Masamune Date the One-Eyed Dragon / Hawk of the North / Dokuganryu Masamune (1942)

Released in mid-1942, Dokuganryu Masamune was obviously intended to appeal to the Japanese warrior spirit by portraying the early career of one of history’s great warriors. As such, it is precisely the kind of movie that the Occupation forces ordered destroyed after 1945 at the same time they banned any new ones in similar vein. How it survived is not quite clear, and if there were nothing else to recommend it, that historical value alone would make it important.*

But it is also an entertaining  movie on an epic scope, with the traditional cast of thousands and lots and lots of horses. You wonder how the Daiei studio managed to find so many men and horses in the middle of a war that for the Japanese started long before December 11, 1941. The large battle scenes are interspersed not only with strategy sessions but also with intimate moments among both Masamune’s family and the average soldiers, providing a fine balance that keeps interest going even if you have little knowledge of Japanese history.

The Date clan was one of many warring groups in Japan in the 16th century. When Masamune became head of the clan on his father’s retirement, he set out to unify the north by the simple expedient of attacking and defeating everyone else. Fortunately for his clan, he ultimately allied with the Tokugawas. Following the peace established after 1600 he became noted as a law-giver and poet and is generally regarded still as one of the great heroes of Japanese history. His story has been told in movies and TV since the early silent days, and this particular movie was essentially remade as Hawk of the North in 1959 with Kinnosuke Nakamura and widescreen color.

As in all historical movie epics, the history is romanticized to some degree. Most obviously, the historical Masamune lost his eye through childhood disease; here he is wounded in battle and in true “Don’t worry about me, it’s only a scratch” fashion, shoves the eyeball back in and continues fighting one-handed. He is ready to give up the warrior life until his wife talks him back into a new campaign, which I think probably happens only in the movies. And of course Chiezo Kataoka was about 20 year older than the real Masamune at the time of the events depicted, but then Kataoka was one of the greatest stars of jidei-geki and stars have no age.

The movie also simply stops with a great cavalry charge, suggesting to me that it was intended to have a Part II, though no record of one currently exists. Perhaps, since it was at a time in the war when Japan seemed to be sweeping all enemies before them, the makers merely wanted to celebrate the heroism and victorious strategy of its subject.

From the viewpoint of the movie-making, the surprise is how much it looks like a Kurosawa movie.

 

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The battle scenes look like they walked right out of Seven Samurai, Throne of Blood, or Kagemusha. The available print of course needs considerable restoration to give the full effect, but here we see the same massed banners, the horses emerging from the dust or fog, gallops through the woods, the exotic helmets, horsemen appearing on the horizon, the castles burning as the warriors charge as we would see decades later in the samurai histories that made Japanese movies world-famous.

Hiroshi Inagaki, the director, was one of the most respected specialists in jidai-geki, but his reputation faded in the years after the war, despite the success of the Miyamoto Musashi trilogy with Mifune. Kurosawa’s career did not cross his in any significant way, so there can be no direct influence traced. Almost all of Kurosawa’s “first assistant” work was with Yamamoto on comedies during the thirties (though Yamamoto did direct two of the most highly regarded war movies of the time after Kurosawa had gone on to other things and a Chusingura that Kurosawa did not work on). What this suggests to me at least is that there was a long-established tradition of how the “samurai movie” should look, and that during its revival after the Occupation, Kurosawa tapped into and was a major figure in the revival of that tradition. We simply don’t have any similar movies from the thirties or forties to show how that tradition established itself or if Dokuganryu Masamune is actually the beginning of the visual style of Japanese samurai epic films not named Chusingura.

Two other points are perhaps worth making as they shed some light on the general Japanese attitude to warfare at the time. The first is that Masamune believes that negotiation can never resolve an issue; to him, the opposition must be totally defeated before they can be trusted. The second is his wife’s argument that he must start more wars because, otherwise, the lives of those lost in previous battles would be wasted. Stated so baldly, this view seems totally irrational, but it is the thinking behind much of the Japanese persistence when it was obvious to all in the know that Japan had lost the war by mid-43 at the latest and any number of noble last stands in military history (and sadly an argument used by politicians in all nations including our own).

If you can find a copy, see it; it has everything the historical epic is expected to have.

• The only surviving jidai-geki from the war years that I have been able to find are Naruse’s very odd Tale of Archers, Mizoguchi’s Famous Sword and Chusingura (which was reportedly a box-office disaster in its day), and Kurosawa’s Men Who Tread on the Tiger’s Tail, which was not even released until after the end of the Occupation. Only the relatively recent discovery and release of three Yamanaka films give us any clue about the pre-war “period” films, and probably with little acccuracy since he was noted for being a bit outside the mainstream in his approach. And none of these feature battle scenes or horses. This is really our only available pre-cursor to the great epics of later years.