We are in the twilight of the samurai. Most of the castles have been dismantled and fallen into ruin, not because of war, but from two centuries of enforced peace and martial law. Samurai wives wave their husbands off to work as if they are going to the office, and indeed, many of them are. The cities thrum with bars and brothels, and the nobles ignore the rules restricting showy clothes and fine living.

The samurai don’t even want to be samurai any more. They resign commissions to become merchants. They tinker with musical instruments. They grasp at arts and culture that are denied to them because they are still supposedly members of a death cult that has seized the government, but is now ossified and stagnant.

The gap in time, for example, between the events of The Great Killing and Eleven Samurai is 160 years, a similar distance between today and the 1860s. It is as if our own society was effectively unchanged from the time of Dickens, Darwin and the American Civil War until the present day. Director Eiichi Kudo is unafraid to re-use some footage from film to film, but that is partly because literally nothing has changed from year to year under the authority of the Tokugawa.

And what of swordsmanship? What of that skillset that served the samurai so well for 800 years of fierce warfare? Now it is evolving into a martial art – a series of sporting demonstrations and bloodless practices, as a warrior elite that comprises 10% of the state finds itself increasingly idle and unoccupied. The samurai are turning into parasites on the body of a Japan that relies increasingly on farmers and urban merchants. But every day, they still train for battles that never come.

Jonathan Clements is the author of A Brief History of the Samurai. This text is an excerpt from the video essay Fighting the Poison, included in Arrow Films’ forthcoming Samurai Revolution trilogy box set.

The inspiration for Thirteen Assassins was the assassination of the Austrian Archduke Ferdinand that led to the outbreak of the First World War. Storyliner Kyo Watanabe, eventually superseded on the writing credits by Kaneo Ikegami, was intrigued by the idea that the would-be killers had failed in their first attempt, but still managed to get the job done. He proposed a plot to murder a samurai nobleman – one of the many local warlords obliged to march up and down Japan for “alternate attendance” on the Shogun in Edo. What if, he argued, “there is an assassination attempt on the way, but some people die and it fails. So they have to lay in wait for him on his way back, and it succeeds.”

Watanabe’s idea was that the samurai would overcome vastly superior forces, in much the same way as the legendary 47 Ronin, by kettling, neutralising and ambushing them. He envisioned a prolonged closing battle in which thirteen wily warriors outwitted “a hundred” assailants (actually fifty-three) in order to get to their target.

The problem would be finding a director prepared to work on such a movie, since it was usual for fight choreographers to handle the battle scenes. The producers hit upon the thirty-four-year-old Eiichi Kudo, a director who frequently surprised his crews by coming up with ideas of his own for sword fights.

Kudo was dragged in, and the film was scheduled to go into production as one of Toei’s second-string features: low-budget double-bill filler, lacking big-name stars or an appreciable budget. But the film veritably demanded an intricate set for its big finish – that climactic fight in a hastily fortified post-town. Unable to secure the financing for his set, Kudo stole someone else’s, having heard that his art director had previously built a village at a nearby army base for Sadatsugu Matsuda’s Duel of Blood and Sand (1963) and had “forgotten” to dismantle it. It was still sitting there, slowly falling apart, and nobody would mind if a bunch of samurai turned up and wrecked it.

Jonathan Clements is the author of A Brief History of the Samurai. Eiichi Kudo’s Thirteen Assassins is being released as part of Arrow’s Samurai Revolution box set this March.

Although he was not yet the overall boss at Toei, Shigeru Okada’s responsibility for approving budgets gave him a de facto power to control productions. By the early 1960’s, he’d had enough of the diminishing returns from period dramas, particularly since the “price of horses was going up” and audiences seemed uninterested in more samurai films.

“Television has completely kidnapped all the children, housewives, and the elderly,” he announced at a production meeting. “The only people coming to the cinemas now are youths and men over thirty, and they are drawn by a delinquent sensibility. Wholesome films for the whole family at Toei just won’t get an audience anymore.”

Instead, Okada pushed for his writers and directors to knock up films about yakuza, set in the late 19th century or later, so that they could use the tail-ends of period sets, or real-world locations.

The last major exception at Toei was the five-year span of the Miyamoto Musashi series, for which Tomu Uchida would direct a complete adaptation of Eiji Yoshikawa’s brick-sized novel. The first three films all made it into the top five annual box office scores, leading Uchida to pull out all the stops for the fourth, Duel at Ichioji, in which Musashi would have to face his nemeses at the Yoshioka school in a massive fight.

Uchida became obsessed by a phrase in the script, which he felt obliged to reproduce exactly: “The thick morning mist gradually disappears, and the topography centred around a drooping pine clearly emerges.”

Intent on coming up with a moody swordfight amid rice paddies covered with a thin sheet of ice, Uchida proclaimed that “if it doesn’t exist, we will have to invent it.” Selecting a location near Japanese military training grounds in Shiga, he ordered the art department to make a tree, fixing cedar bark to a steel frame, and then planting it in the soil.

Concrete was poured all around the paddy fields, in order to allow pathways for cast and crew. The art department, realising that water and ice wouldn’t show up on the film stock being used at the time, repeatedly poured wax over the fields so that something would be visible when warriors’ feet kicked through the mud.

Eventually, it took two months to prepare the ground for one twenty-minute fight sequence, which Uchida further extended by insisting on filming for a single “magic” hour each day, so that the dawn light would remain constant. “I want to film the duel only at the time when the sky begins to whiten,” he said, “the same time the actual duel took place.”

