Darian J. Shump

[Continued from Part 2!]

As a final note, we have to acknowledge that neither Mugen nor Jin are unique in their subversion of chanbara tropes. Although they — and their battles — are ostensibly the focal points of the series, the two are surrounded by a rotating cast of characters whose actions and/or words continually highlight the complex nature of human morality.

In one episode, for example, random villagers and soldiers believe the giant, disfigured Oniwakamaru to be an ogre, yet he ultimately saves Fuu by crushing the neck of her captor and would-be assassin. On another occasion, we learn that the Kawara Yakuza is led by Heitaro the Buddha, a middle-aged man who refused to disband the group lest “the [local] youngsters” lose the only place they could call home. Later still, a young man named Shinsuke fences opium to buy medicine for his terminally ill mother; the Niwa Brothers appear to be little more than thugs, at least until they inform Jin that they want to graffiti Hiroshima Castle as vengeance for their father’s disgrace and suicide; and Sara, a blind goze who travels with the trio for some time, reveals herself to be a skilled assassin, but admits that she was forced to take her most recent contract in order to see her son.

Each of these cases serves to undermine the oversimplified moral narratives that characterize (Japanese) melodrama — and the melodramatic chanbara, by extension. The heroes are not always heroic, and the villains are not always villainous; rather, they exist somewhere in the middle by the end of the tale. At the same time, the series leaves us with only questions about the validity of “good” and “evil” because it never attempts to provide any answers to their moral dilemmas: Oniwakamaru and Sara allow Mugen to cut them down, Shinsuke dies at the hands of local guardsmen, and Heitaro takes his own life to save his son. None are given the opportunity to experience any real character development, and none are forced to face the long-term repercussions of their negative actions.

But this is intentional. All are merely brief encounters on a much longer journey to find the Sunflower Samurai. They are side characters, literally and figuratively, but their actions show that honor, courage, and benevolence are never limited to the samurai alone.

Historical characters undergo a similar type of treatment. Whereas the aforementioned criminals actively subvert audience expectations by showing that they are capable of goodness, the series takes extensive liberties with its portrayals of real-world figures to passively illustrate the limits of reality over fiction. Thus, an ukiyo-e artist named Hishikawa creates a print of Fuu that finds its way to Holland and inspires Vincent Van Gogh’s Sunflowers; Isaac Titsingh, Governor General of the Dutch East India Company (VOC), inadvertently falls in love with a male kabuki actor before revealing that it is “even better” because he is actually gay; and Jin is nursed back to health by a red-haired, gap-toothed, half-crazy hermit who claims to be the legendary Miyamoto Musashi.

All are meant to be read as lighthearted instances of artistic license because they seem so absurd. However, the world of Samurai Champloo is a world in which tradition and modernity are connected and good and evil exist within a single individual — in other words, it is a world not entirely unlike our own. The “fictional” idea of a red-haired Musashi is therefore implied to be hardly any more absurd than the “real” legends that surround his swordsmanship, and hardly any less difficult to verify. Here, then, the series undermines its roots in chanbara by problematizing the super-reality of melodrama. It reminds us that the idealized past, a past that supposedly produced legendary swordsmen, might have not been so ideal after all.

But aside from Mugen or Jin, no single secondary character better embodies the inverted expectations of history, reality, and morality than Heike Shige. As his name suggests, Shige claims descent from the Heike / Taira Clan of Heian Japan, one of the most prominent side branches of the early modern imperial line. Mugen, Jin, and Fuu encounter Shige in a crater-turned- excavation site, which he insists is home to the treasure of the Heike and the key to his goal of overthrowing the shogunate. He tells the trio that he and his workers have been searching for the treasure for five years, but Fuu soon discovers that the target of his ire is the Kamakura Shogunate — and not the Tokugawa. At the same time, she realizes that his workers seem to subsist on wasabi root alone, and appear to have the ability to recover from gruesome bodily harm.

She confronts Shige to inform him that he has been digging for five hundred years, but he refuses to listen; instead, he responds by resurrecting dozens of his deceased workers and threatening to add her to their numbers. Fuu is only saved when a weakened Jin reveals that the genealogical scroll Shige keeps with him is actually incomplete: There is a clear break between his own name and those of his Heike ancestors. When the zombies turn toward Shige, furious that they have wasted their (after)lives, he strums his biwa; turns his head toward the sky; exclaims, “Thank you for watching!”; and summons a meteor onto the dig site. The episode ends with a shot of Ogami Ittō and Daigorō (of Koike Kazuo’s Lone Wolf and Cub) observing the resulting mushroom cloud from afar.

Casual observers treat the tale of Shige as pseudo-filler, a deviation from the main plot that serves only to underscore Watanabe’s flippant attitude toward history (and passion for zombie flicks). For them, it is simply the “bizarre” zombie episode. The problem with these descriptions is that they necessarily fail to acknowledge the ways in which Shige mirrors both Mugen and Jin. His intentions are, after all, noble: He aims to restore the Heike to their former glory by overthrowing the “usurping” Kamakura. The plan itself is a romantic one, but it turns tragic as Shige loses track of time — and loses his own humanity — in the process. Meanwhile, this stoppage of time leads to a conflation of tradition and modernity that manifests through Shige’s own body. He is simultaneously young and old, alive and dead, a relic of the past unable to live within the present. And when he learns that he is not a true Heike, he breaks the fourth wall to address the audience directly. In that moment, the line between reality and fiction collapses, and the entire narrative falls apart as even the primary trio seems to be caught in the meteor’s path.

