I was a soldier in an insurgency type conflict once. This was in the 1990s, but the atrocities you describe here in pre modern Japan were similar to many things that happened on my own battlefields in the late 20th Century. The human capacity for inhumanity is not limited by times and eras or by culture and ethnicity. We are all capable of it. Thanks for this video.

“Truth is not what you want it to be; it is what it is. And you must bend to its power or live a lie.” ― Miyamoto Musashi

Even Miyamoto Musashi in "The Book of Five Rings" Says to strike your enemy first when he is preparing to fight you. During his rise as a great swordfighter he repeatedly attacked his opponents while they were unprepared or were preparing to fight. In WW2 the cruelty of the Japanese was legendary, both the allied forces and during their invasion of China.

Thank you for not censoring your words when talking about historical atrocities. Its important that we speak in plain language when describing such horrors, and censoring words such as rape only contribute to historical misunderstanding and false revisionism.

"War is brutal, why do you think men that preform it to be anyless" words from a man wiser then myself.

I started learning about the era with the first Shogun Total War. I never had any illusions about Samurai honour or loyalty. It was a bunch of warlords backstabbing and slaughtering each other in a no holds barred civil war from the start for me and my journey just involved me learning the nuances of it. One of my earliest memories is re-enacting the slaughter at Mount Heii in Nobunaga's second historical battle.

Nobunaga mindset was all about " if you want to make a omelette you have to crack some eggs".

Not all pop culture portrayed samurai as the good guys. A perfect example of that is ghost of Tsushima. In the DLC (spoiler alert for those who’ve never played it) we come to find out that the main characters father who is portrayed as being good throughout the whole game is actually more along the lines of nobunaga. It serves as a plot twist but the developers already knew and I guess didn’t want to fully portray the samurai as these honorable good guys when most of the time they were pretty damn evil

I think this is all down to a modern misunderstanding of what "Honor" actually entails. To a knight or a samurai, it wasn't dishonorable in the slightest to kill innocent civilians during a siege. Honor was found in performing well during military campaigns and being loyal to your lord.

No matter what culture makes Warriors seem popular and epic...They're core are that they are killers and they do what they must to live their life styles/social status/reputation intact or to elevate themselves on gamble and pay with their lives. Not many Warriors live long and if they do, they regret not have have a warrior death given dying of old age was not what they expected to reach.

Honestly, I can still enjoy Samurai Warriors and the like and still be aware of how messed up the history is. I mean, that's human history after all, right? Messed up and brutal. I feel like that's a sentiment a lot can all agree on.

I think this video is important to both have and to remember. While a lot of people on this channel come from fandoms such as Sengoku Basara and Sengoku Musou it is important to remember that samurai are real people who lived in times of social upheaval and civil war. A lot of terrible things happened, often in the name of "Unification" and "Maintaining peace" and not just by Nobunaga. Perspective is very important.

