With or without offense.
Whoever who wrote this is a normal person with normal real life and whoever who don’t like it is a weaboo or wapanese. Idiot wapanese weaboo.

Great insight.
Looks like Japan’s lies are being uncovered one by one.

As is often the case, you have to take wikipedia, this article, Hollywood, and all the posters involved with a grain of salt. More often than not, the truth usually lies somewhere in the middle, not on one end of the arguments.

Example:
The pedophile issue.
Were they “rampaging”? Highly unlikely.
Was it happening? Probably.
Will we ever hear about it in a movie? Probably not.

OK, sorry to say, but this article is pretty stupid.

Yes, as others have said before, these aspects of historical culture within Japan existed. That does not, however, mean that’s all that ever happened. Somehow I get the feeling the author spent 15 minutes with Google and figured he had enough information to declare what he read as definitive fact.

Also, before people say it, I am by no means a weeaboo – I hate them as much as anyone else. Seriously. To say I am is like saying someone who studies the history of Germany is a Neo-Nazi.

But, really, the article itself is pretty unbelievable.
Here’s why:

To claim that shudo was a universal interest for all Samurai is simply untrue. It happened, yes, but it’s not like every guy with a sword roamed around Japan looking for teenage boys. The relationships (if you could call them that) were brief, and for the most part positive…weird wording, I know, but the “rampaging pedophiles” comment is pretty inflammatory. Not to mention misinformed.

Yes, backstabbing happened. Yes, betrayals were not uncommon. But seppuku was actually a common end for politically and socially influential figures…for example, if a shogun or daimyo was angered/disappointed in the botched results of a battle, he’d send an order for the general to commit seppuku then & there. It was essentially a “F*** you, you’re fired.” notice. Especially commonplace during the warring-states period.

The Samurai were not farmers. At all.
Read up on the social class-divisions during the Edo period (the same time all the pedophile samurai supposedly “quit their jobs”), and you’d find the samurai were still the top class, socially. Next came the farmers, who were second-most important simply for the fact they worked all day so everyone else could have a bowl of rice with dinner. Another user compared that to saying medieval knights spent all day pulling turnips – of course, it’s possible there were samurai who grew their own food, but to call them “farmers” is just false. Yet again.

Last thing I had a gripe with was the statement how after the Sengoku Period everyone supposedly sold their swords (which they would never do so long as they had a master or any grain of self-respect) and sat around writing poetry and being jerks. Again, not true at all. They may not have been killing each other for years at a time, but that doesn’t mean there weren’t small conflicts. Even if there were no battles, the samurai still trained and learned the ideals they’d been learning for a thousand years.

So, while I can see the point of the article is to inform readers of things they may not have known before, the inflammatory statements and wording of its blatantly inaccurate facts is a bit overpowering.

1) This article does have certain ammount of true fact (Shudo, No written code etc)
2) I doubt author of an article has deep knowledge of the matter. So basically it’s just journal style article aiming to surprise readers who has absolutely no knowledge on the matter. It has a lot inaccuracies as well as overstatements. Not to say much, gonna just point out 1 of them – “The Samurai Were About As Faithful As a Lonely Housewife”. If we look records of japanese history, we can see many stories of famous samurai betraying their masters such as Akechi Mitsuhide betraying Oda Nobunaga, and many other. However, author doesn’t tell us that 99% of it were high-class samurai betraying each other, basically daimyou. If we talk about daimyou, or generals, yes they did change loyalties quickly. But if we talk about lower-rank samurai, they never betray their Daimyou. That was absolutely unheard of.
Okay, another one. Samurai never worked as farmers… I don;t know where author took this information. But even lowest of samurai didn’t work as farmer. If they became farmers they were no longer samurai. That’s connected with warrior traditions. Samurai considered impossible for someone who was born in warrior house to be a farmer, or merchant.

I feel this article has a bad tendency to look at samurai and asian whole culture from the western point of view. These days, a lot of young western “historians” are trying to force their point of view. They say : “If it’s hard to believe for us westerners it can’t exist at all. So Japanese are creating myth. Let’s tell everyone about it.” If you think this tendency is new, it’s not true. The tendency started from Sir Basil Hall Chamberlain, who wrote many such things about Japan. But one of the reasons for Chamberlen to do that was frustration because of not getting high payment for his work, so it is at least not so objective.

Samurai culture is reflected in Japanese traditional values. No matter how strange it might appear to westerners, it’s still part of Japanese national identity, not a myth nor government propaganda.

Last thing i want to point out, some persons seem to say Japan Imperial Family’s origin can be traced to Korea. They even called this indisputable fact. But as far as I know it’s not a fact but only a hypothesis of some kinship between Korea Royal Family and Japanese Royal Family, which is based on ambigious reading of one phrase in 日本書紀 (Nihon Shoki) concerning Korean prince going to Japan. Scientific hypothesis can’t be included in a textbokk until it’s proven right.

Sorry for a very long post, at least i hope it might be interesting for some people.