by Jonathan Clements

In the late actor Shintaro Katsu (1931-1997), Zatoichi had the perfect performer. Katsu was a powerhouse of TV and film production, an accomplished player of the three-stringed samisen, and an infamous drinker. He had a self-destructive streak that cost him several high profile parts (including, according to movie rumour, leading roles in both Akira Kurosawa’s Ran and Ridley Scott’s Black Rain), but left him ever popular as the brawling underdog. Katsu played many other roles, but it was Zatoichi that he made his own.

Zatoichi began in the Japanese cinema with the 1962 movie released in the West as The Blind Swordsman. Directed by Kenji Misumi, it was the first of 25 films, a run that only ended with Zatoichi’s Conspiracy in 1972. But while cinema seemed to have tired of the blind swordsman, television welcomed him. In the early 1970s, an era dominated by student unrest and bribery scandals, not to mention the Vietnam War, samurai stories were colonised by tales of ronin – masterless warriors disowned by the establishment. These anti-heroes included the struggling father and son of Lone Wolf and Cub, and the people’s champion Monjiro, who wandered Japan wearing an unforgettable, broad-brimmed wicker hat, fighting unjust landlords and corrupt samurai. Zatoichi fitted right into this radical tradition, lasting for four seasons and a hundred episodes. A final Zatoichi movie was released in 1989, the same year as the American remake Blind Fury, directed by Phillip Noyce and starring Rutger Hauer. The taglines for the Hollywood version included: “He’s lucky he can’t see what he’s up against” and “Master of the sword. Avenger of the truth. Blind as a bat.”

“Beat” Takeshi Kitano resurrected the franchise for a new century in 2003, with a luscious colour palette, brutal fight scenes and a bizarre tap-dancing finale. But was that the last word? Was it all over for the blind swordsman?


A NEW ICHI
Producer Toshiaki Nakazawa was ready to try something different, commenting after the worldwide success of Kill Bill (2003) that the time was write for a Zatoichi film with an actress in the lead.

“The idea of a story with a female Zatoichi came from the producer,” says director Fumihiko Sori. “Since Shintaro Katsu and Takeshi Kitano had created very strong icons of a male Zatoichi, he thought it would be a difficult challenge for a male performer to offer a new perspective. But he also thought that it would be interesting if we plotted something with a female ‘Ichi’.”

At first, Sori was reluctant. An avid fan of Shintaro Katsu’s original, he fretted that this would be nothing more than “some B-movie manga chick” with a sword, a fleeting gimmick. He changed his mind when he saw footage of a potential leading lady in White Nights (Byakuyako, 2006), a TV drama on TBS about a pair of children who each murder one of their parents and swear a deadly pact to cover up each other’s crime. In the pivotal role of a murderous daughter was the young actress Haruka Ayase.

“When I saw Miss Ayase in White Nights,” recalls Sori, “she seemed like such an ordinary girl with a serene air about her, who was able to act as if she were not acting at all. I thought she was a great performer. When she was in the role of Ichi, the cast and crew all said that she seemed so gentle, but she had fantastic reflexes. Ichi is a role that primarily demands sword-fighting ability. That was the first condition that we made sure to mention in casting. Later, after she’d had thirty minutes of sword practice and was already looking extremely accomplished, I thought: ‘We’re going to be all right.’ After only one sword training session, her teacher said: ‘This kid’s really doing it!’”

“There are probably people who still think of Haruka Ayase as just a pop star, but she’s totally an actress. She’s got a natural way she stands, moves: a dancer’s grace. If there’s anything that was a problem for us, it was that her face was not ‘bad’ enough. Make-up kept having to rough up her skin a little. She puts on this aura of calm, but when the time came for her to have her first fight alongside Takao Ozawa, she let out this invincible scream and got stuck in.”


