For many people their introduction to the samurai – Japan’s hereditary warrior class - happens when they visit a museum and see a suit of Japanese armour. It often looks like a very ornate beetle, and one of the most interesting parts is the face mask with its grinning teeth and horse-hair moustaches. This item often provokes a common question, ‘Why would anyone want to fight in this?’ In this talk I will go ‘behind the mask’ to examine the truth about these legendary warriors. The use of the word ‘samurai’ as a term to describe a fighting man in fact developed quite late in recorded Japanese history. Japan was already no stranger to conflict, including threats from overseas, when a reigning emperor abandoned plans for a conscript army and turned instead to recruiting powerful landowners who had honed their military skills on the wild frontiers of the settled Japanese state. It took another two centuries for these same landowning families to realise what political power they could exercise, a revelation that resulted in a fierce civil war. The outcome was the governance of Japan by the military samurai class for the next 700 years, although much of that time was to be characterised by petty rivalries and civil wars. Japan would be reunified under firm control in 1591, by which time most of the traditions of the samurai as they are understood today were firmly in place. These recognised behaviour patterns and values included loyalty (a concept honoured as much in the breach as in the observance) personal honour, ritual suicide, head-collecting and the cult of the sword. When wars effectively ceased in 1615 ‘armchair samurai’ had free rein to elaborate upon such authentic traditions, developing among other things the questionable notion of bushido (the warrior’s code) and the almost totally fraudulent idea of the hereditary cult of the ninja. The modern age has done little to dispel such concepts and commercial interests have if anything enhanced them. Visitors to Japan can now tour concrete castles built as replicas of places that never had any military value and watch displays by actors dressed as warriors who never existed practising martial arts that were originally created as school sports. Even Kurosawa’s classic film Seven Samurai, created with the aim of debunking the samurai myth, turned out to be its most potent glorification. December 2013 will see Hollywood’s own version of homage to the samurai ideal in the release of 47 Ronin, an unashamed fantasy starring Keanu Reeves based on one of Japan’s most cherished samurai legends. The lecture will conclude with a brief behind- the-scenes glimpse at this remarkable take on one of the world’s greatest warrior societies. How new is Hollywood’s fantasy, and how much does it differ from Japan’s own fantasy of the samurai that has endured for centuries?