Battleship Mikasa 三笠

Yesterday I went to Mikasa Park - and much as that may sound like the Japanese equivalent of a song penned by Jimmy Webb, it's in fact a stately space by the seaside in Yokosuka, located right next the U.S. naval base there.

A previous resident of Yokosuka was William Adams, the inspiration for the British hero John Blackthorne in James Clavell's tome Shōgun, back in the 17th century; he was more recently channeled by Richard Chamberlain in the 1980 TV miniseries.

It was also in the southern part of Yokosuka in the mid 1850s that Commodore Matthew Perry arrived with his fleet of Black Ships, to force the opening of diplomatic and trade relations between Japan and the United States.

Almost one hundred years later American occupation forces landed at Yokosuka (on 30 August 1945, after the surrender of Japan) and the naval base has been used by the US Navy since then.


Yokosuka crops up as the locality of the Sega video game Shenmue, as well as being blown up in the futuristic tactical RPG Front Mission 3.

Director Imamura Shohei set his 1961 film Pigs and Battleships (豚と軍艦) in Yokosuka, and the place was the location of climactic fisticuffs in the Godzilla film Terror of Mechagodzilla (メカゴジラの逆襲, 1975).

But the real reason I went down there was for an exceptionally big ship.

The Mikasa is a pre-dreadnought battleship ordered from Britain by Japan in 1898 and took three years to complete, at the cost of £880,000 (¥8.8 million). Upon arrival in these waters the ship ended up becoming the flagship of Admiral Heihachiro Togo, Commander-in-Chief of the Japanese Grand Fleet during the Russo-Japanese War (1904-1905).


Named after Mount Mikasa in Nara, the Mikasa is in fact the last pre-dreadnought ship in the world, a survivor of the Russian conflict, running aground in fog in 1921, decommissioning later that year, retirement as a memorial ship in 1926, bombing in World War 2, and extensive dismantling during Japan's demilitarization thereafter.

Restoration work, in conjunction with the U.S. Navy, brought the old lady back to life and she was opened to the public in 1961. Now it's a nifty museum with its own cinema, models, paintings and documents, many of the compartments look as they did in Togo's time, and there're some hilarious mannequins "manning" cannons.

The main guns (seen above with a ring-in, unsuspecting live bystander to get a gist of their size) had a range of 10 kilometres and fired projectiles weighing 400 kilograms. It took 40 people to operate them, surrounded by armour weighing in at around 50 tons.


The ship was the major setting for Nihonkai Daikaisen: Umi Yukaba (1983) - variously known in English as Battle of the Japan Sea and Battle Anthem, it tells the story of a young musician assigned to Mikasa’s shipboard band, and depicts the Battle of Tsushima Straits in 1905.

At Tsushima the Mikasa led the combined Japanese fleet into one of the most decisive naval battles in history - almost annihilating their Russian foes.



The movie starred the great Toshiro Mifune as Admiral Togo; it was directed by Toshio Masuda, who helped make Tora! Tora! Tora! in 1970 as well working on the anime Space Battleship Yamato series - and was involved as the producer on its 2009 reboot Rebirth Yamato.


There's also an NHK drama called Sakanoue no Kumo, screened last year, which portrays a rapidly modernizing Meiji Japan (1867-1915) and has extensive location and press shots around the Mikasa.

But the best find of this little expedition was the Admiraali Export Beer with Admiral Togo's face on it (see first picture above), which I'm partaking of now as I write these words.

It's quite the tasty amber drop. Yum!

Toshiro Mifune: Sexy Beast 三船 敏郎

1984 might’ve been the year that the Macintosh was introduced, Terms of Endearment won the Oscar for Best Picture, and Australia swapped national anthems (finally ditching ‘God Save the Queen’), but it was also the year that a major Japanese magazine conducted a national poll; when the results were in the actor Toshiro Mifune, at age 64, was declared the winner of the ‘Most-Japanese Man’ competition – singled out from all Japanese males, past and present, over the nation’s known history.

This is no minor feat when you fathom that the Japanese trace their recorded history back two millennia.

Mifune was prolific in the acting industry long before attempting English language roles in Steven Spielberg’s 1941 or the TV miniseries Shogun.

His filmography at imdb.com tips the 180 mark, over a hundred of which were produced prior to his turn as Lee Marvin’s violent Man Friday in Hell in the Pacific (1968); the list stretches from his first film in 1947 through to the his death at age 77, fifty years later.

