So you more or less put words in my mouth unfairly, whether or not it was through a simple misread (perhaps I didn’t make it very clear) or you just indeed think so little of me. Ah well.

You have let my comments in into your blog; you have left them untouched. I know that you really care for your blog. You have even opened up, and tried to widen your perceptions.

Please permit me to say this, sincerely. “Man, you have ‘Warrior Spirit’ ”. This is a part of what I am trying to say.

CJ, by this one, simple remark you illustrate how completely, totally you fail to grasp the essence of ‘warrior spirit’ in the Japanese sense.

‘Warrior Spirit’ is not garbed in the armor of the warrior, nor in his arms and weapons, not even in his profession. ‘Warrior Spirit’ is a core, embedded approach to Life, the manner of your ‘soul’. You could have ‘Warrior Spirit’ wielding the sword, tabulating accounts, working as a garbage man. It is an approach to Life, the manner of your ‘soul’. You could have ‘the soul of an accountant’ when you are a four-star general.

Great-great-grandfather was a samurai; probably of Iguchi Seibei’s generation. He became businessman; in your words, “turned from an honorable warrior to a glorified accountant.” But this was not so; he did his business in precisely the same way he had earlier lived his life – with courage, rectitude and, yes, honor. In business as in his previous life, the manner of his soul remained the same. You could be in ‘Warrior Spirit’ throwing garbage bags into the truck, flipping a hamburger. You could have ‘the soul of an accountant’ when you are a four-star general. Think Iraq, think Afghanistan; perhaps you can then have an inkling of what I am trying to say.

This, again, just demonstrate this vast unbridged gulf: You (in the West) think you know, but really you just do not.

Not to put too fine a point on it: Your failure to understand others is, really, YOUR problem, not the problem of others.

CJ, I actually do not have any ‘problems with the western world’; I am very comfortable with it and in it, very comfortable. I am merely trying to point out the problems some of those in the West have in their dealings with others.

Just let me say this: if someone is just trying to do this – to point out some of the problems some Westerners have in their perceptions of others – then this effort is turned round to be his ‘problems’ with the West; isn’t this PATRONISING??

[Please excuse my idiosyncrasy – caps lock and punctuation. The thing is, I just find it rather hard to get through, if you know what I mean. I wonder whose problem this is?]

Personally Kojiki, I wouldn’t take offence to it as you seem to be doing. Could it be comical? Yep. Could it be an interesting revisionist drama that perhaps subverts the usual stereotypes? Yep.

As long has you are having fun throwing down with caps lock, using far too much punctuation and explaining your problems with the western world randomly onto the website.

Though I definitely agree, Twilight Samurai is an infinitely more subtle and brilliant film though I wouldn’t say it captures ‘the warrior spirit’. It’s more of a film brilliantly portraying the downfall and changes in Japan and how the samurai turned from an honorable warrior to a glorified accountant.

To some Chinese, the casting was offensive because they mistook geisha for prostitutes, and because it revived memories of wartime Japanese atrocities. I think this is why cinema is great, taking in all the good and bad, it really does make you think.

On the West, and APPROPRIATENESS and BEING PATRONISING: let me just place two points here.

President Clinton Bill and founding father Washington George. If I address your former president and your founding father in this way, and persist in doing so (even in the course of formal speeches to the UN and state dinners): How will you feel ?? You will protest and say that the proper way to address Western names is to have surnames last. But I insist, saying that we, Japanese, have surnames first and that this is the PROPER (probably ‘more civilized’) way. So Clinton Bill and Washington George. Will you not say that I, and my country, are being both INAPPROPRIATE and PATRONISING ??

This is precisely the manner in which the West have ridden roughshod over our names and the proprieties of placing of surnames. It is not Naoto Kan but Kan Naoto. It is not Yukio Hatoyama but Hatoyama Yukio. But have you ever seen our prime ministerial names in their proper order in America, the West ??

Our customs and traditions are traversed, blatantly. This is just an indication of ATTITUDE.

In Shogun (the series) Blackthorne (Will Adams) is made to have an affair with Mariko (a thinly disguised literary adaptation of Hosokawa Gracia, spouse of one of the major, and respected figures, of the Edo era, Hosokawa Tadaoki). Lord Hosokawa Tadaoki, a major daimyo of the Edo period, was also made to be in Shogun to be an effete, brutish wife-beater. His wife found solace in Blackthorne’s arms. Completely fanciful, completely INCONCEIVABLE.

Let me put it this way, a Japanese sailor cast away in America during the War of Independence taught the revolutionary army Jiu Jitsu and screwed the wife of Hamilton Alexander who was, by the way, an effete and brutal wife-beater. Do you find this INAPPROPRIATE and PATRONISING ?? Will you laugh uproariously if you see a Japanese drama series that have such episodes ?? In one episode you have Elizabeth Hamilton in the shower with this Jiu Jitsu expert.

By the way James Clavell, who wrote ‘Shogun’ also wrote ‘Noble House’ of Hongkong. The ‘Noble House’ is Jardine Matheson, a trading conglomerate in Hongkong. Everybody in East Asia knows Jardine Matheson was THE Opium House (trader) that imported opium into China at the point of the gunboat cannon for over a hundred years. The main Opium House trader: ‘NOBLE HOUSE’ ??

INAPPROPRIATE and PATRONISING ??