---

Samurai Movies (38)

June 30, 2022

[Rochu 5] He realized that the drama 'Tenka Gomen' had some features to attract viewers. It was broadcasted a half century ago but was still somehow fresh. The three main characters of the drama were : Gennai (an eccentric who liked freedom and wanted to change the suffocating society, especially the bureaucracy), Ukyonosuke (a very skillful sword master who was always complaining that there were too few real samurai now, because the present samurai were just bureaucrats), and Inabakozo (a skillful thief whose motto was that professionals didn't hurt people and didn't make poor people annoyed.) Some supporting characters of the drama were : Genpaku (a skillful doctor whose interest was anatomy), Kurenai (a beautiful woman who was a teacher at a small private school), Okitsugu (A high officer in the Tokugawa Government who wanted power to change the society to be more energetic, who was later promoted to rochu), Renge (Okitsugu's girlfriend who was always complaining about being a woman and not a man). The drama had some features. 1. In each episode there was a certain social problem, which was related to a problem in modern society. Gennai and his company would try to solve them. For example: ・After a big earthquake occurred there were many fires and a lot of houses burn down. Reconstruction didn't proceed well because a greedy merchant had bought up most of the lumber, so the price went up. Gennai and his company went to the mountain side to negotiate with the villagers for lumber but they believed that the battle between Toyotomi and Tokugawa was being waged ...   ・Medicine for a kidney disease a certain crystallized mineral was very expensive because a merchant monopolized its importing route from China. Gennai decided to find the mineral and crystallize it and went to a certain mountain with his company and met a person who was experimenting with the mineral's crystallizing. His wife had suffered from the kidney disease and passed away, so he wanted to find a cure for the disease ... ・Gennai found that a lot of fish had died in the river and the cause was lead poisoning of the river from lead ingredients from a make-up cream factory. He started to research about the effects, but the make-up cream company and their supporters interfered with his detective work ... 2. The Tokugawa Government was bureaucratic and always emphasized precedents (like now). His han (Takamatsu han of 100,000 koku) was always the same.   3. Okitsugu was a high officer who sometimes helped Gennai because his ideas were advanced. But implementation succeed of these ideas were rare and normally they had to give up in front of the group of very conservative rochu. ・After a big earthquake, almost all of the buildings in Edo burned down. Gennai and Okitsugu wanted to make a new type of city planning in which roads were wide and straight so that fires wouldn't spread easily, fire fighters could get to go the fire as soon as possible. But the group of rochu didn't accept the plan, saying that in a castle town narrow, winding roads were ideal in case they were being attacked, although nobody had attacked for 150 years until Gennai's era. 4. In order to persuade officers from the authorities, Gennai sometimes used rhetoric. ・When he was living in a temporary house under a bridge, an officer came and said that he didn't have approval of the government and had to leave. Gennai said that the land was the river's possession and he was lent the space by the river. The officer said that possession could be claimed by only human beings. But Gennai quoted from an old novel that stated people treated nature that had personalities. Sometimes officers were confused and gave up their claims.   5. Gennai was a practical person, and didn't insist on vanity. ・When he came up with the idea to have an exhibition in which a lot of medical materials and information was gathered, he went to a well-known professor and asked him to lend his name as the leading promotor of the exhibition. The professor accepted it as it would raise his reputation and didn't cost anything.             (To be continued ...)

No.484




*suffocating :息苦しい
*bureaucracy :官僚主義
*bureaucrat :官僚、役人
*anatomy :解剖
*wage :遂行する
*crystallize :結晶化する
*monopolize :独占する
*cure :治療法、薬
*lead :鉛
*precedent :前例
*vanity :虚栄心