The Last Samurai, a 2003 Tom Cruise film, is a Lawrence of Arabia-style epic that is interesting on a number of levels and worth seeing if you haven't had the chance. (It was more popular in Japan than it was in the States, so you probably missed it.) I thought it was an thoughtful study of the clash between the modern and the premodern that has been the most wrenching dynamic driving history for the last five hundred years. We can talk all we want about cultural diversity, but the only differences between cultures that really matter in the long run are those that define the divide between the modern and premodern.
The dramatic conflict that structures this movie is the historical one suffered in Japan shortly after the Meiji Restoration in 1868. After about 250 years of isolating itself from the rest of the world, Japan realized that in order to maintain its national sovereignty in the face of Western encroachments, it needed to modernize. This meant first centralizing power by the abolition of a decentralized feudal system that the restorationists felt weakened Japan. And this in turn required the destruction of the samurai class. The movie is about one of the several samurai rebellions against the central government that occurred in the 1870s.
Tom Cruise plays an American ex-Civil War and Indian Wars veteran hired by the Japanese government in 1876 to modernize/westernize the young emperor’s army. He’s portrayed as a fearless a warrior who nevertheless feels the need to drink away his shame because of his participation in a Sand Creek-type massacre of innocents during the Indian Wars. His story is one of finding his soul and recovering his honor after spending time in captivity with the samurai tribal leader, Katsumoto. Cruise’s Nathan Aldren is to Japan what O’Toole’s T.E. Lawrence was to Arabia. He’s someone who recognizes that there are profound spiritual depths in this culture that he has been asked to help destroy. So like Lawwrence he goes native, and becomes its defender.
This is ultimately a story meant to contrast the nobility of the chivalric, premodern warrior vs. the mechanized soul-less affair that modern warfare was at that time becoming. I don’t know whether it was the filmmaker’s intention, but it isn’t too much of a stretch to see how the soul-less efficiency of the emperor’s army in its destroying the samurai parallels the efficiency of the American forces in the Middle East. The real long-term battle the US is waging there, of course, is not against tyrants like Saddam but against figures like Osama bin Laden, whom Muslims see as a romantically defiant culture hero. Like Katsumoto, Osama fought to preserve his traditional culture against what he perceives to be the soul-less encroachments of the materialistic West. Like Katsumoto, he’s going to go down fighting, and while his defeat is inevitable, he’s going to cause a lot of damage before that defeat comes.
Meiji Tenno, the young emperor, was portrayed in the film as ambivalent about what was happening to his country. He ascended to the throne when he was only fifteen, and he’s portrayed as a weak puppet of Omura, a Bismarck-like figure whom the movie portrays as the architect of Japan’s modernization. Omura plays the part of the villain, although he surely thought of himself with some justification as a patriot who was doing what needed to be done to make Japan strong.
The samurai Katsumoto is a genuinely tragic figure in this film, but a better movie would have made Omura one, too. Omura knows what he’s destroying, but he also knows that if his modern army doesn’t defeat the samurai now, the Americans, Russians, or English will do it later, and Japan will be lost. So what real choices does Omura have? To indulge in romantic nostalgia about a world that one way or the other cannot survive? Or to do what he can to enable Japan to control its own destiny?
Perhaps there are other options, but I don’t know of any cultures that have been able to make the transition to modernity without its being painful, bloody, and profoundly tragic. The West went through it in the period dating from the Post-Reformation religious wars between Catholics and Protestants in the 1500s, through the Puritan revolt in England in the mid 1600s, to the French Revolution in late 1700s, through the wrenching process of industrialization in the 1800s.
Japan was the most precocious country in Asia in its understanding the way the world was going, and this movie attempts to dramatize how the drive to modernize, for all of its benefits, destroys a way of life that only the most ignorant can think of as savage or primitive. This is a tragedy that continues in our day to play itself out throughout the entire developing world.
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It's interesting how strong is the impulse so many still feel to romanticize certain aspects of premodern cultures. The same impulse that wants to romanticize the samurai way of life parallels the way many Americans still romanticize the ante-bellum south. It might seem treasonous for many Americans to romanticize Osama in the way the filmThe Last Samurai romanticizes Katsumoto. (Some Muslim filmmaker in the not too distant future surely will make such a film.) But the same Americans could very easily make the connection Katsumoto : Mural as Robert E. Lee : Abraham Lincoln.
If you're like me you've probably wondered how a man of such reputed noble character as Lee could justify fighting for a government that sanctioned slavery. But southerners like Lee saw themselves as protecting a traditional agrarian way of life that was rooted in values radically opposed those of the industrializing North. Many Southerners saw their Northern enemy as a dehumanizing, money-driven machine--much the way Omura is caricatured in The Last Samurai. Or to draw a parallel to another movie of the last decade, the Southern confederacy saw itself as Gondor attempting to defend its noble way of life and sacred traditions from the power-mad, machine-driven monster to the North.
The American Civil War was, like the efforts to centralize power in Japan, Germany, and Italy during roughly the same period, the story of a nascent industrial power bent on establishing its central authority by wiping out the last remnants of a resistant premodern way of life rooted in the feudal past. Lincoln's importance for our country was like Bismarck's for Germany and Omura's in Japan. They each laid the foundations for enormously powerful centralized national military industrial machines that would collide with one another in the next century. The American machine, as it turned out, would be the last one standing.
The radical left sees this development as an unmitigated evil, while the neoconservative right celebrates it as an unambiguous good. I say it's just the way it is in a fallen world. Power is corrupting, and despite America's exceptionalist claims, it is has no dispensation from its corrupting influences.
It may be that there is no other way for this world-historcal transformation to work itself out in the coming decades except in this violently tragic way, but one should hope what has been lost from our premodern past will not be forever lost. I've argued often here that one of the essential tasks of the postmodern era into which we are now moving is precisely to retrieve what has been lost. Nostalgia for the premodern is impotent and pointless, but sifting through the treasures of the past to find there what must be preserved and carried forward is not pointless. It is essential for a future renaissance.