YOJI YAMADA (Director)
Born in Osaka on September 13, 1931, Yamada was raised in Manchuria and returned to Japan in 1947. He studied Law at Tokyo University from 1949. While there, he helped run a film club. After graduating in 1954, he took an entrance exam for both Shochiku and Nikkatsu; he was accepted into the latter company, but was sent over to Shochiku because of over-staffing at Nikkatsu. He worked initially as assistant to such directors as Yuzo Kawashima, Yoshitaro Nomura, and Minoru Shibuya. He
also began writing scripts for Nomura and Kazuo Inoue in 1958. He worked on the TV film INOKU and directed his first film STRANGERS UPSTAIRS. His 1969 film, TORA-SAN, OUR LOVABLE TRAMP launched the TORA-SAN series that hecontinued directing on an average of two TORA-SAN series each year until 1996 when the lead actor Atsumi Kiyoshi died at the age of 68. This was the most popular and profitable asset of Shochiku's. Of the 48 TORA-SAN films produced, Yamada directed all but two of them.
Yamada won a Japanese Academy Award for one of these works in 1977 and Atsumi received a Special Prize from the Academy in 1980. The actual title of the series is IT?S TOUGH BEING A MAN (Otoko Wa Tsuraiyo) but the movies are usually referred to by the name of Atsumi's character, Tora San. The formula, which was a combination of road movie, romance, comedy and nostalgia, guaranteed box-office success every time.
Yamada also made some personal films, in which MY SONS (1991) was his most critically successful non-Tora-San film at that time. Other films include WHERE SPRING COMES LATE (1970), HOME FROM THE SEA (1972), and THE YELLOW HANDKERCHIEF (1977). His films have won numerous awards at home and abroad, including A DISTANT CRY FROM SPRING won the Special Jury Prize in Montreal in 1980. His latest film, THE TWILIGHT SAMURAI, is both a box-office hit and a sweeping critical success in Japan and
Asia. He is currently working on another samurai film, based on stories by the author of THE TWILIGHT SAMURAI, Shuhei Fujisawa.
YOJI YAMADA SELECTED FILMOGRAPHY
TWILIGHT SAMURAI 2002
With Hiroyuki Sanada, Rie Miyazawa
A CLASS TO REMEMBER /CLASSROOM 1993
With Toshiyuki Nishida, Keiko Takeshita
MY SONS 1991
With Rintaro Mikuni, Masatoshi Nagase
THE YELLOW HANDKERCHIEF 1977
With Takakura Ken, Chieko Baisho
HOME FROM THE SEA 1972
With Chieko Baisho, Hisashi Igawa, Chishu Ryu
WHERE SPRING COMES LATE 1970
With Chieko Baisho, Hisashi Igawa
TORA-SAN SERIES (48 FILMS) 1969-1996
With Kiyoshi Atsumi
RIE MIYAZAWA (Tomoe)
Born in 1973 in Tokyo, Miyazawa first became popular at the age of 12 as an actress on TV commercials and as a model. At the age of 18, Miyazawa was making 400 million yen a year from endorsements alone.
She made her big-screen debut in BOKURA NO NANOKAKAN SENSO (Our Seven Days War) in 1988, for which she won the Japanese Academy Award for Best Newcomer the following year. Success followed success on the big and small screens but things reached a new level with the release of the nude photo book SANTA FE, photographed by renowned photographer Kishin Shinoyama in 1992. The book sold over 1.5 million copies in 3 months. Though it started a whole new trend, it remains the most famous and
best-selling nude photo book in Japan.
Despite putting in a solid performance with Takakura Ken in Kon Ichikawa.s 47 SAMURAIS, and having several projects in the works, she cancelled all projects and moved to LA, and lived there for 4 years battling an acknowledged health problem with anorexia.
After her return to Japan, Miyazawa started to rebuild her serious career. She reported on TV for the Cannes Film Festival, and appeared in the KYOSOKYOKU. IN 2001, she won the best actress award at the Moscow international film festival, for her role as a Kung-Ju opera singer, in PEONY PAVILION, a Hong Kong movie portraying the decadent lifestyle of the upper- class in 1930s, Suzhou, by winning the Japanese Film Academy supporting actress award for TWLIGHT SAMURAI, she has solidly reestablished
herself in the Japanese film industry.
