Deathblog: Shinichi ‘Sonny’ Chiba (1939-2021)

It goes without saying that I was incredibly sad to learn on Thursday that the great Sonny Chiba (‘Chiba-chan’ to many of his fans in Japan) has passed away at the age of 82, following a ten-day battle with covid-19.

Normally when a noteworthy figure passes away at a reasonably advanced age, we’re inclined to fall back on clichés of the “he had a good run” variety, but in Chiba’s case, it instead just seems heart-breaking that a man who remained so vital and energetic throughout his life, hitting his ninth decade still fighting fit and looking far younger, should meet such a miserable end. A terrible reminder (lest we needed one) of what a curse this damned virus continues to be.

Trying to summarise the entirety of Chiba’s career in film and TV is a daunting task. From his early days as a fresh-faced juvenile supporting player at Toei, he swiftly worked his way up to heroic leading roles through the ‘60s, appearing in that capacity in such delightful sci-fi/monster romps as ‘Golden Bat’ [‘Ogon Batto’] and the U.S. co-production ‘Terror Beneath the Sea’ (both 1966).

Ahoy mateys: Chiba in the early ‘60s.

Even in these early films, the energy and charisma he brought to the screen was formidable, but it was towards the end of the decade that, alongside an inevitable parallel career as a supporting player in the studio’s ninkyo yazuka dramas, before he began to reinvent himself as a martial arts / action star, soon cementing himself as Japan’s foremost exponent of screen-fighting and stunt work in a long series of increasingly outrageous karate, crime and exploitation movies.

Outside of the generally ultra-violent / adult-orientated movies he made for Toei, millions across Japan also soon knew him as the star of the somewhat more family friendly ‘Key Hunter’ and ‘The Bodyguard’ TV series, and as the founder of the self-explanatory Japan Action Club, through which he attempted to develop the nation’s stunt performers and choreographers to a level which would allow them to compete with Hong Kong’s supremacy in the field, mentoring such stars as Hiroyuki Sanada and the ever-incredible Etsuko Shihomi in the process.

On the other side of the Pacific meanwhile, Chiba gained an entirely entirely audience, becoming an unlikely American grindhouse icon after the fledging New Line Cinema, ever on the look-out for a “new Bruce Lee”, recut and redubbed Shigehiro Ozawa’s staggeringly excessive karate/gore exploiter ‘Gekitotsu! Satsujin Ken’ [‘Sudden Attack! Killer Fist’] in 1974, transforming it into ‘The Street Fighter’.

Arguably featuring a more extreme approach to on-screen violence than had been seen on U.S. screens up that point (excluding perhaps the unrated gore movies of HG Lewis and his imitators), ‘The Street Fighter’ predictably proved a box office smash in inner-city theatres, prompting New Line to repeat the procedure with just about every one of Chiba’s equally crazed early ‘70s pictures they could get their hands on, as well as Shihomi’s signature ‘Onna Hissatsu Ken’ [‘Sister Street Fighter’] series and sundry other Toei product besides.

Back home meanwhile, Chiba had repeatedly proved his thespian chops in a somewhat more serious context by this point, continuing to take supporting / second lead roles in the hard-edged jitsuroku yakuza films which dominated Toei’s A-picture output through the early ‘70s, generally playing to type as wild / out-of-control ‘human dynamo’ type characters - most memorably perhjaps in ‘Hiroshima Death Match’, the excellent second instalment of Kinji Fukasaku’s epochal ‘Battles Without Honour and Humanity’ [‘Jingi Naki Tatakai’] series (1973).

 Chiba with Meiko Kaji in ‘Wandering Ginza Butterfly: She-Cat Gambler’ (1972)

The respect gained from these more quasi-realistic yakuza roles led (or so I’ve always tended to assume) to Chiba subsequently establishing himself as a stalwart presence in the succession of more ambitious, ‘blockbuster’-style projects which came to dominate the Japanese box office once the increasingly unsustainable ‘production line’ ethos of the major studios more-or-less ground to a halt as the industry contracted in the latter half of the ‘70s.

Considerably lightening up his hard-boiled image, Chiba switched back to his ‘60s ‘heroic lead’ persona to play the driver of the titular shinkansen in Junya Satô’s ‘Speed’-inspiring epic ‘Bullet Train’ [‘Shinkansen Daibakuha’] in 1975, before moving on to such big budget productions as Fukasaku’s ‘Star Wars’-inspired ‘Message From Space’ (1978), Kôsei Saitô’s jaw-droppingly macho time travel battlefest ‘Sengoku Jieitai’ [‘G.I. Samurai’] (1979), and, most significantly, playing a long succession of brooding patriarchs and aging master swordsmen in the series of historical / fantasy epics which more or less defined commercial Japanese cinema through the early ‘80s, beginning with Fukasaku’s ‘Yagyu Clan Conspiracy’ [aka ‘Shogun’s Samurai’] in 1978.

