Tag: 1960s

The Heart of Hiroshima (愛と死の記録, Koreyoshi Kurahara, 1966)

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Sayuri Yoshinaga was the top female star at Nikkatsu in the mid-1960s. Together with her regular co-star Mitsuo Hamada, she starred in a series of hit youth romances such as The Mud-Spattered Pure Heart, The Sound of Waves, and Gazing at Love and Death which was Nikkatsu’s biggest box office success at the time. The Heart of Hiroshima (愛と死の記録, Ai to Shi no Kiroku) was intended as the latest in the series, but Mitsuo Hamada was attacked by a drunk customer at a bar shortly before filming after which he needed surgery to save his eyesight. Normally, the film would be postponed, but Nikkatsu was having financial difficulties at the time and refused to wait despite pleas from Yoshinaga and even from the actor who replaced him, Tetsuya Watari, who was a good friend of his. 

At the same time, Yoshinaga was now 21 years old and uncertain how long she could convincingly go on performing in Nikkatsu’s typical teen dramas. The studio was also worried about the possibility of losing their top star if she decided to move into more serious dramatic roles while they did not believe they had a suitable replacement. They were currently on bad terms with Ruriko Asaoka who ended her exclusive contract that year and moved to Ishihara Pro, and were worried that their other popular actresses such as Chieko Matsubara weren’t ready to take on that kind of responsibility. To try to convince Yoshinaga that the film would be more artistic in nature they hired New Wave director Koreyoshi Kurahara rather than studio stalwarts like Buichi Saito who’d directed Gazing at Love Death, but when she again tried to refuse insisting they wait for Hamada, they forced her hand by simply beginning to shoot the film on location in Hiroshima without her. Casting Tetsuya Watari may have also been an attempt to shake up the franchise as at that point he was known more for action and hadn’t really played this kind of very intense, romantic role before.

Though it follows a familiar pattern in exploring a doomed romance between a boy and a girl whose pure love is obstructed by social division, the film does deal with some quite controversial themes in touching on the discrimination faced by those who were affected by the atomic bomb. Yukio (Tetsuya Watari) lost his whole family in the blast and was taken in by Mr Iwai (Asao Sano) after being released from a long-term hospital stay. He’s doing well working at Mr Iwai’s print shop and has no current health worries when he has a meet cute with Kazue (Sayuri Yoshinaga) knocking into her on his bike and smashing some records she was carrying which he insists he compensate her for, though he doesn’t know she works in a record shop so it doesn’t really matter. After a comical misunderstanding in which Yukio mistakenly thinks Kazue is dating his friend, and she thinks he’s a creep who’s coming on to her while dating another girl from the shop, they fall in love and want to get married.

However, Yukio’s symptoms start to resurface and he asks himself if he really has a right to start a romantic relationship and get married, especially as there’s a risk any children he may have could be born with genetic abnormalities. Because of the stigma directed towards those who were affected by radiation from the bomb, he feels he can’t explain any of this to Kazue and continues to blow hot and cold, while she too is close to a young woman (Izumi Ashikawa) who seems to have had a romantic past with her brother but once tried to take her own life because she has a large radiation scar on her face. She has since resigned herself to living for her parents, suggesting that she will not marry. When Yukio eventually has to tell Kazue, he does it inside the dome at the Hiroshima Peace Memorial Park where she, of course, says it doesn’t matter and is only hurt and upset that he suggested they break their engagement.

The underlying suggestion is that those who were affected by the atomic bomb are being denied love by an unforgiving society that has avoided fully processing its traumatic past. Though it’s strongly suggested to her that Yukio will not survive his leukaemia, Kazue remains devoted to nursing to him but is also placed into an impossible position. She tells Yukio that she is already his wife and will stay with him, but is persuaded to leave by her mother and sister-in-law who tell her it’s “improper” for her to be with him overnight in the hospital despite the fact he’s in a communal ward with several other people there all the time as well as the medical staff. Her friend advises her to leave permanently, but then also calls her heartless knowing Yukio has no one else when Kazue begins to waver and suggests he may give in to the pressure given the emotional toll the whole experience is already taking on her. Nevertheless, she never really gives up on Yukio and is ultimately unable to reconcile herself to a world in which he would become “a man that no one could love”. The film ends on a rather bleak and ghostly note as a group of school children walk past the dome, suggesting that to some these comparatively recent events have already become history rather than a living memory and lingering trauma hanging over a rapidly changing society.

The Woman Who Touched Legs (足にさわった女, Yasuzo Masumura, 1960)

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Busho Sawada’s serialised novel had been adapted several times before with the first released shortly after its publication in 1926, but this “modernised” version directed by Yasuzo Masumura, The Woman Who Touched Legs (足にさわった女, Ashi ni Sawatta Onna), is tailor-made for the post-war era as the titular woman heads off in search of the old Japan only to learn that it no longer exists and what little of it remains is being sold off for golf courses and ever expanding American airbases whose noisy aircraft fly constantly overhead.

