Chapter 8 Japan 333Until the Edo period, no two elite cultures could have been more divergent
than that of the Chinese scholar-official class and the Japanese samurai. Under
the Tokugawas, however, samurai culture began to change, and the warrior cul-
ture of the previous four centuries began to shift to resemble in some ways their
equivalent elite class in China, the shenshi. Remarkably, both were based in
Confucian values, which goes to show how structures of power and historically
embedded social actors can utilize philosophies in tremendously diverse ways.
Neo-Confucianism and samurai culture were developing over roughly the same
centuries but took very different courses. However, the gap began to close in
the seventeenth century, as the Tokugawa regime needed to turn warriors into
administrators, and samurai lifestyles were increasingly urban and cultured
along lines that would be recognized in, and were again influenced by, China.
The Confucian influence is strong in the ethical injunctions for warriors in
Daidoji Yuzan’s Code of the Samurai, written in the eighteenth century. He was a
member of the Taira family; his father was a vassal of Tokugawa Ieyasu’s son,
and Yuzan became an orthodox Confucian scholar and expert on military af-
fairs. He wrote the text (see box 8.4) for young samurai at a time when the samu-
rai class was seen as falling away from the austerity and simplicity of the old days,
but it was also a time when Confucian values borrowed in the eighth century
were getting reinforcements from the Neo-Confucianism of the seventeenth andAn unknown Japanese artist portrays the ritual of seppuku. 1867.