But Mugen, Jin, and Fuu all return in the next episode, the beginning of the series’ final arc. Shige and his zombies thus subvert our expectations of not only history, reality, and morality, but also the structure of a standard narrative. The conclusion is not a conclusion, despite its atomic implications, and the heroes live to journey onward another day. More importantly, Shige illustrates the extremes of a “fanatic” devotion to the past (Jin) and “criminal” life without thought in the present (Mugen). Neither is tenable in the end, but both are ultimately capable of mediating the other.

Concluding Thoughts

On a panel in February 2006, Watanabe Shinichirō gave a list of Samurai Champloo’s cinematic influences. Among them were Bruce Lee’s Enter the Dragon (1973), Don Siegel’s Dirty Harry (1971), and a Japanese character named Zatoichi, the focus of a television series (1974-1979) and more than two-dozen films (1962-1989, 2003). Unlike his chanbara predecessors, Zatoichi is blind, yet still capable of wielding two blades (or a blade and scabbard) simultaneously and to deadly effect. The character is also known in part for his checkered past, one for which he attempts to atone through his present actions. Even so, he remains a perpetual outsider, a wanderer incapable of fitting into society and consequently forced to survive on its literal and figurative borders.

Similar themes of inverted expectations, moral complexity, and liminality permeate the entirety of Samurai Champloo. As we have seen, neither Mugen nor Jin fit the stereotype of Ryukyuan criminal or noble samurai; rather, both characters subvert popular assumptions about their respective roles by embodying characteristics of their counterpart. Mugen thus exhibits an amorphous code of honor at least somewhat reminiscent of bushidō, while Jin struggles with the notion of loyalty and the need to subordinate himself to a lord. And in the process, they each come to embody and undermine a series of binaries — tradition and modernity, good and evil, Japanese and non-Japanese (Ryukyuan) — that are themselves derived from historical manifestations of chanbara and bushidō.

Additional Reading

[Note: As with other academic papers posted here, I’ve removed footnotes to ease the experience of reading in a web browser. This means that paraphrased or summarized material is not always explicitly attributed, particularly in the introductory “lit review” in Part 1. My writing is heavily indebted to each of the authors below, academic or otherwise, and I am always happy to provide additional citations from my original paper as necessary.]

“Episode 22 – Cosmic Collisions.” Amalgam: A Samurai Champloo Fansite. Accessed 24 April 2020.

“Shinichiro Watanabe at Detroit Film Theatre, Feb. 8th, 2006.” Amalgam: A Samurai Champloo Fansite. Accessed 24 April 2020.

“The Complete Guide to Anachronisms in Samurai Champloo – Cosmic Collisions.” Amalgam: A Samurai Champloo Fansite. Accessed 24 April 2020.

blautoothdmand. “Samurai Champloo: Anachronisms, counterculturalism, and going against the grain.” WordPress. Published 16 April 2016.

drealyn22. “Untitled Response to Anonymous Question.” Tumblr. Published 14 July 2017.

onereadleaf. “Samurai Champloo: Creative, Cynical History.” WordPress. Published 18 February 2013.

Benzon, William L. “Postmodern is Old Hat: Samurai Champloo.” Mechademia: Second Arc, Vol. 3 (2008): 271-274.

Bolton, Christopher. Interpreting Anime. Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press, 2018.

Coates, Jennifer. Making Icons: Repetition and the Female Image in Japanese Cinema 1945-1964. Hong Kong, PRC: Hong Kong University Press, 2016.

Davis, Darrell William. Picturing Japaneseness: Monumental Style, National Identity, Japanese Film. New York, NY: Columbia University Press, 1996.

DeHart, Jonathan. “Forbidden Ink: Japan’s Contentious Tattoo Heritage.” The Diplomat. Published 4 October 2016.

Figal, Gerald. Civilization and Monsters: Spirits of Modernity in Meiji Japan. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1999.

Harootunian, Harry. “‘Detour to the East’: Noel Burch and the Task of Japanese Film.” In Noël Burch, To the Distant Observer: Form and Meaning in the Japanese Cinema, ed. Annette Michelson. Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 1979.

Kearns, Angel. “Inked and Exiled: A History of Tattooing in Japan.” Bodylore. Accessed 15 April 2020.

Rabson, Steve. The Okinawa Diaspora in Japan: Crossing the Borders Within. Honolulu, HI: University of Hawai’i Press, 2012.

Park, Macy. “Anachronistic Anarchy: A Linguistic Character Analysis of Shinichiro Watanabe’s Samurai Champloo.” The Eagle Feather. Accessed 24 April 2020.

Siniawer, Eiko Maruko. Ruffians, Yakuza, Nationalists: The Violent Politics of Modern Japan,1860-1960. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2008.

