Right off the bat, The Last Samurai asks us to romanticize and reduce samurai culture as not a thousand-plus year-old profession and class in a medieval system of governance, but rather as an ideal impossible for American culture (either in the 19th century or implicitly today) to attain. The prologue’s narrator is asking us to compare Watanabe’s visual sense of Zen and honor (as he is literally meditating) with where we next find our true protagonist, Cruise’s Capt. Algren: at the bottom of a bottle, with the retired cavalry officer drunk and hungover as he sits in a dark room decorated by American flags left to wrinkle on the ground.
Like Kevin Costner’s Civil War veteran Lt. Dunbar in Dances with Wolves, Cruise’s Algren is weighed down by the guilt and atrocities he witnessed while riding beneath the American flag. Samurai even takes it one step further since Algren’s trauma stems from the horrors he saw committed by both sides—including himself—during the various American Indian wars on the frontier. While we eventually learn of Katsumoto’s grievances with imperial Japan’s rush toward modernization, it is told mostly in broad strokes and with a single, caricatured villainous bureaucrat he must overcome: a Japanese railroad baron (Masato Harada) who whispers poison in a young emperor’s ear. By comparison, Algren’s shame and disdain for his former commanding officer—a fellow by the name of Custer who got 211 fellow cavalrymen massacred—is much more acute and inescapable.
The Last Samurai is not the story of an American encountering the last days of the samurai, but rather how the samurai helped an American put to bed the demons of his experiences in the American West. As such, the samurai are themselves only understood through those rose-tinted glasses that the film’s opening narration instructs us to use: warriors willing to give their lives for that “forgotten word” of honor.
It’s a classic, if better intentioned and articulated, replay of the “noble savage” trope in Dances with Wolves. As such, the only dimensionality offered to that lifestyle is by the performances, which include future Shōgun producer and star Sanada, as well as a magnificent Watanabe who gave an Oscar-nominated turn as the samurai rebel who takes a curious interest in Cruise’s bewildered American prisoner—a bit like how a gifted veterinarian might adopt and nurse a wounded stray dog. Screenwriter John Logan provides enough nuance to that relationship that Watanabe can flesh it out to haunting effect. Still, at the end of the day, the samurai culture is merely a frame in which Cruise’s protagonist can stare at his own reflection—and eventually shave off the trauma of his past by donning a kimono and katanas.
Meanwhile in Shōgun Blackthorne does eventually transition into wearing Japanese attire, including the katanas because he is told to by his captors/hosts/maybe pseudo-friends. However, the show never feels the need to depict the Englishman “going native” as an act of either salvation or heroism. There is, indeed, something faintly comical about Jarvis’ stranger stumbling through high Japanese society with blades he doesn’t know how to use and bouncing off folks who view him a bit like their court jester.
The culture clash likewise becomes a much richer source of drama and tragedy when it is not only about how it affects Blackthorne’s well-being. In fact, it is arguable the true star of the show is neither the Westerner nor the would-be shōgun of its title, Sanada’s commanding Toranaga. Instead its Toda Mariko (Anna Sawai) who walks away with the series. She’s a woman of an ancient house which has fallen into recent disgrace due to the actions of her father. As a consequence, Mariko yearns to redeem her honor by committing seppuku (ritualized suicide). Yet her lord Toranaga forces her to endure, including as Blackthorne’s translator (having converted to Catholicism, Mariko is well-studied in Western languages).
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