The samurai warrior class came to dominate Japanese society because for most of its history the country has been at war. Apart from the Mongol invasions of the 13th century and the debacle of World War II, the warfare has been internal warlords fighting each other, or the central authority of the shogun. One has only to see some of the historical dramas filmed by the great director Akira Kurosawa,such as The Seven Samurai, Yojimbo, Throne of Blood, or Ran to get a vivid sense of what the samurai were all about. Once the strangeness (to Westerners) of the bizarre dress and armor is registered, and one gets acclimated to a different culture and age, the motivations of the characters become clearer. For the samurai, there is usually an issue of honor to resolve, either by attack, revenge, or submission to authority. The closest European analogy to the samurai was the medieval knights, who also operated on a code of honor. Cervantes's Don Quixote is an example of a knight taking the idealism of chivalry to absurd lengths, which nonetheless proves its central importance. Knights, like samurai, often came from the upper classes. With primogeniture, or inheritance of property only by the eldest son, there were always second or third sons who had no other way of gaining their fortune, or social status, than by becoming samurai _ or monks. In America our closest equivalent is the cowboy, an idealized figure
             who has proved to be a durable peg on which to hang moral conflicts also
             involving bravery and honor. It's no accident that The Seven Samurai was remade in Hollywood as The Magnificent Seven, a gang of cowboys almost as violent as the samurai of the Japanese screen, who at the same time are groping for a moral code of sorts. There was nothing tentative about the moral code of the samurai. The Bushido Shoshinshu, or Code of the Samurai, was written to educate young samurai in the early 18th century. Its author, Taira Shigesuke, was a pr...