A conversation starter for eighteenth-century specialists: which single event of the period has had the most influence on contemporary popular culture, has been filmed most often, reimagined most often? Ask these questions the next time you’re at the coffeehouse and you’ll hear a number of predictable, occidentally-minded suggestions: the Boston Tea Party; the mutiny on the Bounty; the storming of the Bastille. An incident that might not be mentioned – but should be – is the killing in 1703 of Lord Kira Yoshinaka by retainers of his dead rival Lord Asano Naganori.
The tale of the 47 ronin has played an incredibly important role in Japanese culture and identity, and has been subject to many retellings on page, stage and screen. Beyond the adaptations that explicitly revisit or repackage the historical event (accounts assigned the title Chushingura), there are also countless homages to its spirit and significance – films like Kudo Eiichi’s 13 Assassins (1963), remade by Miike Takashi in 2010. Such works have in common an exploration and veneration of traditional samurai values, enquiring how far a samurai’s loyalty can or should be pushed and what obligations remain to him when feudal hierarchies are ruptured or otherwise fail. The same spirit of enquiry has often informed the depiction of samurai ideals in wider global culture. Indeed, one can argue that Japan’s attitude towards the 47 ronin has also had a substantial, albeit covert, influence on western concepts of heroism in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries.
The sequence of historical events is relatively straightforward and undisputed, though details are contested and can be represented differently according to the agenda of a given adaptation. In April 1701, Lord Asano attacked Lord Kira in the palace of the shogun at Edo (now Tokyo), allegedly under provocation. Kira survived and went unpunished for whatever incitement he had offered. In keeping with strict rules forbidding any sort of violence in the royal residence, Asano was ordered to commit ritual suicide (sepukku) and did so. His possessions and land were confiscated, his retainers left as ronin (masterless samurai). Yet in the two years that followed his death, forty-seven of these men continued to see themselves as bound to their master and his cause. Led by Asano’s chamberlain, Oishi Kuranosuke, they plotted to kill Lord Kira, eventually achieving this in January 1703 during an assault upon his residence. The ronin were then ordered to commit sepukku themselves, a sentence they apparently welcomed. They died in March of that same year.
It is in many respects a gruesome story; one whose heroes and villains are not as clearly delineated as we might want them to be. Its core appeal – whether for eighteenth-century audiences or subsequent generations – tends not to derive simply from its moral aspects. After all, who is to say that Kira truly deserved to die? Rather, it offers a crystallisation of a samurai code that operates at one remove from the law and from other systems of morality. What matters is not necessarily that the ronin’s master was right but that he was their master. This kind of message doesn’t always make for comfortable reading or viewing – even in eighteenth-century adaptations, and still more prominently from the twentieth century onwards, attempts are made to align Oishi’s men with virtue and Kira with forces of evil. But these manoeuvres cannot conceal the fact that the story’s true interest lies elsewhere, perhaps with the samurai as anti-authority figure or with the sheer allure of loyalty and self-sacrifice for their own sake.
The process of adaptation began in the eighteenth century itself. From the 1740s onwards, versions of the story were being enacted in puppet theatres, with the names changed and events transposed to an earlier time period to avoid censorship. There was a keen awareness, even forty years after the events themselves, that the actions of the ronin were politically sensitive, and that excessive praise for their rebellious attitude could serve to destabilise the power of the shogun. At the same time, however, the tale has been looked on as a fundamentally conservative one, encapsulating a reverence for hierarchy and its obligations. At heart, then, it’s a slippery, politically volatile story. Even when used as a propaganda tool, it rarely behaves precisely as the propagandists hope it will.
The purpose of the present review isn’t to provide an exhaustive catalogue of Chushingura films. In spite of the story’s aforementioned influence, it is sadly the case that only a tiny proportion of its direct cinematic adaptations are readily available to viewers in Britain. This review therefore seeks to survey only the three most easily accessible versions of the story, including a recent Hollywood interpretation. Japanese name order (family name first) is observed throughout the review, as it has been up to this point. However, I should signal here that I have enjoyed these films as a non-Japanese speaker and my observations are consequently dependent, at least in part, on the quality of English subtitles.
