Period Dramas in Japan FINAL PAPER

Mitsuhiro Yoshimoto

KUROSAWA

Film Studies and Japanese Cinema

Duke University Press 200o

15. Seven Samurai

The impetus for the production of Seven Samurai(Shichinin no samu-

rai,1954) came from Kurosawa's interest in making a new type of jidai-

geki film.Kurosawa's intention was to destroy cliches and dead formu-

las to renew jidaigeki as a film genre that could show the past more accurately and at the same time appeal to the contemporary sensibility |of the audience. His effort to break the stalemate of jidaigeki as a genre

led to a search for accurate historical facts about how samurai actually lived in the Edo period. Originally,the film was supposed to portray one day of a samurai's life: he gets up in the morning. goes to work at a |castle,makes some mistake on the job,and goes home to commit sep-

puku, or ritual suicide. With scriptwriter Hashimoto Shinobu and pro- ducer Motogi Sojiro, Kurosawa dug into archival materials and talked

to historians. But this initial plan stalled quickly because it was almost impossible to find out any specific details of the samurai's daily life

(e.g, what kind of food did samurai typically have for breakfast? What

was their daily routine like at the castl?).The plan was soon changed

to make a film based on famous episodes from the lives of military arts masters.Hashimoto proceeded to write a script based on this new idea

and finished it in two months. But this second plan was again aban- doned because Kurosawa realized that a narrative film needs more than

just a series of climaxes. The third and final idea came from Kurosawa's

interest in the details of mushashugyo, the samurai's journey to perfect

his martial arts skills. As Kurosawa,Hashimoto, and Motogi began re-

search on this subject, they learned that samuraisometimes worked as

|watchmen for peasants in exchange for meals.Kurosawa decided to ex-

pand this historical fact into a flm in which peasants hire a group of

| samurai to defend their village from bandits. Hashimoto wrote the first

draft of the script,and Kurosawa and Oguni Hideo later joined in its

revision.!

One of the most popular Kurosawa films, Seven Samurai has been | extensively commented on by American and Japanese critics alike. The

predominant approach to the film seems to be an allegorical reading. Frederick Kaplan suggests that "Kurosawa uses cinematic technology to explore the dialectic between time and history; he deals cinematically with the past in order to deal ideologically with the present and future, and, more specifically, with class struggle and the role of intellectuals in that struggle." Bert Cardullo argues that Seven Samurai"portrays the power of circumstance over its characters' lives....The work of circumstance is interested in what surrounds the human being, and how he reacts to it, under stress. Tragedy is interested in what is im- mutable...in each human being,and the world, and how this leads to man's...destruction...The one art looks out, the other in. It is the difference between East and West,self and other."+Kida Jun'ichiro finds in Seven Samurai a basso continuo of Kurosawa fims, the ab- sence of civil society and the powerlessness of intellectuals in Japan.4 For Stephen Prince,"Seven Samurai is a film about the modern works, an attempt, by moving farther back into history, to uncover the dia- lectic between class and the individual, an effort to confront the social |construction of self and to see whether this annihilates the basis for individual heroism."'Sato Tadao found that Seven Samurai justified the Japanese rearmament; in 1954 the National Safety Force and the Mari- time Safety Board were reorganized into the Self-Defense Force(Jieitai) in apparent violation of the Article 9 of the 1947 constitution, which "renounces war as a sovereign right of the nation and the threat or use of force as a means of settling international disputes." Another critic suggests that the image of the dead samurai might be a reference to those Japanese who were killed in World War ll? In this chapter,instead of proposing another thematic reading of the

film,I will focus on its different aspects,most importantly its generic status as a idaigeki film. I wil first examine the history of jidaigeki as a dominant genre and then contextualize Seven Samurai in relation to that history. What isjidaigeki? How did this popular genre come about? What are some of the basic features of jidaigeki? What kind of role did it play in the development of Japanese cinema? How has it changed or remained the same since its emergence? And how does Kurosawa situate himself in the history of the jidaigeki film?

206 Kurosawa

Japanese Cinema and the Genre System

Genres as institutions are created by the film industry largely to con- trol the mode of film reception and consumption.Along with the star system and other economic practices of the film industry(e.g, the ver-

tical integration of studios,distribution divisions,and theaters), genres

|serve to minimize financial risks for the industry.The studios strive to

achieve the predictability and stability of their business enterprise by |repeatedly using in their films similar themes, story patterns, charac-

| ter types, dramatic settings,physical locations,formal devices, visual

iconography,and sets and decor.By carefully combining these generic

subcomponents to produce infinitesimal differences, the studios try to

develop a field of intertexts that restrict the meanings and effects of

films and create specific audience expectations. Genres therefore func-

|tion as a contract between producers and consumers, which facilitates

a smooth exchange of money and commodities. However,the total |predictability stymies the self-perpetuation of genres. The audience

expects certain kinds of products guaranteed by generic conventions

|but simultaneously demands constant variations within the parameters

of those conventions.To satisfy the audience's simultaneous demand

for the expected and the new, genres must periodically renew them-

selves by infusing new elements and creating unexpected variations. The occasional violation of generic conventions is therefore permitted

or even welcomed because what is demanded by the audience is not the

repetition of the same but the repetition of differences. Another impor-

tant aspect of genres is that they are not completely autonomous but

interdependent on each other.As Fredric Jameson argues, it is impos-

sible to understand fully the significance of any particular genre unles

it is related to other contemporaneously existing genres constituting

| a genre system. The ideological underpinnings of a genre can be de-

coded only when it is examined as part of the synchronic system of

genres existing at a specific historical moment. For critics interested in the question of genre,Japanese cinema is

a fertile object of study.In Japanese cinema there are as many difer-

ent genres and subgenres as in Hollywood cinema.There are studies

of specific Japanese film genres, but surprisingly,the genre system as

such has not been examined by film specialists or scholars of modern

Seven Samurai 207

Japanese culture. This neglect of the Japanese cinema's genre system is another sign of how Japanese cinema studies has been shaped by the speciic agendas of disciplinary politics and border patroling discussed in part 1. |What makes genres in Japanese cinema unique is that they can be

classified into two mega-genres,jidaigeki(period film) and gendaigeki

(modern film), the equivalents of which do not exist in Hollywood

cinema. The absolute importance of this distinction is reflected in the directorial system,the star system,and even the physical structure of

film studios. Although they are fundamental to the way Japanese cinema is struc-

tured, jidaigeki and gendaigeki did not exist in the early Japanese cinema.The first dominant generic distinction was established between kyugeki (or kyuha) and shinpa(or shinpageki), which were later trans-

formed into jidaigeki and gendaigeki respectively.In principle, kyu- geki-the word literary means "old drama,"and the alternative ex. pression kyuha means ""old school"-was derived from Kabuki. The early Japanese cinema started with the filming of Kabuki performances (e.g, Viewing Scarlet Maple Leaves [Momijigari],Two People at Dojoji Temple[Ninin Dojoiji],both made in 1899).Instead of trying to hide the

stage,these early Kabuki films emphasized the fact that the audience is watching a theatrical performance.To this extent,the Kabuki film was a substitute for a real Kabuki performance and thus wasregarded as poor people's theater."Kyugeki film took off as a popular entertain- ment when Makino Shozo started infusing his films with non-Kabuki elements (e.g, stories from a popular oral storytelling form called ko- | dan,trick photography,etc.).Makino also created the first Japanese

film star,Onoe Matsunosuke, who became a children's idol for his ap- pearance in numerous ninjutsu(art of the ninja) films.A former itiner-

ant Kabuki actor,Matsunosuke was the most popular star of the early Japanese cinema(katsudo shashin).The height of his popularity was

the period between 1912 and 1918,during which he appeared in close to one thousand films.Where kyugeki was based on a traditional theater, shinpa(new school) was directly derived from a new type of drama that

appeared in the early twentieth century. Originallya political drama as-

sociated with the Freedom and People's Rights Movement of the 188os,

shinpa dealt with contemporary social iues and Western ideas; how-

208 Kurosawa

ever, stylistically,it did not completelycut offisties to native theatrical traditions and made liberal use of many Kabuki conventions includ- ing the oyama, or female impersonator. Often called shinpa daihigeki(a

grand tragedy),shinpa tended to be a sentimental drama with a tragic

ending. The ichotomy of kyugeki and shinpa poses a number of crucial ques-

| tions about the early Japanese cinema, but to pursue those questions

fully is beyond the scope of the present study. What I would like to do instead is to speculate about some of the implications of the shift in Japanese cinema from the kyugeki/shinpa paradigm to the dualism

of jidaigeki/gendaigeki as a fundamental classificatory principle.The

most obvious aspect of this shift is the emergence of a new historical

|awareness, a sense of historical distance and perspective.The classif-

catory categories of dramatic form(kyugeki versus shinpa,i.e,old ver-

| sus new) are replaced by the dichotomous categories of historical peri-

odization(jidaigeki versus gendaigeki,i.e,past versus present),which

are a manifestation of the utmost importance of separating the present from the past.Moreover,the dichotomy of jidaigeki and gendaigekialso

|foregrounds the fact that the ideas of past and present are not neutral

categories.Instead, the new generic distinction shows how historical consciousness is inseparable from the recognition of a larger histori-

cal process, that is, the end of feudalism and the rise of capitalism.The

differentiation of Japanese films into jidaigeki and gendaigeki becomes

possible by positing the point of the past/present disjunction in his-

tory, the point of historical break characterized by the encroachment

on Japan by the Western imperial powers posing the threat of coloni-

zation. Although modernity,imperialism,and colonialism are some- | times treated as separate issues, the basic distinction between jidaigeki

and gendaigeki in Japanese cinema most clearly shows that questions

of modernity can never be answered when they are separated from the

other two terms.To the extent that it enables the Japanese to imagine

a new Japan radically different from what is perceived as the old world

(i.e. pre-Meiji Japan and the rest of Asia),the binarism of jdaigeki

and gendaigeki can play a complicit role in the formation of Japan as

a nation-state and even the homegrown imperialism of modern Japan.

By instituting the major distinction between jidaigeki and gendaigeki,

Japanese cinema contributed to the ideological imperative of imagin-

|Seven Samurai209

ing the absolute point of historical disjunction, which was essential for

the Japanese national formation. | The replacement of kyugeki/shinpa by jidaigeki/gendaigeki marked a

fundamental shif in the conceptualization of the cinema.When it was first introduced into Japan in the late nineteenth century,the cinema

was perceived as another specimen of modern technology from the West. But the early history of Japanese cinema shows that the way

this modern technology was appropriated cannot necessarily be called modern.Initilly, traveling exhibitors showed films throughout Japan. Even after the first permanent movie theaters were built in 19o3, these itinerants did not disappear immediately.The mode of exhibition was also heavily influenced by the tradition of oral storytelling and perfor- mance. Even though they are related to each other oppositionally,kyu- |geki and shinpa are in the end semiautonomous practices, representing

different approaches to the question of how to create a new kind of dramatic and narrative entertainment by using film technology. The distinction of kyugeki and shinpa does not constitute a coherent struc- tural totality; that is, kyugeki and shinpa cannot be reduced to species of the genus called cinema.In spite of its fundamentally modern nature as a technological device, the cinema in Japan still had to go through a procss of modernization(i.e., the creation of a new mode of repre-

sentation speciic to monopoly capitalism) along with such traditional

cultural practices as literature,theater,and fine arts. It is only as a result of this modernization that jidaigeki and gendaigeki emerged as genres

of the cinema as a fully established art form for the masses (taishu).

