[COLUMN] Blue Eye Samurai Is a Child of Two Worlds | by Darren Mooney

NOTE: This piece contains spoilers for Blue Eye Samurai, now streaming on Netflix. Go watch it. It’s gorgeous. The piece will still be here when you get back.

Blue Eye Samurai, Netflix’s recent animated series from Amber Noizumi and Michael Green, is an interesting study in cross-cultural pollination.

This is reflected in the production. Noizumi and Green are a husband-and-wife team working in Hollywood. Blue Eye Samurai is an American production with a largely Asian-American cast beautifully animated by a French-Canadian company. It is not only indebted to Japanese samurai movies, but to the wave of American pop culture inspired by those films. Kill Bill is cited as a major influence by Noizumi. The premiere even features a montage set to Tomoyasu Hotei's Battle Without Honor Or Humanity.

However, this cultural overlap is also written into the show itself. The show derives its title from its lead character, Mizu (Maya Erskine). Mizu is a young warrior, the child of a Japanese mother and European father. Blue Eyed Samurai unfolds against the backdrop of the Edo period, when Japan had closed its borders to the West. Mizu has identified the four white men in Japan at the time of her conception. She dedicates herself to hunting them down and killing them.

Mizu’s blue eyes mark her as different from other Japanese people, and she is frequently dehumanized – identified as “it” or “that.” Mizu is introduced confronting Hachiman (West Liang), who reacts with horror to her mixed-race heritage. “The samurai, he's not human,” the flesh-trader gasps. “I saw its eyes.” In the third episode, a flashback to her first moments of life finds two soldiers discussing what to do with this newborn baby. “It’s a half-breed,” one states. “It’s hardly human.”

Mizu’s background is a source of shame to her in a culture that values purity. Blue Eye Samurai is a show about characters trying to navigate a world that imposes rigid boundaries between insiders and outsiders. Mizu’s heritage is not the only source of conflict. She presents as male to the outside world, because that is the only way to accomplish what she sets out to do. Indeed, there is a sense in which Mizu’s gender is treated as a twist, revealed as the cliffhanger to the first episode.

Mizu is not the only character facing this struggle. Princess Akemi (Brenda Song) resists her father’s (Patrick Gallagher) attempts to marry her off. She seeks freedom in a different way than Mizu. “Fight within your confines, not against them,” urges Seki (George Takei), Akemi’s tutor. He warns her there are “a fixed number of paths” for women to follow, literalized through the show’s repeated emphasis on “the 12 and 20 positions”, sexual positions wives are expected to master to please their husbands.

Throughout Blue Eye Samurai, characters try to navigate a world that restricts their options and their choices. Ringo (Masi Oka), an enthusiastic noodle chef with no hands who serves as Mizu’s apprentice, talks about the challenges of trying to pursue greatness. He recalls reading a prayer box that told him “there are four paths through the world. The way of the farmer, the artisan, the merchant, and the warrior.” This seems like a very narrow way of looking at things.

Blue Eye Samurai is a personal project for Noizumi and Green. The title derives from Green’s nickname for their daughter. The story reflects Noizumi’s experiences as a Japanese-American, “feeling like an outsider at home for not being seen as white, and then going to Japan and feeling like an outsider and being seen as not Japanese enough.” Chinese-American director Jane Wu could relate to that, “So here, I'm the Chinese girl. And when I go back home, I’m the American girl.”

Blue Eye Samurai is a show about what it is to be both Asian and American. Although the series is set in feudal Japan, it resonates outside that specific context. In the past few years, America has become increasingly isolationist and closed off from the rest of the world, like Edo-period Japan. More than that, racism directed at Asian Americans has increased dramatically in the past few years. The show’s setting feels like a way to engage with these anxieties through metaphor.

As Noizumi explains – and it’s worth noting that “Mizu” is an anagram of the final four letters of her surname – the show derived from “feeling stuck between two worlds.” As she put it, “What if we put those feelings into a world in Japan, where the borders were closed, where it was so homogenous, and that era is still heralded as the golden age of Japan? The golden age, where nobody was allowed in who looked different, and what that must have felt like. Just, let's make a good story out of that.”

Blue Eye Samurai is a wonderful expression of the ways in which Japanese and American pop culture exist in conversation, intertwined and engaged. “We said that this was an ‘East meets West’ and there were a lot of things inspired by actual western movies, Clint Eastwood-type things that we wanted to bring that energy to Mizu,” Noizumi explains. That influence is reflexive. It extrapolates western iconography into a samurai setting, which was itself derived from samurai films.

