Heian rulers ignored the countryside, so that by the 900s the provinces had become almost completely separated from the capital. At the same time, changes in the Taika and Taiho laws made it possible for feudal lords to build large country estates, and these factors helped give rise to feudalism in Japan.
Without a central government, provinces became like tiny nations, settling their disputes with the aid of small fighting bands. This led to the rise of a new warrior class called the samurai—Japan's knights. Like knights, samurai were not soldiers, but individual warriors sworn to defend their feudal lord. They also wore armor, though it was made of bamboo and not metal, and they placed a somewhat greater emphasis on the sword than European knights did. In Europe, lances and crossbows made it possible to fight at a greater remove, but combat in Japan was face-to-face, and swords were so sharp they could slice a man's body in half with a single stroke.
In the Heian and the later Kamakura period, the samurai developed their own code of honor, called bushido (“way of the warrior"), but this was quite different from chivalry. For all its flaws, chivalry was based in Christian notions of gentleness and compassion, and as such helped curb knights' penchant for brutality; bushido, on the other hand, defined a samurai's virtue in terms of his ability to strike quickly and decisively against an enemy. Nor was there any European equivalent for ritual suicide, a central aspect of life not only among the samurai, but the Japanese upper classes as a whole (see box, “Ritual Suicide").
World History
