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Have not read the book, but I've been looking forward to this since the first trailer, and first episode was a triumph. Can't wait to get home and watch the second. Opening the story on the Dutch captain giving a flowery speech on the sweet release of suicide, which Blackthorne tells him to his face is the coward's way out, was a great contrast with our protagonist's reaction to Yabu's willingness to take his own life rather than let the sea take him. He can't reconcile his view on killing yourself with the physical courage Yabu displayed crawling down that cliff to save the Spaniard's life, and when he tries it rings so hollow the Spaniard can't help but mock him. There's a clear ideological clash between the acceptance of destiny and self-determination running as a thematic thread throughout the episode, with Blackthorne representing an extreme embrace of the idea that he makes his own fate through hard work and determination. Each of the Japanese characters navigates the dichotomy in a different way, but they navigate it, and given the Rodriguez's little speech about Shukumei and the centrality of Christianity to the narrative, I have to assume the ebb and flow between the two is going to be a central theme going forward. Speaking of Blackthorne and Yabu, the most striking element of the first episode was the parallelism crafted between the two of them. While Blackthorne comes across as an arrogant wanna-be Conquistador from the jump, the story subtly works to dull it a bit through his more admirable traits: concern for his men, the embrace of his responsibility as the new commander, bravery, guile, etc. By contrast, Yabu's negative traits are emphasized. Before he appears on screen, his nephew's mom notes how he didn't even come for his brother's funeral. He orders that horrific boiling execution, ostensibly because the Portuguese Priest needs to have the blasphemy against his God vindicated, but clearly just because he wants to hear how the man dies for his weird philosophical obsession. Then has a voyeuristic sex romp and chats non-chalantly about the killing over breakfast, even requesting a poem. THEN he outlines his Baby's First Game of Thrones scheme to make himself a warlord once his dumb leader dies. The frame is designed to have us presume Yabu will be a villain for our flawed western antagonist... and then it pulls the rug out from under us a bit and starts to show Yabu's more positive traits. He takes up an oar himself during the storm and follows Blackthorne's orders to help save the ship. He puts himself on the line when he's already on thin ice with his boss to help Blackthorne go after Rodriguez. Then there's everything about the rescue scene, including the fact that he sees through Blackthorne's lame attempts at manipulation but does the right thing anyway. The whole thing crystalizes when Rodriguez reveals that he knows the truth about Blackthorne's mission and Our Hero IMMEDIATELY, and without any hesitation, attempts to murder the guy to protect himself. He and Yabu are cut from the same cloth, warriors in a brutal age who fancy themselves civilized and enlightened, but in reality they are both greedy, self-interested killers. I'll be interesting to see how both evolve over time. Toranaga and Mariko are obviously interesting characters from the jump as well, as is the complex political situation they're in, but I'll wait until I see episode 2 since it seems like they're going to get a more robust spotlight there. Sanguinia fucked around with this message at 17:25 on Feb 28, 2024 |
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Feb 28, 2024 17:18
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Scoss posted:Maybe there are some unavoidable similarities about telling a story involving western interlopers in feudal japan but you can see a great deal of The Last Samurai that seems like it must have been influenced by the original book. I know Last Samurai was based on a specific incident in which a pair of French soldiers aligned themselves with the Shogunate forces during the wars leading up to the Meiji Restoration. The project was a brainchild of a New Zealander named Vincent Ward and spent a lot of years being developed and workshopped before it finally got made. Inspiration from Shogun could have easily come into the mix at any time
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Feb 28, 2024 21:22
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Jamwad Hilder posted:"The Last Samurai" is also in reference to the actual samurai (plural!) that feature in the movie, but it's also very easy to understand why everyone assumes they meant "Tom Cruise is the last samurai" Last Samurai did extremely well in the Japanese box office for basically that exact reason. I watched it with my native Japanese language teacher in my freshman year, and she said it was a quantum-leap forward compared to previous American cinema in terms of how it portrayed the language and culture, used top-class Japanese cast to play all the characters, and didn't go nearly as overboard as she expected with the White Savior elements, keeping the bulk of the agency in the political plot squarely in Japanese hands. Her biggest complaint was how romanticized the whole Samurai lifestyle and their motives for fighting the Meiji was compared to actual history. Seems like that won't be a problem with this show!