Various attempts to modernize Japanese cinema appeared late in the second decade of the century.Inoue Masao's The Captain's Daughter

(（Taii no musume,1917)used a moving camera and close-ups (outsu-

shi) and tried to do away with kowairo, oral performers who imitated

the voices of the film's characters.Nikatsu Mukojima studios' reform

movement produced The Living Corpse (1keru shikabane,1918),whose

innovations included the use of a realistic set instead of a cheap painted backdrop and the inclusion of the name of the director and other main

staff members in the credits. The first articulate attempt to modern- ize Japanese cinema can be found in the effort of Kaeriyama Nori-

masa and the Pure Film Movement（Jun Eigageki Undo).Originally

|a technical specialist,Kaeriyama tried to replace shinpa with shingeki

210Kiurosawa

by following Hollywood conventions with the intention of exporting Japanese films. Kaeriyama formed the Film Art Association (Eiga Gei-

|jutsu Kyokai) and produced The Glow of Life (Sei no kagayaki,1919) | and Maid of the Deep Mountains(Miyama no otome,1919). His inno-

vations included the use of a script and actresses rather than oyama, or female impersonators.In 192o the new film company Taikatsu was established to pursue the production of innovative films. Under the |direction of Thomas Kurihara and Tanizaki Jun'ichiro,Taikatsu pro-

|duced such films as Amateur Cub(Amachua kurabu,1920),The Sands

|of Katsushika(Katsushika sunago,192o),The Night of the Doll Festival

(Hinamatsuri no yoru,1921),and The Lasciviousness of the Viper(Jasei

|no in,1921).j" In the same year,Shochiku founded a new film company

whose goal was to modernize Japanese cinema by importing the system of moviemaking directly from Hollywood. Along with the film produc- tion company, Shochiku also established an actor's school and invited Osanai Kaoru, the leader of shingeki, to be the school's director.But Shochiku's ambitious plan, which originally included the development | of a new modern city around its film studios, suffered a severe setback

because of the exhibitors'and audiences' resistance to rapid changes.

For a similar reason,Tanaka Eizo's attempt to modernize shinpa film at Nikkatsu was also brought to a halt. One of the most decisive events for the emergence of a new Japanese

cinema was the great Kanto earthquake in 1923.Although certainly not

a direct cause,the earthquake was a major factor in the accelerated pro-

cess of modernization in the 192os. After 1923,jidaigeki permanently

replaced kyugeki; around the same time,shinpa lost its ground to the

emerging genre of gendaigeki. Film studios in Tokyo,which mostly

produced shinpa films, were virtually all destroyed by the earthquake,

and the center of film production was momentarily moved to Kyoto,

|where film studios had been mainly specialized in the production of

kyugekifims.As filmmakers moved from Tokyo to Kyoto,a number of

innovations were brought to kyugeki. At the same time, as Tokyo began |to reemerge as a new urban center of Americanism,mass culture, and

consumerism, shinpa was finally replaced by gendaigeki. The dichotomy of jidaigeki and gendaigeki does not imply any value

judgment on the aesthetic merit of either genre.Yet it is clearly jidai-

geki that holds as a pivot this dichotomous system together. Although

Seven Samurai 211

films that depict contemporary social incidents and mores do not nec- essarily draw the audience's attention to their status as representations, |jidaigeki by its nature cannot but foreground its own generic conven-

tions. Moreover, the sense of the contemporaneity depicted in gendai- geki is reinforced by the existence of jidaigeki, which shows a distant |past.Thus,to understand the ideological implications of the emergence

of the new genre system, we must examine the institution of jidaigeki

more closely.

What Is Jidaigeki?

Let us start our examination of jidaigeki by distinguishing it from what is called the"samurai film." The samurai film as a generic category has commonly been used by American critics, but not much by Japanese.! Of course, that the"samurai fim" has not been a popular term in the Japanese critical scene does not by itself diminish its critical value. It is possible to propose the samurai film as a new theoretical category to

raise different questions and shed light on aspects of Japanese cinema

that might have been concealed by jidaigeki as a historical category of genre.As long as it has a clear definition, raises new questions, and ex- plains old problems more convincingly than already existing generic terms,a new theoretical category can be invented and used in analy- sis. However, as Rick Altman argues, since a theoretical category can never be outside of history, it is necessary to scrutinize it as much as

the historical category of jidaigeki. Where does the generic category of samurai fim come from? The

notion of samurai in this category is directly derived from the fact that many jidaigeki films feature samurai or sword-carrying warriors as

main characters. Another important factor in the determination of the samurai film's generic characteristics is the inclusion of sword-fighting

scenes (chanbara).Yet these two majior characteristics of the samurai

film lead to critical contradictions rather than elucidation. If the samu-

rai film is defined solely by the social status and classidentity of its pro- | tagonists,then regardless of its ultimate utility, it could at least main-

tain a generic coherence. However, when the spectacular sword fight is regarded a more important core of the samurai film as a genre, its

212 Kurosawa

generic coherence collapses. Many sword fight masters in jidaigeki are

not samurai, either lawfully employed or masterless, but commoners, mostly outlaws and gamblers (yakuza or kyokaku). David Desser is

aware of this contradiction when he claims that "those films which cen- teron non-Samurai heroes yet whose focus is on men (or women)who

|wield swords in feudal Japan, are also Samurai films.""He acknowl-

edges the fundamental contradiction by calling it the samurai film's generic complexity, but he never explains why jidaigeki films with non- |samurai heroes should still be called samurai films.If the use of swords

| is the only crucial factor in determining the identity and coherence of

the samurai film as a genre, then why not call it, for instance,a sword |film? This fundamental contradiction in the definition of the samurai

fim as a genre cannot but lead us back to our previous examination of the samurai as a sign imbued with colonial ideologies. It is rather ironic to hear that the "great paradox of the Samurai Film is that it has nothing whatsoever to do with history and everything to do with | myth."s For what is ahistorical is not jidaigeki films brought together

as samurai films but the notion of the samurai film itself.The samurai film as a generic category tels us less about Japanese cinema and more about a colonialist representation of Japan, which is shared by many

Westerners and Japanese. To understand the speciicity of jidaigeki, we must examine two de-

velopments in popular culture in the early 19zos:the rise of popular literature(taishu bungaku) and the emergence of Shinkokugeki（New

National Theater) as dominant cultural forces. Shinkokugeki was a new

school of popular theater founded in 1917 by Sawada Shojiro (aka Sawa-

|sho).Although its dramatic repertoire was rich in variety, Shinkoku-

geki was best known for its realistic sword fights(tate) or swordplay

(kengeki). And it is this tate that jidaigeki avidly appropriated and fur-

|ther refined. The most popular repertoire of Shinkokugeki included

such plays as Tsukigata Hanpeita and Kunisada Chuji by Yukitomo Rifu,

and Daibosatsu Pass(Daibosatsu Toge),an adaptation of the muti-

volume popular novel by Nakazato Kaizan.The serialization of this long, unfinished novel started in 191s and with some interruptions con- tinued until 941, three years before Nakazato's death.Even though the

scope of the novel goes beyond the narrow confinement of popular

entertainment,Daibosatsu Pas is best known for one of its protago-

\even Samurai 213

| nists,Tsukue Ryunosuke.The epitome of evil and nihilism, Ryunosuke is an extremely skilled swordsman who coldly kills people for no ap- parent reason. He eventually goes blind, but this does not at all dimin- ish his swordmanship. The popularity of Daibosatsu Pass was boosted further when Shinkokugeki performed its adaptation in 192o.Sawada's performance of the role of Ryunosuke made indelible impressions on spectators,and from that time on,the popular image of Tsukue Ryu- nosuke became inseparable from Sawada's stage performance." Dai- |bosatsu Pass was imitated and appropriated in numerous sword plays, popular novels,and jidaigeki films, and Tsukue Ryunosuke became a prototype of many well-known chanbara heroes from the one-armed, one-eyed ronin Tange Sazen to the blind swordsman Zato Ichi." Popular literature,or more specifically taishu bungaku, began to take

shape as a new cultural force in the early 192os under the strong leader- ship of writer Shirai Kyoji.In 1924 the inaugural issue of the popu- lar magazine King came out,* and in the following year, the first little magazine exclusively focused on popular literature,Taishu bunge,was started.The popularity of taishu bungaku soared in 1926 when Heibon- sha launched an enpon(one-yen book)series called "The Complete Works of Popular Literature"(Taishu bungakuzenshu).Even though it marginally included detective fiction (most notably the works of Edo-

gawa Ranpo) and other types of popular genres,taishu bungaku was |overwhelmingly chanbara fiction or jidai shosetsu(period novel), thus

sharing almost the identical narrative world with the jidaigeki fim.

Some taishu bungaku writers,most notably Naoki Sanjugo, were ac- tively involved in the moviemaking business.In the mid-192os,taishu bungaku and jidaigeki film mutually stimulated each other's develop-

ment.Jidaigeki relied on the mass appeal of taishu bungaku as its raw

material,and taishu bungaku expanded its sphere of infuence as jidai-

geki transformed its heroes into cultural icons.

One of the first filmmakers to recognize the value of Shinkokugeki's

realistic sword fighting and taishu bungaku was Makino Shozo. Right

before Tokyo was reduced to rubble by the powerful earthquake,Ma-

kino left Nikkatsu to establish his own company,Makino Educational

Film(Makino Kyoiku Eiga)." Although he was responsible for the

enormous success of kyugeki and its biggest star,Matsunosuke,Makino

was keenly aware of the limitations of what he had created.Kyugekiand

214 Kurosawa

its counterpart shinpa were usually a mere photographic representation of theatrical performances,and for those who were immersed in Holly- wood and European films, those Japanese films(katsudo shashin) were

less than what they considered a true cinema(eiga).In kyugeki films,

action scenes were often supplemented by various photographic tricks, | but heavily influenced by Kabuki; the actual sword fighting(tachima-

wari] was slow in tempo and less a realistic depiction than a stylized

dance. At his studios,Makino Shozo assembled a new generation of such filmmakers and actors as Bando Tsumasaburo, Susukita Roku- hei,Yamagami Itaro,and Makino's son Masahiro," whose works soon eclipsed the fims of the old group represented by Matsunosuke." And a golden age of jidaigeki came in the late 192os when Ito Daisuke made a

|series of films featuring Okochi Denjiro,a former Shinkokugeki actor,2

From its beginning, the cinema has been an art of spectacle as much as one of drama and narrative.Even after narrative film became the dominant genre of commercial cinema, the spectacle has remained its |indispensable component.The dominance of Hollywood in the world

market has been in part because of its success in incorporating spec-

| tacle scenes into tightly knit narratives. The well-told stories of Holly-

wood movies lure the audience into a fantasy world, and the extrava- |gant spectacle scenes not only manipulate the ups and downs of their

|emotions but also provide them with vicarious experiences of con-

spicuous consumption.To compete against Hollywood movies,cine- |mas of other countries have also tried to combine spectacles with nar-

|rative without making them too independent from the narrative flow.

