The Real History of Samurai Culture

♦In 1877, a band of samurai took up arms one last time against a government they had helped create. They lost, and with them, an entire class of warriors ceased to exist.
But the samurai most people picture today, the lone swordsman bound by an ancient code of honor, is not quite the samurai who fought for most of Japanese history. Much of that image was built after the fighting had already stopped. So who were they really? The story begins not with a sword but with a bow, on horseback, in provinces the emperor could no longer control. It runs through a civil war that handed real power to the warriors, an invasion from across the sea that nearly broke them, and a century of chaos in which an entirely new weapon arrived from the other side of the world. Then came something the samurai had never faced before. Peace. Two hundred years of it. And it changed them more than any war ever had. This is the history of the samurai, and of how a legend was built and rebuilt over nearly a thousand years.

♦Please consider to SUBSCRIBE: https://goo.gl/YJNqek
♦Our general knowledge channel: https://www.youtube.com/@MasteringKnowledge
♦Music by Epidemic Sound

00:00 The Warriors Who Built Their Own End
01:50 Origins in Heian Japan
04:05 The Genpei War
05:11 Yoritomo and the First Shogunate
06:19 Life of the Warrior Elite
09:41 The Mongol Invasions
10:40 The Warring States Period
13:03 The Three Unifiers
14:10 Peace and the Birth of Bushido
15:58 Meiji and the Last Rebellion

Big Thank you to:
potatohistory-us, johnathondwigans, MohitAgrawal-d9n, Николай Димитров, Tobias Tron, Mahmoud Shahin, Justin Bourke, Augustus Caesar, Chaim laser
Joshua Kerr, Slayer, John McKeon ,Michael Morale,Rory,Smithy3371, The Angry Celt, Paula