THE ORIGINAL ZATOICHI
Ichi’s original creator, the writer Kan Shimosawa (1892-1968) was intimately involved with the samurai tradition. His grandfather had been one of the old-school warriors loyal to the Shogun in Japan’s 1868 civil war, joining the 1000-strong Shogitai (Corps of Clear Loyalty) that held what is now Tokyo against advancing Imperial forces, before fleeing to make a last stand on the northern island of Hokkaido. The Shogun’s forces lost, and Shimosawa’s family chose to remain on the remote frontier rather than return to their homes in the south. As an adult, Shimosawa travelled to Tokyo and became a journalist with the Yomiuri Shinbun, but was unable to resist his samurai roots. With an understandable interest in the late samurai era, he published his first novel, Rise and Fall of the Shinsengumi, in 1928. Over the next forty years, he maintained a prolific output of stories about samurai, yakuza gangsters, and legends of the Hokkaido aborigines. Many of his works formed the sources for early movies and the silent screen, with an incredible 60 movie adaptations of his work by the outbreak of WW2. The Story of Zatoichi (Zatoichi Monogatari, 1962) was the eighty-sixth movie to be based on a Shimosawa creation; ironically, although it would become his most famous work and spawn two dozen sequels, it was not based on one of his many novels but on a minor character in a short story.

Zatoichi was not a samurai – as a commoner, he would have been executed for carrying a sword, hence his habitual use of a blade concealed in a walking stick. Instead, he was an underclass hero of a type that only truly flourished after WW2, when the samurai of old were blamed for leading Japan into a war it could not win, and new, proletarian heroes rushed to fill the gap. Most prominent among these were the ninja, a shadowy underclass of peasant assassins whose invisibility from previous accounts was used as a facetious argument for their great skill at remaining hidden. Also, the yakuza, Japan’s gangsters, left spouting their own code of honour-among-thieves when the old ruling elite was swept aside. But at the time of his creation, Zatoichi was in a class of his own, a true underdog.

For the blind in feudal Japan, there were only two possible careers. The blind could not, by definition, be peeping toms, and hence were often found working as masseurs, where they could not steal a glance at coy female clients. The blind were also encouraged to become musicians, not only because of the old tale that they would have heightened sense of hearing, but because their disability would keep the secrets and scandals of their samurai clients safe from prying eyes.


PURE OF HEART
As Todd Brown noted on the website Twitch Film: “The one major variation from the original character – other than the gender switch which is, admittedly, fairly major – is that in Ichi our wandering, blind sword fighter is cast as a truly tragic sort, a woman abandoned and alone through no fault of her own and struggling to find a reason to go on living.”

Fumihiko Sori could not agree more. “The drama element is suffused with a message of staying alive,” he says. “To be, or not to be, that is the question that hounds its protagonist throughout. We want to see what kind of chemistry, what kind of synergy can push her one way or the other through the people she encounters. It might seem like a trite question, but that’s because we live in an era when staying alive is appreciably easier.”

Whereas the original Zatoichi was often a hard-living, hard-drinking, gambling man, ever ready with a quip or a sly smile, this new creation is a troubled woman, sometimes struggling even to put one foot in front of another in what first appears to be a futile quest to swap one location’s darkness and squalor for another’s. This new emphasis has its roots in a sub-genre of 1990s television drama, known as the “pure” shows, each of which turned upon the troubles of a disabled lead character.

The most famous example, giving its name to the entire trend, was Pure (1996), concerned with the fortunes of an autistic artist, but Pure was only one of many disability dramas that dared the Japanese to count their blessings during the 1990s recession, including a deaf protagonist in Heaven’s Coins, a detective with multiple personality disorder in MPD Psycho, and a blind flower seller in Edge of the World, not to mention the eternally bandaged, permanently wounded Rei Ayanami in Evangelion. One series, Please God! Just a Little More Time broke new ground by confronting conservative TV audiences with an HIV-positive heroine – the screenwriter was ICHI’s Taeko Asano. Another, Socrates in Love, featured a love-interest wasting away with leukaemia, a role that first brought ICHI’s star Haruka Ayase to the attention of the Japanese media.

ICHI adds a historical element, depicting its heroine as an old-time variant of these modern disability dramas. Characters in the film address Ichi as “goze”, an archaic term for a blind woman. Associating in guilds in the main urban centres, these women would find work as masseurs or minstrels, specialising in folk songs and long warrior-tales set to music. Ironically, it is through the recitations of this blind and unseen underclass that many of the stories of the samurai themselves have survived. The goze and their male counterparts upheld a bardic tradition in old Japan, preserving many old legends, before being supplanted in the 20th century by more modern media.