The significance of idaigekit in the history of Japanese cinema needs to

be reexamined in this context Although the wordjuidai means "times,"age," or "period,"jidaigeki

is not exactly equivalent to either "period film"or "historicalfim."The

| period that jidaigeki exploits for dramatic purposes is not just any his-

torical time but mostly the Tokugawa or Edo era,from the early 16oos

to 1867.There are a number of jidaigeki films set in the pre-Tokugawa

era,but they are still exceptions rather than the norm.To understand why idaigeki exploits the Edo period as a fertile field of materials, the complexity of Japanese modernity needs to be noted.It is misleading,

for instance,to argue that Japanese modernityabruptly started with the

Meiji government's modernization policy articulated in such slogans

Seven Samurai 215

as fukoku kyohei(rich nation,strong army) and wakon yosai(Japanese spirit,Western technology).In Japanese,there are three different words that approximately mean"modern":kinsei, kindai, and gendai.The fist term is strictly reserved for the Edo period,and the last one can mean both"modern"and "contemporary"Although the phrase "feu- dal Japan"is often unproblematically equated with"premodern Japan," as the term kinsei indicates, the feudalism of Edo Japan was not incom- patible with a specific form of a modern socioeconomic system.The formation of modern Japan had already started in the Edo period, and to understand the specificities of Japanese modernity after the Meiji Restoration and the encounter with the Western imperial powers, it is imperative to put it in this larger historical perspective. Edo Japan as the most common setting for jidaigeki allowed film-

makers to transform sword-fighting scenes into mass entertainment spectacles, which contemporary settings would not easily facilitate." No matter how modernized post-Meiji lapan was,the process of mod- ernization was far from complete,and the fast-paced daily lives of the masses did not irreversibly cut off their ties with the older mode of living, either.When filmmakers turned their attention to contemporary Japan, what they saw was not a fully modernized society but strains and contradictions caused by the ongoing process of modernization. As their daily lives were increasingly transformed by the modernizing forces of monopoly capitalism,the audiences demanded more speed and spectacle; yet because of the incomplete state of modernization, that demand could not always be satisfied by showing contemporary Japanese life.Thus a paradox:the more Japan was modernized,the more there was demand for films set in feudal Japan. Edo Japan as depicted in jidaigeki is not a historically accurate repre-

sentation but the idealized image of Edo.During the Meiji the writer Ozaki Koyo and his literary group Kenyusha tried to keep the Edo chonin(townspeople)culture alive in their elegantly stylized writings. Thanks also to the advertising campaign by Mitsukoshi,the first mod- ern department store in Japan, the Edo became an enormously popu- lar commodity after the end of the Russo-Japanese War (1904-19o5). Amid the nostalgic Edo boom of the late Meiji,the popular imagi- nation idealized the early years of the Edo period and constructed a

216 Kurosawa

ictitious historical narrative in which what happened in later years of the period appeared in the idealized setting of the seventoenth cen- tury."Jlidaigeki owed its existence in part to this popular imagination, and the use of a historically ambiguous word such as jidaigave rise to the widely shared sense of imaginary history. To this extent, the emer- gence of Japanese cinema with its new genre system in the mid-192os contributed to the formation of the national consciousness and the re- construction of the national history that was violently disrupted and at the same time engendered by Western imperialism.The dichotomy of jidaigeki and gendaigeki can be read as a symbolic translation of the larger historical framework within which the issues of modernity,im- perialism, and colonialism intersect, while subgenres such as maternal |melodrama and gangster films narrativize specific types of sociopoliti-

|cal contradictions induced by the modernization process.Through the institutional distinction of jidaigeki and gendaigeki,the cinema func- tioned as one of the essential means for the Japanese to come to terms with questions of modernity. The emergence of jidaigeki as a new genre had little to do with a

| return to tradition and more to do with a rebellion against the old

forms and conventions of Kabuki and kyugeki. If Shinkokugeki pro- | vided a model of realistic sword fighting, what compelled inovators

of jidaigeki to push their experiment to the limit was the impact of Hollywood cinema,particularly action movies, or katsugeki, exempli- fied by Douglas Fairbanks's swashbuckling fims and William S. Hart's |Westerns."In addition,the slapstick comedies of Chaplin, Keaton,

and Lloyd provided them with examples of athletic action and move- ments,The list of Japanese films that adapted or imitated Hollywood productions by merely changing characters' names and physical set- |tings is endless.But these films cannot be regarded as evidence for

either the Americanization of Japanese cinema or the Japanization of American cinema. Particular kinds of shot composition, camera move- | ment,editing techniques, narrative motifs, and characterization in

Hollywood cinema were thoroughly assmilated as semiotic codes to such an extent that where those formal devices and thematic motifs originated became irrelevant.And only as a successful result of this as- similation did"Japan" become a meaningful sign in relation to film. In

Seven Samurai 217

| other words,"Japan"did not preexist the translation and assimilation of new semiotic codes; instead,"Japanese cinema"emerged precisely as an effect of intertextual fermentation. The significance of jidaigeki did not simply lie in its status as a new

|commodified spectacle.Like Shinkokugeki, jidaigeki precariously bal- anced itself between a pure entertainment and an art form with im- portant messages and aesthetic value. The founder of Shinkokugeki, Sawada Shojiro,started his theatrical career when he was still a stu- dent at Waseda University as a trainee of the shingeki group Bungei Kyokai(Literary Association),which was headed by Tsubouchi Shoyo. A highly idealistic shingeki actor, Sawada vehemently refused to com- promise his aesthetic standards to please what he considered the vul- gar taste of popular audiences. Sawada was unsatisfied with Bungei Kyokai's somewhat unexpected succes, since it was to a large extent due to the popularity of one actress,Matsui Sumako." He left Bungei Kyokai right before it was dissolved because of internal confict, and he reluctantly joined Shimamura Hogetsu's Geijutsuza, which was still centered around Sumako,Hogetsu's lover. In1914, when Geijutsuza decided to stage a play based on Tolstoy's Resurrection, Sawada's exas- peration over Geijutsuza's commercialization reached the limit.Dur- ing the performance of Resurrection, Sumako(in the role of Katusha) sang a song, which was so popular that its record sold forty thousand copies. Sumako's Katusha became an idol,and her hairstyle and fash- ion were avidly imitated and sold as character goods.Geijutsuza trav- eled throughout Japan and the Japanese colonies to show Resurrection, which was performed 444 times.Led by his idealistic zeal for theater as high art, Sawada left Geijutsuza and tried to realize his vision else- where.But he encountered enormous financial difficulty and suffered a series of setbacks. After having barnstormed and lived a hand-to- mouth lif for a few years, he came to realize a need for anew type of popular theater that is neither Kabuki,shinpa, nor translated foreign plays (148).In 1917, to achieve his new goal, Sawada started Shinkoku- geki, but without a star actress, the troupe failed to attract the popular audience.The financial trouble forced Sawada's troupe to leave Tokyo and move westward to Kyoto, where their fortune went further down- hil.As a last resort,at a theater in Osaka, Sawada and his followers decided to include a sword-ighting scene in the program.Partly be- 218 Kurosawa

cause of their lack of skill and also because of their desperate state of mind, their performance was extremely speedy,energetic,and violent, nothing like Kabuki's dancelike tachimawari.The audience responded immediately,and Shinkokugeki began to be known as the theater of realistic sword fighting. The direction of Shinkokugeki was finally set, and Sawada came up with "a half-step principle"(hanpo zenshin shugi)

| as Shinkokugeki's motto.On the one hand, if artists take a full step

forward,argued Sawada, the masses would be simply left behind. On the other hand,if artists stay with the masses by passively satisfying |their demands, there would be no progress in art.Therefore, if artists

|want to pursue art and simultaneously keep in touch with the desire

and sensibility of the masses, they must take only a halfstep at a time. True to his convictions, Sawada continued to explore the possibilities |of sword fighting as spectacle and art, whileregularly performing other

types of plays,including translated Western plays. |Like Sawada Shojiro,many filmmakers,including those who came

to specialize in jidaigeki, had been involved in shingeki movements be- fore they entered the film world.Tanaka Eizo, Katsumi Yotaro, lwata |Yukichi,Moroguchi Tsuzuya, and Kamiyama Sojin (who later moved

to Shoyo's Bungei Kyokai) all studied at Tokyo Acting School(Tokyo

|Haiyu Yoseisho),which was established to train shinpa actors but ended |up producing shingeki actors(162-73).This new breed of film actors

and directors had a kind of training and education decisively differ- |ent from the background of Onoe Matsunosuke and his generation of

filmmakers. Ito Daisuke, the most important jidaigeki director in this |period, was a student of Osanai Kaoru, a leader of the shingeki move- |ment. Ito's initial ambition was literature, but when Osanai assumed

the post of the head of Shochiku Cinema Institute (Shochiku Kinema

Kenkyusho),Ito, with Osanai's assistance,entered Shochiku's acting

|school as a trainee. When Shochiku started making films in 1920, Ito

moved to its script department and in 1924 directed his first film for |Tekoku Kinema.For this new generation of filmmakers, the cinema

|was not just a spectacle or entertainment. It was a new type of mass

medium that could appeal to a large number of people as entertain- ment and at the same time have aesthetic and political significance. Spectacular sword fighting in jidaigeki was not at all incompatible with

formal experiment and political radicalism.

