How teaching English can save your life Quote of the Day
“I will practice my English with you, if you will do me the honor”
“You keep alive just to practice your English?”
Ken Watanabe and Tom Cruise in The Last Samurai, enacting a scene set 130 years before Nova teachers were also kept alive by their students just to teach English.
In the keeping alive through English teaching (or not) theme, also spotted: English teachers begging in Madrid and Bangkok. Would’ve loved to have asked how they many to sink even lower than teaching in ECC, but I’m English, we don’t talk to strangers don’t you know, and there was nothing about them on the Net…
Did manage to find out quite a lot about The Last Samurai, though.
Historical inaccuracies in The Last Samurai (some found on the internet and some my own ideas)
- Most of the Meiji army was still made up of samurai mixed with peasants rather than the mass of untrained peasants in the movie. They were also pretty much trained up, battle experienced and modernized by the time depicted in the movie.
- The influence of the Americans is exaggerated (surprise surprise). Although the Americans did open up Japan with the arrival of Perry’s black ships, due to the distraction of the American Civil War and the Meiji government’s feeling of having more in common with certain European countries and governments, the Americans were not one of the biggest influences at that time. The closest thing to the Tom Cruise character in history is a Frenchman.
- The site of the first battle where Tom Cruise is captured is nowhere near Mount Fuji, and it could not possibly be visible from there.
- They refer to the mythical creation of the Japanese islands by dripping from a sword, but it should be a spear
- The Meiji Emperor didn’t speak English
- The few Japanese villages that are in the mountains stick as close to the valley bottom as possible, rather than perching on top of the hills as in the movie. In countries and regions where the opposite is the case, it is almost always to stay away from regular raids, whereas Japan had had 300 years of peace.
- The temple and Buddha in the movie are far too big to be in the tiny village shown. The house is also too luxurious- not all samurai were rich, many were poorer than merchants and well off farmers, as they were forbidden by law to take part in any trade.
- Very few samurai lived in villages- in Japanese feudalism they served the local lord or the Shogun and got their rice stipend directly from them rather than being in charge of a certain number of their own peasants they could tax. Although you could understand them as being there to stay safe from the Meiji army in an isolated place, if I remember correctly they mention that it is their ancestral home.
- They seem to have fluffy white rice in every meal, although that was a luxury for most people until well after WWII
- Some of the battle gear, especially the head gear, is totally over the top
Generally,though,in accuracy terms The Last Samurai is certainly a step up from the “Rising Sun” and”Shogun”books, movies and television series. More worrying is the general message. Even if the samurai had been fighting against the corrupt Westernized modernizers to retain a pure, traditional national Bushido spirit (it is much more likely they were fighting against the loss of their privelidged position), you only have to look at which people are standing up for those values in Japan, Afghanistan, Saudi Arabia, Burma etc. to have severe doubts about what message they are trying to convey.
More information:
The Last Samurai: Movie myth or history on National Geographic
How True to History is Tom Cruise’s The Last Samurai on the History News Network.
Land of the Rising Cliche in The New York Times