Sanshiro Sugata, Part Two (Akira Kurosawa, 1945)

Susumu Fujita and Osman Yusuf in Sanshiro Sugata, Part Two

Sanshiro Sugata   Susumu Fujita
Shogoro Yano :  Denjiro Okochi
Gennosuke Higaki / Tesshin Higaki : Ryunosuke Tsukigata
Genzaburo Higaki : Akitake Kono
Sayo Murai : Yukiko Todoroki
Yujiro Toda : Soji Kiyokawa 
Yoshima Dan : Masayuki Mori 
Buddhist Priest : Kokuten Kodo
American Sailor: Osman Yusuf 
William Lister: Roy James 

Director: Akira Kurosawa 
Screenplay: Akira Kurosawa 
Based on a novel by Tsuneo Tomita 
Cinematography : Takeo Ito 
Production design: Kazuo Kubo 
Film editing: Akira Kurosawa 
Music : Seiichi Suzuki

Patched together from what aging film stock could be gathered during the end-of-war shortages in Japan, and interrupted during its filming by bombing raids, Akira Kurosawa's Sanshiro Sugata, Part Two, was a labor imposed on the writer-director by the studio, Toho, which wanted a sequel to the hit Sanshiro Sugata (1943), and Kurosawa's lack of enthusiasm for the project shows. The story is routine: Sanshiro has helped judo triumph over jujitsu as the primary Japanese martial art, but he has gone into retreat for several years, honing his spirituality. But one day he comes across an American sailor beating up a rickshaw driver -- a job he once took on himself -- and thrashes the bully. This brings him to the attention of a promoter who wants to stage a fight between the judo master and an American boxer named William Lister. Eventually, after another fighter is beaten to a pulp by Lister, Sanshiro gives in and thrashes Lister, giving the prize money to the fighter who had been beaten. Meanwhile, his old opponent, Gennosuke Higaki, whom he defeated at the end of the first film, warns him that his brothers, Tesshin and Genzaburo Higaki, are out to revenge themselves for Gennosuke's defeat. They are masters of karate, which originated on Okinawa and was just making its way into mainland Japan at the time when the film is set, the late 19th century. Gennosuke gives Sanshiro a scroll depicting the basics of karate to help him in the eventual fight with the brothers. Naturally, the film concludes with a fight between Sanshiro and Tesshin -- the other brother is recovering from an epileptic seizure -- that takes place in the snow, an echo of the fight in the original film with Gennosuke in a windswept field of tall grasses. This battle is the only part of the film that shows much commitment on the part of Kurosawa, who insisted that the principals fight barefoot in the snow, not without many complaints from the actors. Unfortunately, the poor film stock, unable to provide shades of gray, turns much of this fight into a battle of silhouetted figures. Much has been made of the propaganda in the film, particularly the portrayal of the hapless American sailor and boxer, but Kurosawa, no lover of the imperial regime, manages to shift the film's emphasis to the fearsomely wild Higaki brothers. 

Sanshiro Sugata (Akira Kurosawa, 1943)

Ryunosuke Tsukigata and Susumu Fujita in Sanshiro Sugata

Sanshiro Sugata: Susumu Fujita
Shogoro Yano: Denjiro Okochi
Sayo Murai: Yukiko Todoroki
Gennosuke Higaki: Ryunosuke Tsukigata
Hansuke Murai: Takashi Shimura
Osumi Kodana: Ranko Hanai
Tsunetami Iinuma: Sugisaki Aoyama
Police Chief Mishima: Ichiro Sugai
Saburo Monma: Yoshio Kusugi
Buddhist Priest: Kokuten Kodo

Director: Akira Kurosawa
Screenplay: Akira Kurosawa
Based on a novel by Tsuneo Tomita
Cinematography: Akira Mimura
Art direction: Masao Tozuka
Film editing: Toshio Goto, Akira Kurosawa
Music: Seiichi Suzuki

You know the plot: A talented, cocky young newcomer takes on the old pros and gets his ass kicked, but he learns self-discipline and becomes a winner. You've seen it played out with young doctors, lawyers, musicians -- it's even the plot of Wagner's Die Meistersinger -- and others challenging the established traditions. But mostly it's the plot for what seems to be about half of the sports movies ever made, including Akira Kurosawa's first feature, Sanshiro Sugata. It's also a film about the conflict between rival martial arts disciplines, jujitsu and judo, but fortunately you don't need to know much about the nature of the conflict to follow the film. From what I gather from reading the Wikipedia entry on judo, the founder of that discipline, Jigoro Kano, wanted to give jujitsu a philosophical underpinning that would put an emphasis on self-improvement for the betterment of society, and he called it judo because "do," like the Chinese "tao," means road or path. Kano's renaming was meant to shift the emphasis from physical skill to spiritual purpose. In Kurosawa's film, young Sanshiro comes to town wanting to find someone to teach him jujitsu, and signs up with a teacher who accepts a challenge from the judo master Shogoro Yano. (The name is an obvious twist on "Jigoro Kano.") Sanshiro watches as not only the teacher but all of the other members of his dojo are defeated -- in fact, tossed into the river -- by Yano. Whereupon Sanshiro becomes a follower of Yano's, but has to undergo some defeats and a cold night spent in a muddy pond before he gets the idea of what judo is all about. The film was not a big hit with the wartime Japanese censors, who wanted more aggression and less philosophy in their movies, so 17 minutes were cut from it, never to be seen again. In the currently available print, the missing material is summarized on title cards, but what's left is more than enough to show that Kurosawa arrived on the scene as a full-blown master director. His camera direction is superb, and he knows how to tell a story visually. For example, when Sanshiro joins up with Yano, he kicks off his geta, his wooden clogs, so he can pull Yano's rickshaw more efficiently. Kurosawa cuts to a passage-of-time montage in which we see one of the abandoned geta lying in the road, then in a mud puddle, covered with snow, then tossed aside as spring comes. The film's crucial scene is a showdown between Sanshiro and his jujitsu rival, Higaki, in a field of tall grasses, swept by wind with rushing clouds overhead; it's a spectacular effect, even if the battle turns out to be a bit anticlimactic. However much the censors may have disliked it, audiences were enthusiastic enough that Kurosawa made a sequel, Sanshiro Sugata Part II in 1942.