Reprising his role as real life figure Jûbei Yagyû (‘Lone Wolf & Cub’ fans take note) through several further movies and TV spin-offs, Chiba also portrayed legendary swordsman Hattori Hanzô in several further TV series - by which point I think it’s probably safe to say his place in the popular culture of a new generation was pretty well defined.

In subsequent decades, he made a speciality of the scene-stealing cameo, regularly turning up to bring some gravitas to grizzled, former hard man yakuza / samurai roles in everything from humble V-cinema action flicks in the ‘90s to ill-starred Hong Kong co-productions, epic historical/fantasy reboots in the early ‘00s and - inevitably - Tarantino’s ‘Kill Bill’ movies, all whilst also keeping to plates spinning vis-à-vis his presence as a much-loved media personality, martial arts/fitness guru and general elder statesman of Japanese commercial cinema.

And, all this of course barely scratches the surface. I wish I had the capacity to try to do it all justice. For a wider appreciation of Chiba’s contribution to cinema, I’d recommend spending some quality time with the estimable Sketches of Chiba blog, and, right here on BITR, why not have a look at my creaky old 2013 review of one of his earliest action vehicles, 1970’s Yakuza Deka: The Assassin, or the trailer gallery for one of his craziest and most essential movies (a film so extraordinary in fact that I found it impossible to review in a more conventional manner), 1974’s inimitable Wolf Guy: Enraged Lycanthrope.

More Chiba tribute content may or may not follow soon, time allowing, but for now, to quote the retitling of New Line’s U.S. version of 1973’s ‘Bodigaado Kiba’: Viva Chiba!

Nippon Horrors / Horror Express 2020 #10: Kaidan Hebi-Onna /‘Snake Woman's Curse’ (Nobuo Nakagawa, 1968)

 A decade or so after he turned out a series of fairly wacky horror pictures like Ghost Cat Mansion and The Lady Vampire for Shintoho, Nobuo Nakagawa - who had largely retired from directing after directly contributing to the bankruptcy of the aforementioned studio with his 1960 epic ‘Jigoku’ [‘Hell’] - returned to the fray for this considerably more conventional kaidan effort, produced under the unlikely auspices of Toei.

I say ‘unlikely’, because, although they soon would soon go on to cut a bloody swathe across the early ‘70s with some of the most grotesquely violent and OTT genre movies ever made, supernatural horror was never really Toei’s ‘thing’, leaving Kaidan Hebi-Onna [‘Snake Woman’s Curse’] feeling like a bit of a curious one-off.

According to what little background info I can find on the film, the production seems to have originated with writer Fumio Kônami, who apparently told the producers that he would only allow the studio to film his script if Nakagawa (who had not worked in the industry for about five years at this point) was hired to direct. (1)Apparently keen to try to establish a viable kaidan/horror line at the time, Toei acquiesced to the writer’s request, and…. bob’s yr uncle, as we say over on this side of the globe. (2)

Plot-wise, ‘Kaidan Hebi-Onna’ is in most respects a pretty standard, run-of-the-mill kaidan picture - essentially a variation on the old bakeneko (ghost-cat) story, in which a wronged woman returns from the grave with the help of an animal spirit to take her vengeance on the hateful aristocrats who have destroyed her family, only with snakes used as the totem animal this time around instead of cats.

Set (and presumably filmed) somewhere in Japan’s remote far western region, the story opens with an elderly peasant farmer (the ubiquitous Ko Nishimura), practically throwing himself under the wheels of the local landlord’s coach, as he begs for leniency vis-à-vis the repayment of his debts. Needless to say, such mercy is not forthcoming from the venal plutocrat (Seizaburô Kawazu), but, on his death-bed, the farmer is still pleading deliriously for the chance to save his family’s small-holding, uttering the key phrase which will go on to become something of a catch-phrase for the film’s spectral avengers: “even if I have to eat dirt, I will pay you back”.

After the man’s death, the landlord decrees that his homestead will be demolished in order to clear space for the planting of mulberry trees (used in the production of silk), whilst his wife (Chiaki Tsukioka) and adult daughter (Asa, played by Yukiko Kuwahara) are cheerfully informed that they will be taken into service in the landlord’s household, there to ‘work off’ their late patriarch’s debts.

