Sanjuro
Sanjuro: Akira Kurosawa’s master class on the Law of Opposites
Every scene repeats the same principle: To find the truth, look for opposites.
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When Did the The Dark Ages Really End?
Ferdinand Magellan and his crew slipped the surly bonds of the Dark Ages when they set out to circumnavigate the world in AD 1519. For the most part, however, they took most of the Dark Ages with them in the form of their ideology, cultural sensibilities and religious beliefs. This is why Catholicism prevails to…
The Right Stuff
“There’s no such thing as a natural-born pilot. Generally, the person with the most experience is best.” — Chuck Yeager On the one hand there’s The Wrong Stuff such as ignorance, hubris, fear and panic; On the other hand there’s the education, training and experience we use to purge all of The Wrong Stuff and…
Nexus 3019
Personally, I’m an AI skeptic. Humans by nature tend to personify things. Show them a wind-up toy and their first impression is “Look! A little person!”. The more human a robot looks, the more human we assume it to be, regardless of its internal sophistication or lack thereof. The appearance itself sets our imagination in…
The Dorian Succession
According to Google AI, the Dorian invasion is traditionally dated to circa 1100 BCE, aligning with the end of the Late Bronze Age and the collapse of the Mycenaean civilization. Many modern historians believe this movement of northern Greek tribes actually occurred in waves spanning roughly 1200 to 1100 BCE, triggering the Greek Dark Ages….
Anomalies and their Followers as Drivers of Episodic Social Upsets
While episodic social upsets driven by psychopaths and their followers are both painfully obvious and abundant to the point of distraction in the historical record, it is enlightening to place these upsets into the context of Babiak & Hare‘s psychology experiments. In these experiments, as treated further in another post, the minds in a random…
Proposed Constitutional Amendments
lesson learned (n): A law that prevents the recurrence of past social upsets. Most laws are passed in response to particular situations. Root cause analysis exposes the underlying dynamics that lead to particular situations. Based on these underlying dynamics, we can design fixes that prevent particular situations from arising. The Constitution of the United States…
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Sanjuro in the Context of Corporate Culture
Sanjuro is not the only samurai film whose story bears on modern politics or corporate culture – indeed not even the only Kurosawa samurai film. Seven Samurai illustrates the highly context-dependent treatment of competent players and Hiroshi Inagaki’s Chūshingura chronicles the so-called Akō incident of 1701-1703 in which a clan leader’s refusal to submit to corruption and his subsequent unjust conviction leads his most loyal vassals to take a politically spectacular and historically iconic revenge in strict accordance with samurai tradition.
It took me a while to discover Takashi Miike’s 13 Assassins (2010), which establishes a clear trend in the focus of Japanese-made samurai movies toward social justice. These 13 hand-picked assassins mete it out in droves as they descend upon a human monster (masterfully played by Gorô Inagaki) and his growing entourage to interdict his political career and save Japan from descending back into feudalism on the brink of the Meiji Restoration.