I was busy cleaning and reorganizing my storage and stumbled across these photos from the movie. I'm pretty deep into Japanese language, culture and history and thought I'd post a couple images with a little commentary.
The movie "Last Samurai" is clearly a Hollywood dramatization for the masses; reality is always more complex and murky, often with lots of brutality, ugliness and just plain stupidity. But in some ways "The Last Samurai" manages to capture some idealized aspects of pre-Western Japanese culture from the POV of the Samurai class (as I'm able to understand it from my own devoted amateur study.)
One nice thing about the movie is that they used Japanese for the Japanese and not just some "Asian". The language is correct. (Contrast to Memoirs of a Geisha where the main character was played by a Chinese, though she certainly did an admirable job.)
For me there are two main things that come out of these photos. One is the manor of sitting. It's easy to see here how tense and un-relaxed Tom Cruise (as most any westerner would be) sitting in this position. The Japanese still grow up spending a fair bit of time sitting on the floor in the home environment and are simply far more relaxed and for lack of a better word, pliable. The other is the apparent simplicity of the architecture. I love the "minimalist" Japanese aesthetic and would love to build a home inspired by this style someday.
Many people don't realize that the Japanese were full-tilt Feudal up through what was our Civil War. The setting (correct time period) for Last Samurai is roughly con-current with our post Civil War Indian Wars. In this pic you can see the lower class bowing to the Samurai. Lack of respect between class rank could rather easily result in the loss of one's head in rapid fashion. It was the absolute moral duty of Samurai to serve their lords and protect their "fiefs". They were raised from birth as a true warrior class.
To Tom Cruise's credit he spent something like a year in training for the film. But it is laughable (as the movie suggests) that his skills would be even vaguely comparable to a born Samurai. Still the scenery is beautiful.
Lot's to say about this actually, but the main thing is that the traditional Japanese aesthetic is the bottomless depth of simplicity and harmony of elements.
I once had a kind of (unsolicited) psychic reading. I was told I was a Samurai lord in ancient Japan. I just want to know if I had a cool helmet.