As you might imagine, this is far from an idyllic prospect for the two women. Set to work weaving silk in what basically amounts to a small scale Victorian sweatshop, Asa must work sixteen hour days under the supervision of the landlord’s thuggish, lecherous son (Toei yakuza/action regular and future Roman Porno director Shingo Yamashiro), whilst her mother meanwhile becomes a general domestic dogsbody, bullied and belittled at every turn by the landlord’s sadistic wife (Kurosawa regular and future ‘Female Prisoner: Scorpion’ / ‘Sex & Fury’ legend Akemi Negishi).

Although their fellow servants treat them with kindness, and although Asa still has steadfast fiancée Satematsu (Kunio Murai) waiting for her on the outside, the inhumane treatment doled out to the two women leads them, inevitably, to their sad and undignified deaths. Asa’s mother, significantly, has always made a habit of habit of helping unloved animals (she was nursing a pigeon back to health when the family lost their home), and she is struck down whilst attempting the prevent the killing of a snake which has intruded into the landlord’s house.

As anyone who knows the ‘rules’ of this genre will be well aware by this point, the Big Man and his horrid family had better watch the hell out, as Nakagawa and his crew prepare to get busy with the thunder crashes, gel lighting, stage blood, green-faced living corpses and double-exposed snake effects, for the riotous closing act of vengeance-from-beyond-the-grave.

To Western audiences, these films often play more like ritual re-enactments of familiar folk tales than exercises in contemporary story-telling, which perhaps to some extent accounts for their failure to gain much of an overseas following, as the lack of novelty within their narratives can soon become pretty dispiriting. Once you’ve seen a handful of ‘em, you’ll know exactly how things are going to play out, right from the outset. The only interest comes from seeing how efficiently the filmmakers will accomplish their task, in technical and dramatic terms.

For domestic audiences however, we must assume this would not have been so much of a problem. More accepting of the traditions behind the bakeneko form, and more able to appreciate the more subtle cultural resonances within it, one hopes they would have been able to view each addition to the cycle with fresh eyes. 

(By way of comparison, we can perhaps imagine how a viewer largely unfamiliar with American culture would feel after being sat down and told to watch 25 early ‘80s slasher films. We might love them all for their minor eccentricities and variation on the theme, but to the uninitiated, aren’t they all kind of the same, more or less?)

In some ways, ‘Snake Woman’s Curse’ feels like a case in point in this regard. As eye-rollingly over-familiar as the basic storyline may be, look deeper and some very specific points of departure from the norm begin to emerge. For a start, the film is set during the Meiji era (1868-1912), a time of dramatic change and modernisation for Japan, immediately differentiating it from the more historically static Edo or Tokugawa eras in which kaidan stories more traditionally take place.

Again, domestic audiences would likely have been keyed into this right from the start, as the landlord is seen roaring through his domain in a Western-style coach, whilst his son sports a bowler hat and other foreign accoutrements. The mechanised ‘sweat-shop’ in which Asa is put to work likewise represents a form of industry unknown in pre-Meiji Japan, but whilst the the adoption of these innovations by the film’s villainous aristocrats would seem to indicate an implicit support for the older, folk-based way of life favoured by the hard-done-by peasants, the approach taken by Kônami’s script is, as usual, a little more nuanced than that.

The ambiguous attitude to modernisation and/or Westernisation so frequently encountered in early ‘70s Japanese genre cinema is perfectly encapsulated here via a memorable one scene cameo from Tetsurô Tanba, playing a regional police chief dispatched to investigate the murderous goings on within the landlord’s domain.

Effectively acting as the very personification of modern, democratic state governance, Tanba reduces the landlord to a fit of spluttering disbelief as he calmly undercuts the local lord’s Shogunate-derived feudal authority, daring to suggest that the police may wish to investigate the death of one of his peasants, and that he might even dare to implicate members of the aristocrat’s own family in the process - an absolutely unthinkable prospect for a man born into the strict caste system of the Tokugawa era, and an amusing demonstration of that the way that, however keen the ruling classes may have been to enrich themselves using technological innovations offered by contact with Western capitalism, their understanding of the social and political implications of such development tended to lack somewhat behind.

As you will no doubt have gathered from the preceding paragraphs, ‘Kaidan Hebi-Onna’ is about as politically conscious a kaidan pictures as you could possibly hope to find, taking the age old fantasy of the rural peasantry exacting revenge against their cruel feudal overlords baked into all bakeneko stories, and hammering it home for strongly than ever, applying it to a more nuanced, more realistic and more historically recent setting in the process.

