Half of Japan’s samurai were women, groundbreaking exhibition at British Museum says

A groundbreaking new exhibition at the British Museum reveals the untold history of Japan’s Samurai class, including the fact that half of them were women. Samurai is the first exhibition to explore how the warrior order’s image and myth were manufactured and purports to challenge everything the public thinks they know about the Japanese icons. Bringing together over 280 objects and digital media from both the collection and 29 national and international lenders – with many items including a suit of samurai armour on display for the first time – the display includes arms, armour, paintings, woodblock prints, books, clothing, ceramics and photographs. The samurai emerged in the early medieval period in the 1100s to 1600 as wealthy households hired warriors for private security provision. The mercenary group developed into a rural gentry and by 1615 they had moved away from the battlefield to serve as government officials, scholars, and patrons of the arts. It is here where half of the samurai class were women and although they did not tend to fight they were a vital part of the elite order, playing a key role both on and off the battlefield.“It's a surprise that comes from a narrow use or a narrow understanding of the word samurai, because samurai doesn't mean warrior,” Dr Rosina Buckland, Asahi Shimbun curator of Japanese Collections, told The Independent. According to the exhibition, the most celebrated female samurai was Tomoe Gozen who died in 1247, and whose exploits are the subject of The Tale of the Heike. She was reported to have ripped off the head of the samurai Uchida Saburo leyoshi who tried to capture her for ransom. Later, as battles subsided, women dressed according to their rank within this class. High-ranking women wore long, trailing robes decorated with nature motifs and references to Japanese literature. Unmarried samurai wore long sleeves on their kimono to demonstrate their status. They were educated to prepare them for married life, running a household and raising children, the exhibition reveals. Appropriate behaviour, etiquette and the right cultural preparations were all part of an ongoing education in society. The exhibition also documents the influence of samurais on popular culture with a special section dedicated to film, television, manga, video games and contemporary art including commissioned works by the celebrated Japanese artist Noguchi Tetsuya. “Historians have always known that the popular understanding – as is the case with most cultures – is some distance away from where they’re being interpreted,” says Dr Buckland.“There’s a distance in time and space and a popular understand that can be easily consumed, and a description that be easily understood is what spreads. “Hollywood movies and imagery gets spread around the world and that become fixed as people’s ideas but historians know that when you dig beneath the surface, you find something quite different. There’s a little grain of truth in it but it gets exaggerated.”Split into three sections, the exhibition explores the samurai’s role as fearsome honour-bound warriors, their evolution into a cultural class of bureaucrats and their modern day influence on popular culture. After the samurai stopped fighting in 1615, Dr Buckland says a rich and layered cultural landscape emerged. “They’re not warriors in practice during this period,” she says. “They’re just warriors in name. They're kind of this standing army that never actually has to fight a battle because there's 250 years of peace. “So we show a samurai in normal everyday clothing like a business suit. We show them that there are women. Half of the samurai class were women, and there's a woman's robe and her daily hair regimen instruments, a dressing set and a hand mirror and a book of etiquette. There are lots of cultural pursuits in this section. Books that samurai published or artworks that they enjoyed.”Samurai reveals that much of the myths around the group were shaped by politics, nostalgia and global pop culture, long after their age had passed. In peacetime, particularly during the early 20th century that was a politically charged period for Japan as it engaged in colonial expansion, Dr Buckland says the samurai image was manipulated for the purposes of galvanising a national identity. Some of the highlights of the exhibition include a rare suit of samurai armour newly acquired by the Museum complete with a prestigious helmet and golden standard, shaped like iris leaves, which were designed to make the wearer both “identifiable and fearsome”. Others include a vermillion red, woman’s firefighting jacket, a rare portrait of a 13-year-old samurai who led an embassy to the Vatican in 1582. Modern installations include a Louis Vuitton outfit inspired by Japanese armour and references to popular video games such as Assassin’s Creed: Shadows (2025) and Nioh 3 (2026). “We’re using this very well-known word ‘samurai’ to introduce people to the richness of Japanese culture and the complexity of history and explain all the different roles they had over the centuries,” says Dr Buckland. “Because they’re the elite, they have the best stuff, the best quality objects. It allows us to interrogate this popular understanding.”Samurai runs from 3 February to 4 May 2026.