Clint Eastwood’s big break as a movie star was in A Fistful of Dollars, a spaghetti western that was one of several American remakes of Akira Kurosawa’s samurai epic Yojimbo. Of course, Yojimbo was itself heavily influenced by Kurasawa’s affection for the westerns made by John Ford and was adapted from Dashiel Hammet’s Red Harvest. Kurasawa’s Japanese films were heavily influenced by American genres, and then went on to exert their own influence on those same genres.

The cycle is perpetual and ongoing. It is a feedback loop of inspiration and creativity. Eastwood broke out as the star of a remake of a samurai classic. Decades later, Eastwood’s revisionist western Unforgiven would be remade as a samurai film starring Ken Watanabe. Indeed, these genres are just part of the lingua franca of pop culture, to the point that Quentin Tarantino can make Kill Bill as a fusion of the Asian martial arts film and the American western.

Of course, this relationship is more complicated than cultural exchange. There are more loaded issues involved, particularly as they relate to colonialism. Although Blue Eye Samurai is critical of the close-mindedness of the feudal Japanese culture it depicts, it is also skeptical of western involvement in Japanese politics. Abijah Fowler (Kenneth Branagh), the only white man in Japan, is portrayed as a complete monster who seeks to destroy (or perhaps “befoul”) the local culture.

Indeed, Blue Eye Samurai owes a lot to Yojimbo, particularly its interest in the importation of firearms into Japan as an expression western imperialism. “A gun will never be as beautiful as a sword,” Fowler boasts at one point. “But with a gun, you can take any sword you want.” This idea is central to Blue Eye Samurai from its opening scenes. That first confrontation between Mizu and Hachiman is driven by the fact that he has a pistol in a culture that has banned trade with outsiders.

Yojimbo served as a commentary on the social decay of contemporary Japan, reflecting a moment “when decaying values have lost their universal acceptances and new modes have neither clearly emerged nor fully displaced the old.” Film historian Stephen Prince argues that Yojimbo tied “Japan’s opening to the West in the 19th century to Japan’s post-war economic rise, warning about the high costs of eschewing cultural values like thrift and frugality in favor of materialism and consumption.”

Of course, Kurasawa was making movies during the American Occupation of Japan in the wake of the Second World War. Many of his non-samurai films, such as Stray Dog and Drunken Angel, grapple with this directly. Alexander Jacoby argues that many of Kurosawa’s films “can be interpreted in part as interrogations of the Occupation itself.” In the period setting of Yojimbo, that influence is demonstrated by the gun that Unosuke (Tatsuya Nakadai) brought home from “his travels.”

In Blue Eye Samurai, Fowler uses his firearms to stage a coup against Shogun Ito (Keone Young). Fowler’s weapons reduce Edo (which he describes as the “biggest city in the world”) to ash. The city burns as a result of western munitions, which is somewhat loaded imagery in the context of the history between Japan and the West. Fowler blames the Shogun for letting him in in the first place. “A small crack in the wall. All that vision, you couldn't see how little space a bullet needs.”

This all gets at the complicated and charged relationship between Japan and America. It is not a simple binary. Kurasawa might have been wary of American influence on Japanese culture, but he was also quite aware of how influenced he had been by American culture. Indeed, it’s no small irony that Kurasawa himself did a lot to encourage that exchange, with Charles Silver arguing that the success of Kurasawa’s Rashomon “opened up a whole new cinematic world to moviegoers.”

Blue Eye Samurai similarly avoids these false binaries. The show returns to the metaphor of the forge, focusing on those beautiful swords fashioned from metal. Mizu trains with a blind swordsmith, Master Eiji (Cary-Hiroyuki Tagawa), to whom she laments, “No amount of hammering can remove my impurity.” However, in the season’s penultimate episode, Mizu’s sword breaks because it was “too pure” – “the blend was wrong.” As Eiji explains, “an impurity in the right place is a quality.”

Blue Eye Samurai suggests that purity is a myth and a delusion. After all, there is an inherent irony in rendering the blue eyes associated with an Aryan ideal and placing them in a context where they become something “other.” The show suggests that impurity can be a virtue, embracing a willingness to let ideas cross-pollinate between cultures. The season’s sixth episode heavily features a Japanese cover of Metallica’s For Whom the Bell Tolls, a striking illustration of hybridization across cultures.

Blue Eye Samurai is a child of two different worlds, and is all the more beautiful for that.