Yoshimoto, Mitsuhiro. “Logic of Sentiment: The Postwar Japanese Cinema and Questions of Modernity.” Ph.D. Dissertation: University of California, San Diego, 1993. ProQuest ID: 9330404.

[Continued from Part 1!]

The following sections seek to combine these three discourses — of a transformative continuity between tradition and modernity, vernacular modernism in melodramatic chanbara, and rapid oscillation from identification to alienation — through a focus upon Mugen, Jin, and a conglomerate of secondary antagonists and side characters. In doing so, I intentionally position myself against popular interpretations of Samurai Champloo in the American context, many of which emphasize themes of difference and historical irreverence. For instance, Macy Park argues that Mugen, Jin, and Fuu are “undeniably different in their respective roles,” and “each represent an aspect of Watanabe’s ideal social champloo.” A blogger named onereadleaf admits that the series is a “dialogue with history,” but almost immediately afterward insists that it has a “sense of irreverence and an unwillingness to take itself seriously.” And William Benzon, author of one of the very few academic articles on the series, proposes that it “goes beyond subverting postmodern interventions into culture, identity, [and] antihegemonic subalterns” by “rendering such critical expostulation irrelevant.”

As I see it, all three authors, and the broader body of work that they represent, singularly fail to consider Samurai Champloo as a product of Japanese history, society, and even the mind of its creator, Shinichirō Watanabe. We will see below that difference is superficial, especially in the case of the relationship between Mugen and Jin, and that tradition and modernity are really not that far removed from one another. At the same time, I show that the series’ lighthearted approach to history is indicative of Watanabe’s own awareness of cinematic and moral expectations tied to chanbara film. Samurai Champloo is thus far from “irreverent,” not least because the term necessarily implies a lack of respect for its subject. Watanabe may intentionally subvert the norms of the melodramatic chanbara, but he never loses sight of the past and those to whom he is indebted.

Mugen: The Ryukyuan Criminal

Mugen is intentionally constructed as a rebellious antihero. He first appears in shackles alongside Jin, calmly awaiting his execution at the hands of a corrupt prefectural governor. When asked for his final words, he sneers and says that “if living means bowing down to the likes of you bastards, then I’ll die on my feet with my head held high.” He echoes this sentiment in a flashback to an earlier encounter with the governor’s son. The latter, a corrupt thug himself, refuses to believe that Mugen would defy him; as he puts it, the Warring States period (Sengoku jidai) is over and “folks swinging swords are anachronistic.” Mugen responds with a simple proclamation: “Your common sense doesn’t mean jack to me. I hail from the Ryukyu Islands.”

We see the implications of this attitude throughout the remainder of the series. Most obviously, Mugen looks the part of the freewheeling vagabond. His hair is unkempt, he sports a short goatee, wears simple blue earrings, and has blue bands tattooed around each of his wrists and ankles. Unlike Jin, he prefers a loose, unbelted happi-style jacket and shorts, as well as metal-soled geta that he employs in battle. Mugen also carries his sword, which itself has a curved blade and pronged tsuba, in a patterned sash around his right shoulder; as a last resort, he secrets a shorter tantō at the small of his back.

Mugen’s actions consistently reflect a similar lack of refinement and inclination toward immorality. Although the entire trio often finds itself perched on the brink of starvation, only Mugen allows his appetites to override any semblance of self-preservation or restraint. He eats crabs like apples, apparently swallowing the entire shell; consumes unknown mushrooms picked from a forest floor; steals food from the table of the Nagatomi Yakuza; and mugs members of another yakuza group for ferry money, only to spend it instead on an abundance of squid. And these appetites extend beyond food, as well. When Fuu falls asleep after drinking in the second episode, for example, Mugen, now responsible for carrying her in a wooden cart, implies that he is going to teach her a lesson and says, “I’m gonna rape you, you dumb broad.” He later bets the Sunflower Samurai “raped [her] and threw [her] away like garbage,” even as he forces himself upon — and is physically rebuffed by — women on several different occasions. The idea here is not just that Mugen is a criminal or criminally-minded, but rather that he possesses this proclivity toward excess and fails to understand the need to temper it in any situation. According to him, “I don’t know the meaning of the word [restraint].”

But nowhere is this more evident than in his approach and willingness to engage in armed combat. Whereas Jin’s swordsmanship is characterized by fluidity and grace, Mugen’s movements are erratic, unpredictable, and “inefficient.” His style is less reminiscent of any form of kenjutsu than of American breakdancing or Brazilian capoeira, not least because he habitually employs his feet as both offensive and defensive tools depending on the terrain and skill of his opponent. More importantly, though, he kills without hesitation. At various points in the series, we see Mugen cut down local retainers, members of multiple independent yakuza, Buddhist warrior priests, Shogunate soldiers, and at least three yojimbo or samurai who hesitated at the last moment or otherwise allowed themselves to die by his hand. Moreover, he actually fails to recognize three brothers he injured in a previous maritime raid, presumably because he has killed so many others in the interim, and tells the “Street Killer” Ukon / Shōryū that he is having “the time of [his] life” in the midst of their duel. Mugen clearly lives for the fight, the opportunity to prove himself against a worthy adversary. He is willing to admit the untenability of such a lifestyle, and questions whether each morning will be his last, but he never makes a sincere effort toward meaningful change. It seems that he simply cannot stop.

