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The Truthful Fakery of Kaneto Shindō: a Review of “The Naked Island”

Public domain island image

It’s a bit odd that Kaneto Shindō’s The Naked Island (Hadaka no shima, a.k.a. The Island, 1960) has taken so long to receive the Criterion treatment on DVD and Blu-ray, for this Japanese movie has been praised all over the world since it first arrived on the international scene in the early 1960s. Filmed on the tiny island of Sukune in the Inland Sea, not far from Shindō’s native city, Hiroshima, the bare-bones plot concerns a family of four – a man, a woman and their two young boys – who must transport, with great difficulty, their daily supply of water from the mainland to the island to cultivate their sweet potato crop, which would die (as would they) without this obsessive attention. Its vision of poverty and struggle in an exotic setting won such enthusiasm from European art house audiences at the time that the French actually turned its melancholy theme tune, composed by Hikaru Hayashi, into a hit pop song.

Yet the film, considered a classic by many, has had its share of detractors and doubters. Pauline Kael, in her review, dismissed the movie as phony, even sneering at the undeniable pictorial beauty of its Inland Sea setting, photographed by Shindō’s excellent cameraman, Kiyomi Kuroda. (“It’s pictorial, all right,” she wrote.) The New York Times’ Bosley Crowther – who, in his much more favorable review, naively called the work a “documentary” – wondered why the couple failed to build structures, such as cisterns, for catching and storing rainwater, so as to spare themselves at least some of those long, laborious trips carrying buckets of water.

Oddly, one of the film’s most vocal skeptics has been the director himself, who once candidly pointed out that the sweet potato crop that the family is shown cultivating would not, in real life, have required such enormous quantities of water to thrive. He also noted on this video’s commentary track – recorded in 2000 – that not only was the island on which they shot the movie uninhabited, but farmers from the area, such as the ones depicted, would never have actually watered their crops in the heat of the noonday sun, as is done in the film, because the water would almost immediately have evaporated.

So how has a movie of such dubious plausibility managed to evoke such a powerful response from audiences and critics for over fifty years? More than most films, The Naked Island is an overwhelmingly visual experience – except for one song by some schoolchildren, there is no spoken dialogue at all – with very little in the way of plot. So evoking its almost tactile beauty and primal power in a print review like this one is well-nigh impossible. A more profitable approach would be to examine why and how Shindō created it, beginning with some relevant background on the director’s difficult but very interesting early life.

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Kaneto Shindō was born in 1912 in Hiroshima into a rich and respectable family. But while he was still a child, his father agreed to serve as guarantor for a loan on which the borrower apparently defaulted, leaving the family suddenly destitute. They lost all their land, and the boy’s mother had to go to work as a farm laborer to support the others, which seems to have drastically shortened her life.

The young Shindō, resolving to enter the film industry, worked at menial jobs for various film studios while writing scripts at night. He eventually drifted into the orbit of his idol, the great Kenji Mizoguchi (Ugetsu, Sansho the Bailiff), who kindly informed the young man that he had no talent as a screenwriter. Undaunted, he continued to work for Mizoguchi as an art director and assistant and kept on writing, with the loyal support of his common-law wife, Takako… until she perished from tuberculosis in 1943. Drafted into the Japanese navy, he was one of only six men of his 100-man unit who survived, and happened to be absent from his hometown when it was reduced to rubble by the first atomic bomb in August 1945.

After the war, he formed a scriptwriter-director partnership with the established filmmaker Kōzaburō Yoshimura. Their very first collaboration, the classic The Ball at the Anjo House, was voted the best film of 1947 by Japanese critics. But the movies that the partners wanted to make were too dark and daring for the mainstream studios of the day. So in 1950, at a time when independent cinema was virtually nonexistent in Japan, the two men, together with the colorful character actor Taiji Tonoyama, formed their own production company, Kindai Eiga Kyokai (The Modern Film Association). It was for Kindai that Shindō directed, with the help of funds from the Japanese Teachers Union, his third film, the beautiful, moving Children of Hiroshima (Genbaku no Ko: literally, Atom-Bomb Children), which premiered in Japan on August 6, 1952 ‒ the seventh anniversary of the atomic explosion, and only months after the end of the American Occupation.