Mizoguchi Kenji, The Loyal 47 Ronin (1941-1942)
Released in two parts in 1941 and 1942, Mizoguchi’s monumental portrayal of the 47 ronin is a good example of how the story resists political co-option. The film was commissioned by the authorities as a rousingly patriotic work, its first part released shortly prior to the attack on Pearl Harbor. But it’s difficult for a modern viewer to see how this ponderous and sombre film could ever have bolstered the regime’s propaganda machine. It is concerned above all with details of negotiation and preparation, and it is distinguished, as noted by Mark Le Fanu in his book Mizoguchi and Japan (BFI, 2005), by a general “air of opacity” (p.98).
Much of the film’s first two hours (it comes close to four hours in total) is taken up, perhaps counter-intuitively, with Oishi’s attempts to prevent the Asano house from being restored in the wake of his lord’s death. If the name were revived, the ronin would no longer have justification to seek revenge, and so we see Oishi painstakingly scuppering all efforts at diplomacy, posing as a wastrel and a drunk in order to bring the house into further disrepute. How does this map onto Japanese jingoism of the 1940s? I am not certain that it does. A project which might have been a celebration of Japanese strength and samurai determination instead becomes a mournful reflection on the perils of officialdom and the demands of the world; what we feel at the climax of the film is not triumph or admiration, but relief that the job has been done, resignation that the samurai’s act may not have accomplished much of anything. It would be a discredit to Mizoguchi’s sensitivity and conscientiousness as a film-maker to see this as an entirely inadvertent outcome.
Perhaps the film is best understood as an exercise in withholding from the audience what they most desire, a work which encourages – practically demands – patience at the same time that it extols this quality in its protagonists. The most notable omission in the film, one which made me gasp with surprise as I watched, is the attack on Kira’s palace and his subsequent assassination. We spend several hours building up to an absence. In one scene Oishi is visiting Asano’s widow; his true agenda is still concealed from her and she sees him as a disappointment, barely worthy to light incense in memory of her husband. For the next scene we are also at Lady Asano’s residence, but the pivotal action has now taken place, the widow and her attendants receiving word of the assault in a letter thrown into the mansion. When we finally rejoin Oishi, he and his men are already carrying Kira’s severed head to their master’s burial place. This omission of such an important scene is in keeping with Mizoguchi’s immediate source material, a sequence of kabuki plays by Mayama Seika. It also makes sense given the strictures of Japan’s 1939 Film Law, which in shifting more oversight of cinematic production to the government, had made it harder for directors like Mizoguchi to offer Hollywood-inspired action set-pieces. But one also gets a strong sense, here and at other moments of the film’s narrative, of passive aggression, a resistance and awkwardness on Mizoguchi’s part which run in parallel with the behaviour of his characters. We are being chastised for having expected glorious feats and moments of individual heroism; and maybe there is also some subtle protest here against the government’s own attempts to enlist Oishi and his men.
For a similar moment of resistance, we might look to Mizoguchi’s representation – or lack of representation – of the ronin’s final act of sepukku. The deaths are announced rather than portrayed. The final moments of the film are haunted by an awareness of what cannot be said, the places the camera cannot go, and by the persistence of bureaucratic form even at the moment of sacrifice. Isolde Standish, in her A New History of Japanese Cinema (Continuum, 2005; paperback, 2006), has seen this ending as reassuring for the powers of government: “[The ronin’s] vengeance thus dealt with within the law negates its potential revolutionary status” (p.105). But for a modern, Western viewer, there is something chilling about the way the ronin await their turn to commit suicide, and more particularly, about our inability to see them in the moment of death. It is far more disconcerting than portrayals of the act itself – as it is seen, for instance, in the most recent screen adaptation. We hear the names of the men called out one-by-one by some unseen clerk – there are two announcements for each: one summoning the ronin to death, and one confirming when sepukku has been committed. Finally, Oishi gets the call himself, walks towards the camera, pauses, then continues onwards as the camera pans up and around the orderly scene of sacrifice. Of course, it is a respectful depiction, but there might be as much incomprehension as politeness in the director’s act of withdrawal.