Seven Samurai 219

In the i92os,Japanese society was undergoing tremendous changes. The great Kanto earthquake in 1923 destroyed the old Tokyo and pre- cipitated the emergence of mass culture and Americanism.A new ur- ban cultural scene in Tokyo and elsewhere was dominated by radio, film, vaudeille theater, weekly magazines, jazz,and cafes.It was also the age of so-called Taisho democracy and political repression.In 19z5 universal male suffrage became reality, and all males over twenty-five |were now eligible to vote. In the same year,however, the Peace Pres- |ervation Law(Chian ljiho)was passed to suppress widespread leftist activities and labor movements.In 193o the Great Depression hit lapan. Many workers lost their jobs in cities, and in the countryside, which was severely ravaged by depression and bad weather,many farmers sold their daughters to brothels to avoid starvation.Labor unrest was widespread allover Japan,and socialism and anarchism were extremely popular among youth.At the same time,the government was rapidly leaning toward militarist expansionism,and the extreme right wing as. ssinated politicians and businessleaders who obstructed their pursuit of radicalism.In the midst of social uncertainty,the age of American- ism shifted to that of the "erotic, grotesque,and nonsense"(ero-gro- nansensu), reflecting the nihilistic desperation of popular sentiment. Popular culture,including film and taishu bungaku, responded to these radical social changes and uncertainties. For instance, the term taishu bungaku itself was a product of this tumultuous period.The word taishu began to be used in the early 192os by socialists and an- |archists such as Yamakawa Hitoshi and Takabatake Motoyuki to refer to the "people" or the "masses." The choice of the word taishu instead of tsuzoku(popular,common,etc.) indicates that taishu bungaku was marked by a sense of classdifference and struggle as much as bya more predictable opposition of high art and low culture" The connection between taishu bungaku and leftist politics can also be discerned in the background of one of the founders of taishu bungaku, Nakazato Kaizan, the author of Daibosatsu Pass. Kaizan was born and grew up in the Tama region, which produced not only late Edo loyalists such as Kondo Isami and Hijikata Toshizo but also young activists of the People's Rights movement in the 188os. Kaizan, too,was a politially

active youth,who was forced to resign from his teaching position at an elementary school because of his missionary work and socialist be- 220Kurosawa

liefs.He soon became a regular contributor to the Christian social- ist weekly Heimin shinbun(Commoner's Paper),and opposed to the

Russo-Japanese War.Shortlyafter the High Treason incident(Taigyaku

Jliken) in 191o,Kaizan began to be drawn to Buddhism and continued

| to develop his own utopian vision of society.Kaizan was often regarded

as an extremely opinionated, eccentric writer,but it is worthwhile to remember that he was one of a few writers during World War Il who refused to join the Society for Patriotism through Literature (Bungaku Hokokukai),a governmental organization established to control and

mobilize writers for war effort.(Another writer who refused to become

a member of this militarist association was Uchida Hyakken, who is featured as a protagonist of Kurosawa's last fim,Madadayo.)》

What was called taishu bungaku was almost exclusively jidai shosetsu featuring samurai and gamblers.Popular stories and novels whose dra- matic settings were contemporary Japan were simply called tsuzoku

bungaku,which lacked any cla-related connotations." Why did tai- |shu bungaku as a new literary genre include only stories set in the Edo

period, particularly its last days? Writers like Nagai Kafu exoticized

the remnants of Edo in contemporary Tokyo by way of passive contes- |tation of the autocratic government and its policy of modernization.

Taishu bungaku, which was implicitly marked by the class conscious- nessof the politicized masses,used as an imaginary field of experiment

the last days of the Edo period (bakumatsu), when loyalists (kinno-

ha)and bakufu supporters (sabaku-ha)engaged in a bloody battl and fought for hegemony. The transitional years from the Edo to the Res-

toration became an allegorical image of the contemporary social situa-

tion, where the radical left and right activists were both trying to pro-

mote their versions of revolution.In the cinema,various adaptations of

Shinkokugeki's Tsukigata Hanpeita made the last days of the Tokugawa

shogunate one of the most popular dramatic settings for idaigeki in the

mid-192os."The emergence of jidaigeki was almost simultaneous with

the filmmakers' discovery of the figure of the ronin, or masterless samu-

|rai, which made it possible for them to represent images of youth un-

constrained by social customs and obligations.* The most radicalized

images of youth were found in the leftist tendency films (keiko eiga)

of the late 192os and early 193os." At the same time,the most inno-

vative jidaigekifilmmakers were themselves radical youth, who chifly

Seven Samurai 224

|worked at Makino Kinema and other small independent production companies established by film stars.* According to Makino Masahiro, even before the leftist tendency film became popular, Makino studio was already a hotbed of anarchists." The vitality of jidaigeki in the 192os and early 193os was inseparable from young filmmakers' anar- chistic rebellion against the establishment and, at an institutional level, small production companies'struggle against large capital." Thus it is not surprising that the golden age of jidaigeki came to an end with the government suppression of a leftist movement and the dismanting and absorption of small independent companies by the majors, which were accelerated by the introduction of a new technology,synchro- nized sound.The end of the jidaigeki's golden age coincided with the replacement of the silent cinema and benshi's narration by the sound cinema in the mid-193os.l

Jidaigeki and the Occupation

If the first setback for jidaigeki was created by the suppression of the leftist movement and the transition from silent to sound film, the sec- ond major crisis came with Japan's defeat in World War Il and the subsequent American occupation. During the Occupation,Japanese cinema was under the watchful eye of the American censors, who im- mediately started working on the control of the film industry. On Sep- tember 22,1945,GHQ's Civil Information and Education Section(cIE) issued to some forty Japanese fimmakers a document that laid out a general policy for film production.The cIE's plan was to make Japa- nese cinema contribute to the elimination of Japanese militarism and ultranationalism; the fostering of basic human rights including free- dom of speech, assembly,and religion;and the transformation of Japan into a country that would never again threaten world peace and secu- rity.The American officials also explained to the asembled Japanese filmmakers what they perceived as fundamental problems with Japa- nese film and theater."Kabuki theater is,"according to the Americans, ""based on the principles of feudalistic loyalty and revenge. The present world does not accept this type of theater anymore. The Japanese will never be able to understand the foundation of international society in- 222 Kurosawa

sofar as things such as treason,murder,and deception are openly jus- tified in front of the masses,and personal revenge is permitted in place of law. Of course, serious crimes also occur in Western countries; how- ever,Western morality is based on concepts of good and evil,not on loyalty to feudal clans or blood relatives."Two months later,cIE an- |nounced a list of thirteen types of films that were no longer allowed to

be produced.The list included any films showing revenge as a central theme, distorting historical facts,portraying feudal loyalty or contempt

|for life as desirable and honorable,and approving suicide directlyor in-

|directly.9Through these orders,directives,and "guidance," the Ocu-

pation government tried to destroy j daigeki, which was regarded as a major source of what the Americans considered Japanese feudalis- |tic sentiment, and therefore,as such, responsible for ultranationalism

and militarism.In the immediate postwar years, jidaigeki was basically banned by the Occupation authorities,except when films did not show | any sword-fighting scenes or when they explicitly criticized Bushido,

revenge,and other feudal ideals. |As we examined in the previous section, jidaigeki is, despite its

explicit diegetic content,a modern genre,and it does not afrm or |reflect feudalistic values straightforwardly as the American censors be-

lieved. Not a simple continuation of traditional popular culture,jidai- geki has lss to do with a revival of tradition than with an emerging society of the masses and various strains of modernization. Why did |the Americans react so strongly against juidaigeki? What was really be-

hind the Occupation government's ban on these films? To answer these questions,it isilluminating to compare how they treated another "feu-

dalistic"cultural practice, Kabuki.Initially Kabuki,too, suffered from

the Occupation's policy, which immediately banned such popular clas- sics as Chushingura and Kanjincho because of their glorification of feu-

dal loyalty.But the restriction on Kabuki was gradually relaxed by the efforts of an American official who argued that Kabuki's attraction did

not necessarily lie in the particular content of a story but in aesthetic beauty based on stylized form and conventions. Through distantiation and stylization, the themes of loyalty to the great lord or self-sacrifice

for revenge were said to be emptied out,and the audience rather en-

joyed the formal beauty of Kabuki'sfamboyant acting and stage design

without being influenced by feudal values idealized by drama. In con-

Seven Samurai 223

trast,film-as an intrinsically more realistic medium-would suppos- |edly have a more direct impact on the way audiences think and act. | There is nothing wrong with pointing out some basic dfferences between Kabuki and jidaigeki film as artistic media. But the way the Ocupation censors distinguished Kabuki and jidaigeki simply raises more questions about the validity of the logic behind their different treatment of the two.Although jidaigeki fimmakers tried to get rid of forms and conventions inherited from Kabuki, the connections be- tween Kabuki and film were not completely eliminated.The majority of the biggest juidaigki stars were originally from the world of Kabuki (e.g, Bando Tsumasaburo, Kataoka Chiezo,Ichikawa Utaemon,and Arashi Kanjuro).The term jidaigeki itself was probably derived from Kabukisjidaimono (or jidai kyogen).The way jidaigeki used the past as a dramatic setting to elude censorship paralleled the way Kabuki'sjidai mono had used pre-Edo history to portray and comment on contem- porary social events to avoid the authorities' represion.These obvious similarities between Kabuki andjidaigeki make it diffcult for us to ac- cept the Ocupation censors'clear-cut distinction between them at face value. Another important point to be stressed is that far from being promoted as a vehicle for propagating feudal ideals,juidaigeki was dis- dained and even suppressed by the militaristic Japanese government as a trivial and ultimately useles entertainment.The assertion that by idealizing feudalistic social relations jidaigeki functioned as an ideo- logical apparatus of Japanese militarism is basicallya fiction.The Ocu- pation censors argued that Japanese militarism was a direct product of feudalism,and that jidaigeki shamelessly indoctrinated Japanese audi- ences by feudal ideas. But if this had really been the case, why did the militarist government during the war try to suppress jidaigeki? We can more aptly regard the idaigeki film as a scapegoat,doubly suppressed by the Japanese government during the war and by the Ocupation government after the Japanese defeat. Thus there is a fundamental contradiction in the Occupation cen-

sors' characterization of juidaigki, which reveals les about the speci- ficity of this genre than about their ideological agenda and stratagem. The sharp differentiation of Kabuki fromjidaigekienabled the Occupa- tion censors to reinforce the status of the former as a national treasure and to replace the specificity of history with the notion of aestheticized 224 Kurosawa

Japaneseness as fetish.The dichotomy of Kabuki andjidaigeki also en-

abled the Americans to differentiate Japanese history into two parts,a

good tradition, which is nonviolent and apolitical and shared by the majority of the ordinary Japanese,and a premodern feudalistic tradi- | tion, which is deemed largely responsible for Japanese militarism and

sadistic atrocities committed by Japanese military oficers and soldiers. Behind the Occupation government's ban on jidaigeki lies a faith in modernization theory, which asserts a linear, progressive movement of |history from feudalism to modernity. By imposing this progressivist

view of history on the Japanese, the Americans tried to disguise their Occupation as the liberation and democratization of Japan. The Occupation censors did not pay much attention to the specific

narrative content of jidaigeki films. Instead, they were reacting to the

immediate images on the screen, particularly the images of swords. There is something absurd about the Americans'excessive obsession with, and fear of, the Japanese sword, which as an iconic image epito- |mizes for them feudal loyalty,revenge,and the irrational energy and

brutality of the Japanese. I shall not venture any possible psychoana- |lytic connection of the Americans' fear of the Japanese sword, cas-

| tration complex,and uncertainty about their own national identity.

