Tag: Tsuyoshi Ihara

Samurai Hustle Returns (超高速！参勤交代 リターンズ, Katsuhide Motoki, 2016)

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At the conclusion of 2014’s Samurai Hustle, it seemed that samurai corruption had been beaten back. Corrupt lord Nobutoki had got his comeuppance and the sympathetic “backwoods samurai” Naito was on his way home having found love along the way. Of course, nothing had really changed when it comes to the samurai order, but Naito was at least carving out a little corner of egalitarianism for himself in his rural domain. 

The aptly named Samurai Hustle Returns (超高速！参勤交代 リターンズ, Cho kosoku! Sankin kotai returns) picks up a month later with Naito (Kuranosuke Sasaki) taking a rather leisurely journey home in preparation for his marriage to Osaki (Kyoko Fukada) only to receive news that there has been a “rebellion” in Yunagaya. Predictably, this turns out to have been orchestrated by none other than Nobutoki who has been released early from his house arrest thanks to his close connections with the shogun but has been humiliated at court and is otherwise out for revenge with a slice of treasonous ambition tacked on for good measure. Just as in the first film, but in reverse, Naito and his retainers must try to rush home to get there before the imperial inspector arrives or else risk their clan being disbanded. 

Meanwhile, the shogun is absent at the wheel after having decided to resurrect an old tradition abandoned because of its expense and inconvenience to make a pilgrimage to Nikko. In an interesting parallel, the farmers are uncharacteristically upset with Naito, blaming him for the destruction of their fields because he wasn’t there to protect them. Naito also feels an additional burden of guilt given that, having run flat out all the way to Edo, he took his time coming back leaving his lands vulnerable to attack while he now risks losing the castle. Nobutoki wastes no time at all looking for various schemes to undermine him while secretly plotting to overthrow the shogun and usurp his position for himself. 

As in the first film, the battle is between samurai entitlement and the genial egalitarianism of Naito’s philosophy. “The real lords of Yunagaya are people like you who are one with the soil,” he tells the farmers, while Nobutoki sneers that “lineage rules supreme in this world, inherited wealth breeds more”. It doesn’t take a genius to read Nobutoki’s machinations as a reflection of his insecurity, that he invests so much in his rights of birth because he has no confidence in his individual talents. Naito counters that it’s the people around him that matter most, “people are priceless. Friends are priceless,” but Nobutoki rather sadly replies that people will always betray you in the end. Even the shogun eventually agrees that “anger brings enemies, forbearance brings lasting peace” but treats Nobutoki with a degree of compassion that may only embolden him in his schemes.

“Nepotism has endangered the shogunate,” the shogun ironically sighs apparently lacking in self-awareness even if beginning to see the problems inherent in the samurai society but presumably intending to do little about them. “No government should torment its people,” Naito had insisted on boldly deciding to retake his castle but even if this particular shogun is not all that bad, it’s difficult to deny that his rule is torment if perhaps more for petty lords like Naito than for ordinary people or higher-ranking samurai. Naito struggles to convince Osaki that she is worthy of his world and only finally succeeds in showing her that she has nothing prove and love knows nothing of class. The people of Yunagaya are impoverished but happy, satisfied with the simple charms of pickled daikon unlike the greedy Nobutoki whose internalised sense of inadequacy has turned dark and self-destructive. 

Then again, Naito is still a lord. He obeys the system out of love for his clan and a genuine desire to protect those around him but otherwise has little desire to change it actively even if his quiet acts of transgression in his closeness with the villagers and professions of egalitarianism are in their own way a kind of revolution in a minor rejection of the shogun’s authority to the extent that the time allows. Nevertheless, with his return journey he once again proves the ingenuity of a backwoods samurai getting by on his wits as he and his men race home to save their small haven of freedom from samurai oppression from the embodiment of societal corruption.

