Film-Philosophy
Journal | Salon | Portal (ISSN 1466-4615)
Vol. 7 No. 34, October 2003
Aakash Singh
Kojeve's Masters and Slaves, Kurosawa's Samurai and Farmers
_Seven Samurai_ Directed by Akira
Kurosawa Japan, 1954 As Japan's most famous
international classic, Akira Kurosawa's 1954 film _Seven
Samurai_ (_Shichinin no samurai_) suffers no shortage of
commentary or criticism. Set in 16th-century Japan, when
society was irrevocably and swiftly changing, with the noble
class near the point of extinction, the film (co-written by
Kurosawa) portrays a small farming village besieged yearly
by bandits, who carry off their women and plunder their
crops. Out of desperation, the farmers recruit samurai to
protect them, repaying them only with meals. The samurai,
led by Kambei, who pitied the plight of the farmers, include
a young disciple called Katsuhiro, a master swordsman named
Kyuzo, Kambei's long-time friend Shichiroji, the clownish
Heihachi, the empathetic and astute Gorobei, and a man who
pretends to be a samurai -- although he fools no one -- whom
we later discover to have been a farmer's son, though not
from the village concerned (who gets dubbed Kikuchiyo).
[1] The seven samurai, together with the farmers,
manage after a long battle to overcome the bandits, albeit
with heavy casualties. The innumerable interwoven
themes of the film have each been given some treatment in
reviews: the samurai 'concept' in relation to Hagakure, or
the _Book of the Samurai_; Kurosawa's treatment of nature --
farms, fields, flowers, and every variation of light and
weather; the battle scenes which make this film a classic
'action drama'; the societal inequality and the subsequent
'humanism' of the film as a whole; the moral clash and
tension between farmer and samurai embodied in the character
Kikuchyo, the farmer-samurai; the musical motifs; and many
others, even some fanciful notions, like essays on the
symbolic use of horses in the film, or on homoerotic
innuendo among the samurai. Nevertheless, despite the
nearly exhaustive commentary on these themes and the film's
many sub-plots, I do not think that the closing scenes of
the film have either been sufficiently explored or
adequately understood. I refer primarily to two events: 1,
the farmers' sowing, accompanied by drum-backed song, made
possible due to the village's victory over the attacking
bandits; and 2, the head-samurai Kambei's resigned final
statement that it is the farmers who have won and not the
samurai. The sowing scene has even been regarded by some
critics as superfluous to the main theme of the film. But if
this scene, along with the other shots in the last few
seconds of the film, were taken to form a uniform statement,
then Kambei's declaration that it is the farmers and not the
samurai who have won could actually be clearly comprehended
as a precise identification of what has unfolded through the
drama of this film -- it is, in short, the briefest answer
to the question: What is the film about? If we posit that the
over-arching action of the film presents the victory of
farmers over samurai, as opposed to the prevailing
description of the film as portraying the victory of the
farmers and samurai over the attacking bandits, then we as
viewers and interpreters of the film would be in a position
to comprehensively and even systematically organize all of
the innumerable interwoven themes of the film -- themes and
sub-plots which have hitherto merely been arbitrarily
stressed or underplayed, or even less critically simply
enumerated by one critic or another. The virtue of this
interpretation of the film is that it not only serves to
organize and make integral the films sub-themes, but also
helps to resolve long-standing debates occurring in both
Japan and abroad, such as the argument over whether Kurosawa
ought to have closed the film with a wedding between the
young samurai Katsuhiro and the farmer-girl Shino with whom
he had been having an affair. In his review of the film, the
American film critic Roger Ebert asks: 'Should the hero get
the girl?' If we understand the film, as Ebert does, to
present a cooperation of farmers and samurai with the aim of
repelling bandits, then we cannot definitively answer
whether there should or should not have been a wedding --
either would have been arbitrary, or at best a resolution of
one of the film's many sub-plots. However, by arguing that
the film uses the cooperation of farmers and samurai to
conquer bandits as a *means* to present the real end, the
victory of farmers over samurai, it becomes clear that such
a wedding was precluded in principle. The reason that the
central, overarching theme of the film has hitherto been
missed by critics has to do with its esoteric source: the
Master-Slave dialectic of the German philosopher G. W. F.
