0 a member of a military class of high social rank from the 11th to the 19th century in Japan: --
Samurai warriors
In order to serve the needs of this large samurai population, for house construction and regular household consumption, merchants and artisans also congregated in the city in large numbers.
Although the samurai class was dysfunctional by their fathers' time, they were still strongly attached to the moral training and ideology nurtured for centuries in the samurai tradition.
While clearly the injured party, the merchants had little recourse against the ruling samurai class.
Many served as employment agents who provided samurai employers with labourers, and they had many followers under them.
In the pre-modern period statistics are especially unreliable as official population records did not count the samurai.
If an estimated 500,000 samurai is added, the total population comes to about one million.
This ideology, however, did not always protect merchants from samurai and authorities.
Among the samurai it was always the required form.