SELECTED FILMOGRAPHY
TWILIGHT SAMURAI (Yoji Yamada) 2002
PEONY PAVILION (Yeung Fan) 2001
47 RONIN (Kon Ichikawa) 1994
THE PRINCESS GOH (Hiroshi Tashigawara) 1992
SEVEN DAYS. WAR (Hiroshi Sugawara) 1988
MIN TANAKA (Zenmon Yogo)
Born in 1945, Min Tanaka grew up in suburban Tokyo, where he studied modern dance and performed in several productions. In the early 1970s, he began to create original dance works exploring the meaning of the body and movement through improvisation. In an attempt to free the body from functionalism and conventional aesthetics, his dances were often nude, taking place in urban as well as natural settings.
In 1985, Tanaka founded Body Weather Farm, a cooperative environment for dancers and artists who raise crops and animals, exploring the origins of dance through farming life. As Kazue Kobata wrote, .Becoming alert, and sensitized, and transmigrating through the history of life as a whole in this very existence is what [Tanaka] tries to achieve through dance..
Between 1982 and 1986, he worked closely with Tatsumi Hijikata, founder and powerful guiding spirit of Butoh, the contemporary dance tradition which originated in post - WWII Japan. Butoh derives its power from the individual dancer in a mental and physical sense, relying not on a set choreography, but rather on individual improvisation and on the directing of energy from his surroundings to the audience. Tanaka continues to be active in collaborating with visual artists, musicians,
opera companies, theatre and dance troupes in Japan and internationally.
THE TWILIGHT SAMURAI is his first foray into film.
KAZUKO KUROSAWA (Costume Designer)
Born in 1954 in Tokyo on the day when her father Akira Kurosawa celebrated the completion of his film "Seven Samurai", Kazuko Kurosawa studied fashion at San Design Institute, then at Ito Clothing Institute. Upon her graduation, Kazuko founded her own fashion design company.
In 1974, she joined her father's film production company, Kurosawa Productions, as an executive. She started working as her father.s costume designer from DREAMS (1990) and continued working for his later films RHAPSODY IN AUGUST (1991) and MADADAYO (1993).
After her father.s death, she designed costumes for Takashi Koizumi.s AFTER THE RAIN (1999) based on her father.s screenplay. While working as an executive at Kurosawa Productions, she has also been active in writing essays, having published two books about her memories with her late father.
FILMOGRAPHY
ZATOICHI (Takeshi Kitano) 2003
THE TWILIGHT SAMURAI (Yoji Yamada) 2002
LETTER FROM THE MOUNTAIN (Takashi Koizumi)
THE SEA IS WATCHING (Kei Kumai)
AFTER THE RAIN (Takashi Koizumi) 1999
MADADAYO (Akira Kurosawa) 1993
RHAPSODY IN AUGUST (Akira Kurosawa) 1991
DREAMS (Akira Kurosawa) 1990
An Interview with YOJI YAMADA
By MARK SCHILLING, Japan Times film writer
A director since 1961, with 77 films to his credit, Yoji Yamada, 71, is a Japanese film industry icon. His "Tora-san" series, about a wandering peddler who is forever falling in love, but never gets the girl, generated 48 hit installments -- and made Yamada the most successful Japanese director of his generation. He has also won his share of prizes, both domestic and internationally.
His latest film, "Tasogare Seibei (The Twilight Samurai)," has garnered the largest amount of awards at home, including the Kinema Junpo magazine Best One prize--considered Japan's most prestigious. On March 7, it also won 12 Japan Academy Awards, including Best Picture and Best Director, the second- highest number ever after Masayuki Suo's 1997 "Shall We Dance?" Ironically, the film is Yamada's first-ever samurai drama -- but he is now planning another.
MS: Why did you decide to do a samurai drama, after more than 40 years of making contemporary dramas and comedies?
