Pacific Asia Museum's Exhibit The Samurai Re-Imagined is a Limited View - Page 3

Perhaps the greater question is: how does the curator define samurai? The seven samurai in Kurosawa's film were ronin. So was Yojimbo and thus Usagi Yojimbo. The concept of the loner is contrary to what the samurai represented within the Tokugawa system. The samurai life was confined by duty and honor. Likewise, the samurai in the exhibit were represented by the actors in ukiyoe, usually Kabuki.

Yet the samurai class openly supported Noh, not Kabuki. This is the samurai as represented for the consumption of the masses, not the actual samurai themselves. The themes were often about the double suicides and the competing forces of aijo (romantic love) and giri (duty).

It should be pointed out that the play Chushingura was important because at the time, such feelings of duty and honor had been losing ground, and so this was a revival, perhaps even a nostalgic one, of the bushido code. Chushingura is the name of a fictional account for the revenge of 47 ronin. Although officially ronin, they considered themselves loyal vassals to their lord even after his death (which is what made them ronin).

The historical events took place in 1701. The act of revenge took place two years later. The puppet play called Kanadehon Chushingura was first performed in 1748, yet in order to avoid censorship by the Tokugawa shogunate, the events were set a few centuries earlier. The Kabuki play sets the events in the Muromachi period (1333-1568).

Twilight Samurai represents the samurai class as what they had become during the later Tokugawa era. Although poor, Seibei is still bound to his lord and loyal. He is a fine swordsman and will end up dying in a war. The kind of samurai that Bermudez looks at in anime and manga is superficial, and he also doesn’t indicate how this comes to terms with the Western vision of the salaryman as the new samurai in the English-language business rhetoric of the 1980s or the manga Salaryman Kintaro. He also conveniently forgets the image of the samurai, very kabuki-esque, in the cult classic Brazil.

For those interested in Japan, manga, anime, or the concept and history of samurai, this exhibit is simplistic at best and misleading at worst.

Article Author: Purple Tigress

Former theater critic for the LA Weekly and Los Angeles Times . For the last five years, an editing slave at a dot-com but recently laid off. Currently an under-employed freelance writer and artist.

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