Zatoichi - The Blind Swordsman
Can the Japanese Save Us?
from 
JoeUser Forums
JoeUser Forums
So, obviously I saw the movie, and more or less liked it. Not earthshakingly good, but with a lot of nice moments. I've seen it compared to "Seven Samurai" (7S). Sorry. Go rent the original if you want really dynamite movie viewing.
Both films do focus on the day to day, real lives of "ordinary" Japanese people. But, the ordinary people of 7S were dirt poor, abysmally ignorant peasants, for whom rice is the only physical thing of real value, who are victimized by a bunch of thoroughly evil, but also extremely primitive bandits. The victims and villians of Zatoichi are far more sophisticated and middle class, and it's hard to believe that they would let themselves be trodden under without a real struggle.
In 7S, the good guys - desperately poor Ronin willing to work for rice - win by out-thinking the villians. Sometimes, despite their superior fighting skills, they also lose. Life is like that. The Blind Swordsman, on the other hand, wins every battle by his supernaturally good fighting skill, like a kind of drop-in character from one of the multitude of Japanese anime which always feature some hero who can never be hit by any bullet and never misses a shot. After the first couple of encounters, you know what will happen. Everyone will die, except the hero.
On the other hand, there are a lot of nice scenes in Zatoichi, and there is the surprising grand finale, which is really great entertainment and has nothing whatever to do with the rest of the plot. If you liked the choreography in "Dancer in the Dark," then there are a number of moments leading up to the grand finale of Zatoichi, in which a surreal rythym takes over mundane life and the world becomes momentarilly a kind of Vedic dance number, done very well and with high humor, which almost redeems the movie's faults.
My question about this and the trend in anime has to do with the integrity of Japanese culture. I have high hopes that the Japanese will show us the way to survive in this 21st Century. They are, after all, the supreme cultural adapters and adopters, and seem to quite consistently find the best that other cultures have to offer and then improve on it. However, the Zen of Japanese culture has always been more in line with 7S, or that's my impression. The humble warrior/artisan who lives for the perfection of his skill, but is thoroughly human, mortal and fallible - that is supremely Japanese.
But, what does he do when the A-bomb is dropped on his city? Only a near GOD, like Godzilla, or Vass, the Stampede from the popular Trigun series, can deal with the impersonal near-cosmic forces unleased upon us with modern scientific warfare. So, forget the gentle Samurai leader of 7S, who begins the movie with a clever ruse to rescue a child from a desperate bandit. HE cannot defeat Fat Boy. Unfortunately, this surrender to fate reflects more the attitude of Chinese culture, where the individual has for millenia been the pawn of social, econimic, military forces far beyond his control.
Thus, the multitude of Chinese warrior films, in which the good guys are distinguished from the villians only by the fact that they win, that their martial arts skills go to the next level. Instead of stopping five simultaneous arrows with one sword swipe, the next boring movie shows us five hundred CGI arrows stopped short in a solid block of metal and wood hanging in air by the hero's mighty sword. The implicit message: merely human doesn't cut it. Only a superhuman can succeed against superhuman forces. Give up. Give in. Compromise. Surrender. Go along. Who are you to know any better, anyway?
My hope is that the underlying energy of Japanse culture will triumph. I do not think that there has ever been a culture with the level of interpersonal dynamism I see in Japan. A lot of this has to do with preventing the debilitating drain of energy that so characterizes modern America for so many of us. The Japanese have learned a set of social forms that contain and channel energy, instead of wasting it in useless oppositions.
In contrast, WE no longer have the general civic caring and civility that once made us one of the all-time high-trust societies on the planet. We expect people to behave badly, and we don't try to deal with them as fellow human beings with rights. Instead, we just lock them away in prisons that are approaching 3rd World conditions. We have substituted revenge for justice. And that's just a symptom.
What kind of society spends part of every single day for months on end worrying itself about the fate of some mundane young woman, an aspiring prison guard(!) fer God's sake! I'm referring to Chandra Levy, of course. EVERY SINGLE MORNING. While millions died in holocausts in Africa and Osama was organizing his flight crews, we CHOSE to glue our attention on something of utter banality and total lack of meaning, relevance or any uplifting value, no matter what the outcome. When my VHS recorder awakened me on 9/11, just in time to watch the 2nd plane hit the tower, I had two immediate reactions:
1) Ah, here it is... (I work in the security industry professionally. WE were only surprised that it hadn't happened long before.) 2) NO MORE CHANDRA! (Or - at least now, we will be focused on something real, instead of blithely ignoring the slide of our planet into perdition, lulled by banal soap operas disguized as news.)
