The untold part of the “Magnificent Seven” story

I suppose few would believe me, if I said the real event behind the story, “the Magnificent Seven”, the Hollywood classic from 1960, starring Yul Brynner, Steve McQueen, James Coburn, Charles Bronson, et al. (and just remade again in 2016, starring Denzel Washington Jr.) was the story of how the Imperial Japanese Army was born.

Those who already know that “the Magnificent Seven” is merely a Hollywood remake of a 1954 Kurosawa film, “the Seven Samurai” might find it plausible that the story would have Japanese roots that go much deeper than you see in either movie, but it still must sound like a long shot to connect it to the birth of the IJA.

To give you a short version of my reasoning, at the time the IJA was formed in 1871, only 7% of the population were Samurai, who were trained to fight and there was no way that such a tiny minority could defend Japan against the kind of threat the United States and Russia, etc posed to Japan. So it became obvious that the “Magnificent 7%” had to teach the other 93% how to fight like Samurai, and that is the whole story of the birth of the IJA in a nutshell. Add to that some side stories about the need to bring the two formerly strictly segregated social classes of farmers and Samurai together to fight as comrades and that is the film the “Seven Samurai” ergo “Magnificent Seven”, which sprinkles the social classes joining hands with a bit of romance.

And the way the 7 men conducted themselves in the story, taking the job for a pittance of only $20 for 6 weeks of hire, which even wouldn’t pay for their bullets and going into that village despite knowing they were grossly outnumbered by the bandits, just because they believed the farmers deserved justice: those are character sketches directly out of the “Imperial Rescript to Soldiers and Sailors”, issued to the IJA, when they were facing a moral crisis that threatened to tear the IJA apart after the rebellion of 1877.

These conclusions I drew, however, are only a byproduct of another research project I had for myself, so how truly it reflects the origins of the script of the movie is not really the point. Of the 3 writers, who worked on the original script, at least 2 were in the army or from an army family, so they should have been very aware of how their story paralleled that of the birth of the IJA. But even if that was how the story was born, they would not have admitted such a thing in interviews, as that could have seriously affected commercial prospects back in 1954, when such topics were taboo. So take it or leave it, I just wanted to point it out as a thought that came to me while researching my main theme.