The most effective advice given here comes from a lower-class woman, which makes Knightly Advice something of an anomaly among jidai-geki. It is also unusual because it takes a very serious crisis in Japanese history and treats it as a comedy.
When the Tokugawa Shogunate was established in 1600, political power was still quite fluid. Partly to ensure other powerful daimyos did not try to overthrow the Tokugawas, it was decided to treat them in effect as equals (here sub-titled as “non-liege lords”) who had simply chosen to cooperate with Tokugawa’s leadership. Unfortunately, this decision reduced the samurai who had been faithful to Tokugawa (here called “knights”) throughout his wars to second-class subjects. This managed to maintain the peace through the lifetime of the first Shogun and his son, when the personal connection of most of the knights was strong. By the time of the grandson, however, the knights were beginning to rankle at their second-class status. Everything came to a head at the New Year ceremonies when a knight tried to force his way ahead of one of the daimyos. Civil war in Edo was a very real possibility, and the crisis was further increased by plots of some of the daimyos to rise up to overthrow what they saw as a weak young Shogun. Peace was restored by the exposure of the daimyo plot and the young Shogun’s decision to make the daimyos and his own knights equals at his court. A very serious situation indeed and a point when Japanese history could have been changed significantly.
But in Knightly Advice, the peaceful resolution is found by an old man, Lord Okubu, and Miss Yu, a merchant’s daughter. Okubu had been a brave and honest fighter whom the first Tokugawa had told to be an advisor to him and his heirs, independent of the official council. He defuses the initial urge of the knights to rise up after the man who had caused the initial crisis was much more severely punished than the daimyo by simply boring the young knights to death, repeating all the battle stories he had told hundreds of times before until all the younger men have nodded off.
When he goes to the castle to see the Shogun, the councillors fob him off with the dilemma that, if he convinces the Shogun to change his mind, the Shogun would no longer be infallible. Disturbed by this argument, he returns home to find new crises. Yu, daughter of the richest rice merchant in Osaka, has suddenly appeared at Okubu’s mansion with the announcement that the first Shogun appeared in a dream and told her to marry Okubu and have seven children. The knights think this is hilarious, since Okubo is in his sixties and is always talking about the Shogun appearing in his dreams. He soon finds that Yu has taken charge of the household (though not his bedroom). As new political crises arise, she interjects with advice from an unusual viewpoint, that of the successful merchant father she had observed all her life. She finds the loophole that solves one problem and provides the money that Okubu needs when he is appointed to a position he can’t afford. The final crisis is averted when the Shogun visits Okubu’s house and she does not recognize him, proceding to lecture the group about loyalty to the people who had made him successful, just as her father was always loyal to the workers and servants who had made him rich. Hearing this, the Shogun is reformed and the Knights are restored to their proud status. Unfortunately, as she says, she came to be a bride and was only a go-between, so she has to return to her father to await a different husband.
Yu is Satomi Oka, an actress who had made no particular impression on me before, though she is the faithful love of Kinnosuke’s Nakamura’s Musashi Miyamoto. Here she is as cute as the proverbial, but manages to stop short of the grotesque comic posturing of her maid. However, it is not the performance but the character that is remarkable. We have seen in earlier movies samurai who take the advice of their wives, or even are hen-pecked by their wives. But I at least have not come across a movie in which samurai are saved by the advice of a commoner, much less a female commoner. Admittedly, she has enormous wealth behind her, yet she is a signal of a tremendous change in modern Japanese thought in which commoners (at least wealthy commoners) were to have a real voice in how society was organized. Even more remarkable is that, though she is a comic figure among the serious politics at stake, she always gives the best advice. When people listen to her, crises get solved. This is a most unusual position for women in Japanese films, where many have given good advice to their husbands or fathers but few have been heeded.
The other point I find particularly interesting is that the script is credited as an original, not an adaptation from a novel, to Hideo Oguni, Kurosawa’s most common collaborator. His decision to treat what could have been a very serious jidai-geki as a light comedy is quite remarkable and makes us wonder what was his precise contribution to Kurosawa’s films.
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