This, in turn, meant they had to leave their equipment in place every day, and start setting up at three each morning so as not to waste the day, every day, for two weeks. Unfortunately, Uchida’s efforts amounted to little, since Duel at Ichioji failed to outperform the previous three movies at the box office, and barely broke even. A fuming Okada refused to approve the full budget for the fifth and final film, which was completed with a number of corners cut and shots fudged. It would take years for Okada to be persuaded to return to the samurai epic on film in any big-budget way.

Jonathan Clements is the author of A Brief History of the Samurai. The Miyamoto Musashi films are being released in the UK by Eureka later this month.

Despite lacklustre reviews from the American press, Message from Space endured far beyond what might have been expected, buried in the children’s slots at American theatres, paired on a double bill with Luigi Cozzi’s Star Crash (1978). Message from Space might have sunk below the radar of mainstream film, fading into the background noise of Saturday morning screenings for the next decade, but that gave it an oddly broad footprint with an audience of 1970s and 1980s children.

To put such American numbers in context, the smash-hit Pokémon – the First Movie (1999), was shown on a mere 3,041 screens, although that was a first-run record in the United States. The cross-over hit Shall We Dance? (1997) barely managed 268 screens. Kurosawa’s acclaimed samurai epic Ran (1985) was shown on a mere 30 screens. Unloved and largely unappreciated, Message from Space ultimately ran in over 17,000 theatres, where adults left their kids for a couple of hours’ respite, unaware that they were watching a fantastic swordfight finale between Shinichi Chiba and Mikio Narita, or the height of Tōei’s SFX work onscreen.

From my sleeve notes to Message from Space (1978), released by Umbrella in Australia as part of their Out There by Toei collectors’ box.

Justin Sevakis’ oral history of the anime industry gets around to interviewing me about the development of anime in the UK, the philosophy of memorabilia, “a bunch of women called Glenda,” the agonies of Dark Myth and the concept of Silver Otaku.

There’s also a bonus for AnimEigo subscribers, with further footage in which I discuss the logistics of festival guests and interviews, gossip about Leiji Matsumoto, Naoko Yamada, Mamoru Hosoda and others, the creation of Smith Toren and foreigners in the anime business.

Further details of the anime business from the inside, of course, can be found in my book Anime: A History.

The History Channel’s Ancient Aliens series gets to Japan, which means I get to sound like the voice of reason when discussing the possibility that the Japanese imperial family’s ancestors came from space. It’s all in my Brief History of Japan.

Something I stumbled on while researching a script for Eureka’s Zen and Sword extras: a meeting between the historical novelist Eiji Yoshikawa, and Tomu Uchida, the director who was adapting his Musashi novels for the screen.

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Last year [c.1962 – JC], I visited Eiji Yoshikawa at his villa in Karuizawa to ask his opinion on the second part of Miyamoto Musashi for my film adaptations. He was in the middle of writing the final part of the Ashikaga chapter of his Private Taiheki…. I had heard that he was in poor health, so I intended to limit my talk to the main issues, but he suddenly held out his hand.

“As the days of the Ashikaga come to an end,” he said bitterly, “I feel as though my family will die, and my hand will rot as it holds the writing brush. You can sing the story of the tragic end of the Heike clan at Yashima and Dannoura, but I don’t like the stories of the Ashikaga clan. It’s a path of power and famine. There are no people there.”

He spoke in a low voice but with a strong tone, and looked at us with sharp eyes, as if to express a writer’s anger towards the rotten history of humanity…. It was only later that I finally grasped the meaning of what he said at the time.

One was the spirit of his anger about writing a history of a corrupt era. The other was: don’t start a song you can’t sing.

From Tomu Uchida’s posthumously published memoir, Fifty Years a Film Director (1999). Jonathan Clements is the author of A Brief History of the Samurai.

“…he leaned on different sporting allusions, particularly a fusion of pilot and mecha evocative of equestrian sports or bicycle racing – where Gunbuster imagined the machines as fighter jets, Diebuster reconceived them as more like living mounts with wills of their own. They were not so much vehicles now as participants in school life, organic personalities that invited a form of cross-species bonding, like a young girl befriending her pony, which can fly, and shoot things.”

From my essay in the sleeve notes to Anime Limited’s release of Diebuster.

Like several other notable titles of the 1980s, Angel’s Egg was briefly shown in a Tokyo cinema in order to qualify it as a “film”, and hence command attention from movie magazines. However, it was hardly a major splash – an early morning screening on Sunday 22nd December at the Toei Hall, a week after the video cassette was already on sale, ironically on the release day of the fourth film in the Urusei Yatsura franchise that Oshii himself had once helmed, and only a day after the premieres of both Vampire Hunter D and the Captain Tsubasa movie. If you were an anime fan that weekend, you would have had a busy schedule. Angel’s Egg, it seems, lost out in all the competition, an avowedly arthouse project in an anime scene that had a very different idea of what “grown-up” cartoons should be.

The reaction to the film on its original release was muted. Yoshikazu Yasuhiko damned it with faint praise in Animage by comparing it to Eiichi Yamamoto’s Belladonna of Sadness (1973), itself a film that flopped on its original release, only to be praised by later critics as an arthouse classic. Hayao Miyazaki commented that Oshii had gone on a “one-way trip” with no notion of how to come home. In the most cutting of bad notices, Oshii’s own mother told him that she doubted anyone would want to see another one of his films ever again.

From my article in the sleeve notes to the Umbrella (Australia) release of Mamoru Oshii’s Angel’s Egg.