Tag: Tomisaburo Wakayama

Silk Hat Boss (シルクハットの大親分, Norifumi Suzuki, 1970)

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A true patriot squares off against a series of duplicitous nationalists in Norifumi Suzuki’s Red Peony Gambler spin-off, Silk Hat Boss (シルクハットの大親分, Silk Hat no Oooyabun) starring Tomisaburo Wakayama as top hat-wearing yakuza Komatora. Set in the world of 1905 in which Japan had just emerged victorious from the Russo-Japanese war, the film on one level attacks the rising militarism of late Meiji in which corrupt and arrogant military officers collude with venal yakuza to further the course of empire while lining their own pockets, but stops short of rejecting it outright.

Kumatora is about to return home in glory after taking his guys to the front to defeat the Russians and is expecting to receive a hero’s welcome when the boat docks in Kobe. Unfortunately, he is met only by his sister and an underling, Hansuke, who he immediately berates for the affront of having grown a magnificent moustache in his absence which is even bigger than his own. It turns out that evil yakuza rival Chindai has stolen all the credit for the work done by those like Kumatora and the ordinary foot soldiers who lost their lives defending Japan’s interests. 

Chindai has teamed up with corrupt military officer Kito who wastes no time throwing his weight around. Having fallen her during a brawl but been rebuffed, Kumatora searches for Osakan geisha Choko only to find her running away after Kito tried to assault her. Running around in his underwear, Kito rudely demands that Kumatora “return” Choko to him, but true to form Kumatora only tells him that he’s being unreasonable and the choice of whether to return or not belongs to Choko herself. Something similar occurs when Kumatora visits the family of a fallen comrade and discovers that his wife has been forced into sex work while the daughter, Satsuki, is seriously ill. Noticing the pock marks on her face which remind him of his own, Kumatora immediately decides to take the girl to a hospital at his own expense and, in fact, throws Kita out of a rickshaw in which he was riding because the girl’s need is greater. 

Kumatora is, perhaps unexpectedly, a great defender of the rights of women. After taking his guys to a brothel, he finds out that the girl assigned to him is only 14 and ends up cleaning her ears and singing a lullaby. Eventually he discovers that Chindai and Kita have been rounding up sex workers and tricking other women into sexual slavery with the intention of trafficking them and resolves to free all of them while looking for Satsuki’s mother to let her know she no longer needs to work in the red light district. Of course, Kumatora is very much in the throes of his unrequited love for Red Peony Gambler Oryu (Junko Fuji), running back to his lodgings mistakenly thinking she’s in town, but partially rejects Choko’s affections after she becomes besotted with him because he thinks it’s unfair to ask a woman to become the wife of a yakuza who might after all die any day.

Kumatora is also a fierce defender of his men, ceremoniously handing each of them a condom at the brothel and reminding them to stay safe before they head off with the women whom he has already rather comically inspected. He is very clear that the victory over the Russians was bought with the lives of ordinary workers who should be fairly rewarded with their share of the glory rather than allowing men like Chindai to exploit their heroism for their own gain. Kumatora finds an ally in good general Matsumoto who hands him a letter he can’t read from a general he admired who calls him the ideal Japanese man for his bravery and fighting spirit, but is as expected targeted by Kito and Chindai who are only interested in lining their own pockets. What it boils down to is that Kumatora is good because his patriotism is genuine while Kito and Chinda are bad because their nationalism is self-serving which does quite uncomfortably suggest that imperialism itself is not an issue only how it’s progressed. 

In any case, the corrupt officers are finally dealt a crushing blow by a resurgent Kumatora along with a little help from Oryu herself who eventually turns up to save the day in the bloody showdown which ends the film. Slightly absurdist in tone, the Silk Hat Boss has its fair share of offbeat humour beginning with Kumatora wearing his top hat in the bath and jokingly comparing various generals’ penis sizes to that of a loofah but is undeniably endearing in its hero’s guileless goodness. 

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. 

