The samurai are dead.

That’s not a morbid or melancholic statement - just a fact. Every samurai who ever lived has long since passed, and only the memory of their way of life remains. By the mid 1800s, the old ways were fading. For centuries, Japanese society had followed a Confucian hierarchy that placed the samurai at the top.

Everything changed when Japan opened to the West. New weapons, technologies, medicines, and ideas flooded into the country. Power shifted away from the shogunate and toward the imperial court, culminating in the Meiji Restoration on 3 January 1868, when authority was formally returned to The Emperor. Within a decade, the samurai stipends were abolished, the military was modernised, and the last major samurai uprising - the Satsuma Rebellion of 1877 - was crushed.

Today, the castles and strongholds once built with only conflict in mind stand as museums and cultural landmarks. Japan’s armed forces are now a Self-Defense Force, not an army of expansion. And the way of the samurai survives as a cultural relic - preserved and reimagined in film, television, anime, and literature, recognised across the globe.

Yet beneath the surface, the legacy endures in quieter ways.

Across Japan, individuals and small groups continue to study, preserve, and protect the remnants of that heritage. Much of this work is quiet, patient, and often unnoticed. After all, it’s far more captivating to watch a stylised swordfight in high definition than to painstakingly translate a weathered scroll written by a long-dead warrior. It’s easier to enjoy the choreographed flow of martial arts than to study the brutal techniques honed for the battlefield.

My own role in the Gun Corps often felt the same. To understand the samurai, you have to understand the culture. One that values martial prowess. One that values art. One cannot exist without the other.