To that extent, Saya (Machiko Kyo) is an embodiment of aimless post-war youth. Her father was accused of being a spy and took his own life while her mother worked herself to death when she was just a child. Though she travels with a rather dim young man who refers to her as his older sister, they are not actually related by blood and seem to have belonged to the same community of street criminals in Osaka along with their “big sister” Haruko (Haruko Sugimura) who has since moved back to Atsugi which is Saya’s “hometown”. Since her parents’ deaths, she’s been obsessed with the idea of revenge and pickpocketing money to save for a giant memorial service to show the relatives who chased her family out of town how well she’s done for herself. But when she arrives, she can’t even find the place she’s looking for. A policeman flips through a series of ancient, handwritten ledgers looking for evidence of people with her surname and suggests they’ve all left town. Even the last one left is the wife of an adopted son who plans to move to Tokyo after their house is purchased by developers who want to build a golf course.

The golf course may be a symbol of Japan’s increasing prosperity, but the airbases seem to hint more at a sense of corruption and oppression. Saya’s “hometown” is a mythical concept that belongs to an idealised vision of a pastoral Japan before the war that she unconsciously wants to return to. Her mother spoke of a small settlement of perhaps 30 houses, a village society with a river running through it. The village has now, however, been swallowed by the airbase and, in fact, erased so that no one even quite remembers it. Saya is left feeling that she no longer has a hometown, and ironically asks policeman Kita to arrest her so she can go back to prison, which is, perhaps, where her heart truly lies. At least, it’s much quieter than here without any noisy aircraft flying overhead.

Nevertheless, Kita (Hajime Hana) is a fairly bumbling policeman and the film opens with what turns out to be part of a book set in a lawless Japan where people gamble, party, and openly sell guns on an ordinary train. Kita is currently on holiday, which he’s been forced to take even though he doesn’t really want to. He’s technically powerless for the moment, but continually complains that he’s not allowed to arrest Saya unless he catches her in the act of pickpocketing. It’s clear that the pair have feelings for each other it’s inconvenient to admit, and all this talk of “arrest” maybe more a kind of metaphor in which Saya secretly wants to be caught by Kita with the snapping of the handcuffs akin to the putting of a ring on a finger. The pair effectively lead each other on a merry dance with Saya ironically eventually chasing the policeman rather than the other way around.

The film does open rather salaciously with a closeup of a woman’s legs in fishnet tights followed by a kickline, and Machiko Kyo does indeed play up her sexy image to play the beautiful pickpocket who uses her body as a tool to mesmerise much to Haruko’s disapproval. Besides Kita, she’s followed by a rather louche writer (Eiji Funakoshi) who declares that he doesn’t need models, though evidently captivated by her, while declaring himself too successful and overworked. He doesn’t want more money, he just wants some free time and no one seems to want to let him have any, though he doesn’t exactly get a lot of writing done on this wild goose chase looking for Saya’s missing hometown. Absurd as it is, this unlikely rom-com between a beautiful pickpocket and bumbling policeman does at least end in a moment both of constraint and liberation as Saya finds herself content with her famous legs cuffed and Kita content to wear a different hat as they ride off on a decidedly unusual honeymoon.

Pressure of Guilt (白と黒, Hiromichi Horikawa, 1963)

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When a lawyer’s wife is found strangled at home, the police immediately arrest a “suspicious person” who is found to be carrying jewellery stolen from her room. Open and shut case, some might say, and prosecutor Ochiai (Keiju Kobayashi) agrees. But in reality nothing is really so black and white in the contemporary society of Hiromichi Horikawa’s crime drama, Pressure of Guilt (白と黒,, Shiro to Kuro). Perhaps ironically, the film opens in the same way as Tai Kato’s later I, the Executioner, with a man’s hands stretching around a piece of rope, and also features a law enforcement officer who is distracted from his duties by a bad case of piles he refuses to get treated.

Ochiai says his haemorrhoids are born of sitting down thinking too much, but the problem might be that he doesn’t think enough or that he suppresses thoughts which might prove inconvenient. There’s something that bothers him about the idea of Wakida (Hisashi Igawa) being the killer, but he shoves his doubts out of his mind and continues questioning him until he confesses. Some of this is born of prejudice. Wakida has a long criminal record mainly for burglary, and has been in and out of prison the whole of his adult life. Currently suffering from TB, he appears to be one of the young men who came to the city in search of work but found only exploitation and eventually had no option but to turn to crime. That he stole the jewellery is not in dispute, but Wakida continues to insist he didn’t kill Mrs Munakata (Koreya Senda). His lack of cooperation puzzles Ochiai, but it confuses him still more that Wakida keeps changing his story. He is, it seems, trying to tell him what he wants to hear, but finally becomes fed up with the whole thing after receiving a letter from his mother telling him to confess. She evidently thinks he did it too. Falling into hopelessness, Wakida declares that he no longer cares who did it and might as well be him because his life is essentially already over. In his condition he won’t last long in prison. There’s no prospect of turning his life around, either. So a death sentence won’t make any difference.

