Warrior Legend in Akira Kurosawa’s Seven Samurai

Author: Akira Kurosawa

Time Period: 1951 CE–2000 CE

Country or Culture: Japan

Genre: Legend

Overview

When Japanese filmmaker Akira Kurosawa decided to direct his movie Shichinin no Samurai (Seven Samurai, 1954), he performed painstaking historical research and included well-known samurai legends in his film. Seven Samurai tells the story of a group of masterless samurai led by the expert swordsman Kambei Shimada. In the year of 1587, the samurai are hired by the inhabitants of a village threatened by plunder from bandits once their harvest has come in. As the villagers can offer them only rice for their services, the seven samurai primarily fight for the villagers out of a sense of honor, self-respect, and disgust with the bandits preying on the weakest members of Japan’s feudal society.

Once the villagers, led by their elder, Gisaku, and the rash young Rikichi, have managed to persuade the samurai, the film focuses on the distinct personalities of the seven valiant warriors. Kambei Shimada has leadership qualities and outstanding sword-fighting abilities. His self-appointed young disciple Katsushirō Okamoto strives to become a battle-hardened samurai. Shichirōji, who once served under Kambei as a junior officer, rejoins his former commander. Gorōbei Katayama is an archer whose good-humored nature stands in contrast to his lethal skills with his bow and arrows. He recruits charming and witty Heihachi Hayashida for the group, even though Heihachi’s skills are not fully developed yet. Finally, there is taciturn Kyūzō and the clownish Kikuchiyo, who attaches himself to the group and shows the most sympathy toward the peasants. Kikuchiyo was added to provide some comic relief and to prevent the movie from becoming too solemn and thus less likely to interest its audience. He is the most dynamic character of all seven samurai.

In contrast to the villagers, who are individualized, the bandits remain a literally nameless force of evil. They are distinguished only by their different functions as leader, scouts, and fighters.

Akira Kurosawa went into retreat with his two favorite screenwriters, Shinobu Hashimoto and Hideo Oguni, in December 1952 to craft the script for Seven Samurai. Secluded at a traditional Japanese inn, the three men worked for almost seven weeks on the screenplay. During this time, Kurosawa began to immerse himself in samurai legends. He continued to look at these legends as he studied the period of the film, Japan’s Sengoku (or Warring States) period, for the subsequent three months of preproduction of the movie. Seven Samurai was filmed during 148 shooting days spread out over one year. It was released on April 26, 1954. The film quickly gathered national and international acclaim for the director and his cast.

A filmic analysis of how Kurosawa incorporated, developed, and adapted popular samurai warrior legends in Seven Samurai is particularly intellectually rewarding, as Kurosawa spent considerable thought and artistic talent on this issue. Cinematic analysis shows how Kurosawa worked with his source material from Japan’s diverse samurai legends to adopt them into a filmic masterpiece that is both about the past and about Japan’s post–World War II present of 1954. A close critical look analyzes the portrayal of Kurosawa’s individual samurai as archetypical characters. Their interplay and function in the dramatic plot to save a village from the forces of evil is analyzed in light of Kurosawa’s success in bringing into film, the medium of the twentieth century, the legends of Japan’s feudal past.

Summary

The movie Seven Samurai opens with bandits gazing at a village in the near distance. Because they plundered it the preceding fall, they decide to wait for the next harvest before raiding it again. Unbeknown to the bandits, they have been overheard by a peasant. He rushes to inform the villagers of the event. In great despair, a peasant woman cries out, “There are no gods here anymore” (Kurosawa 2). One young villager, Rikichi (played by Yoshio Tsuchiya), proposes to fight the bandits: “Let’s kill them—kill them all” (3). Yet the other villagers know they stand no realistic chance. The revenge of the bandits for peasant resistance would be brutal and lethal.

The village elder, Gisaku (played by Kokuten Kodo), proposes that the village hire samurai for their protection. As the peasants can only offer food, namely rice, as payment, Gisaku tells the recruiting party led by Rikichi, “You must find hungry samurai” (Kurosawa 7). This is possible, since the Sengoku period in Japan, during which the movie takes place, has left many samurai without a lord to provide for them.

Initially, Rikichi’s party cannot find samurai willing to serve for food. In one village, they witness how a samurai uses the self-effacing guise of a priest to overcome and kill a thief who has taken a boy hostage. This samurai, who identifies himself as Kambei Shimada (played by Takashi Shimura), attracts two samurai followers impressed by his feat to save the boy. One is Katsushirō Okamoto (Isao Kimura). Katsushirō comes from a wealthy landowning family and aspires to become a valiant samurai through Kambei’s teaching. The other is the comical young man Kikuchiyo (Toshiro Mifune), who appears to have a rather shady background. Impressed by the determination of the villagers who approach him, Kambei agrees to their proposal. He tells them, “I accept your sacrifice,” meaning the giving of their best food, rice, to the samurai (Kurosawa 29). Both Katsushirō and Kikuchiyo join Kambei, the latter initially against Kambei’s will.

