The Last Samurai Essay

In The Last Samurai protagonist Nathan Algren grows fond of his Bushi captors sympathizing with their supposedly “simple” ways like the Natives he had fought in the Great Sioux War. The film’s message is clear, like the Natives the Bushi were a relic doomed by industrial modernization and the triumph of western norms. This Eurocentric and sentimentalist understanding of the emerging Meiji period results in a portrayal of the samurai as rusticated and anti-modern, fundamentally misrepresenting Bushi society in mid to late Tokugawa Japan and often the very essence of warrior order since its emergence in the 12th century. While often idealized as static traditionalists, the samurai were a diverse and dynamic group that laid the foundations for
This is not entirely inaccurate as Katsumoto is based off Saigo Takamori the reluctant leader of the Satsusma Rebellion and a Goshi. However, these village samurai were largely exclusive to Satsuma and considered inferior to their more numerous urban counterparts. Similarly, the Satsuma Rebellion actually began in the city of Kagoshima rather than a rural village. Consequently, the samurai depicted as typical of the warriors in film are anachronistic. The entire social order of the Edo period relied on driving the Bushi into castle towns – the basis of Japan’s remarkable urbanization between the 17th and 19th centuries. This trend originated with the unifiers who removed the Bushi from the land to diffuse conditions that had enabled the gekokujo. Building off reforms implemented by Hideyoshi including the 1591 edict requiring samurai to live under daimyo supervision in castle towns, Ieyasu and his successors mandated the sankin kotai. This system made Edo arguably the most populated and dynamic city in the world as the Buke Shohatto required that the “daimyo…serve in turns at Edo” and they were soon followed by enterprising merchants and