The samurai has long endured in the global imagination as an iconic fixture of Japanese cultures and cinema. Movies featuring members of Japan’s warrior classes who adhere to a bushidō ‘way-of-the-warrior’ code of honour and practice rooted in Zen Buddhism, Confucianism and Shintoism, spearheaded the boom in the overseas appreciation of Japanese cinema from the mid-1950s onwards.
Seven Samurai and Hollywood remakes
Undoubtedly the best-known example, Kurosawa Akira’s Seven Samurai (1954) regularly ranks highly in critics’ and audiences’ polls of the best films of all time. The epic tale of mud, blood and selfless heroics depicts a group of rōnin (masterless samurai), who band together to fend off repeated attacks on a beleaguered farming community by marauding bandits. It won the Silver Lion at the Venice Film Festival in 1954.
The first instalment of Inagaki Hiroshi’s Samurai trilogy (1954–1956), which depicted the adventures of the legendary master swordsman Miyamoto Musashi (1584–1645), romped to victory in the foreign language category at the 1955 Oscars. It was the earliest take on his oft-dramatized life story to be shot in colour, with other notable filmed versions including Uchida Tomu’s five-film Zen and Sword series (1961–1965).
Kurosawa spoke openly about his admiration for directors such as John Ford. His film Seven Samurai was remade in Hollywood as The Magnificent Seven (1960), and Yojimbo (1961) was later unofficially remade by Sergio Leone as A Fistful of Dollars (1961). It was inevitable that parallels would be drawn between samurai films and the American Western film genre, most notably by the critic Alain Silver in his 1977 book The Samurai Film.
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The iconic star of Kurosawa’s films and of Inagaki’s Samurai trilogy, Mifune Toshirō, even popped up in the American Wild West in the bizarre European production of Red Sun (1971), playing bodyguard to a Japanese ambassador murdered en route to visiting the president and forming an unlikely friendship with Charles Bronson. The universality of the samurai genre was also not lost on George Lucas, for whom Kurosawa’s The Hidden Fortress (1958) provided the basis for Star Wars (1977).
The first samurai films
The term jidaigeki, meaning period dramas, broadly refers to fiction films set in Japan’s premodern era prior to the Meiji Restoration of 1868. Included within the jidaigeki category is the samurai film and its sub-genre of chanbara – literally sword-fighting films, the term coming from the onomatopoeic sound of swords clashing. Such films dominated the earliest decades of the Japanese cinema in numerous, mostly lost works based on legendary historical figures and classic kabuki plays. It was not until the late 1910s that dramas dealing with contemporary life, or gendaigeki, started being produced.
The pioneering ‘father of Japanese film’ Makino Shōzō (1878–1929) set the ball rolling with The Battle at Honnoji Temple in 1908, before going on to make over a hundred short works based on historical subject matter, usually featuring the animated presence of Japan’s first movie star, Onoe Matsunosuke (1875–1926), whose expressive, wide-eyed facial expressions earned him the nickname ‘Medama no Machan’ (‘Eyeballs’ Matsu).
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Makino deployed innovative uses of ‘trick’ techniques like reverse motion, jump cuts and double exposures to create physically impossible action sequences. He was also responsible for the ambitious early version of the Chūshingura legend, The 47 Loyal Ronin, released in several instalments between 1910 and 1912. A compilation of the surviving fragments is considered to be the oldest example of Japanese fictional cinema in existence.
The story, seen as embodying ideals of valour, loyalty, and self-sacrifice, was based on a true historical event. After assaulting a court official, the daimyō (regional feudal lord) of the small fiefdom of Akō, Naganori Asano (1667–1701), was ordered to commit seppuku (ritual suicide) by the fifth Tokugawa shogun, Tsunayoshi. His 47 retainers spent a year plotting to kill the official, Yoshinaka Kira, and avenge their master’s death, before they themselves were commanded to kill themselves in accordance with samurai custom. It has been adapted to film and television on countless occasions, including versions by such esteemed directors as Inagaki Hiroshi, Kingugasa Teinosuke, Mizoguchi Kenji, Fukasaku Kinji and Ichikawa Kon.
