SecondWindGroup
patreon
[COLUMN] Blue Eye Samurai Is a Child of Two Worlds | by Darren Mooney
🕑 Added 2023-12-04 15:44:05 +0000 UTC
NOTE: This piece contains spoilers for Blue Eye Samurai, now streaming on Netflix. Go watch it. It’s gorgeous. The piece will still be here when you get back.
Blue Eye Samurai, Netflix’s recent animated series from Amber Noizumi and Michael Green, is an interesting study in cross-cultural pollination.
This is reflected in the production. Noizumi and Green are a husband-and-wife team working in Hollywood. Blue Eye Samurai is an American production with a largely Asian-American cast beautifully animated by a French-Canadian company. It is not only indebted to Japanese samurai movies, but to the wave of American pop culture inspired by those films. Kill Bill is cited as a major influence by Noizumi. The premiere even features a montage set to Tomoyasu Hotei's Battle Without Honor Or Humanity.
However, this cultural overlap is also written into the show itself. The show derives its title from its lead character, Mizu (Maya Erskine). Mizu is a young warrior, the child of a Japanese mother and European father. Blue Eyed Samurai unfolds against the backdrop of the Edo period, when Japan had closed its borders to the West. Mizu has identified the four white men in Japan at the time of her conception. She dedicates herself to hunting them down and killing them.
Mizu’s blue eyes mark her as different from other Japanese people, and she is frequently dehumanized – identified as “it” or “that.” Mizu is introduced confronting Hachiman (West Liang), who reacts with horror to her mixed-race heritage. “The samurai, he's not human,” the flesh-trader gasps. “I saw its eyes.” In the third episode, a flashback to her first moments of life finds two soldiers discussing what to do with this newborn baby. “It’s a half-breed,” one states. “It’s hardly human.”
Mizu’s background is a source of shame to her in a culture that values purity. Blue Eye Samurai is a show about characters trying to navigate a world that imposes rigid boundaries between insiders and outsiders. Mizu’s heritage is not the only source of conflict. She presents as male to the outside world, because that is the only way to accomplish what she sets out to do. Indeed, there is a sense in which Mizu’s gender is treated as a twist, revealed as the cliffhanger to the first episode.
Mizu is not the only character facing this struggle. Princess Akemi (Brenda Song) resists her father’s (Patrick Gallagher) attempts to marry her off. She seeks freedom in a different way than Mizu. “Fight within your confines, not against them,” urges Seki (George Takei), Akemi’s tutor. He warns her there are “a fixed number of paths” for women to follow, literalized through the show’s repeated emphasis on “the 12 and 20 positions”, sexual positions wives are expected to master to please their husbands.
Throughout Blue Eye Samurai, characters try to navigate a world that restricts their options and their choices. Ringo (Masi Oka), an enthusiastic noodle chef with no hands who serves as Mizu’s apprentice, talks about the challenges of trying to pursue greatness. He recalls reading a prayer box that told him “there are four paths through the world. The way of the farmer, the artisan, the merchant, and the warrior.” This seems like a very narrow way of looking at things.
Blue Eye Samurai is a personal project for Noizumi and Green. The title derives from Green’s nickname for their daughter. The story reflects Noizumi’s experiences as a Japanese-American, “feeling like an outsider at home for not being seen as white, and then going to Japan and feeling like an outsider and being seen as not Japanese enough.” Chinese-American director Jane Wu could relate to that, “So here, I'm the Chinese girl. And when I go back home, I’m the American girl.”
Blue Eye Samurai is a show about what it is to be both Asian and American. Although the series is set in feudal Japan, it resonates outside that specific context. In the past few years, America has become increasingly isolationist and closed off from the rest of the world, like Edo-period Japan. More than that, racism directed at Asian Americans has increased dramatically in the past few years. The show’s setting feels like a way to engage with these anxieties through metaphor.
