was a

samurai The samurai () were members of the warrior class in Japan. They were originally provincial warriors who came from wealthy landowning families who could afford to train their men to be mounted archers. In the 8th century AD, the imperial court d ...

and

military strategist A military, also known collectively as armed forces, is a heavily armed, highly organized force primarily intended for warfare. Militaries are typically authorized and maintained by a sovereign state, with their members identifiable by a d ...

Edo period The , also known as the , is the period between 1600 or 1603 and 1868 in the history of Japan, when the country was under the rule of the Tokugawa shogunate and some 300 regional ''daimyo'', or feudal lords. Emerging from the chaos of the Sengok ...

Japan Japan is an island country in East Asia. Located in the Pacific Ocean off the northeast coast of the Asia, Asian mainland, it is bordered on the west by the Sea of Japan and extends from the Sea of Okhotsk in the north to the East China Sea ...

. He was born in Fushimi in

Yamashiro Province was a province of Japan, located in Kinai. It overlaps the southern part of modern Kyoto Prefecture on Honshū. Aliases include , the rare , and . It is classified as an upper province in the '' Engishiki''. Yamashiro Province included Kyoto it ...

(present-day

Fushimi-ku, Kyoto is one of the eleven wards in the city of Kyoto, in Kyoto Prefecture, Japan. Famous places in Fushimi include the Fushimi Inari Shrine, with thousands of torii lining the paths up and down a mountain; Fushimi Castle, originally built by Toyoto ...

). Among the works he wrote in his late years was the widely circulated , an introduction to warrior ethics that was influential among middle- and lower-class

. It has been translated into English by Arthur Lindsay Sadler as ''The Code of the Samurai'' (1941; 1988), William Scott Wilson as ''Budoshoshinshu: The Warrior's Primer'' and by

Thomas Cleary Thomas Francis Cleary (24 April 1949 – 20 June 2021) was an American translator and author of more than 80 books related to Buddhist, Taoist, Confucian, and Muslim classics, and of ''The Art of War'', a treatise on management, military stra ...

.''The Code of the Samurai: A Modern Translation of the Bushido Shoshinshu of Taira Shigesuke'', translated by Thomas Cleary. . Yūzan was the son of Daidōji Shigehisa (大道寺繁久), the grandson of Daidōji Naoshige ( 大道寺直繁) and the great-grandson of Daidōji Masashige ( 大道寺政繁), an important advisor to the

Later Hōjō clan The was one of the most powerful samurai families in Japan in the Sengoku period and held domains primarily in the Kantō region. Their last name was simply , but were called "Later Hōjō" to differentiate between the earlier Hōjō clan who h ...

. Shigehisa had been a samurai in the service of Matsudaira Tadateru, ''

daimyō were powerful Japanese magnates, feudal lords who, from the 10th century to the early Meiji era, Meiji period in the middle 19th century, ruled most of Japan from their vast hereditary land holdings. They were subordinate to the shogun and no ...

'' of the Echigo Takada

fief A fief (; ) was a central element in medieval contracts based on feudal law. It consisted of a form of property holding or other rights granted by an overlord to a vassal, who held it in fealty or "in fee" in return for a form of feudal alle ...

, but became a ''

rōnin In feudal Japan to early modern Japan (1185–1868), a ''rōnin'' ( ; , , 'drifter' or 'wandering man', ) was a samurai who had no lord or master and in some cases, had also severed all links with his family or clan. A samurai became a ''rō ...

'' in 1619 when Tadateru was dismissed from service. Yūzan studied the arts of war in

Edo Edo (), also romanized as Jedo, Yedo or Yeddo, is the former name of Tokyo. Edo, formerly a (castle town) centered on Edo Castle located in Musashi Province, became the '' de facto'' capital of Japan from 1603 as the seat of the Tokugawa shogu ...

under Obata Kagenori, Hōjō Ujinaga ( 北条氏長), Yamaga Sokō and others. He then lectured on the subject as a guest of the Asano at the

Hiroshima is the capital of Hiroshima Prefecture in Japan. , the city had an estimated population of 1,199,391. The gross domestic product (GDP) in Greater Hiroshima, Hiroshima Urban Employment Area, was US$61.3 billion as of 2010. Kazumi Matsui has b ...

fief, the

Matsudaira clan The was a Japanese samurai clan that descended from the Minamoto clan. It originated in and took its name from Matsudaira village, in Mikawa Province (modern-day Aichi Prefecture). During the Sengoku period, the chieftain of the main line of the ...

at the Aizu fief, the Matsudaira clan at the Fukui fief, and elsewhere in Japan. Yūzan's son Daidōji Shigetaka (大道寺重高) became a retainer of the Fukui fief with a stipend of 300 ''

koku The is a Chinese-based Japanese unit of volume. One koku is equivalent to 10 or approximately , or about of rice. It converts, in turn, to 100 shō and 1,000 gō. One ''gō'' is the traditional volume of a single serving of rice (before co ...

''.

References

{{DEFAULTSORT:Daidoji, Yuzan 1639 births 1730 deaths Samurai Military strategists Writers of the Edo period People from Fushimi, Kyoto Japanese male non-fiction writers