Shinobi no Mono 2: Vengeance (続・忍びの者, Satsuo Yamamoto, 1963)

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Though Goemon might have thought himself free of his ninja past at the conclusion of the first film, he was unfortunately mistaken. Shinobi no Mono 2: Vengeance (続・忍びの者, Zoku Shinobi no Mono) sees him trying to live quietly with Maki and their son in a cabin in the woods, but Nobunaga is more powerful than ever. He’s wiped out the Iga ninja and is currently hunting down stragglers. Try as he might, what Goemon discovers the impossibility of living outside of the chaos of the feudal era. 

After he’s caught and suffers a family tragedy, Goemon and Maki (Shiho Fujimura) move to her home village in Saiga which is the last refuge of the Ikko rebels who oppose Nobunaga. This time around, the film, based on the novel by Tomoyoshi Murayama, even more depicts the ninja as backstage actors silently shuffling history into place. Thus Goemon takes advantage of a rift between the steady Mitsuhide (So Yamamura) and loose cannon Nobunaga (Tomisabur0 Wakayama) in an attempt to push him into rebellion. But what he may discover is that even with one tyrant gone, another will soon rise in its place. Hideyoshi (Eijiro Tono) seems to be forever lurking in the background, while Ieyasu makes a few experiences explaining that he intends to wait it out, allowing his rivals to destroy each other so he can swoop down and snatch the throne at minimal cost. 

But he too has his ninja such as the legendary Hanzo Hattori (Saburo Date) who arrives to complicate the intrigue and tempt Goemon away from his attempts to live a normal life. Interestingly enough, one of the factors leading to Nobunaga’s downfall is his disregard for Buddhism in frequently burning temples associated with ninja along with everyone inside them. Burning with a desire for vengeance, Goemon describes Nobunaga as inhuman, a demon, though he also embodies the vagaries of the feudal era in which no one is really free. Nobunaga has built a large castle estate for himself while ordinary people continue to suffer under onerous demands from local lords. Hideyoshi has also done something similar in an attempt to bolster his status and prepare for his own inevitable bid for national hegemony. 

The implication is that though the constant warfare of the Sengoku era is of course bad for farmers in particular, the political machinations which revolve around the egos of three men are far removed from the lives of ordinary people. Even so, the code of the ninja continues to be severe as we’re reminded that love and human happiness are not permitted to them. A female ninja spy working for Hanzo is despatched to Nobunaga’s castle to seduce his retainer Ranmaru but is cautioned that she must not allow her heart to be stirred. Predictably this seems to be a promise she couldn’t keep, eventually dying alongside him during an all out attack on the castle. 

Goemon discovers something much the same in encountering further losses and personal tragedies, but takes on a somewhat crazed persona in his continuing pursuit of Nobunaga, grinning wildly amid the fires of his burning castle while taunting Nobunaga that he is the ghost of the Iga ninjas he has killed. Then again, he’s laid low by his own ninja tricks on discovering that Hideyoshi has had a special “nightingale floor” installed that lets out a song whenever someone crosses it, instantly ruining his attempt to infiltrate the castle. “The days when a few ninja could control the fate of the world are over,” Ieyasu ironically reflects though perhaps signalling the transition he embodies from the chaos of the Sengoku era to the oppress peace of the Tokugawa shogunate.

Somehow even bleaker than its predecessor, Yamamoto deepens the sense of nihilistic dread with increasing scenes of surreal violence and human cruelty from a baby been thrown on a fire to a dying commander teetering on his one leg and holding out just long enough to gesture at a sign requesting vengeance against those who have wronged him. Echoing the fate of the real Goemon, dubbed the Robin Hood of Japan for his tendency to steal from the rich to give to the poor, the conclusion is in its own way shocking but then again perhaps not for there can be no other in this incredibly duplicitous world of constant cruelty and petty violence. 

Ninja, A Band of Assassins (忍びの者, Satsuo Yamamoto, 1962)

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Ninja in Japanese cinema had largely been relegated to the realms of childish fantasy prior to Satsuo Yamamoto’s Ninja, A Band of Assassins (忍びの者, Shinobi no Mono) which cast a distinctly less heroic light on the famed mercenary spies of the feudal era. Indeed, there’s something reminiscent of the cult of militarism in the repressive nature of the ninja code and the hero Goemon’s (Raizo Ichikawa) original allegiance to it despite his father’s wariness and attempt to warn him that human happiness has no place in the life of a ninja. 

