The 1st Rule of the Samurai:

No girls allowed.

Did you ever see a woman samurai? I didn’t think so. Because women are ill-equipped to participate in the pissing matches that constitute a central part of the Samurai Way. No one wants to get into a big, messy swordfight, with limbs hacked off and shirts ruined, when differences can be settled with a pissing match. Have you ever seen women try to have a pissing match? Talk about messy. Not the Samurai Way, my friends.

Rule of the Samurai #2:

No drinking anything for three hours before battle.

Nothing cements you more firmly in the annals of loser samurai than to die while taking your armor off to have a leak in the middle of battle. If dehydrated, in a pinch, it is acceptable to lick the sweat off of your enemy, but don’t let anybody see you do it, because that might start some rumors about the samurai we can do without.

Also, do not compliment your enemy on his beautiful fighting outfits, this is Samurai Rule 84. Granted, there are many rules between the last two, but they’re mostly common sense things about not pissing in the wind, haste makes waste, and don’t eat chili before you go swimming. But Rule 84. That one is a biggie.

Rule 85, I think, is to keep your powder dry. Or possibly “thou shalt not covet they neighbor’s gong.” That one’s right around there too. I swear I used to have them all memorized.

Oh! Seventeen. Rule of the Samurai #17 is never show off your skills when a simple ass-whupping will suffice. This rule was added after Master Yo Li was killed while showing off his mystic flying skills and the lightness of his soul to an invading British army. Once the army arrived, Yo Li began floating around mystically from tree to tree, at which point the Englishmen shot him on principle.

The Samurai Code is especially important to remember when fighting a foe with superior technology, since there has to be a way to determine who will take all his armor off and streak naked across the battlefield, to draw the machine-gun fire away from the long-straw samurai. Also, when fighting another army of fellow samurai, there need to be rules to keep you from accidentally hacking up your friends in the confusion of battle, and somebody has to determine which army’s going to be armors, and which one skins.

Which brings us to Samurai Rule #62, which is that if you possess the means, you really should make a backup suit of armor that looks like a suit of very fat skin to fool the eye, because fighting without armor sucks hard.

This is the Samurai Way.

For more of this great story, buy Pinky Mulgrew’s painfully-authetic Asiany tome Chinks in the Armor.