In September 1978, Manhunt became the first Japanese film to be released in China since the Cultural Revolution, arriving as one of three movies presented at a Beijing “Japanese Film Week” – the others were Kei Kumai’s Sandakan No. 8 (1974) and Koreyoshi Kurahara’s The Glacier Fox (1978). It subsequently went on a national release in 1979, and circulated in multiple prints for years thereafter.
A 1999 survey reported that a staggering eighty percent of Chinese respondents claimed to have seen the film, some as many as ten times. It is for this reason that one sometimes sees Japanese claims that the movie was seen by 800,000,000 people – an extrapolation that assumes that the respondents tracked with the population of China as a whole. And yet, the film was indeed seen by a remarkable number of people, from the cinemas of Beijing to open-air travelling performances in rural valleys. In his book A History of a Billion Chinese People’s Passion for Japanese Film (2006), author Liu Wenbing recounts his first viewing of Manhunt as a teenager in the 1980s, at an outdoor screening in the countryside, in which ten thousand people took their places on one side of a cloth screen, while another eight thousand watched the film in reverse aspect, from the opposite side of the projection.
Audiences in the People’s Republic were bewitched by what had been entirely everyday location work in Tokyo. For a nation where the bicycle was the standard mode of transport, audiences were amazed at the sight of streets thick with automobiles. From the funky opening music, and the very first shot – an aerial image of the Shinjuku skyscrapers – Manhunt offered Chinese cinema-goers a window into a different world. The rooftop showdown, likely to have been chosen simply for ease of shooting without disrupting traffic, takes on a new meaning when one imagines an awestruck audience, ignoring the fisticuffs in the foreground to gaze in wonder at the Tokyo cityscape.
From my article in the Umbrella (Australia) Blu-ray booklet for the Japanese film Manhunt (1976), starring Ken Takakura.
Much to everybody’s surprise, including mine, I shall be appearing today on screen at the Odeon West End in London, introducing Mamoru Oshii’s Angel’s Egg. For connoisseurs of my introductory videos, I believe this to be the first recorded in my new office, so everyone can criticise a different section of my bookshelves.
The distributors at Anime Limited announced this yesterday, only to receive a welter of social media replies from fans demanding Bleach. This is why you can’t have nice things.
Angel’s Egg, presumably along with my face looming out of the screen, will also be appearing in a number of other locations in the weeks to come.
“His first novel, Paradise, is a ‘genetic’ romance, in which two star-crossed prehistoric lovers are separated by the Bering Strait, only for their distant descendants in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries to be reunited by some strange attraction and hereditary memory. However, it was with Ring, a supernatural detective drama, that Suzuki first found true success. Combining an eerie sense of the time abyss of the Japanese countryside, in which modern comforts are written only lightly over centuries of tradition and secrets, with one of fiction’s most perfect basilisks, it posits a ‘haunted’ scrap of film that will strike its viewer dead unless it is shown to another, hence passing on the ‘curse’.”
Fittingly on David Attenborough’s 100th birthday, I stumble across a podcast that latches onto the “history as a calendar year” analogy that I stole from Life on Earth.
It even comes with a bunch of nifty, and I am guessing, A.I.-generated infographics to summarise the book. But who are these anonymous podcasters? Could this be the first review of my work delivered by robots?
The Emperor Meiji tried to draw a line under the seditious leanings of some of those in his service. Pointedly, in 1879, he changed the name of the “Tokyo Shrine to Summon the Spirits” to the “Shrine to Quiet the State” (Yasukuni Jinja). Like many of the other classical Chinese allusions in 19th-century Japanese politics, this reference tends to be cited out of context, without much consideration of the text being quoted. In the original Chinese, the term is found in an official’s defence of his decision to put a soldier into a government position:
“I have done it to secure the quiet of the State. When you have men who have rendered great service, and you do not give them the noblest offices, are they likely to remain quiet? There are few who can do so.”