As the leader of Goemon’s clan, Sandayu (Yunosuke Ito), explains the ninja are obliged to serve whichever lords require their service, but he refuses to work with Oda Nobunaga (Tomisaburo Wakayama, billed as Kenzaburo Jo) owing to his famous animosity towards them. He even goes so far as to call Nobunaga a greater threat to the ninja than demons or devils. Opening in 1573, the film takes place at a tumultuous moment as Nobunaga continues to solidify his plan to unite the whole of the land under his banner by absorbing or defeating rival clans. The pre-credits sequence finds Goemon playing dead on a battlefield surrounded by ominous crows and encountering another ninja from a rival clan, Kizaru (Ko Nishimura), who has become a more literal kind of vulture in stealing from the dead.

Stealing is against the ninja code and something of which the young and idealistic Goemon fiercely disapproves. Nevertheless, in a cruel irony he’s forced to become a burglar in an effort to raise funds for more weapons to combat Nobunaga whom he has also been ordered to assassinate in return for his life after having been caught having an affair with Sandayu’s wife, Inone (Kyoko Kishida). Goemon is inspired by the legendary figure dubbed the Japanese Robin Hood for his mission stealing money from the rich to give to the poor, but here is far from heroic. When his affair with Inone is discovered by a servant, Goemon kills him to maintain the silence. He then believes that Inone has also been killed after falling into a well and attempts to flee the scene only to be confronted by Sandayu. 

Only too late does to he begin to understand what his father tried to warn him about, that the code of the ninja is cruel and unforgiving. It cannot grant him pride or happiness despite the self-satisfied glow he feels on having been singled out by Sandayu as a protege. A ninja must be ready to sever all ties to those he loves and endure intense torture without speaking. If caught in an impossible situation he must scar his face and take his own life as one of Goemon’s acquaintances eventually does after being captured by Nobunaga. Goemon assumes he has no reason to be afraid because he is the most skilled ninja in the garrison and a single ninja can take down a fortress all on his own, but in reality he is powerless, merely a puppet manipulated by Sandayu for his own ends. After falling in love with a sex worker, Maki (Shiho Fujimura), he grows tired of his missions, gives up on burglary, and makes no move to assassinate Nobunaga but is pursued by Sandayu’s minions, the irony being that not even a ninja can escape from the confined space of ninjadom.

This world is so steeped in secrecy that nothing is as it seems and Goemon discovers the rug pulled out from under him in more ways than one before beginning to realise that Sandayu has deliberately engineered his downfall and was most likely behind his father’s murder in an attempt to get his hands on his recipe for gunpowder which is, as Nobunaga says, the future of warfare. Nevertheless, even within its commitment to realism the film contains plenty of ninja tricks from sudden appearances to superhuman leaps and expert shuriken throwing and grappling hooks.  The sense of melancholy futility implied by the presence of the crows in the opening scenes never recedes, Yamamoto frequently descending into mists as Goemon sinks into his confusion and eventual disillusionment with the tenets of ninjadom. Rival ninja clans more obsessed with their reputation and status vie for the head of Nobunga while all Goemon wants is the right to live a quiet life with Maki though that’s something that largely cannot be found amid the constant chaos of the feudal era. 

Memoir of Japanese Assassinations (日本暗殺秘録, Sadao Nakajima, 1969)

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According to the narrator of Sadao Nakajima’s artistically daring Memoir of Japanese Assassins (日本暗殺秘録, Nihon ansatsu hiroku) the practice of assassination had got so out of hand in the early years of Meiji that the emperor was forced to institute a law banning it while accepting responsibility for the lawlessness his imperfect governance had produced. But by opening with the Sakurada Gate Indecent from 1860, the film seems to be asking what went wrong in Meiji and why the assassinations have still not stopped with the implication that more may be on their way in rather febrile political atmosphere of the late 1960s in the run up to the renewal of the Anpo security treaty with Asama Sanso still a few years away.

