Re: Impressions!
Oh, they didn't have firearms. They had mre siege-oriented gunpowder weapons (cannons, etc.).
And yes, the original samurai were mounted archers, with swords taking a major backseat to bows as far as importance goes. (This was mainly because the height of military technology pre-gunpowder was the mounted archer.) I can't tell you how special the horses were, except that the horses raised in the Kantoo plain (modern-day Tokyo) were larger and hardier than any others in Japan, and thus the Minamoto 'clan' (which was based there) had a 'leg up', as it were, against the other cavalry.
Really, in many ways the 'gentleman samurai' wearing haori, hakama, and daisho is an anachronism, as the samurai weren't really that way until the Tokugawa period (1600 AD+, after the Sengoku Jidai). You don't really see a real emphasis on bushido _and_ unmounted Samurai except in fictionalized accounts (like the Seven Samurai), or in the _very_ rare violent disturbances of the Tokugawa period (like the Chushingura).
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