[sirdarling]

I feel that it is important not to read direct translations at first, I know that with a guided translation your view gets skewed a little with the author's interpretations, but what SirDarkSol has said about the differences is true. To a samurai of Tsunetomo Yamamoto's standing, there are no samurai who would be considered a grunt, as SirDarkSol stated, that was where the ashigaru came in.

The words that you referenced earlier, to burn the book after he had written it... was referenced earlier in the foreward. Tsunetomo did not believe that the world was ready for the statements that he was making; hagakure was a collection of tales that Tsuramoto Tashiro, a younger member of his clan wrote down. Tsunetomo somehow knew that the very thing that would make Japan stronger would be of no good to the current society.

Again to reference a previous question of yours, a retainer of a lord was required to obey his lord to his death. It is very true that at that time it was somewhat of a requirement, a retainer sometimes protested his lord's decision with seppuku, proving with his life how ardently he felt about a decision being right or wrong... but there are many historical references of a samurai disagreeing with their lord, just in a different way than we would now.

But Hagakure was more of an admonishment of how bad society was percieved by Tsunetomo than what samurai life was like at that time. It is an extreme, rather than an average of what it was like to be one at that time.