The funny thing is that it’s realising his fiancée must have figured out he did because she’s covering up for him that forces Hamano (Tatsuya Nakadai) into a confession. He’s plagued by guilt that Wakida might die for his crime, but not enough to exonerate him by coming forward. Nevertheless, he tries to talk Wakida round, asking why he confessed and if he was pressured by the prosecutors. The Japanese legal system places confessions above all else, but the issue is that Wakida’s confession is the only evidence that links him to the murder. Just because he stole the jewellery doesn’t mean he killed Mrs Munakata. Ironically enough, he’s defended by the victim’s husband (Koreya Senda), an anti-death penalty activist lawyer who agrees to represent him in part to vindicate his principles. Wakida only agrees to cooperate with Munakata and Hamano who is acting as his assistant when he confirms they’re not trying to help out of pity but only for their own self-interest. 

Yet Ochiai might have a point asking why Hamano is certain that Wakida didn’t do it, or why, on beginning to suspect him, he’s trying so hard to exonerate a man who was going to pay for his crime. It’s Hamano’s own suspiciousness that leads him to question his judgement about Wakida and ask himself if his thinking wasn’t too black and white and he should have investigated more thoroughly rather than pressuring Wakida into a confession and charging him. On realising he may have made a mistake, Ochiai puts the prosecution in a difficult position as his boss warns him of the potential reputational damage to the police and prosecutors if they’re shown to have made a mistake with the mild implication that, as he had assumed someone in Hamano’s position would want to, he should just keep quiet and let Wakida hang. 

Surprisingly, however, it only seems to improve the public’s view of the prosecution to be able to see them admit that they made a mistake and try to fix it rather than refuse to change their position. Mystery writer Seicho Matsumoto makes a cameo appearance as a TV pundit who says he admires Ochiai, while the film also uses a real TV show host to interview Ochiai boosting the sense of realism. As it turns out, there was more to the story than even Ochiai or Hamano thought, but still he declares that it’s better to be a fool than a hopeless idiot and that he was right to look for the truth even if it ended up biting him in the behind. The pressure of Hamano’s guilt, however, never really dissipates even as he struggles with himself, trying to find a way to save Wakida and avoid becoming a murderer twice over, without giving himself away. Nothing’s really that black and white after all, and this case wasn’t exactly open and shut, but the conviction that it had to be based on prejudice and circumstantial evidence might be the biggest crime at all no matter how it actually turned out.

Kyu-chan, Draw Your Sword (九ちゃん刀を抜いて, Masahiro Makino, 1963)

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Kyu Sakamoto was a hugely popular singing star in the 1960s best known internationally for the smash hit Ue wo Muite Aruko (Sukiyaki) which, somewhat incongruously, features in this jidaigeki comedy, Kyu-chan Draw Your Sword (九ちゃん刀を抜いて, Kyu-chan Katana wo Nuite), directed by one of the masters of the samurai movie, Masahiro Makino. Adapted from the novel by Ippei Okamoto, the film is essentially a vehicle for Sakamoto as indicated by the inclusion of his name in the title even though he plays a character called “Sangoro”.

The joke is that Sangoro is incredibly lazy and can hardly lift his head off the pillow while his ageing parents are struggling to feed themselves. If they don’t find a way to get him working soon, they’ll all starve to death but Sangoro seems incapable of understanding. The parents try to think up various jobs he could do without having to exert himself and eventually come up with Kyokaku, or “town knight”, a man about town of the Edo era somewhere between street tough and vigilante. In fact he even ends up meeting some legendary characters such as Banzuiin Chobe (Eitaro Shindo) who became a kind of Robin Hood figure in later literature standing up for the common man against the abuses of the samurai class. 

When he goes off to the city to become a Kyokaku because he figures starving to death would be too much effort, Sangoro’s father cautions him not to be too lazy to draw his sword even though it’s rusty and unlikely to do much damage. Sengoro does, however, take his ambition seriously and is keen to make a name for himself in Edo which he first does by becoming the blood brother of Gonbei (Chiyonosuke Azuma), one of Banzuiin’s men. Though his clumsy attempts to fight him don’t bode well for Sangoro’s career, Gonbei takes him on precisely because he’s fun to have around even if he is a bit useless and sometimes you need guys like that too. Introducing him to area’s top courtesan Takamado (Yoko Minamida), they hope to set the cat among the pigeons with a local gang that’s been harassing them led by the irritating Mizuno (Fumitake Omura) and Shirogoro (Koshiro Harada).