At the dawn of the 1960s, after making a number of other socially-conscious films for Kindai, with very little to show in the way of box-office success, Shindō and his young company were near ruin. As a last-ditch effort, he conceived of a simple story set on a remote island that would require only four actors – Tonoyama, Shindō’s favorite leading lady, Nobuko Otowa, and two children from the area – plus a skeleton crew, including Kuroda, on a miniscule budget. When he screened the film at the Moscow Film Festival, the audience received it warmly and it won the Grand Prix. The total lack of dialogue proved, ironically, to be an asset on the festival circuit: since virtually no subtitles were required, the picture could be marketed anywhere. Thus, both the film company and Shindō’s career were saved.

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The Naked Island, which focuses particularly on its hard-working farmer heroine, is a prime example of what Japanese critic Tadao Sato called Shindō’s “feminism”… but the meaning of the word, in this context, must be clearly understood. Like that of his mentor, Mizoguchi, Shindō’s feminism is far removed from the common Western sense of the term, that is, support for the social and political emancipation of women. Rather, it implies a very personal love, even a kind of awe, for the capacity of Japanese women for sustained self-sacrifice, but it is also about the duty of Japanese men to accept the harsh burden of guilt such sacrifice imposes on them.

Where Shindō parts company from Mizoguchi, however, is in his frequent identification of female oppression with class oppression. Throughout his film career, he rejected solidarity with the social class his family was born into – the comfortable bourgeoisie – and embraced (often with ambivalence) the class his family fell into: the manual laborers, the dispossessed, the utterly marginalized. Many of the women in his films thus carry the double stigma of gender and class discrimination, and their heroism is the patience and grace with which they bear this yoke.

 

Nobuko Otowa in The Naked Island

A farm wife (Nobuko Otowa) labors in the fields in Kaneto Shindō’s The Naked Island (1960). Credit: Courtesy of The Criterion Collection.

This is why Shindō’s muse and mistress (and future wife), Nobuko Otowa, became so essential a part of his filmmaking team. Otowa worked with Shindō for over 40 years, from 1951 to 1994. To my knowledge, in all of Japanese cinema, the only director-actor collaboration that surpassed theirs in sheer output was that of Yasujirō Ozu and Chishū Ryū, though the Shindō-Otowa partnership, while not quite as prolific, lasted longer. (She also did fine work at the same time for other illustrious filmmakers, such as Heinosuke Gosho and Keisuke Kinoshita.)

Yet when the best actresses that Japanese cinema produced during its Golden Age are recalled – including such names as Setsuko Hara, Kinuyo Tanaka, Isuzu Yamada and Hideko Takamine – Otowa never seems to get name-checked. This is a shame, for she excelled at portraying Japanese women of every class and profession. For Shindō in the 1950s, she played, among other characters, a prim young schoolteacher (in Children of Hiroshima), a geisha who gets transformed into a mindless toy before our eyes (in the devastating Epitome, 1953) and, in what may have been her oddest role, a mentally-challenged (autistic?) homeless woman (The Ditch, 1954), whose bizarre behavior Otowa somehow makes relatable, even sympathetic.

A particularly striking example of her skill at getting to the essence of a character occurs in a powerful scene from Shindō’s very first film as director, the semi-autobiographical Story of a Beloved Wife (1951). The screenwriter hero’s common-law wife, who is named Takako (like the director’s own deceased wife), is ill with tuberculosis. In the middle of the night, she begins coughing up blood. The hero, with trembling hands, holds a porcelain basin in front of her to catch the blood. The couple’s eyes meet, and she grasps his hand as if to steady it. Then she takes a pen and paper from a nearby desk and, without speaking a word, writes “Don’t worry. I won’t die” (though the hero, and presumably the audience, by this time knows she will die). So when Shindō decided to make his movie about farmers consisting entirely of such scenes, in which deep emotions are conveyed completely nonverbally, he knew that Otowa was up to the job.

 

Nobuko Otowa and Taiji Tonoyama in The Naked Island

A farm wife (Nobuko Otowa, left background) and her husband (Taiji Tonoyama, right) carrying water in Kaneto Shindō’s The Naked Island (1960). Credit: Courtesy of The Criterion Collection.

It has seldom, if ever, been noted that one of the reasons The Naked Island works so well is not only Otowa’s skill as an actress (according to Shindō, the Moscow audience believed she was an actual farmer), but her high comfort level with her unprepossessing co-star, Taiji Tonoyama, who plays the husband. With his bald head, bug eyes and stuck-out ears, Tonoyama strongly suggests to the modern viewer (or at least to this viewer) a depraved Yoda. But he was, at the time, a character actor much in demand whenever a lecherous, dissolute or generally unsavory middle-aged character was called for. And, as a full partner in Kindai Eiga Kyokai, Tonoyama had acted in many films with Otowa throughout the 1950s.

