The Origin of the Samurai: Can Masakado Be Called the Founder of the Warrior Class?

'When and where were the samurai born?' — this is one of the basic questions of Japanese history.

In the general understanding of modern historical scholarship, the formation of the samurai class is said to have taken shape gradually from the 10th to the 11th century, in the process of the armed transformation of local landlords.

As the first large-scale case in this process, the name of Taira no Masakado is often cited.

The Kantō of the 10th century was a region in which the ruling apparatus of the ritsuryō system had substantially weakened.

The authority of governors dispatched from the center was limited, and local powerful figures needed to arm themselves to defend their holdings.

Masakado's Taira clan too was one of these — while holding the high descent of being descendants of Emperor Kanmu, in substance a local Kantō Shimōsa armed force.

It was this 'local armed force bearing aristocratic blood' that became the prototype of the later 'samurai' class.

The historical significance of Masakado's rebellion, going beyond mere rebellion, lies in being 'the first large-scale case of attempting to establish an independent government on the basis of military force.

' Until then samurai-type armed forces had moved within the frame of individual estate strife, but Masakado subdued a wide area of eight provinces, appointed his own governors, and declared the establishment of a system of rule independent of the court.

This conception ended in failure, but it made the precedent that 'a local force with military power can oppose the central regime' — the distant prehistory of the later warrior governments.

There is a gap of 245 years from Masakado to Minamoto no Yoritomo's establishment of the Kamakura shogunate (1185).

But the conception Masakado showed of 'a warrior government based in Kantō' was quietly inherited across those 250 years along with the maturation of the samurai class.

When Yoritomo opened the shogunate at Kamakura, the warrior bodies of Kantō had already come to have a thickness as a social class incomparable to Masakado's time.

Masakado was a failed rebel, but the historical continuity that the conception he first showed came to be realized 250 years later is one of the most important threads in the medieval history of Japan.