Wen Dongguan.
Edited by Eastern View.
Preface. 
In today's increasingly commercialized entertainment era, those classic images in the traditional culture of various countries have been gradually diluted or even distorted by various film and television adaptations.
The chivalrous warriors who symbolize traditional Chinese culture have gradually become empty shells of some dancing swords and swords, reflecting the changes of the times in the United States, cowboys have become a group of sharpshooters with beards, and Japanese samurai chasing honor have also become rough men wielding broadswords in film and television works.
But who would have thought that these declines were vividly presented by a director in 1954 with a story under the lens.
The famous Japanese director Akira Kurosawa's "Seven Samurai" depicts this honor that has gradually been diluted and even forgotten by the times.
The threat of bandits.
The story of the film is quite simple, and the opening chapter simply and directly presents the biggest antagonist in the story, a nest of rampant and domineering bandits.
They do not want to be like the peasants, who work to get the harvest, and they have no glory or pursuit, they have power but choose to use it to be strong and weak.
The fact that these thieves were able to run rampant in the countryside also reflected the pathos of that era.
At the same time, the presence of these people forced the villagers who survived by labor to seek help from outside.
The presentation of this part also perfectly demonstrates the superb level of Akira Kurosawa as Japan's No. 1 director.
A few simple shots accurately show the horror of the bandits and the helplessness of the villagers, and you can see the fear of the villagers when they are threatened with death.
At this time, the village elders made an interesting proposal: "Use rice as a reward to find hungry samurai to protect the village".
This not only protects the village, but also minimizes the loss of the village.
Only provide them with three meals a day, and ask them to pay with their lives to protect the village against thirty or forty bandits.
Although it was quite rude to some samurai, it was not impossible in this chaotic Sengoku era.
Assemble seven people. There were many setbacks in recruiting samurai, and several villagers were not only humiliated by the rejection in the streets, but were often even mocked and ridiculed by the people who lived with them.
But in the end, he also met nobles along the way.
Kanbei is a strong and noble samurai, although he has participated in many wars, but in this chaotic era he has no choice but to be reduced to a ronin.
The villagers happened to meet him shaving his hair and pretending to be a monk to save a kidnapped child, so they found an opportunity to invite him to dinner.
Although he had long since become a wandering ronin, Kanbei was moved by this sincerity after learning that the peasants had invited him to eat white rice and that he had to rely on barnyard rice to survive.
Not only did he promise to help the villagers, but he also took on the leadership role of recruiting the remaining six people, and also formulated a strategy for the next defense of the village.
Goroubei, the first to respond to the summons, admired his personality when he found out that Kanbei was willing to help the villagers and only received food and drink, so he responded to his summons and joined the team.
Not only on the German side, but also in the later village defense battles, Goro's wisdom played a key role many times, not only proposing to capture the bandits alive to spy on the enemy, but also to realize the danger of the enemy's firearms for the first time.
The second Shichiroji is an old friend who Kanbei hasn't seen for many years.,After meeting and catching up, he directly accepted the invitation.。
Shichiroji's greatest characteristic is his loyalty, and he did not hesitate to express his willingness to help the moment he heard that Kanbei had a difficult battle to fight, and he did not waver in his determination to learn that there was no benefit but to satisfy hunger.
The third Pingba was discovered when he was helping the villagers chop wood for food, he was optimistic and cheerful, and he was not discouraged after becoming a ronin, and was willing to put down his martial arts to simply make a living by chopping wood.
He is the most approachable person in the crowd, so he readily agreed.
Kuzo was found and appreciated by the Kanbei when he was fighting people on the street.
Most of the time he is silent, but he is strong in martial arts, and when everyone mistakenly lets go of the bandits, he can catch up with them and kill them and capture them**.
Kikuchiyo is the most unique one in the team, he has been watching from the neighborhood as early as when Kanbei saved the child, but because of his rough words and deeds, Kanbei was recognized as a "fake samurai".
Born into a peasant family, he was indeed not a true samurai in terms of force or morality, and in many cases his behavior could even be called barbaric.
But that yearning for justice and sheer bravery also made him willing to join this team.
At the same time, he is also the most active person in the whole team, although everyone often jokes about him, but he also relies on his unique brute force to gain an advantage at critical moments.
As the last member of the team, Katsushiro has never been counted as a member of the samurai because of his fledgling apprenticeship.
But his innocence and youthfulness gradually became the purest yearning for bushido among all people as the story progressed.
It is precisely these seven people with different personalities who present the key elements that make up the spiritual core of bushido from seven perspectives.
But it's not just the bandits who outnumber them in front of them.
The antagonism of the villagers.
Director Akira Kurosawa's presentation of the relationship between the villagers and the samurai is quite unique and realistic, and although the samurai accept the villagers' requests for help, they are still two different classes with completely different lifestyles and understandings of life.