At this point, we can read Mugen through two separate socio-historical lenses. Since popular analyses of Samurai Champloo often highlight its loose interpretations of Japanese history and Tokugawa society, it is worth considering a similar type of treatment first. In order to do so, we would be forced to assume that Mugen is a reflection of a specific group in Edo Japan, and therefore beholden to the norms by which they abided at the time. A superficial reading might then emphasize certain parallels between his physical appearance and the style of the late-Tokugawa and early-Meiji shishi, or “men of spirit.” According to Eiko Siniawer, the shishi were violent, anti-shogunate political activists who hailed from domains like Satsuma, Chōshū, and Tosa. Their endeavors carried them to prominent cities across the country, but shishi active in the capital city of Edo were particularly recognizable as a result of their “long hair, unshaven faces and unwashed bodies, light and casual clothing, and bare feet in wooden clogs.” These contemporary descriptions are almost an exact match for Mugen, and are further reinforced by his apparent lust for physical violence; it was not uncommon for shishi to intimidate, assault, or assassinate their opposition. The only problem is that the character himself is apolitical. Despite the breadth of his moral shortcomings, he is steadfastly opposed to following orders and outright rejects any notion of life lived in service to others.

In keeping with this Tokugawa-oriented approach, we might alternately consider Mugen to be an embodiment of historical mainland stereotypes of Ryukyuan peoples. There is a slightly greater amount of textual support for doing so. After all, Mugen is meant to serve as a foil to Jin, the “noble samurai.” Everything about his character, ranging from his gluttonous eating habits to his frenetic movements in combat, exists in stark contrast to Jin’s refined nature and “proper” training. Mugen is the Other, an outlier from a place far beyond the confines of mainstream Japanese society as it appears in the series.

Ryukyuan islanders may have occupied a similar space in Tokugawa Japan. Indeed, contact between Japan and the Ryukyu Islands can be traced to the end of the Yamato period (250-710), at which point the court “sent envoys for the purpose of establishing relations” with the “Southern Islands (Nantō).” However, Japanese influence was relatively limited over the ensuing six or seven centuries, and the islands themselves maintained strong ties with Ming China from 1372. The shadow of Chinese culture consequently loomed large through the establishment of the Ryukyu Kingdom (1429-1879) and its subordination to Satsuma’s Shimazu after the Battle of Sekigahara; Chinese models of architecture, court ranks, rituals, land ownership, and even animal husbandry were not uncommon throughout the island chain. Meanwhile, a Satsuma-led “de-Japanization” policy intended to appease the Ming — and ensure a continued source of trade — might have subsequently contributed to “preconceptions on the mainland of Okinawans” as “inferior,” “strange,” “exotic,” and/or “Chinese.”

The issue here is that discriminatory attitudes were not limited to the Tokugawa period. Mainland prejudices against Ryukyuan / Okinawan individuals still mirror historical perceptions even today, but are arguably more widespread due to the increased frequency of travel between the regions and widespread nature of visual media. They also reflect the added weight of history, including the economic impact of the American occupation upon the island of Okinawa itself. In fact, it is not uncommon for Okinawans in Japan to experience discrimination in the housing or labor markets linked to lingering assumptions about their poverty and criminality. And while a post-1972 “Okinawa boom” is commonly touted as a step forward, it has only served to commodify, fetishize, and thereby reinforce the other-ness of Okinawan culture.

Recent issues like these comprise the foundation of our second analytical lens, which insists upon viewing Mugen as a product of contemporary Japanese society whose story just happens to be set in the not-so-distant past. By adopting this approach, we retain a greater ability to account for the active role of authorial intent, as well as the passive influence of thematic subcurrents of life in late-1990s / early-2000s Japan. The former is undoubtedly most important for our purposes because Watanabe intentionally links Mugen with a minority identity through a disconnected series of visual and aural sequences. On both occasions when he is near death, for example, Mugen has visions of being surrounded by shadowy figures in “robes” of leaves; in one case, they appears as graphite-style sketches on a white background. The figures are never identified in the series, but fan theories suggest that they might represent the Paantu, a group of supernatural beings celebrated on Miyako Island. This would make some sense, especially considering the fact that it is also on one of these occasions that we hear “Obokuri-Eeumi,” a song by Asazaki Ikue of the Amami Islands in Kagoshima Prefecture. A similar musical shift takes place when Mugen encounters the Ainu Okuru playing Andō Umeko’s “Pekambe Uk” on the tonkori. He inquires of the song’s origin and expresses his surprise: “We’re from places nowhere near one another, but I’ve heard similar music.”

Despite his apparent reliance on ethnic stereotypes and clear effort to link Mugen with traditional elements of Ryukyuan / Okinawan culture, Watanabe never actually engages in processes of discrimination or fetishization himself. In fact, he has previously described his inclusion of racial and social minorities in both Samurai Champloo and Cowboy Bebop as part of a conscious effort to ensure they are represented accurately. It is therefore unlikely that he intended for audiences to read Mugen as little more than a “backward Ryukyuan criminal.” Instead, Watanabe evokes this stereotype with a stock set of images (e.g., casual clothing, a crude nature, and an inclination toward violence) in order to actively deconstruct it through further characterization.