Its worth bearing in mind that Oda Nobunaga was the absolute outlier when it came to gross violence during the senguko period, which was, itself, the most violent period of japanese history. Its also worth bearing in mind one of nobunaga’s senior commanders assassinated him - likely because of his unrestricted violence. Another point to remember is that during this period EVERYONE had weapons - including monks and peasants - and everyone was pretty good at using them, bleeding Nobunaga’s armies dry in guerrilla wars in the mountains, which is why nobunaga engaged on his genocidal campaigns against monastaries, monks and the peasants of entire small provinces. It was nobunaga’s successor and former lieutenant, Hideyoshi Toyotomi, who finally united all of japan them disarmed all of japan other than the samurai. Toyotomi is interesting because he was a peasant - he came up through the ranks, starting as an ashigaru, and it was nobunaga’s necessary reliance on ashigaru that changed samurai warfare from small-scale encounters to large scale battles. Thats also why the traditional weapon of the high ranked samurai, the o-dachi, began to be superseded by the smaller katana. An o-dachi is impractical on a closely packed battlefield. The problem in the senguko period was that if another clan was not your ally it was generally accepted that sooner or later they would attack you. Even if they were your ally, you couldn’t trust them. Leading to a kill-or-be-killed situation until there was no one left to fight the Tokugawa who came out as the last powerful clan standing. Nobunaga destroyed the delicate balance of clan power because his oda clan was small and already under threat, he was known to be a wild violent man, and he came to power in the oda clan fully expecting to be murdered by his own family. Once he started the killing (by killing his brothers) there was no going back. Its perhaps worth putting this in context. During the taiping civil war in china (1850-1864), the people of taiping controlled cities were routinely massacred by imperial forces at the end of sieges, often resulting in slaughters of hundreds of thousands of people in a single event. The estimated casualties of that war - 20-30 million are widely considered a conservative undercount. That level of brutality - which some western countries aided by spurning the christian taiping movement and fighting with the imperials - makes the samurai seem tame in comparison. The taiping civil war is one of the most destructive wars in history and by far the bloodiest civil war, but it is largely unknown. Only the ccp really remembers it, and they remember it as a lesson not to let western ideas into china. But china has a litany of atrocities that make the samurai seem civilised (when the mongols sacked Hangzhou, capital of the southern song dynasty, they literally exterminated everyone) An interesting samurai in all this is the One Eyed Dragon - Date Masamune. One of Toyotomi’s henchmen and then Ieyasu Tokugawa’s, who backed travel to and trade with Europe, became a christian, and may have sheltered christians from Ieyasu’s later persecution. Many of Masamune’s converted samurai remained in Spain to avoid persecution in japan, apparently with his blessing. But bear in mind this happened at the end of the senguko period, when the fighting was more or less over.

In Japan, we still use the expression ``capture the head(neck)'' as an expression for defeating an enemy.

What makes the violence even more astonishing to me is that Japan is a relatively small landmass, and only a meager portion of that land is fertile. Other regions (i.e. like Europe) could sustain much higher populations, making it far easier to absorb and recover from massacres. Yet even in though human life should have been at a much higher premium in Japan, the warrior culture was even more brutal than most.

We live in Fukui - close to the Asukura site near Ichido dani where Nonobunaga obliterated the Asakura clan,,,,We went to the museum nearby. There were so many personal items recovered - combs, hair pieces of ladies, sake cups that someone would have had sake, children toys.... so many personal items that real people would have used. All were smashed obliterated and stamped into the earth.....Seeing these things, many of which were someones personal possessions was such a cold experience....Thank you for the video - my family is Japanese and it is good for them to see their true history. My wifes family were guardians of Osaka castle....my children have an interesting history.....

The more I learn about all these ancient wars, the more amazed I am that we as a race have survived so far.

This reminds me of the movie 7 Samurai when Toshiro Mifune character Kikichiyo was berating the samurai about the war atrocities that the Samurai have done against the farmers. Where stealing, killing, burning and doing horrible acts against women was common on civilians and in turn, these Samurai atrocities drove the commoners and farmers become thieves to steal dying samurai possession. This scene I remember was a personal message from Akira Kurosawa as an apology to the Japanese people, as Kurosawa was from a Samurai family background. Sadly this mentality of "Kill civilians of the enemy countries" or "Take no prisoner" still persisted even in WW2 where the Japanese army was committing brutal war atrocities in whole Asia that even Nazi Germans was horrified after hearing what happened in 1937 Nanking Forgot to mention, I think Yoshiteru Ashikaga is one of the rare case Samurai/Shogun who truly died in battle.

As someone who likes Chinese culture, I was also disappointed to find out that all Chinese emperors did horrible things. Specially when you imagine Confucius/Budhist teachings would have a greater impact in their laws.

Samurai in Korea: "Yeah they were sayin sum BS in Chinese, so we just started slashin'."

I never really bought into the mythology to begin with, and that was back in the 1970s when I was in middle school and first learned about the samurai and Feudal Japan from reading library books. I was also quickly disavowed of the whole Western mythos of knightly chivalry, King Arthur, etc. The fact of the matter is that warfare is brutal, bloody, and cruelty as in the commission of war crimes against noncombatants was and remains very much a reality, the rule more than the exception even amongst well-disciplined, well-trained professional soldiers.

The thing to remember about honor codes like chivalry and bushido regulated how you treated a specific in-group. If you were outside that group... Well, then everything goes.

