Samurai

Explores the reality and myths of the samurai from medieval times to today’s popular culture

The figure of the samurai is unique in its global intelligibility, read both as a symbol of Japan and as a universal icon of the virtuous and fearless warrior. While the term is now common worldwide, there is little understanding of the historical reality, or of the wide variety of ways in which the stereotype has been used over time. This is the first book to explore the centuries-long trajectory of the samurai through objects from international collections. It discusses the warrior class’s historical origins in the medieval period’s civil wars and stories they told of their own achievements. With the establishment of peace, the samurai became an official class fulfilling a bureaucratic role. The ideal of the medieval warrior took on legendary status.

Although the samurai social class was abolished in 1876, with the full opening of Japan to international visitors, the concept of the samurai was packaged for foreign tourists and repurposed as a model for the modern soldier in a period of military conflict and colonial expansion. The image of the samurai has been interpreted and reimagined in Japan and across the world in myriad ways. Discussions of national myth and global samurai bring the story up to the present day through a selection of films, television shows, manga, anime, video games, and more.

Rosina Buckland is Asahi Shimbun Curator: Japanese Collections, author of The Splendour of Modernity: Japanese Arts of the Meiji Era, and curator of the exhibition Samurai at the British Museum. Oleg Benesch is professor of modern history and head of the Department of History at the University of York and coauthor of Japan’s Castles: Citadels of Modernity in War and Peace. Contributors: Thomas D. Conlan, Morgan Pitelka Rebekah Clements, Nam-lin Hur, Birgit Tremml-Werner, Hiromu Nagahara, Mark Ravina, Natasha Bennett, Clemens Büttner, Chika Tonooka, Tatiana Linkhoeva, Sven Saaler, Judith Vitale, Sarah Panzer, Michele Monserrati, Sarah Thal, Alisa Freedman, Frederik Cryns, and Rachael Hutchinson