The way Hollywood tells it, The Last Samurai as portrayed by Tom Cruise was a US mercenary. But the real-life contender for the role was a French artillery officer whose exploits were every bit a match for Hollywood’s fiction. Many commentators have pointed out similarities between Nathan Algren, Cruise’s character in Edward Zwick’s film and the story of Captain Jules Brunet.Brunet was sent to Japan as part of a French mission to help modernise the Army of the Tokugawa Shogunate, or hereditary military dictatorship, during the 1868 Meiji restoration of the Emperor’s primacy.Like Algren, Brunet fought the Emperor’s troops against the background of civil war, betrayal and changes of allegiance. And, also like him, he emerged, safe and sound from the bloody last stand of his samurai ‘‘cadets’’ and brothers-in-arms whose raison d’etre was doomed by the very modernisation he represented.But perhaps, Brunet helped found the short-lived ‘Ezo Republic’ on Japan’s northern Hokkaido Island, the last redoubt of the supporters of the former Shogun Yoshinobu Tokugawa. Little-known in France and in Japan, Brunet, born in 1838, was a product of the Elite Ecole Polytechnique, a fine soldier and a talented artist. He was ‘‘intelligent, distinguished, alert and gifted when it comes to sketching.Before being sent to Japan in 1867 as part of France’s military mission after the long-closed country started to open up, Brunet was part of an ill-fated expeditionary force in Mexico. The mission was responsible for setting up and training seven infantry regiments, a cavalry battalion and four artillery regiments for the Shogun’s army, a total of 10,000 men. British and US officers were meanwhile working with ‘‘the party which is hostile to French interests,’’ as Brunet was later to put it in a letter — in other words the forces of Emperor Meiji.When the defeated Shogun ceded power in late 1867, the French mission had to leave Japan. But some mission members stayed behind to organise the resistance of the ‘‘Bakugun’’ Army — the Samurais loyal to Tokugawa. Listed as a deserter, Brunet wrote to France’s Napoleon III that he had decided to ‘‘serve the cause of France in this country or die in the process.’’But starting with the breaking up of its Flotilla in a storm in late 1868, the ex-Shogun’s forces suffered one setback after another. Brunet reached the Port of Hakodate on Ezo, as Hokkaido was then known, with Admiral Takeaki Enomoto and a handful of other French officers, where Enomoto was elected president of the ‘‘Independant Republic of Ezo.’’ — (PTI)