I absolutely love the way you narrated this topic in your video, especially in your intro on the attack on Mount Hiei. It's so good and suspenseful, like an epic tale unfolding before you, except this is real history. This is a kick ass video. Great work, Shogunate!

Regardless if in history or fiction... any "code of honor" has exceptions. Loopholes, justifications for exceptions or simply people forgoing their honor by ignoring it and counting on nobody calling them out.

Touching back to when you talked about Samurai retreating or attempting surviving a battle to fight another day- There is this old film I watched here on KZfaq the other day called "Samurai Burai 1952" or "Sword For Hire 1952" that sorta sheds light into the dilemma of those who choose to die in a last stand and those who wish to live another day. Ironically the story starts with the Siege of Odani castle with the besieged defenders of the Azai clan and how the story of the film unfolds is something I would recommend people to watch just so that way through those characters eyes people could understand why moments such as retreat and survive could be just as chaotic and difficult versus that of making your last stand in defiance to the enemy.

Viewer discretion is advised: because this video speaks the truth and presents historical facts.

Great video! I remember a quote from The Seven Samurai, that Kikuchiyo (Toshiro Mifune's character) said while arguing with the other samurai about how farmers hide food, weapons, sake, etc. "But then who made them such beasts? You did! You samurai did it! You burn their villages! Destroy their farms! Steal their food! Force them to labour! Take their women! And kill them if they resist! So what should farmers do?"

What I wonder is were samurai any more vicious/brutal than warriors and authorities in other countries back then ? During the Imjin war didn’t the Korean’s and Chinese see the Japanese as somewhat barbaric ? That’s interesting because the samurai often saw themselves as civilised people.

One detail that may be interesting to the reader, is that during a certain period, the samurai was rewarded with sacs of rice (common currency at the time) if they brought the severed head of an official, or general to the daimyo (chieftain). As nobody knew (there were no cameras), the samurai used to cut the head of a base soldier and dressed it with the kabuto (helmet) of an important guy. Then things turned bad for these samurai selling fakes, and many of them ended up committing seppuku when their ruse was discovered. Humans are basically the same animals through the ages.

This tracks. I learned a lot of this in my Way of the Samurai Japanese History Advanced Collage course. My professor pulled no punches.

So happy that you made this video!

Sir, I would personally love a video that is hours and hours long about samurai brutality. I can’t imagine a better way to fall asleep.

Excellent video… again . Thanks!

Excellent content, bro. Measured and fascinating at the same time :-)

Love your channel, and since you mentioned monks being killed by samurai, I wondered if you could in the future if you have any information, could tell us who were the sohei (warrior monk) and what role did they play during samurai times and if any samurai were monks or priests themselves. GREAT Video as always

Totally awesome vide! Thank you SO much!!!

Having read so many of their myths and legends; from The Tale of Genji to The Bamboo Grove, there is a truly brutal world under the flower blossoms of Japan.

another enlightening video as always.

Well done video. I truly eat this up as a medievalist so seeing how it compares to medieval Europe is really interesting. Your are so correct there's 2 sides to every coin and knowing both helps us understand the bigger picture that is history.

Love that you specify these people were a product of their time. Savagery was more common amongst even the common man.

God bless you, really, God bless you and all these other Historical content creators that seek to preserve history, blemishes and all, unbiased and truthful. Where others would seek to rewrite it or cover up things that don't align with certain ideas they have. May you and all those dedicated to keeping the history of humanity alive and well carry on for all time.

As the opposite is so omnipresent on KZfaq that this stands out, I want to commend you on your narration with different cadences and stress patterns. I'm particularly sensitive to people ending every sentence in the same cadence, and your more natural storytelling voice is a very welcome change.

Great video, great channel. One of my favourite

Shoutout to @falcon’sfightertales, and a great video as always!

Love your content

Beautiful work, well done.

If the Usagi Yojimbo graphic novel series taught me anything as a kid, it’s that there were just as many (or even much more) brutal or brutish ones as the morally just ones, like the main character Miyamoto Usagi. Great vid!