YY: First of all, I liked the work of [Shuhei] Fujisawa -- he wrote period fiction about the samurai and the common people. I thought I would make a film based on three of his novellas. This was about four or five years ago.
Secondly, I had seen many period dramas over the years, but I wasn't satisfied with them. They were full of lies and said nothing about how the samurai really lived. Akira Kurosawa told me that also bothered him [about the genre]. He wanted to make a realistic film about the lives of the samurai. He had a lot of trouble getting the information he needed -- the materials just weren't there -- so in 1954 he ended up making "Shichinin no Samurai [The Seven Samurai]" -- a totally different
kind of film.
Anyway, I wanted to try to make a film that would show how the samurai lived, ate, talked and felt. I thought I could understand that sort of thing -- after all, these people were my ancestors.
MS: The climactic fight scene between Hiroyuki Sanada and Min Tanaka is especially impressive. It gives a sense of the way it really might have been.
YY: I wanted to shoot more realistic fight scenes than you see in [samurai movies], even Kurosawa's. I mean, when the bad guys have the hero surrounded, why do they always attack him one at a time, so he can pick them off? Why don't they all go for him at once? Also, when the bad guys are cut, they die right away. In reality, it's a lot harder to kill someone in a sword fight, unless you get in a good cut. According to period accounts, samurai sword fights could go for
two or three hours.
They'd cut each other again and again, until they turned white -- and the weaker one finally fell. That's how it was -- they would slowly die of blood loss.
Also, back then women didn't usually wear the sorts of flashy clothes that you see in samurai films. They dressed more plainly. They didn't do their makeup as nicely or wear their hair as elaborately. I wanted to show that.
There have been good period dramas -- Sadao Yamanaka's "Ninjo Kamifusen [Humanity and Paper Balloons (1937)]" and of course Kurosawa's "Shichinin no Samurai." When I saw those films, I was surprised. I realized that there were period dramas that you could watch just as you would contemporary dramas. Those films were my touchstones.
MS: Even though "Tasogare Seibei" is a period film, it has a lot to say about contemporary Japan -- the hero deals with the same sort of social and economic turmoil that you find today.
YY: I tried to include plot elements that present-day Japanese could relate to. When you're ordered to do something by the boss, you have to do it. Or it might be the end of your job. That's something everyone can understand -- and that's the kind of situation the hero faces. Some people buckle under the pressure and commit suicide. In Japan, nearly 30,000 people kill themselves every year -- a lot of men in their 40s and 50s. Some of them have been fired, some have
been told to fire others. The hero deals with his situation differently, of course -- but the pressure is similar.
MS: The heroine, played by Rie Miyazawa, is also a contemporary type. When her husband beats her, she leaves him. That's not the sort of thing you see in traditional period dramas, where the woman is supposed to stick it out, no matter what.
YY: She has a modern way of thinking, that's true. In a way, her story is a critique of the feudal system, though the film doesn't spell it out as such.
In the Edo Period [1603-1867] women weren't allowed to have their say. In the Middle Ages, Japanese women were fairly strong and made important contributions to culture, but in the Edo Period and the Meiji Era [1868-1912] women more or less disappeared from public view. Particularly in the Meiji Era, women were discriminated against. They were supposed to be impure. That way of thinking still exists -- women aren't allowed to step into the sumo ring, for example.
But while injecting modern elements into the film, I tried to make it exciting. When a company employee is restructured he can't reach for a sword. But a sword fight makes the film easier for the audience to understand. It also has more impact. MS: Min Tanaka, the butoh dancer who plays the hero's opponent in the
climactic fight, is particularly impressive, even though it was his first film role. Did you have to give him any special training or instruction?
YY: He had never used a sword before, so he had to practice that. He really worked hard. Also, in butoh, the dancers hardly say anything, so he had to study how to deliver his lines as well. Fortunately, he had a good voice. He had a great death scene -- only Tanaka could have done it that way. It took him two minutes to die on camera. I just told him, "Do it your way." He had a scary face -- that helped. You need a long face to be scary, like Seiji Miyaguchi in "Shichinin
no Samurai." Tanaka has that kind of face.
