Comments by "XSportSeeker" (@XSpImmaLion) on "Meet A Real Samurai (Cuts 240 mph BB Gun Pellet) | EVERYDAY BOSSES #15" video.

  1. Always an interesting subject... I'm no expert but I imagine lots of things had to be cut to fit. Samurai was only a government designated label for the most part, that's why historically it doesn't make much sense to tie to very specific images. It was basically a caste system, not something meant to signify a certain type of profession or specialization. But samurai had to follow a system of morality, behaviour, beliefs and overall system (you could see it like a particular set of laws and rules) called bushido. That's where practices like sepukku comes from. But it's not like it's the honorable way to die. You could die as a samurai of old age, natural causes and whatnot without commiting sepukku, honorably. This is kind of a mix up. Sepukku was a way of keeping your honor when accused of crimes or of violating the bushido code when the accusation came specifically from superiors. Because bushido was a very vertical system, masters and those above you in the caste system always had the moral high ground. Like the local lord/daimiyo accusing you as a samurai of a grave crime. So, you are accused, and you have no way of proving you are innocent, you commit sepukku as proof of strength in showing you are innocent and willing to pay with your life to show your conviction. Sepukku was basically the ultimate way to show your conviction in something. Similar to self-immolation, for instance, but drawing particularly from the bushido code. Following what I've already said, shinobi or ninjas were quite diverse, but in general terms it was just people secretly hired, usually by feudal lords, to do stuff that was frowned upon by or outside the bushido code. It was dishonorable work. But they were there because their type of work obviously had strategic advantages for feudal lords. This is why it's closer to spies. It's also why there's all this myth around invisibility, hiding in shadows, assassination techniques and whatnot - they weren't meant to be seen or known about, and they were often supposed to kill themselves if caught. Because if they were caught on the act and tied to a feudal lord, again, as they were under bushido code, the feudal lord himself would probably have to commit sepukku, and the shinobi would probably be killed on spot without any recourse - as they are already in a social caste considered inpure or not worthy. It's not that all shinobi did assassinations though, again, those are general terms of a caste system. You could have a shinobi/ninja that just gathered information and intelligence as part of the crowd, for instance. Of course, shinobi that worked close to feudal lords and were very specialized in certain tasks like assassinations or infiltrations got their positions by being very proficient at the stuff they did. The legends are a mix of portrayal and exaggeration of the most famous ones I guess. You can imagine that people like that, from specific castes I mean, can get extremely proficient, evolve their own techniques, and be trained to almost perfection when this sort of stuff is going around for several hundreds of years in a country that had a warring state that lasted almost 600 years. This is why there are stuff around hidden villages and families with generations of people who were trained from a young age to be shinobi. Hundreds of years in a very strict societal caste system will lead to stuff like that. It's not so much that those villages were really hidden per se, but they were very out of the way, isolated, and common people in a society would not know about them because feudal lords really did not want for their existance to even be known. In a way, kinda unfortunately, this is also why there's not much actual history on them. Lots of speculation, and some second hand register and accounts, but of course, shinobi couldn't record their histories or let it be known in any way, as they were bound to secrecy by feudal lords, which were still their superiors in all ways. So there you go. A bit of what I have read over the years on the subject.
    99