It’s no accident that Akira Kurosawa, the writer/director with whom Mifune did his superior work, orchestrated most of these Japanese films. By the time the rest of the world cottoned on to the actor, he and Kurosawa were estranged, having made their last film together in 1965 after a partnership that lasted almost two decades.


There’s his well-meaning rookie cop, eerily akin to a young Gregory Peck, who loses his gun on public transport in Stray Dog (1949); the brash samurai charlatan in Seven Samurai (1954); his hyperactive, paranoid dynamo in the Macbeth-as-jidaigeki-drama, Throne of Blood (1957); a bespectacled salaryman with the slow-burning vendetta in The Bad Sleep Well (1960); the ailing yakuza gangster in Drunken Angel in 1948.

Over the 98-minute course of Drunken Angel (this is one of Kurosawa’s shorter tales) the actor is by turns brutal and suave; at other moments there’s a scary vitality to his agitated, hollowed out face-of-impending-doom performance – in particular the show-stopping manic turn he makes in a drunken dance hall.

While the film stock may have dated, the style and performance here most certainly hasn’t.

Perhaps the most memorable and famous of Mifune's roles is the blasé, mysterious stranger in Yojimbo (1961) and its sequel Sanjuro the following year – himself the role model for both Clint Eastwood’s and Bruce Willis’ Man with No Name characters in A Fistful of Dollars and Last Man Standing.


The stand-out collaboration is debatable, but if you want to angle things in Mifune’s corner, toward the movie in which he rattles bones most as the sexy beast/enfant terrible of old-school Japanese cinema, you’re going to have to settle on 1958, when the actor was 38 and at the height of his stagecraft.

Star Wars aficionados interested in finding out the source material for Episode IV are duty-bound to investigate a B&W movie made that year by Kurosawa in the widescreen TohoScope format, starring Mifune, and originally released in Japan in December – because The Hidden Fortress has most of the key elements of a plot used 19 years later when the first Star Wars movie was released.

But in truth it’s Toshiro Mifune, above and beyond the superior script and direction, who shines.

Cast in the principle role of General Rokurota Makabe, the actor’s turn here sparked the whole ‘sexy thing’ reference in the somewhat dubious headline for this article – and without doubt contributed to his man’s man award in 1984.

As a samurai, General Makabe is perhaps the scariest, most fearless and honourable man alive – as well as one of the more charismatic and inspiring. He’s got that rousing leader quality, the sort Russell Crowe delivered in Gladiator, Edward James Olmos brandishes on Battlestar Galactica, and King Hal throws about in the pages of Shakespeare’s Henry V.

It’s also the kind you just didn’t get at all from Orlando Bloom in Kingdom Of Heaven.

Think effortlessly debonair, man-of-action panache, and gravelly speeches that’d embolden even an inert, pen-pushing sloth like myself to pull myself to my knees, yell a bit, shake a blunt spear about in the air, and cheerfully follow both his magnetic persona and/or twinkling eyes into battle – at least some of the way, before diving for cover.


You just know that Makabe is like Lieutenant Colonel Kilgore in Apocalypse Now, and he’ll never actually cop an injury at all. The guy wears serious bravery on his sleeve, and acts like it’s a regular wristwatch.

Most of all, though, while the steely scowl and the gruff baritone are the hallmarks of any encounter with Mifune in the reels of The Hidden Fortress, there’s also a barely repressed machismo that hovers there as he strokes his chin in thought, seemingly not amused or divorced from the events that transpire around him – then throws back his head with riotous laughter, more than a little bit mad.

Each facet is a thrilling moment that keeps your eyes glued on this fascinating, sexy beast of a man and his scene-chewing performance.

Here's just a taste of Mifune & Kurosawa combined.

MIFUNE in 'DRUNKEN ANGEL':



'HIDDEN FORTRESS' SNEAK PREVIEW:




This story is also online at the Aussie online Filmink site, as they're publishing a 4,000-word (hardly) epic ramble I hacked together to coincide with the Akira Kurosawa centennial-since-his-birth in their May 2010 issue.

All images and clips © Toho.

SPOTLIGHT: Kurosawa's The Bad Sleep Well (1960)

Akira Kurosawa's The Bad Sleep Well (悪い奴ほどよく眠る, Warui Yatsu Hodo Yoku Nemuru) was the director's first semi-independent production away from the studio system constraints of Toho and Shochiku.

While a scathing indictment of the Japanese bureaucracy - complete with its entwined corporate greed and self-serving political maneuverings - that shaped this country's business and social structure following on from the Allied occupation (and the country's economic miracle thereafter), the plot opening here also rings true to contemporary Japan 50 years on.

