So a lot of Japan’s popular literature and thus its self-conception came out of the internal peace, external isolation Edo period of the 17th to 19th centuries, and that includes a lot of the image of samurai as honor-obsessed poet-duelists.

The memorable way one professor taught us to think of it, at the time they were really something like the Montagues and Capulets of Shakespeare’s Verona: heirs to a few-generations-ago tradition of local rule and small warring that left a culture of violent rivalry, but now largely a group of self-important bravos getting carried away with drama and killing people in the street, thus disturbing the actual commercial basis of urban life and ticking off the civic authorities despite their semi-independent family power bases