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Caste of Blood: A Look at Feudal Japan through the Lens of Kurosawa’s Seven Samurai
Of all the injustice in the world, there is none so heinous as to be condemned at birth.
This condemnation, the ultimate in the list of our transgressions against one another, has led to
some of the greatest tragedies ever to visit this pale, blue dot we insignificant folk call home.
Untold millions of lives have been lost for a moment of unparalleled arrogance. What is meant
by the phrase “condemned by birth”? To put it simply, such a phrase in this context means a
person is inherently inferior to other people. This person has made no mistake, made no
transgression against society, aside from being who he or she is. No doubt, as Americans we may
believe the scourge I am talking about is racism. That is only one of the forms such a
wrongdoing may take. Another equally distressing manifestation of inherent arrogance is a caste
system, such as one may find in Hindu society, the old order of Europe, and, more importantly
for the sake of what is written here, feudal Japan. Nobody expresses this idea more intelligently
or quite as well in general as Akira Kurosawa in his 1954 classic, Seven Samurai.
Our film opens to a scene featuring the main location of the story, a small farming
community in Japan during the 1600s. Here we are introduced to our farming camp, simple
peasants with little to no money who are regularly assaulted by the villainous bandits who roam
the countryside. During this scene the villagers become painfully aware of their fate—they are to
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be assailed once more by the savage brigands, and will likely starve as a result of the raid on
their food stores. There is at first, a great deal of lamenting among the villagers. The noble
responsible for the region has left them to fend for themselves time and time again, and so cannot
be trusted to intervene on the villager’s behalf, and our simple farmers have had little to no
fighting experience, leaving them unable to defend against the better equipped, more experienced
raiders. Finally the suggestion to hire samurai in exchange for food is made, and a group of
farmers set out to find whoever they can to help them in their darkest hour.
At this early a point in the film, it is important to identify a very important similarity
between the two groups, the bandits and the famers. These groups are victims of the same
perpetrator, that perpetrator being the rigid class system they had been born into. Many of the
bandits during the time that Seven Samurai is set were ronins, that is they were samurai without
lords, unable by the mores of society to give up the life of the sword in response to the changing
social structure of the time (the nobility was dwindling in influence), they became raiders,
thieves and mercenaries. Farmers, being of the lower classes of feudal Japanese society, were not
permitted any sort of special training in the ways of war, and class mobility was virtually nonexistent except in the case of adoption. So it is easy to see then, why the bandits would have had
such an advantage over the farming community, even given the farmers’ greater numbers. It is
also easy to see why both of these groups can blame their problems squarely on the shoulders of
class rigidity and outmoded social mores.
Our farmers are able to meet with several samurai in their quest to find aid. Though their
initial efforts to recruit warriors lead them to failure, they eventually find one lord-less samurai
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to help them. Through this benevolent champion, our long-suffering plebian population is able to
recruit an additional six heroes for their cause, four full-fledged samurai warriors, an apprentice
samurai, and one additional warrior of uncertain origin. Together, our seven samurai set out to
defend the village.
This is another point in which we should examine the more subtle elements of Seven
Samurai. Six of our seven champions are out of work and have no lord as a direct result of the
deteriorating noble class. They are little more than ronin, though admittedly, they are a much
more benevolent breed of warrior than what our malicious bandits have proven to be. Truth be
told, our samurai function much like mercenaries, accepting the food payments of the farmers in
exchange for the strength of their sword arms. Like the bandits before them, our samurai could
not give up the life of the swordsman, and are so condemned by their society to carry on the
faltering way of life even unto the grave.
The most telling revelation to be gained from this portion of the movie involves our
warrior of mysterious origin. For the early part of the movie, he had claimed to be of a noble
samurai lineage, but this was proven to be false. This reveals to us the importance of birth in
feudal Japanese society. This man is forced to lie about who he is simply to be who he wishes to
be. Later on in the film, we find out that this character is the son of a farmer whose village had
been destroyed by bandits of a similar caliber to the ones assaulting our group of farmers. This is
another telling revelation within Seven Samurai—this suffering is nothing new, and is affecting
more than one generation. The rigid class system is a failure, one in which this character seeks to
transcend by ascending to a rank he may never officially hold.
