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Notes -
I've been reading more of James Clavell's Asian Saga. I've also been catching up on cleaning and maintaining my garden tools.
In the books every peasant bows and scrapes at the feet of the samurai. My very limited knowledge of martial arts is that those same peasants developed ways of fighting with their gardening tools because they were forbidden from owning real weapons.
So... who were the peasants fighting?
The... samurai and their military leadership? At least in Japan.
Meiji- and Edo-era peasants (and especially hinin, which were somewhere between Indian dahlit and American homeless) had extremely minimal rights, at the same time that the samurai class had an explicit right to strike those who offended their honour, a rule that was of significant relevance and controversy in an incident involving Westerners that Clavell references. (Tbf, especially 1600s-era social and economic stratification meant that people sympathetic to the peasants or, more often, merchants, were often writing the histories.)
But that didn't stop peasant uprisings from happening: Chichibu is similar in time to Tai-Pan and_Gai-Jin_, and Jōkyō the best-known early Edo period peasant uprising that would have fit for Sho-Gun.
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