The Masters of Cinema Series

Assassination

by Joan Mellen, 2006

In Assassination (Ansatsu, 1964), his ninth film, SHINODA Masahiro chronicles brilliantly the moral and social breakdown preceding the fall of the Tokugawa shogunate (1603-1868). Premier Naosuke Ii, his actual title, “Regent,” has been assassinated for supposedly collaborating with the foreigners who have arrived in “four black ships” determined to open Japan to the West. Ii’s strategy, in reality, was more benign; he advocated a period of trade with the foreigners to afford Japan time to perfect its defences against them.

The year is 1863, and the mood Shinoda depicts is anarchic. Historian G. B. Sansom described the period in terms that all but describe the plot of Assassination: “The throne rebukes great officers for doing what it knows it has already approved, or enjoins them not to do what it knows they have already done … patriots assassinate other patriots for views they have never held or professed, and statesmen declare intentions that everybody knows to be contrary to their real purpose.” Each side will accuse the other of rendering Japan vulnerable to the foreign invaders.

Conspiracies abound. A map, residing beneath the opening credits, signals that plots will be ubiquitous. Behind the actions of its characters, Assassination expresses Shinoda’s conviction that there was no intrinsic moral or ethical difference between the two contending parties, Emperor or Shogunate. Neither side was in a position to control the Western incursion.

As Shinoda explained to me, “the powerful samurai of the Meiji Restoration kept the Emperor as a ruler. The Tokugawa shogunate had kept the Emperor too. There was actually no change.” He was not interested in “utopian ideals,” Shinoda told writer Audie Bock: “I would like to be able to take hold of the past and make it stand still so that I can examine it from different angles.”

Assassination explores the meaning of the Meiji Restoration of 1868 through a character study of one exceptional ronin (disenfranchised samurai), a brilliant scholar and swordsman named KIYOKAWA Hachiro (TANBA Tetsuro). Referring to himself as an “idealist,” Kiyokawa has operated a fencing school, attracting disciples by his great skill no less than by the force of his personality. A man gifted in intrigue, he is referred to as “mysterious.” Kiyokawa is befriended in Shinoda’s film by a hero of the Restoration who is immediately recognizable to Japanese audiences, the dissident Tosa samurai SAKAMOTO Ryoma (SADA Keiji).

As Assassination opens, KIYOKAWA Hachiro is being pardoned by the shogunate for having committed a murder. Principles of justice give way to official expediency. The shogunate wishes to make use of Kiyokawa’s sword against those who favour the end to military government and the official return to power of the Emperor. Kiyokawa is pardoned because he is the best man to organize a freelance, mercenary army on behalf of the Tokugawas. “In these turbulent times,” his would-be employer remarks, “he may prove useful.” Another assesses Kiyokawa’s dedication and prowess as “a razor in skilled hands [that] works wonders,” even if “you may cut your own finger.” Enlisting Kiyokawa, the shogunate hires simultaneously his future assassin, SASAKI Tadasaburo, just to be on the safe side.

Together Sakamoto and Kiyokawa stand before wall posters depicting them as wanted men. Both wear deep straw hats tipped forward to conceal their faces, hats which by Tokugawa law could be worn only by men of the samurai class. Ryoma tears down the poster picturing Kiyokawa because he has been paroled. He leaves his own on the wall.

“I haven’t been amnestied, like you,” Ryoma says with some irony, since he has opposed the shogunate directly and overtly, allowing no ambiguity as to where his loyalty has been lodged. The historical Ryoma had openly endorsed the assassination of Regent Ii. At the close of the scene, Kiyokawa tramples the discarded poster claiming him to be a wanted man, an act of contempt that foreshadows the coming erosion of his character.

It is Ryoma who will be the conscience of the film. Yet Shinoda subverts even Ryoma’s heroism. With his ubiquitous laughter, Kiyokawa remarks that Ryoma needs a bath, a bit of deflating naturalism, if grounded in the history of the period. Scholar Marius Jansen has written how the “shishi”, dissident samurai like Kiyokawa and Sakamoto, refused to shave or wash, and clomped defiantly through the streets in wooden clogs.

Activists, the shishi worked in the early 1860s for the fall of the shogunate, governed, at their best, not by personal ambition, but by a desire to preserve the “national purity” from foreign contamination. Yet, often, as Ryoma does in this film, they indulged in alcohol; often, as Kiyokawa does, they frequented brothels. Their careless lifestyles were reflective of the general spirit of protest against the rigid, closed authoritarian social structure over which the Tokugawas had presided for over two hundred and fifty years.

