I shudder to think what new search phrases I may find on my stats page as a result of this title, but I can’t live in fear of perverted Googlers.

So the other day I saw Seven Samurai for the first time. It was, as promised, quite good. It was an entertaining three and a half hours, contained the only katana-fighting I’ve ever seen in a movie that seemed realistic, and was exceedingly pretty (except for the girl. Really, they should have cast the girl dressed as a boy (Shino) as the young samurai with the flowers on his clothes (Katsushiro), and vice versa, because Katsushiro was so pretty the soundtrack got all twittery when he was near; of course, maybe only a Japanese woman can make the horrible whine-shriek-sob ululation that Japanese women make in movies and anime when they get upset.).

However, partway through, as Kakuchiyo (the crazy guy) was bounding through the forest bandit-hunting, the bandit captain and some of his men stood on a low rise. As they turned to go, I snorted. That’s right, I’m admitting I make unladylike sounds. For lo, one of the bandit lieutenants was wearing a a helmet, a breastplate…and nothing else. Okay, a man-thong, but that barely counts. “Good thing they brought along Bondage Bandit!” quoth I.

“Er, that’s normal in Japan, honey,” replied wonko.

“Bondage bandits are normal? And yet the panty machines are what gets the press over here?”

He gave me a look, and explained that in Japan, nudity and partial nudity aren’t such a big deal. “It’s not like there were people running around naked all the time when I was there, but if a person forgot his pants, it wasn’t a big deal.” (Funny, I always thought if you forgot your pants you didn’t notice until you got to class. But then, perhaps my dreams have been ineffective at training me for real life.) This inspires me to ask the wonkofam whether it was during or after their sojourn in Japan that etmorpi inexplicably ran about pantsless in the Colonel’s back yard. Maybe the hidden motive was multiculturalism!

At any rate, Ryan’s point was carried, for no sooner had he explained why no one seemed to be pointing and laughing at this bandit for running around pantsless in a temperate forest with pointy things than our hero slayed the Bondage Bandit and took his armor…pantlessness included. Kakuchiyo spent the rest of the movie runnin’ about two cheeks to the wind. “Ack!” said I.

“I totally based Hiro on him,” said wonko. (Hiro is his character in Buffy the Vampire Slayer: the Role-Playing Game. Hear that, Internet? Ryan’s a big geek!) Off my look, he hedged, “Just the running around high school naked with a sword…”

While Kakuchiyo’s bare-bummed exploits do explain a lot about Ryan’s character – since they are both volatile, immature and inexplicable samurai-posers, I hardly credit his assertion that the similarity is only skin-deep – I still am utterly confused by them in general. How can you go into battle with only a piece of twisted cotton between your bottom birthday-suit and the spears, swords and arrows of the ravening horde? Don’t you get COLD?

The only thing I can conclude is that it adds to the warrior’s bragging rights — after all, you must be pretty brave to take on forty bandits in your underwear, especially if it’s a man-thong. I envision aging samurai swapping stories over cups of sake. “That Katsushiro…what a fighter! He took out five ninja sent to assassinate his lord…with a bamboo spatula!” “I heard he did it wearing nothing but a man-thong,” another grizzled warrior adds, and they all nod in respectful awe. Of course, it’s Katsushiro, so a one-eyed samurai marked with many scars adds, “I hear there were flowers on the thong.”