Wolverine is not a %^&* Samurai!!

Okay the Marvel Strength Directory's a pretty neat site. But one thing really pisses me off. In the entry for Wolverine, they describe him as follows:

Abilities: Due to his extensive training as a CIA operative, a Samurai, and as a member of the Weapon X program, Wolverine is a master of multiple forms of martial arts, weapons, and vehicles. He is also a trained expert in computers, explosives, and assassination techniques.

Gahhh! NO! He was NEVER a *samurai*! Samurai was a social class. The word means "servant", in truth they were the highest level of society. In the Heian Period, when Japan was actually ruled by a court of aristocrats, the samurai were distant relatives that recieved military training. After the Heike War, the samurai became the dominant social class.

You are born, or adopted into, a samurai family. Samurai status is based on heredity. Ultimately, the men of the samurai class were the only ones allowed to carry weapons, but their wives and children were also samurai. Samurai =/= L33t katana-wielding warrior!. In fact, by the late Tokugawa period, most were petty bureaucrats. The swords were ornamental.

I suppose it's possible, one could imagine, that Wolverine/James Howlett/Logan was adopted by a samurai family. Ignoring of course the policy of strict isolation and *beheading* of European/American foreigners marooned on Japanese soil. Which only got stricter as time passed and was one of the motivations behind Matthew Perry and his Black Ships forcing open the ports of Japan. But a good story could of course have Wolverine somehow disguise himself and then be adopted into a samurai family.

Except for another small problem. Wolverine's birthdate is given as in the 1880s. That's a few years *after* class differentiations were *eliminated* in Japan. The Meiji Restoration wanted to foster an idea of national unity and rapid modernization/westernization. The old Confucian-inspired class distinctions: Samurai>Peasant>Artisan>Merchant>eta and hinin were eliminated. While naturally financial and class differentiations still occured and do occur in practice, especially if you happen to be descended from one of the eta or hinin that lived in buraku villages, and being descended from a samurai family can still get you a bit of prestige, there are no present day samurai.

Seriously, after the founding of the Meiji government, one of the major architects of the movement, Saigo Takamori, appalled that the government had decided to abolish his class and essentially make them obsolete by creating a standing conscript army, took his men and revolted. This was the Satsuma Rebellion by the way. This was in 1877, by the way, at least three years before Wolverine was born.

Gee, it's not like this stuff hasn't turned up in a relatively well known movie that came out a few years back, right? (A hint: The Last Samurai does not and never did refer to Tom Cruise's character.)

Now, the warrior we think of from old Akira Kurosawa films and anime is called a bushi. A bushi was a warrior of the Samurai class who devoted himself to the martial arts and followed the code of Bushido. Now, I have a great deal of trouble reconciling Wolverine as he's portrayed in the comics I've read with what I know of Bushido, but for the sake of argument, I'll ignore that. Wolverine's gone through a lot of changes over the years.

He may have been a bushi, but he was NEVER a samurai. And you don't have to have studied years of Asian History to know the difference. Crack open a history book. Crack open an *encyclopedia*. It takes ten seconds to look up "samurai".

I get irked by poor research.