Although a broad streak of anti-feudalism lay at the heart of the chambara genre, the idea of honorably settling one's problems with a sword was often nonetheless lionized by such films. Eventually, even this notion began to be torn down as yet another assumption foisted upon Japanese society by an obsolete system of values.
In the film Harakiri (Seppuku, 1962), brilliantly directed by Kobayashi Masaki, the plot is driven by a bloody mixture of ritual suicide, honor, and revenge. It is an exquisitely filmed wide-screen masterpiece that serves as illustration of some of the core principles of samurai thought and of their conflict with the modernization of Japan.
"Meditation on inevitable death should be performed daily. Every day when one's body and mind are at peace, one should meditate upon being ripped apart by arrows, rifles, spears and swords, being carried away by surging waves, being thrown into the midst of a great fire, being struck by lightning, being shaken to death by a great earthquake, falling from thousand-foot cliffs, dying of disease or committing seppuku at the death of one's master. And every day without fail one should consider himself as dead."
- From the Hagakure ("Hidden Among the Leaves")
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A ronin, Tsugumo Hanshiro, appears at a castle and asks that he be allowed to use their grounds to commit seppuku. The clan elder of the Iyi family relates to Tsugumo that another, younger ronin had requested exactly the same privilege only weeks before. Suspecting that the younger ronin was using the threat of suicide to extort money from them as other unemployed samurai had recently done, the Iyi compel the young man to immediately go through with the deed. Strangely, the man begs for two days to set some affairs in order, but the clan leaders refuse. They discover that his swords have been replaced with bamboo blades; his poverty has forced him to pawn his originals.
Scornfully, an Iyi swordsman berates him, saying, "A samurai's blade is his soul." In a gesture of brutal irony, they force him to agonizingly disembowel himself with his bamboo sword. Tsugumo finally relates that his own reason for approaching the Iyi is tied to the fate of the young ronin, his son-in-law, and that he is there to avenge the man's death. The son-in-law's original motive for extortion had been to get medicine for a sick child -- hence his request for two more days. Tsugumo's last words to the Iyi before unleashing a bloody maelstrom are, "You boast of traditions of bravery. But even the code of the House of Iyi seeks only a false front!" At the end, the Iyi cover up their dishonorable actions, thus ironically proving the vanquished Tsugumo right.
Harakiri is a study in procedural formalities, as its characters push each other into action by repeatedly citing ideals of proper conduct, but the film demonstrates that the code of bushido, like any set of rules, can be used as thin justification for selfish cruelty by arrogant men. Bushido spelled out exactly of what was expected of a samurai under any circumstance. A mixture of protocol, ritual and nihilistic ruthlessness, bushido led to many logical dilemmas or paradoxes that were the heart of many samurai narratives.
Tsugumo is played by the legendary Nakadai Tatsuya, one of the most recognizable faces in chambara. His chiseled features often radiated coolness and composure, a façade that covered a glowing ember of rage and formidable power that would be mercilessly unleashed upon his foes.
Samurai Rebellion (Jôi-uchi: Hairyô tsuma shimatsu,1967), also from director Kobayashi, demarcates a bitter line between the dishonorable machinations of those in power and the steadfast loyalties and strength of character possessed by many retainers. The film stars Mifune Toshirô as Sasahara Isaburo, a worthy and good-natured soldier, who decides to retire and let his son take over the family duties. When his clan's lord requests that Sasahara's son, Yogoro, marry the lord's former mistress, who has reportedly attacked the lord out of jealousy for another mistress, Sasahara initially refuses, declaring the request unreasonable. His son finally relents, and remarkably, falls deeply in love with the woman, Ichi, who proves to be an incredibly sweet, kindhearted and loyal wife.