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Feb 28, 2024 23:28
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Jerusalem posted:What stands out to me there is that the Taiko was explicitly a peasant too and rose up to his exalted position and retained his beloved status even after his death (and pulled the ladder up after him by forbidding other peasants from doing it). But I guess the contradictory values of extolling the virtues of the Taiko for his achievements while simultaneourly condemning the high ranked Ishido for his origins is kinda par for the course when it comes to the hypocrisy of those at the top of any given society. This is a reflection of the real history, by the by. During the course of Oda Nobunaga's initial push to unify Japan under his rule, he acquired two lieutenants: Toyotomi Hideyoshi, a peasant who rose to become a Samurai and eventually a military and political leader through pure merit, and Tokugawa Ieyasu, heir to a minor cadet branch of the venerable Minamoto clan, some of the bluest blood you could find in the entire nobility. When Nobunaga was killed, Hideyoshi rose to supreme power through a military campaign that both avenged his master and crushed all resistance to his rule, leading him to be named Imperial Regent by the Emperor. The traditional wisdom is that by all rights he should have been granted the title of Shogun, but he was refused because he wasn't born into the Samurai. He later "retired" granting him the title Taiko (Eh? EH?) so he could pass the office of Regent to his son and create dynastic rule for his family, but he retained political control. The pulling-up-the-ladder social reforms were one of his most major policy moves while he was at the peak of his power, alongside the invasion of Korea. I've seen at least some historians speculate that his moves were less about ingratiating himself with the nobles by playing along with their classism and more about centralization of political power. To whit, one of his main ideas was the "Great Sword Hunt," which disarmed the peasantry, robbing the ability to climb the social ladder through martial success and shattering their ability to revolt against unjust rule, but just as crucially denying their daimyo's the ability to use peasant levies as a military resource. He also melted down the confiscated weapons and made them into a statue of Buddah as a flex, because that was the kind of dude he was. He also forbade Samurai to live among the peasantry, legally requiring them to take up residence in castle towns, and restricted the movement of peasants, binding them to the land of their daimyos like serfs. This had the effect of driving a wedge between the military and workers within the then-loose caste system and putting an even greater barrier between the lowborn and any kind of advancement, but it ALSO puts a significantly larger financial burden directly onto the nobles who were now his vassals, restricting their labor pool and demanding they shoulder the expense of caring for their soldiers more directly. The most fun twist is that once Hideyoshi died (I guess maybe spoilers since stuff might come up in the show's ending?) and his brother in arms Tokugawa succeeded in his political and military campaign to replace him, being granted the rank of Shogun, Tokugawa quintupled down on those reforms. Some historians believe that despite how close they had been as Nobunaga's left and right hands, Tokugawa never completely got over the fact that a commoner had risen to rule all of Japan and he'd been forced to serve him, so he took those already oppressive anti-mobility reforms and refined them into the most rigid caste system in Japan's history which endured for 300 years until the Meiji Restoration. So, who is most responsible for ensuring another Hideyoshi wouldn't appear and the highborne would retain their rarified status in the coming centuries? Hideyoshi himself for striking the first blows against those who might follow in his footsteps in the name of real politick, or his dear friend Tokugawa who cranked those blows up to 15 for the sake of his own deeply held belief in the superiority of his own class? The answer is yes. Sanguinia fucked around with this message at 17:39 on Apr 17, 2024 |
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Apr 17, 2024 17:37
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Shishkahuben posted:Are there practical or cultural reasons that samurai re-sheath their swords immediately after use? Part of me always wonders how much blood is coating the inside of their scabbards after the lil flick they do. Probably just artistic license, it just stands out a little bit. There's actually a specific name for that little flick move, chiburi, more or less literally meaning "shaking off the blood." In reality a samurai would have a special cloth dedicated to wiping off any excess blood after the flick, but the advent of Samurai film, specifically the insanely popular series Zatoichi about a blind samurai typically omitted that element for coolness reasons. Certain old documents also make references to wiping off remaining blood on pieces of the samurai's clothing, though this was considered vulgur and not to be done unless necessary. Regardless, all of these practices being done before an immediate re-sheathing of the sword post-combat are linked to one of the most popular sword arts of this time period, battojutsu, also known as iajutsu in modern times. This is the "quick draw" style of samurai swordsmanship media is so in love with, with numerous potential techniques to be performed straight out of the scabbard. This style was extremely popular among the Nobility and higher-ranked Samurai during and after the Warring States period because the constant fighting for territory and influence meant that one tended to expect attack at almost any time, even when in the comfort of one's own home. Sanguinia fucked around with this message at 21:32 on Apr 17, 2024 |
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Apr 17, 2024 21:25