Hegel's _Phenomenology of the Spirit_, as interpreted by
Russian-born French philosopher Alexandre Kojeve,
[2] and presented to Kurosawa by second or
third-hand accounts, such as through the early writings of
Japanese novelist and dramatist Yukio Mishima, who had been
influenced by Kojeve's work. Let me dampen the initial shock
the reader must experience at the assertion that Kurosawa's
great Japanese classic is developed around a theme of German
philosophy radicalized by an existentialist interpreter.
First, while I do not have the space to go into details
here, it should be kept in mind that Hegel's _Phenomenology_
had been introduced into Japanese philosophy quite early in
the century, with the development of the Kyoto school. As is
widely known, Nishitani and Nishida's works were strongly
influenced by Hegel, and Japanese intellectuals, like
Mishima, were well aware of every sort of interpretation and
reinterpretation of Hegel's thought by the time of the
Second World War. Second, Kojeve's interpretation of Hegel's
_Phenomenology_ was by far the most popular and influential
such interpretation, gaining international attention and
acclaim after the War. Japanese thinkers were well aware of
Kojeve's _Introduction to the Reading of Hegel_ long before
Kojeve made his famous voyage to Japan in 1959. Finally, by
the time Kurosawa become aware of the Hegelian Master-Slave
dialectic, it had already been thoroughly 'domesticated',
not only through the popular writings of the Kyoto
philosophers, but also in the growing *bushido* literature,
reinterpretations of the Hagakure (literally, 'Hidden
Leaves', now often referred to as _Book of the Samurai_)
which appealed to the Master-Slave dialectic to explain the
extinction of the cult of the warrior. There is commentary on
Kurosawa's film that points out the link with Hagakure. The
Hagakure was composed at a time (1716) when feudal Japan had
been at peace for nearly a century. This long peace strained
the status of the samurai as it undermined their utility. In
this context, bandits would have served to prolong the
existence of this dying class. But what commentary linking
_The Seven Samurai_ with Hagakure fails to explore is the
way in which Hagakure was read in Kurosawa's time -- this is
crucial. It is the reinterpretation of Hagakure (which took
its lead from Kojeve's work) that characterizes Kurosawa's
use of it, and allows us to see that the ultimate battle
that Kurosawa portrays in his film is not one of samurai and
farmers against bandits, but rather, more subtly and
insightfully, the class of samurai (Kojevean *Masters*)
against the class of farmers (Kojevean *Slaves*). Let's
first look at Kojeve's basic thesis, and then see how it
plays out through Kurosawa's film. In Kojeve's interpretation
of Hegel's philosophy found in his seminal _Introduction to
the Reading of Hegel_, the concept of *desire* is key.
Desire is what is responsible for self-consciousness in man.
Desire is defined as lack, which is filled in by a certain
activity, activity being a negation of a given reality: the
*I* of Desire is an emptiness that receives a real positive
content only by negating action that satisfies Desire in
destroying, transforming, and assimilating the desired
non-I. But animals, of course, also have desire. For desire
to be distinctly human, it must be directed toward another
desire. Because human consciousness requires the desire of
another desire, being human presupposes being social,
presupposes that there are others. The human is
self-conscious, and ultimately he will be not only
self-conscious, but also conscious of his inner freedom, of
his individuality, of his history. This leap from the spark
of self-consciousness in man, the advance made from animal
self-sentiment, to his awareness of his freedom,
individuality and historicity occurs because of Kojeve's
linkage of human desire to 'recognition'. That is, when one
desires the desire of another, one desires to be desired, or
what Kojeve identifies as desiring to be
recognized. Kojeve's explanation of
recognition occurs in the context of the famous
fight-to-the-death, the heart of the Master-Slave dialectic
that Kojeve is discussing. For desire to be truly human it
must not only be orientated toward another desire, it must
also win out over animal desire(s). That means that truly
human desire would overcome the most basic and most
significant animal desire, the desire to preserve life.