In due course, four more samurai agree to protect the villagers. Like Kambei, they have lost their lords and been reduced to the status of rōnin (masterless samurai). They include master archer Gorōbei Katayama (played by Yoshio Inaba); Kambei’s former lieutenant, Shichirōji (Daisuke Katō); Heihachi Hayashida (Minoru Chiaki), who has been reduced to cutting wood for a townsman in exchange for food; and the silent, mysterious Kyūzō (Seiji Miyaguchi).

“Years ago, when all of you were still babies, our village was burned out by bandits. When I was running away I saw something. There was one village left unburned. It has hired samurai.”

As the samurai enter the village, the peasants hide out of fear. One of them, Manzo (Kamatari Fujiwara), orders his beautiful daughter Shino (Keiko Tsushima) to cut her hair “so [she] can look like a boy,” as he fears sexual predation by the samurai (Kurosawa 51). The samurai are alienated by the peasants’ shyness. To break the tension, clownish Kikuchiyo raises a false alarm about the bandits returning. Suddenly the villagers implore the samurai to save them. This breaks the ice as Kikuchiyo berates the villagers: “Look, you idiots. We come all this way and then look at the welcome you give us!” (62).

There is another crisis when Kikuchiyo discovers samurai armor in the village. The other samurai realize that the peasants have killed samurai defeated in battle and have taken their armor. Kikuchiyo resolves the situation. On the one hand, he denounces the peasants as devious and “most cunning . . . animals” (Kurosawa 75). Then he turns around and blames the samurai of making them thus with their endless battles and predations on the villagers. This reveals that Kikuchiyo is of peasant stock and explains his prior comic antics; Kikuchiyo’s intervention also results in the samurai and peasants joining forces.

The seven samurai fortify the village and instruct the peasants in self-defense, primarily with bamboo spears. Katsushirō begins a relationship with Shino.

Eventually, as harvest time nears, three bandit scouts appear, and Kikuchiyo involuntarily betrays the presence of the samurai in the village. The samurai decide to intercept the scouts. Two are killed by Kyūzō, and the third reveals the location of the bandit camp before the enraged villagers put him to death.

Three samurai go on a raiding party against the bandits’ stronghold, guided by Rikichi. They succeed in surprising and killing some bandits. As they torch the bandits’ huts, a woman emerges from one of them. She looks at Rikichi and then turns back into the inferno. She was Rikichi’s wife, kidnapped by the bandits. Rikichi tries to go after her but is stopped by Heihachi. Suddenly, a bandit’s musket shot fells Heihachi. The samurai retreat after this first loss of one of their own. Heihachi is buried in the village in a solemn ceremony.

Next, the bandits assault the village. Several are killed, but their three muskets pose a grave danger. Kyūzō slyly captures one musket from a bandit. This earns him the undying admiration of young Katsushirō, who tells Kyūzō, “You are . . . really great” (Kurosawa 146).

Kambei’s strategy is to let one or two bandits through a gap in the village’s fortification and then kill them there while the peasants close the gap. This works well during the next bandits’ assault.

Katsushirō continues to praise Kyūzō, saying, “He has the real samurai spirit” (Kurosawa 155). This riles Kikuchiyo, who tries to get a musket himself. Lacking discipline, he abandons his post to do so. He succeeds but is scolded by Kambei on his return: “Your going off like that merits no praise at all” (160). To save the situation at the post abandoned by Kikuchiyo, Kambei sends reinforcements there. In the melee, Gorōbei is shot and falls in battle. Wearily, the samurai prepare themselves for the final assault of the surviving bandits. Katsushirō has sex with Shino. In a scene cut from the original American release of Seven Samurai, there is a disturbance at night when Shino’s father, Manzo, discovers his daughter with Katsushirō. As Katsushirō looks on in shame, Manzo beats Shino.

The next morning, the surviving thirteen bandits attack. They are allowed into the village by Kambei according to his plan to finish them off there. This nearly succeeds in a fierce battle as one mounted bandit after another is felled and killed. However, the bandit chief (Shinpei Tagaki) escapes into a hut full of village women. He emerges to battle the samurai only to retreat again. From the hut, he shoots Kyūzō fatally in the back with his musket. Kikuchiyo attacks the hut and is mortally shot, but he manages to pursue the bandit chief by sheer force of will. With his last strength, Kikuchiyo kills the bandit chief with his sword before collapsing in his own death.

As the peasants bring in their harvest, they play musical instruments. As one of the three surviving samurai, Katsushirō spots Shino. However, she retreats from him, ending their relationship. A sad Kambei sums up the outcome of the battle, after which the film ends with a fade to black: “We’ve lost again. No, the farmers are the winners. Not us” (Kurosawa 186).

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