Bushido / Bushido zankoku monogatari (1963)

Now and then, what starts out as a star vehicle turns into something much more significant. Such is the case with Bushido, in which Kinnosuke Nakamura gets to satisfy his urge to play multiple characters by taking on eight different roles in the same movie. The result is a long way from the ego trip a brief summary suggests it to be. It is also a long way from the delicious stereotypes of No Way to Treat a Lady or Kind Hearts and Coronets, for there is nothing comic about either the characters or the plot. Instead, Nakamura plays essentially the same person in eight different eras of Japanese history  with eight different emotional and moral dilemmas.

As I have noted before, around 1960 the jidai-geki began a major change of direction, with one stream continuing the long popular habits of heroism, honor, and swordplay and the new stream taking a much more cynical view of Japan’s past, up to and including the war years. The great landmarks of this change are relatively well known, especially Harakiri in jidai-geki and The Human Condition in relation to the war, but they were far from alone in this new attitude. Bushido adds something new to this criticism of the samurai tradition by connecting it clearly to the new corporate world.

Kinnosuke begins as Susumu, a salaryman who lives the 24/7 life of the salaryman, fully devoted to the company. His fiancée, depressed by the change in his personality and the realization that she will always come a far second to the company, tries to commit suicide. While she is in the hospital, he begins to examine the diaries of his family, which was a modest samurai family for centuries. In the course of his readings, he finds not a history of honor and bravery but of humiliation and hypocrisy, always changing but always constant. He finds records of pillage and assault on helpless villagers rather than noble battles and ancestors forced to give not just a daughter but even a wife to the lord. One of the ancestors becomes the unwilling homosexual concubine of the lord.* Another is tricked into murdering his own best friend. All of which must be kept quiet “for the honor of the clan.” This does not stop when the clans are officially abolished, as we see another relative as a kamikaze pilot in the war.

 

Gradually, he comes to understand that the whole code he had believed in had been a lie, that his ancestors had all, sooner or later, found themselves forced to violate their own conscience by The Code, which seemed to mean something different whenever the Lord or his counselors wanted it to. More importantly for him, he realizes that he is falling into the same trap with his loyalty to the company. Like his ancestors, he is expected to have complete loyalty to those above, who feel no loyalty at all to him or the others of his group.

This is not the first time we have seen the salaryman question or challenge the mis-use of the Samurai/Corporate Code of service, but it is the first that I have found that openly questions the very foundations of the Code itself. This is something that Americans have yet to do with the Western, for example. By the early sixties we were seeing a number of more “realistic” Westerns, but they never managed to escape the romantic nostalgia for a time when a man, a horse, and a gun was all that was needed for an honorable life, a time that never really existed.

For the director, Tadashi Imai, the film is something of a revival, in the sense that everything he made after Kiku to Isamu (1959) has dropped out of circulation, but it also marks a change of direction. While he had directed period pieces like Nigorie on occasion, he was a gendai-geki movie-maker at heart and even in period films had never dealt with samurai and sword-play. Nevertheless, Bushido and the following Audachi belong in the discussion of the great samurai films of the early sixties.

This is not all due to Imai, and in the contemporary world we tend to forget that the director can only film what someone else has written. In this case, the process began with a novel by Norio Nanjo, who also provided the source for Kobayashi’s marvelously cynical Inheritance (1962). The adaptation is by Naoyoki Suzuki and Yoshikata Yoda. Suzuki at the time was mentally jumping between the two chanbara strains by writing all Nakamura’s Musashi Miyamoto films. Yoda, on the other hand, actually wrote almost all of Mizoguchi’s surviving films yet has been all but obliterated from the critical commentary on Mizoguchi. Yet, somehow, after Mizoguchi died, Yoda’s screenplays seemed to show up in rather a lot of other good movies, so perhaps Mizoguchi’s movies did not flow directly from the godhead after all.

Still, the success or failure of the film for a contemporary audience outside Japan rests firmly on Nakamura’s shoulders. He plays eight different men, not eight different stereotypes, and to me succeeds unexpectedly well. I also think it is essential to the movie to have Nakamura play all the roles — eight different stories with eight different actors would become terribly confusing, no matter how much voice-over is supplied. While it has its flaws, Bushido is nonetheless a major film in a very significant era of Japanese film-making and should be more well-known. The AnimEigo dvd is not a full restoration, but at least it can be found in America.

* Various reference works tell us that homosexuality has been accepted, or at least tolerated, throughout Japanese history. The Tale of Genji even has a homosexual episode, and there are hints and allusions to its fairly regular practice among samurai and their personal trainees, not unlike the ancient Greek connection of teacher and student that often included sexual relations. So it had floated around fairly openly in the past. Since westernization began, there has been anti-homosexual pressure from various groups, but Japan has no laws outlawing same-sex activity. (However, boys were banned from Kabuki performances because of the assumption that they would also be prostitutes.) Nevertheless, it has not shown up in any obvious ways in movies I have watched before this time. There is a mention of a homosexual brothel in Bakumatsu and a 1960 gay bar passes without comment in Black Line Zone.  Early in his career, in Gang of Five, Nakamura played a man who was raised as a woman, though as an adult he acts as a male. The outrage in Bushido is not that the lord engaged in homosexual activity per se (there are other boys in the same segment who are jealous of Nakamura) but that such activity in this case were actually rapes of an unwilling partner sacrificing himself for the good of his family. (Female viewers who have seen so many girls sold off may want to say, “welcome to our world,” but that’s a different essay.)

Update 11/18/2019: Some months after writing this, I re-discovered the famous Bushido published in 1905, which defined the seven basic traits or duties of the samurai code.  I Have not had a chance to rewatch the movie to see how each episode matches the seven steps, but the fact that there are seven flashbacks suggests that the authors had this work in mind and that the novel and film were intended as a specific rebuttal of that work.