As some of you know I was quite involved in martial arts when I was younger. Started in an Okinowan school, Uechi ryu, then Kempo and finally Hung Gar and Wing Chun Kung Fu. I miss it a lot but my knees gave out and I knew I was done.
All it took was one sweep.
Anyway I still like watching martial arts and wanted to share one of my guilty pleasures, a certain variety of Japanese martial arts movies whose genre may not even have a name.
These movies were produced in the 1960's through the 1980's and I want to talk about three series specifically. They had a penchant for cartoon style violence that was often extreme and an open depiction of sexual behavior that doesn't even have a corollary in Western cinema.
All of these movies were made by or featured actors from basically one family.
We don't watch television but we do stream and these can be often found in the Criterion collection on TCM or HBO Max.
I am not recommending that you watch them because those with less prurient tastes might be horrified. But I find them highly interesting and entertaining.
The three series are Zatoichi, the blind swordsman, Lone Wolf and Cub and Hanzo the Razor.
Zatoichi, or more properly
Ichi, is a blind masseur from the late edo period who is continually having to fight his way out of squabbles, often against enormous odds.
Carrying swords openly was taboo for non samurai during that time but he keeps a sword in his cane, which is permissible.
Zatoichi has a love of gambling and women. Over 100 episodes were filmed.
He was portrayed by several actors but Shintaro Katsu was the man, in my opinion.
Like many of our movies of the old west, Zatoichi was a force for good and always wanted to help the downtrodden.
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Lone Wolf and Cub is a bit more bizarre that
Zatoichi.
It started as a Japanese manga magazine series written by Kazuo Koike and illustrated by Goseki Kojima in 1970.
It is the story of the Shogun's executioner, Ogami Ittō, who is falsely accused by the Yagyu clan and is forced to become an assassin with his young son, the three year old Daigorō, after his wife is murdered.
They decide to live a life at the gates of hell.
This is a very violent story and not for the squeamish. You have to like this sort of thing. I do, but I consider these series to be like cartoons whose actors are human.
The principal actor is Tomisaburo Wakayama. He is also the brother of Shintaro Katsu. Here is a portion of his biography from Wikipedia:
Wakayama (his stage name) was born on September 1, 1929, in Fukagawa, a district in Tokyo, Japan.His father was Minoru Okumura (奥村 実), a noted kabuki performer and nagauta singer who went by the stage name Katsutōji Kineya (杵屋 勝東治), and the family as a whole were kabuki performers. He and his younger brother, Shintaro Katsu, followed their father in the theater. Wakayama tired of this; at the age of 13, he began to study judo, eventually achieving the rank of 4th dan black belt in the art.
In 1952, as part of the Azuma Kabuki troupe, Wakayama toured the United States of America for nine months. He gave up theater performance completely after his two-year term with the troupe was over.Wakayama taught judo until Toho recruited him as a new martial arts star in their jidaigeki movies,originally using the stage name "Jō Kenzaburō". He prepared for these movies by practicing other disciplines, including kenpō, iaidō, kendo, and bōjutsu.All this helped him for roles (now using the stage name "Wakayama Tomisaburō") in the television series The Mute Samurai,the 1975 television series Shokin Kasegi (The Bounty Hunter), and his most famous film role: Ogami Ittō, the Lone Wolf.
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Shintaro Katsu returns in a starring role in the third series I am sharing,
Hanzo the Razor. This one is a trilogy and certainly not for the faint hearted. For more on Katsu, from Wikipedia:
Born Toshio Okumura (奥村 利夫 Okumura Toshio) on 29 November 1931. He was the son of Minoru Okumura (奥村 実), a noted kabuki performer who went by the stage name Katsutōji Kineya (杵屋 勝東治) and who was renowned for his nagauta and shamisen skills. He was the younger brother of actor Tomisaburo Wakayama.
Shintaro Katsu began his career in entertainment as a shamisen player. He switched to acting because he noticed it was better paid. In the 1960s he starred simultaneously in three long-running series of films, the Akumyo series, the Hoodlum Soldier series, and the Zatoichi series. In 1972, Katsu Productions released the initial chanbara film in a trilogy with the Hanzo the Razor: Sword of Justice based on a gekiga by Koike Kazuo. Hanzo the Razor: The Snare would be released in 1973, and Hanzo the Razor: Who's Got the Gold? in 1974.
Katsu had a troubled personal life. A heavy drinker, Katsu had several brushes with the law over drug use as well, including marijuana, opium and cocaine with arrests in 1978, 1990 and 1992.
He had also developed a reputation as a troublemaker on set. When director Akira Kurosawa cast him for the lead role in Kagemusha (1980), Katsu left before the first day of shooting was over. Though accounts differ as to the incident, the most consistent one details Katsu's clash with Kurosawa regarding bringing his own film crew to the set (to film Kurosawa in action for later exhibition to his own acting students).Kurosawa is reputed to have taken great offense at this, resulting in Katsu's termination (he was replaced by Tatsuya Nakadai). In her book, Waiting on the Weather, about her experiences with director Kurosawa, script supervisor Teruyo Nogami chalks the differences between Katsu and Kurosawa up to a personality clash that had unfortunate artistic results.
Hanzo is another character who is a law enforcer during the Edo period. He is aided by two hapless ex criminals that he has saved and who now owe their lives to him. It is also very violent but what makes it extraordinary, at least for me, is that the protagonist has an enormous penis, which he often uses to get women to spill the beans with after a vigorous lovemaking session.
He is forced to put his gigantic manhood through a withering series of self abuse in order to tame his sexual urges and sometimes engages in outright acts of rape.
This is something we don't see in Western Cinema, and we rarely see this level of female nakedness or open sexuality in our period movies.
It is almost like a shunga cartoon, which often depicted acts of sexuality perpetrated by similarly endowed characters.
Japanese culture seems somewhat less hung up on matters of sexuality than we are in the west.
Give any one of these three series a shot and see what you think.
And if you find them horrifying, you have a remote.
Please don't blame me.
