Samurai: a ‘blockbuster’ display of Japan’s legendary warriors

We think of samurai as fearsome warriors – and they were, said Neil Fisher in The Sunday Times. Yet if you visit Nomura Residence, an “elegant” house in the Japanese city of Kanazawa where generations of samurai lived, you’ll find it has delightful features, including an exquisite garden. Inside, you can see a fine piece of calligraphy – a letter written in 1566 to a samurai from his liege lord. “We appreciate that you worked so hard to kill one high-ranked soldier on the fourth of last month at the Yokokitaguchi Battle,” it says. “We are very happy that you brought us his head.”

The story of the samurai is, you realise, a “bundle of contradictions” – “elegance and formality, banality and butchery” – and that is how it is presented in the British Museum’s “blockbuster” show. It explores the role of the samurai and their pop-cultural afterlife – and in so doing, it clears up a few misapprehensions. The biggest is that the samurai were a “military sect”, when for centuries they were more “a privileged tier of society” that helped ensure the smooth running of the state. During the Tokugawa shogunate (1603-1868), “about 10% of the population counted as samurai class”, half of whom were women.

The show takes you on a “scintillating journey” through “a world of gore, power and artistic beauty”, said Jonathan Jones in The Guardian. The samurai were not the first to believe that, in battle, the warrior is transformed into something other. The Vikings had their berserkers, for instance. “But no culture has ever put quite as much creativity into blood-lust” as this one. When the samurai donned their armour – “so vital, so electric”, with their grimacing black masks – they would have seemed truly demonic. Even empty, the suits here “pulse with menace and mystery”.

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There are lots of weapons on show too, and images of samurai in bloody battle – but also a painting of a warrior stopping to smell the blossom he is riding past, and another of a samurai making love to a courtesan while two other women “caress the blade of his unsheathed sword”. That perhaps encapsulates the appeal of this exhibition: the samurai were lethal but sexy, their warfare violent yet theatrical.

For samurai, who “aspired to be sophisticated courtiers and held the arts in high regard, beauty and brutality were intertwined”, said Alastair Sooke in The Daily Telegraph. Some of their armour was positively dandyish; a 19th century quiver here glitters like a disco floor. The show is in three parts. The first covers the rise of the warriors as a fighting force in medieval times; the second – and most engrossing, in my view – is about the peaceful Tokugawa shogunate, when they morphed into bureaucrats; the third explores their impact on popular culture. The effect of this section, which includes comic books and an effigy of Darth Vader, whose helmet was modelled on samurai armour, is bathetic, as if you’ve walked into a teenager’s bedroom. It’s a disappointing climax to an otherwise “riveting” exhibition.

British Museum, London WC1. Until 4 May