Mentor Log 6

Because my mentor left Athens to go home for summer vacation on the 6th. I only completed 7 hours and 45 minutes of my 10 mentor hours. As a solution, Mr. Siegmund said to rent a foreign Japanese movie and pay attention to the cultural aspects of the movie. The movie was 132 minutes so it was a little over two hours. These two hours covers the hours that I need to complete the mentor section of my project.

The name of the movie that I rented was called The Hidden Blade, the entire movie was in Japanese so I had to read the captioning the whole time. The movie was about a samurai who was living in the time when everything was becoming modernized and "westernized". Samurai fight in battle using only swords and traditional weapons. The character Munezo was teaching and being taught how to use guns, which is not a samurai thing. Due to this modernization, Munezo was having a hard time making personal and political decisions because he was raised using the traditional tactics in all aspects, including political and personal aspects.

In the movie, Munezo and his sister's husband have a friend that leaves to join some kind of a political clan. Later, this friend gets captured and they find out his name and who he was trained by. Munezo and this friend trained together and they matched each other in skill. So, Munezo gets ordered to go and kill his friend to prove that he is innocent and had no part in the political clan. He is accompanied by guys from the community who have guns and his friend gets shot. He has to live with making this decision because it came between his honor and duty. Later he in a way deals with his decision by seeking revenge on the man who ordered him to kill his friend. His friend's wife kills herself because she slept with the man who ordered her husband be killed. She slept with him because he promised her that he would spare his life is she did. He lied of course and Munezo kills him.

All in all, I learned from this movie that the Japanese and the Asian culture hold their honor and duty in the highest regards. But, when one has to make a decision between the two, that is when a lot of trouble starts. Mostly I think that honor is what is most important to the culture because even when people have to follow their duty over their honor they usually go back and avenge their loss of honor.