Seven Samurai

Postwar Japanese films make regular, subtle, realistic, and thematic use of food and eating to move the plot, explore personal relations, reveal character, comment on history, and express moral and ethical judgments. Hollywood studio films from the 1940s to the 1980s tend to ignore food, use it only in passing, or code it as ethnic or regional.

This chapter looks at four Japanese films made for domestic consumption: Tokyo Story (1951) and The Seven Samurai (1954), whose use of food is all the more telling because they are not “foodie” films; Tampopo (1985), in which food plays a leading role; and The Family Game (1986), in which food plays a supporting role.

The chapter finishes with a brief comparison to Hollywood films with comparable themes  that do not make comparable use of food, such as The Magnificent Seven (1960) and Shane (1953),

The article explores the manifestly allegorical nature of Kurosawa's controversial 1950 film Rashomon, and how it was directly responding to the dishonesty of individuals called before recent war crimes trials (1946-48). After noting the overt symbolism of the film's opening setting, which manifestly alludes to the plight of Japan, the trials which dominated the nation's media in the late 1940s are also discussed (it notes 29 employees of the film company had been purged). As is stated at the film's onset, the community was distressed because it was evident that lies were being told and the truth concealed: similarly, in post-war Japan no one knew who to believe about war atrocities. Testimony is compromised, Rashomon shows, because the guilty seek to hide their misdeeds. A direct comparison is made with Clouzot's film from the Nazi-Occupation Period, Le Corbeau of 1943, which told a story of village life to likewise highlight dishonesty and betrayal in time of war. As with Rashomon, there was a local backlash against the film due to the plain, if uncomfortable contemporary message it delivered. Kurosawa's use of a medieval setting/story to moralise, again, about post-war Japan in his later samurai films, 'Seven Samurai' and 'Yojimbo', is considered; although, as is pointed out, his allegorical purpose was completely lacking in the popular Western versions of these films, 'The Magnificent Seven' and 'A Fistful of Dollars'. (Another cowboy film, 'High Noon', is praised in passing and likened to Kurosawa's approach.) Rashomon's seeming influence on Ingmar Bergman's 'The Seventh Seal', another allegorical tale of ethics and personal conduct against a medieval war setting, is also highlighted. 5pp