Amid the songs of the 1930s, one stands out not for its musical or lyrical achievement, but for its tone. “Mother at the Nine Steps” (Kudan no Haha, 1939) was written for the spring ceremony at the Yasukuni Shrine, where the newest war dead would be ceremonially accepted into its halls. The song tells the story of a lady from the provinces, coming to the Nine-stepped Hill (Kudanzaka) that leads to the venue:
From Ueno Station to the Nine Steps
Frustrated by unfamiliar places
Taking a whole day and relying on my walking stick
I’ve come to see you, Son.
A large gate that can reach the sky
What an honor to be enshrined
In such a magnificent place as a god.
Your mother is shedding tears of joy.
I put my hands together kneeling
I find myself chanting a prayer to the Buddha.
I am taken aback and flustered.
Sorry, Son, I’m such a yokel.
Just like a kite giving birth to a hawk
I appreciate how fortunate I am.
Just to show you your Order of the Golden Kite
I’ve come all the way to Kudanzaka.
It seems oddly ungracious to ridicule a bereaved mother for being a “yokel”, like she hasn’t suffered enough. But for music historian Osada Gyoji, that is part of the song’s subversive appeal. We have gone, in the space of two years, from the unlikely sight of mothers waving off their sons “without tears,” to this broken old woman in the big city shedding tears that are plainly not “of joy” at all, but continuing to put a brave face on her personal desolation.
“The verb for beheading, in this context, retains a visceral sense of the battlefield – it is not the stark, slashing kiru of a ritual execution, but the unpleasant, gritty kubinejikiru, literally, ‘head twisting off and cutting’, wrenching the head from the neck with the aid of a dagger or butcher’s knife.”
Sorry if it’s a bit quiet on the blog at the moment, but I am literally all at sea, onboard the MS Westerdam on a two-week circumnavigation of Japan. I’m this voyage’s designated expert with Road Scholar, a company that “enriches” travellers’ experiences by forcing them to spend time with me, something that readers of this blog get for free. I’ve been lecturing about the samurai and the history of Japanese food, and squiring people around castles and tea farms, sake breweries and museums. This week alone, I’ve soaked in the hot springs at Arima, shouted myself hoarse at a sumo wrestling match, and joined in the celebrations in Kochi when the locals discovered they’d struck the tourist jackpot by becoming the subject of the just-announced 2028 NHK taiga drama.
Hiroki Yamaguchi “…was working within the constraints of shoestring funding, a largely amateur or volunteer cast and crew, and shooting on a Panasonic DVC-Pro – a video camera with a price-point and capabilities that can be matched today by a second-hand iPhone. Nobody on the production was paid; the props and set were literally scavenged from a junk yard. Even the advertising was low-tech, with the cast hefting a poster-board through the streets of Tokyo, exhorting passers-by to give Love, Actually a miss and try the little indie film playing in a smaller screen at the same cinema.”
From my sleeve notes to the bonkers Hellevator, coming in May from Treasured Films.
Over at Animeigo’s Youtube channel, they make their bonus footage available from their oral history of the anime business, which means you get to hear me talking about the logistics (and the finances) 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.
“I stepped ashore,” wrote A.B. Mitford in 1911, “and, rubbing my eyes in amazement, saw myself in a world younger by six centuries than that which I had left behind me. Feudalism is dead, but its ghost haunts me still. I shut my eyes and see picturesque visions of warriors in armour with crested helms and fiercely moustachioed visors.”
His comments are quoted by Natasha Bennett as part of her essay on “Collecting samurai armour in nineteenth century Britain”, which summarises the passion and obsession that the Victorians had the newfound Samurai, a discredited, failing military elite whose swords and helmets, woodcuts and silks were being offloaded on the European market by the crateful. The British Museum’s lavish exhibition Samurai deals in even-handed and intricate care with the sides in a modern battleground, in which the truth of the historical samurai contends with the stories they told themselves about themselves, in ancient war chronicles, in the twilight of the rule of the shoguns, in the long and tragic 20th century, and in modern myths.
The exhibition catalogue, expertly overseen by Rosina Buckland and Oleg Benesch, gently deals with the expectation that many of the visitors to the British Museum are likely to think of the samurai as figures from a fantasy movie or a heroic myth, rather than real-world people with everyday concerns. One image beautifully encapsulates the attitude not only of Mitford but of the Japanese Imperial Army itself, as Japan’s victory in the very modern 1905 Russo-Japanese War is celebrated with an Army-approved image of three samurai: “the triumphal celebration in the Middle Ages.”