Truly and thoroughly human desire means desire orientated
toward another desire without concern for the preservation
of life, without concern for one's animal desire -- in other
words, desire seeking recognition even at the risk of life.
Two men, or two desires, confront one another in this fight,
and one of the two will establish himself as the superior,
the other as inferior: he who is not willing to sacrifice
his life in this struggle, giving in to the other,
establishes that he is still bound to the natural, still
essentially slavish; while the other, willing to sacrifice
life for a non-vital end, recognition, establishes that he
is master over himself, and master over the other. Thus,
while the master will be recognized by the slave, the slave
will not be recognized by the master. Since according to Kojeve,
man is only satisfied through recognition by one whom he
recognizes, the master is not truly satisfied by the
recognition of the slave. Nevertheless, the master forces
the slave to work for him, and thus the master has the
benefit of enjoying and consuming the product of the slave's
work -- the master idles away his time in partial
satisfaction; the slave toils away in service to the master.
While the slave works, he works upon (i.e. he becomes master
of) nature. The slave became a slave because he was subject
to nature, or unwilling to sacrifice his life for a
non-natural end. Through work, however, the slave overcomes
nature, and overcomes his own nature as well: in order to
work and produce a product for the consumption of the
master, the slave must repress his natural instinct to
consume the material. The master had overcome nature and
himself by risking his life for a non-vital end, had become
master over the slave, who had shown his slavishness by
being tied to nature. Now the slave overcomes nature and his
own nature through work. The master's action was destructive
simply, while the slave's action, work, destroys in order to
create -- he does not destroy but rather he sublimates.
Progress, technological and historical, requires this
sublimation that is work, which is to say that it
presupposes the era of mastery and slavery. The master
remains identical to himself, he is required to spark the
historical process, but he doesn't get anywhere. The slave
will ultimately become the 'absolute master', satisfied by a
universal recognition, rather than the sort of first-moment
master who is doomed to remain unsatisfied. The slave will be able to
be fully satisfied at a given point in history -- at that
point, however, he will cease to be a slave. Through work,
the slave was able to achieve the same humanizing result
that the master had achieved through the fight; that is,
surmounting the given, natural conditions of existence. When
the slave becomes conscious of the fact that he is
transforming the given material of nature through work in
the service of another, i.e. for an idea, then he becomes
conscious of his freedom, and of autonomy. With the thought
that arises from his work, the slave develops the notion of
freedom, although being in bondage, the slave becomes more a
slave by this realization than he was before he knew what
freedom was. The Slave is obliged to
overcome mastery by a nondialectical overcoming of the
Master who obstinately persists in his (human) identity to
himself -- that is, by annulling him or putting him to
death. And this annulling is what is manifested in and by
the final fight for recognition, which necessarily implies
the risk of life on the part of the freed Slave. This risk,
moreover, is what completes the liberation which was begun
by his work, by introducing in him the constituent-element
of mastery which he lacked. Being both Master and Slave, he
is no longer either the one or the other, but is the unique
synthetical man, in whom the thesis of mastery and the
antithesis of slavery are dialectically overcome -- that is,
*annulled* in their one-sided or imperfect aspect, but
*preserved* in their essential or truly human aspect, and
therefore *sublimated* in their essence and in their being.
We today are the product of this synthetical man. Kurosawa's
film, then, presents a moment in the process of our
historical development. The Master characteristics
of the samurai are presented in several scenes. Among these,
there is one which contrasts the honor-bound samurai with
the slavish farmers, when the samurai have captured a
bandit, intend not to harm him since he is protected by his
status as 'prisoner of war', and yet the farmers mutilate
him anyway with hoe and pitchfork. There are of course
several other examples of the different moralities, if you
will, of the samurai and farmers. Further, that the samurai
have overcome the fear of death is presented in a scene
early in the film, where Kambei is listening to the recent
exploits of his old friend Shichiroji. Shichiroji had
survived a burning castle tumbling down upon him in his
previous battle. Kambei asks, 'Were you terrified?'