Trailer (no subtitles)

Samurai Hustle (超高速！参勤交代, Katsuhide Motoki, 2014)

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A kindhearted lord finds himself in deep trouble when he’s suddenly called back to Edo despite having just returned from his biennial service in Katsuhide Motoki’s jidaigeki comedy Samurai Hustle (超高速！参勤交代, Chokosoku! Sankin Kotai). Set in 1735, the film is in some senses unusual in pointing the various class biases even with the hierarchal samurai society as the tiny rural clan at the film’s centre are swept into intrigue by the machinations of an ambitious courtier who thinks they lied about their goldmine being extinct and plans to get his hands on it by dobbing them in to the Shogun.

The problem is that they really weren’t lying. The Yunagaya clan is dirt poor, especially after having spent a small fortune travelling to Edo and back. In this era, even distant lords were called to Edo every two years to serve at court. They were expected to parade to the capital in style, showing off their wealth and status as they go which is of course inordinately expensive. The expense was the point. Practices like these along with forcing clans to move domains on a whim were designed to weaken their resources so they’d have no recourse to rebellion even if they were even more annoyed about being forced to travel back and fore for no real reason. 

It took Lord Naito (Kuranosuke Sasaki) and his retinue 10 days to walk home, which is why it’s even more of a shock to get a letter telling them to high-tail it back in five or risk being dissolved by the shogun. Evil retainer Nobutoki (Takanori Jinnai) knows it’s impossible for them to arrive on time which is how he plans to get his hands on the gold. What he didn’t count on, however, is the unexpected scrappiness of a “backwoods samurai” who’s used to having to find ingenious solutions to difficult problems because he doesn’t have the money to solve them. Nobutoki is essentially a snob who looks down on country folk and thinks Naito does not befit the rank of a samurai anyway, sneering at his humble gift for the Shogun of some locally sourced daikon pickles. 

The homeliness of the daikon signals Naito’s down to earth nature as a fairly egalitarian samurai who doesn’t really care about hierarchy and status even if he knows he has to play the game. What he cares about is the safety and happiness of his people, which is one reason he’s going to bust his arse to get back to Edo and clear his name. Aside from his humanitarian principles, also giving away some of their rice stocks to neighbouring clans suffering during a time of famine, Naito is also thought of as an eccentric because of his severe claustrophobia which makes it impossible for him to close the door when using the bathroom, let alone travel in a palanquin, though he’s found an ingenious solution for that one too. 

In an odd kind of paradox, he becomes a defender to proper samurai values in his opposition to Nobutoki who plays fast and dirty, sending out ninja assassins on the road to try to ensure he won’t make it to Edo before the deadline. Meanwhile, he bonds with a feisty sex worker who, like him, is dealing with childhood trauma and is sick of entitled noblemen who look down on the poor despite being a fellow human who as she puts it poops and screws just like everyone else. In a way she frees him from the confines of his hierarchal existence by helping him overcome his claustrophobia, at least while she’s at his side, while he saves her from her oppression by transgressing class boundaries and bringing her into the samurai world if only as a concubine.

Nevertheless, as he warns her, being poor is hard even when you’re a samurai, and ironically his circumstances aren’t much better than hers even if he has a superficial level of comfort and security tempered by his genuine ability to appreciate the simple charms of daikon over fancy Edo cuisine. After all, sometimes samurai become peasants or peasants become samurai and for an impoverished lord like Naito the distinction is fairly thin, though he evidently does his best to protect those around him from both sides of the class divide while remaining unafraid to tell the Shogun exactly what he thinks of him. After all, you’ve got to roll with the times, especially if you’re a backwoods samurai at the mercy of a harsh and arbitrary system but also far enough away from the mechanisms of power to begin to ignore them. 

Trailer (no subtitles)

They Say Nothing Stays the Same (ある船頭の話, Joe Odagiri, 2019)

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“Something new comes along, old things have to go” according to the philosophical boatman at the centre of Joe Odagiri’s They Say Nothing Stays the Same (ある船頭の話, Aru Sendo No Hanashi). A Meiji-set lament for changing times, Odagiri’s first feature following his 2009 mid-length comedy Looking For Cherry Blossoms is a visual tour de force shot by Christopher Doyle with whom he worked on the 2017 Hong Kong film The White Girl whose ethereal images of the majestic Japanese landscape with its misty vistas and rolling river perfectly compliment Odagiri’s poetic contemplation of transience and goodness. 