The film was also something of a departure for Hiroyuki Sanada. Before this film, he had usually played comic roles -- not many serious ones. He had been in a lot of period dramas, but he told me he was also dissatisfied with them. He wanted to know why everything had to be so beautiful, when it wasn't like that in reality. He told me it was his dream to make this kind of film. That was encouraging.
His training in the martial arts helped a lot -- I felt confident that he knew what he was doing. Real samurai stand differently, somewhat like Noh actors. Not straight up, but with their hips forward a bit. They take small steps, without lifting their feet from the ground -- they do that to keep the sword steady.
MS: There's something of a period drama boom now, but unlike "Tasogare Seibei," many of the new period dramas use computer graphics to create fantasy elements. They aren't about realism at all.
YY: Yes, that kind of fantastic film is popular. Also, there are a lot of horror films now. In troubled times like these, more films like that tend to get made -- fantasy and horror. People want to escape, and that's what they go for.
MS: But "Tasogare Seibei" has done well at the box office, even though it's taken quite a different approach.
YY: That's true, but it's drawing a different kind of audience. First of all, older people came to see it. Then they told their sons about it -- men in their 30s and 40s. Then their sons saw it and told their sons about it -- junior and senior high school students. So there are three generations seeing it. That's helped it have a long run -- the audience keeps changing.
MS: It has universality -- you don't need to be a period drama fan to enjoy it. The message -- that you can find happiness even without a lot of material possessions -- appeals to people.
YY: The Japanese are wondering what is going to happen to the country. They feel anxious -- and so do I. What's going to happen to the banks? Is my money going to be there tomorrow? But at the end of "Tasogare Seibei," Seibei is with his children -- and as long as he has his family and they all love each other, he can go on. The audience leaves with the feeling that everything will somehow turn out all right. They're thinking if I have something like that in my life,
I can make it, even if the company goes under. That thought gives them comfort and courage.
MS: The film is in tune with the mood in Japan now, but do you think the same will be true abroad?
YY: That worries me -- how will people from other countries react? But we're living in anxious times, when people everywhere don't know what is going to happen next. What is the Bush administration going to do? Will they start a war? That is certainly worrying. Why have things come to this pass? Why can't this be settled by the United Nations? Why do we have to have this sort of international conflict? What is going to happen if a war starts?
People from Iran and other Islamic counties who took part in February's Berlin Film Festival certainly felt this sort of anxiety. The world has come to a strange and unpleasant pass. So in that sense, I think people abroad will be able to relate to the film, even though Americans and Europeans don't feel the same economic anxiety as Japanese.
The Japan Times: March 16, 2003
THE SAMURAI IN JAPANESE HISTORY
The samurai (or bushi) were the members of the Japanese military class.
Samurai employed a range of weapons such as bows and arrows, spears and in the 19th century, guns; but their most famous weapon and their symbol was the sword.
Samurai were supposed to lead their lives according to the ethic code of bushido ("the way of the warrior"). Strongly Confucian in nature, Bushido stressed concepts such as loyalty to one's master, self discipline and respectful, ethical behavior.
After a defeat, some samurai chose to commit ritual suicide (seppuku) by cutting their abdomen rather than being captured or dying a dishonorable death.
Heian Period (794-1185)
The samurai's importance and influence grew during the Heian Period, when powerful landowners hired private warriors for the protection of their properties. Towards the end of the Heian Period, two military clans, the Minamoto and Taira, had grown so powerful that they sized control over the country and fought wars for supremacy against each other. One of these wars is portrayed in Masaki Kobayashi.s .Hoichi, the Earless. episode of .Kwaidan. (1964).
Kamakura Period (1192-1333)
In 1185, the Minamoto clan defeated the Taira clan, and Yoritomo Minamoto established a new military government in Kamakura in 1192. As shogun, the highest military officer, he became the ruler of Japan.
Muromachi Period (1333 - 1573)
During the chaotic Era of Warring States (sengoku jidai, 1467-1573), Japan consisted of dozens of independent states that were constantly fighting each other. Consequently, the demand for samurai was very high. Many of the famous samurai movies by Akira Kurosawa took place during this era.