Shichiroji replies, 'Not particularly.' Kambei then
suggests, 'Maybe we will die this time', to which Shichiroji
simply responds with a smile. On the other hand, the
'slavish' nature of the farmer is clear from the crying and
wailing in the opening scenes of the film. It is captured
profoundly by such camera shots as when (about 40 minutes
into the film), one of the farmers fails to prevent the
theft of the rice they use to feed the samurai, and Kurosawa
shows him miserably picking up the few dozen remaining
grains, which gleam white on the dirty black floorboards. In
the battle, too, Kurosawa captures the crux of the issue in
one shot, when he cuts to the frozen, terrified face of a
farmer in close-up. The camera pans back slowly to show the
villager gripping the end of a bamboo spear upon which one
of the bandits is impaled. The villager is so shocked by
what he has done that he cannot move. Now, it is important to
underscore that the Kojeve-influenced reinterpretation of
the bushido phenomenon, most famously provided in Mishima's
literary works -- as well as his life: Mishima committed
ritual suicide samurai-style (*seppuku*) in the office of
the General of Japan's Self-Defense Force -- is not simply a
textual argument. Kurosawa shows the Kojevean thesis
*filmicly*. Let's use as examples two of the most celebrated
shots in the film. First, recall (about 47 minutes into the
film) when the lean, sinewy master swordsman Kyozu is
introduced. Kyozu sunders the less-skilled samurai in half
in a battle of skill, honor, and prestige. Kyozu did not
care to engage in the sword fight, since he knew from the
earlier bamboo test fight that he would be the winner. The
other samurai forces him; they prepare, and attack. The
viewer does not know for certain what has happened, what the
result is, for about two seconds. Then the less skilled
samurai topples over slowly away from the camera. It's a
great scene, the frame is tense and powerful. But one thing
the scene shows is that mastery culminates in death, that
its 'negating nihilism' (as Kojeve would say) cannot bring
about the work that sustains and ultimately satisfies
civilization. Of course, mastery is powerful and noble and
superior, but it is also, in the final analysis,
unsatisfying and insupportable. Contrast this scene with
another famous one. Recall (about 1 hour into the film) when
Manzo, the father of the beautiful girl Shino, comes into
his hut with a razor in order to crop her hair so she looks
like a boy, since the samurai, notorious rapists, are soon
to arrive. The frame shows her from behind, her curved
figure filling the center of the screen, as she washes her
long silken hair. A lovely, feminine figure, curves and
softness. It's a beautiful but also tense 2-3 second shot,
and it shows in some sense the essence of the slave:
feminine and soft. Of course, by the end of the film, Shino
is not wedded to the young samurai, though she has had an
affair with him. This shows that even the young samurai
cannot necessarily adapt, and instead like all his kind must
become extinct. On the other hand, the farmer-girl wouldn't
marry him (or rather, her father wouldn't let her), on the
surface because of the class difference between farmers and
samurai, but on a deeper level because the young samurai,
like all samurai, has become useless. The farmers can kill, they
have learned to kill in a planned, organized, and effective
way -- but they can also sow and reap. That ability to
create and grow is shown in the images of Shino's curves and
femininity (i.e. the ability to give birth), while the
ability to kill is shown in the tough, lean figure of Kyozu,
the master swordsman. Showing the farmers'
rising synthetic characteristics, their assimilation of the
Master elements of the samurai, Kurosawa closes the film
with the farmers sowing, accompanied by music and dance --
in short, victory. Interestingly, those who beat the drums
and sing are those who were recognized by the samurai as
having become brave fighters during the battle scenes. Still
earlier, they were the ones who ate millet and suffered
hunger while they cooked and fed the samurai steamy white
rice. The farmers are now organized, happy, hard-working,
etc. In other words, they are behaving in such a way that
you would expect them to fight without samurai, next time
there is an invasion. Thus the farmers are now able to
defend themselves as well as grow food and do other
'slavish' things. The next shot shows Shino
walk past Katsuhiro, snubbing him in fact, as she joins in
the sowing and singing, her voice first rising above those
of the others, and then fading into the common song. The
last shot shows that the head-samurai Kambei has seen and
understood the significance of the drum and song-backed
sowing dances, of Shino's snubbing of the young samurai, and
of all of the events that have unfolded in the film. The
samurai are slowly leaving the village, but where to? To
seek other fights and perhaps even beg for food, as is their
fate with the coming end of the era of mastery. Thus, Kambei
states in the closing line of the film -- just before the
camera gives us a view of the noble samurai graves standing
symbolically over the many farmer graves -- that 'it is the
farmers who have won and not us'. It's pure Kojeve, what he
called 'the tragedy of the Master'. This analysis of
Kurosawa's film naturally raises an important question.
