Sengoku Basara: Samurai Kings

If the image (left) doesn't grab you straight away, take my word for it - as cheap as it sometimes is.

This was was an interesting series. I always love my Production I.G stuff, and it's great to see it getting the attention it deserves outside Japan.

The complete first season was released overseas towards the end of last year by FUNimation Entertainment in the USA, and it's also out through my fave chaps at Madman in Australia.

I did an interview with the series' character designer and chief animation director, Toku Okubo, back in 2009 for the late Geek Monthly magazine, and it went something like this (well, actually, a lot like this since I just cut and pasted):

Sans Wikipedia, you’d be forgiven for not immediately guessing when the Sengoku Period took place.

So let’s indulge in a quickie history lesson here.

Also known as the Warring States era, the Sengoku Period covers a time of dramatic political and military flip-flop that gripped then-divided Japan, from the middle of the 15th century to the beginning of the 17th, when shogun Tokugawa Ieyasu took charge.

Think something akin to the barbarity of Europe’s Thirty Years’ War (1618-1648), minus the religious hogwash but with occasional earthquakes added into the mix, and you may begin to get an accurate picture.

357 years, two months and six days after the peace treaty that ended the European equivalent of complete chaos (in other words, on July 21, 2005, just to save you wearing down your fingers), Japanese videogame producer Capcom - the makers of similarly rough-and-tumble games like Street Fighter, Captain Commando and Resident Evil - released Sengoku Basara (戦国BASARA, aka Devil Kings) for PlayStation 2.


Obviously the game’s specifics revolved around the mayhem of the Warring States period, and it starred three real-life historical warlords as the central cast: Sanada Yukimura (once dubbed the #1 warrior in Japan), Date Masamune (nicknamed the One-Eyed Dragon, for obvious reasons.), Takeda Shingen (the Tiger of Kai), and Oda Nobunaga (the Devil King himself), a man who conquered much of Japan before committing seppuku in 1582.

Given the ever-popular combination of the slice-and-dice action format with samurai iconography (it sold 1.2 million units in Japan alone), this baby was always destined to reach screens other than PCs, and play on machines dedicated away from games - which is where veteran anime studio Production I.G (of Ghost in the Shell franchise fame) became involved.

Their resultant series, released on TVs here in Japan from April [2009], is not directly based on dusty facts from antiquity, but sets its sights on “paying homage to history” - which gives them plenty of leeway to be creative, especially in the character stakes.

Think contemporary brooding flair and surly, somewhat streetwise youth-culture antics that rest at home in the 21st century living room, rather than the blank, honor-bound rural rigidity probably present four centuries ago.

“It also has a high-octane story arc and fantastic action throughout the whole series,” assesses character designer and chief animation director, Toku Okubo. “I think we’ve created a whole new genre that didn’t exist before!”

While this is Okubo’s first major foray into character design, he previously worked on key animation on Mamoru Oshii’s Ghost in the Shell 2: Innocence, as well as on the Ghost in the Shell TV series and Immortal Grand Prix, and was the animation director on several episodes of Blood+.

Also on board for the I.G ride is director Itsuro Kawasaki, who helmed the Tsubasa Reservoir Chronicle movie and did episode directing chores on Ghost in the Shell and Noir on TV. Scripting the armoured descent into anarchy is Yasuyuki Muto, responsible for the movie Afro Samurai: Resurrection, costume romp Le Chevalier D’Eon, and ninja-actioner Basilisk.


Okubo’s own involvement, however, had quite unusual origins.

“Everything started when the producer, Tetsuya Nakatake, held an in-house competition to establish the character designer for this new series. I‘d worked as a key animator many times, but never designed the characters for any project thus far. I thought this was going to be a good opportunity, and I took on the challenge.”

Luckily for us he was successful, as the character designs here are sensational - although Okubo is keen to pass around the plaudits.

“Each artist added his personal touch in creating the spectacular animation for each character’s fighting technique,” he raves.

“And the background art is beautiful. It perfectly matches with the colour palette used for the characters, and this gives a distinctive realism to the animation as a whole.”

The action here is as vital as the rapidly changing story and the range of unique characters involved, and Okubo is quick to make his pick of the cream of the crop of historical figures at play in the series.

“Takeda Shingen,” he blurts out. “He’s a real dandy, and he can fill the screen by just being there.”

With Okubo himself doing all the cast compositions, Shingen most certainly does - it helps when your own design god goes to bat for you.

Here's the opening montage to the series; you'll have to pick up and watch the rest:




© CAPCOM / TEAM BASARA

The Hōjō Clan & Hachiōji Castle

You may never have heard of Hōjō Soun, and that's because in war the winners have the bragging rights.

Hōjō Soun was a conspicuous warlord during the Sengoku warring period in the south Kanto region and there's even a statue of the chappie in front of Odawara JR Station.

He's featured in the weighty tomes 'Hōjō Soun's Twenty-One Articles. The Code of Conduct of the Odawara Hōjō' by Carl Steenstrup, 'Ideals of the Samurai: Writings of Japanese Warriors' by William Scott Wilson & Gregory Lee, and 'War in Japan: 1467-1615' by Stephen Turnbull.

