The Last Samurai :: essays research papers

The Last Samurai-Scene 11 - 17The scene started off with a man by the wee of Capt. Nathan Algren (Tom Cruise) laying on a floor wearing dirty garments and holler out the name of a man that he had just killed for state of ward his capture. The police chief was captured during a fight between the Americans and the Japanese, but instead of cleaning the American, the Samurai leader Katsumoto (Ken Wantanobe) wanted him alive so that he could learn from his confrontations trends. The Captain was staying in Katsumotos ex brother-in-laws shack with the instantaneously widowed newfangled lady and her children. The lady was very un-accepting of the war hero at first, because he was the man who killed her husband, but as the horizontal surface grew, she, along with the rest of her Buddhist tribe grew to like the American. As the American got stronger and was given more rights by their tribe, he started to learn the art of Japanese language and symbolism. While he was learning the se mantics of another culture, I detect that he had completely forgotten his counsels as an American pass and instead, took on the way of the Samurai. As the ways of the Samurai embodied him, he grew emotionally and spiritually enough to the point of complete change of being. He was now willing to fight for the Samurais, and although they did not have all the weapons that the Americans possessed, they did have lots more structure of discipline and self control. The clip ends with the American apologizing to the young lady for the slaying of her husband. She accepts, and then tells him in Japanese that they ware from each one doing their duty, and that it was only karma that took her husband. I would have to say that it was the semantics of this Japanese culture that he was learning that intrigued me the most about this film. That is why I chose to tie in the concept of semantics with this movie clip, because its definition is very culturally-bound in a way that combines the study o f words and meaning with the ways of the Japanese.Semantics ties into this scene from its beginning when the Captain first gets a glance of how these natives speak, all the way though to the ways that they write and prepare for war. The Japanese had a very different way of structuring words than the American had ever seen, but as he started to cod part in their teachings, the Captain started to be able to write and yet speak in their native language.