I shall only note how frequently the wartime American fims include the images of swords to represent the Japanese as incomprehensible |aliens.Frank Capra's propaganda film Know Your Enemy:lapan(1944),

for instance,shows Japanese swords to categorically assert the bru- | tality of the Japanese as a race(67).The Purple Heart(Lewis Milestone,

1944), the first Hollywood film to explicitly show the Japanese torture

|of American prisoners of war, is another example of the films that asso-

| ciate Japanese fanaticism with the sword.There is a bizarre scene in the

|film where Japanese soldiers frenetically dance and swing their swords

|around in a courtroom when they hear the news of MacArthur's re-

treat from the Philippines.The Occupation feared so much the power

of the sword as a symbolically charged iconic sign that the censors cut

| excessive swordplay scenes even in foreign films (69).When Japanese

filmmakers protested against the Ocupation's apparently irrational re-

action, the American censors defended their decision by saying that the sword is an instrument of feudal revenge, but the gun is a weapon of

self-defense and individualism.

Seven Samurai 225

The effect of the Occupation censorship onjidaigeki was already visi- ble in the films of the immediate postsurrender days.A Baby Grven by a Fox(Kitsune no kureta akanbo),a jidaigeki film directed by Marune Santaro and released on November 8,1945,does not include any sword fighting scenes.The film's protagonist is Tora(Bando Tsumasaburo),a laborer who carries people and baggage across the Oi River. One day he finds an abandoned baby boy in the woods and decides to bring him up by himself. The boy, named Zenta, is a natural leader. He tells his father that he wants to become a samurai someday. When Tora prom- ises him a reward for his rapid progress in learning writing,Zenta asks for a sword. At first Tora scolds Zenta for his unreasonable request and tries to explain that a sword is only for samurai,not for commoners like themselves. But in the end Tora gives in to Zenta and buys him a small sword.With his new sword,Zenta plays the role of a noble lord, carried by his friends as retainers on a causeway. From the opposite side comes the procession of a real daimyo.Zenta, who is too proud and stubborn, refuses to make way for the daimyo's procession, and the children are captured and incarcerated by the angry samurai.Con- sidering the historical context of the Occupation and its censorship, it is hard not to interpret this episode without reference to the Occupa- tion's fear and condemnation of the sword as a symbol of everything negative about Japanese tradition.The introduction of the sword as a significant narrative motif is too abrupt in this film about the life and feelings of common people.This unnatural turn of events cannot but draw the audience's attention to the sword as an object inviting mis- fortune. And perhaps the film's peculiar underscoring of the sword is an implicit critique of the Occupation censors'irrational suppression of the images of sword and sword fighting. The Ocupation censorship nearly killedjuidaigeki. Only seven jidai-

geki films were made in 1946," and the Occupation censors' relaxation of their control over jdaigeki occurred very slowly. Even when the Occupation offcially ended its censorship of Japanese films in October 1949, Eirin,the lapanese censorship board established in June 1949 to replace the Occupation censors, continued to limit the numberof jidai- geki films.In 19so the film industry agreed to a policy of self-restraint regarding the production of jidaigki,whereby each company was allowed to make only one jidaigeki film per month. Under such cir-

26 Kurosawa

|cumstances, studios,directors,and actors who specialized in juidaigeki

were forced to make different kinds of juidaigeki or even venture into the unfamiliar territory of gendaigeki. In jidaigeki,there was a boom

|of torimonocho, a type of detective story whose protagonist is not a

|sword-carrying samurai but a Tokugawa-period detective or meakashi

a commoner with some not too serious criminal background. Because meakashi used an iron bar called jitte rather than a sword, torimono-

cho films could show spectacle scenes without sword fighting. Some jidaigeki stars,most notably Kataoka Chiezo,found a new home in gen-

daigeki's detective genre.In the Tarao Bannai series,Chiezo exchanges a sword for a pistol and solves mysterious cases with his brain rather than with his physical strength. As decisive as it was,the Occupation censorship was not the only rea-

son for the decline of jidaigeki as a genre. Jidaigeki was also gradually losing its fundamental source of energy and vitality with the radical re- conceptualization of modern Japanese history. Until the end of the war, |the pivotal point of historical disjunction had been the end of the Edo

and the beginning of the Meiji. After the defeat, however, it was Au- gust i5,1945, that became at least as significant as the Meiji Restoration

in marking a historical discontinuity.For the postwar Japanese cinema,

what was more important was how to deal with the immediate past and contemporary chaos, war and its disastrous consequences. Japa- nese cinema responded to the necessity of asserting the radical newness of postwar Japan,even if it turned out to be only imaginary, and to a

lesser degree,the necessity of repressing the fact of Ocupation.

lidaigeki in the 19osos

|One of the most important developments for jidaigeki during the 195os

was the founding of a new film company,Toei.In April1951,Tokyo Eiga

Haikyu, a distribution company established two years earlier, was re-

organized as Toei after absorbing two production companies,Toyoko

and Oizumi studios. Even after the merger,however, Toei was still on the verge of bankruptcy.In Kyoto, stars such as Kataoka Chiezo and

IchikawaUtaemon were forced to round up money to cover the cost

of location shootings. The financially desperate situation was so well

Seven Samurai 227

known that many inns and restaurants refused to serve Toei actors and crews."In 1952, with the end of the Occupation and the resurgence of jidaigeki as a popular film genre, Toei's financial situation slowly started improving." Although it produced many gendaigeki films at its studios in Tokyo, Toei was predominantly known for its jidaigeki films featuring such big stars as Chiezo and Utaemon.When the industry's self-restriction on the distribution of idaigeki films was finallylifted in August 1951,all major studios took advantage of the abolition of the quota.Yet it was clearly Toei that most benefited from the new situa- tion.In 1946 Toei hired Makino Mitsuo,a son of Makino Shozo and a younger brother of Makino Masahiro,as the head of its Kyoto studios when he repatriated from Manchuria, where he had worked as a pro- ducer at the Manchurian Motion Picture Association.In the early days of the Occupation,because of the near impossibility of making jidai- gekifilms,Daiei released its biggest uidaigekistars,Bando Tsumasaburo, Arashi Kanjuro, Kataoka Chiezo, and Ichikawa Utaemon.Toei signed exclusive contracts with Chiezo and Utaemon in 1949.In addition to these newly acquired superstars, Toei also had jdaigeki stars such as Tsukigata Ryunosuke and Otomo Ryutaro,jidaigeki directors Makino Masahiro and his half brother Matsuda Sadatsugu,and scriptwriters Hisa Yoshitake and Yahiro Fuji."In other words, unlike other studios, Toei wasfully prepared to mass-produce jidaigekifims.In 1952,for in- stance,ninety jidaigeki fims were made by the Japanese film industry. Among the five majors,Toei produced the largest number of jidaigeki films (twenty-six, or 28 percent of the total output),and it was also the only company that made more jidaigeki films than gendaigeki films." In 1954 Toei started a weekly double feature,leading the way in the mas production of films.The shorter film of the double feature was called Toei gorakuhen(Toei entertainment edition),which, featuring young rising stars such as Nakamura Kinnosuke and Azuma Chiyono- suke,successfully opened up a new market for movies aimed at chil- dren under high school age." Kinnosuke grew into one of the biggest movie stars of the 19sos, and his popularity was eclipsed only by Nik- katsu's action star Ishihara Yujiro.In 1957 Toei became the first apanese film company to adopt CinemaScope,and at the box office, it was num- ber one among the six majors."The height of Toei jidaigeki's popu- larity and Toei's success lasted from the mid-195os to the early 196os, 228 Kurosawa

right before Japan experienced the miracle of high-growth economy; in 1961,more than 32 percent of all the fims made by the industry were Toei fims." What are some of the basic characteristics of Toei jidaigeki films?

|Based on set patterns and formulas,the story of a typical Toei jidai- gekifilm is simple and predictable.Frequently,the same materials were |literally used again and again (e-g,Chushingura, Shimizu no lirocho,

etc.). The narrative is organized around the simple opposition of good

and evil and predictably leads to a happy ending: the hero always tri- umphs; the villain is killed or punished.Being so sure of the dfference |between justice and injustice,the hero never wavers in his judgment

and determination."* The villain, in contrast, tests the boundary sepa- |rating justice and injustice, or good and evil.This is why in the world of Toei chanbara films,anybody who "thinks"falls into the category of a villain.The anti-intellectual sentiment of Toeijidaigeki manifests itself most clearly in the casting.The role of the hero is always played by a former Kabuki actor or somebody who is familiar with Kabuki's |milieu;in contrast, the villain's role is played by an actor who comes

from the world of shingeki.The hero does not have any psychological |depth or interiority,and the villain is punished precisely for his "think-

|ing" as much as for his evil deed. Predictably, the hero is a superior

swordsman, but this does not necessarily mean that Toei jidaigki in- cludes spectacular swordplay or scenes of excessive violence. The major

|attraction of Toei jidaigeki is a sword fight scene(thus Toei jidaigeki is

called chanbara),yet the sword fighting is not as athletic or realistic as

| it was in prewar chanbara films.Instead, it is a highly stylized and care-

fully choreographed dance.The absence of realistically violent sword fighting,coupled with the avoidance of any sexually explicit senes,

means that Toei jidaigeki is remarkably wholesome,the kind of films

|the Ministry of Education would conceivably be willing to recommend

|(in reality, of course,the ministry neverendorsed Toeijidaigeki because

it was regarded as nothing more than a mindless entertainment).The

source materials of Toei jidaigki include not only canonical jdaigeki

| texts but also NHK's serial radio dramas resembling kodan stories.By

adapting these serials,Toei made ninjutsu,the art of the ninja,a popu-

|lar subject again.(In the early 196os, the ninja film became more than

st an entertainment at the hands of directors such as Yamamoto Sat-

Seven Samurai 29

|suo, who used this genre as a means of social critique in A Band of Assassins[Shinobi no mono,1962].) Toei jidaigeki is to some extent an atavistic return to kyugekiand the world of Tachikawa bunko; that is, it is a more technologically advanced version of the primitive cinema exemplified by the films of the kyugeki superstar Onoe Matsunosuke. Toei jidaigki is a star-oriented cinema.The film's plot is not neces- sarily determined by the inner logic of the narrative but often by the balance of stars appearing in the film. According to the generic rules of Toei jidaigeki, the stars should not play the role of villain, and they should also not fight against each other in the film. When there are many stars in one film,a direct fight among them is dificult to avoid, but the star system demands the observance of the rules even if as a result the film becomes utterly artificial and unrealistic. The estab- lishment of a rigid star system and strict hierarchy among actors and staff at Toei was geared toward the mass production of jidaigeki films. |The use of the leading stars in a weekly rotation enabled the studio to produce two films a week with enough variations in the casting and subtle permutations of stories. Many excellent supporting actors added depth to Toei's offerings.The hierarchical organization of the studio gave actors and other employees the sense of their own proper places and functions,so that it greatly increased the efficiency of production. At the studios, the leading stars were treated like small feudal lords,and this anachronistic treatment ironically gave the actors presence when they appeared as great lords,master swordsmen, or other heroic figures in films. |As dominant as it was, Toei did not completely monopolize the genre

| of juidaigeki in the 19sos. There were alternatives to Toei's formulaic entertainment movies. During the Occupation,there were already some attempts to innovate the genre of jidaigeki by such non-idai- geki filmmakers as Kinoshita Keisuke(The Yotsugya Ghost Story[Yot- suya kaidan,1949])and Yoshimura Kozaburo(Ishimatsu of the Forest [Mori no Ishimatsu,1949]).These new jidaigekifilms were artistically ambitious but commercially not so successful.In the 195os,Mizogu- chi made a series of unique jidaigeki films based on well-known lit- erary sources(The Life of Oharu[Saikaku ichidai onna,1952],Ugetsu [Ugetsu monogatari,1953],Sansho the Bailif(Sansho dayu,1954],A Story from Chikamatsu[Chikamatsu monogatari,1954],New Tales of 230 Kurosawa

the Taira Clan[Shin Heike monogatari,19ss).Imai Tadashi,a leftist

director of gendaigeki,made his frst jidaigeki film,Night Drum(Yoru no tsuzumi,1958),an adaptation of a Chikamatsu play. And even at