The extraordinary chemistry between the two stars of The Island can be witnessed in a scene that occurs almost exactly half an hour into the film. The heroine, as per her routine, is dragging two heavy buckets of water up a steep slope towards the crops at the top of a hill when she suddenly stumbles. As the husband, standing on the hill slightly above her, looks on impassively (apparently, this has happened before), one of her buckets tips over, spilling the precious water uselessly over the arid earth. The wife carefully secures the other bucket and looks up expectantly towards her husband. He stops what he’s doing and walks down the hill… probably, we suppose, to help her. He pauses in front of his wife and suddenly slaps her, hard, knocking her to the ground, an act to which she offers no protest or resistance. She then gets up, and only then does he help her carry the remaining bucket the rest of the way up the hill.

As USC film scholar Akira Mizuta Lippit has noted (in an interview included as a supplement on this disk), there’s no rage or animosity in the husband’s sudden, shocking act of violence. In other words, the slap isn’t the equivalent of saying, “You’re a stupid, useless idiot.” Instead, the slap is an extreme way of telling her, “You’re my wife, but you can’t make mistakes like this if we’re going to survive,” and the fact that she makes no complaint proves that she grasps this fact. And all the complex, painful ambiguity of the scene is perfectly and silently conveyed by these two veteran actors.

It should be noted that the director, through such scenes, is not really calling for the liberation of such women from their hard lot in life. Rather, he is calling on viewers to bear witness to the almost superhuman sacrifices that the heroine, and women everywhere in Japan, particularly those of the lower classes, make every day on behalf of the men in their lives.

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As Professor Lippit remarks in his interview, many of Shindō’s fellow filmmakers in Japan were not exactly over the moon about The Naked Island’s international success. “This is a film,” he says, “that for many of them played into an image of Japan that was too easily consumed by the rest of the world,” that is, an image of a country transitioning, very slowly and painfully, from a “backward” agrarian past to the technologically-driven present. Yet the film may have been seminal, for in the coming years, some younger filmmakers, particularly Shohei Imamura, would follow Shindō’s lead in exploring the legacy of “primitive” Japan.

When American film scholar Joan Mellen asked Shindō about this theme in The Naked Island, as well as in films by others, he gave a very interesting answer. “Yes,” he said, “that tendency has been rather popular among Japanese filmmakers for the past five or six years. The reason is that, since the latter half of the nineteenth century, we have been witnessing the weakening of the human mind. I think this is a universal problem. Consequently, modern men, and I for one, are in the process of reevaluating primitive man’s energy and identity.”

This belief of Shindō’s is probably the reason why The Naked Island, despite the hardscrabble, frustrating, grief-filled lives it depicts, does not really belong to the ever-expanding category of Miserabilist Cinema. The brief scenes of joy in the film – the father playing with one of his sons, the boys engaging in a fight with toy swords, the mother enjoying a bath alone – feel real and unforced. Unlike contemporary urbanites, these people of the land are not alienated from pleasure or from themselves. For Shindō, the eternally struggling “primitive” family in the film is to be respected and admired, not pitied, for its “energy” and “identity.”

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Shindō’s remarkable longevity as a man and as an artist – his final film, Postcard (2010), directed from a wheelchair, was released when he was ninety-eight years old – must surely have come at the price of tremendous survivor’s guilt. He once said that he had “always had the souls of the 94 [men in his battle unit who died] with me and have made them the theme of my existence.” Indeed, because he passed away at age 100, he could be said to have lived exactly one year apiece for each man in his unlucky squad, including himself.

I suspect that the only way he could have survived so long the burden of the many dead souls haunting him – his mother, neighbors and friends killed at Hiroshima, his fellow servicemen, Mizoguchi, his amazing wives – was to make films. By creating the false-yet-true masterpiece, The Naked Island, as well as famous films like Onibaba (1964) and Kuroneko (1968), and many other excellent works, he bore that burden with the same stoic grace he so admired in his female protagonists.

Postscript: After she died in 1994, Otowa’s ashes were scattered, at her request, over the island, Sukune, featured in the film. When Shindō died nearly two decades later, his ashes joined hers on the same island… as if the couple had really grown sweet potatoes there, rather than a movie.

