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.

Two years previously, when the Studio Park had been opened to great fanfare, Toei had sent sixteen truckloads of cinema-grade scenery, costumes and armour off to the trash heap, convinced that it would be a waste of money to keep storing samurai sets and material in an era of thrillers and detective dramas.

Red-faced producers were obliged to rebuild many interiors from scratch, leading to complaints from the studio head, Shigeru Okada. Despite his earlier enthusiasm, he now remembered somewhat tardily that he had been the bean-counter who had shut down period dramas at Toei in the first place. It was all very well making samurai films, he fumed, but horses now cost ten times what they used to.

From my booklet article in the new Eureka Blu-ray release of Shogun’s Samurai, a.k.a. The Yagyu Conspiracy.