Unlike the current artwork depicted, the samurai who were tasked with protecting the village did not receive much warm welcome from the villagers who had been killed.
Even the people couldn't even see a few figures on the way here, and the snubbing and fear of the villagers were vividly presented by the director.
Later, when the crowd gathered to inquire about the situation of the bandits, they received only panicked, noisy, and even contradictory answers.
The villagers are afraid of the samurai, but they need them to keep them safe.
The samurai looked down on the villagers, but they had to survive on the food they provided.
The two are interdependent, but they hate each other.
Before the samurai entered the village, the villagers were afraid that the samurai would rob and bully the women in the village, so they all shaved their hair and pretended to be men, and moved to the edge of the village.
Food and supplies were deliberately hidden, and only enough surplus food was given to the samurai to survive.
For samurai who pursue honor and justice, receiving such treatment makes many people dissatisfied.
Even when it was discovered that the villagers had killed the fallen samurai who had fallen here during the war.
Some people even directly expressed "people who want to kill this village".
But in the end, the director also used the words of Kikuchiyo, who "yearns for justice but is not formal", to reveal the truth of these contradictions, the villagers seem to be cowardly, but in fact they are shrewd, stingy to hide food and supplies, and cunningly use samurai to drive out bandits.
Brutally kill the remnants of the defeated soldiers who have fallen here, and take away their equipment and money.
The villagers didn't care about winning or losing the war, they didn't care about the honor that the samurai pursued, they only cared about the things that were closely related to life, such as farmland and food.
At the same time, it was the samurai themselves who made the villagers become like this step by step.
The samurai, who were one rank higher than the villagers, had a lot of status and did not care about the food and supplies that the villagers regarded as their lives, but only chased the glory and fame they longed for.
During the war, they burned, killed, looted, plundered people, and plundered women.
The contradictions and antagonisms between the two are difficult to reconcile.
But in the face of this stormy bandit, these can only be relegated to the secondary.
Prepare for war in the wilderness. The village was low-lying and difficult to defend, so the scouts decided to start building a wall on the thorns, using wooden stakes as a hedge, and giving up half of the village to prevent the bandits from burning the house to vent their anger.
The rest of the people began to teach the villagers martial arts, but still out of mutual war, they only let them sharpen the bamboo poles as spears.
As time went on, the relationship between the villagers and the samurai gradually eased, and the samurai shared the food they received with the children of the village.
Katsushiro, the youngest samurai apprentice among the group, fell in love with Shino, a girl from the village, by chance, but the mutual admiration of the two is forever separated by a layer of class differences that cannot be bridged.
Great War Bandits. After a few days of preparation, they caught several bandit forwards who had come to observe the crops, and learned the location of the enemy cottage from the captives.
The people attacked the cottage at night, killed many bandits, burned down their houses, and rescued the villagers who were captured.
But the optimistic wood-chopping samurai Heihachi was also caught in the fire in the process and died.
The villagers who wept and knelt at his funeral showed him respect, but the samurai who was still standing knew that continuing to fight was the best memorial to a dead samurai.
It was precisely because of this attack that the bandits learned of the existence of the samurai in the village and began to attack in turns, so that the samurai had to start focusing on patrolling.
During a patrol, Kikuchiyo snatched an enemy musket and left the post without permission, causing the flank to be breached, and in the melee, Goro, who had hit it off with Kanbei, was unfortunately killed.
The gray hill was filled with a sword blade and several bamboo spears.
After the devastating attack, Hisazo, who had never spoken much, even stood up to care for the villagers around him who had not experienced many war casualties.
It was as if after so many battles, the estrangement between the samurai and the villagers had finally disappeared, and they even took out wine and meat to entertain the remaining five samurai.
And after Katsushiro and Shino's love affair was discovered, everyone still couldn't accept this kind of cross-class behavior.
The next day, the final battle ensued, and everyone decided to minimize the damage by setting up a formation to gradually release the bandits into the village in batches to encircle and suppress them.
However, two samurai, Kuzo and Kikuchiyo, were still sacrificed, and only three were left: Kanbei, Shichijiro and Katsushiro.
Looking at the four katanas on the wild hills, the villagers returned to the fields one after another and began their farming life.
But they turned a blind eye to the samurai who sacrificed their lives to protect them on the side of the road.
On the way out of the village, Kanbei, as the leader, said, "This is also a defeat, and only these peasants will really win."
And the samurai, who had no value in peacetime, could only leave silently and become a ronin in the mountains again.
Epilogue. This film from 1954 is presented with a simple story, and the entire samurai culture at the end of the Warring States period faded to the extinction.
Perhaps this concept of relying on the times can only reflect its true value if it remains in that era.