The DVD of The Naked Island (I have not viewed the Blu-ray) is a typically top-notch, full-scale Criterion release. The quality of the widescreen black-and-white images (and this movie, more than most, stands or falls by its visuals) is breathtaking, with literally pearly grays and wonderfully subtle gradations of tone in nearly every shot, and virtually no sign of scratches, dirt or other flaws, though the film is over half a century old. The commentary track (from 2000), provided by both the director and the film’s composer, Hikaru Hayashi, mixes technical details and personal reminiscences that are illuminating and sometimes moving, though at times the two men focus overly much on the film’s score to the detriment of other aspects of the production. There is also a brief but touching video introduction by Shindō himself from 2011 (he was 99 at the time), as well as a very casual but heartfelt tribute from the filmmaker’s number one fanboy, Hollywood actor Benicio Del Toro. Finally, an interview with film scholar Akira Mizuta Lippit provides additional context, and a printed essay by Haden Guest makes a strong case for Shindō as a neglected Japanese master. All in all, an essential purchase for all J-Cinema fans.

 

Matsuda

Sadatsugu Matsuda – The Most Successful Director of Japan’s Golden Age of Cinema

Matsuda

The reception of Japanese cinema in the West has always existed within a confined space. Neither based on domestic commercial success nor on the reception of Japanese critics, what entered the Western canon of Japanese classics was chosen solely based on its availability on international film festivals. In the 1950s and early 1960s, Akira Kurosawa and Kenji Mizoguchi were singled out as Japan’s two greatest masters of cinema.

When in the 1970s the work of Yasujiro Ozu was discovered in the West, critics began to speak of “The Big Three of Japanese Cinema”. Without a doubt, all three of them, Ozu, Mizoguchi and Kurosawa, were indeed highly important directors whose oeuvre had a tremendous impact on the Japanese film industry.

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“The Big Three” – Kurosawa, Mizoguchi and Ozu

However, if one had consulted the critical consensus of Japanese reviewers at that time, another artist would without a doubt have emerged as Japan’s most celebrated director: Tadashi Imai, a left-leaning director of socially critical films who not only won more Kinema Junpo Awards (Back then, Japan’s most respected cinema award) than all of “The Big Three” but whose films enjoyed immense popularity among Japanese critics.

Of course, this narrow-mindedness only applies to what we might call “Mainstream Film Criticism”. The reception of Japanese cinema in the West has always been distinguished by a few brave individuals, including Donald Richie, Stuart Galbraith IV or Alexander Jacoby, who dared to look behind the alleged exoticism of Japanese cinema. Indeed, the process of discovering the great artists of Japanese cinema has not ended yet and continues on being as relevant and important as it always has been.

Yet, while more Japanese director receive their deserved praise based on the quality of their work, the reception of Japanese films based on their commercial success is still largely neglected. Despite of the early effort by Donald Richie and Joseph L. Anderson whose pioneering work, “The Japanese Cinema: Arts and Industry” (1959), attempted to recount not only Japan’s greatest cinematic achievements, but also the commercial framework behind them, few scholars since then have attempted to explore the industrial aspects of Japanese cinema.

While most producers granted their directors considerably more artistic freedom than their American counterparts had ever dared to, the style of a contract director was always also shaped by a producer-enforced company style. Thus, the Japanese film industry was as much distinguished by its artistic quality as by its mass production of films. In the end, it was exactly this mass production system coupled with the individual talents of its directors leading to the “Golden Age” of Japanese cinema. Something still neglected in Western circles where commercial success is often confused with artistic quality.

In the West, for example, the myth that Akira Kurosawa’s “Seven Samurai” (Shichinin no samurai, 1954) became Japan’s most successful film after its release in 1954 is still thoughtlessly adopted. It’s true that “Seven Samurai” was Japan’s most expensive film ever made. A record, however, which was broken a few years later when Kunio Watanabe’s nationalistic war epos “Emperor Meiji and the Great Russo-Japanese War” (Meiji tenno to nichiro daisenso, 1958) became not only Japan’s most expensive, but also highest-grossing film of all time.

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“The Emporer Meiji and the Great Russo-Japanese War” – A Nationalistic War Epos

Furthermore, the assessment that Akira Kurosawa was Japan’s commercially most successful filmmaker appears to be based more on wishful thinking than reality. In fact, not a single Kurosawa film occupied the first place at the annual Top Ten rankings during the 1950s. “Seven Samurai”, for example, ranked third behind Tatsuo Osone’s “Chushingura” adaptation and Hideo Oba’s third part of his highly regarded “What is your name?” trilogy. With box office earnings of ¥198 million Kurosawa’s next big blockbuster, “Throne of Blood”, was the second most successful film of the year 1957.