Ichi has left behind a son she bore to the clan lord, and she vows to forget him, bearing a daughter for Yogoro. When the lord's first-born son dies, it makes Ichi's son the new heir, and the clan lord suddenly demands that Ichi be retuned to him to take his proper place as the heir's mother. Sasahara, inspired by the young couple's love (which contrasts with his own stale marriage), adamantly refuses to return the girl to the abject horror of his relatives.
Sasahara and Yogoro and pushed into a confrontation, and must make a last stand against their clan's own men. Like the protagonist of Harakiri, Sasahara's struggles pit his own idealized (and possibly naïve) version of bushido against the uncaring, dehumanizing politics of the powerful men above him. He is doomed to failure because he cannot possibly best the overwhelming odds, but he is more than ready to die for what he believes to be just.
In Gosha's Goyokin (1969), Nakadai Tatsuya plays Wakizaka Magobei, a man who leaves his clan in protest when they massacre a village to cover up the theft of Shogunate gold, which they've pulled off by wrecking an official transport ship. When his clan, still financially desperate, plans to do it again, Wakizaka decides he was wrong to look the other way the first time; he can no longer allow another innocent village to pay for his former clan's misdeeds, even if it means the destruction of the clan.
With the aid of a Shogunate agent, Samon (Nakamura Kinnosuke, the well-known star of many films) Wakizaka thwarts the plot. Gosha again dissects bushido by revealing the utter, dehumanizing ruthlessness at its core through the persona of clan leader Tatewaki, a man who will do anything to preserve his family. A significant moment of resolution comes at the end of the film as Wakizaka and Samon watch masked villagers drum in a kind of ritual. Samon asks, "Is this a life-saving festival?" Wakizaka replies, in grim acknowledgement that coldly calculating men like Tatewaki have rotted the system from the inside out, "No, it's a funeral. Our funeral -- this is the end of the samurai."
Gosha leaves us with a haunting image at the film's end: Wakizaka plunges his sword, the symbol of a samurai's honor and existence, into the icy ground and walks towards the barren mountains and oblivion as his faithful wife follows several paces behind. Goyokin's bleak, frost-blasted landscapes and oppressive, washed-out palate give the film a powerful visual style. Ravens are used repeatedly as a symbol of impending doom. Nakadai plays his role as a walking corpse, a man emaciated and drained of life by his overwhelming guilt. The role of Wakizaka was originally written for Mifune Toshirô to play as the fifth Yojimbo installment. Mifune walked out due to personality clashes with Gosha and the fact that filming was done in the bitter cold of Hokkaido, Japan's northernmost island.
Kenji Mizoguchi's The 47 Loyal Ronin
Seppuku ("cutting the stomach"), or colloquially hara-kiri ("stomach cut"), had many forms according to circumstance.
kanshi: performed to admonish an overlord and inspire him by self-sacrifice to correct errant or injudicious behavior.
junshi or oibara: faithfully following one's master in death.
funshi or munen-bara: when an oppressed or ill-used warrior takes his own life in righteous indignation.
sokutsu-shi: death as form of apology.
Part of the formality of seppuku typically required that a kaishaku, or second, be present to decapitate the person after they had slit their belly in order that their excruciating agony not be prolonged.
Source: The Samurai Film, Alain Silver
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Only decades after the war, at the end of the 1960s, did Japanese filmmakers feel comfortable with the open depiction of nationalist and anti-Western sentiment. Although xenophobia has long been a constant of the Japanese national character, specifically through the precedent of sakoku, the depiction of such anti-foreigner viewpoints would have been explicitly banned under the Occupation and were thus omitted from the cinema until long after the war. Even if such feelings were not held by the writers or directors of such films but simply by the historical characters they sought to describe, their mere depiction would have been seen as inflammatory.
Band of Assassins (Shinsengumi, 1970) begins with a shot of a European man in nineteenth-century clothing crying out as he is slashed with a sword, his blood to spraying across the camera lens. With a cut to a street scene of samurai cutting down other whites, we hear a voice shout out, "We will expel all the barbarians! We can't let the foreign barbarians disgrace Japan!"
