Heart Of The Samurai Analysis

As today, international commerce relationships and cooperation among the nations seem to play an important role in their economies and overall well-being. With such great emphasis on trade, many nations adopt an open door policy in order to make a name for themselves. However, countries such as North Korea continue to isolate themselves from the rest of the world and forbid any contact with the exterior. Margi Preus deals with the topic of isolation from a perspective of a young Japanese boy named Manjiro in Heart of the Samurai. After the death of his father, he becomes the head of his family and therefore responsible for meeting their basic necessities. One day the sailboat in which Manjiro and his comrades travel shipwreck and end up on …show more content…
Preus suggest that in the past, xenophobia, the fear, and hatred towards foreigners, explains why many nations used to isolate themselves from the rest of the world. The protagonist of Heart of the Samurai, Manjiro becomes aware that the isolation of Japan has a direct impact on the way he perceives the world. To illustrate this, Manjiro has difficulty coping with the differences between American and Japanese cultures especially when he witnesses the cruel slaughter of whales by these blue-eyed barbarians. As a Buddhist, he knows “it [is] wrong to kill- not just people, but living creatures”; however, people in his village ask for forgiveness for taking the life of a fish, especially big creatures like whales (Peus, 2010). On the contrary, Americans seem too busy imagining how many barrels of oil they will add to their cargo to be worrying about the spirit of the whale or the ceremony they should do to “express gratitude to the [creature] for the gift of its life” (Preus, 2010). At first, Manjiro believes that their actions reinforce the idea that indeed foreigners are barbarians and Japanese should live in total isolation to prevent bad influences from corrupting its people. However, as time passes, he discovers the good and noble side of Americas and he is able to overcome the prejudices linked to the white …show more content…
For example, the writer utilize the feudal social hierarchy ruling in Japan to emphasize the misfortune of the low-rank people as Manjiro. According to this social structure, the class rank in which the people are born to cannot be changed by any circumstance; in other words, if they are born in that social class all their future generations will belong to the same cast. Manjiro struggles with the fact that because he descends from a peasant family he could never aspire to be a high- status warrior as a samurai. However, his way of thinking starts changing as he discovers that Americans believes that “with hard work and discipline, a man with hopes and dreams can see them come [true]” (Preus,