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Continuing on the plot of the film, our samurai take up temporary residence in the
village. It is here we learn that our farmers have not been entirely honest with the samurai.
According to our man with the mysterious origin, our farmers have additional fields hidden in
the mountains, along with hidden food stores and supplies. This turns out to be true, when the
villagers bring such food stuffs out to celebrate. Our farmers also bring out a rare cache of
supplies, much to the disgust of their benefactors: armor from dead warriors. Apparently our
farmers are not quite as incapable and weak as we had been led to believe. It is my belief that
Kurosawa had chosen to reveal this to us in order to elevate the status of the farmers, making
them more akin to people and less akin to cattle awaiting slaughter.
Seven Samurai’s characters, with the exception of one major character, can then be said
to fall into one of three camps: the honorable samurai, the marauding bandits, and the eternally
suffering rice farmers. While the overarching theme of the film may seem to be a cooperative
effort by the farmers and the samurai to rid the countryside of the bandit menace, we may also
present an alternative theme, namely that the farmers had gained a victory over the samurai, and
by extension the hereditary class system in which they had been born into. The common folk are
the only ones who really come out ahead in the end. Their class will move on and grow, while
the samurai will become a memory (Morris 1996).
One might ask what all this has to do with globalization, and the answer may surprise
you. Akira Kurosawa’s cinematic masterpiece is based on the German philosopher Georg
Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel, at least arguably. For instance, in his journal article Kojeve's Masters
and Slaves, Kurosawa's Samurai and Farmers, Singh Aakash link Hegel’s work to Alexandre
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Kojeve’s work, and further on through a list of Japanese thinkers down to Kurosawa (2003). The
major idea passed between the groups is the master/slave dialectic of Hegel as it is understood by
the other thinkers who have encountered it. Since Hegel’s work is not the subject of this paper, I
will not afford it any undo space, but I believed it important to note the way in which an idea was
transferred from a nation so removed in the measure of distance from Japan, and a notion so
removed from the mindset of feudal Japan. This film represents the spread of ideas via
globalization.
To abandon the sort of meta-thinking we had ventured into with regard to Hegel, another
aspect of Seven Samurai in relation to globalization, is the change globalization brought to Japan
via the normal spread of ideas through economic ties and the post-war occupation by the United
States. While there is a definite (and growing) disparity between rich and poor here in the states,
there is far less rigidity as far as class is concerned (both historically and currently) than was
experience in Japan during the 1600s. In this case, American influence on Japanese society was
undoubtedly positive, as it further diminished the importance of birth on the individual’s life, and
removed the hereditary god-emperor of Japan from power, (as a side effect, Shintoism was
partially restored to its original pre-imperial state) (Von Mueller 2000).
While the above examples of the interplay of commerce and conquest involving Japan
are positive, there were negative aspects as well. Let us look back toward Seven Samurai. One of
the key advantages that the bandits had over both the farmers and the samurai were three
firearms. These were obtained through trade with European powers and were altogether rare. As
we saw in our film, such weapons were used to a strikingly effective degree. Without the
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interference of these weapons, one might question whether the bandits would have been any real
threat at all.
We are all citizens of a global community, whether we would acknowledge it or not.
Sometimes it is hard to admit we are the same whenever we examine the lives, culture, and
history of a group that seems altogether alien, but it has to be done. It is our responsibility to
demonstrate humanity and decency to these people and be careful as to what we choose to do in
regard to them. If one thing can be gleaned from Seven Samurai it is the dual nature of
globalization as both a liberator and destroyer. Such an idea most definitely presents us with food
for thought.
References
LeMahieu, D.L, “The Ethopoetic Moment”. Scope: An Online Journal for Film Studies. 2009.
Feb.13
(no pagination)
Singh, Aakash, “Kojeve’s Masters and Slaves, Kurosawa’s Samurai and Farmers”. Film
Philosophy. 2003. 7. (no pagination)
Von Mueller, Eddy “Naked Swords: The Zen Warrior Tradition and the Intertextual Odyssey of
the Nameless Ronin in Seven Samurai, Yojimbo, and Sanjuro”. Post Script: Essays in Film and
the Humanities. 2000. 20(1). 53-67
Morris, Gary. “The Seven Samurai”. Bright Lights Film Journal. 1996. Sept.17. (no pagination)