Mugen, after all, remains with Fuu and Jin for a reason. He tells the pirate Mukuro that “they ain’t [his] friends” and he just “promised [he’d] protect them,” but even a willingness to abide by such a simple promise is admirable for a so-called criminal. There is something inside of him akin to a code of honor, albeit in an amorphous (and perhaps inconsistent) form. It is for this reason that he refrains from killing Koza, a friend from his youth, after she betrays him: Mugen knows the struggles that she faced on their home island and empathizes with her decisions. The same holds true for the conclusion of his duel with Jin. After their swords break, Mugen says, “I don’t feel like killin’ you at all.” If he were a “true” criminal, or nearly as detached as he pretends to be, he could have easily found a way to continue the fight. But he instead chooses to prioritize his respect for — and friendships with — both Jin and Fuu in the end.

Jin: The Noble Warrior

As noted briefly above, Jin initially appears to differ from Mugen in nearly every imaginable way. If Mugen is callous, reckless, and unrefined, Jin is considerate, prudent, and cultured. His fighting style is graceful and minimalistic, characterized by a finely-tuned economy of motion, and he regularly carries himself with a disarming poise that belies his confidence and strength of will. At the same time, he is a man of few words; Fuu criticizes Jin for “speaking” in non-verbal utterances (e.g., “Hmm,” “Mmm”) during their capture, and admits that she knows little about him at the end of their journey. Jin’s actions, and the words of those around him, ultimately serve to tell us more about his character than any measure of emotional openness on his part.

Of course, each of these characteristics is to be expected. Jin is meant to embody the cinematic stereotype of the noble samurai, which is itself derived from conceptions of bushidō that emerged around the time of the Meiji Restoration. Such conceptions are fairly diverse, and typically oriented toward the unique social concerns of their respective creators, but one in particular provides a clear glimpse into his nature. According to Nitobe Inazō, author of Bushido: The Soul of Japan, bushidō is “the code of moral principles which the knights [of Japan, the samurai] were required or instructed to observe.” These principles encompass a wide range of personal qualities, all of which are inextricably linked and many of which have since filtered into the popular consciousnesses of both the United States and Japan. Thus, Nitobe says that a true knight-samurai is loyal to their sovereign and country, courageous and calm in the face of danger, morally upright, benevolent, polite, truthful, and honorable. They should be appropriately educated in the various military arts, but still have enough practical (i.e., nonmilitary) knowledge to reinforce their sense of self-awareness. And, lastly, they must disdain “the art[s] of making or hoarding” money.

[Nitobe’s Bushido was not particularly well received after its initial publication in Japan in 1900. However, it rapidly gained traction amongst English-speaking populations and experienced a surge in popularity in Japan in the second half of the twentieth century. I have consequently chosen to rely on Nitobe because I feel it more closely reflects the popular perception of bushidō around the time of Samurai Champloo’s production.]

Jin possesses each of these qualities to a certain degree, but none guide his actions more than loyalty and honor. In one of his first lines in the series, he condemns the corrupt governor’s retainers for their choice of lord: “To serve your lord and do his bidding. Is that honor? Even if that lord is a piece-of-shit nobody?” He poses a similar question to Kariya Kagetoki in their final duel, expressing his astonishment at the fact that “a man as skilled as [him would] stoop to being the Shogunate’s dog.” Both lines suggest that the decision to grant one loyalty is necessarily contingent upon the capability of a given swordsman; a “true” samurai must refrain from serving an inferior lord, lest they sacrifice their own honor in the process. As a result, honor itself becomes something that must be retained at all costs. Jin repeatedly refuses to part with his swords because he deems them “the embodiment of a warrior’s soul,” a tangible source of pride for a samurai. He also elevates his rivalry with Mugen, and their promise to finish their duel at the end of the journey, to a near-sacred status. When he believes that the pirate Mukuro killed Mugen, Jin tells him that “I was supposed to be the one who killed him” — and then cuts Mukuro down in turn. The obvious implication here is that Mukuro deprived Jin of the ability to fulfill his own obligation, and thereby put his honor as a warrior at risk. The only way he could hope to rectify this wrong was by slaying the transgressor.

However, Jin is not the perfect samurai. He places such a strong emphasis upon loyalty and honor that he spends much of his life alone, bereft of a lord and anything akin to real friendship. Nobody is worthy enough to warrant his loyalty, and every other path in life is less than honorable for a man of his skill. He is consequently stuck, a ronīn without a way out. In fact, Jin refuses to pawn his swords for food — despite knowing that the trio is perpetually penniless and starving — on at least two separate occasions, but then decries the alternative of using them in a street performance for coin. Meanwhile, he seems to struggle with the very notion of life in service to another person. A flashback to his encounter with the swordsman-monk Zuikou reveals the extent of his uncertainty: “Man is naturally born into a state of freedom. He is not born so that he might submit to rules or a master. But does this not contradict the duties of a warrior?” This line of thinking might even explain Jin’s relationships with his former sensei, Mariya Enshiro, and Fuu, the only two individuals to whom he ever seems remotely beholden. He believes in loyalty, but not enough to stop him from killing Mariya and repeatedly leaving Fuu or allowing her to be kidnapped and insulted.

