What is bushido?  Wikidpedia informs us that it was the code of honour established by the ancient Japanese samurai, or noble knights who ruled Japan from the Middle Ages until as recently as 150 years ago.  The samurai were hired mercenaries who were retained by wealthy lords or shogun to keep them in power and subdue the peasant population.  They were possibly some of the fiercest fighters known throughout the history of human warfare.

The bushido code developed from a set of survival techniques into a codex of deep philosophical principles that determined how the samurai would act in relation to their lords, their fellow samurai, and ultimately how they would behave in relation to each other.  This set of rules, according to which the samurai would live their lives, was intrinsically tied up with the philosophy of Zen Buddhism, which was the religion followed majority of the warrior samurai.

Many samurai did become bloodthirsty bandits who terrorized the local populations where they lived. However, the samurai were a much more diverse group who generally backed those feudal lords who could maintain them in the most lavish way.  Despite that, over the hundreds of years of their existence, they did develop a special code of behaviour not dissimilar to that of the legendary Arthurian knights of European history during the Middle Ages.

With the demise of feudal times, the samurai disbanded, but their skills and arts were maintained by samurai families who kept their traditions alive.  Those families maintained the martial skills of their ancestors along with the samurai honour code, or bushido, that bound the groups of samurai warriors in a single goal.  Bushido, literally "way of the warrior", included an awareness and practice of the following seven virtues: