ABSTRACT
This chapter introduces the main directions and trends in research concerning the origins of the bushi, the beginnings of warrior rule, and the conduct of warfare. In recent decades, historians have overturned a number of the constituent parts of what was once the received wisdom concerning warriors and warfare in medieval Japan. The men-at-arms who rode about the battlefields of medieval Japan were known to their contemporaries by a variety of names, including bushi, tsuwamono, mononofu, heishi, and musha, but they are most familiar to modern readers—particularly audiences outside Japan—as samurai. In the early postwar era, Ishimoda Shō and Nagahara Keiji analyzed bushi history within a Marxist framework that cast the appearance of the Kamakura shogunate as a landmark in the transition from a classical "slave state" to a medieval "feudal age". Reconstruction of early medieval warfare poses.
