The violence, the romance, the legends, and the reality of the samurai warrior are explored in an intriguing new exhibit, Samurai and the Culture of Japan’s Great Peace, at New Haven’s Yale Peabody Museum of Natural History.

Every object in the exhibition—dating from as early as the 16th century and ranging from intricately detailed woodblock prints and lacquer ware to brocade robes, shining swords, and glittering armor—has its own story, told in a way that invites visitors to actively engage with the exhibit via touch screens and projections.

In addition to more than 150 objects from the Peabody’s Japanese collection, artifacts for the exhibition were gathered from the thousands of related items in the Yale University Art Gallery, the Sterling Memorial Library, the Yale Collection of Musical Instruments, and several private collections. The public has never before viewed many of the objects.

Robert George Wheeler of Branford, a retired physicist, professor emeritus at Yale, and a faculty affiliate in anthropology at the Peabody, is credited with first coming up with the idea of the Samurai exhibit.

In 2003, Wheeler, a longtime student of Japanese culture, was searching for Japanese tea-ceremony objects for a seminar he was auditing at Yale and knew there would be suitable artifacts in the Peabody collection. Other discoveries included a samurai helmet, a large lacquer-covered bowl, and 20 Japanese swords.

“Going back it became obvious that these things had been inventoried but hadn’t been curated—they weren’t identified in terms of age and so on,” Wheeler says.

Wheeler invited Morihiro Ogawa, special consultant to New York’s Metropolitan Museum of Art and Tokyo National Museum, to come to New Haven and examine the swords and suits of armor.

“He’s probably one of the world’s experts on Samurai swords and suits,” Wheeler notes.

Ogawa suggested restoring five of the swords, and in 2003 they were sent back to Japan to be worked on by Okisato Fujishiro, a world-renowned restorer of samurai swords. Wheeler and Roger Colten, manager of the Peabody anthropology department, continued working through the rest of the collection to figure out what other objects should be restored.

“Then the great tsunami hit Japan and everything came to a stop,” Wheeler recalls. “In the summer of 2013, the swords came back in beautiful condition. The management of the Peabody decided this would be a wonderful exhibition.”

Fabian Drixler, associate professor of history at Yale, and William Fleming, assistant professor of East Asian languages and literature and theater studies, were recruited as curators, along with Wheeler. The technical team started to put the exhibit together last February.

Wheeler says that one of the most important things he hopes visitors will come away with from this exhibition is to learn that, starting after 1615, the samurai presided over 250 years of peace, the longest that any large society has known.

“People think of them as fierce warriors, and in that time they didn’t engage in any wars,” Wheeler points out.

“Today ‘samurai’ is a global brand: the man of uncompromising honor and loyalty, perfectly trained in the martial arts, and calmly indifferent in the face of death,” it says in the exhibition catalog, written by the three curators. “But the real history of the samurai is far more complex and interesting, full of drama, transformation, and paradox.”

Wheeler also wants to educate people about the ancient Ainu people—represented in one section of the exhibit——about whom he says Americans know little. The Ainu lived at the northern edges of Tokugawa Japan. In daily life, they prayed to and performed various ceremonies for the gods. The men would impress each other with their carving skills, while women made robes to ward off evil spirits.

“Some of the [artifacts] are very unique, and some of the clothing is really very lovely,” Wheeler says.

Another thing that’s brought to light in the exhibit that Wheeler find very interesting is the forging of samurai swords, which are among the sharpest and toughest in the world.

“How did these Japanese people in the 13th and 14th century learn how to master this whole steel business?” he asks. “Things were never hot enough to melt, and yet they fabricated these [swords] that are not only gorgeous but responded to the need: they had to be hard, sharp, and strong. Using 20th-century techniques, we learn how they did it.

“Some of the things in the exhibit are just absolutely exquisite,” Wheeler continues, “such as the gold lacquer boxes using makie-gold flecks that were put into the lacquer. The artistic value is exquisite. Their techniques were very advanced, even during the 15th century.”

Samurai and the Culture of Japan’s Great Peace is supported by a grant from Connecticut Humanities and is on view through Jan. 3, 2016. For a full schedule of related public lectures, guided tours, and workshops, visit www.peabody.yale.edu. Entrance to the exhibit is included with general museum admission: $9 adults; $8 seniors 65 and over; $5 children aged 3 to 18 and older students with I.D. Children younger than 3, museum members, and Yale I.D. holders are admitted free. The Yale Peabody Museum is at 170 Whitney Avenue, New Haven. For more information, call 203-432-5050.