Toei there was an exception.Uchida Tomu, a prewar master of gendai- gekiflms,made some remarkable jidaigekifilms including Bloody Spear at Mount Fuji(Chiyari Fuji,195s).It is to this list of film directors that

Kurosawa Akira belongs.

Western and Jlidaigeki

Jidaigeki has often been compared to the American Western. Both genres, set in important periods of Japanese and American national histories, feature armed heroes-samurai and gamblers,cowboys and gunmen-whose violence plays the essential role in the narrative de-

velopment and resolution.The Western and jidaigeki heroes are often social outsiders who restore order or help people fighting against the villains whilefully being aware that their virtuous action does not allow |them to reintegrate themselves in a renewed social order. These and

|other similarities between the Western and jidaigeki are more than just

|coincidental.As I noted earlier,jidaigeki is not a pure Japanese genre.

The Hollywood cinema,including the Western, strongly influenced the formation of jidaigeki conventions. For instance,Kurama Tengu, one

of the most beloved heroes of jidaigek, is played by Arashi Kanjuro (or Arakan) wearing black headgear to hide his identity. Sato Tadao specu-

lates that Kurama Tengu and other masked heroes of jidaigeki were in

part a product of influences of Hollywood movies such as The Mark of Zorro (Fred Niblo,192o),featuring Douglas Fairbanks as a swashbuck-

ling hero.The Japanese release of The Mark ofZorro in 1921 was in fact soon followed by its direct jidaigeki imitations.* By emulating Buster

|Keaton, Arakan created another favorite jidaigeki character,Muttsuri

Umon, who rarely shows his emotion on his face.As Sato Tadao points

out, there are remarkable parallels between William S.Hart's West-

erns and a subgenre of jidaigeki called matatabi mono, films featuring

wandering kyokaku or yakuza. The key figure in the proliferation of | matatabi films was the writer of taishu bungaku Hasegawa Shin, whose

popularity is attested by the fact that between 1929 and 1940, seventy-

Seven Samurai 231

sixfims were made based on his novels."As in William S.Har's flms, the hero of Hasegawa's stories is a"good-bad man": a bad man who is converted into a good man through his encounter with the purity and inocence of a virginal woman.The narrative in which the woman plays such a role did not exist in traditional Japanese fiction and drama. Kawatake Mokuami's plays, particularly shiranami mono, which fea- tures thieves as protagonists,do share certain similarities with the fims of William S. Hart,but the encounter between a woman and a good- bad man in Mokuami's plays does not lead to the purification of the man's soul. Borrowing narrative motifs from a remarkably different cultural tra-

dition is easy to do.But it is rather diffcult to appropriate them so thor- oughly that the end result does not show the fact of borrowing. Why could the Japanese jidaigekifilm so succesfully incorporate Hollywood motifs and become popular to such an extent that the spectators be- lieved the films they were watching were based on Japanese cultural tra- ditions? Sato Tadao proposes to explain this remarkable sucess by the similarity between Japanese and American social changes in the 1920s and 19yos."It is possible,"writes John Belton,"to locate the origins |of the Western in the disturbance of an agrarian-pastoral order intro- duced by the IndustrialRevolution, technological innovation, urbani- zation,and in the transformation of small-town America into a mod- ern,mass society. The Western can thus be regarded as"a conservative |reaction to a growing dependence upon technology and to the imper- sonality of the consumer-oriented mass culture that accomplishes the modernization of America in the 192os and later."s This view is shared by Sato Tadao,who argues that because of a similar process of transi- tion in Japan from an agrarian society to a modern and urban-oriented society,jidaigeki as a popular genre has an affinity with the Western. The transformation of kyugeki into jidaigeki was without a doubt

facilitated by the appropriation of Hollywood conventions. At the same time,jidaigeki was not perceived as a simple imitation of the Western

and other Hollywood genres.Heroes of Hasegawa Shin's works are as remarkably "Japanese" as the loyal forty-seven ronin of Chushinguna. |Despite his admiration,Arakan was not interested in becoming Japan's

Buster Keaton; instead,he interpreted Keaton's performance as a sign

and recoded it to suit his own purposes.In short, despite their afini-

232Kurosawa

ties,the Western andjidaigeki differ from each other in some crucial aspects. The most obvious difference is the meanings of the names of the two

genres:"jidaigeki"is,as we have already discussed, a temporal term, and "Western" is a spatial one.The term "Western" is directly related to America's western expansion in the nineteenth century and the idea |of Manifest Destiny,"a providentially or historically sanctioned right

to continental expansionism."To the extent that its historical setting is roughly the period of 865 to 189o, the Western is a historical genre. Nevertheles,the name of the genre itself emphasizes a geographic loca- |tion and spatial expansion rather than a historical period.In marked

|contrast,for uidaigeki, history is far more crucial for its generic iden-

| tity than spatiality.As Joseph Anderson writes,"few jidai-geki present

the wide open spaces of the old-style Western."M The smallness of the |Japanese land,of course, partly explains why the images of expansive

space are rare in jidaigeki.The relative spatial confinement in jidaigeki is also due to the diferent nature of the Japanese historical situation in the nineteenth century,which is neither encapsulated by the idea of Manifest Destiny nor characterized by the constant westward move- | ment of the frontier, but best described in terms of the acute sense of

encroachment by the imperial powers including the United States. If the Western hero is associated with the untamed wildernes,for the |hero of the idaigekifim, such culturally unmarked landscape is rarely

| available. Traditionally places in Japan have symbolic meanings and

historical associations,as one can see in numerous makura kotobu and other poetic references. If American imagination spatializes time, its

Japanese counterpart temporalizes space.

Also called "horse opera," the Western requires the iconographic image of horses. The horse in the Western is an important means of |transportation and movement and often emphasizes the vast expanse

|of desolate landscape to be traversed. The images of cowboys on horse-

back and covered wagons alert us to the enormity of wilderness and the vulnerability of humans.To the extent that it makes it possible for Westerners to go into "uncharted territories freely,the horse also sym- bolizes freedom.For jidaigeki, on the other hand, the horse is not a crucial narrative or iconographic component.There is no new territory to be conquered,no wilderness to be tamed in the world of jidaigeki.In

Seven Samurai 233

Kurosawa on the set of Seven Samurai. Photo courtesy of Photofest.

fact,in the majority of jidaigeki, people's lives are so rigidly stratified based on various kinds of differences that the ideas of movement and mobility are antithetical to the normal functioning of society. Whereas characters in Westerns have the option of leaving a community and joining a new one,characters in jidaigeki are so rigidly constrained by, or torn between,giri and ninjo that the only available form of freedom left to them is often to kill themselves."The final image of the solitary swordsman walking into the distance indicates that he is an exile from |the familiar world and an outcast from the social situations which give

him stature as a man....Roads in jidai-geki lead to nowhere.

Kurosawa and Reimvention of Jidaigeki

Kurosawa,whose emergence as a filmmaker more or less coincided with the demise of the prewar jidaigeki, was never part of the jidai-

gekiestablishment." Among the eleven jidaigeki films he made, four are based on original scripts (Seven Samurai,The Hidden Fortress,Yojmbo,

234 Kurosawd

Kagemusha); one is an adaptation of a Kabuki play (The Men Who Tread on the Tiger's Tail); three are adaptations of modern Japanese literary works(Rashomon, Sanjuro, Red Beard);and three are adaptations of

foreign works (Throne of Bood,The Lower Depths,Ran). Except Kage- musha, Kurosawa's juidaigeki films do not rely on specifically historical facts.Nor do they use canonicaljidaigeki materials-for example,Chu- shingura,Tange Sazen,Kunisada Chuj,Miyamoto Musashi-to satisfy

the audience's demand for the same or the predictable. When Kurosawa does incorporate popular jidaigeki elements,he transposes them to a dramatically different setting to foreground their generic conventions. Kurosawa's first fim, Sanshiro Sugata, is based on the popular novel with the same title by Tomita Tsuneo, which itself is a judo version of the popular novel Musashi,by Yoshikawa EijiInstead of remaking Dai- bosatsu Pass, Kurosawa wrote a script,A Sword Fighting Master Dampei (Tateshi Danpei),a story of Danpei, who worked for Sawada Shojiro's |Shinkokugeki and invented a realistic sword-ighting style as opposed to Kabuki's stylized dance.By making films that deviate from the ge- |neric conventions of jidaigeki, Kurosawa maintains a metacritical rela-

tionship to this popular genre. |Kurosawa is not,however,the frst director to innovate jidaigeki as a

genre. In the i9yos there were two remarkable fimmakers,Yamanaka Sadao and Itami Mansaku, whose jidaigeki films explored the genre's possibilities and showed new directions. What distinguishes the films of Yamanaka and Itami from the mainstream jidaigeki is a contempo- rary sensibility.Both do not present the samurai as a heroic figure but take a satiric view of Bushido. They reject chanbara only for the sake of chanbara focus on social outcasts and people on the margins of society,

|and prefer humor to irony as a trope of narration.The settings and

characters of their jidaigeki films are often straight out of gendaigeki |and foreign films, yet there is nothing tacky about their attempt at hy-

bridization.They maintain a sense of critical distance from the jidaigeki

materials but never look down on them.Unfortunately, Itami's and |Yamanaka's careers were interrupted by their untimely deaths before

they could realize the full potential of their abilities and artistic visions. |Yamanaka died in 1938 from a disease he had caught at the front in