He's also attributed with the telling aside, "A man shows his inmost self by a single word".

This erstwhile leader (really named Ise Shinkuro Nagauji - he became a monk and adopted the name of 'Soun') had humble beginnings, with apparently just six men under his command in 1480; his success was such that by the time of his great-great-grandson in 1590 the clan possessed tens of thousands of them.

In 1493 Soun gained control of Izu province and the following year he secured what would be the Hōjō Clan's future capital: Odawara.


Word is that in order to do so he arranged for the young lord of the castle to be (ahem) murdered while he was out hunting.

In 1512 the ancient capital of Kamakura was added to the Hōjō territories, followed by Arai in 1518.

It was around this time that Soun took on the ancient aristocratic name of Hōjō in order to associate his new and powerful family in this part of Japan with that of the shikken who ruled for 150 years. The new Hōjō family (also known as the Odawara Hōjō) took on the Kamakura Hōjō's mon, or badge.

There's even a t-shirt you can get online with their family crest here at Zazzle.

Hōjō Soun died at the impressive age of 88 but the clan he set up wasn't so lucky.

While their power in the Kantō region in the 16th century grew to rival that of the Tokugawa clan, but eventually they were eliminated by Toyotomi Hideyoshi after the long Siege of Odawara (May to August 1590).


Before Odawara fell, however, Hideyoshi's forces laid siege to the unfinished Hachiōji-jō, the castle of Hōjō Ujiteru, brother of clan leader Hōjō Ujimasa.

After he left his own fortress to assist his older brother at Odawara Castle, Ujiteru's keep was left undermanned. While considered unassailable in its position astride Mount Fukazawa, only around 1,300 soldiers were there to defend when 50,000 or more of Hideyoshi's troops arrived; legend has it that families threw themselves into the nearby waterfall and that the waters of the river ran red with blood.

The castle fell in just over a day and was later destroyed by the victorious forces.

As a tourist spot, Shiroyama (as the site is now called), despite being a short bus ride from JR Takao Station, has been pretty much overshadowed by the crazily popular nearby Mount Takao.

That's the joy of the place.

It's a huge national forest that has easy hiking trails and castle ruins, and that infamous waterfall is still there - beside the beaten-down ramparts. The Hachiōji Castle site is in fact one of the hidden gems of Japan, as the pictures here may (or may not) attest.

And it's a beautiful place that's eerily empty.

Possibly this is because of the rumour that the place is haunted keeps some people at bay, or equally it's the ignominious fate of the original owners.


So what did happen to them, anyway?

As I mentioned, the losers rarely write the history. After the Hōjō were defeated in the siege of Odawara, Ujiteru was forced to commit seppuku along with his brother Ujimasa.

But Ujimasa himself still lives on, however, in the video game Sengoku Musou 3 (Samurai Warriors 3), released in Japan for the Wii in December 2009.

Quite bizarrely the Hōjō Clan bigwig's weapon is a cane that has a sword hidden inside, which can also fire bullets.

The Siege of Odawara is the climax of Hideyoshi's story in the earlier game Samurai Warriors 2, while Shuranosuke Sakaki is a long-running manga character and had his onscreen debut in the rather sub-standard 1990 animation Sword for Truth by anime director Dezaki Osamu, which tells of the struggles of the defeated members of the Hōjō Clan to save face by obtaining two mythical swords - and they contract the bad-ass master swordsman Shuranosuke Sakaki to do so.

Shuranosuke Sakaki and the ragtag fleet of Hōjō survivors also pop up in the 1996 live-actioner Legend of the Devil, directed by Masaru Tsushima (Ninja Women) and starring Masaki Kyômoto (Legend of Eight Samurai).

So there is some life after death after all, even for the also-rans.

SPOTLIGHT: The Idiot 白痴, 1951

Fyodor Dostoyevsky is probably my favourite Russian writer, but not for reasons you might expect – I’ve never read Crime and Punishment, and I’ve only seen the 1958 William Shatner film version of The Brothers Karamazov.

But about 20 years ago I stumbled across a slimmer tome (skinnier because he never finished it): Netochka Nezvanova, which basically translates as ‘Nameless Nobody’, ended up as a birthday prezzie for my Mum that I also ended up scouring myself.

For some reason I loved it; probably it was the melodrama and the age I was at the time, and it even shaped the name of the musical project (Little Nobody) that I’ve worked under for 15 years and is a key element in my upcoming novel Tobacco-Stained Mountain Goat.

Anyway, I digress.

Apparently Akira Kurosawa also shared a passion for Dostoyevsky, and had wanted to make The Idiot even before he shot Rashomon.


Called Hakuchi in Japanese, here we have the 160-minute tale of Kinji Kameda, told several years after his being unfairly accused of war crimes and reprieved only moments before being shot – an experience which has given him nightmares ever since and a life that is a blank slate of either innocence, goodness or idiocy; the different people he meets here choose one or the other.

