Japanese Samurai Movie Notes, I have previously commented on Akira Kurosawa's Seven Samurai in conjunction with the relevant writings of Nitodo Inazō, and this article is a reverse retelling.
Both were made in 1962, and the following year, Masaaki Imai's "The Cruel Tale of Bushido" Berlin Capture Bear, and Masaki Kobayashi's "Cut belly" won the Cannes Jury Prize, both of which are critical perspectives that deserve to be juxtaposed.
The samurai in Kurosawa's mirror always keeps an idealized path even if the situation is bleak, and in Imai's shot, a samurai history is only a negative asset.
The film begins with a suicide attempt in modern Japan, because of his fiancée's short-sightedness, the company employee Iakura Jin can't help but think of the three-hundred-year-old ancestral diary he recently read, and to flip through the history of his family.
During the Keicho period (early seventeenth century), the ancestor Iikura Jiro lost the Battle of Sekigahara and defected to The horishibu Shōsuke of Shinshu as a vassal, but later in order to carry the black cauldron for the lord, he had to bear the fault of the Shimabara Rebellion, and had to be loyal. Jiro's eldest son, Saji Aemon, died of illness, and according to the custom, the high-ranking samurai in the domain would be martyred one by one, so he left his wife and children to follow in the footsteps of his father.
During the Yuan Lu period (the end of the seventeenth century), the third generation of the Iwakura family, Kutaro, who was handsome in appearance, was forcibly adopted as a male concubine by the lord of the domain, and Hisataro was insulted and fornicated with the concubine of the lord of the domain, Hagi no Fang, and was punished for corruption after the incident, fortunately Hagi Nobuchi was pregnant beforehand, and finally stayed behind.
During the next year (the end of the eighteenth century), the fourth generation of Iakura Shuzo was even more miserable. In order to bribe the Edo shogunate, the lord of the clan presented his wife and daughter together as a gift. In order to take care of the overall situation, he finally fell to the end of being given death by the lord, because the short knife was given by the lord, and he also felt that the act of cutting the abdomen did not lose face.
Looking at the Meiji period, the fifth generation of Iiko Iiko was still loyally serving the last lord of the Hori family, Hori Takaki, and when he was defiled by the demented lord of the clan, his beloved girlfriend was defiled, and he himself died in the Battle of Ko-Noon.
During the Showa period, the situation changed, the Iwakura family changed allegiance to the emperor, and in the sixth generation, that is, the protagonist of the film, Iakura entered this generation, and his brother Iwakura entered the kamikaze special attack team and was loyal, and then the world changed again, although he did not have to be loyal to the emperor, but his little office worker had to be loyal to the company, and his boss knew that his fiancée was working as a typist in a rival company and asked him to instruct his fiancée to obtain the bidding documents of the other party.
The company won the bid as desired, but in order not to make the other company suspicious, the boss asked the Iakura marriage date to be postponed until it was completed, which triggered the attempted suicide at the beginning of the film.
The history of the Iakura family is a history of foolishness and abuse, this kind of family slave loyalty to the lord, do not know the concept of handing over life and family to the lord, "loyalty X love X" Yunyun, are a set of words that tell others to seek death, but unexpectedly these samurai actually took it seriously, one by one, they gave up their own self, and later, developed into a flood beast that abused modern East Asia.
The film is a commendable reflection on the Japanese samurai tradition, and the original novel "The Genealogy of Abuse" was written by martial arts writer Nanjo Nobuo. There are many abdominal cuts in this film, so I will talk about Masaki Kobayashi's "Cut Belly".
Director Masaki Kobayashi's 1962 film "Cut belly" won the Special Jury Prize at the 16th Cannes Film Festival (IMDb score 8.8, Douban score 9.3)
During the Kanei period (mid-seventeenth century), the third shogun of the Tokugawa shogunate, Iemitsu, implemented centralized power, weakened the daimyo of the princes, and became ronin and had no livelihood. The ronin were hungry, so they ran to the lord's house and threatened to cut their abdomen in the entrance, usually always getting money to go away, and cutting the abdomen became a popular extortion method.
At the beginning of the film, Ronin Tsuyun Hanshiro came to the famous Men I'i house to concoct the same method, the master Saito Kanyu mentioned that last year there was a ronin Sensen-iwa begging for a daughter who also came to such a show, this box was promised to come down, in order to prepare for the woman to stop, the woman repeatedly pushed, the crowd found that he was carrying a bamboo knife, they forced him to cut his abdomen with a bamboo knife, begging the woman to be in pain and finally bite his tongue and die.
It turned out that this woman was Hanshiro's son-in-law, who had made a plan to raise money for the treatment of his wife and children, and the real purpose of Hanshiro's coming was to take revenge, and finally, after solving the masters of the Ini family one by one, Hanshiro fulfilled his promise and completed the cutting of the abdomen.
The narrative technique of "Cutting the Belly" is quite clever, in fact, it happened in an afternoon, but through the dialogue between Tsuyun Hanshiro and the owner of the Ioi family, and bringing out the tragic story of Sensen-iwa's request for a daughter half a year ago, we discover the real intention of Tsuyun Hanshiro about the coercion of the abdomen.
His original lord had long been desperate to keep his reputation due to the collapse of his family business, and his son-in-law had already pawned his samurai sword because of his livelihood problems, which was the common fate of the samurai. However, after the three masters of the Ikai family, Tsuyun Hanshiro finally sat down on the patio of the Ikai family and performed his belly-cutting ceremony, in order to greatly humiliate the famous Ikai family, and the Ikai family had to announce to the outside world that the dead disciples were all sick and died, which made a deep mockery of the samurai class within the system and the nature of its patrons.
Back to The Bushido of Niwato Michizo, chapter 12 of this book, dedicated to the study of the cut of the abdomen, is a fresh text I have read, and here it is copied in copy for criticism, and the positive and negative reading is all in the reader's ———
The deliberate choice of this part of the body to be cut open is based on the belief of ancient anatomy that this place is the home of the soul and love. Moses wrote that "Joseph burned his heart for his brother" (Genesis 43-3); David prayed to the Lord not to forget his intestines (Psalm 25:6); Isaiah, Jeremiah, and other ancient psychics said that the intestines "chirped" (Isaiah 1611) or the intestines "ached" (Jeremiah 312). All this confirms the belief that is popular among the Japanese people and whose soul resides in the belly.
Although the word "belly" is broader than the Greek phren or thumos, the Japanese, like the Greeks, believe that the human soul resides somewhere in this part. The French, although one of their best philosophers, Descartes, proposed the theory that the soul exists in the pineal glands, took the word ventre [abdomen], which is still anatomically vague and physiologically clear, as "the meaning of courage" today. Similarly, the French entrelles (abdomen) are used to mean love, pity. This belief is not simply superstition, but is still very scientific compared to the general idea of the heart as the center of feelings, and the Japanese surpass Romeo, and do not need to ask the monks, they know clearly, "which ugly part of this stinky skin sac lives with the name of the person."
Modern neurologists talk about the so-called abdominal brain marrow and lumbar brain marrow, and put forward the theory that the sympathetic nerve centers in these parts can feel strong stimulation through mental action. Once this psychophysiological doctrine is recognized, the logic of the cut-off is easy to form ——— I open my treasure trove of souls and show you what it looks like. Is it dirty or innocent? Please come and see it for yourself.
Cutting or not cutting is a problem ——— talking a little about "The Cruel Story of Bushido" and "Cutting the Belly"