The end result is a complex figure. Jin is neither the idealized samurai of the American consciousness nor a complete embodiment of Japanese bushidō à la Nitobe. His conception of loyalty is not uniform, but his effort to understand it is sincere. He looks toward the past and martial tradition for guidance, but wears modern glasses “for show.” And he believes in sacrificing himself for the “greater good” of Fuu’s mission, but fails to do so properly. In these ways, Jin subtly exhibits the same qualities of imperfection and superficiality that supposedly make Mugen a “criminal Other.” It is therefore not surprising that he readily admits “[he’s] no saint” at the start of their journey — and that in the final episode, we see this made manifest. As Jin returns to confront Kariya one last time, the camera tilts upward over his body: He has lost his glasses; the right half of his haori hangs loose, revealing his chest; and his long hair is undone, blowing in the wind. Like Mugen, he looks “wild.” Moreover, although the subsequent duel initially proceeds with a rapid and highly choreographed series of sword strokes reminiscent of traditional chanbara, it takes a surprising, “last resort” technique — the use of his daishō — for him to win. It is in his final battle of the series, then, that Jin chooses to fight “wild,” as well.

[Continue to Part 3!]

[Retrospective: I recently rediscovered this paper from my last semester in FSU’s Religion Department. At the time, I was enrolled in a course titled “Samurai Ethics,” which emphasized the deliberate modern construction of a singular ideological system that came to be known as “bushidō.” I was never able to do anything with this one, but it turns out I don’t hate the argument as much now as I did when I first wrote it.]

[Note: Part 1 focuses entirely on my methodological approach and it’s a bit dense for my liking now. If you’re into Japanese cinema or history, you may want to check it out. If you’d prefer to get into the anime, skip ahead to Part 2. A full list of sources will be included at the end of Part 3.]

Released in May 2004, Watanabe Shinichirō’s Samurai Champloo tells the story of three unlikely traveling companions — Fuu, Mugen, and Jin — and their journey across Japan in search of the Samurai Who Smells of Sunflowers. The twenty-six episode anime series gained popularity amongst American audiences for its novel combination of medieval Japanese and hip-hop cultures, not least because the latter plays a prominent role in its soundtrack, character design, and narrative trajectory. Subsequent analyses of the work, most of which remain confined to the realm of popular discourse, tend to focus on the apparent incongruity of these two thematic elements through a series of simple oppositional binaries: East versus West, Japanese versus Okinawan, and traditional versus modern. As a result, though, the series’ message has often been reduced to one of discontinuity and irreverence. Jin and Mugen, samurai and criminal, come to represent two opposing worlds, neither of which prove capable of meeting in any meaningful way.

In this paper, I push back against these interpretations and argue that the series subverts conventions of the melodramatic chanbara (チャンバラ, samurai films) by inverting expectations of history, morality, and reality through its depictions of its primary and secondary characters. The series is thus concerned more with similarity than difference, a fact that stems from Watanabe’s unique response to “samurai films” and bushidō ideology as a Japanese director embedded within a Japanese context. I consequently begin by nesting my argument among three discourses pertaining to history and film in Japan, including the link between tradition and modernity, the role of melodrama as a form of vernacular modernism, and the oscillation between reality and fiction in anime. Then, I turn toward Mugen, Jin, and a loose grouping of secondary characters and antagonists — and in each case show that the simplicity of the characters’ superficial appearances and actions is ultimately undermined by a deliberate illustration of their shared moral complexity and embodiment of both past and present.

Tradition versus Modernity

My methodological approach is guided by three interrelated discourses. The first is concerned solely with perceptions of the Japanese transition to modernity, including the ways in which “traditional” culture influenced the composition of both classical and postwar cinema. While it does not explicitly address the film industry, Gerald Figal’s Civilization and Monsters provides an interpretation of the traditional-modern divide that is rather useful in this regard. He argues that the construction of the “fantastic” (fushigi) in Meiji Japan represents a deliberate attempt to “rule by ‘modern reason’ [that recast] past ‘reason’ as well as past and present ‘imagination’ as folly.” One of the “principal [tasks] of Meiji ideology” was thus to “fashion from disparate beliefs in spirits a modern and unified Japanese Spirit,” a project that effectively rooted the present in the past. As a result, Figal presents the relationship between tradition and modernity as neither a harsh break nor a continuously straight line, but rather a weaving path characterized by deliberate transformation along the way. When elements of tradition survive the process, they emerge forever altered in order to meet the needs of an evolving society.

Similar arguments about the “survival of tradition” permeate scholarship on early Japanese cinematic history. In his introduction to Noël Burch’s To the Distant Observer, for example, Harry Harootunian describes the volume as a reminder of “the ceaseless process of interaction between past and present where[in] the latter is constantly called upon to conjure the former.” According to him, Burch skillfully showed that “older cultural practices and artistic forms [often] had to be radicalized to make Japan’s modernity something more than simple imitation.” It was for this reason that elements of theatrical forms like kabuki and bunraku inevitably found themselves “pressed into the service of film’s early formation” in any of a number of ways, not the least of which was the survival of live narrators (benshi).