Such violent actions were instigated by the sonno-joi ("Revere the Emperor, Expel the Barbarians") movement. The film, set in 1863, is about the formation of an extremist militia called the Shinsengumi. Composed of fanatical roshi (masterless samurai, but not ronin), the Shinsengumi's sole purpose was to kill anyone who opposed the bakufu ("tent government" or "Shogunate") in direct opposition to the sonno-joi. Such shishi (anti-shogunate activists) accused the bakufu of bowing to foreign pressure -- as it had already done in capitulating to Perry. Used as a political tool by its sponsoring clan, the Shinsengumi are ultimately fractured by politics and internal dissent.
Samurai Assassin (Samurai, 1965) shows the internal workings of the opposing movement, the pro-imperial sonno-joi. The story is framed by historical events that took place in 1860, specifically, the political assassination of a major bakufu official. Mifune Toshirô plays the previously quoted main character, Niino Tsuruchiyo, a low-level samurai who becomes a pawn in a larger political struggle to destabilize the Shogunate. The film's ending is steeped in irony; Niino's greatest triumph is simultaneously a personal tragedy as he unwittingly assassinates his own father at the film's end. A small fish in a big sea, he cannot win no matter which course he chooses and his final murder functions as a critique of right-wing extremism in that it suggests that in seeking to attack the enemy, you only attack yourself.
Both Band of Assassins and Samurai Assassin, despite their strong depiction of nationalistic zeal, nonetheless function as strong examples of anti-feudal thought; the film's main characters are inevitably presented as extremists blind to anything but the twisted internal logic of their bloody cause.
Perhaps the ultimate deconstruction of the chambara mythos, the final word in de-glamorizing the figure of the ruthless swordsman, was Tenchu (Hitokiri, 1969), Gosha Hideo's oft-misunderstood masterpiece. This film also looks at a group of Meiji-era right-wing fanatics. This remarkable work starred the inimitable Katsu Shintarô as the samurai Okada Izo, a man ultimately destroyed by his own selfish ambition. Okada begins as a ronin so impoverished he tries to sell his family armor. Offered a position as a retainer by Tosa clan leader Takechi (Nakadai Tatsuya), Okada realizes his dreams of wealth and his ambition to become a samurai of renown.
Although Okada is not bright enough to have political motivations, he becomes an assassin for the cause of the shishi, anti-bakufu nationalists who assassinated those whom they felt were disloyal to the emperor. To his delight, he is handsomely rewarded in gold for each victim. During these attacks, Okada, like the other shishi, shouts out "Tenchu!" ("Heaven's punishment!") as a righteous rallying cry. Though Okada's reputation grows, his thick-headed lack of discretion soon becomes a liability for the Tosa clan -- he is only too eager to carelessly slaughter anyone whom he feels might increase his own prestige and wealth.
Takechi's chance to rid himself of this growing embarrassment comes when Okada is imprisoned for some slight infraction. Takechi denies to law officials that Okada is who he claims to be, and Okada is locked away, his dreams of wealth and glory shattered. Upon his release from prison, he is a lifeless shell of his former self, and seeks only to live in peace. Yet Takechi cannot resist a final attempt to rid himself of Okada and attempts to poison him. Okada, reawakened from his deathlike stupor, exacts both his personal revenge and deliberate self-destruction in an act of nihilistic contrition that -- importantly -- does not involve the use of a sword.
The use of actor Katsu Shintarô as a man destroyed by his own selfish arrogance was a masterstroke for Gosha since Katsu's career had been built on the portrayal of brash, good-natured killers, the epitome of the cool, casual samurai slaughter machine. Tenchu meticulously tears down every trope of chambara in order to depict samurai as glorified murderers and clan loyalty as an elaborate means of control.
