Category Archives: Japan

A Samurai in Time (侍タイムスリッパ―)

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  • 侍タイムスリッパ― (A Samurai in Time)

3/29/25 (Sat)

A samurai from the Aizu clan, which supports the shogun, is facing off against a member of the rebelling Choshu clan in what we now know was the dying days of the shogunate in the mid-19th century. Just as they pull out their swords, the samurai is struck by lightning. When he wakes up, he finds himself in a jidaigeki film studio in modern Japan.

As soon as I heard this much, I tuned out. I’m not a big fan of time travel comedies, which tend to rely on slapstick and fish-out-of-water setups; they rarely reach the dizzying heights of Back to the Future. Moreover, this was a small film directed by a rice farmer in Kyoto, who also acted as scenario writer, cinematographer, lighting co-designer, and editor. But as with One Cut of the Dead, it started as a small independent piece in a single theater, quietly built an audience on word of mouth, and has become a sleeper hit, earning an impressive ¥10,000m thus far in domestic sales on a tiny ¥26m (not a typo) budget. More amazingly, it won the Japan Academy Award for Best Film, the first ever for an independent work. So curiosity got the better of me. The producers must not have expected much from this since it’s already streaming on Amazon even as it continues in theaters despite opening last October.

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Demon Pond (夜叉ヶ池)

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  • 夜叉ヶ池 (Demon Pond)

3/2/25 (Sun)

Shinoda Masahiro’s 1979 adaptation of Izumi Kyoka’s 1913 stage fantasy. Shinoda, who had previously drawn on Bunraku theater for Double Suicide, here turns to Kabuki as his inspiration. While the stage show was not necessarily written for Kabuki, I saw a pitiful Kabuki version directed by and starring the great Tamasaburo way back in 2008 that I’d prefer to forget. The film, which also starred Tamasaburo, had not been seen for 42 years after its initial television broadcast, and I didn’t recognize the material until I started watching. I wouldn’t have bothered had I known. Continue reading →

Samurai III: Duel at Ganryu Island (宮本武蔵完結編 決闘巌流島)

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  • 宮本武蔵完結編 決闘巌流島 (Samurai III: Duel at Ganryu Island)

1/31/25 (Fri)

The final film (1956) in Inagaki’s Musashi trilogy (here are Parts 1 and 2) is by far the most straightforward, disposing of most pointless subplots as the story builds relentlessly from the start to the climactic duel with Sasaki Kojiro. The island, known in the film by its old moniker Funajima, was later renamed after Kojiro’s Ganryu fighting school due to the fame of the real-life battle in 1612. The trilogy thus stops at the midpoint in the career of the 28-year-old Musashi, who remained active as a warrior, artist, and author (most notably The Book of Five Rings) until his death in 1645.

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Samurai I: Musashi Miyamoto (宮本武蔵)

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  • 宮本武蔵 (Samurai I: Musashi Miyamoto)

1/26/25 (Sun), home

Inagaki Hiroshi’s 1954 remake of his now-lost wartime epic about the legendary swordsman, adapted from Eiji Yoshikawa’s popular 1930s novel. The novel is a highly romanticized look at the elusive Miyamoto’s life, where the known facts are thin on the ground, and has done much to establish his swashbuckling image. The film is the first in a trilogy, as made clear in the English title. It proved a huge hit both at home and abroad. It was honored by Hollywood at the Academy Awards as the year’s best foreign-language film. I don’t think it was even the best Japanese-language film that year (its competition included The Seven Samurai, Sansho the Bailiff, Chikamatsu Story, Late Chrysanthemums, and Blue Ribbon and Kinejun winner Twenty-Four Eyes), but no arguing with success.

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Love Never Dies (Tokyo)

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  • Love Never Dies (Tokyo)

1/17/25 (Fri), Tokyo

This show, a sequel of sorts to Phantom of the Opera, flopped big time in London and again in a significantly rewritten version in Australia; it never made it to New York. The revised show has had more success in Tokyo, where it has played on several occasions since 2015. The theater in this opening-night performance appeared nearly full. The lead roles are all double- or triple-cast. For the opening, veterans Ichimura Masachiku (now well in his 70s) and Hirahata Ayaka are back as the Phantom and Christine. Interestingly the show is not being produced by Gekidan Shiki, which has made the Japanese Phantom an immense success for the past three decades, but by the smaller Horipro.

The setting is said to be ten years after the original musical (though there’s some confusion in the timeframe). The Phantom, who was left for dead in the original, has somehow survived with the help of Madame Giry and Meg and has moved from the Paris Opera to Coney Island – a good metaphor for the musical’s own journey. Continue reading →

A House in the Quarter (五番町夕霧楼)

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  • 五番町夕霧楼 (A House in the Quarter)

1/14/25 (Tues)

Tasaka Tomotaka’s 1963 version of Minakami Tsutomu’s novel was being shown as part of a celebration of actress Sakuma Yoshiko, whose performance in this weepy transformed her virginal image and propelled her to stardom. It offers a rather sanitized look at a brothel full of happy hookers overseen by a kindhearted madam. While this was hardly Japan’s first work about brothels, its salacious marketing strategy and portrayal of sex, however mild by today’s standards, raised eyebrows at the time and (along with Imamura Shohei’s The Insect Woman) triggered an “erotica boom” in Japan’s film industry.

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The Ghost of Yotsuya Parts 1 & 2 (新釈四谷怪談)

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  • 新釈四谷怪談 Parts 1 & 2 (The Ghost of Yotsuya)

1/11/25 (Thurs)

Kinoshita’s two-part 1949 work is one of more than two dozen film versions of the evergreen Kabuki classic Yotsuya Kaidan since the silent era. The first eight minutes or so of Part 2 simply repeat the final minutes of the first half, so I assume that this was originally intended as a single film, broken up either for excessive length or just to make an extra buck (the second one opened in theaters just two weeks after the first). The original Kabuki version was also split into two days, mixed with scenes from Chushingura (it was a spinoff of the latter), so I suppose it follows tradition in a sense. In any case, the film could and should be reedited into a single 2.5-hour film and should certainly be seen that way.

The Japanese title is literally “Yotsuya Ghost Story: A New Interpretation”. New is right – for one thing, the ghost story has no ghosts. Oiwa appears only as a figment of the guilt-ridden Iemon’s imagination rather than an actual spirit as in the play. The film cleverly has Tanaka Kinuya playing both Oiwa and Oiwa’s sister Osode, so that the latter represents for Iemon a haunting manifestation of Oiwa after her murder.

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Destiny’s Son (斬る)

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  • 斬る (Destiny’s Son)

12/27/24 (Fri)

Misumi Kenji’s 1962 chambara flick inconveniently has the same Japanese title Kiru (meaning slash to death) as Okamoto Kihachi’s wild 1968 work, which managed to beat the earlier film to the obvious English choice Kill.

The film opens with a dynamic sequence in which a maidservant sneaks in and stabs the lord’s mistress to death “for the sake of the clan”. Skipping forward a year, we learn that the man chosen to execute her has fallen in love with her, and it is only after their son is born that he duly cuts her head off. He entrusts the child to a low-ranking samurai and becomes a monk, shutting himself off from the world entirely.

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Noh: Kagekiyo (景清)

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  • NOH: 景清 (Kagekiyo)

12/18/24 (Wed)

The great warrior Kagekiyo, devastated after the Heike loss, has blinded himself in despair and lives a desolate life as a recluse in a remote hut in Hyuga Province (today’s Miyazaki Prefecture). His worried daughter, refusing to believe rumors of his death, has set out with her retainer to find him. Continue reading →