Heiji Scroll: An Intertextual Analysis Of The Last Samurai

Heiji Scroll

The scene depicted in the first segment is surely about a battle that occurred in the ancient Japanese society. The people in the scroll are dressed up, ready for battle with thick armoury and weapons. However not everyone are riding on horses, this could be due to the ranking of the warriors. Therefore only the people of the highest ranks could receive a horse, and even so the colour of the horse is different among them, so perhaps it would be easier to distinguish who was the leader. This set of ranking which classifies warriors into groups, is still seen in militaries today, there is always a commander and soldiers who obey him similar to the system shown in the segment. The words written on the left, must be describing or stating something related to the event, but it looks like it is written in traditional Japanese and I don’t know how to read it, much less understand it, which limits me from completely knowing what the …show more content…
The second segment portrays a very different scene, it shows the warriors murdering a man. The artist had drawn the faces of the warriors, so it seems they held no emotions and the man’s face is in extreme pain and terror. This leads me to assume that the artist’s perception of the battle is bias towards the warriors, since it is displaying how fierce, strong and successful the warriors are, compared to the man they are killing, who is clearly not as powerful as the warriors. The man is also obviously from one of the highest social classes, because he is carrying a sword with him, a privilege only the people from the high ranks can have. However this assumption can’t be immediately taken as accurate, because like the first segment it is only a section of the Heiji Scroll, and there