Jennifer Coates sees the roles of postwar-era actresses as functioning in much the same way. Stars like Hara Setsuko (1920-2015) and Tanaka Kinuyo (1909-1977) began their careers prior to the outbreak of the Second Sino-Japanese War, and therefore came to prominence as the conflict reached its peak. During the American occupation, major film studios sought to “maintain an element of consistency” by building on this “extant popular appeal,” even as they simultaneously repackaged the actresses’ personae to fit postwar society. The end result was a cinematic culture that provided reassurance and “a sense of connection to the past” to audiences struggling to cope with devastating personal and national loss. Familiar faces onscreen served as tangible reminders that some things still remained the same.

By comparison, Darrell William Davis’ discussion of the “monumental style” of Japanese film builds more directly upon Burch’s earlier work. In Picturing Japaneseness, he defines the style as “a prewar cinema permeated by a hieratic, sacramental appropriation of a classical heritage in order to promote an apotheosis of Japanese national identity.” In other words, the monumental style consists of those movies that actively employ (or deploy) pre-Meiji culture to construct and elevate a singular myth of Japan and its people. This “mythologization” is accomplished through the concurrent presence of myriad factors, ranging from the incorporation of certain cinematic techniques (e.g., long takes, moving cameras, etc.) to a concern with sociocultural themes (e.g., bushidō). Perhaps more importantly, Davis also acknowledges that monumental films influenced the composition of postwar cinema; Kurosawa Akira’s Ran deliberately “unravels the indigenous associations of monumental style itself.” Even in the case of comparatively recent films, then, it is possible to trace an unbroken — but hardly unaltered — line from the memory of historical foci to the manifestation of contemporary concerns.

This notion of a “transformative continuity” applies to not only the fictional world of Samurai Champloo, but also my own attempt to situate it within the real world of Japanese cinema. Within the series, modernity and tradition prove to be fluid concepts. A cursory glance suggests that they manifest and clash most frequently through the appearances and actions of characters like Mugen (i.e., the modern) and Jin (i.e., the traditional). However, as we will see below, the dichotomy is a false one, and both characters actually embody at least some of the characteristics of their respective counterpart. A related measure of temporal fluidity guides the
construction of the series, as a whole. That is to say, Samurai Champloo may be a modern cultural production, but it is a modern cultural production rooted in earlier cinematic and theatrical traditions. Elements of its story, character design, and visual style all exist along a continuum that stretches back through postwar and prewar film to nō, kabuki, and bunraku plays, as well as other ideological concepts (e.g., bushidō) that coalesced around the time of the Meiji Restoration. None reflect contemporary societal concerns in exactly the same way, but all have nevertheless had some impact upon the series’ final form. The end result is a narrative that actively engages with the past in form, despite occasionally rejecting it in content.

Chanbara versus Melodrama

With this in mind, my argument draws from a second related discourse surrounding manifestations of genre in the Japanese context. Although Samurai Champloo is popularly described as a chanbara-style anime in the West, the overwhelming focus upon its setting, combat scenes, and the “samurai-ness” — or apparent lack thereof — of its main characters has largely led to the neglect of other potential cinematic influences. It is therefore worth considering the series as more than just a modern chanbara variant because of a handful of superficial similarities; instead, we would do well to question the historical and cultural circumstances surrounding the construction of both genre and the genre in Japan, as well as the broader implications of its exportation to the United States (and beyond).

Catherine Russell’s reconceptualization of the studio era of Japanese cinema provides a solid foundation for this analytical turn. Drawing on the works of Miriam Hansen and Christine Gledhill, Russell proposes that films of the studio era can be treated as a “parallel form of classicism” through a theoretical framework rooted in the concepts of vernacular modernism and melodrama. The former, she notes, “incorporates the various cultural practices by which the experience of modernity has been articulated and modified,” and thereby situates cinema “alongside the ‘everyday’ discourses and practices that it also mediates.” Put differently, a framework of vernacular modernism insists that films cannot be separated from a given sociohistorical context because they necessarily reflect (and reflect back upon) the institutions that gave rise to them in the first place. Japanese studio-era productions in particular represent the “changing structures of Japanese society” that came about as a result of its response to modernity — and do so through their reliance upon a stock set of visual and thematic principles.

Meanwhile, melodrama, which Russell sees as a supplement to vernacular modernism, serves to undermine the very notion of modernity itself. Here she draws from the extensive work of Yoshimoto Mitsuhiro, so it is worth considering his own understanding of the term at some length. According to Yoshimoto, the notion of melodrama is a somewhat vague one, and its characteristics often seemingly contradictory. The term can be applied to both a “generic mode” rooted in socio-economic tragedy or a specific narrative form associated with the romantic opposition of good and evil. Its content appears realistic at first glance, partly because it intentionally “manipulates [an] audience’s emotion by presenting the tension between the possibility and impossibility of the final gratification.” At the same time, though, it exists “beyond [the] reality of daily life.” Meaning is found not in the superficiality of verbal discourse between characters, but rather through the “mood and atmosphere evoked by the mute [bodies of characters] and the environment” that surrounds them. The aforementioned moral conflicts are embodied more than they are articulated, and characters undergo a process of psychological flattening that precludes the existence of any rational complexity in terms of motivation; most are merely pulled forward by “transcendent forces” as “events inexorably unfold themselves” over time.

