Deathblog: Jô Shishido (1933–2020)

It’s sad to have to kick off this year’s blog posts with an obituary, but we must of course take some time here to pay tribute to the great Jô Shishido, one of the most distinctive and charismatic stars to have ever bothered the world of Japanese commercial cinema, who sadly passed away this week at the age of 86.

Shishido began his career by painstakingly working his way up through the ranks of Nikkatsu studio players during the 1950s, and it was seemingly at this point that he took the extraordinary step of undergoing an early form of facial plastic surgery in order to ‘fill out’ his cheeks. Insofar as I can tell, the reasons why he felt this was necessary have never been entirely made clear, but it has been suggested that both the studio’s criticism of his perceived ‘skinniness’ and an apparent desire to pursue tough guy / action-based parts rather than conventional romantic leads may have influenced his decision.

At times, the results of this on-going surgical dabbling gave Shishido a bizarre, ‘hamster-cheeked’ appearance which has subsequently helped endear him to cult movie fans in the West, but, perhaps more surprisingly, it doesn’t seem to have hurt his standing with image-conscious Nikkatsu at the time either.

In fact, Shishido soon carved out a niche for himself playing villains, thugs and leery, fast-talking ‘bad boys’, and by the late ‘50s he frequently found himself second or third billed alongside the studio’s leading male heart-throbs Yûjirô Ishihara and Akira Kobayashi, earning himself the nickname “Hitman Joe” (soon amended by the studio to the slightly less contentious “Ace Joe”) in the process.

He gained his first leading roles within the strange sub-genre of Nikkatsu’s borderless ‘Eastern-Westerns’, allowing the never-knowingly-modest actor to show off his horse-riding and gun-twirling skills in movies like ‘Quick Draw Joe’ (Takashi Nomura, 1961), whilst the accidental death of fellow star Keiichiro Akagi and the temporary retirement of Ishihara (who had broken his leg in a skiing accident) saw Shishido and fellow b-lister Hideaki Nitani hastily promoted to the giddy heights of Nikkatsu’s exclusive “Diamond Line” of male stars in 1961.

Poster for ‘Rokudenashi Kagyo’ [‘Tiger of the Sea’ aka ‘Ace Joe: Gambling for a Living’] (Buichi Saitô, 1961)

Even at this early stage in his career though, Shishido already seemed to find himself gravitating toward the stranger end of Nikkatsu’s output, notably starring in rebellious director Koreyoshi Kurahara’s ‘Glass Johnny: Look Like a Beast’ (1962), an unconventional feature inspired by Fellini’s ‘La Strada’ which reportedly broke with all of the studio’s usual stylistic conventions.

Throughout his early films, ‘Ace Joe’s approach to performance tended to be wilder and more daring than his Nikkatsu contemporaries, veering unpredictably between powerful, kinetic intensity and tongue-in-cheek goofery – a combination which naturally endeared him to the studio’s other resident rule-breaker, Seijun Suzuki, leading to the series of films for which he remains best known in the West.

Shishido first worked for Suzuki in the underrated, noir-tinged thriller ‘Voice Without a Shadow’ (1958), but he really came into his own playing the berserk, cartoon-ish leads in the director’s eye-popping pop art gangster rampages ‘Youth of the Beast’ and the splendidly named ‘Detective Bureau 2-3: Go to Hell Bastards!’ (both 1963), before moderating his screen persona somewhat to essay the role of the virile, shirtless fugitive who sows sexual discord amid a close-knit group of teenage prostitutes in Suzuki’s erotically charged masterpiece ‘Gate of Flesh’ (1964).

The weirder side of Shishido’s persona came to full fruition though in the film which both he and Suzuki seem destined to remain best remembered for, the extraordinary surrealist-noir fever dream ‘Branded to Kill’ (1967). Certainly, few are likely to forget Shishido’s oily, unhinged performance here as the ill-fated ‘No. 2’ assassin, his artificially-enhanced cheeks looking particularly freakish as he finds himself lost in a tangled nightmare jointly ripped from ‘Point Blank’ and ‘The Tenth Victim’, battling to beat his rivals to the hallowed No. 1 spot, in between becoming sexually aroused by the smell of boiling rice.

