the.com/samurai
a career built on loyalty, swordsmanship, and dying well if it comes to that.
means a member of japan's hereditary warrior caste who served a feudal lord in exchange for land, rank, and the obligation to die on command.
from from the japanese verb saburau, meaning to serve — first a term for any attendant, it narrowed by the 12th century to mean armed retainers of the military elite.
codebushido came later, romanticized retroactively in the 1900s
class ranksamurai outranked merchants despite merchants having more money
disarmament1876 edict banned swords, ending the class legally
literacymany were poets and bureaucrats, not just fighters