I finally got a chance to see this movie on DVD yesterday. Although it was very entertaining, I was amazed at the series of events that took place in the film. For those that know:
Was any of that movie based on actual facts? Did the US Calvery actually send advisors over there to train the Japanese army to on how to fight
Although I never gave it much thought, I had always imagined that the Samauri went the way of the dinosaur right around the same time the old Shogun and Ninja Assasins did.
I know that this appears to be a factual question without much debate.
You might want to e-mail a mod and ask that they move it to General Questions.
There actually was a revolt of samurai in 1877, known as the Satsuma revolt and led by Takamori Saigo. However, that smidgen of fact is about all that made it into the movie.
You can also look up other references to Takamori Saigo and the Satsuma Rebellion.
(Note that these web sites may have their own biases, but they are all pretty consistent in their descriptions.)
Very loosely, yes. However as you might expect the movie takes numerous liberties ( by all accounts, I must say - in interest of full disclosure I should note I haven’t actually seen it, but have read reviews and discussions about it ).
No, I don’t believe many, if any U.S. officers ended up training the new Japanese army. Rather it was organized along Prussian lines and trained mostly by Germans, French, and other Europeans ( the navy meanwhile was laid out on the British model ). The actual conflict was known as the Seinan War and was no little thing - at least 100,000 troops ( 60,000 government, 40,000 rebel ) were involved on all sides and casualties were significant ( in the neighborhood of 35,000 + another few thoiusand executed after the fact ). Further…
There were samurai fighting on both sides. The government was just more heavily weighted towards the stereotypical peasant conscript.
Both sides utilized firearms and artillery. The government forces were just better equipped as such. The fight between a truly medieval army and a modern army had been won years earlier when the actual Shogunate had been overthrown. The core of the army that overthrew them was in part the rebel forces ( from Kagoshima/Satsuma ) in the Seinan War that had been successful against the old samurai of the Tokugawa Bakufu precisely because they modernized.
In concert with this, Saigo, the leader whom the movie’s Japanese leader is apparently very loosely based, was not entirely a hidebound traditionalist. He was in some ways - he broke with the government in part based on an incident they refused to let him use a gambit wherein he proposed to go to Korea and create a international incident by provoking his own death, thereby giving Japan pretext to invade. Further he did feel the former samurai class had some legitimate grievances. But he had in fact been an early modernizer of the military as noted and a member in good-standing of the Meiji government, as a proponent of military rule ( until squeezed out/ he left in a huff in 1873 over the Korean incident ).
The samurai ceased to be samurai after the Shogunate was overthrown and gradually lost what remaining little priviledges they had retained as things like the wearing of swords were gradually banned. Smaller uprisings like the Saga and Kumamoto rebellions by small groups of disgruntled samurai were predecessors leading up to the final convulsion of the Seinan War in 1877, where Saigo became the standard-bearer for samurai grievances ( former samurai actually, their caste status having been erased - the correct term in this period is shizoku ). However these risings weren’t always purely samurai based - a revolt in 1870 in Choshu was led by samurai but supported by peasants and townpeople enraged by the spectre ( and actuality ) of rising prices under the new regime.
Fascinating, Tamerlane. I hope you’ll excuse my picking a little nit – it’s a pet peeve of mine and it’s been done a couple of times here – mounted soldiers are cavalry, not calvary.
It was a work of fiction, loosely based on a few actual incidents and using a concept known as “dramatic license” to tell a story. Look it up. :rolleyes:
Well, I’ll take that rebuke in good humour, as seeing as I didn’t actually see the thing I really shouldn’t be criticizing :). In that you’re right. You’re also correct that there is nothing wrong with taking a little dramatic license hear and there, though I freely admit the history geek in me involuntarily twitches a bit over pseudo-historical films. A devastating character flaw, I’m sure :D.
However, while perhaps “wrong” was not the correct choice of word, the OP did request information on the historical background of the film and that does seem to be an element where the film digressed from reality.
If you liked that movie, you should check out a book called The Devil Soldier by Caleb Carr. It is a true story about an American officer - Frederick Townsend Ward - who did the same sort of thing for the Chinese that Tom Cruise did for the Japanese. Except that it really happened.
In fact, when I first saw the trailer for The Last Samurai, I thought it was about Ward.