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Barry Foster posted:How prevalent would violence be in an average samurai's life through the eras? Would it be possible to be the lord of some nowhere place and be professionally trained in Violence but never get into a scrap? Or was it basically a given that if you were born into a samurai family you were definitely gonna have to kill a guy at some point. The idea of a hereditary warrior caste in Japanese society kind of went roughly hand-in-hand with an increase in violence in their history. In the earliest periods we have records for there was of course plenty of internal struggle for dominance within the fledgling Imperial court and as those in power attempted to expand their authority across all of the Home Islands, but a lot of these were fairly limited in scope by later standards. Around the 600s, the ruling class started to reform their military along Chinese models, coinciding with a dramatic passion for all things Chinese among the aristocracy, and these reforms coincided with a period of relative peace as most soldiers became peasant levies minus a dedicated group of professionals to train them in times of crisis. Resources were diverted to the arts, which is why we have so much poetry and painting from that era. A few hundred years later, internal unrest and rebellion against the Imperial court became more frequent, particularly as they neared total dominance of the main island of Honshu. The samurai class started expanding, and then the Imperial family started to seclude themselves, losing power to the landed nobility who began fighting among themselves more frequently and/or rebelling against the throne more often. By 1100 this culminated in the Genpei War, which led to the collapse of the Imperial family's power and the rise of the very first Shogunate. Prior to that time, the term was reserved as a temporary office at the Emperor's service, but this made it a hereditary military dictatorship for the first time. This was when the Samurai fully came into their own as a caste within the social heirarchy. Things got quiet for a few decades, then came the Mongolian invasions, and a second Shogunate dynasty. This was also the period when mass infantry started to come back into style, meaning larger-scale battles whenever battles did occur. There was a gradual escalation of internal violent disputes as the second Shogunate's power decayed over about 200 years, and then came THE SENGOKU JIDAI, everyone's favorite Game of Thrones Super War that lasted a full century. That era's ending coincides roughly with the events of this show, after which there was a period of fairly solid peace for another three centuries until the Meiji Restoration, which ended the Samurai as a legitimate warrior caste once and for all. Thank you for coming to my Ted Talk. Sanguinia fucked around with this message at 22:40 on Apr 17, 2024 |
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Apr 17, 2024 22:38
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kiimo posted:While the snow remains 
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Apr 17, 2024 23:24
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This is the best meme format
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Apr 22, 2024 16:39
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Chadzok posted:I wanted a montage of what happened to everyone's real-life equivalents and a "Christianity was banned within X years" or whatever After his victory at the Battle of Sekigahara, Ieyasu Tokugawa's (ie the real Toranaga) power over Japan is essentially unchallenged. None of the remaining daimyo have the strength or will to oppose him. Three years later, 1603, the Emperor formally anoints him with the title of Shogun. Two years after that, 1605, he officially retires, naming his son Hidetada to the office in his place. While Ieyasu retains true political power, this move cements his family's herditary hold on the position of Shogun and confirms that the position itself will remain the permanent head of government. This begins an unbroken 250 year Tokugawa dynasty, an era we know today as the Edo Period. Over the next ten years, Ieyasu consolidated power by addressing the only two effective threats to his continued rule: the wealth brought to Christian daimyos by favoritism in foreign trade, and Hideyori Toyotomi, the son of his long-dead friend the Taiko. Within 10 years, the Christian religion had been forbidden and all Tokugawa retainers and vassal required to forswear their adherence to the faith. The construction of ocean-going ships was forbidden. Trade with Europe was banned outside a single port in Nara, controlled by a Tokugawa loyalist and far from the power centers of the once-Christian lords. Hideyori, the young boy whose power Ieyasu had once held in trust as part of the council, spent most of his remaining years in Osaka Castle. He was married to Ieyasu's grandaughter and assumed to be a useless fool who had no care that his father's wishes for him had been usurped. Around 1614, this illusion was shattered when he imprinted a subversive message onto a bronze bell as part of a rennovation of a major temple within his fief which appeared to call for the end Tokugawa rule and the return of his family to power. He began to gather a small army of ronin and forge alliances with anti-Shogunate lords. Ieyasu's response to this challenge was decisive. One year later, Osaka castle was burning, Hideyori was dead, and the Toyotomi line extinguished. Ieyasu died in 1616 with all his enemies vanquished. His heirs carried on his legacy by solidifying an inflexible caste system that shattered social mobility into the Samurai class, ensuring another Toyotomi Clan would never rise, and sealing Japan's borders entirely to foreigners on pain of death. There would be peace and corruption in equal measure for generations as Japan prospered and stagnated in isolation, waiting for the day the Black Ships would force them back into the modern world and begin the fall of the Shogunate.