Much more successful, however, was Sadatsugu Matsuda’s “Port of Honor”, which, grossing more than ¥353 million, was the great hit of that year. Ultimately, Kuroswa may certainly have been a successful filmmaker, but based on the commercial success of his films, it would be wrong to describe the 1950s as “The Age of Kurosawa” or that of his company, Toho. On the contrary, the 1950s belonged to the Toei jidaigeki and its leading director, Sadatsugu Matsuda.

A director as prolific as he is unknown. Before somebody took the time to translate his name properly, he was known as either Sadaji Matsuda or Teiji Matsuda in the West. During his more than 40 years as a director he made at least 167 films, only 48 of whom are listed in the Imdb, “the most complete movie database in the world”.

In addition, he had his heyday in that period, in which the Toei Company conquered the Japanese film market with their trademark Toei goraku. A genre that is passionately despised by most critics. In 1959, Donald Richie, for example, described the audience for such films as having “no idea whatever of the meaning of the words quality or intelligence (…).”

This writing marks the first attempt to deal with Matsuda’s oeuvre. While Sadatsugu Matsuda could hardly be described as an artist, his unprecedented successful career shall here be the criterion for a reassessment of his work. Matsuda was a director whose career always remained closely connected to his studio, who never developed a signature style and dutifully churned out every film assigned to him by his film studio. A classic company man, which was precisely the reason why he became the most successful filmmakers of the 1950s.

Who was Sadatsugu Matsuda? Matsuda was born in 1906 in Kyoto. An illegitimate son of Shozo Makino, often called “The Father of Japanese Film”. During the early 20th century, Makino’s kyugeki, primitive historical films who closely imitated the stylistics of the Kabuki theater, gained huge popularity with the Japanese public.

Shozo Makino (1878 - 1929)

Shozo Makino (1878 – 1929)

The main actor of these film, Matsunosuke Onoe, was subsequently named the first great star of Japanese cinema. In the 1920s, Makino ended his collaboration with the aged Onoe. He founded his own film studio, “Makino Educational Film Studios”, and became a notable avantgarde producer, who launched the careers of major stars like Tsumasburo Bando, Chiezo Kataoka or Ryunosuke Tsukigata. In the beginning, however, Makino’s production company was poor and couldn’t even afford proper staff or equipment.

Thus, Makino’s son Masahiro and his daughter Tomoko became prime actors in the early days of “Makino Educational Film Studios”. After having graduated from junior high school, Sadatsugu Matsuda also joined his father’s production company as a camera assistant. In 1925, he was promoted to full-fledged cinematographer and shot films for Makino contract directors like Buntaro Futagawa, Mokushi Katsumi or Saichiro Matsumoto before he changed profession and became a motion picture director for his father’s company in 1928.

Shozo Makino and Tomoko Makino (1907 - 1984)

Shozo Makino and Tomoko Makino (1907 – 1984)

Like his father, Matsuda specialized in the helming of period features, often starring youth idol Toichiro Negishi (1899 – ?). These films were modelled on the success of the shinkokugeki (“New National Drama”), an important theater troup which had given Shozo Makino the impetus to revolutionize the period film with more cinematic techniques and lightning-quick sword fights. But Matsuda was also adept at comedy, directing films like “The Goronbo’s Story” (Muriyari Sanzengoku, 1929), said to have been an effective combination of nonsensical comedy and period drama.

Nevertheless, his work was somewhat overshadowed by that of his half-brother Masahiro Makino (1908 – 1993). Having been a noted child actor since age four, Masahiro had become a director for his father’s company in 1926. He teamed up with screenwriter Itaro Yamagami and cinematographer Minoru Miki to create many praised masterpieces of jidaigeki. Their films “Samurai Town, Story One: Beautiful Quarry” (Roningai: Daiichiwa Uusukushiki emono, 1928) and “Beheading Place” (Kubi no za, 1929) won consecutive number one spots in Kinema Junpo’s annual Top Ten ranking.

Around the same time, Matsuda met Chikueda, sometimes also credited as Tsukie, Matsuura (1907 – 1999), a talented Makino actress who had performed so viciously what could have been Japanese cinema’s the first female fight scene in Masahiro Makino’s “Sozenji Baba” (1928). Matsuura and Matsuda got engaged and, in 1932, married.

