Samurai As Generic Term
A samurai may…be more simply understood by his practice of bearing arms rather than any social status or aesthetic sensibilities. The word therefore becomes a generic term for any pre-modern Japanese fighting man, and there is something to be said for such a pragmatic view, because the official definition of the word samurai changed considerably over the centuries. For much of Japanese history (if contemporary writings are to be believed) everyone with something to defend—a landowner, a villager, a priest or a pirate—was armed to the teeth and was therefore a warrior (bushi or musha) of some sort at some time. Yet back in the tenth century [C.E.] no fighter of any reputation would have wished to be called a samurai, because that expression still had connotations of menial rather than military service. By the thirteenth century the word had acquired the exclusively military meaning it enjoys today, although to be a samurai still involved the notion of subservience to someone else. The samurai’s superiors were leaders called gokenin (‘honourable houseman’), whose elite status derived not only from their skills at warfare, but also from the ownership of the patches of land from which they took their surnames. Gokenin expected loyalty from the non-landowning samurai who followed them into battle. Their samurai followers (the European notion of a squire is a good parallel) were able to rise in society because of good service and the rewards that followed.
And rise they did, until the expression ‘samurai’ acquired an elite connotation that allowed it to encompass the entirety of Japan’s military aristocracy. The samurai’s upward social mobility found its greatest expression during the Sengoku Period, Japan’s ‘Age of War’, which is conventionally dated from 1467 to 1603. The long conflicts of the Sengoku Period sucked into their whirlpool a huge number of elite mounted warriors, lowly fighting samurai, armed monks, village communities and an intermediate class of jizamurai (‘local samurai’), who owned some land and were both farmers and fighters at the same time.
— The Lost Samurai, Chapter 1