If only...
We are a lot further down the road of personal surrender of responsibility, and it's not a nice place at all. Japan, please take note.
Both films do focus on the day to day, real lives of "ordinary" Japanese people. But, the ordinary people of 7S were dirt poor, abysmally ignorant peasants, for whom rice is the only physical thing of real value, who are victimized by a bunch of thoroughly evil, but also extremely primitive bandits. The victims and villians of Zatoichi are far more sophisticated and middle class, and it's hard to believe that they would let themselves be trodden under without a real struggle.
In 7S, the good guys - desperately poor Ronin willing to work for rice - win by out-thinking the villians. Sometimes, despite their superior fighting skills, they also lose. Life is like that. The Blind Swordsman, on the other hand, wins every battle by his supernaturally good fighting skill, like a kind of drop-in character from one of the multitude of Japanese anime which always feature some hero who can never be hit by any bullet and never misses a shot. After the first couple of encounters, you know what will happen. Everyone will die, except the hero.
On the other hand, there are a lot of nice scenes in Zatoichi, and there is the surprising grand finale, which is really great entertainment and has nothing whatever to do with the rest of the plot. If you liked the choreography in "Dancer in the Dark," then there are a number of moments leading up to the grand finale of Zatoichi, in which a surreal rythym takes over mundane life and the world becomes momentarilly a kind of Vedic dance number, done very well and with high humor, which almost redeems the movie's faults.
My question about this and the trend in anime has to do with the integrity of Japanese culture. I have high hopes that the Japanese will show us the way to survive in this 21st Century. They are, after all, the supreme cultural adapters and adopters, and seem to quite consistently find the best that other cultures have to offer and then improve on it. However, the Zen of Japanese culture has always been more in line with 7S, or that's my impression. The humble warrior/artisan who lives for the perfection of his skill, but is thoroughly human, mortal and fallible - that is supremely Japanese.
But, what does he do when the A-bomb is dropped on his city? Only a near GOD, like Godzilla, or Vass, the Stampede from the popular Trigun series, can deal with the impersonal near-cosmic forces unleased upon us with modern scientific warfare. So, forget the gentle Samurai leader of 7S, who begins the movie with a clever ruse to rescue a child from a desperate bandit. HE cannot defeat Fat Boy. Unfortunately, this surrender to fate reflects more the attitude of Chinese culture, where the individual has for millenia been the pawn of social, econimic, military forces far beyond his control.
Thus, the multitude of Chinese warrior films, in which the good guys are distinguished from the villians only by the fact that they win, that their martial arts skills go to the next level. Instead of stopping five simultaneous arrows with one sword swipe, the next boring movie shows us five hundred CGI arrows stopped short in a solid block of metal and wood hanging in air by the hero's mighty sword. The implicit message: merely human doesn't cut it. Only a superhuman can succeed against superhuman forces. Give up. Give in. Compromise. Surrender. Go along. Who are you to know any better, anyway?
My hope is that the underlying energy of Japanse culture will triumph. I do not think that there has ever been a culture with the level of interpersonal dynamism I see in Japan. A lot of this has to do with preventing the debilitating drain of energy that so characterizes modern America for so many of us. The Japanese have learned a set of social forms that contain and channel energy, instead of wasting it in useless oppositions.
In contrast, WE no longer have the general civic caring and civility that once made us one of the all-time high-trust societies on the planet. We expect people to behave badly, and we don't try to deal with them as fellow human beings with rights. Instead, we just lock them away in prisons that are approaching 3rd World conditions. We have substituted revenge for justice. And that's just a symptom.
What kind of society spends part of every single day for months on end worrying itself about the fate of some mundane young woman, an aspiring prison guard(!) fer God's sake! I'm referring to Chandra Levy, of course. EVERY SINGLE MORNING. While millions died in holocausts in Africa and Osama was organizing his flight crews, we CHOSE to glue our attention on something of utter banality and total lack of meaning, relevance or any uplifting value, no matter what the outcome. When my VHS recorder awakened me on 9/11, just in time to watch the 2nd plane hit the tower, I had two immediate reactions:
1) Ah, here it is... (I work in the security industry professionally. WE were only surprised that it hadn't happened long before.) 2) NO MORE CHANDRA! (Or - at least now, we will be focused on something real, instead of blithely ignoring the slide of our planet into perdition, lulled by banal soap operas disguized as news.)
If only...
We are a lot further down the road of personal surrender of responsibility, and it's not a nice place at all. Japan, please take note.