Some might be apt to suggest that the film’s success as a horror movie suffers as a result of this heavy emphasis on socio-economic angst, and indeed Nakagawa’s pacing here is glacially slow, whilst the atmosphere he builds is painstakingly sombre. The inevitable horror ‘effects’ which dominate the final act meanwhile, whilst inventive and fun, are strictly conventional within the genre.

So, we’re definitely not looking at a Friday night horror banger here I’m afraid, but, if you can approach the film in an appropriately sober, arthouse-y frame of mind, Nakagawa’s execution at least is absolutely top notch. Performances are excellent across the board (in addition to the aforementioned esteemed actors, there are also turns from such Toei notables as Yukie Kagawa and Hideo Murota), whilst Yoshikazu Yamazawa’s photography, highlighting the fertile-yet-foreboding topography of Japan’s mountainous Western coast, is beautiful, radiating an overpowering brown n’ green aura which seems to link the earth where the snakes crawl directly to the hallowed afterlife from whence the spectres emerge.

Shunsuke Kikuchi’s score meanwhile is richly evocative, and the carefully wrought production design includes a wealth of great “folky stuff” (songs, costumes, local festival customs) for Japanophiles to enjoy. Most importantly perhaps, Nakagawa manages to imbue the script’s off-the-peg structure with a handful of genuinely haunting, transcendental images which will live long in the viewer’s memory after viewing.

Born in 1905, the director was sixty-three years old as the time of this film’s production, and it would be all too easy to interpret the slower, more meditative direction Nakagawa takes here as the work of a filmmaker trying to establish himself as a more ‘serious’ voice in cinema during the twilight years of his career, after half a lifetime spent churning out rushed 60 minute programmers and battling the studios for budgets.

Unfortunately for us reviewers’ desperate need to try to impose a narrative onto everything however, Nakagawa rather kicked this idea in the nuts by immediately going on to make a brief but prolific comeback as a commercial director in 1969, directing five action/yakuza pictures for Toei in quick succession before, curiously, adopting the pseudonym “Ise Tsugio” in order to make what I presume to be a series of obscure, independently distributed pinku (erotic) titles (ubiquitous S&M / rope torture guru Oniroku Dan is credited as writer on at least one of them). All of these hit cinemas before the year was out, with the director’s anonymity surely somewhat undermined by the fact that they were all proudly produced by his own ‘Nakagawa Pro’.

So, once again, we return to the idea of ‘Kaidan Hebi-Onna’ seeming like a real one-off - an odd, inexplicable diversion in the paths followed by its director, writer and studio. It is what it is, I suppose - but thankfully for those with an interest in this particular overlooked corner of Japanese culture, what it is is very worthwhile indeed.

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(1) An absolutely pivotal figure in the golden age of Toei exploitation, Kônami (1933-2012) went on to contribute to a huge number of the studio’s best and/or most outrageous films from the early ‘70s, including the entire ‘Female Prisoner: Scorpion’ series, Sonny Chiba’s Yakuza Deka movies, the extraordinary Wolf Guy: Enraged Lycanthrope, the horrifying Zero Woman: Red Handcuffs and Kinji Fukasaku’s ‘Sympathy for the Underdog’ and ‘Graveyard of Honour’, to name but a few. 

(2) CREDIT WHERE IT’S DUE DEPT: All background info on the production of this film is taken directly from Jonathan M. Hall’s well-researched commentary track on the 2007 Synapse DVD release.

Toei Trailer Theatre # 1: I AM THE WOLF MAN – PROUD AND GENTLE-HEARTED.

We jump here from Nikkatsu’s trailer department to that of their ‘60s rivals/’70s successors for the title of “Japan’s coolest movie studio”, Toei – basically just in order to give me an excuse to write a few words about ‘Wolf Guy: Enraged Lycanthrope’ (Kazuhiko Yamaguchi, 1975).

I was contemplating a full length review of this remarkable motion picture, but, having revisited it this weekend, I honestly don’t think there is much I can say about the film that will not be made immediately apparent by the act of watching it. (If ever a work of art spoke for itself, etc.)

Essentially I think, ‘Wolf Guy: Enraged Lycanthrope’ represents a kind of platonic ideal of everything a “cult movie” can and should be – all the more-so given that, as with most of Toei’s admirably unpretentious output, it was more than likely knocked out in a couple of weeks for a hypothetical audience of adolescent manga fans and boozed up salarymen, without the slightest notion that it would still be attracting attention over four decades later.

