This book is a broadly-cast study of the purposes, methods, technology and mores of warfare among the early samurai, and their relationship to the polity and social structure of tenth to fourteenth century Japan.

Karl Friday, an internationally recognised authority on Japanese warriors, provides the first comprehensive study of the topic to be published in English. This work incorporates nearly twenty years of on-going research and draws on both new readings of primary sources and the most recent secondary scholarship.

It overturns many of the stereotypes that have dominated views of the period. Friday analyzes Heian -, Kamakura- and Nambokucho-period warfare from five thematic angles. He examines the principles that justified armed conflict, the mechanisms used to raise and deploy armed...

Tracing the evolution of state military institutions from the seventh to the twelfth centuries, this book challenges much of the received wisdom of Western scholarship on the origins and early development of warriors in Japan.

Western scholars and educators are generally far less familiar with the samurai in his original-and, ostensibly, primary-role as warrior and masters of arms than in his other functions as landowner, feudal lord, literature, or philosopher. Yet, any attempt to comprehend fully the samurai without considering his military abilities and training (bugei) is futile. With verve and wit, Karl Friday combines the results of nearly two decades of fieldwork and archival research to examine samurai martial culture from a broad perspective: as a historical phenomenon, as a worldview, and as a system of...