The Blogfathers

I don’t have a lot of real-life role models for fatherhood. Only one of my friends had a baby before me, but he’s a hippie with a billy-goat beard who lives in a log cabin in the woods built in one day by a troupe of Amish carpenters. Most of my male friends live in Athens, Georgia, and they are either busy (1) dating a hot woman who is 3-feet tall; (2) playing “percussion” in a 26-member indie rock band; or (3) protesting the Bush administration so much that there is a van full of NSA agents parked outside their house listening to every word said inside. So they are too busy doing all that and getting drunk and high all the time to have kids. Plus, most of the dads I know here in San Francisco are like a hundred years old and wear Façonnable and listen to the Kronos Quartet.

Thus, I have been forced to the internet to meet quasi-real life dads like my fellow blogfathers and those guys I hope we never have to play in softball. And the internet has provided me with a community of cool dads that the real world just couldn’t. But before my wife gave birth, I mostly relied on television and movies to teach me about fatherhood, and frankly that didn’t do shit to prepare me for this.

So, as a regular feature here at the blogfathers, I will be profiling various fictional fathers who (I thought) could teach me a thing or two about parenting and what fatherhood would actually be like. This week: Itto Ogama: a father who is deadly serious about “bring your child to work” day.   

One of the most oft-repeated phrases around our apartment is, “Goddamn it Dutch! Not another fucking samurai movie!” That’s my wife, a woman who doesn’t like to listen to the guttural Japanese of Toshiro Mifune or the shrieking that comes from limbs severed by swords when she passes out on the couch at 10:00 p.m. This usually ends with me practicing really gay-looking restrained karate moves on her ass. Why? Because samurai, like ninjas, are awesome. A while ago I read this book called The Heike Story about quarreling clans of samurai in twelfth-century Kyoto, and it inspired me to burn through as many samurai movies as I could in the following weeks. I burned through Kurosawa, Okamoto, and Hiroshi Ingaki quickly. Then I started watching less critically-acclaimed movies, the stylized kind where blood shoots out from slashed arteries like a fire hose. I liked the ones where the samurai had some kind of handicap. In the Zatoichi series, the samurai protagonist is blind. But it is in the series featuring Itto Ogami, the Shogun’s decapitator, that I found my first worthy profile in fictional fatherhood: Lone Wolf and Cub.

Lone Wolf and Cub was a popular and long-running Japanese manga comic before it was a series of movies made in the early 1970s starring total badass Tomisaburo Wakayama. Some critics considered it to be the greatest manga of all time. It chronicles the story of Itto Ogami, the fierce and proud samurai chosen by the Shogun to hack the heads off of feudal lords ordered to commit seppuku. This, apparently, was an honorable position, because the evil Yagyu Clan gets jealous and sends ninjas to kill him at his home. Instead they kill his wife and her maidservants, leaving his infant son, Daigoro crying at his dead mother’s breast.

This is the defining moment for the whole series: you know this dude is going to kick some major ass and get his revenge. But the ladies whose job it was take care of the male fruit of his loins while he was off choppin’ heads are dead. What can a ronin do?

Well, he proceeds to enact a ceremony that is like a macabre twist on the first-birthday Korean Toljabee: he asks his son to choose between the ball and the sword he has set before him. In words that anyone who loved early Wu-Tang Clan records can probably recite from heart, Ogami says, “Choose the sword, and you will join me. Choose the ball, and you join your mother… in death.”

Of course the kid chooses the sword, and Ogami has this look in his eye like, “Goddamn, now all that ass kicking is going to be a whole lot harder.” But here’s the key: having an infant to tote around doesn’t keep Ogami from kicking ass. In fact, it just makes him that much more of a badass that he can go from town to town, accepting 500 pieces of gold to kill anyone that his customers want him to kill, plus hundreds of ninjas and samurai sent by the enemy clans, and he does it the entire time WHILE PUSHING AROUND HIS KID IN A PRAM.