By then, Shozo Makino had succumbed to a heart failure at age 50. One year before, Makino’s company was already dwindling having experienced the walk-out of several of its biggest names, among them Chiezo Kataoka and Chozaburo Arashi (later known as Kanjuro Arashi). With Makino’s death in 1929, the company kept struggling for four more years and then promptly went out-of-business.

After having completed Makino’s last, unfinished film, “Raiden” (1928) starring his own half-brother, Masahiro, in the lead role, Matsuda left the sinking ship and became a freelancer directing films for companies such as Nikkatsu, Teikoku Cinema and Shinko Cinema. Today, most of his prewar films seem to be incomplete or lost. An 18 minutes fragment of “Raiden” remains the only extant legacy of Matsuda’s days at his father’s company.

"Raiden" - The actor to the left is Masahiro Makino.

“Raiden” – The actor to the left is Masahiro Makino.

During the war, Matsuda directed several propaganda pieces, however, his career didn’t fully flower until after the war. In 1945, Japan surrendered and fell into the hands of the American occupation forces under the leadership of General Douglas MacArthur. During the years of occupation, jidaigeki were outlawed as remnants of Japanese feudalism. Period film stars had to trade the sword of a tateyuki (“heroic leading man”) for the gun of a brave private investigator or fierce detective.

Ironically, it was in this environment when Sadatsugu Matsuda made his first breakthrough as a director. In 1946, he directed the first “Tarao Bannai” film. Until 1960 no less than ten sequels should follow, eight of them directed by Matsuda, each of them a smash hit at the box-office. Indeed, during the early postwar years “Tarao Bannai” literally dominated the industry.

Starring Chiezo Kataoka, already a major jidaigeki star since the late 1920s, as heroic private investigator Tarao Bannai, the detective series centered around the adventures of the title character who fought crime with seven different disguises and superior marksmanship. While the individual films in the series may be largely forgotten, the character of Tarao Bannai itself remains popular in Japan to this day and has enjoyed countless references in comic books, animated programs or tv series.

Tarao Bannai

Tarao Bannai – The Man With Seven Faces!

While being immensely successful, “Tarao Bannai” also proved itself to be crucial for the path of Matsuda’s later career. In 1950, Chiezo Kataoka, having become the greatest star of the 1940s, co-founded Toei Kabushiki-gaisha, better known under its abbreviation of Toei, soon to become Japan’s leading motion picture company. After having directed four “TaraoBannai” films for Daiei, Matsuda was invited by Kataoka to join him to his new production company.

Already being an experienced veteran journeyman director, Matsuda enjoyed a certain star status from the beginning. While directing more “Tarao Bannai” films for Toei, he emerged as studio’s leading director of Toei’s trademark jidaigeki, especially if they starred the seasoned jidaigeki giants Utaemon Ichikawa and Chiezo Kataoka. During the following decade, Matsuda should direct hit after hit seeming almost unstoppable at the box-office.

In 1955, he achieved his first number one spot at the annual box-office results. “Warriors of Ako” (Ako roshi: Ten no maki, chi no maki, 1955), a retelling of Japan’s famous legend of the 47 ronin, earned more than ¥313 million in revenues, more than ¥100 million more than Nobuo Nakamura’s “A Tale of Shuzenji” (Shuzenji monogatari, 1955), the second highest-grossing film of the year standing at “measly” ¥183 million. Until the end of the 1950s, six more films were among the highest-grossing of their respective year, among them especially his acclaimed “Jirocho” trilogy has to be mentioned.

With Kataoka portraying Jirocho, the eponymous medieval gambler and oyabun (“yakuza boss”) of the Tokaido road, all films in the series were tremendously successful. The aforementioned first part, “Port of Honor” (Ninkyo shimizu minato, 1957) was the only film to surpass “Throne of Blood” in revenues, part two, “A Chivalrous Spirit” (Ninkyo tokaido, 1958), ranked seventh at the annual Top Ten and “Road of Chivalry” (Ninkyo nakasendo, 1960) once again became the most successful Japanese film of the year.

port of honor

Chiezo Kataoka as Jirochi in “Port of Honor”

At the end of the decade, Matsuda’s six Top Ten hits alone had grossed over two billion yen, at least one billion more than those of every other director. However, as Toei’s bread and butter, Matsuda was also put in charge of directing the company’s most viable film series. Thus, the director also shot four of the five film of matinee idol Ryutaro Otomo’s “Tange Sazen” series (1958 – 1962), more “Tarao Bannai” films and all eight films of the “Shingo” series (1959 – 1963) starring Hashizo Okawa as young samurai Shingo Aoi. From their respective number of sequels, one can safely assume that all of these film series were highly successful.