Toichi (Akira Emoto), the boatman, has ferried weary souls across the river for as long as anyone can remember but his days are numbered. Modernity is coming to the village in the very literal form of a bridge currently under construction not far from the crossing point, the workmen’s hammers ringing in Toichi’s ears like a ticking clock reminding him that his era is coming to a close, industrial noise at war with the tranquility of nature. For all that he tries to be philosophical. The bridge will certainly be convenient, as he admits to a man (Takashi Sasano) who needs to transport his cow across the river, the only current solution being to cross where the water’s shallowest and have the cow (and its minder) swim alongside while the man rides the boat. Toichi’s young friend Genzo (Nijiro Murakami) who sells herbal medicines, however, isn’t quite so philosophical. He doesn’t think the bridge is a good thing at all and only half-jokingly suggests blowing it up before it’s finished. 

But change comes earlier than expected. Hitting a strange object in the water, Toichi discovers it to be the body of a young girl (Ririka Kawashima) apparently still alive if only just. He takes her in and nurses her back to health, dressing her in a red outfit incongruously in the Chinese style, though she claims to have lost her memory and only later gives her name as “Fu”. Toichi muses on the possibilities, her name perhaps taken from the character for wind which, he points out, is a great motivator for a boatman capable of speeding up the rate of change, but also hears tell of a heinous crime the next village over in which an entire family were brutally murdered with only the daughter apparently spared, feared to have been kidnapped by the killer. Suspecting Fu may be the missing girl, he decides to help her, explaining her presence away in implying she’s a relative from “upriver” he’s been asked to look after for unspecified reasons. 

Toichi too claims to be from “upriver” though we never find out where it was he got those clothes from, assuming someone left them on his boat or like the portrait of the Virgin Mary he admires for its beauty and a memory of sorrow in the eyes of the woman who gave it to him as she explained that she would not come this way again, they simply drifted into his life. The poetic import of his existence as a boatman is not lost on him as he crosses the wide river of life and death, haunted by the strange spectre of another young woman who tells him that he’s damned himself with kindness in intervening in matters of fate. The modern world ebbs ever closer, a city doctor dressed in a white suit bringing Western medicine that challenges Genzo’s concoctions while the arrogant engineer and coarse construction workers resentfully climb into Toichi’s boat. 

“Bridges aren’t important, I prefer fireflies” Fu affirms, hearing the various ways in which the river is already changing. We find the bridge completed in the depths of winter, Toichi attempting to earn a living with animal pelts but now throroughly out of place in the frozen landscape. Nihei (Masatoshi Nagase), a local, laments the way the bridge seems to have hurried their lives, everyone busily crossing back and forth, the modern world now thoroughly penetrating the village. No longer so young or so kind, Genzo is fully corrupted, dressed in a three-piece suit and cape with a brogues on his feet unsuited to the rocky terrain and now looking down on his old friend who will not be able to cross the bridge into the modern world but will be forever cast away, a boatman to the end never resting too long on the shore. 

Yet Toichi maintains his imperfect humanity, admiring Nihei’s father (Haruomi Hosono) as man who truly put others before himself even in death in bequeathing his body to the animals in recompense for the many lives he took as a hunter. Toichi admits that he is not so good, a “selfish nobody” who resents the bridge despite himself but resolves to do better to become a man like Nihei’s father. Odagiri shows us leaves on the water which resemble Toichi’s boat as if to remind us how small he is and how great the river, but leaving us with the knowledge that it and he flows on if in flight, continually displaced by the onrush of an unwelcome modernity with its all of its selfishness and lust for the dubious lure of convenience. Boasting a host of famous faces in tiny roles from an imposing Yu Aoi taking village women to perform in a festival to Masatoshi Nagase in an extended cameo and Harumi Hosono as a beatific corpse, Odagiri’s melancholy tone poem is an elegy for an idealised pre-modern age in which the fireflies still shone on the banks of the river and there was time enough for human goodness. 

They Say Nothing Stays the Same streamed as part of this year’s New York Asian Film Festival.

International trailer (English subtitles)