Samurais, Ninjas, and Geishas: The Peaceful Warrior's Paradox

Most of those awesome samurai stories, ninja legends, and geisha tales? They're not from the war-torn times you'd expect, but from the peaceful Edo period that Ieyasu kicked off. It's like the warriors got bored without all the fighting and decided to become history's coolest liberal arts majors.

With no wars to wage, they turned to arts, literature, and probably inventing really elaborate tea ceremonies. It's thanks to this era that we have all those cool Japanese cultural exports. Ieyasu essentially turned warriors into poets - now that's what you call a plot twist!