whose income barely fed a family. The two swords, a long katana and a shorter wakizashi worn together, marked the class in public and were illegal for anyone else to carry.
Two and a half centuries of Tokugawa peace turned warriors into administrators. Samurai became clerks, tax officers and teachers, drilled in schools, went into debt to merchants who ranked below them in theory, and wrote a great deal about what warriors ought to be. The gap between the paperwork and the ideal is what most samurai fiction is quietly about.
Meiji reforms ended the arrangement within a decade. Stipends were converted and then cut, the sword ban of 1876 removed the last public marker, and a conscript army made the class militarily unnecessary. Some rebelled and lost. Kurosawa built the film genre out of the aftermath, and anime borrowed the genre almost intact.
Spelling SAMURAI
SAMURAI is seven letters, four of them vowels, and it ends on the AI pair that also closes yokai and isekai. Two As sit at positions two and six. There are no long vowels and nothing doubles, which makes this one of the more forgiving long words on the list. Guess the final I early and the row tends to collapse into place.