The answer to the question that it presents, is that oppression has still not ended in Japan and that most of these assassinations took place because people had enough of difficult social conditions those in power little did to address. However, the first few pre-20th century  assassinations which are presented in the form of short vignettes, are largely a product of the confusion of the bakumatsu era as reactionaries attempt to halt Japan’s increasing openness to the wider world and what they see as a loss of national identity and sovereignty. The implication is that this sense of ideological conflict is a direct cause of the nationalism that defined the first half of the 20th century. 

It’s not until we reach the early 1920s that the secondary cause of Japan’s dire economic situation rears its head as the right-wing nationalist leader of Righteousness Corps of the Divine Land (Bunta Sugawara), a society dedicated to workers’ rights, assassinates the head of a family-run conglomerate he accuses of feeding on the blood on the common man. From this incident we can see that it is not as easy to draw a line between left and right in terms of political ideology as it might be at other times or in other nations as otherwise nationalist forces share ideas that might lean more towards socialist ideals. Ikki Kita whose philosophy informed the February 26th Incident that ends the film described himself as socialist, but is also regarded by some as the architect of Japanese fascism. With the so-called “Showa Restoration”, he advocated for the elimination of private property and a doctrine of socialism from above in which the emperor would assist in the reorganisation of society. Which is to say, the clarification of the Meiji Restoration actually meant.

In any case, it’s easy to see the reasons that these ideas caught hold and that concepts such as “revolution” were a counter to the persistent hopelessness of the depression and the extreme poverty of Japanese society while the large conglomerates prospered through trading with the United States. The bulk of the film focuses on Onuma who assassinated Junnosuke Inoue in 1932 as part of an intended reign of terror known as the League of Blood instituted by the far right Nichizen Buddhism cult led by Nissho Inoue (Chiezo Kataoka),. Onuma was still alive at the time the film was made and apparently acted as a consultant. Played by a fresh-faced Shinichi Chiba, he’s depicted as an earnest young man who is driven into the ground by the increasingly capitalist mentality of the 1920s, a time of high unemployment and frequent labour disputes only exacerbated by the Great Depression. 

Though he had been a bright and attentive student, Onuma was forced to leave education because of his father’s early death and thereafter worked a series of causal jobs before leaving a position at a kimono dyers because of their callous treatment of another employee who was forced to embezzle money because his mother was ill and he was denied a loan by the boss who justifies his position by stating that he’s already given the man several advances on his salary. Onuma’s brother also resigned from his job to take responsibility for failing to spot someone else’s embezzlement, leading Onuma to conclude that being honest gets you nowhere in this morally corrupt society. This is rammed home for him at his next job at a cake baker’s where he becomes almost part of the family and draws closer to the maid, Takako (Junko Fuji). The boss intends to rapidly expand the business by building a bigger factory hoping to capitalise on the coronation of the new emperor. Staking everything on the factory, he takes out loans from loan sharks but fails to get a business permit from the police later remarking that he was naive thinking he could do business honestly not realising that the police expected a bribe.

Tuberculosis and the death of a girl who like him could not afford medical treatment further leave Onuma feeling resentful and hopeless leading to a suicide attempt after which he is born again in Nichiren Buddhism and becomes a servant to Nissho. It’s easy to see how Nichiren could offer an escape to young men like him who burn with rage and a desire to change society, though in essence it’s no different from the militarism that was growing in parallel being rooted in nationalist ideology and for the early part at least centred in the military. The May 15 Incident saw the military and members of the League of Blood assassinate the prime minister to enact the Showa Restoration and reorganise society. The revolution failed, but the 11 young officers who took part in received little punishment, furthering cause of the militarism, while directly contributing to the February 26th Incident which though it also achieved little further cemented the power of the military over the government. 

