Samurai on Shifting Ground: Negotiating the Medieval and the Modern in Seven Samurai and Yojimbo

Abstract

Just as revisionist historians criticize the romanticized view of the medieval knight in Hollywood depictions of the Western Middle Ages, so too critics take to task the idealized image of the samurai in films set in premodern Japan.¹ Thomas D. Conlan, for example, undermines the popular myth of the samurai by exhaustively detailing the realities of warfare in feudal Japan, demonstrating that the filmic emphases on unswerving loyalty, sword worship, and rigidly ethical behavior all fly in the face of historical evidence.² Within his own works in the samurai film genre (the jidai-geki,³ [period drama]), the director Akira Kurosawa makes his own use of such revisionist energies, deploying cinematic samurai to present a premodern Japan marked by a fundamental social instability.⁴ Eschewing the static social model of the majority of samurai films, in which the class origins of the individual transcend the fluctuations of a modernizing world, Kurosawa sets his wily warriors upon a shifting socioeconomic stage that keeps questions of identity continuously in play.