Homeless Samurai Warrior
Samurai
(侍?)
[bu͍.ɕi̥] were the military nobility of pre-industrial Japan. According to
translator William Scott Wilson: "In Chinese, the character 侍 was
originally a verb meaning to wait upon or accompany persons in the upper ranks
of society, and this is also true of the original term in Japanese, saburau. In
both countries the terms were nominalized to mean "those who serve in
close attendance to the nobility," the pronunciation in Japanese changing
to saburai. According to Wilson, an early reference to the word
"samurai" appears in the Kokin Wakashū (905–914), the first imperial
anthology of poems, completed in the first part of the 10th century.[1]
By the
end of the 12th century, samurai became almost entirely synonymous with bushi (武士), and
the word was closely associated with the middle and upper echelons of the
warrior class. The samurai followed a set of rules that came to be known as
bushidō. While they numbered less than 10% of Japan's population,[2] samurai
teachings can still be found today in both everyday life and in modern Japanese
martial arts. -Wikipedia