Given that Kurosawa presents a philosophic notion as the
over-arching structure of his plot, does this mean that
critics are correct to say that he has sacrificed the
development of particular characters for the sake of
presenting general *types*, who consequently and
disappointingly cannot be seen to be really flesh and blood
persons? I would argue that just the opposite is true:
Kurosawa's genius, his true achievement in the film, lies
precisely in how he was able to develop his characters, and
the character relationships, while at the same time showing
the broader historical sweep within which all particular
persons tend to get lost. Each time I see the film I notice
more and more details that Kurosawa had packed into the
drama, providing clues as to what motivated particular
characters, providing what we would call, in short, their
*personalities*, whether farmers or samurai. Perhaps the finest example
of this is the farmer-samurai Kikuchiyo. Kikuchiyo is a
farmer's son who hates the samurai for having destroyed his
village during his youth, but at the same time he hates the
farmers for their weakness, pettiness, and duplicity.
Kurosawa balances his particular personality, his
overcompensation, bravado, and so on, with his *type*, the
early or pre-mature and thus doomed synthesis of mastery and
slavery. We can see this layering in the scene where
Kikuchiyo cannot break in the horse -- as a farmer's son, he
did not benefit from equestrian training. Or again in his
conquest across enemy lines, when he managed to kill bandits
and steal a gun, an achievement resulting not in praise by
the samurai but in censure for having defied the rules and
putting all at risk. These scenes, along with those where we
come to learn about the farmer-samurai's parentage and the
fate of his village, show how brilliantly Kurosawa has
handled the difficult task of presenting a philosophic
thesis (which tends to suppress personality) within a drama
(which tends to present its story through specific persons).
Further, Kurosawa managed this in the specific medium of
film, replicating the layering of plot and theme by
exquisite camera work techniques, such as deep-focus. Action
develops and occurs in the fore- mid- and back-ground of
several shots, suggesting that the story itself develops in
several contexts simultaneously. That Kurosawa captured on
film the historical fate of the samurai within the
philosophical context of the Master-Slave dialectic,
unfolding in a drama with specific characters motivated by
their own defined interests, is already achievement enough.
That he managed in the process to produce one of the finest
films ever made is nothing less than awe-inspiring. I find
it amusing that awe, however, is far from the uniform
reaction of critics. In his biography of Yukio Mishima,
Peter Wolfe links him with Akira Kurosawa by referring to
them as the 'two great distorters' of the bushido tradition
in Japan. [3] What Wolfe complains of as distortion,
I would rather celebrate as reinterpretation -- or what
Kojeve himself called a *mise a jour*, a bringing up to
date. Humboldt
University Berlin, Germany 1. See
<http://www.umich.edu/~iinet/cjs/films/reviews/pics/sevensamurai.jpg>. 2. Kojeve, _Introduction
to the Reading of Hegel: Lectures on the Phenomenology of
Spirit_ (New York: Basic Books, 1969). 3. Peter Wolfe, _Yukio
Mishima_ (New York: Continuum, 1989), p. 16. Copyright ©
Film-Philosophy 2003 Aakash Singh, 'Kojeve's
Masters and Slaves, Kurosawa's Samurai and Farmers',
_Film-Philosophy_, vol. 7 no. 34, October 2003
<http://www.film-philosophy.com/vol7-2003/n34singh>. Join the _Film-Philosophy_
salon, and receive the journal articles via email as they
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