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Apr 24, 2024 18:10
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Arglebargle III posted:One thing other posters in the thread brought to my attention is that this kid is the son of a peasant who everyone agreed was a great right-hand-man to his noble leader. A leader who couldn't be shogun because he was a peasant. So they invented a new title for him and now the kid is... what exactly? There's no precedent for this title being passed down. There was no precident for the title of Shogun being passed down until somebody decided to make that happen at a time nobody was willing or able to do anything about it. It was originally something akin to the Roman Dictator, a temporary office at the behest of the Emperor when the Emperor had true political and military power. Shogun as a dynastic head of government only happened in the wake of a gigantic civil war that saw the Emperor relegated to a figurehead. That was also when Samurai as a hereditary warrior caste became a thing by the by
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Apr 25, 2024 03:21
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Macdeo Lurjtux posted:There's some criticisms that the violence and politics are too exaggerated for the reality. Though that could be samurai apologia driven by the far right over the last 40 years has been really successful at reshaping the narrative. It could also be typical grognard "I hope someone was fired for that blunder!" BS, any sensible person would understand that this is a "Based on a true story" hyper-reality drama and make allowances for how it breaks from the history that inspired it.
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Apr 29, 2024 21:04
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HerpicleOmnicron5 posted:yeah that's one change im not fond of, it should've been toranaga's order, not something volunteered. alternatively, if toranaga was shown to be about to order it himself and he rushed to offer it as a last ditch attempt to receive clemency, it'd go down better. that's the big one that was super out there for me. Jamwad Hilder posted:Well what I mean is that he wouldn't have been ordered to kill himself either. He might've been chastised at most, and that would've been the end of it. Seppuku is something that typically happened for extremely serious offenses as capital punishment, or in the aftermath of a war or battle as a way to save face when you're going to die/be executed anyway. It was not something you would have offered or been ordered to do just for acting above your station and standing up for your lord in an Important Meeting. He's an important son of an important retainer, if it was based in reality Toranaga would have been making excuses for him not to die. Ending his entire line by killing his own son also doesn't have much basis in reality but it's added for drama. Overall the prevalence of seppuku and everyone being obsessed with dying feels like shock value and orientalism that's in the original book, and the show, because it's dramatic and because it makes the reader/viewer think "wow this is such an alien situation for Blackthorne" I don't totally agree. I do think that a degree of orientalism stemming from the source material and how it overemphasizes and overuses this particular already-over-romanticized aspect of Samurai culture is a factor at play here, but I also don't think having the retainer offer and Toranaga wordlessly accept (creating a situation that wouldn't happen in real life) is a strict downgrade from Toranaga simply ordering the death himself or protecting his man. The implication to me was that Toranaga's excessive passivity in the exchange was a conscious effort to project next-level weakness to his enemies. He didn't want the retainer dead, that much is clear from the following scene where Toranaga opines to his bodyguard about the pointless bloodshed that he wants to bring to an end. However, he knew his enemies would expect it despite it not being called for because they are the verge of destroying him and will see the unreasonable expectation as one more way to press their advantage by robbing him of an asset. The whole reason the retainer speaks out of turn is because of how brazen the other four are being in abusing their power and rewriting the rules of the game. The way the scene is framed, its very clear everyone on Toranaga's side knows what's going on, but also that Toranaga's strategy is to buy time by looking as weak as he can so their arrogance over assured victory will give him room to come up with something. My view was the retainer offering his seppuku rather than Toranaga demanding was a deliberate act so his leader would not even have to show strength in commanding his subordinates. Instead he just silently ascents to something he makes clear he doesn't want the next time he's alone. re: the Blackthorn element , I also think it's important to keep in mind that those first two episodes are very much about showing that Blackthorn is a petty, close-minded simpleton on the subject of death. The juxtaposition of his contempt for the Dutch captain vs his instant (if confused) admiration for Yabu's attempt to kill himself so the sea won't be the thing that killed him and Mariko's conversation with the widow are just as much context for that offer of seppuku as Toranaga describing it as useless bloodshed. Blackthorn's dogmatic impulse to LIVE so his mission will be accomplished is also mirrored by the various Samurai's willingness to die for their mission, which makes that initial scorn Blackthorn has for the captain all the more ironic. I think there's a lot of nuance and complexity in how death is looked at by all the characters in those initial episodes, so I don't feel it's fair to boil it all down to the idea that these unrealistic seppukku are happening just so our POV character can be shocked by The Alien Customs Of The Foreigner even if that was the main thrust of the scenes in the source. The show isn't meant to reflect the historical reality that closely.
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Apr 30, 2024 22:12
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Boris Galerkin posted:If -sama is reserved for people that deserve respect, while -dono is the same but with the additional caveat that that person you're calling -dono is your peer, then does that mean Mariko calling Anjin Anjin-sama instead of Anjin-dono mean that Mariko recognizes that she isn't Anjin's peer but is his lessor? I might be remembering wrong, but I don't think -sama automatically denotes your inferiority, just recognition of high rank. -dono then further implies that you are of equal rank.
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Apr 30, 2024 23:56
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Jamwad Hilder posted:This is a good post, thank you, my point was meant to be more from a historical perspective. I originally brought up the incident as an example of an earlier discussion point, that one common criticism from the domestic Japanese audience is that the violence is overdone for the time period. The way I see it is that, from a narrative perspective and within the story the show/book is telling, the events as they unfold make sense. From a historical perspective, seppuku was not nearly as common as the book/show makes it out to be (as you referred to, it's a bit romanticized to some extent), and this instance is not something that someone would be required to commit seppuku over. Right, and I totally respect looking at the show from a realist perspective, that's 100% part of its appeal. My thinking was more to say that I don't view its realism as "realism," per se, but more that fantastic form of real that helped Game of Thrones appeal to so many people, or got people into the Robert Downey Jr. Sherlock Holmes movies (just as two off-the-cuff examples). It's Imitation Realism and it exists to make events feel especially grounded and therefore intensify our empathetic connection to the political, sociological and ideological conflicts our characters experience in tandem with their personal conflicts. The breaks from REAL Reality don't bother me in those types of stories so long as they have utility within the story and they don't compromise the world's internal logic. As an example of the later, since the thread brought up Blue Eye Samurai, the biggest point where that show lost me (aside from some of the stuff during the ending) was the big mid-season climax because the amount of damage the protagonist took attacking the keep was so cartoonish it pushed me past the brink on my suspension of disbelief. That happening had utility within the story's themes, but it went so far past the limits the story had set for itself in previous content that it had me rolling my eyes and sucked me out of the narrative Anyway those breaks from reality almost always create an opening for fine content creators like that Reddit Guy to teach me more things about actual history, so that's nice. 
Sanguinia fucked around with this message at 06:19 on May 1, 2024 |
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May 1, 2024 06:14
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Zero VGS posted:Like I'm a "dubs over subs" cretin, but this show requires reading subs. It's all paced knowing that Americans who went to public school will need to keep up. But it's not something you can have running in a background tab if that's your plan. It wouldn't make any sense if the Japanese was dubbed into English. Isn't there an English Dub version though? I thought I saw that when I was looking at Hulu the other day.
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May 7, 2024 17:23
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