Warrior Legend in Akira Kurosawa’s Seven Samurai.

When Japanese filmmaker Akira Kurosawa decided to direct his movie Shichinin no Samurai (Seven Samurai, 1954), he performed painstaking historical research and included well-known samurai legends in his film. Seven Samurai tells the story of a group of masterless samurai led by the expert swordsman Kambei Shimada. In the year of 1587, the samurai are hired by the inhabitants of a village threatened by plunder from bandits once their harvest has come in. As the villagers can offer them only rice for their services, the seven samurai primarily fight for the villagers out of a sense of honor, self-respect, and disgust with the bandits preying on the weakest members of Japan’s feudal society.