The decline and fall of the samurai

There was more to the warriors than a readiness to die for honour

In 2019, a self-defence forces (SDF) office in Japan’s Shiga Prefecture published a recruitment poster featuring three cartoon girls wearing what were presumably non-regulation miniskirts, which exposed their underwear. The characters were from the anime Strike Witches, a popular TV show, manga and video-game series created by Fumikane Shimada, an illustrator who had been contributing promotional material for military use since 2013. The use of juvenile soldier nymphs in advertisements had reportedly helped to boost the number of local candidates taking the SDF entrance exam by about 30 per cent.

It’s a far cry from the violent historical image of Japan’s warrior class, as projected in the Hagakure, the 17th-century samurai Yamamoto Tsunetomo’s classic guide to martial conduct. But in recent decades, those legends have had to compete with countervailing forces within Japanese culture. Following the country’s formal surrender to the Allies in 1945, Japan worked hard to redraw its image and committed itself to technological innovation, craft, pop culture and pacifism. Samurai mythology was no longer pushed by the government to represent the nation abroad, as it had been since the 19th century. In its stead came Totoro, Nintendo, Michelin-starred sushi restaurants and Hello Kitty. What place did the samurai have in a land of such abundance and peace – where more than a few aspirant soldiers were willing to enlist not for the promise of wielding a state-issued katana (a samurai’s traditional sword) but because they were bewitched into doing so by cartoon panties?

Yet the image of the samurai has far from vanished. While the US occupation forces banned the warriors’ representation in the Japanese media from 1945 until 1952, they soon returned to prominence in films, manga and TV shows. Jidaigeki (period dramas) featuring samurai were staples of the mid-to-late Shōwa period, which ended in 1989, and remain popular today. From Akira Kurosawa’s epics (such as his 1954 film Seven Samurai) to the 1970s comic-book series Lone Wolf and Cub, stories and images drawing from bushidō (the set of samurai values first formalised in the 17th century) became all but inescapable.

But, like cowboys in revisionist Westerns, these samurai were reimagined for modern audiences who found little inherent glamour in feudalist hierarchies or austere notions of giri (duty). Where the Hagakure’s ideal warrior would plunge “recklessly towards an irrational death” as a point of pride, these postwar creations – many of whom were masterless rōnin (itinerant samurai), stripped of social status – were either existential heroes in search of meaning or else flattened into harmless archetypes. My young son loved wearing a T-shirt bearing a cartoon of a Hiroshima Carps baseball player decked out in full 18th-century armour – a character way too cute to instil any fear or awe in anyone.

“Samurai”, a major new exhibition at the British Museum, brings together some 280 objects and pieces of digital media to interrogate the multiple identities of these warriors since their emergence in the 12th century. They were mercenaries, then feared rulers, then patrons of the arts; they were also objects of fetishisation by European medievalists and a propaganda tool during the Second World War. The exhibition’s lead curator, Rosina Buckland, tells me that though the West tends to fixate on “the strong, martial image of the samurai”, this was only ever one aspect of who they were. Over the course of a millennium that ended in the late 1860s – when the emperor Meiji stripped the warriors of their official titles and imposed direct imperial rule – they became an everyday part of a society that acknowledged sexual fluidity, accepted women into the ruling class (as well as into military service) and worried about what the style of an ornamental sword mount conveyed about its owner’s taste. “We’re all attracted to the drama and the ideal of the powerful warrior,” says Buckland. “But they’re not the whole story.”

Nonetheless, the samurai have become stock characters used globally to signify military might and discipline, often mixed with an exoticised sense of the mythic. You see them serving this role in Western-made movies such as the 2003 Tom Cruise vehicle The Last Samurai, in video games such as 2025’s Assassin’s Creed Shadows and in 2024’s US-made TV series Shōgun.

As Japan boomed in the 1970s and 1980s, many in the West sought explanations for the nation’s economic success in its martial philosophies – a trope that has yet to fully die out. Like the Romans and Vikings, the samurai have become a fantasy of masculinity and power, freighted with a multitude of meanings often unconnected to historical reality.

Or perhaps that’s what they have always been. Buckland tells me that the samurai were “already a myth” during the 250-year period of peace that followed the rise of Tokugawa Ieyasu to shōgun in 1603. With no war through which to prove their right to rule over the masses, they began to cultivate legends of their class’s heroism in combat, virtue and chivalry. Many would commission illustrated accounts of past battles to bolster their collective reputation – PR exercises that have since become part of the historical record.

Samurai are, then, larger than life by design. They are manufactured icons that can easily be co-opted to suit even contradictory agendas. In The Last Samurai, directed by Edward Zwick, they serve a near-identical role to that of Native Americans in Kevin Costner’s Dances with Wolves (1990). In Zwick’s film, the 19th-century warriors are shown as noble savages defending ancient truths from the forces of Westernisation – a sentiment the 20th-century Japanese fascist novelist Yukio Mishima would have heartily endorsed. But where Zwick’s protagonist defines bushidō, the way of the warrior, as a matter of experiencing “life in every breath”, for Mishima it was to be “found in death”. The novelist was so committed to his fantasies that he died performing seppuku (suicide by disembowelment) in 1970, after attempting a coup. Mishima also saw the samurai way as a bulwark against the “feminisation of Japanese males” due to his country’s postwar dalliance with US culture.

However, for my father, bushidō is simply about self-discipline and “our shared responsibility for the well-being of others”. Our ancestors belonged to the warrior class; in the 14th century, they founded Miyazaki castle in southern Japan. They were later welcomed into the powerful Ito clan and given a bukeyashiki (samurai home), where some of my relatives still live. Though the Zushis’ status as nobles was stripped in the 1870s, my father’s side of the family long cleaved to samurai principles, which, he says, were subtly manifested in daily life. When I ask him in what way, he replies, “I always felt conscious that I had to stand in front of others and look out for them.”

Dad warns me that the spirit of the tradition is all too often “distorted and used” to excuse savagery and adds that, for him, its true form is nowadays more readily found in quiet, self-reflective moments than in conflict. When he was growing up in postwar Japan, he says, each member of his family would gather in their Miyazaki house on New Year’s Day and sit up straight at a table. “Then we would declare how old we would be that year and what we would achieve.” It was a promise to each other and to themselves, staking their family honour on their commitment to seeing things through. So, like the samurai of centuries past, it was still about the clan and duty – just not the kind that had to be proven with spilled guts, your own or otherwise.

“Samurai” is showing at the British Museum, London, until 4 May

[Further reading: Why don’t we write love letters any more?]