Though imperialism is subtly presented as another form of injustice as the nation spends money on warmongering while the people starve, the film straddles an awkward line in struggling to avoid glorifying the actions of the far right in painting Onuma and leader of the February 26th Incident Isobe (Koji Tsuruta) as dashing, idealistic heroes whose only wish was to save Japan and remake it in a way they believed to be better. This was pretty much the antithesis of what Nakajima intended, though it was picked up by some as a piece of right-wing propaganda. The film courted controversy both with Toei studio bosses and the government who ordered Nakajima to soften the excerpts from Isobe’s diary fearing they were too incendiary, though Nakajima had already shot the footage and was forced to find a compromise. Toei as a studio did rather lean towards the conservative and especially in its yakuza films which is perhaps unavoidable given that yakuza organisation did often have strongly nationalistic sensibilities. Accordingly, the film stars almost their entire roster of Toei’s yakuza and ninkyo eiga stars from Tomisaburo Wakayama to Ken Takakura and Koji Tsuruta along with Junko Fuji as as Onuma’s love interest who is eventually forced into sex work because of the economic conditions of the 1920s, and perhaps comes with some of that baggage. Its closing question, however, given the fact that all these assignations achieved almost nothing of what they were intended to, seems to be posited at the current society mired in the Anpo protests and the declining student movement to ask how else society might be changed and revolution enacted to create a fairer society for all through an ideology that could end this cycle of political violence.

Eight Men to Kill (賞金首 一瞬八人斬り, Shigehiro Ozawa, 1972)

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In the first instalment of the Bounty Hunter series, Shikoro Ichibei (Tomisaburo Wakayama) had been a shogunate spy intent on putting down rebellion to their oppression, but by the third, it seems he’s thoroughly fed up with the ills of feudalism and apparently no admirer of the Tokugawa who he feels to have failed in their responsibility to the people along with their personal greed and desire to hold on to their power.

Ichibei’s chief objection is their lack of healthcare provision, seeing as he is a doctor who mainly cares for the poor. That’s one reason he agrees to the job, asking for a large percentage of the gold he’s been asked to retrieve by a worried retainer who explains that the Edo government is relying on it to bridge a gap on their finances. If the gold’s not returned, the entire economy may crash. The government’s heartlessness is further borne out by the retainer’s words that it’s not the time to be concerned about one boy whose importance pales in contrast to that of the Tokugawa Shogunate when a rogue ronin kidnaps the son of the man responsible for the theft of the gold from a local mine. 

In a repeated motif, men attempt to swallow the gold as a means either of stealing or hiding it but it gets stuck in their digestive system and causes them a great deal of pain that could lead to death. The cruel mine owner Kanoke Tatsu (Minoru Oki) forces Ichibei to cut open the man’s stomach to get the gold out, while he insists on sewing him back up again because as a doctor it would be wrong not to. What he’s really performed maybe a kind of gold-ectomy, removing the toxic substance from the men’s stomachs even if he may not be able to save their lives or improve their circumstances.

Ichibei tells the bandit, Yasha the Wolf (Kenji Imai), who is held responsible for the theft of the gold, that he is as bad as him and is only looking for a fast way to make money, yet he wants it to use to build better hospitals for the poor, ironically using the government’s cash to make up for their failing. Meanwhile, he finds himself coming up against a man much like himself only inverted in the form of wandering assassin Yajuro (Shigeru Amachi), a former secret policeman in the rebellious Bishu domain who doubt crosses everyone he comes across in an attempt to get his hands on the gold. Ichibei asks the man who hired him why they don’t want to use government spies but he tells him that it’s because they’d run out. The ones they sent to investigate have all been killed, presumably by the treacherous Yajuro.

All around him, Ichibei discovers only omnipresent greed. A geisha he comes across is working with the mine owner to steal the cash, but simultaneously seducing Ichibei and the apparently won over by his bedroom prowess though it’s difficult to know which is an act, her fondness for Ichibei or pledges to sell him out to Kanoke. Meanwhile, Kanoke vacillates when presented with a binary choice by Yajuro, his adorable three-year-old son, or the gold. As always, it’s the innocent who suffer while personal greed and governmental indifference leave ordinary people little room to manoeuvre. 