Furthermore, at a breakneck pace of roughly ten films each year, Matsuda emerged not only as a constant hit maker, but also as one the most productive directors of the decade. Thus, it can be claimed that it was indeed Matsuda, this forgotten and neglected company man, who was the financially most successful director of the 1950s, “The Golden Age of Japanese Cinema”.

The reason for this can be attributed to Toei’s typical company product. After having opened its gates, Toei soon specialized in producing low-budget jidaigeki. Toei jidaigeki were mass-produced on a weekly basis, mostly shot in less than two weeks and were intended as lightweight family entertainment completely lacking the grim atmosphere, violent sword play and thoughtfulness of more earnest genre colleagues.

Instead, the usual Toei jidaigeki is distinguished by rather loose plot threads, low-brow humor and borrowing its formulaic narrative from famous feudal tales of Japanese folklore. Indeed, with its reliance on clearly formulated black-and-white drawing of their central characters and a glorification of feudal concepts of honor, the Toei jidaigeki was, in the words of film scholar Mitsuhiro Yoshimoto, “(…) an atavistic return to kyugeki (…) a technologically advanced version of the primitive cinema exemplified by the films of kyugeki superstar Matsunosuke Onoe.”

The production method of the Toei jidaigeki is also noteworthy for abolishing the star status of the director in favor of an actor-based system. True, Toei also employed their fair share of prestige directors, most importantly Tadashi Imai and legendary pioneer Tomu Uchida, yet these filmmakers made celebrated festival favorites and rarely touched the world of the Toei jidaigeki.

Instead, the usual Toei jidaigeki director was an anonymous hack, his style strictly formulated by company policy. The actors were the true ticket sellers of Toei. This was exactly the reason for Toei’s domineering status at the box-office. With lucrative deals, the company lured in some of the most famous of all jidaigeki stars, as well as countless promising newcomers on their way to the top.

Seasoned audience members could marvel at the magnifying presence of such legends as Utaemon Ichikawa, Chiezo Kataoka, Denjiro Okochi or Ryunosuke Tsukigata, often starring together in one film to provide several all-star Toei features every month.

Directed by seasoned genre directors such as Matsuda, Masahiro Makino or Yasushi Sasaki, these films usually functioned as the main feature of a weekly double or triple bill and ensured the attendance of the older generations drawn into the seats by the presence of their favorite childhood heroes.

Younger Toei aficionados stayed for the lower half of the double bill constituted by one or two one-hour long serials. These so-called Toei gorakuhen (“Toei Entertainment Edition”) served to introduce promising young matinee idols such as pop queen Hibari Misora, Kinnosuke Nakamura, Hashizo Okawa or Chiyunosuke Azuma who soon enjoyed a cult-like following by millions of teenage girls.

Even the most hackneyed of Toei’s program features usually made their money back with a large margin of profit. Thus, despite being arguably Japan’s most successful filmmaker of all-time, most of Matsuda’s films were low-budget features.

Even his more prestigious efforts usually lacked far behind in scale than comparable prestige pictures of other production companies. To underline this great irony of Matsuda’s career, being both the most important director of his studio and representing the most humble of all company man, we have to take a look at Matsuda’s probably most significant picture, Japan’s first feature-length widescreen film in color.

A pioneering production which at the same time was the background of a fierce race between two competing studios, Toei and Shintoho. A few years earlier Shintoho had begun the epochal production of “The Emporer Meiji and the Great Russo-Japanese War” supposed to be not only most the expensive film ever made, but also Japan’s first widescreen film.

Before the production could wrap up, however, another feature premiered on the big screen. A slight comedy about a wakasama (“young lord”) pretending to be a commoner and finding the love of his live in the process, having the unassuming title “The Lord Takes A Bride” (Otorijo no hanayome, 1957). It was the work of Sadatsugu Matsuda and Japan’s first full-color, feature-length widescreen film.

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“The Lord Takes a Bride” – Japan’s most forgettable milestone.

Eventually, Shin Toho’s film should become the highest-grossing Japanese film of the 1950s, but Toei could collect all the credit for pioneering the new technique. Toei, the richest studio in Japan, had won the race against Shintoho, poorest of Japan’s “Big Six”, by producing the most forgettable milestone of cinema ever conceived.