Azuchi-Momoyama Period (1573 - 1603)
When Hideyoshi Toyotomi reunited Japan, he started to introduce a rigid social caste system, which was later completed by Ieyasu Tokugawa and his successors. Toyotomi forced all samurai to decide between a life on the farm and a warrior life in castle towns. Furthermore, he forbade anyone but the samurai to arm themselves with a sword.
Edo Period (1603 - 1868)
In 1603, Ieyasu Tokugawa was appointed Shogun by the emperor and established his government in Edo (Tokyo). The Tokugawa shoguns continued to rule Japan for over 250 years.
Ieyasu brought the whole country under tight control. He redistributed land among the daimyo (clan lords): more loyal vassals received strategically more important domains accordingly. Every daimyo was also required to spend every second year in Edo. This meant a huge financial burden for the daimyo and moderated his power at home.
After the destruction of the Toyotomi clan in 1615 when Ieyasu captured Osaka Castle, the Tokugawa's last potential rival was eliminated, and relative peace prevailed in Japan for over two centuries. As a result, the importance of martial skills declined, and most samurai became bureaucrats, teachers or artists. The samurai class cultivated an appreciation of literature, philosophy and the arts, in particular the tea ceremony. (This aspect is portrayed in Masahiro Shinoda.s .Gonza, the
Spearman. [1986].) The Edo Period produced much of what we recognize today as uniquely Japanese: kabuki, ukiyo-e (woodblock printing) porcelain and lacquer-ware, for example, were all born and thrived during this time.
The most important philosophy of Tokugawa Japan was Neo-Confucianism, stressing the importance of morals, education and hierarchical order in the government and society: A strict four class system existed during the Edo period: at the top of the social hierarchy stood the samurai, followed by the peasants, artisans and merchants. Placing the peasants in the second top of the hierarchy did not mean that they were regarded highly. The government.s true aim was to exploit them more effectively.
Furthermore, there were hierarchies within each caste and the members of the four classes were not allowed to change their social status.
All samurai were forced to live in castle towns and received income from their lords in form of rice. Masterless samurai were called ronin and caused minor troubles during the early Edo Period. Outcasts (eta and hinin), people with professions that were considered impure, formed a fifth class.
A "koku" is about 180 litres and was used primarily as a measure of rice. Rice could be exchanged for money, so the financial power of a region was determined by the amount of rice it harvested. For example, the Edo Shogunate's lands produced eight million koku, which indicates its financial power. A person was called a daimyo if he produced over ten thousand koku per year.
Despite peace at home, the Tokugawa government.s grip on power was steadily declining. A cycle of natural disasters and years of famine led to a decline in revenues which in turn led to higher taxes and riots among the already stressed farm population. The social hierarchy began to break down as the merchant class grew increasingly powerful while some samurai became financially dependent of them. In the second half of the era, corruption, incompetence and a decline of morals within the
government caused further problems.
By the end of the 18th century, external pressure started to be an increasingly important issue, when the Russians first tried to establish trade contacts with Japan without success. Other European nations and the Americans followed them in the 19th century. It was eventually Commodore Perry in 1853 and again in 1854 who forced the Tokugawa government to open a limited number of ports for international trade.
With the growing recognition of the technological superiority of the Western nations and overall inability to adapt to the challenges facing the country the Tokugawa government fell in 1868, the samurai class was abolished and Japan's feudal era came to an end.
THE SAMURAI IN FILM
Hollywood and the rest of the Western world have long been fascinated by the samurai, fearless warriors from Japan.s feudal past. A big part of that fascination has been their code of honor, known as .bushido.. Based on Zen and Confucian wisdom, the principles of courage, honesty, courtesy, honor, compassion, loyalty and complete sincerity, are strictly adhered to.
After the Second World War, these principles were associated with kamikaze pilots and Japan's wartime hostility. In Frank Capra's 1945 propaganda movie, Japan: Know Your Enemy, bushido is described as "the art of treachery". Since then, however, samurai movies have served as a useful bridge between the US and Japan. In fact, bearing in mind that the real samurai class was officially abolished more than 30 years before the invention of cinema, most of what the US knows about samurai it
knows from the movies.