As Noizumi explains – and it’s worth noting that “Mizu” is an anagram of the final four letters of her surname – the show derived from “feeling stuck between two worlds.” As she put it, “What if we put those feelings into a world in Japan, where the borders were closed, where it was so homogenous, and that era is still heralded as the golden age of Japan? The golden age, where nobody was allowed in who looked different, and what that must have felt like. Just, let's make a good story out of that.”
Blue Eye Samurai is a wonderful expression of the ways in which Japanese and American pop culture exist in conversation, intertwined and engaged. “We said that this was an ‘East meets West’ and there were a lot of things inspired by actual western movies, Clint Eastwood-type things that we wanted to bring that energy to Mizu,” Noizumi explains. That influence is reflexive. It extrapolates western iconography into a samurai setting, which was itself derived from samurai films.
Clint Eastwood’s big break as a movie star was in A Fistful of Dollars, a spaghetti western that was one of several American remakes of Akira Kurosawa’s samurai epic Yojimbo. Of course, Yojimbo was itself heavily influenced by Kurasawa’s affection for the westerns made by John Ford and was adapted from Dashiel Hammet’s Red Harvest. Kurasawa’s Japanese films were heavily influenced by American genres, and then went on to exert their own influence on those same genres.
The cycle is perpetual and ongoing. It is a feedback loop of inspiration and creativity. Eastwood broke out as the star of a remake of a samurai classic. Decades later, Eastwood’s revisionist western Unforgiven would be remade as a samurai film starring Ken Watanabe. Indeed, these genres are just part of the lingua franca of pop culture, to the point that Quentin Tarantino can make Kill Bill as a fusion of the Asian martial arts film and the American western.
Of course, this relationship is more complicated than cultural exchange. There are more loaded issues involved, particularly as they relate to colonialism. Although Blue Eye Samurai is critical of the close-mindedness of the feudal Japanese culture it depicts, it is also skeptical of western involvement in Japanese politics. Abijah Fowler (Kenneth Branagh), the only white man in Japan, is portrayed as a complete monster who seeks to destroy (or perhaps “befoul”) the local culture.
Indeed, Blue Eye Samurai owes a lot to Yojimbo, particularly its interest in the importation of firearms into Japan as an expression western imperialism. “A gun will never be as beautiful as a sword,” Fowler boasts at one point. “But with a gun, you can take any sword you want.” This idea is central to Blue Eye Samurai from its opening scenes. That first confrontation between Mizu and Hachiman is driven by the fact that he has a pistol in a culture that has banned trade with outsiders.
Yojimbo served as a commentary on the social decay of contemporary Japan, reflecting a moment “when decaying values have lost their universal acceptances and new modes have neither clearly emerged nor fully displaced the old.” Film historian Stephen Prince argues that Yojimbo tied “Japan’s opening to the West in the 19th century to Japan’s post-war economic rise, warning about the high costs of eschewing cultural values like thrift and frugality in favor of materialism and consumption.”
Of course, Kurasawa was making movies during the American Occupation of Japan in the wake of the Second World War. Many of his non-samurai films, such as Stray Dog and Drunken Angel, grapple with this directly. Alexander Jacoby argues that many of Kurosawa’s films “can be interpreted in part as interrogations of the Occupation itself.” In the period setting of Yojimbo, that influence is demonstrated by the gun that Unosuke (Tatsuya Nakadai) brought home from “his travels.”
In Blue Eye Samurai, Fowler uses his firearms to stage a coup against Shogun Ito (Keone Young). Fowler’s weapons reduce Edo (which he describes as the “biggest city in the world”) to ash. The city burns as a result of western munitions, which is somewhat loaded imagery in the context of the history between Japan and the West. Fowler blames the Shogun for letting him in in the first place. “A small crack in the wall. All that vision, you couldn't see how little space a bullet needs.”
