Forget the battles and bloodshed, the samurai can teach you poetry and flower arranging

The legend of the samurai has endured because of its underlying philosophy, discovers Christine Manby while planning a warrior weekend

(Tom Ford)

The hills and mountains of north Wales have seen thousands of feats of derring-do over the centuries but there can’t be many people who’ve walked those forbidding paths in full samurai armour. Antony Cummins has. On the face of it, Cummins is an unlikely samurai. The original samurai were the medieval military nobility of Japan, renowned for their selfless bravery in war. They dominated the country between the 12th and 19th centuries.

Cummins grew up in 1980s Manchester. But this was a time when all things Japanese were the rage in the UK. In 1980, Richard Chamberlain set hearts aflame as a 17th-century English navigator taken prisoner by samurai warriors in TV miniseries Shogun. By the end of the decade, The Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles were crawling out of sewer.

Thus inspired, young Cummins threw himself into learning martial arts. Twenty years later, having studied ancient history and theoretical archaeology, Cummins travelled to Japan where he returned to the stories that had sparked his childhood passion. Working with a translator, he founded the Historical Ninjitsu Research Team, tracking down medieval manuals and scrolls, determined as he says to “change the perspective on the historical truth that lies behind the story of the samurai and the infamous ninja.”