While Hollywood’s first widescreen film had its hero come to terms with having witnessed the death of Jesus, the hero of “The Lord Takes A Bride” faces his biggest obstacle when confronted with his lovers affinity for squid, whose taste the young lord detests.

Sadatsugu Matsuda certainly was a giant of cinema, one who made mostly low-budget features. Millions saw his films, yet nobody took the time to remember his name. His style ensured certain success, yet was solely that of his studio. Had he been a producer, he would have been rich, but as a director he was determined to be all but forgotten.

Despite of these admittedly harsh words, Matsuda was anything but a bad director. Even his most forgettable films were at least entertaining and always well-crafted. Occasionally, he also made good films, sometimes even great ones. One is “Ako Roshi” (1961), yet another adaptation of Japan’s “Chushingura” and arguably Matsuda’s masterpiece.

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“Ako Roshi” – One of the best retellings of the old story.

Shot in the most beautiful of color photography, written by excellent screenwriters Kaneto Shindo and Hideo Oguni, elaborately mounted and beautifully acted by a simply astonishingly large all-star cast, “Ako Roshi” grossed ¥435 million, making it the second highest-grossing film of 1961. This time, however, it was Kurosawa who took the first spot at the annual box-office Top Ten.

Indeed, in 1961 and 1962 two Kurosawa films became the highest-grossing features of their respective year, while Sadatsugu Matsuda had to be satisfied with the second respectively third spot. In the end, the early 1960s marked the true beginning of the age of Kurosawa and the end of the Toei jidaigeki.

The political climate in Japan had changed. Student demonstrations resulted in violent clashes with the police, terrorist groups, both left and right, emerged and threw Japan in a state of utter confusion. Toei’s teenage audience had finally grown up and began rallying in the streets.

Witnessing the declining success of their trademark company product, Toei tried to counter the audience’s demand for fresh and controversial material with the production of several zonkoku jidaigeki. Modelled on such milestones as “Yojimbo” (1961) and “Harakiri” (1962) and shot in somber black and white, these so-called “cruel period films” tried to lure the audience with gritty and violent depictions of the injustices of feudal Japan.

Their production marked in many ways a renaissance of the Toei jidaigeki. Seeing their star status in imminent danger, actors put more effort in their work, while younger Toei directors took the opportunity to escape their fate as providers of lightweight matinee fare, which often resulted in excellent performances and well-crafted films.

But it was once again Sadatsugu Matsuda who delivered the defining work of that era. Starring Ryutaro “Tange Sazen” Otomo, he directed “Duel of Blood and Sand” (Chi to suna no ketto, 1963), which surprisingly managed to be both highly entertaining entertainment with great action scenes and clever plot twists as well as being a grim and subversive study of feudal hypocrisy, modelled on Kurosawa’s “Seven Samurai”.

In the end, however, Matsuda rather chose the benefits of retirement instead of becoming part of this new mode of jidaigeki production.

Sadatsugu Matsuda in his later years.

Sadatsugu Matsuda in his later years of life.

In 1969, he made a shortlived attempt at restarting his career directing the first two “Mekura no Oichi” films, a notorious “Zatoichi” rip-off, but then left the world of cinema forever. He died in 2003 at the venerable age of 97.

Sadatsugu Matsuda was a hack, an unsung craftsmen and nonethelessly remains a giant of Japanese cinema. By the end of the 1960s, his Top Ten entries alone had broken the 3 billion yen mark, a record which should not be broken until the 1970s.

Acclaimed directors such as Mizoguchi, Imai, Kurosawa or Ozu may have directed masterpieces, but it remains ever more important to note that their “Golden Age of Japanese Cinema” wouldn’t have been possible without the backing of the big studios, which in turn were fully dependant on the efficiency of their anonymous company men whose work was the fuel that kept the machines running and brought “The Golden Age of Japanese Cinema” to life.

I’d like to thank my friend Daniel Warland for creating the featured image of this article as well as Matsuda Film Productions for providing their wonderful “Silent Film Database” without whose impressive insights into Japanese silent cinema this article wouldn’t have been possible.

Pablo Knote is a German-based critic and researcher on Japanese cinema. In 2012, he founded www.nippon-kino.net, Germany’s largest website solely dedicated to the classic Japanese cinema. He also writes for www.easternkicks.com and www.tasteofcinema.com.