The Message Behind Message: Ronin Warriors, Christianity and the Decline of the Samurai
Every time I rewatch the series and get to Message I feel the overwhelming desire to write a dissertation.
There’s just so much there.
It’s also an intensely Japanese movie, which seems redundant to say since it’s an anime about samurai, but Message really goes way deeper than any of the previous movies or the series as a whole and dives into events and contexts that really don’t translate all that well to the casual viewer, or even fans not familiar with anything beyond the pop culture conceptualization of samurai. Message really was a parting love letter to the Japanese fans about Japanese history and Japanese samurai.
So why, I can hear some of you asking, was there an obviously Christian/non-Japanese antagonist? And why does she end up so damn sympathetic?
Weeellll the Edo Period wasn’t the best time to be a Christian in Japan. The faith had been there since the Portuguese first arrived and it’s standing in Japan had never really been all that solid, but Edo was when shit really started to fall apart. Christian daimyo in Kyushu were getting massively wealthy by trading with Europe and that made the shogunate government really, really nervous so in 1612 they were ordered to give up their faith and lessen, if not cease trade entirely. Over the next few years, the push began to be made to isolate Japan from the world again– all leading up to the Closed Country Edict of 1635.
This was the world Suzunagi was raised in. I’ve personally never been able to tell if both of her parents were ethnically Japanese or not, if one of them was European, they certainly seemed to be acculturated to Japanese society– they both wear traditional Japanese clothing and from what we see of them don’t incorporate any other trappings of Western culture aside from Christianity. (Though Suzunagi is seen in Western style baby clothes and as a very young girl which makes me think they were at least somewhat tied to the trends of the West, or trading with Europe in some way.) Her father owned a theater, which was, as it is today, something of an upper class economic venture. At the very least she comes from an openly Christian family that likely profited by trade and cultural exchange with Europe at the time.
What more precisely pin-points when Suzunagi hails from in the Edo Period is the flashback to her death and the death of her mother during the Shimabara Rebellion: an uprising lead by persecuted, over-taxed and famine-stricken ronin and peasants in south-western Japan. The ships that are shown firing into the city and destroying the theater were Dutch warships commanded by the Tokogawa shougunate. In the wake of the uprising, close to 37,000 Christians were killed, particularly those who helped fund the rebellion. In the flashback to the execution of Suzunagi’s father, he is accused of putting the play of the armors on as an act of sedition– arguably a play that deals with the end of the world would have been suspicious, but it’s more than likely the play was simply an excuse and the real deciding factors in his “guilt” were his faith and his economic status. He would have sympathized with the rebels and had the means to fund or even supply them with armor and weapons. (What better way to do that than put on a show about magical samurai?)
Suzunagi lived and died during one of the greatest periods of unrest in the Edo Period. Even if she had survived her parents, she never would have lived to see the Closed Country Edict lifted– she would have grown old, trapped in a country that had taken the two most precious people in the world from her, and her opening opening poem reflects that Japan has never been a place that’s welcomed or understood her. “The sound of insects out of season/call to my spirit/ even the consoling moon with it’s light/ would not understand the significance of my rosary with it’s faint shine.” She’s telling the Japanese audience that their world could never be hers. Not then, and maybe even not now, in the early 90’s, when Christianity is more than common place.
Message revolves on reconciling the audience with a piece of history that is still at the core of what Japan is today: inexorably tethered to the Western world but still hanging on, with whatever strength it has left to their traditions and philosophies, a lot of which can seem irreconcilable with those of the Western world. Overlay that with the with story of Ronin Warriors– one that on the outset draws from the more digestible ideas of samurai and warrior culture and then dive bombs to a story that requires very specific knowledge of Japanese history and it’s no surprise Message was lost on a huge portion of the Western audience.
But it sure as hell wouldn’t have been lost on the intended Japanese audience. The idea that everyone in the story is lost somehow would have resonated very, very deeply with a culture that still ping-pongs back and forth with trying to mesh Eastern and Western philosophies and ideals. The cultural exchange going on in Message, particularly on a religious level is a complexity that continues to play out to this day in Japanese society. This was the animators way of bringing in the last bit of history that makes Ronin Warriors so consummately Japanese–until then there had been no mention of the West in the narrative (not counting Gaiden which really skirts the subject entirely and Kikoutei which was just….a mess.)
The isolation of the Edo period would also be seen as the last time Japan was without any significant Western influence, until the Treaty of Kanagawa and the arrival of Commodore Perry, which is often seen as the beginning of the end of samurai warrior culture in Japan. Message is even more fitting then, for dealing with the incursions and expulsion of Western influence, as the next time the West is seen in Japan, it is to mark the end of the samurai.
Suzunagi is a symbol of the last time the samurai had any cultural prominence in Japan, as well as a mark of shame on what that prominence was predicated on. The fact that Suzunagi ends the story as a sympathetic character is the narrative’s way of acknowledging that the final time of the samurai was built upon a foundation of rejecting all things Western to the point extreme and unnecessary violence– one that the Ronins refuse to perpetuate by trying to save Suzunagi and help her understand the history of the armor instead of using the power they still have within them to end her existence as a spirit as violently as her existence as a physical being was ended.
As she confronts each Ronin, each one refuses to destroy Suzunagi for their own reasons: Rowen because it doesn’t make sense and there’s obviously more going on, Cye because he would never kill (or as Suzunagi frames it, let someone die) just to keep the peaceful life he has, Kento because he actually does welcome being a Ronin again, Sage because he refuses fight entirely and therefore gains a sort of enlightenment through his virtue when he makes Suzunagi realize how lost she is, and finally Ryo, the only one who can give her a way to see the history of the armor. By allowing Suzunagi to see that she’s just one part of the armor’s history, like Luna in Gaiden or Nadia in Kikoutei, the Ronins are able to help Suzunagi contextualize her own death, something that as a confused, terrified child she could never do on her own. She uses her own faith as a guide, but even that isn’t enough, because shouldn’t she have just gone to heaven? As an early Catholic she would have been baptized, and believed that once washed of sin, surely a child could not have done something so heinous as to be denied that? As a part of the armor’s history she was trapped, like so many others, and only when she realized what was really keeping her bound to the Mortal Realm could she move on.
The significance of using the backdrop of the Shimabara Rebellion and the last period of Japanese Isolationism for the final story is that it brings the narrative full circle, and leaves the Ronins with new armor– the armor they always believed in, their virtued armor, free from any taint of evil, negative power. It’s armor that signifies what they always believed being a samurai really meant as opposed to armor that burdened them with the endless tug of war between the virtues and the power of the Netherworld– it’s the ideal that never existed in the Edo Period, where the beginning of the end of the samurai was marred with needless violence and bloodshed.
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