An entire final third of the materials are taken up with the end of the samurai and their incorporation into tourism and popular myth – a tale with as many switch-backs and double-crosses as any military campaign. The curators offer jaw-droppingly beautiful representations of the samurai’s self-celebration, such as a fantastic 1863 portrait of the wrecked Mongol fleet, its drowning sailors clinging to driftwood in a swell caused by a conspicuous sunburst.
One might quibble, as many museum-goers do, that visitors to the exhibition are often paying cash money to see things that they could have seen for free only a few weeks earlier. But while many of these images do have tell-tale donation dates going back decades or even centuries, the whole point of curation is to place such elements in new and interesting contexts, which the British Museum exhibition delivers by the spadeful, with multiple temporary loans from world-class collections like that of the London print-dealer, Israel Goldman.
A lot of the coverage so far of the BM’s exhibition online has been weasel-worded rage-bait about the alleged emphasis on “female samurai”, which is not misguided wokery, but an undeniable historical fact. The samurai were a social class – fully half of them were women, otherwise there was no means of making little samurai. Samurai girls were trained in home defence – the use of the anti-cavalry naginata being most prominent – and samurai warlords were frequently entertained by girls doing “sword-dances.” There is even battlefield evidence of female corpses in samurai armour, although the issue, really, is the extent to which women habitually fought on the battlefield, and whether the fearsome Tomoe Gozen, who rides in and out of the Tale of the Heike in three wild pages, was an entirely everyday sight or a one-off nutcase.
The catalogue is peppered with illuminating mini-essays on all sorts of unexpected spinoffery. Hiromu Nagahara, for example, points out the telling implications of samurai photography, both of the grim bruisers to be seen in a shot of Satsuma samurai, and of the dapper men in western suits, who gather incongruously around the leader of the Iwakura Mission overseas, who still clings to his outmoded samurai costume. Mark Ravina writes about the idealised views of the Satsuma Rebellion of 1877, which is either a futile flex by past-it conservatives, or the valiant stand of the “last samurai”, depending on who you listen to.
Chika Tonooka notes that in the wake of Japan’s 1905 victory over Russia, HG Wells decided to name the elite in A Modern Utopia the “samurai.” Tatiana Linkhoeva writes on the attitude of the Soviet Union to the samurai, seeing them as a poisonous tumour that prevented true proletarian revolution from taking hold in Japan. Clemens Büttner offers a valuably Chinese perspective, that Chiang Kai-shek regarded the code of the samurai as the root cause of Japan’s foreign aggression in the twentieth century. But over in Nazi Germany, writes Sarah Panzer, Heinrich Himmler was all for it, telling Hitler that the “SS should become the German samurai.”
Sven Saaler, whose fantastic book on statues I have reviewed elsewhere, is back to talk about the striking sculpture of Kusunoki Masashige, seen by many a visitor to the Imperial Palace in Tokyo, although from my own observations, many still do not really know who he was. Judith Vitale offers a history of the association of samurai with cherry blossom imagery, which she dates back to the planting of cherry trees at the Yasukuni Shrine in 1879. I lack the space to list them all, but every one is a spark of insight into the long, long tail of Japan’s warrior elite, from Yukio Mishima’s fatal obsession with samurai philosophy, to John Belushi’s crazy samurai character Futaba on Saturday Night Live, to George Lucas’s ransacking of the samurai panoply to create the costume for Darth Vader.
The catalogue, and exhibition, close with such modern icons, often beautifully subtle, such as the katana swooshes to be seen on the shirts of Japan’s football team, the Samurai Blue. Rachael Hutchinson’s closing notes on samurai in video games also drag up the long shadow of the past, when she reveals that Mitsurugi in Soulcalibur was re-skinned as “Arthur”, a blond European knight, for the export of the game to South Korea, where locals were sure not to be all that keen on the sight of a Japanese warrior.
Jonathan Clements is the author of A Brief History of the Samurai, which is also available in the British Museum bookshop if you have any pennies left over. The Samurai exhibition is running at the British Museum until 4th May 2026.