Though the film may be, in a way, a sort of satire poking fun at aimless post-war youth that lacks ambition in comparison to their parents’ generation who bore the brunt of wartime privation. Naive and childish, Sangoro is a well-meaning bumbler, but Takamado unexpectedly likes him precisely for these qualities. She hates men like Mizuno who are obsessed with proving their masculinity and finds it refreshing that Sangoro is not afraid to show his weakness. Just like Gonbei, she appreciates him not for his command of the sword or imposing air of authority, but simply because he’s an uncomplicated good person and fun to be around.

Mizuno and Shigoro are, by contrast, cruel and abusive Tokugawa vassals, who, it’s implied, have a habit of murdering sex workers during their New Year endurance tests. Sangoro is keen to save a young woman, Omitsu (Yumiko Kokonoe), after her father did him a favour and explained he needed 25 ryo to buy back her contract after she agreed to sacrifice herself to get the money for her mother’s medical treatment. Which is to say, she’s the opposite of Sangoro. It turns out that Takamado has a sad story of her own staged by Makino using kabuki-esque sets and effects to dramatise her flashback as she explains her samurai father took his own life after a prisoner he was watching disappeared. Though in another film this might lead to a violent confrontation challenging the evil samurai, in this version a bizarre misundersanding is revealed to have caused the death of Takamado’s father leading to another act of levelling as the supposed villain agrees to give them his secret recipe for pickles with an exclusive license to manufacture it for three years before it’s essentially made open source for the good of the people. Thus Sangoro essentially becomes a shopkeeper and releases both Omitsu and Takamado from their position as indentured sex workers, restoring both their birthright and their freedom basically by being nice and the right kind of righteous while Mizuno and Shigoro just end up embarrassed when all their posturing and obsession with their samurai status appears to mean little in a world in which the merchant has indeed become king.

Tough Guy (悪名, Tokuzo Tanaka, 1961)

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Starring a baby-faced Shintaro Katsu, Tokuzo Tanaka’s adaptation of a popular novel by Toko Kon, Tough Guy (悪名, Akumyo), went on to spawn a 17-film “Akumyo” or “Bad Reputation” series. Asakichi (Shintaro Katsu) is certainly the “tough guy” of the title and fulfilling a certain vision of post-war masculinity in this early Showa tale, yet getting a “bad reputation” is something he ultimately rejects in the film’s closing moments as he continues to straddle a line, not quite the “yakuza” he claims to hate but a noble rogue all the same. 

Asakichi is a small-town boy from rural Kawauchi. Despite the nobility which later comes to define his character, he’s disowned by his family after stealing a chicken from a yakuza-affiliated farmer to use in a cock fight. Originally, he skips town, with the farmer’s apparently married sister Kiyo who tells him that she’s pregnant though is probably not telling the truth. In any case, when they get to the next town he discovers she’s been engaging in sex work and breaks up with her, but Kiyo is only one element of his increasingly complicated love life. While staying in the town, Asakichi ends up developing a relationship with besotted former geisha Kotoito (Yaeko Mizutani) whom he eventually agrees to help rescue through another elopement. Meanwhile, he also becomes a “guest” of the local Yoshioka yakuza group and sworn brother of former enemy Sada.(Jiro Tamiya). 

The problem is that the Yoshioka gang is small potatoes in the town and does not have the resources to stand up against the hired thugs of the Matsushima red light district who eventually turn up to reclaim Kotoito. While she manages to escape on her own, Asakichi ends up randomly marrying a completely different woman, Okinu (Tamao Nakamura), who cannily makes him sign a contract saying they’re married before she’ll sleep with him. Nevertheless, when he hears that Kotoito came back to look for him and was recaptured, he springs into action and heads to Innoshima to battle agains the Silk Hat Boss and a wily yet fair-minded female yakuza who turns out to be the one really in charge of the island. 

Asakichi is, in many ways, an embodiment of a certain kind of masculinity in his determination to do what he sees as right even when others don’t agree with him. Consequently, his moral code seems inconsistent and difficult to define. He was fine with stealing the chicken, but doesn’t like the idea of cheating at gambling (though later does it to get money to rescue Kotoito) despite proving himself an expert at bluff and trickery. Similarly, he hates “yakuza” and refuses to become one, but is willing to stay as their “guest” and to help out when they need extra bodies for a fight. The only thing that certain is that he hates those who abuse their power to oppress the weak, which explains his objection to the yakuza, while otherwise doing what they claim to do but in reality do not in defending the interests of those who cannot defend themselves such as Kotoito who has been sold into the sex trade by a feckless father. 