Suffice to say that ‘Branded to Kill’s promotional artwork - featuring the star wielding a Bond-esque pistol and sporting mod-ish sunglasses as his female co-stars mount a steel staircase behind him – has in recent years become possibly more widely known than the film itself, establishing itself as an iconic signifier of ‘60s cinematic cool. Fitting poetic justice perhaps for a movie which radical nature saw it alternately belittled, demonised and ignored upon its initial release, famously killing the career of its director stone-dead.

Outside of his collaborations with Suzuki meanwhile, the mid ‘60s saw Shishido becoming virtuously synonymous with the harder-edged line of action / yakuza films which Nikkatsu were beginning to produce at the time, heading up the casts of a string of my all-time favourite Japanese crime films - Takumi Furukawa’s aptly named ‘Cruel Gun Story’ (1964), Takashi Nomura’s ‘borderless noir’ ‘A Colt is my Passport’ (1967) and Yasuharu Hasebe’s proto-jitsuroku ‘Retaliation’ (1968) foremost amongst them.

Adopting the persona of a brooding, violence-prone bad-ass through these films, Shishido seems to have spent his last few years at Nikkatsu working almost exclusively in the realm of modern yakuza films, with the occasional ninkyo period film thrown in for the sake of variety, often alongside Ishikawa, Tetsuya Watari and his own younger brother, the ubiquitous Eiji Go. Rarely appearing on posters without his by-now trademark shades, gun and smouldering cigarette, Shishido seems by this point to be directly prefiguring the kind of ultra-macho persona which would be adopted in the following decade by stars like Bunta Sugawara and a post-Zatoichi Shintaro Katsu.

Cruel Gun Story (1964)

Unfortunately, Shishido’s career, like those of so many of his Nikkatsu colleagues, seems to have floundered badly after the studio turned their attentions entirely toward the production of low budget ‘Roman Porno’ sexploitation films from 1970 onwards, jettisoning the vast majority of their creative staff in the process.

In view of his considerable cred as a yakuza star, it would have seemed a natural move for Shishido to transition directly into rival studio Toei’s burgeoning slate of jitsuroku gangster movies, but for whatever reason, that never really happened, with his work for Toei during the early ‘70s restricted to an occasional guest spot here and there – most notably in two of Kinji Fukasaku’s epochal ‘Battles Without Honour and Humanity’ films (I particularly recall him making a very strange appearance as the mentally deficient brother of a gangster clan in the first entry in the underrated ‘New Battles..’ trilogy).

Like so many Japanese movie greats, he eked out a living in the ‘70s and ‘80s through TV work of one kind or another interspersed with intermittent film appearances, including several projects for ‘House’ director Nobuhiko Ôbayashi, eventually returning to yakuza territory for a string of ‘V-cinema’ shot-on-video crime flicks in the early ‘90s.

Still clearly up for a challenge however, Shishido proudly told interviewer Mark Schilling in the early ‘00s that he’d just put his “white pubes” on display in what we must assume was a brave role in S&M auteur Takashi Ishii’s erotic epic ‘Flower & Snake II’ (2005), and indeed he worked for Ishii again in 2010’s ‘A Night in the Nude: Salvation’.

Shishido’s final film appearance came in 2012 (in Manga adaptation ‘The Final Judgement’), but he has also made a great impression over the past few decades as an ever-enthusiastic interview subject, always happy to fill out the extras on releases of his films with wild tales of his time at Nikkatsu, boasting along the way of his unbeaten prowess in the field of swordsmanship, athletics and goodness knows what else, merrily stomping across the line separating fact from fiction in a never less than entertaining fashion.