In Japan, there was no such thing as a "samurai movie" before the Second World War - although it was making plenty of jidaigeki, or historical movies, and, given that samurai had been a big part of society for more than 1,000 years, it would have been very difficult to leave them out. When the American occupation government took over at the end of the war, it limited production of jidaigeki, fearing that they could re-ignite Japanese nationalism. Especially forbidden was the depiction
of samurai swords, which were closely associated with feudal loyalty.
But, by 1950, Japan's film industry had returned to normal and was starting to make an international impact. This was largely thanks to one director: Akira Kurosawa. His Rashomon opened the doors in 1950, but Seven Samurai, four years later, laid out the vocabulary of the modern samurai movie. The director was descended from a famous samurai family, and his father wore the samurai topknot when he was a boy. His seven samurai are noble, honorable, virtuous heroes. But much as Kurosawa
loved the samurai, he also loved John Ford and Howard Hawks. It's debatable how authentically "Japanese" Seven Samurai is - Japanese critics certainly attacked it for being "too western". But it was a huge international hit, and Kurosawa followed it up with several more - Yojimbo, Sanjuro, The Hidden Fortress - all using his signature actor Toshiro Mifune.
What followed was a period of cross-fertilization between westerns and samurai movies. Their heroes were similarly rootless loners, operating in similarly romanticized versions of their country's histories, with similarly black-and-white views of good and evil. Their themes and stories (and, of course, their weapons) were interchangeable. Rashomon, Seven Samurai and Yojimbo were remade, respectively, as The Outrage, The Magnificent Seven and A Fistful of Dollars.
But Kurosawa's influence spread to all action genres. War films like The Dirty Dozen and The Guns of Navarone rehashed Seven Samurai's themes of noble teamwork. French director Jean-Pierre Melville translated bushido to 1960s France in his noir masterpiece Le Samouraï, with Alain Delon as a solitary hit man whose samurai-like values appear pathological in 1960s Paris. In more recent times, Jim Jarmusch's Ghost Dog: Way of the Samurai successfully fused Japanese warrior sensibilities
with those of urban America. And Cartoon Network's hit series Samurai Jack has been bringing bushido to pre-school kids worldwide.
But the Hollywood product that has perpetuated samurai values more than any other is Star Wars. George Lucas is a Kurosawa devotee and has admitted borrowing plot elements from The Hidden Fortress. But there is also more than a hint of samurai about the Jedi, a noble order of warriors who spout Zen-like wisdom, follow an ancient code and fight with swords (Lucas cottoned on to the limitations of gun action well ahead of the pack). Even the word "Jedi" was inspired by Lucas hearing the
word jidaigeki. And before Alec Guinness took the role, an early choice for Obi-Wan Kenobi was Mifune.
While Hollywood quietly adopted the samurai, Japan turned Kurosawa's mould into a whole genre. Pulp samurai movies were churned out in 1960s and 1970s Japan, usually recycling existing legends, historical incidents and previous samurai films. Many took as their subject Miyamoto Musashi, a real-life 17th- century folk hero. The original Zatoichi, the blind swordsman, was played by one actor, Shintaro Katsu, over dozens of movies from 1962 until 1989. As much as Kurosawa, it is these gory
but populist movies that Tarantino makes reference to in Kill Bill.
By the 1980s that craze was over and the cash-strapped Japanese film industry drifted away from the samurai into gun-toting yakuza movies. Since then, there has been little appetite for a samurai action revival. Nagisa Oshima's 1999 drama Gohatto offered an arthouse, homoerotic revision of samurai history, but Japanese youth have tended to associate samurai movies with their parents.
With two major Japanese productions that have both struck a chord domestically and internationally - Yoji Yamada.s box office and critical success (12 Japanese Film Academy awards) Twilight Samurai, followed by Takeshi Kitano's update of Zatoichi - coinciding with Hollywood productions .The Last Samurai. and the samurai-influenced .Kill Bill,. there is no question the samurai is back.
Adapted from The Guardian (UK)
The Way of the Warrior,. October 10, 2003
|