Her position is mirrored in that of the female gang boss, Ito (Chieko Naniwa) , who eventually assumes control over Kotoito’s fate, an ice-cold and fearless leader who nevertheless respects Asakichi’s earnestness and brands him the tough guy of the title after he decides to return alone and accept punishment for freeing Kotoito. In giving them a week’s grace to have a kind of non-honeymoon (on which Okinu actually also comes along), she may not have expected the pair to return and is surprised that Asakichi insists on bringing the matter to a formal close. Eventually he defeats her by refusing to give in, insisting that they see which is stronger, his body or her cane, rather than begging for mercy and thereby accepting her authority. Having defeated her, he breaks the cane in two and throws it in the ocean to stand by his strength alone while crying out that he has won, yet suggesting that he does not want the kind of life that leads to a “bad reputation”. Tanaka makes fantastic use of lighting not least in the final shot of the shining sea that leaves Asakichi alone on the shore, a tiny figure in an expanding landscape.

Trailer (no subtitles)

Shinobi no mono 8: The Three Enemies (新書・忍びの者, Kazuo Ikehiro, 1966)

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The abiding constant of the Shinobi Mono series had been its continual forward motion, at least up until instalment seven which had backtracked to the death of Ieyasu. This eighth and final film (save for a further sequel released in 1970 starring Hiroki Matsukata replacing Raizo Ichikawa who had sadly passed away a couple of years earlier at the young age of 37) however reaches even further back into the mists of time setting itself a few years before the original trilogy had begun.

This time around, we follow young Kojiro (Raizo Ichikawa) on what is a more stereotypical tale of personal revenge albeit that one that eventually becomes embroiled in politics as he joins a ninja band that’s working for Takeda Shingen (Kenjiro Ishiyama). In slightly surprising turn of events, Ieyasu (Taketoshi Naito) turns out to be what passes for a good guy at least in contrast to Shingen’s duplicity though Ieyasu himself is still young and at the very beginning of his military career which is why unlike his older self he’s a little more proactive and willing to start a fight as well as finish one. In any case, Shingen thinks he’s an easy target largely because he simply hasn’t been in post long enough to have begun making connections with local lords, bribing them with gifts to secure their loyalty. 

In any case, Kojiro’s journey begins as something more like a martial arts film as he surpasses his current teacher and is told to find a man called Sadayu (Yunosuke Ito) in the mountains if wants to be up to gaining his revenge against the three men who killed his father while trying to steal his gunpowder. Perhaps there’s something a little ironic in the fact that Kojiro’s father was killed in a fight over what amounts to the substance of the future engineering a wholesale change in samurai warfare and edging towards the oppressive peace of the Tokugawa shogunate. But to get she revenge, Kojiro commits himself to learning true ninjutsu as the film demonstrates in a lengthy training montage. Unlike previous instalments, however, there is left emphasis place on the prohibition of emotion with the reason Kojiro cannot romance Sandayu’s adopted daughter down to her father’s whim forbidding her from marrying a ninja.

Apparently not the Sandayu of the earlier films despite the similarity of the name, this one has decided to side with Shingen because he’s mistakenly concluded that he is a “fair person who understands us ninja” when in reality he just using them and is no better than Nobunaga or Ieyasu. Shingen hires them to tunnel into a castle through the well, but is entirely indifferent to their complaints about safety leaving a Sandayu voiwing vengeance. The ninja, he says, generally serve themselves and are bound to no master but he seems to have thought Shingen was different only to be proved wrong once again.

Of course, Kojiro continues looking for the men who killed his father though they obviously guide him back towards conflict anyway. When he tracks some of them down, one remarks that all he did was finish him off which was an act of kindness to end his suffering not that he necessary approved of what his fallow gang members had done. Kojiro finds a surrogate father in Sadayu much as Goemon had though this time a slightly better one even if Sandayu is also a man with a lot on his conscience. Even more so than the other films, this one takes place in a largely lawless land too consumed with perpetual warfare to notice the starving and the desperate let alone the inherent corruption of the feudal era. The bad of ninjas has a rather scrappy quality, not quite as sleek as the Iga of previous films while also a little naive. Shooting more like a standard jidaigeki, Ikehiro uses relatively few ninja tricks generally sticking to smoke and blow tarts with a few shrunken battles. Nevertheless, the violence itself is surprisingly visceral beginning with unexpected severing of an arm and leading to a man getting stabbed in both eyes. Then again, the film ends in the characteristically upbeat way which has become somewhat familiar only this time Kojiro runs back towards romantic destiny now freed of his mission of vengeance and the oppressive ninja code. 

Shinobi no mono 7: Mist Saizo Strikes Back (忍びの者 新・霧隠才蔵, Kazuo Mori, 1966)

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After the initial trilogy, the Shinobi no Mono series has changed direction following instead another ronin, Saizo, opposed to the Tokugawa because the promised world of peace had no room for ninja. Nevertheless, as time moved on, the sixth instalment shifted again to follow Saizo’s son, Saisuke, who continued his father’s vendetta against the Tokugawa but largely found himself frustrated by the times in which he lived. Nevertheless, film seven picks back up with Saizo and takes place in 1616 shortly after the siege of Osaka. 

