What kind of jobs did samurai have?

Question

What kind of jobs under the daimyo/shogun command?

Answer 1

Samurai were professional warriors... that was their job. They practiced and prepared for combat between actual battles.

They usually weren't directly paid by the people they worked for though. It worked like this: Suppose you were a large landowner in pre-industrial Japan. You needed a way to protect your land, so you took on Samurai to sort of act as your private army. In return, you granted them smaller parcels of land. They didn't work that land themselves, they had peasants do that. The Samurai and the peasants would divide up the profits from the crops. Meanwhile, the Samurai did their thing as soldiers.

It worked like this for several hundred years prior to the 20th century, and ended only with Meiji Restoration in the late 1800's.

Answer 2

Samurai Jobs

Answer 3

Samurai was the highest level in the Japanese military lead caste system.

The common image is that of a man trained for combat, but they were also administrators, lords and nobles, record keepers, ect.,... Similar to the military today - all front line infantry men are soldiers, but not all soldiers carry a gun on the front lines - some are doctors and lawyers and logistics professionals and cooks and mechanics, etc.,...

Soldiers were samurai (usually) but not all samurai were soldiers as their profession. At the end of the day a samurai was someone who swore a blood oath to obey their daimiyo.

Whatever the daimiyo commanded was done - be it on the battlefield, be it to kill themselves or their family as punishment for something, be it to dig a ditch, be it to stand outside an be heckled by the local populace, whatever. Honor for a samurai was in diligence of completing a task. The humiliation of the task ordered was unimportant.

Answer 4

"Samurai" actually means "servant", or "serving person". They were soldiers, basically.