Sadly, Shishido’s home was destroyed in a house fire in 2013, his collection of personal memorabilia lost along with it – nothing to laugh at there of course, but I’ll never forget the interview segment included on Arrow’s subsequent release of one of his films, in which claims that one of his neighbours started the fire, out of jealousy! (You can almost picture his relatives somewhere off camera, head in hands: “oh Dad, we’ve BEEN through this – PLEASE don’t tell the foreign film crew your neighbour started the fire!”)

One hell of a character to put it mildly, Jô Shishido was a real on-off who enlivened everything he appeared in – he will be missed.

Farewell Hitman Joe – R.I.P.

In closing, I need to acknowledge Mark Schilling’s book ‘No Borders No Limits: Nikkatsu Action Cinema’ (Fab Press, 2008), which helped me to fill in many of the details included in this post. A great overview of Nikkatsu’s ‘50s/’60s output and certainly one of the best volumes available on the subject in English, it’s still available direct from Fab Press at the time of writing.

Nikkatsu Trailer Theatre # 5: WE SELL OUR BODIES BUT NOT OUR SOULS!

Well if my gushing praise in last week’s Seijun Suzuki memorial post wasn’t enough to sell you on 1964’s ‘Gate of Flesh’, perhaps the typically hyperbolic outpourings of Nikkastu’s trailer department will do the trick?

Leaving aside a few meaningless and/or questionably translated exclamations and a some inevitable come-ons to the presumed-to-be-male audience however, I think this lean two and a half minutes actually does a pretty good job of conveying the power of Suzuki’s film, in visual terms at least. (It would have been nice to see a bit more of Takeo Kimura’s extraordinary sets, but, never mind – something tells this film’s original viewing public weren’t putting down their yen at the ticket booth for the sake of the set design.)

According to Suzuki, the film’s female stars were mostly drawn from outside the studio’s usual roster of contract players, as the Nikkatsu actresses were understandably unwilling to engage with such risqué material. With aching predictability, the women are all ranked below both Jo Shishido and Koji Wada (who makes almost no impression at all) on ‘Gate of Flesh’s official cast list, but it should be noted that their performances are excellent across the board. They’re all tops in my book.

We should also note the presence here of Chico Roland – Japanese cinema’s go-to guy for black American roles – appearing in a cameo as a U.S. Army chaplain. Last seen around these parts in 1968’s Genocide, Roland is always an extraordinary presence. Constantly on the verge of breaking into hysterics whenever he is on-screen, and seemingly fluent in neither English nor Japanese, I’ve always wondered what his story was. Any info gratefully received by the Chico Roland Appreciation Society c/o the usual address.

Arrow Round up: The Rambling Guitarist (Buichi Saitô, 1959)

When I first began reading up on Japanese cinema a few years back, I’ll confess I found Nikkatsu studio’s oft-referenced “borderless action” style a difficult concept to grasp. From my clueless Western perspective, the Nikkatsu films I had seen up to that point didn’t seem particularly noteworthy for their globe-trotting agenda or concentration on “action”. On the contrary, they seemed fairly conventional stories of Japanese people doing things in contemporary Japan, so… what’s the big idea, y’know?

Having now read (and more importantly, watched) far more widely around the subject however, I hope I am more able to appreciate the extent to which Nikkatsu’s house style from the mid/late ‘50s onwards represented a significant departure from the established norms of Japanese commercial filmmaking, immediately differentiating the studio’s output from that of its competitors.

Watching films made by those competitors during the ‘50s and ‘60s – be they Daiei historical dramas and ghost stories, Toho prestige pictures or Toei ninkyo yakuza productions – it soon becomes clear that the ethical and social imperatives guiding their narratives are of a very different order to those we take for granted in the West, reflecting (if not always uncritically) the complex patterns of mutual responsibility and obligation that underpin Japan’s unique social order.