This time around, the righteous Ichibei cuts a solitary figure. He no longer has a posse and is supported only by an older gentleman who is mute. As a result of his mission, he even ends up on a wanted poster himself with the shogunate, presumably unwilling recognise him, yet eventually congratulating him on a job well done, much to his shame and embarrassment having witnessed shogunate soldiers committing an atrocity. Very much in the western vein, Ozawa lends the dusty old mining town a sense of dread and decay as it rots from the inside out thanks to the corrupt authority of a weakened shogunate seeking only ways to cement its own power. The red-tinted final taking place during a solar eclipse seems to emphasise the hellishness of the situation even as Ichibei announces that they can all go to hell but he’s sending the money to heaven where it can be put to better use. 

The Fort of Death (五人の賞金稼ぎ, Eiichi Kudo, 1969)

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Shikoro Ichibei (Tomisaburo Wakayama) returns yet this time seemingly on the opposite side in the second in the Bounty Hunter series, The Fort of Death (五人の賞金稼ぎ, Gonin no Shokin Kasegi) this time directed by Eiichi Kudo. If the first film had been an Edo-era take on James Bond, the second is very much Spaghetti Western and feudal tragedy as Ichibei finds himself coming to, if not quite the rescue of the oppressed farmers, then at least moral support in taking stand against corrupt and self-interested lords.

This might be surprising in that in the first film Ichibei had been a shogunate spy and seemingly close friend of the man himself, yet this time around he’s working as a doctor while taking bounty hunter jobs to earn extra money to support the poor people who come to him for help. Like a true western hero, he has a small posse which includes the ninja lady, Kagero (Tomoko Mayama), from the first film only she’s being played by the actress who previously starred as his other love interest. In any case, he’s approached by a young man from a small village which is making a last-ditch appeal to the local lord to lower their tax burdens so they don’t all starve, though so far the lord’s response has been to add additional taxes and kill people for not paying them. 

On his arrival, Ichibei soon realises that the man who recommended him was actually the leader of the government forces during a previous peasant uprising at which Ichibei had also tried to help the farmers. In that case, Bessho (Shin Tokudaiji) had won, but it didn’t do him any good. His clan was dissolved and he became a wanderer, taken in by the village and now indebted to them, hoping Ichibei can help but fully aware of the brutality with which such challenges to the feudal order are put down. 

The lord later suggests it’s not really his fault. He has to curry favour with Edo to protect the domain, which is why he agreed to participate in a construction project that led him to confiscate all of his farmers’ rice and wheat. But then it’s also true that he is vain, and cruel. On realising the village has hired a man like Ichibei, some of the retainers suggest reopening negotiations but others complain that they must now crush the farmers or face ruin themselves while trying to ensure the strife in their domain does not come to the attention of the government in Edo. 

Part of their problem is that Ichibei simply has better technology in the form of gatling guns. Tying into the western themes, Ichibei is well versed in the use of firearms, while the samurai are mostly reliant on traditional weaponry such as arrows and swords. The lord later insists on using some canons, but is oblivious to the risk as the shogun has banned the use of gunpowder and using them may end up bringing him to his attention and thereby landing him in a lot of possible fatal trouble. 

In any case, it’s the villagers who suffer. Ichibei encounters a woman who has lost her mind, refusing to give up her baby who has died of malnutrition while her husband was executed for non payment of taxes. Meanwhile, some of the other ronin they hired attempt to rape a villager, and a young couple are prevented from marrying because the headman is worried that it would send the wrong message in a time so much strife. Then again, a woman basically attempts to rape Ichibei, descending on him while he’s still asleep which otherwise leads into a fairly comic sequence in which Ichibei must fight of a bunch of ninjas intent on stealing the gatling gun while dressed only his underwear.

Darkly comic it may be, but also surprisingly violent with a ninja at one point using a dead body as a Molotov cocktail not to mention the severed heads and limbs of the battle scenes. Ichibei is fully aware that the battle is a forlorn hope, but also that the villagers have no choice and perhaps this is better for them than simply accepting their fate and starving to death. Even so, he reserves his final words for the Edo inspector who arrives only when the battle is done to survey the scene, berating him that he ought to know what happened here from looking at the battlefield and deducing that this domain has not been run particularly well. It’s a tragedy of feudalism that provokes a tearful rage from the compassionate bounty hunter trying his best to heal the sickness in his society, though perhaps like the patient who visits him with a venereal complaint concluding the best solution is to cut it right off.

