Fact: all samurai are bisexual.

Since the Heian era, when the capital city of Japan was moved to Kyoto in 749, the sexual orientation of the samurai was started to get fixed: all samurai, basically, are bisexuals.

They always had been. But, before the Heian era, warlords lived too far away from the capital city which was jammed with the civilian clan of Fujiwara, the one ruling the country at the time. Now in the City of Peace (that’s what ‘heian’ means) the Fujiwaras were still ruling, but warrior clans had settled around the same vicinity too.

Why bisexuality? Not enough women around? Or were they all homosexuals, and faked it with women just for the sake of political purposes and biological procreation?

Naah. What some medieval Japanese pulp fictioners euphemistically dubbed ‘comrade love of the samurai’ – i.e. emotional tie between two male warriors – was a part of the practical package of being samurai in the first place.

The entire existence of a samurai, in their collective frame of mind that would get squeezed and twisted and overhauled to be the thing you know as ‘Bushido’ later (I hate to repeat myself, but I want you to remember that Bushido was born in 1700’s), centered upon martial stuff. Women in samurai households got martial art training, but there was no real female samurai in the sense the males were, except in ninja clans – ninjas usually applied some co-ed. Daylight samurai didn’t.

So, who was it that the samurai met more often: his wife or his comrades? (This is rhetorical).

Moreover, love got no place in samurai marriages; that’s why 21st centurian moviemakers made so much of Maeda Toshiie’s love story with his wife Matsu. I have written about this before: “Why Love was Criminal in Feudal Japan”.

While the sharp division of labor and separate education based on gender kept the samurai away from any woman, since he was schooled to have nothing whatsoever in common with his wife, his interests, aspirations, ambitions, fears, and so forth matched perfectly with his comrades’.

He naturally felt more comfortable with a male companion – who knew what he talked about, who would literally stand by his side in atrocities, and blah blah blah. You can waste hours to swear you’ll die for a woman, but Japanese samurai always died with and for his fellow samurai – and the chance to die together in the same battle for the same cause was infinitely higher than the chance to die together with the wife.

So, all the nonsensical part of the thing that you optimistically call ‘love’ was there, for real, between a samurai and another samurai. It rarely existed between a samurai and a female lover.

A samurai came of age at 15. After the ceremony was over, he needed a role-model, and one that would be willing to stick around as his tutor in everything. No problem for sons of warlords and such; their dads hired teachers for him. But average pennyless samurai often had to literally walk a long distance to search for a patron-teacher like that. And once he found the candidate, he wouldn’t be able to pay tuition fee. So, what to do? He became the teacher’s lover.

According to some stats-emitting institutions that I happen to forget at the moment, having a crush on your teacher is as easy as blinking. That’s what happened. Hence, the ‘love’ was usually genuine. And in most cases this wouldn’t be just sex.

In the laced Confucian worldview that the Japanese got from China, a tie between teachers and students last forever. Loyalty, the element of Bushido, cemented the relationship of a samurai with another; such a thing was inapplicable to their connexion with women.

So, once more, the samurai shared everything with another samurai, while there was almost nothing he shared with his wife. Not even kids. Kids belonged to the clan.

Buddhist monks in medieval Japan kept both male and female concubines, mind you. The male ones were the junior monks. Warlords only kept female concubines, whose reason and mode of operation were usually the same as with their legitimate wives – political unions. None of them kept male concubines – at least no fanfare about it. Except one man: Shogun Ashikaga Yoshimitsu, after he fell in love with a young Noh drama actor, Zeami, in 1374. Zeami was, from then on, the official partner of the shogun’s in extramarital activities.

But warlords got valets or pageboys or swordbearers or personal attendants or whatever you call those teenage samurai around him 24/7. Oda Nobunaga got Mori Ranmaru, for instance. There is no historical record about the two being lovers – but who cares. Some valets were their lords’ partners, some others were not.

The thing is, those valets and their lords shared so much, and spent time in each other’s presence all the time, that idolizing the lords was automatic, loving the valets was, too, and, with or without sex, the tie that bound them was way stronger than with any other human being – the valets were the last defense and the human shield for the lords, and if they fell in battle the lords did, too.

Casual mentions of samuraihood usually nails down Death as the core of their worldview.

Now imagine if that were so.

Is there anything odd in the entirely natural conclusion that two persons who could die together side by side any time any day would be more likely to love each other the way they never could anybody else?

Japan has its own view of sexuality and sexual orientations. Today, you will find an endless list of anime and manga (animation movies and comic books) depicting homosexual attachment in various ways – between girls and between boys, without letting go of the conventional girl-and-boy plot.

It is normal if you got shocked by such things. But it’s the way of the Japanese. They have their own frame of mind about nudity and what it signifies (remember the ‘tradition’ of public baths). Those are not the same with the usual caucasian and monotheist outlook. Just try to remember that next time you stumble upon a J-Pop product.

And I said ‘the way of the Japanese’.

Samurai is Japanese.