Great video as always, grateful to listen to your insight and the sources you synthesis and condense in well articulated thoughts. Oftentimes evil and atrocities is banal, it was sadly a commonplace like you mentioned. Thank you for dispelling these myths about samurai history.

This disconnect between idealism and reality is a call sign of all Robber Baron cultures. The Samurai were very much like the European Knights of old, Samurai had Bushido, Knights had the Chivalric Code, both were ideals rarely lived up to in real life.

Excellent presentation. Not overly gory but getting the points across. Thank you!👍

Another good one! Loving all the videos and I completely agree

0:20: 😢 On the 12th day of the ninth month, Nobunaga's troops set fire to holy shrines, temples, and scrolls, causing panic and devastation. 4:04: 📚 The video focuses on the brutal and unjust aspects of samurai culture, while also collaborating with other history-focused KZfaq channels. 7:31: 💀 Samurai on the battlefield were ruthless head takers, cutting off the heads of defeated enemies to display proof of their service to their lord. 10:48: 😱 The samurai invasion of Korea during the Imaging War was marked by brutal massacres and a lack of understanding of the Korean people. 13:53: 💀 Samurai had various ways of dying, including committing seppuku and finding a secluded spot to die. 17:12: 🗡 The brutality and political injustice of the Samurai in pre-modern Japan, particularly under Toyotomi Hideyoshi, resulted in the eradication of many clans and families. 20:21: 💀 Samurai culture was often cruel and brutal, but it also had aspects that people tend to enjoy. Recap by Tammy AI

Thank you, again.can't wait for more Edo period videos. Is there any possible chance of the channel covering "Zatoichi" or "Lone Wolf & Cub"? I'd be interested in your thoughts on that.

I live in Borneo and some of my ancestors in the past were war lords with a penchant for piracy and head-hunting. Much of the populace by the rivers and coastal areas lived in fear during this time since they all too scattered apart. It wasn't until the British merchant, James Brooke, came in and made piracy and head hunting, especially, illegal just over a century ago. Imperial Japanese army invaded us in World War 2 but they discovered the remnant of brutality of locals who haven't forgotten to the idea of taking heads a proof of manhood. In an ironic twist it was the Japanese who lost their heads when they ventured into the jungle looking for food(thanks to Allied campaign of cutting off their supplies). And the Allied Force Z offered immunity to locals from criminal charges of taking Japanese heads if they joined their little band of guerilla raiders. Currently, our state is demanding more autonomy from the federal government and they needed some sort of idea or symbol that locals can rally behind for support. One such idea is pride in the warrior spirit of old, something like the Bushido used to rally industrialized Japan. Everyone hopped on board by donning traditional warrior costumes in parades. My generation are not ignorant of our history but we might be seeing our point of history when we started to dilute or rather sanitize it for future generations. All of my students are shocked to hear that most "warriors" were just brutal pirates who raided villages, beheaded the men and took/sold the survivors as slaves. Many were surprised to hear that their ancestors lived in very tall longhouses with removable ladders as a defense against pirate raids.

Anyone interested in this topic should read a Japanese author named Yukio Mishima. His works explain how honor and dignity were so bound that things the West view of brutal or grisly were embraced selflessly. Western honor in medieval times was based off the Bible, so it differed from Eastern honor, which was about extreme selflessness, detatchment and tolerance of suffering. It was closer to the stoicism of the pre-Christian Roman worldview, if anything is comparable in Europe. His best book is Sun and Steel and Yukio himself committed Sepukku after a failed coup attempt in Tokyo in the 1970s.

This shouldn't be a surprise to anyone imo. The samurai lived in a very brutal age, and such acts of brutality were common all over the world at the time. Morality is an innovation that constantly undergo changes and development. Our human ancestors of the past had not yet reached the levels of moral innovation that our current societies have. In truth, some societies today still haven't. So we can't really treat thw samurai fairly by judging their actions through a modern moral lens. To them, this was normal. They didn't know of anything else. Their entire political and ethical framework stated that sometimes it was necessary.

Irony is, Three Unifiers unified japan that was only divided by samurai. To peasant, monk or merchant there was no divided japan. Hundred years of samurai brutality in a relentless power trip

I cheered for the _other_ guys when I first watched _The Last Samurai_ in the theatre.