When I first encountered ‘Wolf Guy: Enraged Lycanthrope’ last year, via a slightly iffy fan-subbed download of a Japanese TV broadcast, it blew me away to such an extent that I could barely even take it all in. Returning to it for a second time, I decided to take a slightly more methodical approach and test my initial hypothesis that this is a film in which every single moment of screen time has something awesome happening in it.

Did it pass the test? Well, let's put it like this - there’s a brief scene early in the film, shortly after Sonny Chiba’s character Inugami-san witnesses a member of defunct rock band The Mobs being torn to pieces by an invisible tiger on the streets of Tokyo, when he is taken in for questioning by the police. This scene, which lasts about two minutes, is not especially awesome, although it does attain the level of ‘mildly awesome’ in the fan-subbed version, whose translation has one of the police officers declaring, “A spectral slasher? Seems to be the only explanation!”.

Aside from that, everything else that happens in ‘Wolf Guy: Enraged Lycanthrope’ is categorically, unreservedly awesome. It puts the pedal to the floor right from the outset, and barely lets up for a second.

By the grace of the international film copyright gods, it is also now available in the US and UK as a blu-ray/DVD combo pack from Arrow, so you have NO EXCUSE for failing to verify these findings for yourself.

‘Wolf Guy: Enraged Lycanthrope’ – watch it, live it, love it.

(Ok, perhaps don’t “live it”.)

Deathblog: Bunta Sugawara (1933 – 2014)

Well, it’s been a bad month for yakuza movie actors, to put it mildly. Just a few weeks after the passing of Ken Takakura, the pre-eminent icon of the ‘60s ninkyo yakuza film, news came through on Monday of the death of the man who effectively took over as the figurehead of the genre when things turned nastier in the mad-dog, jitsuroku ‘70s - the one and only Bunta Sugawara.

Probably better known to Western movie fans than Takakura, I think it’s safe to say that anyone who has watched even the thinnest scattering of post-1970 Japanese crime films will be familiar with Bunta-san. Though he began acting in 1956, working at Shintoho and Shochiku before he signed up with Toei in the mid ’60s, Sugawara became pretty damn ubiquitous in the early 1970s, with his unmistakable visage and bullet-stopping forehead looming from what seems like thousands of movie posters, and his extraordinary string of collaborations with director Kinji Fukasaku standing out as arguably an all-time high watermark for Japanese crime cinema, incorporating such highlights as ‘Japanese Organised Crime Boss’ (1969), ‘Bloodstained Clan Honour’ (1970), ‘Street Mobster’ (1972), ‘Outlaw Killers: Three Mad-Dog Brothers’ (1972), and no less than eight films in the epochal ‘Battles Without Honour and Humanity’ series (1973 – 76).

Though Bunta-san often played noble, lone wolf heroes in the Takakura mold, he will be equally remembered for his personification of the kind of amoral, mad-dog maniacs that Fukasaku in particular liked to bring to the forefront in his films – a character type that Sugawara managed to realise with an astonishing level of adrenalin-ripped, kill-crazy intensity.

Despite his on-screen excesses however, Sugawara seems to have been regarded as a pretty chilled out guy, and indeed he undercut his ultra-macho image by simultaneously developing a talent for comedic acting, playing a happy-go-lucky straight man in Sadao Nakajima’s ‘Viper Brothers’ films, and no less than ten entries in Norifumi Suzuki’s phenomenally popular ‘Torakku Yaro’ (“Truck Rascals”) series (1975 – 1980). He also sent up his usual screen persona brilliantly in Kazuhiko Hasegawa’s oddball drama ‘The Man Who Stole The Sun’ (1979), playing a seemingly indestructible, Terminator-like police detective to hilarious effect.

He was also, coincidentally, the only Japanese person I’m aware of whose personal name begins with ‘B’, a fact that makes me peculiarly happy whatever I see his name.

I’m not sure quite what he got up to through the ‘80s, ‘90s and beyond, but he continued acting occasionally, popping up in a few Takashi Miike films and lending his voice to a few Studio Ghibli productions. A brief English language obit from Japanese news site Mainichi states that “Later in life Sugawara turned to farming in central Japan's Yamanashi Prefecture, and headed a social justice group”. So that sounds nice. Good for him.

Sayonara Bunta-san, and domo arigato for all the times you acted so hard I felt like I’d actually been punched in the face.

Below is a quickly assembled gallery featuring merely a few of the many awesome posters which featured Bunta’s likeness.