Using these contradictions as a starting point, Yoshimoto outlines a tripartite classification system for melodramas in Japan. He lists the three primary types (and their respective subtypes) as follows:

1. Conflict between Individual Desire and Social Constraints
   a. Giri vs. Ninjo
   b. Tragic Love Story: Typically Illicit Love
2. Dilemma of Social Mobility
3. Power of the Inevitable
   a. Incurable Disease
   b. Inability to Keep Up with Historical Changes / Current of the Times
   c. Helpless Victim and Powerful Villain

Yoshimoto emphasizes that this system can be interpreted either structurally (i.e., as a means of categorizing plot) or historically (i.e., as a chronological trajectory) depending on the film or films at hand. In the case of the former, the three types prove capable of “[accommodating] almost any Japanese film melodrama.” In the case of the latter, they correspond to specific themes of melodrama that emerged in Japan in the mid seventeenth, late-nineteenth, and mid-twentieth centuries, respectively. Both approaches are also inextricably linked with the other, at least to the extent that each of the three types represents a unique socio-political response to a broader concern with modernity. A structuralist application is thus never simply structural, just as a historical application is never simply historical.

My analysis builds upon these concepts by treating Samurai Champloo as a reflection of vernacular modernism in melodramatic form. Its loose interpretation of the traditional-modern divide is indicative of Watanabe Shinichirō’s response to the world around him, but it is a world centered largely upon Japan and the Japanese situation at the end of the twentieth century. As a result, we can only hope to interpret the piece — and understand its intended purpose — by considering its form and content as products of Japanese history and culture. Labels like chanbara are useful and necessary, but only if we recognize that the idea of chanbara has come to mean something different in the American context. The so-called “samurai film” is, after all, comprised of more than just a series of choreographed duels between gruff-yet-honorable warriors. Postwar chanbara (and jidai-geki, as a whole) were highly melodramatic, including even the innovative productions of Kurosawa Akira himself; much the same holds true for the early-modern theatrical performances by which they were inspired. And by ignoring or failing to consider the implications of such factors, we risk not only overriding authorial intent, but also reducing Japanese society to the image or few images that we ourselves have constructed.

Reading Anime

The third and final discourse connects the preceding discussions of Japanese history and film by dealing directly with the medium at hand: anime. The academic study of anime is a relatively nascent field, and its general viability a source of debate, but I have chosen below to accept its existence and cultural import as matters of course. Meanwhile, my definition of anime and understanding of its characteristics are heavily influenced by the work of Christopher Bolton. In his Interpreting Anime, he adopts a rather loose approach to the former, defining it simply as any “Japanese animation based on a drawn image.” These visual productions, he says, differ from other media (e.g., theatre, art, manga) because they possess a unique “ability to move the viewer very rapidly back and forth between […] two poles of immersion and distance.” Anime consequently allows for some form of “resonance” between the viewer’s world and its own, despite regularly interrupting this immersion through its use of “self-conscious textual devices that call attention to the form of the text itself.” The end result is an ongoing oscillation between “identification” and “alienation” that may or may not be resolved over the course of the narrative.

Now, I must admit that I do disagree with certain elements of Bolton’s argument. Undoubtedly the most problematic of these is his insistence that anime is somehow “unusual” or “unique” in comparison to other media. While different media will inevitably reflect different socio-cultural issues in different ways, I find it difficult to believe that anime, as a whole, can ever be entirely separated from manga, its printed counterpart. The same holds true for his attempts to split feature-length anime films from televised anime series, which Bolton says “often fails to generate the [same] kind of oscillation.” Both arguments ultimately serve to undermine the breadth of his earlier definition of anime, and thereby overlook the potential for connections between disparate forms of narrative media.

[Retrospective: Reading the first half of this paragraph roughly four years later is strange because now I agree with Bolton. My current research relies almost entirely on the fact that anime and games do bring something different to the playing field in terms of representation and embodiment.]

We must also acknowledge that the rapid oscillation between identification and alienation, or reality and fiction, actually mirrors our earlier discussion of melodrama. On the one hand, such a parallel further problematizes the narrative of anime as a particularly “unique” medium. On the other, it further reinforces the way in which we read Samurai Champloo as a particular manifestation of the animated medium. The series’ sustained reliance upon simple binaries is indeed indicative of its position as a melodramatic, chanbara-influenced anime, but it does not mean that it accepts this role blindly. Watanabe instead uses these apparent contradictions to undermine the existence of the categories themselves. Tradition and modernity, giri and ninjo, good and evil, and even fiction and reality all fall apart because he shows that the distinctions within each pairing are little more than artificial constructions. In this way, Samurai Champloo functions as a tale of internal similarity despite external difference, and thereby inverts popular expectations of both content and form at every turn.

[Continue to Part 2!]