Having joined up with a band of other displaced ninja, it seems that Saizo (Raizo Ichikawa) has had the rather unusual charge of heart in that his experiences with Yukimura have apparently convinced him to devote himself to serving a lord rather than living wild and free as a ninja while he still has a burning desire to kill Ieyasu but mainly for personal revenge. This is partly in recognition that he’s realised the Tokugawa are here to stay and politically it won’t make any difference killing Ieyasu as one of his underlings will simply move up to take his place.

The other problem that he has is that there seems to be a mole and the other ninja have all settled on Akane (Shiho Fujimura) as the likely source of the treachery seeing as she is a “kunoichi” and therefore not a real ninja. Akane of course rejects this, but has also fallen in love with Saizo, which is of course against the ninja code. Saizo somewhat reinforces the sexist message by telling her to think of her pride and happiness as a woman, both things that a female ninja is expected to reject. Even so, he does not agree with his fellow ninja that she is the traitor and does not reject her affections in quite the way he usually does. Meanwhile, the gang is also in touch with another woman, Yayoi (Yuko Kusunoki), a maid to Lady Sen who also claims to be looking for revenge against the Tokugawa as her father was killed at Osaka Castle while her clan is also opposed to Ieyasu. 

Ever duplicitous, Ieyasu sends his own ninja against them. Led by Fuma Daijuro (Takahiro Tamura), the clan is apparently an ancient enemy of the Iga with whom they’ve long been waiting for a showdown only they don’t usually leave their home promise. The vendetta pushes the film back into regular jidaigeki tragedy, if one with a spy element as Saizo and the others try to figure out the identity of the mole while plotting to kill Ieyasu. The other ninja are somewhat blinded by their own preferences despite the prohibitions against human feeling though they do eventually admit their mistakes and apologise.

This one is perhaps a little nastier with the rival gang calling Akane a whore and threatening to rape her while the Tokugawa also admit they plan to tie up loose ends by knocking off the mole when they’re no one longer useful. Returning to the director’s chair, Kazuo Mori leans more towards a classic samurai aesthetic, but nevertheless stays close to the series’ nihilistic atmosphere which is perhaps deepened by the solidifying of the Tokugawa regime which makes the ninja’s existence more or less redundant. In a slightly meta motif, this film overlaps with the last of the original trilogy in which Goemon does in fact bring about Ieyasu’s death even if, as Ieyasu says, he was old and would have died soon anyway though now he now goes out at the top of his game having achieved all of his major life goals.

It does however adopt the slightly more fantastical trappings of the later films in its flaming shrunken and whirring fire whips not to mention the spear action from Fuma’s gang. The final showdown takes place amid copious snow echoing the coldness of the ninja lifestyle in which human emotions are largely forbidden while not even fellow ninja can really be trusted. Trusting only his mission, Saizo cuts a lonely figure and cannot seem to separate himself from it, running fast towards Edo and a confrontation with politics hoping to start a domino effect, resulting in the decline of the Tokugawa through a simple process of elimination.

Shinobi No Mono 6: The Last Iga Spy (忍びの者 伊賀屋敷, Kazuo Mori, 1965)

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Though there’s a clear divide between the first three films in the Shinobi no Mono series and those that followed, one thing that remained constant is that time passed. By the sixth instalment, we’re already in 1637 which is more than 50 years after the setting of the first film which began in 1575 at the tail end of the Warring States era. Hero of films four and five, Saizo had been desperate to return to the chaos of the pre-Seikgahara society in which the ninja could indeed hold sway though as he discovered the pax Tokugawa was definitely here to stay. 

Given that Saizo would now be an old man, the torch is passed to his son, Saisuke (Raizo Ichikawa), who like his father opposes the Tokugawa but also has a desire for revenge against the corrupt petty official who killed him during the battle of Shimabara which definitely sealed the Tokugawa victory. Ieyasu may be dead, but the regime has only become more oppressive while it seems there is still enough intrigue to provide work for the jobbing ninja only now it’s taking place largely within the palace in the de facto one party state of the feudal society. 

On the other hand, there is a degree of destabilisation and societal flux as the old class system struggles to adjust to a world of peace. The nation is filled with disenfranchised samurai and ronin who largely have no real options to support themselves other than becoming mercenaries or taking odd jobs from various lords in the hope of eventually being taken in as a permanent retainer. It’s these ronin that Saisuke, and the rebellion’s leader Yui Shosetsu (Mizuho Suzuki), hope to marshal in convincing them to rise up against Tokugawa oppression and regain at least a little of the freedom their immediate forebears enjoyed.

The evils of this system can be seen in an otherwise sympathetic lord’s insistence that his underling will have to take the blame and commit seppuku if his decision to help the rebels is discovered. As Saisuke later remarks, the era of human knowledge rather than weaponry is already here and battles are largely being fought over parlour games played in court. At this point, the shogun’s sudden demise leaving only an 11-year-old son has opened a power vacuum that allows unscrupulous lords, like Saisuke’s enemy Izu (Isao Yamagata), to exercise power vicariously. Izu has used it to enrich himself by exploiting desperate ronin and spending vast sums on personal projects, yet he proves himself a true politician in effortlessly covering up for the lord who tried to help the rebels doubtless knowing that he now has him in his pocket for life.

