There's a line in the film 13 Assassins that I think really fits this scene: "You Samurai are useless, and you're even more useless when you congregate in large numbers."
They all are afraid of him because he didn’t only beat all the samurai main players in that house, he just took their top knots. Showing his true skill, and that none of those samurai are willing to show their faces and are feigning sickness and injury to not shame themselves. He didn’t just kill them, he left them alive to live with the aftermath that’s gonna come, the whole country will hear how the most noble and skilled warriors were bested by one man. How they made a man who was just trying to earn some money for his sick and dying family, and they made him commit seppuku with a bamboo sword and didn’t even give him the chance to explain his situation. You really feel for his son in law and grand son and daughter. This movie was great.
After this movie I lost faith in samurais 😢. Today's military officers also say that they are noble and honor their warrior's status but in fact I see all of them are corrupt and careerists.
Personally, I would have to charge them despite the muskets. I have to go out in the heat of it. One of my favorite poems is "If we must die." However, I understand and respect the Samurai tradition.
Modern cinema has ruined this scene for me. The perfectly paced tension, the defensive stances used to keep a large crowd at bay, the samurai that refuse to attack all at once out of fear of being the next one to die, the slow burn delivered via "death by 1,000 cuts"... All that my ape brain can process is how slowly this scene gets dragged out for the sake of realism, and I hate myself for that.
