OH FUCK THIS!

 So, I’d been putting off the “Kasuga meets a White American Japan Nerd” substory for reasons that are gonna get more obvious. Bonus humiliation: I was going through the dialog so quickly I didn’t see if they mentioned anyone alongside Kurosawa, and that matters. If the American asshat shouts out Fukasaku it might break my heart a little. Anyway, the thing was cringy, I avoided completing it, then I hit a kinda ‘face your fears day’ and finished it. It was about what the American Japan Nerd has coming, but also RGG and the world can GET FUCKED. Just goddam everyone needs to work harder.

During a rain storm, Kasuga is asked to choose between an umbrella and a stupid samurai hat-- I nailed it by choosing the hat. Problem: when you imagine a Japan Nerd are you thinking about a guy who is gonna check shit against his copy of Haga-fucking-kura? I got receipts, BITCH:

There is something to be learned from a rainstorm. When meeting with a sudden shower, you try not to get wet and run quickly along the road. But doing such things as passing under the eaves of houses, you still get wet. When you are resolved from the beginning, you will not be perplexed, though you get the same soaking. This understanding extends to everything.

That passage is especially important to me because it is the one single aspect of the Way of the Samurai that I have ever been able to use in my own life (just the literal thing about not giving a shit about walking in the rain; I’ve got some work to do when it comes to ‘extending the understanding to everything.’ It’s hard, though, because I keep coming down with colds for some reason) Also, I’m pretty sure it’s one of the one of the titles they use in “Ghost Dog.”

[also pretty sure that Hagakura exists as a thing to sell to Japan Nerds, more than a Samurai artifact but whatever]

And “Ghost Dog” is what RGG (and most Japan Nerds) miss about being a Japan Nerd. It’s not about fucking Japan! No one (sane) HAS EVER GIVEN A FUCK ABOUT JAPAN. It’s about a world where ‘badass’ and ‘John Wayne’ are not synonymous. The Samurai give inspiration to Forest Whitcare’s character in ‘Ghost Dog;’ they help power the RZA. African American culture, the need to find dignity that is not defined in relationship to White heroes, is the ingredient the RGG is (probably sort of deliberately) overlooking. 

Fuckn A: Kurosawa wasn’t great because he was Japanese. He was great because he got Dashiel Hammet. 

It has ALWAYS been GLOBAL. That was ALWAYS the point. Japanese directors reading American crime authors; Frenchmen making films inspired by the Japanese; an Italian hires ‘the other guy from Rawhide’ to be a cowboy-- savings which will come in handy when he is forced to settle out of court with Kurosawa for having stolen a script; Fukasaku strung out on rage and Westerns; the RZA, motherfuckers, the RZA!!

The bad guys are the police; the good guys are the action sequences. 

Japan had a leg up in making these movies because the characters in all the good Japanese movies are either 1) NOT JAPANESE or 2) the sort of people who conspicuously don’t care about a Japanese/non-Japanese binary in a world that is largely defined by it. Thus the stateless cinema of anti-authoritarian violence came naturally to the Japanese, because the characters in the yakuza world were people who occupied a position outside of the traditional Japanese identity-- and an internationalist, stateless identity was always the GOAL. 

In some ways, RGG acknowledges as much by having “Hong Kong Action Hero,” “Desperado” and “Samurai” all be character jobs; they are admitting that samurais, cowboys and kung fu masters are more or less cut from the same cloth. The central characters can move through these roles, not held back by time or ethnicity. 

This makes Ijincho kinda suck, and possibly be spectacularly dishonest. The idea of three discreet ethnic crime groups actually cuts (as far as this dumb honky can tell) against the point of Yakuza cinema because the ideal movie yakuza was always a guy who would swear an oath with a Korean as opposed to someone who stood for ‘Japan’ against ‘foreigners.’ The Yakuza seem to have gotten a lot more Japanese in the video games.