LAST SAMURAI, THE 207
attempts to portray Japan,” praising director Edward Zwick for having “researched
Japa nese history, cast well- known Japa nese actors and consulted dialogue coaches
to make sure he didn’t confuse the casual and formal categories of Japa nese
speech.” Still, Katsuta observed that even “the samurai had some vulgar attri-
butes. Overall, the film [is] a story of an ‘Americanized’ or idealized version of
the samurai, a story of a utopia to Americans” (Katsuta, 2004). In the United States,
Roger Ebert gave the film three and a half stars out of four, saying it was “beauti-
fully designed, intelligently written, acted with conviction, it’s an uncommonly
thoughtful epic” (Ebert, 2003). More discerning critics found the ideological impli-
cations of the movie suspect. As Motoko Rich notes, “Reservations about The Last
Samurai started with reviews that castigated the movie for its stale portrayals of
Japa nese culture, as well as the patronizing narrative of a white man teaching the
rapidly modernizing Japa nese how to honor their past. Tom Long, of The Detroit
News, wrote that ‘The Last Samurai pretends to honor a culture, but all it’s really
interested in is cheap sentiment, big fights and, above all, star worship. It is a sham,
and further, a shame’ ” (quoted in Rich, 2004).
Reel History Versus Real History
As noted earlier, The Last Samurai draws on disparate events in 19th- century Amer-
ican and Japa nese history, making it a mish- mash historically— vaguely true in a
generalized way but inaccurate, false, or misleading in many particulars. It is most
certainly true that the U.S. Army committed atrocities against Native Americans
during the Indian Wars; the slaughter that Algren relives in flashback sequences
throughout the film is based on two actual massacres. The first of these was the
Sand Creek massacre (29 November 1864), in which a 675- man force of Colo-
rado U.S. Volunteer Cavalry killed and mutilated an estimated 70 to 163 Native
Americans of the Cheyenne tribe, about two- thirds of whom were women and
children. The second, known as the Washita massacre (27 November 1868),
involved an attack by 574 soldiers of Gen. George Armstrong Custer’s 7th Cavalry
on the same tribe at the Washita River, just west of present- day Cheyenne, Okla-
homa (350 miles southeast of the Sand Creek massacre site). Custer’s men killed
an estimated 100 to 150, an estimated 40 to 75 of whom were women and children.
Hereafter the history gets fuzzy because the film conflates ele ments from Japan’s
Boshin War (1868–1869) and the Satsuma Rebellion (1877). The fictional Nathan
Algren is based on Jules Brunet, the French army captain who fought on the los-
ing side during the Boshin War (which was also a proxy war between Britain, which
backed the Imperial Court, and France, which backed the Shogunate, i.e., Japan’s
last feudal military government). The figure of Katsumoto, the samurai chieftain,
is anachronistically based on Saigō Takamori, who led the Satsuma Rebellion eight
years after the end of the Boshin War. Algren could have been at the Washita
massacre and in the Boshin War, but the chronology is tight. The Boshin War ended
27 June 1869— seven months after the Washita massacre, but the film shows Algren
involved in the early stages of the war, which started on 27 January 1868— exactly
10 months before Washita. Transforming the Brunet figure into an American was
obviously a sop to American audiences but not good history. Although it is true