Heaven and Earth / Ten to Chi to (1990)

The battles of Kawanakajima have held an unusually strong hold on Japanese popular culture, especially the fourth battle. We have seen movies about this from the viewpoint of Takeda Shingen, the leader of one side, and from the viewpoint of peasants in the supply train. Heaven and Earth revisits the conflict from the viewpoint of …

Battle of Kawanakajima / Kawanakajima kassen (1941)

One difficulty of finding Japanese movies on YouTube is that you have to know they actually exist in order to search for them. Thus, I am extremely grateful to one of my readers who suggested I look for the “Cinema Japan Retrospective” channel, which has offered a wealth of movies I had thought lost or …

Secret Sword / Hiken (1963)

For many samurai, the sudden and apparently permanent peace that settled over the country after 1615 was a disappointment rather than a relief. The ending of more than a century of war meant the end of any opportunity for advancement through battle deeds and, for the young men, it also meant the end of excitement. …

Saga of the Vagabonds / Sengoku gunto-den (1959)

The curious may come to Saga of the Vagabonds because it is a Kurosawa script without Kurosawa directing, produced between Hidden Fortress and Yojimbo. However, it is not really a Kurosawa movie but a revision of a movie originally directed in 1937 by the legendary Eisuke Takizawa, few of whose movies survive today. How much …

Musashi Miyamoto (1973)

The story of Musashi Miyamoto has been one of the most popular subjects of Japanese film-making, with versions as early as 1908 and as late as 2019. Since Eiji Yoshikawa’s popular serial/novel appeared in 1935-39, however, almost all film versions have used that as their source material. As Yoshikawa’s original was about 4000 pages, it …

Musashi Miyamoto (1944)

Mizoguchi’s Musashi Miyamoto, released in 1944, follows the standard Miyamoto story popularized in the 1930s from the fight at the Ichijoji Temple to his final duel with Sasaki, so it covers familiar territory for chanbara audiences. This is roughly the same territory as part III of Inagaki’s fifties trilogy with Mifune and part V of …

Shinsengumi: Assassins of Honor / Shinsengumi (1969)

Throughout the 1960s, the decade after the Americans arrived became a popular topic in Japanese historical movies, as we have seen in numerous earlier posts on this blog. That interest came to some kind of peak in 1969, with Toshiro Mifune’s production of Shisengumi, in which he portrayed the group’s most significant and charismatic leader, …

Three Women Around Yoshinaka / Shin, Heike monogatari: Yoshinaka o meguru sannin no onna (1956)

The Heike monogatari is one of the great epics of medieval Japan, something like the Homeric epics, the Eddas, or the convoluted histories of England that resulted in Shakespeare’s history plays. As such, it had been retold, re-written, adapted into Noh plays, and thus known in some form by most educated Japanese long before Eiji …

Incident at Blood Pass / Ambush / Machibuse (1970)

A man walks down a road (camera behind of course because this is a Japanese movie), slightly atilt in his posture, and we think we’ve seen that man before. Then he shrugs a shoulder and we know it is Toshiro Mifune, back as the ronin with no name. He soon is given an actual job …

Samurai Banners / Furin kazan (1969)

In many ways, 1969 was a major turning point in Japanese movie-making, and like most turning points, no one was aware of what had happened until long afterward. Samurai Banners is one of the major markers of that turn, for it is Inagaki’s last big film and, in effect, Japan’s last big historical film for …