Seemingly returning to the low-key social principles of the first few films, Saisuke’s rebellion is also towards the inherently unfair system complaining that the battle for power is a monster that feeds on courage and will crush conscience like an insect. But as Izu says, times have changed and the struggle cannot be ended even if Saisuke argues that anything manmade can be dismantled. Saisuke has to admit that he’s been outplayed, the leader of the revolution also turns out to be corrupt, taking advantage of other people’s desperation and dissatisfaction to enrich himself while Izu’s plotting has left him largely blindfolded as a ninja clearly out of his depth in the new and confusing world of the Tokugawa hegemony. A powerful man is always looking for a victim, he reflects, perhaps echoing the plight of Goemon unwittingly manipulated by the duplicitous Sandayu while admittedly somewhat drunk on his own misplaced sense of self-confidence. 

Deviating a little from the realism of the series as a whole, the film shifts into more recognisably jidaigeki territory revolving around corrupt lords and an exploited populace even if in this case it’s the disenfranchised warrior class experiencing a moment of mass redundancy though apparently unwilling to resist. Peep holes behind noh masks add a note of quirky innovation to the backroom machinations of the Tokugawa regime while silent ninja battles and flaming shuriken add to the sense of noirish danger even as it becomes clear that the ninja is approaching a moment of eclipse, no longer quite necessary in a world of constant duplicity.  

Shinobi No Mono 5: Return of Mist Saizo (忍びの者 続・霧隠才蔵, Kazuo Ikehiro, 1964)

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At the end of the previous instalment, Saizo (Raizo Ichikawa) had escaped from the fall of Osaka Castle spiriting away Sanada Yukimura (Tomisaburo Wakayama) who, in contrast to what the history books say, did not die. The pair make their way towards Shimazu, where they are also not well disposed to Ieyasu (Eitaro Ozawa), but as Saizo is informed the Tokugawa clan will never die. Knocking off Nobunaga put an end to the Oda clan, getting rid of Hideyori took the Toyotomi out of the running, but killing Ieyasu will make little difference because another retainer will swiftly take his place.

As a reminder, that’s bad for Saizo because what he wanted was the chaos of the Warring States era back to restore the ninja to their previous status. Nevertheless, at the end of the previous film he claimed to have rediscovered a human heart in his devotion to Yukimura though it may of course be simply another ruse to meet an end. In any case, Ieyasu seems to be putting his ninjas to good use and is once again waiting it out apparently aware that Yukimura is alive and well in Shimazu.

Meanwhile, times are changing. Yukimura is convinced the future of warfare lies in firearms and whoever controls Tanegashima where the weapons are made will prove victorious. They think they can gain it by figuring out how they get access to high-quality iron when trading with anyone outside of Portugal is illegal and the Portuguese don’t have any. It’s access to foreign trade which is becoming a crunch issue as Ieyasu tries to solidify his power, later giving a deathbed order to ban Christianity to stop European merchants taking over the country. Saizo travels to Tanegashima to investigate and figures out that the secret is they’re trading with China, which is pretty good blackmail material, but also encounters two sisters who turn out to be the orphaned daughters of a Tokugawa ninja with vengeance on their mind.

In a surprising turn of events, it turns out that his main adversary is Hanzo Hattori (Saburo Date) but the fact he keeps outsmarting him eventually convinces Ieyasu that the ninja have outlived their usefulness. Hanzo becomes determined to kill Saizo to restore his honour, filling the palace with various ninja traps though unlike Goemon Saizo seems to be one step ahead of them. This lengthy final sequence is played in near total silence, and ironically finds Goemon just waiting, after dispatching several of Hanzo’s men, to see if his poison dart has taken effect and Ieyasu is on his way out. Only in the end Ieyasu just laughs at him. He’s 75. Saizo’s gone to too much effort when he could have just waited it out. Ieyasu has already achieved everything he wanted to. His control over Japan is secured given he’s just been appointed chancellor. He can quite literally die happy because nothing matters to him anymore. A title card informs us that when Ieyasu did in fact die, no one really cared. The Tokugawa peace continued. 

Here, once again, the Ninja too are powerless victims of fate despite their constant machinations. Yukimura tells Saizo to live and be human, advice he gives to the sisters in Tanegashima but does not take for himself staking everything on his revenge against Ieyasu which is, as he points out, pointless for Ieyasu was at death’s door anyway and his demise changed nothing. In his first of two entries in the series, Kazuo Ikehiro crafts some impressive set pieces beginning with a mist-bound underwater battle as Saizo and Yukimura make their escape by water to an epic flaming shuriken battle, though this time around the deaths are noticeably visceral. Men are drowned, stabbed, or caught on wooden spikes. Those who do not obey the ninja code are stabbed and pushed off cliffs while once again emotion is a weakness that brings about nothing more than death. Ikehiro’s frequent use of slow dissolves adds to the dreamlike feel of Saizo’s shadow existence even as the ninja themselves seem to be on the point of eclipse for what lies ahead for them in a world of peace in which there is no longer any need for stealth?

