The Last Samurai

[Naha]

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.

 

[Don Roley]

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.