Toshiro Mifune Centennial, Part 2: SHINSENGUMI – ASSASSINS OF HONOR

As part of my ongoing celebration of Japanese actor Toshiro Mifune, leading up to his centennial on April 1, 2020, I decided to re-watch one of his most important films, SHINSENGUMI: ASSASSINS OF HONOR (1970), arguably his best film that wasn’t directed by Akira Kurosawa, Masaki Kobayashi, Hiroshi Inagaki or Kihachi Okamoto. Mifune produced the film himself for Toho Pictures and had Tadashi Sawashima direct him for the first time. (It was also Sawashima’s very last feature and the only one of his films I’ve seen.) In the film, Mifune plays Isami Kondo, leader of the Shinsengumi, a sort-of paramilitary group formed in 1863 by sword-wielding farmers and ronin (masterless samurai) eager to defend the Shogun, Iemochi Tokugawa, and his entourage during meetings with the Emperor in Kyoto at a crucial time in Japan’s history. In the course of their self-imposed mission, they get into pitched battles with pro-Imperialist factions and kill dozens of their political opponents, often as a result of murderous raids on Imperialist meeting places. With the exception of small details here and there, the events depicted in the film are generally historically accurate, as far as I can determine.

JAPAN’S LONGEST DAY (1967) – Epic drama of Japan’s surrender in 1945

Yesterday, August 15, was the 70^th anniversary of Japan’s surrender at the end of World War II. It was on that date in 1945 that a recorded speech by Emperor Hirohito was broadcast to the Japanese people to formally declare surrender and end all activities related to the war effort. (My father, then stationed at Camp Pendleton in California, was one of the marines assigned to the invasion fleet being prepared to embark for Japan.) I used the occasion yesterday to finally watch a lengthy film (157 minutes) entitled JAPAN’S LONGEST DAY (1967), which dramatizes the events of August 14-15, 1945, and the decision to agree to surrender terms and formally end the war. Available on DVD from AnimEigo, it was produced in black-and-white by Toho Pictures and directed by Kihachi Okamoto (SWORD OF DOOM), with an all-star cast of Toho stars, including Toshiro Mifune, Takashi Shimura, Chishu Ryu, So Yamamura, Yuzo Kayama, Susumu Fujita, and practically every actor we know from every kaiju movie: Akihiko Hirata, Akira Kubo, Jun Tazaki, Hiroshi Koizumi, Yoshio Tsuchiya, and Yoshifumi Tajima, with only Akira Takarada and Franky Sakai notable by their absence. Tatsuya Nakadai does the narration. There’s an extraordinarily large number of speaking parts, most of them military officers, and at a certain point, it becomes very difficult to keep track of who’s who and what their roles are in certain events. There’s only one woman with a speaking role in the entire film, a household servant in the home of Prime Minister Suzuki, and she’s seen briefly when a group of rebellious soldiers tear through the place looking to kill Suzuki. (The IMDB cast list identifies the character as Yuriko Hara, played by Michiyo Aratama, although the woman is never identified in the film.)