Where a Hispanic Catholic, and a Computer Geek write about Gun Rights, Self Defense and whatever else we can think about.
You may know about the history of the 47 Ronin. If not, here is a scene from the Robert DeNiro movie that summarizes it.
Leave it to somebody in Hollywood (probably after ingesting way too much sake and spoiled sushi) to screw up one of Japan’s most revered legends so somebody could remake The Matrix with katanas and pony tails.
Next we will have Gettysburg recreated as a cheerleading competition and fashion show.
Semi-retired like Vito Corleone before the heart attack. Consiglieri to J.Kb and AWA. I lived in a Gun Control Paradise: It sucked and got people killed. I do believe that Freedom scares the political elites.
Comments are closed.
I can empathize with the fact that Hollywood craps on everybody’s legends.
That said, some historical perspective needs to be tossed into Western culture. Particularly on a gun rights blog. The Samurai were the Japanese equivalent of European Knights. A professional, semi-noble, warrior caste. While legends are made of great battles between armies of knights or Samurai, that was not the main job of these ranks.
Japan, like medieval Europe was feudal. The majority of the people were peasants, who tilled the fields, grew the food, built the castles, etc. The nobility, who claimed ownership of the land, took the food, goods, wealth, etc. from the peasantry and claimed “divine right” or “noble birth” as justification for the taking of property. Shinto, the native religion of Japan, is the paragon of this, where the emperor of Japan is not just ruler of the nation but (traditionally) a near deity.
Here is where knights and Samurai come in. They were the enforcers, the tax collectors who took the effort of the peasants and gave it to the lords. Their jobs were to oppress the lower castes in exchange for land and wealth. An entire economy based on the principle of the protection racket.
Remember, a peasant could be executed for insulting a knight or Samurai. In Japan, it was a crime for a peasant to possess a sword, the symbol and weapon of the Samurai class. This is where so much of the mystique of the Samurai sword comes from.
This is where gun rights come in. The reign of the knight, and feudalism for that matter, ended in Europe with the rise of the gun. Guns were easy to use, compared to the life long learning it took to be master swordsman. A peasant with a gun could kill a knight, in armor, at a distance with minimal training. Shortly after the introduction of the gun in Europe, the knight disappeared, and the feudal economy collapsed. The gun wasn’t the only reason, by far, but it did democratize power and change Europe.
Japan went the other way. They banned gun ownership, like ownership of swords, for anybody except special castes. All gunsmiths, like sword smiths, became servants of the Emperor. The oppressive power of the Samurai and feudal system of the Shogun was kept in place by preventing the Japanese from having arms. It stayed this way until after WWII, keeping in mind, that although Japanese military officers were not officially Samurai. They thought of themselves that way, and did carry Katanas into battle in the Pacific. To this day, Japan has the strictest, and most enforced, gun laws of any nation.
If gun rights is all about freedom from oppression and the right for “people to dissolve the political bands which have connected them with another” than the Samurai are the antithesis of what we believe. The closest thing in America to Samurai are (Bloomberg’s private army) the NYPD or Chicago PD, who have the right to carry guns in a place where the average citizen cannot, and do not get prosecuted when they break the laws that would get average citizens thrown in jail.
I agree. I am not in favor of using either Knights or Samurais as examples to follow, (they were pricks) but you have to give props to the 47 Ronin for doing their duty.
Respect the men for who they were, not for who they were forced to work for.
“We have a very daring and skillful opponent against us, and, may I say across the havoc of war, a great General.”
-Winston Churchill, 1942
Besides all that, I’ll put a bit of juvenile words in here.
What the fuck is this shit. I’d rather watch The Last Samurai now.
…Which isn’t exactly praise for The Last Samurai, I’m thinking.
Me, I’m thinking they should have made this back somewhere between 1955-1978, written and directed by Akira Kurosawa and starring Toshiro Mifune- as all the best samurai films were.
It’s been done by several people in Japan but amazingly none by Kurosawa.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Forty-seven_Ronin#Cinema_and_television
I normally skip to battle scenes. This one though makes me want to believe it’s something else.
I think westerners overdo it a little with their protectiveness of other culture’s legends, usually for the sake of bashing Hollywood or pointing out they read the book before its cool.
Let’s face it: The Japanese won’t mind. Have a look at widely successful re-tellings of European stories like Little Red Riding Hood (Jin Ro) and Sleeping Beauty (King Of Thorn) or dig a little deeper into how history is represented even in educational Anime and one will realise that Japan is quite big into putting the narrative (and Japanese narratives usually weird out Westerners) over the factual.
47 Ronin is a legend that takes a small historical fact and transforms it into a widely told story about giri. Why not treat it similar. A movie with women turning into dragons will not accidentally be taken as the real thing (whatever that was).