Ricochet boasts men who have forgotten more about Sengoku Jidai Japan than I have ever learned, & we can all hope to hear again from them. Meanwhile, let me try to say a few things about what Kurosawa is doing in Seven samurai. Kurosawa is famous for two things that I want to recall to […]

Seven Samurai is set at the end of the age of the country at war, which had started in the late fifteenth century. Whatever centralized rule in Japan endured up to that time collapsed in a long war between two major aristocratic alliances that destroyed the imperial capital Kyoto. That was the Onin War. Japan had been ruled […]