THE LOYAL 47 RONIN (1958) – A Samurai Masterpiece

 

I’ve seen five Japanese films about the story of the 47 Ronin, made from 1941 to 1994. There were dozens more films about this famous incident from the early 1700s, as well as several TV series. I’ve chosen to highlight THE LOYAL 47 RONIN, a 2-hour-and-forty-four-minute version produced by the Daiei Studio in 1958 and directed by prolific veteran filmmaker Kunio Watanabe. As much as I like the other versions, I notice a tendency in them to elide certain aspects of the story or withhold key information since Japanese audiences were expected to know all the details. This 1958 film, however, stands out from them because of how it lays out the conflicts of character and protocol in a way that makes these issues clear to non-Japanese viewers, particularly those who may only have a casual familiarity with the story. We see what happens each step of the way and how that informs what happens next and the various reactions among the affected characters, but also among the hierarchy of the Shogunate in power at the time and the general Japanese public. We know why everything happens the way it does and what the inevitable outcome will be. It is my contention that the best crash course in understanding Japan is to study the story of the 47 Ronin as closely as one can in all its iterations. It’s the key to so much else about the country and its hierarchical structure and interlocking relationships between different groups and classes, as well as crucial themes of honor, obligation, and sacrifice.

Japan Journal, Part 1: The 47 Ronin

My last blog entry, covering ESCAPADE IN JAPAN, was designed to be something of a hint as to why I’d go a month without a new entry. This week I returned from four weeks in Japan, a trip I’d long been planning to take after my retirement in September 2015. I spent three weeks in Tokyo and one week in Osaka, from which I visited Kyoto and Nara. There were a number of film-related sightseeing trips during that time, although my blog entries on the trip won’t be limited to those. I have a steady stream of thoughts, impressions and photos to share and I’m finding that the effort to process and sort through everything is slow and painstaking. I packed a lot of activity into four weeks and took thousands of photos and it will take some time and numerous entries to chronicle the key events. But I wanted to start with a short account of one of the first things I did on the trip, something that was important for me to do and an early emotional high point of the trip.