Akira Kurosawa (黒澤明, Akira Kurosawa) grew up in a house where the old world was still present. His father, Isamu, came from a samurai family in Akita Prefecture and reportedly still walked around in traditional garb — topknot, formal dress — decades after the 廃刀令 (Haitōrei, Haitōrei), the sword-abolition edict of 1876, had officially ended the samurai class. The director grew up watching a man perform the rituals of a world that no longer existed. When he came to make a film about samurai in the early 1950s, he was not romanticizing something distant. He was eulogizing something he had seen in his own kitchen.

Production on 七人の侍 (Shichinin no Samurai) began in May 1953. It ran 148 shooting days — an eternity by Japanese studio standards. Toho executives halted production twice when the budget overran its projections. They approved approximately ¥125 million at the start; the final cost came to around ¥210 million, making it by far the most expensive Japanese film ever made and roughly eight times the average production budget for a Japanese studio picture. Kurosawa used the money on precision: authentic Sengoku-era costumes and props researched in historical archives, a production design built from period records, and a climactic battle sequence that is still discussed as one of the most technically demanding action scenes in film history.

For the rain-soaked final battle, Kurosawa flooded a paddy field in January cold, then mixed black ink into the rain machines so the falling water would register on camera. The cast was genuinely hypothermic. The actors playing samurai stood in freezing ink-dark water and fought their way through mud and smoke to a conclusion that — by the strict moral logic of the script — was always going to be tragedy. The samurai win. The village is saved. The villagers return to planting rice, absorbed in their survival, barely glancing at the graves of the men who died for them. The last samurai standing looks at those graves and says: they won, not us. The farmers won. We lost again.

Kurosawa and his co-writers Shinobu Hashimoto (橋本忍, Hashimoto Shinobu) and Hideo Oguni (小国英雄, Oguni Hideo) were writing about Japan in 1954 as much as Japan in the 16th century. The film was released nine years after Hiroshima and Nagasaki, with the samurai class defeated, its privileges stripped, its role in the war a source of national shame. The 浪人 (ronin) — masterless men, warriors for whom the world has no remaining use — were an obvious mirror. These seven highly skilled men with no one left to serve: they exist outside of ordinary society, they are called in when ordinary society cannot save itself, and when it is over, ordinary society goes on without them. Honor does not feed you. The code does not earn you a place at the table. The farmers close ranks and plant their next crop.

The film opened on April 26, 1954, at 207 minutes — also the longest Japanese film ever released. Toho cut it to 160 minutes for most of its initial international distribution run, meaning that Western audiences who loved and praised it for decades were, without knowing it, watching an amputated version. The full cut was not widely restored until years later.

The Silver Lion at Venice that autumn was the first major international prize for a Japanese film. Kurosawa became famous in Europe almost before he was fully appreciated at home. American director John Sturges saw the film and in 1960 remade it as The Magnificent Seven — transposing the story to the American West with a cast that included Steve McQueen, Yul Brynner, and Charles Bronson. The remake was a massive international success. Then came the long chain of descendants: The Dirty Dozen. Star Wars. A Bug's Life. Every 'assembled team of specialists on a noble mission' film traces its structure back here. George Lucas named Seven Samurai his favorite Kurosawa film. The 2022 Sight and Sound poll of critics and directors still ranked it among the greatest films ever made.

More people have absorbed 武士道 (bushidō, bushidō) — the samurai code — through this one film than through any historical event in this book. It is the most consequential samurai event of the 20th century: a fictional story that took a warrior ethos forged over seven centuries and handed it, whole, to the entire planet.

Kurosawa died in 1998. His father's topknot, the old garb, the household rituals of a world abolished by law the year before Akira was born — they all made it to the screen and then out past the screen into everything that came after.