A Toei yakuza in a contemporary-set film may adopt Western dress and (to a certain extent) Western habits, but his goals, and the ways in which he goes about achieving them, will be very different to those of a French or American gangster, and it is this basic difference in narrative drive that can sometimes make such films a tough gig for non-Japanese viewers to fully engage with.

As a result, the phenomenally popular ninkyo sub-genre of the early 1960s remains largely off the menu to us subtitle-dependent crime movie fans, whilst even the more widely celebrated jitsuroku (‘True Account’) films of the early ‘70s have a tendency to leave unprepared foreign viewers emotionally sideswiped when they reach the inevitable blood-soaked conclusion - feeling as if we should be sharing in some grand emotional catharsis, but unable to put the pieces together well enough to understand quite what form it should take.

Returning to Nikkatsu’s output with this background in mind, their “borderless action” concept – concisely defined as an attempt to tell stories which are “IN Japan, but not OF Japan” - suddenly begins to make a whole lot of sense. To the Western viewer, the studio’s run-of-the-mill genre programmers (as opposed to the work of their more audacious and experimental directors, which we’ll leave to one side for the moment) feel breezy, comfortable and familiar. Far more explicitly modelled on American (and to some extent European) templates, they still strive to tell distinctly Japanese stories, but recalibrated to fit a frame of reference that those raised on classic Hollywood thrillers and European melodrama can immediately understand.

This approach, together with Nikkatsu’s co-operative approach to licensing their back catalogue for foreign release, has helped make the studio’s output feel far more prominent for overseas fans of Japanese cinema than it presumably would have been for contemporary domestic audiences, but nonetheless, it is worth noting that Nikkatsu certainly didn’t have foreign distribution in mind when they concieved their “borderless” style. Rather, our easy enjoyment of their films today is an unintentional by-product of the studio’s deliberate attempts to cultivate a younger, more cosmopolitan audience within Japan itself, targeting a segment of quasi-rebellious, pro-Western youth whose aspirations had thus far been largely ignored by the other studios.

With the shadow of Japanese national identity thus looming over them like a particularly aggressive elephant in the room, Nikkatsu’s contracted filmmakers were left with several options for fulfilling their “borderless” agenda. On the one hand, they could choose to simply ignore Japanese culture altogether, as can be seen in such gangster films as Yasuharu Hasebe’s ‘Massacre Gun’ and Takashi Nomura’s pointedly titled ‘A Colt is My Passport’ (both 1967), creating an eerie trans-Pacific urban dreamland in which to play out universal dramas that, with a few tweaks here and there, could just as easily have taken place in Paris or Chicago.

Or, more interestingly, Nikkatsu’s directors and scriptwriters could kick the proverbial elephant in the guts (so to speak) and use the “borderless” blueprint to directly explore the cultural dislocation of life in post-WWII Japan, thus cementing the themes that drive many of Nikkatsu’s best (or at least, most interesting) films. Foreign characters (who pretty much never appear in other Japanese films of this period) are frequent visitors to Nikkatsu’s world, whilst their melodramatic youth films are often set near ports or American airforce bases, and make great play of dramatising the reactions of young people to the brand names, pop music and other exotic imports that characterise such transitory, almost literally borderless, locations.

Within this mixed up world, the heroine of Noboru Kaji’s frothy ‘Whirlwind of Love’ (1969) flits around Tokyo channeling Audrey Hepburn in a very un-Japanese fit of perpetual romantic indecision, whilst Tamio Kawachi’s rich buddies jet off to The Alps, where they still somehow manage to swig from bottles of Asahi, in Koreyoshi Kurahara’s The Woman From The Sea (1959). In Kurahara’s ‘Black Sun’ (1964), Kawachi’s jazz-obsessed drop-out gabbles away to Chico Roland’s rogue GI in fragments of broken English, whilst the best entries in the Stray Cat Rock series (1970-71) poignantly explore Japanese youth’s love / hate relationship with American pop culture and the colonial ambitions it represents.

