I learned that the series of movies were directly inspired by the Japanese movies being produced in the 1950-60's by director Akira Kurosawa.
Kurosawa was famous for taking inspiration from American westerns and detective movies to tell stories of Japanese samurai. In his prime, Kurosawa had wanted to produce western-style movies in Japanese theatre. At this time, Japan was at war with multiple countries, and had a heavy censorship on media release. Kurosawa was only able to release his films if they were heavily injected with war propaganda. It was only after the war that Kurosawa was finally able to release the western-styled movies that he had originally wanted to create.
His film Rashumon was suggested to be entered into the runnings for Venice Film Festival, which it won. After this, the film industry became obsessed with Japanese movies and a boom of samurai and Japanese romance films flooded the theatres. This influx of japanese movies inspired young film producer George Lucas to make a "space opera" about samurai in space.
Physical Resemblance
Darth Vader and the Stormtroopers are both modeled to look like Samurai armour. The helmet shape is the most obvious, with the large sweeping rim a direct inspiration from traditional Japanese helmets.
Above: Some notes I made on stormtrooper/samurai armour comparison. Note the layered segments and bell-shaped helmet.
Above: Basic shape armour breakdown and comparison.
Lightsabers are samurai swords, this is a given.
Character design/attributes
(additional top knot added)
Above: These characters and this scene are inspired from 2 wandering peasant characters from Kurosawa's "Hidden Fortress".
This is more character inspiration that visual, but even Kurosawa's use of a large character against a smaller one echoes R2-D2 and C3PO.
I painted over an image of a sandtrooper to demonstrate how easily the imperial armour could translate into Japanese samurai armour.
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