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Samurai
Japan's hereditary warrior class, bound by bushido and famed for the katana, yumi bow, and mounted archery.
The samurai were Japan's hereditary warrior class — provincial mounted archers who rose through the Genpei War of the 1180s into eight centuries of military rule, from the first shogunate at Kamakura to the Meiji Restoration of 1868. They were soldiers, landholders, administrators, and eventually a legally closed caste whose two swords were a birthright and a badge.
The arms tradition ran deeper than the blade: the samurai began as 'the way of horse and bow,' and mounted archery with the asymmetric yumi defined early elite combat. The spear and the imported matchlock dominated the massed armies of the Sengoku civil wars; the Katana, worn edge-up with the short wakizashi, became the soul-of-the-warrior symbol the Edo peace made famous. Lamellar armor evolved into the great yoroi panoplies that remain masterpieces of craft.
Bushidō — the retrospective codification of loyalty, honor, and death before disgrace — was as much Edo-period literature as battlefield fact, but the class's discipline was real, and its ethos soaked into Japanese institutions long after the swords were banned in 1876. From Kurosawa to the collecting market for papered blades and armor, no warrior aristocracy in world history has projected its image further beyond the moment of its own extinction.
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Katana
The katana is the curved, single-edged long sword of the samurai, worn edge-up through the sash and drawn in the same motion that cuts. Its blade unites two demands that defeat most swordmakers — a hard edge that takes a razor polish and a resilient body that survives impact — through differential hardening of folded steel, the visible signature of which is the hamon along the edge. It is at once a battlefield weapon, a spiritual object, and the most recognized sword form on earth.
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Tanto
The tanto is the dagger of the samurai: a single- or double-edged Japanese blade under thirty centimeters, forged, hardened, and polished by exactly the methods of the great swords and worn as their constant companion. It was armor's answer at grappling distance, the blade of the warrior household, and the canvas for some of the finest work Japanese smiths ever produced — and its name now also describes the chisel-pointed blade style modern makers borrowed from it.