Harakiri

This is an amazing Japanese classic written and filmed without flaw. The action unfolds in story-telling within story-telling. This is a film about truth. Whose truth? That is the unfoldment. In a perverted way, this amazing piece of work has become predictive of Western corporate banking. Perhaps you'll see what I mean at the end of the film.

It's a film that might scare modern audiences a bit, but it deserves the opportunity we want to give it.

In addition to having a very strong film industry, Japan is a country with a very rich past that we in the West tend to devalue. A somewhat ethnocentric attitude, more typical of small minds. For a long time, the Japanese were a people divided by several feudal princes who fought among themselves, disputing power and regional influence. It was in this context, moreover, that the first contact between the Japanese and the Portuguese took place, the first Westerners to disembark, demonstrably (Marco Polo speaks of the Japanese, but he probably never went there), on the islands of Japan, where they took the first firearm, the Christian faith and a strong cultural influence: even today, in the Japanese language, there are hundreds of words directly imported from Portuguese.

The film that brought me here tells us about one of the most fascinating traditional figures of Japan: the samurai, a warrior similar, in essence, to the European knight. They were educated people who were willing to live off the war, as paid mercenaries. In a land where each feudal lord wages war for himself, with his own troops and against his neighbors, it was not difficult to live off war. It would be difficult to live in peace! The samurai had a code of conduct, the Bushido, which dictated rules according to which they guided their lives, seeking to live and die with honor. Honor was more important than life and therefore, in certain situations, it was expected that the samurai knew how to die and was willing to do so, even if by his own hands, in a suicide ritual.

The film begins when a samurai, left unemployed by a long peace, turns to an old man and asks to be allowed to die. In response, he hears a story that occurred some time before, and in which a samurai in the same situation made an identical request in the expectation of receiving money, and ended up having to commit su...