# The Last Samurai



## Goldendawn8 (Nov 18, 2006)

Does anyone know how accurately it followed history?


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## meta (Nov 19, 2006)

Here's an interesting article I found:

How True to History is Tom Cruise's The Last Samurai?


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## Bob Hubbard (Nov 19, 2006)

Interesting write up there. Thank you


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## MA-Caver (Nov 19, 2006)

Yes indeed interesting and makes one sad to reflect that hollywood, one of the most powerful entertainment centers in the world cannot seem to get away from the money making "this is a lot more exciting (and cheaper) than actual history so lets just do the story this way... it'll keep audiences entertained for their money."
Actual history can be much more entertaining than stylized history. But try to convince the studio moguls of that and they'll cry for the holes cut in their purses. 

SIGH... 

Thanks for finding/sharing that Meta


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## meta (Nov 19, 2006)

Thanks to Goldendawn8 for asking this question. Since I saw the movie last week, the title of this post caught my attention. I was surprised to find out just how much this movie misrepresented historical events.


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## searcher (Nov 19, 2006)

It used to be that history was written by the victors, now it is re-written by Hollywood.


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## Xue Sheng (Nov 19, 2006)

Pick just about any move that has been released in the last 50 years that is based on a historical event and then study the actual history. The majority (not all) of them, to be more truthful, are loosely based on historical events and some are pure fabrication with the historical event used as a title or real characters from history used in situation that never happened and then there are interpretations of history based on guessing. The sad part is that many people take these to be the actual story. 

Titanic, Troy, Braveheart, Sparticus, Anthony & Cleopatra, Krakatoa, East of Java, Tombstone, Pearl Harbor, Midway, Gladiator, Oliver stones JFK, the untouchables. The da Vinci code, Etc

Last Samurai was a good movie but for the most part it was fiction with a smattering of history.


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## Hand Sword (Nov 20, 2006)

That's because HollyWood knows, that for the most part, movies about history, usually flop. So, since they are in it for the money, they spice it up, to draw watchers. Most don't care about what really happened, they just want to be entertained.


Aside from that, I liked the movie.


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## P A Goldsbury (Nov 20, 2006)

I used _Last Samurai_ in a class once. The students, all Japanese, had to write a review and compare it with _Tasogare Seibei_, the Japanese original of _Twilight Samurai_. They pretty unanimously preferred the latter, mainly because it was much more believable than Tom Cruise and Ken Watanabe. 

With _Troy_, you have to be careful, however. The problem is whether it is closer to Homer's epics, which are not actually historical documents, or to the actual siege of Troy (for which the evidence is rather sparse).


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## Kreth (Nov 20, 2006)

P A Goldsbury said:


> I used _Last Samurai_ in a class once. The students, all Japanese, had to write a review and compare it with _Tasogare Seibei_, the Japanese original of _Twilight Samurai_. They pretty unanimously preferred the latter, mainly because it was much more believable than Tom Cruise and Ken Watanabe.


Historical inaccuracies aside, I was under the impression that Ken Watanabe was a well-respected actor in Japan. :idunno:


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## Don Roley (Nov 20, 2006)

Kreth said:


> Historical inaccuracies aside, I was under the impression that Ken Watanabe was a well-respected actor in Japan. :idunno:



He is. But he mainly does low- brow type stuff. Even Toshiro Mifune caught hell for his work in Shogun. Just because an actor can act does not mean they know what they are acting about.


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## pgsmith (Nov 20, 2006)

You also have to remember that it was aimed at western audiences. This makes it a much different movie than one aimed at a Japanese audience.

  I've never had a problem with Hollywood, or any of the other nation's movie studios for that matter, altering history for their movies. We need to remember that they are creating entertainment, not history documentaries. Personally, I find history fascinating and for that I read. However, it is wise to check and recheck _anything_ written about history to ensure accuracy. Inaccuracies and misconceptions can be found in a number of well respected history texts. I don't expect *any* entertainment film to be historically accurate in anything other than a general sense.


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## jks9199 (Nov 20, 2006)

Don Roley said:


> He is. But he mainly does low- brow type stuff. Even Toshiro Mifune caught hell for his work in Shogun. Just because an actor can act does not mean they know what they are acting about.


Think about Louis Gossett Jr and many others here in the USA.  Sometimes, I look at roles that some very talented actors and actresses take, and wonder if they really needed the money that bad, or just wanted out of the house!

As to historical accuracy in movies...  I rarely expect it.  Reality doesn't sell.

And even with history books, you have to think about who wrote it.  Wanna bet that a history of the European migration to the US would look rather different if it was written by Native Americans?