Thanks for the good video 👊🏻

The point you bring up is very interesting. I think many movies/TV shows about the era really downplay the brutality. For example, this year`s Taiga Drama (year long drama about 1 samurai) is about Ieyasu and the director/NHK was EXPLICIT in that they were going out of their way to make him warm, fuzzy and relatable (yeah, it sucks). That said, in November, Beat Takeshi (Takeshi Kitano) is releasing a movie called 首（Neck) which is all about Nobunaga wanting to get his hands on Araki Murashige`s neck and Takeshi has made it clear he is thrilled to show how brutal the period was. Here is the promo video (and yeah, it looks brutallly good) kzfaq.info/get/bejne/n896ZKyIxLmmmok.html

Great video thanks

Excellent video

I love the nuance of discussions like this. People have never been "perfect" and life has always been brutal. We truly live in the best of times, yet people are still unhappy with it. They have no idea how lucky they are.

Fantastic video. I think the two can exist at the same time, there were plenty of Samurai who let the absolute power get to their head and abuse their power while there were samurai who were just rulers such as Yamaoka Tesshu

I like Samurai History, I like your content, One of my favorite Samurai films of all time is Harakiri, The original from 1962, It does a great job on depicting how Samurai lived back then.

Great video.

Duels where more prevalent in the early era's and where more for honor purposes. Massive battle where fought all the time, using tactics etc.. And also to mention, the Bow and arrow was also essential to Samurai, as they considered it an Honorable weapon on par with a Katana. ( To die by one or the other was considered honorable and a good death). Another misconception is that Samurai didn't use or like to use Muskets, which was false, since Nobunaga equipped 500 Soldiers with them and was the first to use them during war.

I have enjoyed this video, and found it to be most informative.

So glad you brought up the facts of the days of the samurai.

Thanks for making this. Anyone who's interested in history has definitely run into this weird narrative that has been going around for years now that tries to excuse and gloss over a lot of the horrors commited by Imperial Japan during the 30s and in WW2. That the Japanese were some sort of noble and peaceful nation of buddhists that was corrupted by contact with the "evil white man" during the Meiji Restoration, that they learned all the things they did from the European powers and Americans. I think the general view of the samurai in pop culture is also a symptom of this narrative. It's a pretty crazy narrative when you look at events like the Imjin War or the Sengoku Jidai but also at how samurai had acted for hundreds of years in general towards the Japanese peasantry.

I can tell you did your research. You using “seppuku” instead of “hara-kiri” is just one of the good examples. People will benefit from your videos to shed light on the über lionized image of the samurai. I, too, read a book on the reality of war in feudal Japanese times; it’s very different from what is commonly known today. Also, not all retainers followed their lord in death. It was very common, especially for those who are quite skilled to rather find the employ of another lord than follow a ruined house.

This was brilliant. Thank you.

Great piece

This is way I love history I’ll love the good, the bad and the ugly parts of it which makes history interesting Rather than only hearing about the one thing

How can I find artwork at 1.35 and others?

I hope you will make a second part to this video adding in what you took out from this video.

I'm glad you do not say "OH PROPAGANDA BY WOKE WEST SAY SAMURAI BRUTAL" (or in the case of channels like PaxTube, "crusades good 100%") but instead show the full unbias histories despite the glories of our favorite figures. You have my praise.

They were just as the "Knights in Shining Armor" in the West. Both cultural myths.

I’m so thankful you shared this video. I’ve truly learned something that shattered my past perception of the samurai. In my ignorance, I’ve always thought of the samurai as a class of people that exemplified honor, nobility and a degree of compassion in their actions. The movies out there have really distorted my views of the samurai. However, your important video is certainly an eye opener, a catalyst for a paradigm shift. I am so wrong … so terribly wrong - I’ve just learned that the samurai were heartless butchers!

amazing video this is what history is all about ,,,

there is one thing I always wonder about. How the samurai could take heads mid-battle? I mean look at how the Roman fight, professionally, well drill, tight formation, even if they want to loot the enemy, they do it after the battle. Via versa, how the hell could they take the enemy head without turning their formation into a mess

