Teleidoscope

Tue, Mar 06, 2007

Zatoichi

Posted at 9:50 pm MST to Media

I believe the HD TV format has taken off faster in Japan than it has here. There are a lot of Samurai movies from the 60s and early 70s (and even earlier) showing up on the HD KungFu channel, and I'm sure they wouldn't have been remastered to HD if there weren't a market for them.

They've shown 'Hidden Fortress' and 'Yojimbo' and 'Sanjuro', and some fairly tacky stuff late at night. Last week I caught the end of 'Sambiki no Samurai' which was a favorite of my Japanese language professor. I stayed up way too late last night watching something billed as "Bandits vs Samurai Squadron". It's real name is apparently 'Kumokiri Nizaemon', which is the name or alias of the main character.

And for the past week or so they have been running many of the Zatoichi series of movies. There were a lot of Zatoichi movies (they're showing Zatoichi 12 at the moment) not counting the remake that was done a couple of years ago.

I'm catching the series somewhat out of order but apparently Zatoichi was a great swordsman who went blind and became a travelling masseur and gambler (music and massage were the two traditional professions for blind men in Japan in the old days). He uses a cane that is a camouflaged sword and frequently ends up helping people who are in trouble with either the yakuza or the authorities or both. There are generally a lot fewer yakuza and/or officials around when he leaves a town than there were when he arrived.

I have to say, Zatoichi going blind was probably a good thing for the population of Japan since it probably slowed him down at least a little. As it is, even with him blind, I'm fairly sure his body count in one of the movies they showed last night reached triple digits. That sword-cane has to qualify as a WMD.

The standard Zatoichi fight involves him being attacked from all directions by a bunch of sword-wielding thugs (maybe a dozen to twenty or thirty) and cutting them down in droves. Swish zing swish, and four guys collapse in different directions while the rest of the fight continues down the alley or across the street. It's fairly stylized: most of these were made before buckets of spurting blood was acceptable on-screen. (People bleed from small injuries in the more recent films, but not much from the sword fights, which is a little odd.)

As a special treat, and to provide a contrast with the wholesale slaughter, the writers sometimes establish a skilled but nefarious swordsman early in the movie, so that there can be a one-on-one duel that lasts more than a few seconds as the climax of the story. Some of the fight choreography is impressive, especially since one of the participants has his eyes closed whenever he is facing the camera.

permanent link || trackback || 0 comments || Add a comment