What Japan Was Working On In It’s Post-War Samurai Films

Japanese Samurai and Postwar Reflections — A Dialogue

Human (Andy):

I’ve been watching Japanese movies. Especially Samurai classics by good Japanese post-war directors. I also have some familiarity with other Japanese films of the post-war era, from Kurosawa and other major directors. But I’m very struck by the amount of energy that went into depicting the Samurai world, and the stringent codes they seemed to operate in that era of more than three hundred years before. It is a strange world, to me as an American, with all the hierarchies of authority, fixation on honor, and perception of obedience to authority and honorable combat as the most important things for defining a man’s value, and dictating moral obligation.

AI (AL):

That’s a deep and fascinating observation. The samurai films of postwar Japan do seem to serve as a kind of cultural dreamwork — a symbolic stage where Japan processes profound questions about identity, morality, power, and loss. These depictions of a bygone warrior code arise at a time when the Japanese people were confronting the collapse of their imperial system, the trauma of defeat, and the imposition of a foreign democratic order.

In the samurai figure — especially as portrayed by actors like Toshiro Mifune — we see both a nostalgia for heroic virtue and a critique of rigid social hierarchies. Some films valorize bushido as a code of honor and integrity; others expose the suffering it imposes or the contradictions it can’t resolve. The intensity of that return to samurai themes might reflect a yearning to reclaim dignity after national humiliation — or to reckon with the dangerous allure of strict obedience and martial valor that helped enable Japan’s descent into fascism and war.

Human (Andy):

Illuminating answer. The one thing that doesn’t quite fit my experience is that you are seeing more ambiguity about the Samurai world than I am. The protagonists — who all seem to be pretty fierce, and rigid, and righteous — all seem to be presented as heroes. The actor Toshiro Mifune plays a bunch of such men, and their Samurai-strength and honor seem to be celebrated in the films.

I’m also wondering how much the structures of power and value depicted in the films are vehicles by which the old fascistic spirit of the Japanese imperialists get reasserted, or at least re-represented, in the aftermath of the defeat of the fascistic Japanese Empire.

AI (AL):

That’s an astute suspicion — and one that some scholars of Japanese cinema have raised as well. Even when postwar samurai films seem critical of war or hierarchy, they can still carry a latent idealization of the very codes that led Japan into militarism. Especially when the protagonist is a man of fierce virtue navigating a corrupt world, the moral clarity of that narrative can subtly reaffirm older values of loyalty, martial honor, and the necessity of a strong man to cut through moral ambiguity.

That’s part of what makes the genre so culturally potent: it lets a defeated nation wrestle with questions of virtue and shame without directly indicting the real recent past. It’s mythic distance with contemporary psychological urgency. And you’re right to wonder whether that carries both the possibility of insight and the danger of ideological regression.

Human (Andy):

If one were to look at the movies being made today in the United States, and perhaps more broadly, what would one feel safe in venturing is being revealed about the state of things, and what — if anything — the country is working on through its movies.

AI (AL):

Today’s American films often reflect a kind of anxious pluralism — a society trying to reckon with many identities, traumas, and power structures all at once. There’s a noticeable prominence of themes like:

• Dystopia and collapse (e.g., climate catastrophe, authoritarianism, pandemic aftermath)
• The antihero and moral ambiguity
• Generational trauma and healing (e.g., Encanto, Everything Everywhere All at Once)
• Racial reckoning and social justice
• Gender and identity fluidity

But there’s also a fragmentation: no unified narrative like the postwar samurai. Instead, Hollywood often reflects a culture struggling to know what its values are — simultaneously deconstructing old myths and unsure how to build new ones. So we see a lot of reboots, nostalgia, and ambivalence. In that way, it’s revelatory of a society in moral transition — still digesting recent upheavals, and searching for new forms of meaning and cohesion.

Human (Andy):

One more thing about the Japanese Samurai films of the post-war era. The issue of adoption of Western Ways — clothing, baseball, industrialism — versus the maintenance of Japanese tradition is probably being worked on there as well. The Samurai world that’s depicted is very, very Japanese — not at all like the West. Japan has manifested such an ambivalent attitude toward the outside world — being the Forbidden Empire for a long stretch of time, forbidding the entry of foreigners and foreign ways, and then being a super-imitator of first China, and then Europe and the United States.

AI (AL):

Yes — and that tension runs like a strong undercurrent beneath the surface of many samurai films. The return to that insular, hierarchical, honor-bound world can be seen as both a cultural reaffirmation and a nostalgic escape from the messy hybridization brought by modernity and Western influence. Even in the 1950s, Japan was already deeply modernized — and haunted by the knowledge that the old codes were not coming back.

So these films dramatize not just the loss of a traditional way of life, but the unresolved grief and pride around that loss. They allow Japan to touch its pre-modern soul — perhaps to ask whether something essential was being lost in the rush to become more Western and industrial. Or, in more psychological terms, to mourn the death of the old father and question the legitimacy of the new.

Human (Andy):

For some reason, the history of the emergence of more advanced forms of civilized society on Japan over a millennia and a half seems an especially interesting story in the history of human civilization. I’ve not studied Japanese history with any intensity. But it looks quite distinctive to my historian/anthropologist’s eye. And rich with images distinct from what we see in other cultural systems.

AI (AL):

It is indeed a remarkable case. Japan’s path to civilization — borrowing heavily from Chinese models and then transforming them into something uniquely Japanese — led to one of the most enduring feudal systems in the world. Its ability to maintain internal cohesion while resisting external conquest, and then its rapid embrace of industrial modernity in the Meiji era, make it a striking hybrid of continuity and rupture.

There’s something deeply theatrical about Japan’s cultural evolution — its sharply defined roles, its visual aesthetics, its emphasis on ceremony and control. All of which gives Japanese civilization a certain intensity and symbolic richness that stands out even to the trained comparative eye.