The Ravings of Demented Rabbits

Fukoku kyohei

Rich country, strong army, even. Or maybe sonno joi (Revere the Emperor, Expel the Barbarians). Take your pick.

But I get ahead of myself.

Finally more or less recovered from being sick. My parents aren't, but I'm better. That's excellent.

Too, I apparently did well for myself this last term. Worked half to death, but I managed three Bs and an A-, which may well mean I go to England this spring. That's great.

Lot of movie watching these days. Watched Pirates of the Carribean Tuesday with Tali and Laurent, and there was much rejoicing. It was, as I said after the movie, "a suitably rediculous movie." Fun, didn't take itself seriously, good times. Not necessarily more than 3/5 aliens on my ranking list, but good.

Watched The Last Samurai on Wednesday with Cole before going and playing a LOT of Mechwarrior at the shop, which was a lot of fun and resulted in me doing quite well for having been away for a month, but I'll refrain from going into details for the non-playing readership.

My review, such as it is, of The Last Samurai, is at Tonto. I'm not entirely sure if I conveyed how much I like the movie. Go see it. It's worth the investment.

That having been said, I'm about to proceed to do some deconstruction work on the movie's little worldview, so be warned. If you're not into historical reasoning, now would be an appropriate time to exit the aircraft. Please form a single-file line towards the exit. Thank you. Too, there's likely to be a minor spoiler or two in here somewhere.

Anyway. The main premise behind The Last Samurai is that the old Japan, the Japan of Bushido and samurai and whatnot, is in fact a good thing. It's unclear to me as to if this is supposed to be a universal thing or just for Algren, the main character, but it skirts the unversality line pretty close.

This is, for all sorts of reasons, dangerous. Not in the least because to glorify that sort of thing means you're glorifying a highly socially stratified, formalized, dare I say violent culture which treated its lower classes like shit. Now, the closet agrarianist in all of us rather likes that sort of thing, but the raging democratic capitalists in most of us might well object, when you consider that whatever else it might have done, the Meiji period brought Japanese as a whole increased prosperity, social mobility, and all of the good of the Industrial Revolution.

Which isn't to say the Meiji period was entirely good. Democratization, of course, went right out the window, and living conditions went to hell for a lot of people, among other assorted bad things.

Nevertheless, the movie takes its stand with the samurai. More romantic, to be sure, and there's a certain value to movies that go radically against our prevailing culture (we are, of course, far closer to the Meiji industrialists than the rebels). And that works, as far as it goes.

A few ponderances, though.

The industrialist Japanese are pretty faceless, actually. Algren, for example, is driven towards the samurai because of his experiences in the American West and the massacres of...Cheyenne, I think. The movie wants you to draw parallels between them and the samurai, and between the Japanese industrialists and the American version. This mostly works. There are some random cultural differences in the experiences, but ok. Omura's still faceless, though, hard to hate, easy to feel sorry for. That may be what they wanted me to think. I dunno.

In any case, I got ahold of a copy of Samurai William and I'm reading it. More on that later.

Posted by Dwip at December 18, 2003 7:55 PM