This all gets at the complicated and charged relationship between Japan and America. It is not a simple binary. Kurasawa might have been wary of American influence on Japanese culture, but he was also quite aware of how influenced he had been by American culture. Indeed, it’s no small irony that Kurasawa himself did a lot to encourage that exchange, with Charles Silver arguing that the success of Kurasawa’s Rashomon “opened up a whole new cinematic world to moviegoers.”
Blue Eye Samurai similarly avoids these false binaries. The show returns to the metaphor of the forge, focusing on those beautiful swords fashioned from metal. Mizu trains with a blind swordsmith, Master Eiji (Cary-Hiroyuki Tagawa), to whom she laments, “No amount of hammering can remove my impurity.” However, in the season’s penultimate episode, Mizu’s sword breaks because it was “too pure” – “the blend was wrong.” As Eiji explains, “an impurity in the right place is a quality.”
Blue Eye Samurai suggests that purity is a myth and a delusion. After all, there is an inherent irony in rendering the blue eyes associated with an Aryan ideal and placing them in a context where they become something “other.” The show suggests that impurity can be a virtue, embracing a willingness to let ideas cross-pollinate between cultures. The season’s sixth episode heavily features a Japanese cover of Metallica’s For Whom the Bell Tolls, a striking illustration of hybridization across cultures.
Blue Eye Samurai is a child of two different worlds, and is all the more beautiful for that.
Comments
Cameron Gore
Can confirm. This article was still here after watching the show!
erakfishfishfish
I’ll admit, I tend to be dismissive of anime, but this article convinced me to give it a shot. Holy shit, I did not expect it to be one of the best shows of the year.
Darren Mooney
Thanks Kai! Yeah, I deliberately avoided the word "anime" when writing about it. In earlier comments, there's a bit of back-and-forth on how the term applies - is it a style or a production process, is it tied to Japan or can it be used globally? I don't know the answer to those questions. I don't have enough awareness to even begin. But, whatever it is, it's gorgeous.
Kai
Watched this so I could read the article (that makes two, with Scott Pilgrim, lol), brilliant show, thanks again for the recommend. Great article, nothing really to add that you haven't aready said. I had a little "aha" moment myself while I was watching and pondering that my initial assessment that it's an anime felt... off. It looked like an anime, but the voice talent is English and it's not been dubbed *to* English, the writing style felt much more Western, and... does it look like anime, really? I rarely feel like I'm watching anime when I'm watching this. It's animated, with Japanese characters, but it looks more like a samurai movie. And a bunch of Western shows. Aha. I get it. It's both. Calling it anime felt reductive, calling it western equally so. It's mixed heritage, a blue-eyed samurai itself
Darren Mooney
I think I was surprised, in researching it, how deeply personal it was.
Darren Mooney
“Scavenger’s Reign” is on the shortlist for me. I know Marty raves about it. But we’re in awards season, so time is scarce.
Andrew Franges
Absolutely. The style is so unique, and after watching some behind the scenes stuff, it's clear that so much love and work went into every part of it.
Darren Mooney
Yep, it’s great. And beautiful to look at.
W. Fry
It is wild to me that Netflix has become a reliable place for great animation. HBO (sorry, Max) had "Scavenger's Reign" this year, but Zazloff laid off most of the animation team there. Amazon has "Undone", and maybe that's it...? With "Nimona", "Wendell & Wild", "The House", "I Lost My Body", "The Mitchells vs. the Machines", "Arcane", the cyberpunk show, and "Scott Pilgrim", Netflix, despite everything else about the platform, is reliably consistent with their animation. It's just weird. Haven't watched "Blue Eyed Samurai"--I am leery of American takes on Samurai--but now that it has the Mooney stamp of approval it has risen to the top of my shortlist.
Andrew Franges
One of my favorite shows of the year.