I’ve been looking into the Pacific Theatre of ww2 in recent weeks, and prior to this, I had no idea how ruthless or how intense the bloodlust of the Imperial Japanese Military was. And it seems like the practices of looting, killing and raping, beheading, relentless murder and just plain serial killer types of barbarism against especially enemies who’ve surrendered and citizens, have quite a heavy precedent in Japan previous to the war. It’s so hard to imagine this today with Japanese media always mentioning how life is precious, perhaps more than most other Cultures. I thought the Nanking situation was even just a one off, but it was actually standard operating procedure. At least this background info makes a little more sense of it. There’s much more context and ideology behind ww2’s hellish practices, but at least this seems to show that it absolutely didn’t come out of nowhere. But let’s give Credit where it’s due and mention Japanese culture has developed to be quiet peaceful and humanitarian in the post war period. A rare example of trauma having a positive influence on a very hard and very cold warrior ideal.

Hello there! I want to inploment a grappling system into my samurai game but idk what form of grappling samurai used, or did they even use it. I think it would be interesting if you make a video about samurai grappling, it's just a suggestion so if you don't have time i completley understand.

War is brutal, therefore, to say that a man who is directly involve in that madness is not brutal is a lie

I think the first time I was ever exposed to the idea that samurai weren't noble stoic warriors, was in Princess Mononoke as a child. Samurai are shown to be brutal killers and the only true antagonists of the movie. It was certainly a different view of samurai than what was commonly ascribed.

Nice write up and illustrations. ✅

Its really amazing that the game Samurai Warriors back in the day, the first one on PS2 stated a life long fascination with the Sengoku period for me, its amazing how something like a hack n slash game could ignite such a passion in a teenager.

Haven't watched your channel for awhile, this was a good one.

I knew someone, years ago (in 1971), who carried around a photo album of photos he took while on duty during the Vietnam war. They depicted such atrocities as to be perverse and disgusting. I could only stare horrified at a couple of photos before i got sick.

I think one thing which not everybody can see, but many of us who are older understand , is that cultures similar to that of pre modern Japan, China, Russia, all European states, Muslim cultures, literally all cultures which had organized military and which are associated with “civilization” is that the violent people in these cultures cover up their violent acts with ceremonies, rituals, elaborate clothing, and philosophical ideas but all that is just to sugar coat the actions which were still as brutal as people were hundreds and thousands of years ago.

Very nice video. Nicely researched, edited, written and narrated. Will definitely be checking more out and if all are like this, subscribing!!

Excellent . thank you .

What I always wonder when people question the reality of champion duels between samurai is how long the average standoff between armies was in Japan, as champion duels did regularly happen in Europe from antiquity all the way through the middle ages as, prior to artillery, there were very few ways of forcing the other side to initiate a charge leading to weeks to sometimes even months (just look at Pompey facing Caesar in Greece) of standoffs with both parties deploying in battleformation at dawn and standing opposed to eachother all day waiting for an advantage to justify a charge. During these standoffs champions of both sides would step forward and challenge a representative of the other side to a duel in the nomansland. So unless Japanese armies for some reason just charged and clashed with eachother upon first sight I see no problem with picturing single samurai riding forward from the ranks during the standoff, raise their bow and shout out their name and a samurai of the other side answering in kind

This is going to my downloads

Liked and Subscribed!!!

I find it odd that people think we have to approve of something to find it interesting. I am fascinated by vikings, but hopping off a boat, stabbing a bystander, and ransacking the nearest church before sailing away is not something I approve of doing.

I like the truth you portray to people instead of the romantic image.

This is the kind of stuff you’d turn on SpikeTV/History channel for back in the day, quality content

I used to be a tour guide in Tokyo. You wouldn't believe how many tourists thought the samurai were full of virtue, loyalty, and honor. In some cases, these people were rather shocked after I told them a few stories. And there were a few I judged who couldn't be saved. They had bought into the myth so completely that I judged it better not to push the issue. Anyway, good video!

The term chivalry is miss used allot today. it's meaning used to be being a good Chevalier. otherwise known as you do what your Lord says.