Historical Accuracy
The film contains an accurate portrait of the life of the petty samurai at the end of the Tokugawa Shogunate.
By 1700 military duties were limited to a small number of families... The majority of the warrior class were thus robbed of their old function in society. But since they were still maintained economically by the daimyo, it was more practical and less expensive to press them into service as civil officials than to recruit members from other classes in society... The writing brush therefore began to replace the sword as the primary tool of the warrior's trade. — Peter Duus, Feudalism in Japan, pg 100 (1969)
As seen in the film, the majority of the samurai are warriors in name only; they are mostly accountants.
Read more about this topic: The Twilight Samurai
Famous quotes containing the words historical and/or accuracy:
“By contrast with history, evolution is an unconscious process. Another, and perhaps a better way of putting it would be to say that evolution is a natural process, history a human one.... Insofar as we treat man as a part of nature—for instance in a biological survey of evolution—we are precisely not treating him as a historical being. As a historically developing being, he is set over against nature, both as a knower and as a doer.”
—Owen Barfield (b. 1898)
“My attachment has neither the blindness of the beginning, nor the microscopic accuracy of the close of such liaisons.”
—George Gordon Noel Byron (1788–1824)