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.
Related
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…
Chronology of a Coup
YouTuber @JanetWeiss5166 asked me on 15 October 2025 “Can you help the following facts go viral?” I added bullet points and rendered in italics the part I edited and my addendum. In March 2024 the Supreme Court ruled against the state of Colorado seeking to keep insurrectionist Trump’s name off the state ballot, citing the…
13 Assassins
13 Assassins (2010), directed by Takashi Miike. The rumors swirled while the production was still in development. According to the rumors, it was to be a remake of 7 Samurai (1954), directed by Akira Kurosawa. It wasn’t, but like 7 Samurai, it was a story of ordinary people overcoming extraordinary criminals. Psychopathy was not a…
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…
2 Comments
Leave a Reply
You must be logged in to post a comment.
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.