Word: samurais
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...plays and films, and published scholarly treatises. He gave legendary dinner parties in his Tokyo mansion, which was furnished with exquisite antiques gathered with remarkably eclectic taste. His much publicized "private army" was really a little cadre of idolaters who tried to discipline mind and body according to traditional samurai precepts. Mishima was a protean figure to his countrymen, and a major literary figure around the world. He was one of a very few Asian writers to be heavily influenced by Western philosophy. Why he chose to die so pathetically is a sad mystery...
...country's first antidrug law, adopted in the 1880s, prescribed zanshu, decapitation with a samurai sword, for those trafficking in narcotics. Opium eating, a major problem in 19th century China, never caught on in Japan. After World War II, however, heroin began to gain a foothold. Rival gangs pushed the drug among prostitutes and in the underworld generally bringing Japan to what Tokyo Social Worker Michmari Sugahara called "the verge of hell...
...Legend of Nigger Charley is not much of an improvement. The plot comes more or less out of Kurosawa's Seven Samurai, minus three. Charley is a freed slave who rides through the Southwest righting wrongs with the help of three companions. At one point, shortly after dispatching a gang of drunken louts in a saloon set-to, they help a white homesteader fight off the attacks of a band of marauding outlaws. Charley develops a yen for the homesteader's half-breed wife, portrayed by a comely young actress named Tricia O'Neill, who represents...
...proper dimensions. When the silk merchant makes an attempt to woo him through the use of dancing girls, the camera focuses on the dancers' insipid expressions and stylized foot motions while the sound track conveys their uninspired attempts at music-making. Then, there is a close-up of the samurai's face stamped with a look of such marvelous scorn that the dancers become a spectacle of banality...
...Yojimbo offers no humor. The bad-guys are dead and no room is left for irony. Only the good townspeople, the samurai and the constant dust-laden winds remain...