Cracks in the code

Were they exceptionally honourable? How many were women? How many Christian? Did they even live by the sword? A show at the British Museum looks back at 1,000 years of samurai history to separate truth from myth

- Anesha George

We're going to bet you didn't know that...

et's take that last one first.

The fictional, monastic Jedi order that drives so much of the action in George Lucas’s Star Wars films, he has often said, has drawn deeply from Japanese culture. The emphasis on discipline, loyalty and selflessness can be traced directly to Bushido (Japanese for Way of the Warrior), an unwritten and largely romanticised idea of the samurai code that emerged in modern Japan and spread and was further romanticised in the West.

The samurai tradition itself dates back at least 1,000 years. Long before modern popular culture, their story was already being shaped into myth.

So what's true; what isn’t; what have we most misunderstood? An exhibition at the British Museum (from February 3 to May 4) aims to set the record straight. (They may have taken a lot of our stuff, but they certainly do interesting things with it, don’t they?)

Through 280 objects from the museum's collection and from 29 other sources worldwide, the exhibition titled Samurai traces how these fighters rose from an early band of mercenary warriors to rule Japan for nearly 700 years (1185 to 1868), only for the entire culture to be abolished soon after, as Japan moved from a feudal society to a modern nation-state. So who were they really? Take a look.

Were they always revered soldiers?