Shining armor

More than crude gunslingers in the Old West or the effete epee-thrusting fencers of Europe, Japanese samurais were, quite simply, cool.

Though they were forced to put down their swords by decree in the 1870s, the Japanese knight-warriors, with their Bushido code of honor, bravery and cunning, have continued to fascinate the world. Plus, if the Japanese films of samurai legends are to be believed, the grace of their swordsmanship was enough to attract the eye.

That ethos and more will be on display in "Lethal Beauty: Samurai Weapons and Armor," a touring exhibit at the Honolulu Museum of Art that runs through Aug. 18. The exhibit was organized in 2009 and has been in heavy demand by museums across the country ever since.

"Through movies like ‘The Last Samurai’ or ‘Shogun’ or Akira Kurosawa movies, we are kind of familiar with these things, but who has the chance to see them in reality?" said Andreas Marks, curator of the exhibit. Marks is the former director and curator of the Clark Center for Japanese Art and Culture in Hanford, Calif., an institution devoted to Japanese fine art.

Marks collected more than 60 items by 30 master craftsmen from various private collections, most of them in California. None of their collectors is of Japanese ancestry, Marks said, proving the cross-cultural appeal of samurai culture.

The items date from the 13th to the 20th centuries and include swords, daggers, rifles, suits of armor and more. Some of the swords have earned distinction in Japan, which ranks its cultural artifacts and does not allow those of the highest rank to leave Japan, Marks said. Two of the swords in the exhibit are certified as just below that rank, he said.

"I had one visitor in Hanford who came from San Diego. He came and kneeled down in front of one of the blades," Marks said. "And then he came to me and said he never before believed that he’d be able to see this blade by this very famous swordsmith."

That blade, forged by 13th-century swordsmith Rai Kunitoshi, "really looks like it was forged yesterday," Marks said, adding that all the swords in the exhibit are still "really sharp."

Included in the show are five suits of armor, four of them custom-made for nobles or wealthy merchants who could afford an outfit that served in equal measure as protection, intimidation and ostentation.

"I like to compare (them) with present-day Italian suits, because they’re basically, from head to toe, one complete suit made-to-order for somebody," Marks said.

The fifth suit is a composite, comprising pieces from different makers and different eras.

"The helmet and the breastplate of the composite suit, they definitely have seen battle," Marks said. "They have little nicks and nacks, so you know something has happened here."

Marks also brought a set of painted screens that illustrate famous land and sea battles.

"It is very, very detailed, detailed up to the level of showing some warrior’s heads being decapitated," Marks said. "Blood is pouring out and one guy is carrying the head on the tip of his sword."

Shawn Eichman, the Honolulu Museum of Art’s curator of Asian art, said the samurai aesthetic has become part of popular culture, manifested in such items as Darth Vader’s samurailike helmet in the "Star Wars" films.

"Some things become so pervasive that they become a universal cultural heritage instead of a particular cultural heritage," he said. "The samurai is a really good example of that."

The exhibit also poses the question of how objects of such beauty could be so deadly, Eichman said.

"It is at its most fundamental root something that really comes out of warfare and violence and something that you wouldn’t associate with ‘culture,’" he said. "And yet warfare and violence often becomes a means for creativity, for the birth of new art forms.

"One of the things that makes it so cool is that it does have that inherent contradiction in it."