The samurai film as social criticism
From the late 1920s onwards, directors such as Itō Daisuke revolutionized the chanbara genre with new more dynamic editing and expressive high-contrast lighting techniques in titles like Chuji’s Travel Diary (1927), one of many films based on the life of the Edo-period outlaw Kunisada Chūji (1810–1851). Meanwhile Kinugasa Teinosuke’s Crossroads (1928), described by the director himself as “a samurai film without swords”, with its tale of unrequited love heavily influenced by German expressionism, became the first Japanese film to play widely in Europe and America.
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A general focus on real-life legends of the Tokugawa era also allowed filmmakers to criticize the order of the day, as was the case with Yamanaka Sadao’s Humanity and Paper Balloons (1937), which undermined the mythos of the noble warrior in a story about a debilitated samurai forced by poverty into selling his sword and eking out a living selling paper balloons made by his wife. This same spirit of social criticism in a period setting endured over the decades, particularly in the 1960s, with Kobayashi Masaki’s Harakiri (1962) exploring the paradoxes surrounding ritual suicide and blind feudal loyalty to one’s master, a tradition followed by directors like Yamada Yōji in his samurai trilogy beginning with Twilight Samurai (2002).
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During the war years, films that validated the martial spirit were positively encouraged by the militaristic government, a situation that was quickly reversed after the war under US occupation, with a blanket ban on jidaigeki. The occupation’s end, however, saw a mass resurgence in the genre, largely led by the new studio Toei, which churned out numerous serials and reworkings of old samurai staples for a mass audience, to the extent that hundreds of jidaigeki were made throughout the 1950s. One should note, however, that the international popularity of Kurosawa Akira’s films during this period was due to them being largely set in the lawless Warring States period of the 16th century, without local inherited customs to draw upon and critique, and based on original stories that did not require a detailed knowledge of Japanese history.
Samurai on the small screen
With the advent of television, the chanbara film migrated to the small screen, yielding to the burgeoning popularity of more modern-set yakuza gangster films across the 1960s. Nevertheless, the theatrical serial form persisted throughout the 1960s. Emblematic series produced at Daiei’s Kyoto studios include the Shinobi: Band of Assassins (1962–1966) ninja films and the long-running Zatoichi (1962-89) series featuring Katsu Shintarō, the eponymous blind swordsman who roams the land masquerading as an itinerant masseur (the character was revived by Kitano Takeshi in 2003). Such works were based on more modern historical novels and indeed modern media forms also informed the style and content of many a jidaigeki.
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The first film director to emerge from a television background was Gosha Hideo, whose feature debut, Three Outlaw Samurai (1964), was a theatrical spin-off of the series of the same name that he had created. Like Kurosawa, whom he admired, Gosha was less interested in retelling old tales than using the jidaigeki to explore his own worldview. In this film he cast a cynical eye on the more feral animalistic traditions of the underdog in Japanese society to reflect a new era of political unrest and social turbulence. Later the exceedingly bloody Lone Wolf and Cub (1971–74) films again came from fresh original source material. It was adapted from the Koike Kazuo gekiga (literally “dramatic pictures”), a new style of realistic manga that itself was highly influenced by cinema, and depicts a former executioner of the shogun, wrongly accused of treason, as he flees from his persecutors with his infant son and a baby cart full of a hidden arsenal of deadly sharp blades.
Jidaigeki in general and the samurai film in particular constitute so vast a field that it is almost impossible to summarize its historical trajectory. Nevertheless, it undoubtedly provides a revealing mirror through which to look at Japan’s historical past from the various points in its more recent past.
The film season Samurai on screen is on at Japan House London from 15 February – 24 June 2026.
This article was written by Jasper Sharp, a writer and curator specializing in Japanese cinema and the co-editor of the website Midnight Eye.