We have a main star who isn’t Toshiro Mifune or Takashi Shimura, though both appear here (of course). The focal point is instead actor Masayuki Mori, previously in Kurosawa’s Tora no o fumu otokotachi (The Men Who Tread on the Tiger's Tail, 1945) and Rashomon (1950), and who much later starred as Dark Lord Yamikubo in Zatoichi 21: Blind Swordsman's Fire Festival (1970).

It’s all very Dickensian and melodramatic, set in the harsh snows of Hokkaido in northern Japan; while emotional and a shade wrenching, it isn’t what I’d label one of Kurosawa’s better efforts. Mori is fantastic and he does achieve a surprising level of sympathetic depth as Kameda, but his over all performance comes across as a bit mannered.

Better are the powerhouse performances here from the women, namely the great Setsuko Hara (said to be the inspiration for the protagonist of Satoshi Kon’s essential 2001 anime movie Millennium Actress, though in my recent interview with Kon he watered that theory down quite a bit) as the icy former concubine Taeko Nasu, Yoshiko Kuga (the effervescent schoolgirl from Drunken Angel) as Ayako, and Noriko Sengoku in a brief but typically provocative performance.



© 1951 Shochiku Co., Ltd

SPOTLIGHT: Scandal (1950)

Another Akira Kurosawa slow-burner released 60 years ago, this is lighter-weight-Kurosawa - which still means quite a chunk of substance.

An indictment of tabloid journalism the year before Billy Wilder’s much more hostile Ace in the Hole and possibly autobiographical in some content, Scandal (醜聞, Shūbun) tells the tale of a chance encounter and a photo taken by a paparazzo at a mountain resort that leads to a fabricated gossip magazine story and resultant legal battle.

Toshiro Mifune plays one of the two innocents caught up in the affair: Honest artist Ichirô Aoye, a debonair type with a penchant for pipe-smoking and motorcycles. Although he plays it straighter here than most of his other roles, it’s a treat to see hints of Mifune's later trademark tics and mannerisms drift into the performance; Aoye may also indeed be the actor's most likable part - if a little straight and bland.

Takashi Shimura, in the role of seemingly dodgy attorney-at-law Hiruta, puts in a performance both seemingly familiar yet at odds with Kenji Watanabe – the painfully humble, barely audible public servant he would play two years later in Kurosawa’s acclaimed Ikiru (To Live).


Here he’s all bluster, ramble and smelly feet, but beneath the verbosity and a struggle with inner demons is a man with a dying daughter who’s his best conscience. The man may have a destitute rooftop office with the pigeons and the laundry, but there is an honest bone in there.

Noriko Sengoku puts in another spot-on performance as Aoye’s life-model and best friend Sumie, while Yoko Katsuragi is ethereal in the role of Hiruta’s daughter Masako.

There are moments reminiscent of Dickens’ A Christmas Carol and Sidney Lumet's The Verdict, but as with most Kurosawa films this really is its own creature.

Personally, while I enjoyed the experience but I wouldn't go so far as to say that this is one of Kurosawa's stand-out pictures.

Perhaps the weakest link is Yoshiko Yamaguchi, aka Shirley Yamaguchi, who appeared two years later in King Vidor's Japanese War Bride.

In this film she isn’t given much to work with in the role of Miyako Saijo, the other participant in the “scandal” - but at least she gets to sing a lot.



1950 Shochiku Co. Ltd.

SPOTLIGHT: The Quiet Duel (1949)

What can I say? Comparing this Akira Kurosawa-directed film with Drunken Angel, released the previous year (and spotlighted below on Jan. 3rd) is like comparing milk-based food products and soft, white, porous sedimentary rock.

In Shizukanaru Ketto (The Quiet Duel 静かなる決闘) Toshiro Mifune plays the complete antithesis of his wild, downwardly-spiraling gangster from the earlier movie; this time he's the doctor, and a dedicated one at that, who falls victim during the war to one of his own patients: during an operation to save the man's life, he cuts himself and thereby contracts the soldier's syphilis.

Rather than wallow in despair, however, he returns to his father's hospital in Japan after the war, and throws himself into his work - helping those less fortunate with a genial smile and a warm sense of humour, even while breaking up with his fiancee to save her from the risk of also contracting the disease. He also refuses to mention his illness to anyone.

Mifune is superb in the role; he's like the doctor you always wanted to have, perhaps bearing even more humility and kindness because of the desperate phase of his own life.

Takashi Shimura as always shines in the role of Mifune's father, and there're those typical, perfect moments of Kurosawa humour and warmth even amidst some devastating and frustrating drama. The action is minimal and there's not a katana blade in sight, yet this is superb stuff.


But the real revelation here is Noriko Sengoku, the atypical Japanese actress in the prominent supporting role as apprentice nurse Minegishi.

While her earlier role for Kurosawa in Drunken Angel was a pivotal one it was also brief; here she has much more room to move and develops through the movie - from a self-destructive, selfish single mother early on into the feisty, dedicated, supportive head nurse at the conclusion.

Along the way, Sengoku more than holds her own in the company of Mifune and Shimura - so as a footnote it's interesting to note that she's still acting even now - at the age of 87.

This Kurosawa flick is a little difficult to find, but I got mine from the people at Madman in Australia.


Images © 1949 Kadokawa Herlad Pictures Inc.