Anyway I remember a History of Samurai course that turned out to be framed around “Were the samurai land-holders whose income was secured by the system, or land-administrators granted income streams by the system? The latter.”

And then years later came across the 1950s work on European socialism that clearly, at three-step remove, inspired was why this was considered relevant at all.

More interesting to me was “they only dueled in their later decadent & pointless dandy phase, and everyone hated it” and “in war they were mounted archers, lightly equipped since that time they tried to fight an indigenous army and all drowned in a river”