If you’re wondering what in the hell all this extended scene-setting has to do with assessing the merits of Buichi Saitô’s ‘The Rambling Guitarist’ (as released for the first time with English subs on Arrow’s recent ‘Nikkatsu Diamond Guys’ set), well, the truth is that, basically, it is a film about which I can find very little to say, beyond the broader context provided above.

Whilst global cinephiles might have been introduced to Nikkatsu through the ground-breaking work of auteurs such as Kurahara, Kon Ichikawa and of course my man Seijun Suzuki, in truth those directors were all outsiders, whose best work stood out simply because it went against the grain of official company policy. Beyond the sheer novelty of their “borderless” ideology in fact, the vast majority of Nikkatsu’s pictures were extremely conservative in stylistic terms, with studio bosses demanding a steady schedule of slick, crowd-pleasing vehicles for their ever-expanding roster of proto-idol heart-throb star performers – a phenomenon of which ‘The Rambling Guitarist’ represents a quintessential example. In case you’re wondering, that means Saito plays it safe and sticks firmly to the former of the two categories I outlined above.

Seemingly modelled on the light-weight formula of Elvis Presley’s early movies (minus most of the music), the film sees charismatic, guitar-strumming drifter Akira Kobayashi arriving in a small seaside town where, in classic Zatoichi style, he soon becomes embroiled in a feud between the local yakuza clan, sparking up a romance with the daughter of the slightly less nefarious of the two bosses (played by Nobuo Kaneko, whom you recognize from his role as the perpetually scheming Yamamori-san in Kinji Fukasaku’s ‘Battles Without Honour & Humanity’ saga) and obtaining an advanced apprenticeship in yakuza cool from the ubiquitous Jô Shishido - who looks just as bad-ass as ever here, prior to his regrettable ‘hamster cheeks’ plastic surgery disaster, and sporting some nifty powder blue duds.

Fast-paced, brightly and beautifully photographed in no-expense-spared colour and full of likeable characters, easily resolved moral dilemmas and much romantic beach-side moping, ‘The Rambling Guitarist’ is seventy-something minutes of the finest undemanding, professionally rendered entertainment that Japan’s commercial movie industry had to offer.

A showdown on a fishing boat between Kobayashi and Shishido is a particular highlight (apparently, ‘60s yakuza liked to retain their uniform of tailored suits and shades even when crewing on a sea voyage), but that aside, basically everything here falls out of one’s brain immediately after viewing, leaving little behind beyond a vague feeling of having been satisfactorily entertained - which, I suspect, is exactly the way the big-wigs at Nikkatsu liked to do business.

Mildly diverting tales of happy-go-lucky drifters hanging out with chicks on the beach may not necessarily equate to essential viewing for us 21st century, first world viewers, but if you can put yourself in the shoes of someone born into the hunger and chaos of 1940s Tokyo, with nothing to watch at the flicks except endless tales of doomed, conscience-stricken Samurai, then innocuous films like ‘The Rambling Guitarist’ can take on a new significance. Steeped in what now seems a strain of forlorn, nostalgic optimism, they offer a fleeting fantasy of unburdened personal freedom that can speak just as strongly of the hopes and fears of Japanese youth at this point in time as any of their national cinema’s more weighty offerings.

Nikkatsu Trailer Theatre # 2: SENSELESS CRUELTY VIVIDLY PORTRAYED!

By most accounts, Nikkatsu didn’t exactly give Seijun Suzuki’s giddy post-modern gangster romp ‘Youth of the Beast’ the big push it deserved back in 1963, but clearly that didn’t stop the studio’s trailer department going to town on it in their usual understated style.

Screengrabs and sub-titles are taken from the DVD accompanying Eureka’s recent, excellent UK blu-ray edition of the film. (Please please please do ‘Gate of Flesh’ next, if you’re reading Eureka folks.)