Killer’s Mission (賞金稼ぎ, Shigehiro Ozawa, 1969)

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According to the title card at the beginning of Shigehiro Ozawa’s Killer’s Mission (賞金稼ぎ, Shokin Kasegi), none of the events it depicts have been recorded in history because the shogunate decided to erase them all in fear of the effect they may have on the nation’s geopolitical stability. Nevertheless, it gives some very concrete dates for its historical action, even if they may not make complete sense while foreshadowing the political turbulence of the following century. 

What it essentially attempts to do is tell a James Bond-style tale of political intrigue in a feudal Japan in which perpetual peace has begun to create its own problems. Here played in a cameo appearance from Koji Tsuruta, the Shogun Ieshige was weak in part because he was in poor health and had a speech impediment which led him to be rejected by his retainers. The problem here, however, is with Satsuma which has been on bad terms with the Tokugawa shogunate since the Battle of Sekigahara after which they took power. Satsuma will in fact be at the centre of the conspiracy to overthrow the government in the following century, but for the purposes of the film have fallen foul of a rumour that the plan to do an arms deal with some Dutch sailors who sailed South to Kyushu after being rebuffed in Edo. 

A civil war is feared and in the interests of maintaining peace, Ieshige sends his trusted spy Ichibei (Tomisaburo Wakayama) to protect Satsuma official Ijuin Ukiyo (Chiezo Kataoka) in the hope that he will be able to talk his young and naive lord out of doing the deal. Ostensibly a doctor by trade, Ichibei has a series of spy gadgets such as hidden blades and collapsible guns stored in a secret room at his surgery which he then carries in a black leather utility belt. He keeps the nature of his mission close to his chest, but often double bluffs by simply telling people he is a shogunate spy or otherwise adopting a disguise as he does in a moment of meta comedy impersonating the signature role of his brother Shintaro Katsu by posing as a Zatoichi-style blind masseur. 

As if to signal the cruelty of the feudal world, Ichibei comes across the corpses of suspected spies abandoned outside Satsuma territory while his enemies meditate on their ancient slight and consider taking the deal in the hope of avenging their defeat and overthrowing the Tokugawa. They are warned that creating unrest and sowing division may be exactly what foreign powers like the Dutch crave, but aren’t particularly bothered, preferring to take their chances with them rather than curry favour with the Shogun and possibly destabilising the entire society along with it. 

Of course, much of this is anachronistic with the Dutch sailors appearing in a distinctly 19th century fashion carrying weapons which are also too advanced for the era as are Ichibei’s folding pistols. Through his travels, he runs into a female Iga spy who too can do some nifty ninja tricks and has a gadget of her own in a comb which can shoot poison darts, though luckily it’s one of the poisons Ichibei has already developed an immunity to. Ichibei is fond of crying that you kill him he’ll simply come back to life, barrelling through the air with feats of improbable human agility and generally behaving like some kind of supernatural entity with a secondary talent for violent seduction. 

Though ironic and often darkly comic, there is an unavoidable poignancy in the inner conflict of Ijuin who knows his clan is about to do something very foolish but is torn between his duty to obey them and that to act in their best interests, eventually backed into a corner and left with no real way out of his predicament. As Ichibei points out, it’s difficult to keep the peace, especially when restless young samurai spot opportunities to cause chaos and the outside world knocks on the door of a closed community. Even so, Ozawa ends on a romantic image of a beach at sunset somehow undercutting the violence and tragedy with the restoration of an order that might itself be imperfect in its peacefulness.

Big Time Gambling Boss (博奕打ち 総長賭博, Kosaku Yamashita, 1968)

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A Shakespearean tragedy of blood and honour, Kosaku Yamashita’s Big Time Gambling Boss (博奕打ち 総長賭博, Bakuchiuci: Socho Tobaku) discovers only fatalism and futility in the nobility of the yakuza code. The tragedy is that at any moment anyone could make a free choice to walk away, to abandon these arbitrary notions that convince them they must kill their friends and let their enemies go free, but they don’t because spiritually they cannot. Abandoning the yakuza code would in its own way a kind of death and mentally unsurvivable. 