After police arrive at a wedding to arrest a corporate assistant officer on charges of bribery in a kickback scheme, newspaper clippings tell a background yarn of suspicious construction fees intermingled with free dinners and billions of yen worth of probable bids rigging; the tale then segues into a familiar Japanese casebook study of secretaries and underlings taking the fall for their major corporation bosses.

The Bad Sleep Well - like Ran and Kumonosu-jō (Throne of Blood) - then draws on Shakespeare, in this case the Bard's Hamlet; there are also moments reminiscent of Michael Clayton.

Toshiro Mifune yet again puts in a powerhouse effort as the restrained, focused Koichi Nishi, a young man who manipulates his own elevation to a prominent position within a corrupt company in order to expose the men responsible for his father's death.


Masayuki Mori (the gentle, naive title character in Kurosawa's earlier film The Idiot) here renounces any sympathetic kindling whatsoever as the despotic vice president of the company in focus.

Also on-screen is Kyoko Kagawa, previously with Mifune in Nippon Tanjo (The Birth of Japan, 1959) as well as one of the highlights of Kurosawa's 1957 film Donzoko (The Lower Depths); she also popped up in Yasujiro Ozu's Tokyo Story (1953) and would later appear in the Kurosawa movies Red Beard and High and Low along with the classic kaiju flick Mothra.

Joining them on board a cinematic ride that's as gripping as it is meaningful are Tatsuya Mihashi (whose last role before he passed away - 44 years later, in 2004 - was the kindly, meaningful GP in Casshern) and Kurosawa veteran Takashi Shimura.

Masaru Sato returns on sound track duties; he previously did the score for Kurosawa's Throne of Blood, as well as the later double-act Yojimbo and Sanjuro - and would aurally shine in 1974 on Jun Fukuda's Godzilla vs. Mechagodzilla.

His score here is superb.



Viewing DVD thanks to Madman Entertainment Australia
© 1960 Toho Co., Ltd. All Rights Reserved

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.

SPOTLIGHT: Drunken Angel (1948)

Did I ever confess my love for Madmen?

No, no, not the Emmy and Golden Globe-winnning TV series - I haven't yet had the chance to see it over here in Japan, and anyway that's actually two words, "Mad Men", instead of one.

What I'm gushing about are the real-life people (plural) who helm Madman Entertainment back in my hometown (Melbourne). I call 'em Madmen just to keep myself amused. Stupid pun, I know.

They cover the Australian DVD market with the best in Asian cinema, particularly Japanese (they release something like 99% of all anime there) and I love their work.

Anyway, I'm currently working on a long-winded Akira Kurosawa article and they shot me through a swag of movies I hadn't seen along with others I hadn't watched in far too long, and the box arrived just in time for Christmas.

I know, I know - that sounds weird; living in Japan yet ordering Kurosawa films from Australia. But the fact is that most available Kurosawa DVDs in this country don't come with English subtitles, and my nihongo is nowhere near good enough to carry something as weighty as one of Akira's cinematic tomes.

Yoidore Tenshi (Drunken Angel, 1948) is the Kurosawa film that, rumour had it a little while back, Martin Scorsese wanted to remake around the same time that he re-baked Infernal Affairs.


Credited as the first yakuza gangster movie, Drunken Angel stars the great, somewhat underrated Takashi Shimura as the title character, a frequently sloshed, no-nonsense doctor (Sanada) with a heart buried beneath his gruff exterior.

This is also the first of 16 films that Kurosawa did with actor Toshiro Mifune.

With absolute aplomb, Mifune inhabits his downward-spiraling hoodlum (Matsunaga), a man suffering from tuberculosis and a penchant for the importance of honour - in an industry sorely lacking such values.

Over the course of 90-odd minutes, Mifune is at times charming and suave; at other points there's a scary vitality to his agitated, face-of-impending-doom performance - in particular his manic turn in a drunken dance hall scene (see clip below).



While the film stock may have dated, the style and performances here most certainly have not. There's a contemporary edge to both male leads, in their intriguing relationship, that continues to work 62 years later - and almost 100 years since Kurosawa was born (in March 1910).

The post World War 2 environment around them - this was, after all, just three years after the the cessation of hostilities - is reminiscent of the backdrops in Carol Reed's The Third Man, released the following year: dismembered, dangerous and far from picturesque.

Images © 1948 Toho Co., Ltd. All Rights Reserved.