is the term for the military nobility of pre-industrial Japan. According to translator William Scott Wilson: "In Chinese, the character 侍 was originally a verb meaning to wait upon or accompany a persons in the upper ranks of society, and this is also true of the original term in Japanese, . In both countries the terms were nominalized to mean "those who serve in close attendance to the nobility," the pronunciation in Japanese changing to . According to Wilson, an early reference to the word "samurai" appears in the Kokin Wakashū (905–914), the first imperial anthology of poems, completed in the first part of the 10th century.

Samurai is a 1957 book by Martin Caidin, based on the life and career of Saburo Sakai, the Japanese combat aviator who fought against American fighter pilots in the pacific theater of World War II, surviving the war with 64 kills as one of Japan's leading flying aces. The book is based on journalist Fred Saito's extensive interviews with Sakai as well as on Sakai's own memoirs.