There is however a greater tragedy in play. The film opens in the spring of 1934 with a villain remarking that it’s absurd to restrict oneself to one’s home terrified while a sword and the Japanese flag appear behind him. The catalyst for all this drama is Japan’s imperialist expansion. Yakuza fixer Senba (Nobuo Kaneko) and the shady Kawashima have hatched a plan to get all the yakuza clans to unite in a “patriotic” mission to traffic drugs to the frontlines looting as they go. Noble boss of the Tenryu Awakawa refuses, reminding them he’s just a simple gambling man and has no desire to get involved with politics before collapsing with a stroke. With Awakara alive but bedridden and no longer able to communicate effectively, the Tenryu decide to nominate a successor. The ideal candidate, Nakai (Koji Tsuruta), declines the offer on the grounds that he is a transplant from another gang in Osaka and thinks it would be inappropriate for an outsider to lead the clan. He proposes that his sworn brother, Matsuda (Tomisaburo Wakayama), should be appointed, though he is currently surviving a prison sentence so a caretaker should serve in his stead until his release. Most think this sensible though the proposed caretaker, Ishido (Hiroshi Nawa), also declines given the rules of seniority despite the fact that he is Awakawa’s son-in-law and so dynastic succession would also seem permissible. 

It’s during all of this finagling that Senba begins manipulating events to his advantage, gently manoeuvring the other lieutenants towards accepting Ishido as the new boss while he has no idea he’s being used as a pawn in Senba’s nefarious nationalist plotting. When Matsuda is released early, the entire situation kicks into overdrive in his outrage that the codes of rank have not been respected and that a man who is his inferior now sits at the head of the clan in a place he think’s rightfully Nakai’s but in light of his honourable refusal no one’s but his own. Even Matsuda later recognises his hot-headed recklessness in directly challenging Ishido over his decision to accept, insisting that the proper thing to do in his position would have been to persuade Nakai to take the job. Meanwhile, his own righthand man who’d been slumming it as a mere labourer in his absence, is dragged into intrigue in foolishly defending his honour by recklessly attacking Ishido’s men incorrectly believing they had provoked another gang’s attack on Matsuda little knowing it was all part of Senba’s plot. 

Nationalist trappings aside, Senba’s villainy is obvious from the moment he tells Nakai he thinks Matsuda was foolish for going to prison on the clan’s behalf and that he should have just found a scapegoat and put the blame on them, signalling himself a member of the new amoral yakuza who does not believe in giri and has no ninjo. Nakai rather is the opposite, as his old boss confirms in praising him for his correct decision to turn down the succession as it would not be right for him to accept as one who did not originate in their gang. Matsuda meanwhile pays too much attention to the letter of the code and not its spirit, obsessed with Ishido’s transgression and unable to let the matter drop to live a quiet life even as Nakai tries to convince him that the decision has been ratified by the lieutenants and the boss and so he must obey it. In a poignant moment, Nakai brings out the cup they used to seal their friendship and tells him that he will choose the clan, breaking the cup if Matsuda does not agree to accept a minimal degree of humiliation in returning with the intention of lying low and subtly reminding him that if he does not Matsuda will be placing a heavy burden on him that he may be forced to inflict lethal violence on his best friend and in fact brother-in-law. Realising the gravity of the situation, Matsuda immediately backs down, but events are now in motion that neither of them are capable of stopping. 

Of course, they could walk away but they don’t. Nakai offers the opportunity to Matsuda’s remorseful foot soldier Oto, telling him to leave the clan and take the woman he loves far away to live a peaceful life but of course he can’t because of his debt of loyalty to Matsuda. They are all trapped by the code which they follow and the villains ignore, laughing at them all the way. Then again, that’s what men like Nakai are for, born to set things right even if it comes at great personal cost. Even he finally snarls that he’s merely a murderer, rejecting any sense of honour in his actions while throwing a sword at the symbol of the system which has defined his life and submitting himself to the automatic operation of law of the state as a kind of martyr for system in which he may no longer believe. 

Trailer (English subtitles)