China;Itami died of tuberculosis in 1946. Despite these similarities,Yamanaka and Itami have remarkably dif-

Seven Samurai 235

ferent temperaments as filmmakers. Itami Mansaku is essentially a man of letters, one of the best scriptwriters and a conscience of the prewar cinema.In his teenage years in Matsuyama,Itami immersed himself in literature and art with his friends Ito Daisuke and Nakamura Kusa- tao.Itamistudied Western-style painting by himself and like Kurosawa tried to pursue a career as an artist in his twenties. Even though Ku- rosawa was ten years younger than Itami,there was an overlapping period during which they were both trying to pursue the same goal. In 1928 Kurosawa's paintings were selected for Nikaten; in 1927 Itami's painting caught an eye of the leading modernist painter Kishida Ryu- sei, who praised Itami's work and invited him to become his student. Itami was deeply moved by Kishida's words but declined the invitation, saying that he did not have enough confidence in his work and feared he could not live up to Kishida's expectations. Instead of moving to Kishida's place,in the same year,Itami moved to Kyoto to stay with Ito Daisuke and,on Ito's advice,started writing film scripts. After finish- ing a brief stint as actor and assistant director, Itami directed his first film in i928.His unique jidaigeki films and scripts are filled with inteli- gent humor and critical sensibility. Among twenty-six films he directed |or codirected,only three have survived more or less intact.Akanishi Kakita(Akanishi Kakita,1936), one of the currently available films,is based on Itami's own script, which is the adaptation of a short story by Shiga Naoya.The general setting of the story is very well known, the disturbance and power struggle within the Date clan in the mid- |seventeenth century, which was first popularized by Kabuki's Meiboku Sendai hagi(177).Kataoka Chiezo stars in the film,playing two difer- ent roles: AkanishiKakita,an ugly spy trying to expose the plot against the Date clan, and Harada Kai,the leader of the discontented group framing the plot.Chiezo does not simply portray two characters with diferent social status and personalities but demonstrates two different modes of acting.When he appears as Akanishi, he acts naturally with- out wearing any heavy white makeup; as Harada Kai, his actingisin the style of a conventional jidaigeki, which is heavily influenced by Kabuki, and his face is covered with white powder. Itami pretends to showcase Chiezo's star value by casting him in the two leading roles but in fact develops a metacriticism of jidaigeki's obsolete generic conventions by contrasting the naturalistic look of Akanishi and the utterly artificial, 236 Kurosawa

|antique-looking appearance of Kai.2" The new sensibility of the film is

apparent in the opening raining scene, which is accompanied by Itami's favorite artist Chopin's piano piece"Raindrop"(which Kurosawa uses

in Dreams,in episode s,on van Gogh).And the humorous moments

|are abundant (Kamiyama Sojin's blind masseur,fish-related names of

many characters, et.).Shimura Takashi, who appears as Tsunomata Hirenoshin,a neighbor of Akanishi, and plays the role of Kanbei in Seven Samurai,admits that Itami's Akanishi Kakita made him under- stand for the frst time what the cinema can do as an art form.? If Itami Mansaku kept a critical distance from jidaigeki,Yamanaka

Sadao immersed himself in it.Yamanaka is a man of cinema with a highly developed cinematic sensibility. He directed his first film in 1932 at the age of twenty-three and between 1932 and 1937 became one of the |most innovative filmmakers whose work has left an indelible mark on

the subsequent development of Japanese cinema.Of all his films, only | three sound films still exist:Tange Sazen and the Pot Worth a Million

Ryo (Tange Sazen hyakuman ryo no tsubo,1935),Kochiyama Soshun |(Kochiyama Soshun,1936),and Humanity and Paper Ballons (Ninjo

kamifusen,1937).The first one is a parodic retelling of the Tange Sazen

story, and the latter two are loose adaptations of Kawatake Mokuami's Kabuki plays.In all ases, what is impressive is Yamanaka's ability to di- gest and transform popular materials into radically new works. Tange |Sazen,the one-armed,one-eyed ronin, first became a pathetic sym-

bol of anarchic energy and rebllion when Ito Daisuke made his Ooka's Trials(Ooka seidan) series.Yamanaka completely rewrites this image

of Sazen by changing him into a child-loving, openhearted, and good- |natured ronin living in a tenement house with his wife.Yamanaka's

parody is so convincing that since his film his lovable Sazen has be- come a standard image. Yamanaka's ability to create his unique style | out of diverse materials,both Japanese and foreign, jidaigeki and gen-

daigeki, is quite impressive.It seems that for Yamanaka there is only one cinema,and national and generic distinctions are in the end not particularly relevant.Yamanaka is a master of cinematic language,and his flms are smooth and fawless.The rhythmic lyricism of his films is in part created by various transitional devices, some of which remind us of the cinema of Ozu. Another feature of Yamanaka's films is the creative ellipsis of sword fight and bloody scenes.? There are scenes of

Seven Samurai 237

violence in Humanityand Paper Ballons, but none of them are directly shown on screen except one.At the end of the film, the ronin Unno Matajuro is killed by his wife,who then kills herself.We never see the scene of this double suicide. With a dagger in her hand,the wife ap- |proaches the husband lying on the floor, presumably drunk and sleep. ing. As she blows out a lamp, the screen darkens.In the next shot,it is the following morning,and neighbors are looking inside the couple's tenement from the alley. We learn from them that the couple has com- mitted a double suicide.The camera is positioned inside the tenement in such a way that the samurai couple's bodies completely remain in offscreen space.The fate of the couple is symbolically represented by the film's last shots (one of the most celebrated last shots of Japanese cinema),a paper balloon in a ditch flowing away from the camera.At the climax of Kochiyama Soshun,there is a rare sword fight scene.But even here, what is impressive is not the sword fight itself but the pro- tagonists'willingness to die to save an innocent girl or to stick to their principles,and the lateral tracking shot of Kochiyama and Hirotaro running through a narrow sewer between tenement houses. Kurosawa's attempt to create a new type of jidaigeki film is a fur-

ther extension of what Itami and Yamanaka accomplished in the 193os, with a new twist.Unlike his two predecessors,Kurosawa does not re- ject chanbara. His jidaigeki combine a radically different type of sword fight and spectacle with a strong allegorical narrative and serious the- matic motifs.In the early 195os,when the Occupation was not yet over, Kurosawa was searching for a new kind of jidaigeki.In addition to A Sword Fighting Master Danpei,Kurosawa wrote another idaigekiscript, The Duel at the Kagijya's Corner(Ketto Kagiya no tsuji,1952),and asked Mori Kazuo to direct it.Mori speculates that Kurosawa, who was exe perimenting with ideas about how to make an innovative jidaigeki film, was perhaps not ready to direct it himself and used Mori to see whether his ideas would work or not.?' The Duel at the Kagiyas Corner is an unusual film at least in two senses. First,it is a film about one of the best-known jidaigeki episodes, the legendary revenge of Araki Matae. mon, the kind of material Kurosawa was never willing to use for his own films. Second,even though the film's story is well known, the spe- | cifc treatment of that story is radically different from other preced ing Mataemon films. Kurosawa's approach is a demythologization of 238Kurosawa

the legend in search of realism.According to the widely known story, which was first popularized by kodan storytellers, Araki Mataemon slew thirty-two hatamoto, or shogun's vassals; in reality, he killed only two helpers of the enemy.In the myth, Kazuma avenges the murder of his father; actually it was not his father but his younger brother who was killed.Kurosawa's script narrates a historicized story of the duel at the Kagiya's Corner instead of repeating the popular,mythicized ver- sion.Kurosawa's desire to demythologize the legend is so strong that he opens the script with a legendary version of the duel scene and then immediately undercuts the reality effect of the scene by adding a voice-over narration that explains the difference between myth and history. The voice-over claims that a true record is far more exciting than an exaggerated fiction and declares that the fim will represent the actual duel as faithfully as posible based on authentic historical | records. As if to make sure that this is not a conventional remake of the Mataemon story,the next scene shows the contemporary image of the Kagiya's Corner, tillaccompanied by the voice-over explaining what this famous scenery used to look like in the seventeenth century. Then,inally, the narrative flashes back to the actual dayof the duel.Ac- | cording to Mori, Kurosawagave him specific instructions regarding the

production of the film. Kurosawa, for instance,showed Moripre-Meiji photographs of Japanese wearing their hair up in topknots as models. Kurosawa also advised Mori how to direct a realistic sword fight scene (188).The reception of Moris Duel at the Kagiya's Corner was mixed.

Many praised an unconventional style of sword fighting at the film's climax.But the film did not do well at the box office.Mori himself finds the fim's unnecessarily artificial beginning largely responsible for the film's failure (191-92).Kurosawa reportedly did not appreciate Mori's | direction; considering the perfectionist tendencies of Kurosawa,who

insisted on getting involved in every facet of film production,there is | nothing surprising about his reaction.Regardless,the result of this "ex-

periment"was used as a stepping stone for the production of Kuro- sawa's first realjidaigeki, Seven Samurai For Kurosawa, who was so eager to make a dfferent kind of jidaigeki

it was fortunate that he did not work at Toei,Daiei, or Shochiku.The company he worked for was Toho, which was known not for jidaigeki but for lighthearted comedies and other gendaigeki genres featuring

Seven Samurai 239

urban office workers and petite bourgeoisie. Toho never had, unlike the three majors just mentioned,either separate studios for the pro- duction of jidaigeki in Kyoto or corps of actors specialized in jidaigeki. It is therefore not surprising that the first jidaigeki film produced by Toho, when it was still called PCL, was a parody of jidaigeki,Enoken's Kondo Isami(Enoken no Kondo Isami,1935),featuring the comedian Enomoto Ken'ichi. After the war, Toho's reticent attitude towardjidai- geki did not change much.But after Inagaki Hiroshi joined Toho in the early 19sos,this gendaigeki studio started producing a small number of jidaigeki films on a consistent basis. Kurosawa was able to make Seven Samurai and a few other innovative idaigeki films in this unique envi- ronment.His singular jidaigeki films could not have been made at any other major studio where old jidaigeki conventions were still alive and dominant.7 In the original pamphlet for Seven Samrai, Kurosawa says:"An ac-

tion fim is often an action fim only for the sake of action. But what a wonderful thing ifoneean-eonstruct agrand action film without sacri- ficing the portrayalofhumans.This has been my dream since the time I was an assistant director.For the last ten years I have also been want- ing to reexamine jidaigeki from a completely new angle. Seven Samurai has started with these two ambitions of mine.""" To realize the first ob- jective,he constructs the narrative of Seven Samurai around delicately balanced depictions of distinctly individual characters and the group to which they belong. There are three major groups in the film:seven masterless samurai, peasants,and bandits.Each of these groups has its own identity and particular way of establishing relationships among its members. Each member of the samurai's group has his own dlear individual identity,whereas only some members of the peasants'group are portrayed as individuals. The least individuated group is the ban- dits,who more or less appear as one undifferentiated mass.One of the focal points of the film is the formation and eventual dissolution of an alliance between the first two groups, samurai and peasants. The seven samurai are simultaneously types and individuals whose distinct personalities exceed the character traits of mere types.Kan- bei, who does everything with aplomb, is an ideal leader figure.Kat- sushiro(Kimura Isao) is an idealistic youth who has yet to experience the world.Gorobei is a skilled swordsman who can detect Katsushiro's 240 Kurosawa

ambush immediately.Even though Heihachi is not as strong as other samurai,he has a great sense of humor that can lift the spirits of people around him.Kanbei's right-hand man, Shichiroji (Kato Daisuke), is a survivor, who can become,if necessary,even a vendor. Kyuzo,a la-

conic sword master or killing machine,is also a samurai with com- passion. And there is the lovable farmer-samurai Kikuchiyo(Mifune