(One amusing side note -- at least to me.  A writer named Christopher Stashef wrote a series of fantasies about a modern man transported to a medieval area (Her Majesty's Wizard started the series.)  Part of why he wrote the first one was that so many fantasies set in the Middle Ages were so inaccurate, and he had the scholarly background that demanded it be done more correctly.)


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## zDom (Nov 21, 2006)

There are pleasant surprises, occasionally, when it comes to Hollywood and history.

On Veterans Day I watched the last part of "Sergeant York" and googled it after the movie showed him escorting 132 prisoners he captured with seven men while taking out a machine gun nest.

I thought it was amazing, so I googled it to see if it was a true story and how embellished that story might have been by Hollywood.

Turns out Corporal York (promoted to Sgt. after he war) was very much like the movie depicted him to be (a pacifist who objected to the war) and really DID capture 132 men with only seven other men, killing some 40 in the process.

Asked why he killed those men if he was a pacifist, he explained he figured that nest would have killed thousands if someone didn't do something about it.

An amazing story I might never have heard about if not for the Hollywood film.


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## Xue Sheng (Nov 21, 2006)

zDom said:


> There are pleasant surprises, occasionally, when it comes to Hollywood and history.
> 
> On Veterans Day I watched the last part of "Sergeant York" and googled it after the movie showed him escorting 132 prisoners he captured with seven men while taking out a machine gun nest.
> 
> ...


 
I have seen that film, a few times, and it is good. I too checked out how close to real it was, but I went to the library. The web wasn't around then (I'm old - also think I first watched on a TV WITHOUT a remote) and I was amazed to find out how close to trutful it was.


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## Brian R. VanCise (Nov 21, 2006)

meta said:


> Here's an interesting article I found:
> 
> How True to History is Tom Cruise's The Last Samurai?


 
That was an interesting write up!


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## Kizaru (Nov 21, 2006)

meta said:


> Here's an interesting article I found:
> 
> How True to History is Tom Cruise's The Last Samurai?


 
Quoting the above article, "So it is highly unlikely that the Japanese would have hired an American."

Interestingly, in 2004 or 2005, I found the autobiography of a Union Officer named "Nathan Algren", in the Ichigaya campus library of Sophia University/Jochi Daigaku. According his autobiography, he was hired by the Japanese government at the time to act as a military advisor, and his wife came along with him and taught English.


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## IWishToLearn (Nov 22, 2006)

I spose it's really about how much truth you decide to place in what you're watching.


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## Naha (Dec 2, 2006)

I saw _Flag of Our Fathers_ a few weeks ago.  Eastwood does an excellent job of being accurate.  Almost any movie will have some variance.  Of course, some are completely revisionist history.


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## mantis (Dec 2, 2006)

has anyone seen Lowrance of Arabia? same idea!


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## Naha (Dec 2, 2006)

I own it.  Good movie.  Fairly accurate.  It was Peter O'Toole's first big role, if memory serves, and it won 7 Academy Awards.  Great cast.  It does a good job of showing Lawrence as a person in conflict.  It also shows the dissidence among the Arab tribes and the politics behind the war.


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## Don Roley (Dec 23, 2006)

I finally saw the movie. They showed it on Japanese television and since it was free, I took a look.

Something interesting. I heard that as the ship sails into Yokohama that Mt Fuji looms over the harbor. That is not the reality as anyone who has been there can tell you. Well, they seem to have showed the ship coming toward Japan from the left side of the screen and then did a very sudden shift to the next scene before you can see any mountains. It was abrupt enough to notice. I guess the folks showing it in Japan decided to cut it themselves. :uhyeah: 

One thing I had problems with, aside from all the others already noted, was the way they samurai fared against the modern army. It is not just Americans that portray the samurai as being superior, a few movies and right wing leaning venues seem to try to paint that as the case.

But the reality is that in all the cases I have read of when the modern army went up against samurai rebelions, the samurai got their head handed to them rather badly. It was not a matter of individual skill. It was a matter that the samurai had not trained to fight _as a unit_ for generations. When they went against a group that moved and acted as a unit, they got killed in droves. 

They also had the disadvantage of being rather sure of their skills and their spirit. There is an old joke that you should never share a foxhole with someone braver than you. The accounts I read detailed how they kept charging in small groups, only to get mowed down. Then another group would try the same thing. There was no central command that they would listen to for very long. They had been raised without much in the way of warfare but with plenty of stories of indivuals who had made a name for themselves and they tried to do the same thing.

Not all samurai were like this. Saigo Takamori, before he rebelled agains the government, ran a very professional army during the Meiji restoration. But when he turned his back on the new ways and tried to rebel, his army seems to have dropped all western 'impurities' with the results I gave.


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