TRAVEL
Hokkaido, Japan: Abashiri Prison
A Photo Essay of ‘Japan’s Alcatraz’
Have you ever watched Edward Zwick’s entertaining, historically-inspired movie The Last Samurai? Then you’ve seen Hollywood’s somewhat romanticized take on Japan’s tumultuous transformation from a closed, traditional samurai culture to a rapidly opening and modernizing empirical state. In the movie, Tom Cruise plays an American cavalry officer who is recruited to help westernize the Japanese military. Instead, of course, this being a Hollywood movie and a Tom Cruise vehicle, he joins with the rebel samurai who willingly sacrifice themselves in a re-enactment of the real-life Satsuma rebellion of 1877 — along with other historical battles.
At stake: Japan’s traditional Tokugawa samurai state versus the imperial restoration.
Spoiler alert: after the movie and the popcorn, you may have asked yourself, “What happened to all the political dissidents who never accepted the Meiji Restoration and the end of the samurai era in Japan?”
Or, on a deeper dive, if you happen to know 1965’s Abashiri Bangaichi, the first of the popular yakuza movies in Japan, then you’re familiar with dramatized scenes of life in Japan’s most notorious prison.