Toshiro),without whom the alliance of the samurai and the peasants

would perhaps be impossible. All these personal qualities are not ver- bally explained in the film; instead, they are vividly revealed when the seven samurai react to concrete problems or situations.The person- ality of each samurai is not an abstract idea determining what he says and does. On the contrary, it is the concrete details of his actions that enable other characters and us to see who he is. As individuated as they are, the samurai and the village leaders

are not completely autonomous individuals.They belong to different groups and communities but decide to form a temporary alliance to |fight against the bandits. It is therefore certainly posible to debate to

what extent individuals in the film are forced to subordinate their per- sonal desire and necessity to specific goals of groups. Stephen Prince, for instance,argues that individuals are ultimately subsumed under the group, both thematically and compositionally. He refers to a scene in the beginning part of the film, in which the peasants gather in a vil- | lage square to discuss how to deal with the bandits.The peasants are

distraught and do not believe they can resist the bandits'demand for rice, barley,and women. One of the villagers,Rikichi, refuses to bow |down to the bandits and urges the others to take up arms against the bandits: either kill or be killed by them. Nobody agrees to his plan, and Rikichi,angered and frustrated,leaves the villagers'circle and sits alone.As Prince perceptively points out, when Rikichi isolates himself in diegetic space, the composition of the following shot immediately reintegrates him into the community.In the new composition, Rikichi is in the foreground,and the rest of the villagers are in the background. |The spatial distance between the two is almost eliminated by Kuro-

sawa's trademark use of the telephoto lens, which fattens the image: In the rest of the film, spatial relations between characters in diegetic space and in on-screen space often tell us different stories.And until the last scene after the batte, whenever there is a discord in the samurai-

|Seven Samurai 24

peasants alliance,the composition of the shot frequently tries to inte. grate dissenting members into the group.But this tension between die- |gesis and narration can happen and become significant only because Seven Samurai shows us the images of distinct individuals,which are unique in the genre of jidaigeki. Another conspicuous formal trait that foregrounds the individuality

of key characters is an extreme close-up of their faces. For instance, in the vilage scene just described is inserted a close-up of Rikichi's desperate face. When the village elder appears on-screen, we see his wrinkled face in close-up. When Katsushiro learns that he is allowed to accompany Kanbei and the others to the village, his joyous face is shown in close-up. These instances of close-ups are not a part of the classical shot/reverse shot pattern that creates spatial and narra- tive unity by carefully manipulating the direction of characters'looks, graphic composition,sound cues,and so forth.The close-up face is not distinctly registered either as an object of the other's look or as a sub- ject of the look. Its appearance is often abrupt and abstract.The spatial isolation of the actor's face on the screen is presented as a mark of the individuality of the character he or she plays. The close-up makes us |confront the face as a window to the character's interiority. While the close-up of the human face isolates an individual from agroup,a close- up of an inanimate object reestablishes the relation between the two. For instance, when Kanbei holds a bowl of rice and agrees to defend the village from the bandits, the foreground of the shot is occupied by the extreme close-up image of the bowl, while in the background are Rikichi,Manzo,Mosuke,and Yohei.Here, the bowl of rice functions as a pivotal sign that unifies the peasants in the background and the samurai who are in the off-screen space. It is important to reiterate that jidaigeki is not a history film, and

Seven Samurai is certainly no exception. Kurosawa's interest in the past as it really was is not necessrily the same as an attempt to reproduce the past as faithfully as possible.We should never forget that the period of civil wars(Sengoku jidai) on the screen is in the end only a rep- resentation,no matter how ""accurate" it might seem.This elementary distinction seems to get lost very often in Kurosawa criticism in the United States. (The tendency in Japan is the opposite: Kurosawa's fims have often been accused of being historically inaccurate.) Thus the re-

242 Kurosawa

lationship of individual and group in Seven Samurai does not neces- sarily reflect the historical reality of sixteenth-century Japan.If "Kam- bei tells the [farmers] that everyone must work together as a group and that those who think only of themselves will destroy themselves and all others," it is not because "the material of the past discloses no spaces in which the individual can move,no spaces not already inhab- ited by groups and their demands." Considering that Seven Samurai is a film about a military battl between bandits and peasants led by a group of samurai,there is nothing surprising about Kanbei's speech to the villagers. The ssentialist notion of an "interactionist self""The self must be an interactionist self or cease to exist"-cannot explain the dynamic of human interactions in the film. Because jidaigeki can be only a fictitious representation of the historical past, it is not im-

possible to make a jidaigeki film set in the Sengoku period featuring individual heroism.As Kuwabara Takeo reminds us,the peasants in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries were not as cowardly as they are por- trayed in the film. It was probably not unusual for a village like the one in the film to have a few peasants who participated in military battles as common foot soldiers. Kuwabara further speculates that in reality Kanbei would have become a lord of the village,and Katsushiro would have kept Shino as his mistress.I am not suggesting that Seven Samu- rai is pure fantasy; on the contrary, the film's scriptwriters, Kurosawa, Hashimoto,and Oguni,dug into historical documents and used some of what they found to construct the story,characters,and other narra- tive details. The point I am trying to make is that the fim's reality effect cannot be equated to its historical accuracy. Instead of substantializing the historical past represented in the film, we must try to locate exactly |where the film's overwhelming sense of reality comes from.

If Seven Samurai successfully elevates the level of uidaigeki's realism a notch, it is not by representing-historicalfacts accurately Instead, the film creates a heightened sense of realism by meticulously showing all kinds of details that are normally ignored in conventional jidaigeki |films.These small details include plot and story, character traits,sets and props,costumes,and acting style.The art director and his staff went to Shirakawago to sketch old farmhouses and farming tools,many of which were used as models. Clothes for principal characters and even extras were newly made and then naturally made to look old.The

Seven Samurai 243

actors' hairstyles were not conventionally handled by using a Kabuki- style wig but realistically done by carefully matching each actor's physi- cal idiosyncrasies and the characteristics of the role he or she played. Kurosawa even wanted Mosuke's wig to look like an uneven head he saw in an old picture scroll. To create the fel of an antique house, Ku- rosawa and his staff endlessly polished wooden boards. The prepara- tion for the bandits'attack by the samurai and the villagers is shown meticulously. Men in the village are dvided into different groups and trained by the samurai.To block the bandits' access to the village,new fences are built at the village's western entrance; the bridge at the other end is destroyed; and on the south side,a rice field is irrigated. Kanbei draws a map of the village,and each bandit is represented by a circle on the map's margin.Every time a bandit iskilled, Kanbei crosses out a circle.The map therefore emphasizes not only the strategic signifi- cance of geography and the village's spatial configuration but also the necessity of killing the bandits one by one in hand-to-hand fighting. About the battle sequences there is nothing conventional, either.What we see there is not a stylized dance as in Toei jidaigeki. Nor is it just an athletic display of kinetic movement. It does not matter if one uses his sword properly. When necessary,even farming tools become deadly weapons. The last battlesequence is particularly brutal. It is raining heavily, and the samurai and villagers must fight not only the bandits but also the mud, which drags them to the ground.The fighting is now clearly a matter not of style but of survival. But even in the midst of this fiercely realistic battle for survival, there are moments of poetic beauty. In this sequence, we see one of the most striking images of the film:Kanbei, standing straight in the downpour,slowly draws a bow and then quickly releases it to shoot an arrow at a bandit on a horse.Or see the last image of Kikuchiyo,which Andrey Tarkovsky mentions as an example of the cinematic image-specific,unique,and factual, that is,everything he thinks symbols are not:"The samurai wear an ancient Japanese garment which leaves most of the leg bare, and their legs are plastered with mud.And when one samurai falls down dead we se the rain washing away the mud and his leg becoming white, as white as |marble. A man is dead; that is an image which is a fact. It is innocent of symbolism, and that is an image."s "The beautyand clevernessof story arise from a certain harmony between the simplicity of the plot and the 244 Kurosawa

wealth of details that slowly delineate it," writes André Bazin."Obvi- ously this kind of narrative reminds one of Ford's Stagecoach(1939)

and Lost Patrol (1934)but with a more romantic complexity and more

| volume and variety in the fresco."is Did Seven Samurai change the state of jidaigeki as a popular genre

in the mid-19sos? The answer to this question is no. Seven Samurai |is in many ways an exceptional fim. From the start of shooting, it

took eleven months to finish the film,and the total cost was Y21o mil- |lion, which was seven times as much as the budget for a typical film

around that time. Its scale of production was simply too large to be- come a model for conventional jidaigeki films.More important, other studios, particularly Toei, did not se any need to take such a financial risk to produce a film like Seven Samurai.When Seven Samurai was released, it was the height of Toei jidaigeki. Enjoying a huge commer-

cial success, Toei did not see any necesity for changing their popu- lar formula.Even in the early 196os when filmgoers were apparently getting tired of Toei jidaigeki, Toei continued producing the same old formula films.The fatal blow to Toei's crumbling kingdom came sud- denly in 1961 when Kurosawa's Yojimbo enjoyed great success at the

box office.At select theaters, Seven Samurai was shown together with Yojimbo*(The Hollywood remake of Seven Samurai, The Magnificent

Seven[John Sturges,196o|], which was the most commercilly success-

ful foreign film that year, was also released simultaneously.)" The end

| of Toei jidaigeki was sealed in 1962 with the success of Kurosawa's San-

juro. Finally,in 1963 and 1964,Toei departed from its outworn formula

|and produced aseries ofjidaigekifilms called shudan koso jidaigeki(col-

lective struggle jidaigeki).As this label suggests,like Seven Samurai,

instead of a single hero, these films focus on a group of protagonists who fight against corrupt officials or the system in a bloody battl.But it was already too late to salvage the declining state of jidaigeki by this

|time. Toei soon abandoned jidaigekicompletely and switched to yakuza

movies.

Seven Samurai 245