Usually playing the banjo-like samisen, the goze would wander the countryside in the off-season, performing distinctive “Songs Before Doorways” – performances intended as free samples of their talents, in anticipation of a room for the night or perhaps a venue for a proper concert. In the early scenes of ICHI, we see her attempting one such performance, only to have a door rudely slammed in her face.


THE BAT AND THE BEAT
Notably, the Daiei studio achieved such success with its Zatoichi franchise in the 1960s that the rival Shochiku studio tried to fight back with another blind warrior, in the form of Crimson Bat. An obscure 1950s pulp heroine, the Crimson Bat was resurrected for several movies in the 1960s, starring actress Yoko Matsuyama as “Blind O-Ichi”, a girl abandoned by her mother, who somehow learns how to use a sword under the tutelage of a travelling samurai, kills those who have wronged her, settles down into domestic bliss, only to be dragged out of retirement by the arrival of adversaries from her past. However, the Crimson Bat stories were regarded in some circles as too obviously inspired by Zatoichi, and were silenced in the late 1960s after complaints behind the scenes.

Hence, in the stripping of Fumihiko Sori’s film down to simply “ICHI”, we have a playful combination of these two rival franchises. Are we seeing an adaptation of Ichi, Daiei’s blind, itinerant, crime-fighting masseur? Or is it the other Ichi, Shochiku’s blind, vengeful, lady minstrel? The clues are in the film itself, as we hear that a blind man, unnamed in the script, was responsible for Ichi’s sword training during her childhood. It is strongly implied that this anonymous mentor is the original Zatoichi, and that our heroine may even be his daughter.

The sudden use of a female protagonist also allows the producers to sidestep the appearance of the other modern Zatoichi film, made by Takeshi Kitano in 2003. Kitano’s version, in which he played the title role with an anachronistic dyed-blond hair, was very much in the spirit of Fumihiko Sori’s Ping Pong, utilising new developments in digital technology to heighten its imagery. While great CGI armies battling in digitally generated landscapes might attract the attention of the viewing public, digital effects have also had a much subtler influence on modern filmmaking. Tom Cruise, in The Last Samurai, had a helping hand for his swordfights through the subtle addition of digital blades. Where Ping Pong added little dots of white light to imply crazy table tennis moves, Kitano’s Zatoichi daubed in vicious slashes of red to mark the wounding paths slashed by swords.

“If we mention CGI,” notes Sori, “we’re normally talking about wire work and explosions, but that’s only speaking of its most orthodox, commonly-seen uses. I didn’t want conventional movie sword fights, I wanted something that gave you a sense of the sensitivity of Zatoichi’s character, of the shape her world. Of course, we’ve used digital enhancements, but we’ve used them to accentuate what is real, not what is not already there.” Of over a thousand shots in ICHI, perhaps half use some sort of CGI enhancement, some substituting night for day, others allowing a visceral quality for the fight scenes, able to zoom in on wounds and sprays of blood, or adding digital blades.

ICHI plays up the contrasts between the way the samurai world is imagined, and the way it truly was. Nothing showcases this better than the sequence in which Banki’s men surprise Toraji at a kabuki theatre performance. The actors performing a scene of onstage combat are faithfully, heavily, ludicrously stylised, all slow motion and pauses for effect, bearing little relation to reality. Reality itself, in the form of the ambush, throws the theatre into grappling chaos, devoid of any of the grandstanding or clarity of movie swordfights. It is only after this that we first truly see Ichi in action in daylight – her sword held, as was the original Zatoichi’s, in an odd reverse grip, her fight savoured in slow-motion. It is as unreal as the kabuki, and yet somehow right.

Yet another Zatoichi movie, Zatoichi: The Last, is slated for release in 2010, starring former pop-idol Shingo Katori as in the title role. But Katori will have his work cut out for him following in Haruka Ayase’s footsteps. “There’s a real purity and sincerity about her, you can see it’s not just on the surface,” says Fumihiko Sori of his star. “That’s what she brought to the movie and what made it work.”


Jonathan Clements is the author of Schoolgirl Milky Crisis: Adventures in the Anime and Manga Trade, and the co-author of The Dorama Encyclopedia: A Guide to Japanese TV Drama Since 1953. He is currently writing A Brief History of the Samurai.