NEWS FEATURE: `Last Samurai’ Breaks Stereotypes About Japanese Warriors’ Values

c. 2003 Religion news Service LOS ANGELES _ Once upon a time, the powerful shogunate and their samurai warriors ruled the feudal nation of Japan. The esteemed samurai protected their lords and lived by a code of loyalty, bravery and sacrifice. Their skill in swordsmanship and fierce battles became legendary in both Japanese history and […]

c. 2003 Religion news Service

LOS ANGELES _ Once upon a time, the powerful shogunate and their samurai warriors ruled the feudal nation of Japan. The esteemed samurai protected their lords and lived by a code of loyalty, bravery and sacrifice. Their skill in swordsmanship and fierce battles became legendary in both Japanese history and Hollywood movies.

“The Last Samurai,” a Warner Bros. film that opened nationwide Dec. 5, offers another side to the traditional samurai image of the violent-and-macho warrior.


The movie, reportedly budgeted at $140 million, is set during the late 1870s when Japan transformed from a feudal society to a nation of modernization and technology. The Meiji period, as it was called, introduced Western culture to Japan while abolishing the samurai tradition.

Tom Cruise plays Capt. Nathan Algren, an alcoholic Civil War veteran hired by the Japanese government to quell its samurai rebellion. But when the samurai wound and capture Algren during combat, he learns to respect their warrior honor code and actually joins them in battle.

“I’ve always found the core values of the samurai culture to be both admirable and relevant,” said director Edward Zwick at a recent news conference in Los Angeles. “In particular,” he added, “the understanding that violence and compassion exist side by side and that poetry, beauty and art are as much a part of a warrior’s training as swordsmanship or physical strength.”

Critics have compared “The Last Samurai” to “Dances With Wolves.” In both movies, a disillusioned Civil War officer joins a foreign culture, learns their language and falls in love with one of their women. Others have said that the movie is Zwick’s “love letter” to Akira Kurosawa and the Japanese filmmaker’s masterpiece “The Seven Samurai” (1954).

Kurosawa’s movie sparked Zwick’s fascination with the subject, and his portrayal of the samurai code of Bushido, which stresses unquestioning loyalty and values honor above life, was especially attractive.

“I’m interested in the unexpected possibility of spiritual rebirth reaching those lives for whom it seemed the least possible,” Zwick said of the movie’s Algren character, who discovers a renewed purpose when he lives among the samurai.

But “The Last Samurai” raises a number of issues about the traditional warriors and their portrayals in American films. According to Herbert Plutschow, professor of Japanese studies at the University of California, Los Angeles, Hollywood has transformed much of the samurai stories into action-packed Western adventures. Both Sam Peckinpah (“The Wild Bunch”) and John Sturges (“The Magnificent Seven”) pay homage to “The Seven Samurai” in their movies.


“The Western and samurai films are not actually real history,” Plutschow says. “They are made-up history. They are sort of mythologized.”

Plutschow explains that the cowboys in Pekinpah’s and Sturges’ American Westerns are actually images of gunslingers transposed onto Japanese historical figures. But these same movies tend to show samurai/cowboys as fist-fighting, trigger-happy, rough-and-tumble outlaws. That, says Plutschow, is not reality.

“The samurai just didn’t kill people wantonly. Their behavior was very much restrictive. The idea that these people were allowed to perpetrate violence like James Bond is not historical fact,” he said.

Although the movie’s poster shows Cruise brandishing a sword and fiercely charging into battle, Plutschow says the samurai “didn’t just go out and hack around with their swords. Unlimited violence in Japan is something that wasn’t permitted,” he points out.

A real samurai, Plutschow explains, was typically a civil administrator or a bureaucrat. A warrior often wore two swords, but they were mainly status symbols.

But the samurai values of the Meiji period eventually gave rise to Japanese militarism. “It’s because of the sense of loyalty the samurai had that became loyalty to the emperor and state,” Plutschow says. “It would be hard for a movie company to try to glorify a Japanese emperor.”


Still, “The Last Samurai” does reveal spiritual aspects to the warriors’ lives, especially their calligraphy and meditation. When the samurai leader Katsumoto (Ken Watanabe) captures Algren, he establishes a kind of mentor-pupil relationship with the American officer. Algren learns that skill in the martial arts and weaponry can also be a religious exercise in self-discipline. (He takes on nearly half a dozen swordsmen and defeats them single-handedly.)

In Zen Buddhism, it’s the idea of using a weapon as an exercise in selflessness. “You kind of become the weapon. You fight in a state of selflessness,” Plutschow said.

The Media Action Network for Asian Americans, a watchdog group that monitors Hollywood’s portrayals of Asians, agrees that Cruise’s character respects the samurai code.

“He definitely honors it,” says Jennifer Kuo, the organization’s president.

Kuo praises the studio for removing a scene from the original script of Chinese women smoking opium and another of Cruise trying to rape a geisha.

But when Cruise offers to help a young Japanese woman with physical labor, she tells him that Japanese men aren’t expected to assist with women’s work, and he reminds her he’s not Japanese. That scene troubled Kuo.

“It’s just another slap in the face _ Japanese culture bad, American culture good,” she says.


Still, the Media Action Network has no plans to protest the film. “I felt that (the studio) could have done the movie without Tom Cruise,” Kuo says. “Ken Watanabe steals the movie. We believe he’s the last samurai.”

DEA END ALEISS

Donate to Support Independent Journalism!

Donate Now!