Mizoguchi is one of the twentieth century’s most remarkable directors, responsible – in this reviewer’s opinion – for the single most beautiful film ever made (Ugetsu Monogatari, if you’re wondering). His take on the Chushingura gives copious evidence of his greatness without being a film that one can easily warm to. The artful construction of its scenes, its long takes and the delicacy with which its panning shots probe the architecture of its sets – all this makes a captivating artwork out of what should, by rights, be an interminable trial. It is not its slow pace or its propensity for calculated dialogue, then, that might lower the film in our affections. It is the sense that the audience, Western or otherwise, is not really welcome, and that a project born of conflicted political impulses carries with it an equally conflicted attitude towards the purpose and value of cinematic re-enactment.
Ichikawa Kon, 47 Ronin (1994)
If Ichikawa’s approach to the story of the 47 ronin is more violent than Mizoguchi’s, it is also noticeably more morally ambiguous. The prevailing image I take away from the film is of Lord Kira, played very sympathetically by Nishimura Ko, backed up into a corner of his mansion, terrified and pleading for his life. He looks like nothing more than a frail old man who earned the hatred of these revengeful men through no real fault of his own. I’m not quite sure what Ichikawa wants us to do with these feelings of sympathy though. It isn’t a simple matter of reversing our expectations; we are not being asked to conclude that Oishi and his men are the villains of the piece. Perhaps the closest thing to a villain that the film offers us is the character of Irobe Matashiro, a retainer of Kira’s who takes it upon himself to press for Lord Asano’s harsh and swift sentencing. But even when Irobe’s connivances are taken into account, this isn’t a film that’s very interested in moral judgements. The aesthetic value of the past comes to outweigh its didactic potential. Maybe our compassion for Kira in the moment of his death is meant to be subordinate to the formal grandeur of the image itself.
Ichikawa’s film is also, to a greater extent than either of the other movies discussed here, about the process of ageing. It is a late work from a director who began his film career in the 1930s and who acquired his international reputation in the 1950s and 1960s. Perhaps it is natural then that Ichikawa’s understanding of the ronin’s actions should be informed by both nostalgia and resignation. The Oishi of history had been 43 at the time of his death and was played in Mizoguchi’s version by a 38-year-old. Here the lead role is taken by Takakura Ken, 63 at the time of the film’s release and himself entering the final stages of a long and accomplished professional life. The story thus becomes a meditation on regret and ambition as they are respectively fostered and thwarted by age. The message is far from bleak, however. In fact, the film’s tone is close to that of Tennyson’s ‘Ulysses’: the ronin defy not just the shogun but time itself in their actions, and their immortality is assured. Of the three films reviewed here, this is the only one that doesn’t find it necessary to depict either the ronin’s deaths or the build-up to them.
Similar to Mizoguchi’s treatment of Kira’s demise, Ichikawa’s omission of the ronin’s fate is made possible through selective use of a female perspective. However, where Mizoguchi suggests stability and the preservation of honour in his scenes at the Asano household, Ichikawa raises more questions than he answers with his glimpses of domestic life. His final scene features not Oishi’s wife, but his young, pregnant mistress, played by Miyazawa Rie, a somewhat notorious pin-up girl of the 1990s. She is busy with her calligraphy when she notices the arrival of one of Oishi’s men – a man who would have gone down in history as the forty-eighth ronin had he not been ordered to return to the mistress, Karu, and protect her and the unborn child. On seeing her new guardian, Karu runs out of shot with a smile and the sheet that she has been writing on gets caught by a breeze. The credits roll. While we might want to share in the young woman’s gladness, our final thoughts are likely to be conflicted. Oishi’s reputation has been assured at the expense of his comrade’s glory. The hero’s transcendent nobility is undercut by his personal infidelities and worldly desires. Which is more impressive, we are asked in the end: the courage of the unseen samurai accepting death and beyond that immortal glory; or the perseverance of the ordinary people left behind, those who must come to terms with the world the samurai have made?
The film is stately and many of its performances (not least Takakura’s) are exquisitely restrained. There are points of frustration though. A recurring voice-over, presumably intended to emphasise the historical accuracy of the production, sometimes gives it the feeling of a rather dull wildlife documentary. It makes it harder, not easier, to understand what is happening and why we should care about the events that unfold. I’m also not convinced that the film is as beautiful as it thinks it is. Certain shots of cherry blossom and falling snow seem quite clichéd in their construction. They encourage a complacent attitude towards history that is only properly punctured by the lavish spurts of blood that define the film’s final half hour.