But this is no ordinary pram. It makes a Fugaboo look like a mildew-stained Graco half buried in a crack house lawn. If greg at daddytypes can build an empire catering to gearhead dad sensibilities by reviewing the features of a sorta-gay-looking low country stroller, imagine what he could do if some company had the balls to actually manufacture the carriage that the Lone Wolf pushes his cub around in from town to town. The thing has more gadgets and gizmos than James Bond’s Aston Martin DB 5. If he gets attacked by three dozen female ninjas, Ogami can throw his sword through the neck of one of them and then bust out with like ten spears from the pram to throw at and grapple with the rest. If the three guys who fight with the iron claw and the mailed fist and the spiked bat come at you, he can just push the cart at them because it has wheels with those Ben Hur spikes that come out and slice the legs off anyone in their way. If the Yagyus hire a bunch of artillery to fire mortars at the Lone Wolf and his stroller, he just turns it toward them and tells his son to fire off enough fucking mini-cannons hidden in the front to sink the HMS Victory. Sure it’s made out of wood, but there weren’t too many Teutonic engineers with aubergine-colored eyeglass frames familiar with tubular aluminum and suspension dynamics in seventeenth-century Edo.

Ogami’s use of his infant son as a battle squire is somewhat morally questionable, but always cute. First of all, check out the haircuts they gave babies in medieval Japan. If I could trust the bitches down at Supercuts to get that right I would so get my kid that cut. Daigoro is always willing to toss his pop a new sword or whip a spear out from the pram’s handle if necessary. In the climactic battle scene of the first movie, Lone Wolf and Cub: Sword of Vengeance, Ogami fights a traditional duel. In samurai movies, that means two guys run at each other with swords and jump really high and one gets slashed to death. Witnesses speculate that Ogami will lose, because he is running into the sunlight whereas his opponent has the sun at his back. Right at the moment when the two lift their swords to strike, however, Ogami lowers his head, revealing tiny Daigoro strapped to his back with a big mirror stuck on his forehead. The reflected sunlight temporarily blinds his opponent, who Ogami then kills effortlessly.

Hey, it’s not one of his finest moments of parenting, but it teaches the kid teamwork, right?

As in any Japanese film, there are tender moments more subtle than we American viewers might be used to. We are accustomed to Bruce Willis saying goodbye to his daughter Liv Tyler before rocketing off to space to blow up a meteor, with the ultimate valediction taking place before a stunning technicolor sunset with windblown hair and an Aerosmith soundtrack. But sometimes Ogami walks with Daigoro in his arms, and the camera focuses on his fist as it gently squeezes his son’s leg, a gesture of paternal love and devotion shining through the rough exterior of a ronin torn by his abandonment of the bushido and who has left thousands of dead bodies in his wake. One lesson that many of Ogami’s enemies learn far too late is don’t mess with a badass ronin’s infant son. In many of the later movies, the climactic scenes involve Ogami killing literally entire armies. If anyone messes with Daigoro, they’re the first to start squirting blood like a lawn sprinkler.     

What lessons have I learned about fatherhood from the Lone Wolf and Cub movies? If a group of ninja assassins attack you in the forest, take your baby out before you push your heavily armed baby cart directly into their ranks. Well, apparently also you can take care of your baby and still be the same badass you were before. And in some cases, having a kid makes you even more of a badass, because you’ve got to do everything you would ordinarily do, plus take care of this little creature who looks up to you and needs you to watch out for it. Now you might think that sounds trite or conclusory, and you’d be right. But insulated from other parents for so long, I was stunned by how easy it is for parents to lose their badassness and become, well, parents. One day you’re smoking pot in a bare apartment you can barely afford, living from one rock show to the next and then suddenly you’re picking out Dwell crib bedding to match the drapes in the nursery. While some of this is inevitable, hyperbolized examples of samurai fathers do help kick me in the ass and remind me to keep it real.

[That’s it for this week’s profile in fictional fatherhood. A reader of my other blog (sweet juniper) just told me about these samurai musicals from the 1930s. I’ll let you know if I glean any parenting advice from anything that sounds that awesome.]

Spring Cleaning, Male Bondsmen, Wearing It, Swag, Action, Rides, Samurai, Ninjas