THE LAST SAMURAI
I saw The Last Samurai last night. They
started having special advance preview screenings in Japan this weekend, though
the film doesn't officially open here until December 6th. I'm guessing the
previews are an attempt to build some good word-of-mouth PR for the movie
before its official premier. They're probably also hoping for guys like me,
ex-pats in Japan, to do stuff like write reviews on their web pages. So I'm
falling right into the corporate trap here.
It's a damn good movie. Even though Lucy Liu
is not in it. Koyuki is. And that nearly makes up for it. In case you've had
your head buried in the sand the last few months and missed out on all the
hype, the film concerns an American Civil War hero (Tom Cruise) who gets hired
by the Japanese government in the late 19th century to help train its troops to
put down a rebellion by the last remaining samurai warrior clans. It takes
place during Japan's Meiji Restoration period, when the Emperor was regaining
control of the country as well as trying to rapidly modernize its people who'd
lived in isolation from the rest of the world for centuries. Tom Cruise's
character ends up being captured by the samurai who are impressed by his
fighting skills. Instead of beheading him they take him in and train them in
their ways. Not a tremendously plausible scenario. But it works on screen.
The film is over two and a half hours long,
yet it moves at a restless pace and never drags. The fight scenes are
incredibly staged and coordinated. The location shots, mostly done in New
Zealand with Mount Fuji composited in in post, are breathtaking. Even Tom
Cruise comes off well and speaks way better Japanese than Lucy Liu does in Kill
Bill.
It was interesting to see the way the film
treated Zen Buddhism and its relationship to the samurai way. The samurai were
students of Bushido, the Art of War. It's often said that Bushido is closely
related with Zen, a statement which worries a lot of people. It's lead to a
widespread belief that Zen is somehow a warlike philosophy. It's not completely
untrue to say there's a relationship between Bushido and Zen. But it's more
appropriate to say that Bushido was profoundly influenced by Zen and that Zen,
in order to survive during Japan's long feudal period, ended up developing
certain techniques which appealed to the samurai. Unfortunately, a lot of
Bushido influenced macho nonsense still infects much of what is taught as Zen
both in Japan and in the West.
It's kind of cute the way they address the
Zen stuff in the film. In a couple of shots we see Tom Cruise sitting cross
legged in a kind of half-assed Lotus posture on a hillside looking out at the
mountains. We're also shown a Buddhist temple in which we often see Ken
Watanabe as the head of the samurai praying to a large golden Buddha. In one
scene, someone is trying to teach Tom Cruise about proper fighting technique
and tells him he is using "too many mind." To fight properly he must
have "no mind." Lo and behold, the mere hearing of this advice
enables old Tom to kick some major samurai ass in the very next round. If only
it were that easy...
It is true though, that meditative practices
were of great use to the samurai in honing their fighting technique. This
doesn't mean that sitting zazen is in any way related to fighting per se. It's
just that the development of mental and physical clarity will help you in
anything you chose to do.
The problem with the samurai is they always
used zazen as a means to an end. If you use zazen as a means to reach some
goal, you'll often succeed in reaching that goal. And you'll have missed the
point of the practice entirely. In order to stay solvent in the feudal era,
many Japanese Buddhist temples catered to the samurai's tastes. Zazen became
taught more and more as a means to achieve certain desired ends, that end
usually being Enlightenment. The use of the kiyosaku -- a big stick to whack
those suspected of meditating improperly -- was introduced as a way to make the
practice seem more macho and "serious." The ancient koan stories
began to be used as a focus for meditation in order to try and induce
Enlightenment experiences. Militaristic hierarchies were established. Most of
this stuff predates the samurai influence, but became far more pronounced once
they got into the picture. Much of this stuff unfortunately still persists
today over a century after the last samurai cut off their top knots, and has
accumulated enthusiastic followers in places where the samurai never even
existed. These days a lot of rationalizations are offered for the continued use
of these practices. But none of them are very convincing.
The film also provides an interesting lesson
in history, both ancient and modern. Though the events are fictional, it is
true that Japan did experience a period in which modernization was forced upon
its people in a way that was shocking and deeply disturbing to many of them. In
fact, over a century later there are still lingering effects. People whose
parents were not even born when the Meiji restoration occurred still long for a
return to the old ways of Emperor worship.
We can see parallels to the upheavals that
occurred in Japan in the late 1800s in much of the world today. When societies
are forced to modernize quickly it is often very difficult for individual
people to adjust psychologically to the required changes. As in Japan, these
people often react with anger and violent aggression. But Japan had to change
in order to survive as all societies must.
What's funny is that the movie gets you
siding with the samurai, even though the very act of watching a motion picture
about Japan's feudal age starring a famous American actor would have been
impossible if the samurai had triumphed -- especially for a guy like me, an
American who watched the film in Tokyo seated next to his Japanese wife. The
samurai in the film know their cause is futile and yet feel duty bound to go
out in a blaze of glory. I suspect that attitude explains a lot of the violence
we see in other parts of the world today. A film like this may help us
understand a little better what must be going on in the hearts and minds of
those we are forcing to adopt our ways. Perhaps this will aid in some small
measure to smoothing the process.