The warrior class that seized power from Japan's imperial court and hardened over time into a hereditary estate, ruling the country for some seven hundred years, from the age of the shoguns until the Meiji Restoration abolished it in 1868. Pragmatic professional soldiers who fought brutal civil wars and switched sides for advantage, they were reborn after their abolition as a global legend of honour, loyalty, and the beautiful death -- a code called bushido that was largely codified later, in peacetime and in the modern era, and was harnessed by the militarist state of the 1930s and 1940s.
The samurai everyone pictures -- the lone swordsman bound by an unbreakable code, ready to die rather than lose face -- is largely the work of writers who came after the swords were gone. The real samurai were a hereditary warrior class that ruled Japan for roughly seven centuries. They switched sides, betrayed lords, and fought through more than a century of near-constant civil war. Then peace came, and the warriors with no wars left became clerks and scholars drawing rice salaries. Only as the class was being abolished in the late 1800s did its idealized loyalty harden into 'bushido,' the way of the warrior, taught to a whole nation and later carried into the cockpits of the kamikaze. The legend says more about the ages that needed it than about the men who carried the swords.