Moreover, Okada is no dissatisfied rebel in the mold of Sanjuro or Sazen, but a willing player in a system that seeks only to use him for its own nefarious ends. Okada's blindness to anything but his own self-aggrandizement dooms him precisely because he possesses the same kind of disposable view of human life that was both the foundation of feudal thought and chambara itself. The film, in effect, states that chambara are as morally bankrupt as the system they supposedly critiqued.
Yet another facet of Tenchu functions as an unintentional nail in the coffin of classic chambara. The film stars Mishima Yukio, the famous writer, in the role of hired killer Tanaka Shimbei, whose calculated coldness is shown in counterpoint to Okada's lumbering ignorance. In the film, Tanaka is framed for a murder when his swords are stolen and left at the crime scene. Confronted with the evidence, he glares for a moment at the weapons then suddenly plunges one into his belly.
His blind, instinctual reaction is that of a warrior trained to die at any instant, yet it is portrayed as the hollow gesture of a man who, backed into a corner, has nothing but his honor. Eerily, this scene came only a year before Mishima's actual death by seppuku as a protest against what he saw as Japan's decadence and corruption by the West. His actions were criticized by many Japanese as the rash behavior of an extremist, yet he carried out a ritual that had been a cornerstone of feudal thought and had even been seen as a tragically noble way to die within the highly mythologized context of samurai film. Chambara, it would seem, had finally succeeded in promoting its agenda, which was to counteract the naïve romanticizing of feudalism and bushido, and to reveal the image of the noble samurai to be both hollow and amoral.
The Aftermath - Beyond 1970
Samurai film in the post-Tenchu era had much less to say. From the 1970s onward, chambara has been primarily an exploitation vehicle, and has grown bloodier often without getting deeper.
As samurai film became subsumed into the larger body of the martial arts genre, it became less a vehicle for ideas and more an excuse for the glorification of slaughter. This would seem to be a broad step backwards in terms of what chambara had accomplished throughout the 1960s. Although death was no longer lionized as the nihilistic symbol of an empty code of honor, it was now shown, in greater detail than ever before, simply to appease a bloodthirsty audience.
A perfect example of this trend can be found in Katsu Shintarô's Razor trilogy (1972-1974). While the films are certainly broadly entertaining in their over-the-top gore and cartoonish misogyny, they lack any kind of political or social critique.
Another popular, equally bloody favorite is the unique Lone Wolf & Cub series of the early 1970s, sometimes referred to as the "Baby Cart Assassin" films. These are tales of former Shogun's Official Executioner Ogami Itto and his toddler son, Daigoro. Ogami, framed by enemies who also murdered his wife, now makes his way through the world as a killer for hire. For a fee of 500 gold ryo, he will assassinate anyone, no questions asked.
Daigoro's cart is more than a simple pram. It also functions as a rolling arsenal, and is packed with various weaponry hidden inside secret compartments. These films are also primarily exploitation vehicles and, while they are well-executed, smartly made and a cut above most, they are so focused on murder and mayhem that they are more akin to martial arts films than the chambara of the 1960s. The movies were based on a popular manga series of the same name, certainly one of the most beautifully executed, visually compelling comics ever done.
Gosha and Kurosawa continued to make films for the next several decades. Out of the many samurai pictures being made, perhaps only Gosha's work truly preserved the spirit of classic chambara, although his films tended to be about yakuza rather than samurai. Kurosawa, although going on to make some of his of greatest work yet, tended to create personal dramas or grand historical epics; following Sanjuro, none of his films was truly chambara.
Chambara, it would seem, had fulfilled its role as an important tool for the symbolic examination of a major sociopolitical shift in Japanese thought. Gradually, more of these films, many rarely seen in the West, are finally being made available. As a result, international audiences can continue to be rewarded by the incredible visual and thematic richness of some of the most remarkable, thrilling movies ever made.
For its invaluable help in preparation of this article, I am greatly indebted to Alain Silver's excellent, singular book The Samurai Film for its important insights and essential information. All Japanese names in this article are presented with the family name first and given name last.
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