The Delicious Villany of ‘Blue Eye Samurai's" Abijah Fowler

Image; Blue Spirit

Blue Eye Samurai (2023) is a combination of an anti-Mamma Mia (2008) and Kill Bill V.1 (2003). Our lead is Mizu (Maya Erskine), the child of an interracial "pairing." She is derogatorily referred to as a "white devil," an "Onryō" (i.e., a vengeful type of spirit), or worse, and goes on a mission to kill her father, whom she blames for her "cursed" existence. She has four contenders to track down and kill, as because of Japan’s closed borders, there were only four white men in the entire country when she was conceived. She now wants revenge and as a trained sword fighter, Mizu just might have the skills to accomplish her goal.

The antagonist for the first season — and one of her potential fathers — is Abijah Fowler (Kenneth Branagh), a weapons smuggler who wants to bend the Japanese Shogunate to his will. Fowler is an evil man, but he is self-aware of his evil, providing a fascinating foil for the viewer to observe how colonialism works in action.

A cruel, detached, transactional evil

We first meet Fowler cloaked in shadow. Casually reclined in a chair, he orders that Mizu be tailed (and killed) by a band of mercenaries called The Four Fangs. "Double their price and be done with it," he orders, very used to ending the lives around him, both from afar and up close. He spends the series killing, mangling, and destroying all those who displease him.

To Fowler, most everything is a one-sided transaction. "You pay money for a job you don't wanna think about, so you don't have to think about it," he tells his partner-in-crime, Heiji Shindo (Randall Park), while painting an illustration he will soon burn. "It's the whole point of money," he proclaims.

Fowler is driven by the belief that money entitles him to other people's time.

This belief in deals even applies to the divine. There is one telling scene where he enters a chapel and tries to bargain with God Himself. Christianity is something that he does not believe in. The chapel was only built because the architects of the Tanabe Island fortress assumed all white people were devout Christians, and it shows in how he negotiates:

“We’re not friends. I haven’t, uh, spoken to you in some time. Wouldn’t do you the dishonor of asking for a favor. But I believe there’s something I can do for you. They’ve been godless here as long as they’ve been…Heathens, surely, these Japanese…I plan to cut that shogun’s head from his shoulders and reimagine this nation more to my liking. Now, normal days, I’d imagine you're indifferent to that outcome…But I’ll tell you this, though. If this all goes my way, I will go ahead and take it for a sign that you tilted the wind to my back, and I will, in kind…I will send for your priests to bring them your Word and hand you a nation of souls. My thanks, if you see fit. It’s no matter to me either way.”

He is essentially upselling God to help him conquer a nation, and it's chilling.

Outside of this transactional logic for control, there seems to be little he believes in. He is not driven to take over the Shogunate out of any ideology or religion. The only things that guide him are resentment, entitlement, and a desire for personal enrichment.

He does not like being confined to a fortress on Tanabe Island, as he cannot leave the entire year except for his yearly pilgrimage to Kyoto to pay tribute to the Shogun. He believes that his smuggling operations have entitled him to gratitude from this country he is illegally staying in, telling Shindo: "The shogun lets us operate so long as he can deny I exist. Soon, he won't have that luxury."

His whole bid for power is one gigantic tantrum to leave Tanabe Island.

Yet, despite holding no values beyond his own supremacy, Fowler is self-aware. He comprehends how colonialism works in reality. "No one murders as much as the British," he says with a wry smirk. "It's our number one export." And he knows this because he is a victim of British imperialism. He describes to Shindo how he lived through an artificial famine created by the Tudors, who burned food crops in Ireland to squash a rebellion (presumably, he's talking about the Tyrone Rebellion).

With almost prophetic knowledge, he explains that if successful with his coup, he will have a profound impact on Japan's culture, saying in a monologue to the now-defeated shogunate:

“I couldn’t discover a new world, so I’m gonna reveal one. My new shogun will break open your welded borders. Open Japan wide to the West. We’ll flood your land with our people, our music, our shame, bread, and milk, until you think an ugly face like mine more beautiful than your own.”

This speech is poignant because he is right, of course. White Supremacy has done all of these things. As a tiny example, skin whitening creams remain popular throughout Asia, including Japan, even though such practices not only detrimentally affect people's self-esteem but arguably negatively impact their skin too. From beauty norms to religion, the shame and sensibilities of the West have been imprinted on everyone.

Fowler is saying the quiet part out loud about what the West will do (and, in the present, has already done) to Japan—a rare level of self-awareness among colonialism's villains. He is a baddie who knows precisely what destruction he is reaping.

A blue conclusion

In many ways, we have never recovered from the imperialism of this period. Western powers, driven by their superior weapons and supremacist ideologies, expanded around the world, not only taking and killing but also leaving devastating cultural imprints on the people they changed. Everything from the criminalization of homosexuality in numerous countries to conservative notions of gender can be traced to the norms forcefully established during this period — an era some would argue has never truly ended.

But before we got that self-hatred and shame, it began with men like Abijah Fowler, who spread the doctrine of white supremacy around the world because it benefited them.

With Blue Eye Samurai, we get a villain who is still evil but self-aware—a decolonialist's colonialist—one who can push aside the propaganda and flattery of the past and show us the horror just beneath it.