AHC: Surviving & Functional Samurai Class

edo-mura-samurai.jpg


The challenge is to prevent the liquidation of the Japanese Samurai Class during the Meiji Restoration and make them a functional part of post-Shogunate government

Bonus Points if you describe how your PoDs would make Japanese society look like to day.
 
According to Gregory Clark's The Son Also Rises, half the modern Japanese elites are descended from the samurai. The feudal nobility may have been abolished as a body, but individual nobles seem to have succeeded in staying at the top (if Clark is right, of course). Assuming he is, it means that a samurai Japan might turn out to be fairly similar to OTL Japan, since those peasants and burghers who entered the elites OTL would likely become samurai ITTL (through marriage and adoption).

The British example is also instructive: even in the early 20th century, nobles still held most of farmland (that is, still made up a functional landowning class, just like in the Middle Ages), had absolute veto right on all non-financial legislation via the House of Lords (thus remaining highly political relevant), and manned many, if not most, high civilian and military offices. Despite it all, Edwardian Britain was a highly industrialized and thoroughly modern society.
 
edo-mura-samurai.jpg


The challenge is to prevent the liquidation of the Japanese Samurai Class during the Meiji Restoration and make them a functional part of post-Shogunate government

Bonus Points if you describe how your PoDs would make Japanese society look like to day.

Well, there are many companies founded by old Samurai families: Toyota, Honda etc.
 
Well, there are many companies founded by old Samurai families: Toyota, Honda etc.

I sorta meant similar to how they existed during the Edo period, at least to the point where Japanese society still recognizes them as a unique class unto themselves

Being part of the capitalist class doesn't really satisfy I'm afraid :(
 
Wouldn't this require Japan to remain feudal? That doesn't sound sustainable, especially when Europeans start knocking on their doorstep.
 
the Meiji Restoration explicitly went after the Samurais as a distinct class in an attempt to remove any festering cores of protential rebellion that can aim at pulling off a Boshin War-reprise on them. They were perfectly happy with former Samurai clans going into merchantilelism, running spawling zaibastus, as that either made them willing conspirators in their plan to demolish the samurai caste (or at least, to busy to care), or if they were lacking in accounting, so piss poor that they couldn't afford a rump in a rural whore house, much less establishing a group of likeminded disastisfied samurais to build a rebellion on.
 
I could see the samurai developing into the officer class of the IJN and the IJA. Much like the Prussian nobility developed into the officer caste in Prussia and later the Kaiser Reich and final for Hitler's Germany.
 
Allow them to use firearms per an Imperial edict and develop them into a fighting force dependent on the Imperial family directly. Either way the Samurai evolve into a group not unlike the Russian Spetsnaz but with more focus on hand-to-hand combat. Add in some traditional foci of ninjitsu over time (again, they serve *the Emperor* directly and he would have to sanction this) and you could get a very interesting military unit.
 
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