Shinobi no Mono 4: Siege (忍びの者 霧隠才蔵, Tokuzo Tanaka, 1964)

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When he began what would become the Shinobi no Mono series, Satsuo Yamamoto had wanted to put a more realistic spin on the ninja movie, shifting from the fantasy-esque wuxia with which the genre had been associated since the silent days to something that was largely devoid of romanticism. In the films he directed, the ninja are powerless manipulators doomed to live unhappy lives defined by a cruel and heartless code. Though still based on the same novel, the third film began to compromise that vision in the hero’s miraculous escape from certain death, ending on a note of ambivalent positivity in which Goemon declines the offer to join Ieyasu and instead walks out into independent freedom. 

The first three films had covered all of the action in Tomoyoshi Murayama’s serialised novel, and so the following four are based on original ideas by screenwriter Hajime Takaiwa save for episode six which is scripted by Kei Hattori and Kinya Naoi. Many of the same actors appear but in different roles while the action has moved on 15 years, skipping ahead from the unseen battle of Sekigahara to the siege of Osaka and the end of the Toyotomi. Raizo Ichikawa stars as another displaced Iga ninja nominally in the service of the Toyotomi but secretly longing to bump off Ieyasu not for reasons of revenge but because there is no place for ninja in his new and peaceful society. If they’re able to unseat him, they assume the situation will revert to the civil war society with the effete Hideyori (Junichiro Narita) too ineffective to assume control over the nascent nation. 

It has to be said, this version of events has rather misogynistic overtones with frequent speeches from Sanada Yukimura (Tomisaburo Wakayama) avowing that it’s all Lady’s Yodo’s (Otome Tsukimiya) fault for giving her son bad advice that he is too naive to know not to follow. In negotiating to end the siege at Osaka castle, Yukimura had advised it was better to strike back against Ieyasu and kill him as soon as possible, but Lady Yodo vetoed it and insisted she and her son remain locked up in relative safety. His conviction is somewhat born out seeing as Ieyasu had deliberately targeted the area of the castle where they assumed she was staying in order to further frighten her.

Nevertheless, he’s astute in realising it was all essentially a ruse and part of Ieyasu’s plan to force the Toyotomi into submission. The attack on the castle was only ever intended to engineer a peace treaty which Ieasyu himself presented and forced Hideyori to sign. Then again, there’s some strange symmetry in play. When Saizo enters the castle in an attempt to assassinate Ieyasu he mangles to trick him into killing his double instead, then when Ieyasu’s ninja try to assassinate Yukimura after following Saizo having known he would pretend to be dead and dig himself out of his own grave they also kill his double much to Ieyasu’s consternation. 

It’s this similarity that Saizo hints at when he pities a retainer of Ieyasu’s explaining that Nobunaga and Hideyoshi had tried to eliminate them but they survived while Ieyasu now wants to use them for his own ends but will likely do the same when they are no longer necessary to him. Thus what they want is a kind of chaos, desperate to assassinate Ieyasu to return to the world in which the ninja are able to influence events from the shadows. Even so his conviction is apparently shaken. As in the previous series, Saizo gains a love interest, Lady Akane (Midori Isomura), who has become a sex worker as an apparent act of self-harm after being raped by Tokugawa soldiers during the fall of Osaka castle. But as we’ve been repeatedly told, a ninja’s heart lies under the blade. Born in darkness, they shall die in darkness and are not permitted to fall in love. Thus Saizo rejects her affections, but eventually declares himself corrupted by wanting to die alongside Yukimura as a loyal soldier. The in-film lore would have us believe that Yukimura did not in fact die during the final assault but was spirited away by Saizo to plot Ieyasu’s downfall in the shadows. 

Directed by Tokuzo Tanaka in his only instalment in the series, the film is shot more like a conventional jidaigeki but returns something of the fantasy aesthetic to the ninja as they somersault through the forest. Saizo’s surname effectively means “hidden in the mist”, which is partly ironic seeing as Akane also describes her rape as being overcome by a thick fog, but is also symbolic of his frequent use of smoke bombs as a disappearing trick which again undermines the sense of realism with which the series began. Yukimura is fond of declaring that the clock cannot be turned back, a sentiment echoed by Akane and emphasising the sense of melancholy fatalism that cannot be avoided in a historical drama in which the outcome is already very well known, imbuing Tanaka’s take with the sense of elegy and legend Yamamoto had so deliberately rejected.