We often get so worked up talking about samurai honor and chivalry we can forget that the period relevant to our discussions was that of a brutal civil war. And just like in contemporary Europe, codes of chivalry, if they existed, only applied to other samurai. Now, the Chinese and Koreans spared no details as to Japanese brutality towards civilians during the Imjin War yet popular sources are much more quiet towards Japanese domestic atrocities. Was this part of a deliberate policy of the Tokugawa later regimes to paint the Sengoku Jidai as a period of nostalgia, where the samurai were not only chivalrous but well-behaved? Or were the samurai in fact far more humane to civilians of their home nation compared to outsiders?