Andy O'Brien
SPSO is way more "anime" than BES, but that said, I just use "animated" if anyone asks. I mean most of the stuff in Simpsons is drawn in Korea, does that make it K-Ani? SPSO has songs by Anamanaguchi (spelling way off), so to say a show belongs to a "region" just by lumping it into the label of "Anime" is quite frankly, a debate for someone other than me. Scott, American comic, American directors, highly influenced by other forms of entertainment besides comics. BE, haven't looked into the source yet, but beautiful all over. Namona. Where'd that one come from? Samuri Jack, all American, but really?
Darren Mooney
Yep. I am somewhat careful about the use of "anime", because it's a word that seems like it can apply to both a production process and a style. (And then the question of what that means in this globalised age, where a show can be written in one part of the world and animated in another.) Oddly enough, the style of "Blue Eye Samurai" reminded me most of renaissance-era Disney. But I am not an animation expert in any meaningful way.
Precious Roy
I've been having a think about this because there was a bit of a faff recently over whether the new Scott Pilgrim show counted as "anime," which is a word that has had it's meaning expanded gradually over the decades it's been interfacing with western audiences and studios. My 2c is that Blue Eye Samurai doesn't really qualify as anime the way it's been understood traditionally; it lacks the tropes that loosely define the genre, and it's an almost entirely western production. Not that it matters for the quality of the show, but the label itself can sometimes turn people off.
Syd Beretta
I would have to agree, it has very much opened us all up in many ways. Love to have it back after a bit of a hiatus
Darren Mooney
Incredible. That's one hell of a book club.
Darren Mooney
Interesting! I did not know this. (A nice piece of cultural context that I really appreciate. Thank you for that.)
Darren Mooney
Thank you! Glad you enjoyed. Glad people like the columns.
Darren Mooney
Yep, a beautiful story told very well. I particularly like that it doesn't waste time getting to its key points. (The castle infiltration being in six instead of eight is a great example, as is the meeting in the third episode about the thumbs/sake. All stuff a lesser show would stagger or delay.)
Darren Mooney
Yep. It's wonderfully accessible. (I'll acknowledge that my anime knowledge is not what it should be.)
Precious Roy
Mizu is also just the Japanese word for "water," which is obviously reflected in the color of her eyes, but also I would argue in the way she has to learn to flow through the world on her quest - this is even explicitly stated in one of the flashbacks when she's hiding under the water-blue sheet with her caretaker as a child. Worth noting is that the fire that burns down Edo was started by Mizu in her fight with Fowler, not by the guns themselves (unless I'm badly misremembering). That's why he chides her for the sacrifices she's willing to make for the sake of revenge. It doesn't happen often but this show -made- me sit down and watch it all in one go, the visuals draw you in, but the way the story branches, twists, and folds back together at the end is also a real work of art. I'm so glad you watched it Darren, now we just need to get you, Marty, and KC to have a proper chat about it!
Andy O'Brien
Devoured this series when it came out, got my whole office to watch it, even those that weren't into anime, but I talked them into it.
Drew Wobser
Excellent write-up! I watched Blue Eye Samurai last month and it’s one of my favorite things I watched all year. Already want to rewatch, it’s just beautiful and fantastic. Episodes 5 & 6 back-to-back had me reeling
Dark Jackel
Hey Darren, thanks for the column. I really enjoyed reading it. 😁
Syd Beretta
It is indeed, we only just got the results of the Patreon Poll last night after the Livestream. Starting in on the intro, gotta grab the audiobook, but I also like a physical copy like with the Red Book, Cosmic Trigger and The Art of Seduction. We also did Paglias Sexual Personae as our first book, and last we touched on had been the Tao Te Ching. Just a rousing good time it's been. Looking forward to this delving into the depths.
Darren Mooney
Ha! The universe is telling you to watch it! Also, is that the Bardo Thodol? How does it read?
Syd Beretta
Funny enough this is now my second recommendation, my book club host/podcast buddy (which our next book happens to be the Tibetan Book of the Dead) Angie recommended this about a week or so back. Must give it a proper chance to win me over.