Carl Rinsch, 47 Ronin (2013)
The opening of the recent Hollywood take on the 47 ronin doesn’t bode well for the film’s devotion to historical truth. A portentous voice announces the setting as “ancient feudal Japan, a land shrouded in mystery” – the eighteenth century is nowhere in sight. If we’re being charitable we could see this as in-keeping with the original adaptations of the story, those puppet plays of the 1740s which changed names and pushed the action back into the dim and distant past. But the true rationale and an underlying principle for much of this film is exoticisation for its own sake. CGI views of the landscape are at once sweeping and safe, like one of John Martin’s apocalyptic paintings printed on a beach towel. The same can be said for the menagerie of magical creatures that the film-makers were apparently so keen to include, dragons and giant forest beasts which are all a bit too cuddly for their own good.
If this makes it sound as if there’s nothing here of interest, then perhaps I’ve been unfair. The fantastical elements in the film aren’t actually a big problem, and certain characters – for instance, a sorceress who transforms into a white fox – are relatively consistent with Japanese folklore. It is interesting and innovative to portray Lord Asano’s original crime as the result of a curse. And though the film clearly isn’t going to win any prizes for moral subtlety, there’s something refreshingly honest in its conversion of Lord Kira into an unambiguous figure of evil. It’s not a sensitive interpretation of Japanese history, but it just about works as meta-commentary, a testing of the story’s flexibility and functionality.
That excuse doesn’t always wash, however. It’s one thing to play around with the moral implications of a historical episode and another to graft onto that episode an intrusive, foreign ethic of individual bravery. Simply put, this film would have been a hundred times more interesting without Keanu Reeves’ character.
Let me be clear: the problem is not Keanu Reeves himself. He gives a solid performance and, as an actor, he doesn’t deserve the opprobrium that is so often sent his way. But his character here is unnecessary and distracting. The mysterious outsider, the One, the saviour or whatever you want to call him has no business stealing the show from the ronin of the title. In trying to appeal to modern Western sensibilities, the writers (or should the real blame lie with the studio?) have misplaced the core of the story. Collective purpose is too complicated a motivation for cinema audiences to understand, it would seem. We are left with forbidden love and a more individualistic notion of loyalty. I’m afraid that the 47 ronin have become the Merry Men to Reeves’ Robin Hood.
The problem extends beyond the emotional pull of the film’s narrative to infect the performances themselves. There are many excellent Japanese actors and actresses involved, but the presence of Reeves and the commercial ambitions of the film-makers have required that everyone speak in English. This brings with it an overwhelming sense of artificiality that can’t be explained away as ironic self-reflection. Even Sanada Hiroyuki, a wonderful actor with a lot of experience in Western productions (see his stand-out role in the final season of Lost), comes across as awkward and unconvincing in the role of Oishi. Just as the leader of the ronin has been reduced to a secondary role, the Japanese actors are turned into bystanders in their own, suddenly quite alien, cultural history.
All of this makes the historically faithful climax of Rinsch’s film feel slightly bizarre. After all the kowtowing to Western preconceptions and all the unnecessarily stilted line delivery, we come back to the ronin – plus the ever obedient Keanu – sticking swords in their own bellies. There is one point of leniency – the shogun insists that Oishi’s son live to carry on his bloodline, an intervention which would probably have marked him out for dishonour in real life, but one greeted here with subdued happiness. Apart from this, there is only solemnity: the white robes and the cherry blossom, Reeves dying with a demure grunt like the tragic heroine of a Victorian novel. If the target audience as imagined by the studio have genuinely appreciated the film’s attempts to curry their favour up to this point, then they are surely within their rights to turn away in disgust at this belated concession to historical accuracy. How to make sense of it? Did someone accidentally pick up a different version of the script?
In his final exchange with Asano’s daughter, Reeves’s character tells her he will search for her “through a thousand worlds and ten thousand lifetimes”. If the romance weren’t so flimsy, it might be a speech to make us overlook the gravity of his fate, to see this “ancient” Japan as some strange distortion of the matrix, shortly to be replaced by a new reality. But the get-out clause carries no such weight. It suggests only desperation on the part of the script doctors, writers realising too late that the tale of the 47 ronin won’t do as it’s told. Thus the story proves itself as resistant to the demands of Hollywood as it was to those of fascism. The result is not a good film but a more complicated and conflicted one than might be anticipated.