Shinoda deflates the notion of the “hero” through his depiction of these two shishi. Sakamoto was as much a man in need of a bath as a “hero.” Yet Kiyokawa was also much more than a “xenophobe ronin”, as one history book defines him, far more than, as film critic SATO Tadao put it, a “charismatic country samurai”.

In the late 1950s, Shinoda became an important member of Japan’s “Nuberu Bagu,” from the French term “Nouvelle Vague.” In distinguishing their work from the masters of the Japanese cinema who preceded them, Kurosawa and Ozu, Mizoguchi and Naruse, among others, they borrowed from the then radical techniques of Jean-Luc Godard, François Truffaut and Claude Chabrol. The new wave in Japan, Shinoda would explain years later, in contrast to Kurosawa’s “generation of humanists”, did not possess their “certainty”.

Many of the soon-to-be-accomplished young directors of the Japanese “Nuberu Bagu” began working as assistants at the Shochiku Ofuna studio, where OZU Yasujiro reigned. Among them were IMAMURA Shohei, who worked with Ozu on Tokyo Story; OSHIMA Nagisa; YOSHIDA Yoshishige; and Shinoda, who was an assistant on Ozu’s Tokyo Twilight. New wave techniques well-suited Shinoda’s purpose in Assassination, which was to convey the nihilistic mood of the “Bakumatsu”, the period leading to the restoration to the throne of the Emperor Meiji.

In Assassination, there are virtually no long takes in the Mizoguchi style. Nor are there the sweeping traveling shots favoured by Kurosawa. “Kurosawa exhausted himself with the traveling shot,” Shinoda once remarked to me. In place of techniques that relied upon a certain sense of mutual understanding and cultural security on the part of the audience, Assassination offers a stunning display of harsh, abrupt, and challenging practices: the unexpected use of the freeze frame; the propensity to rack focus, suddenly reversing clarity from background to foreground to background; the aggressive use of the zoom; the hand-held camera reducing the visual plain to the subjective; the jump-cut, removing portions of the action; and a symbolic rather than realistic use of sound. The very stylishness of Shinoda’s always unpredictable cinematography renders Kiyokawa vital, sympathetic and worthy of audience interest.

To explore Kiyokawa’s psychology, to penetrate to the heart of the man, Shinoda abandons linear chronology, which would suggest that history progresses in a rational direction, the future ameliorating the injustices of the past, and present. Instead, he enlists the flashback technique of Orson Welles in Citizen Kane, another film that attempts to penetrate the identity of a seemingly inscrutable figure through a variety of points of view. Kiyokawa’s character is explored through anecdotes related by his closest disciple, who ultimately rejects him; by his assassin; through the diary of his mistress, Oren (IWASHITA Shima); by SAKAMOTO Ryoma, once his friend and ally; and by others. No one perspective, Shinoda suggests, can express adequately the “truth” of a man, or a cause.

Kiyokawa’s dissidence, his final rejection of the shogunate, is revealed to have stemmed from his outrage at being denied the recognition to which his abilities entitled him. To his chagrin, Kiyokawa remained a low-ranking samurai, whose views were not respected because he was not born into the warrior class, but came from a farming family. Academy education was denied him according to the strict regulations imposed by the shogunate. That birth rather than merit would determine his destiny is the crucial motive in Kiyokawa’s choosing to ally himself with the Emperor’s party.

Following in the manner of the great directors – from ITO Daisuke to KUROSAWA Akira – who worked in the “jidai-geki” or period film tradition, Shinoda made Assassination, his own first jidai-geki, to comment on and to satirize the present. Filmmakers, Shinoda once said, “should bear witness to the politics of their age.” His aim, he told me, was to “show the present through the past and history.” He began from the premise that “all Japanese culture flows from imperialism and the emperor system.”

Kiyokawa demonstrates his superior abilities in an early scene where he visits a fencing school. He stops to admire cherry blossoms, that frequent icon in Japanese cinema for the uniquely Japanese. Combining two qualities much prized in the code of Bushido, Kiyokawa is a man both with a delicate, aesthetic sensibility, and exceptional talent as a warrior.

Making spectacular use of the wide screen, Shinoda depicts the fencing match with bamboo swords between Sasaki and Kiyokawa. The action stretches across the horizontal frame, a horizontality that reflects the stasis of Tokugawa society. There is also irony in Shinoda’s employment of the wide screen. The hard, geometric lines of the Edo architecture (Shinoda filmed Assassination in actual eighteenth-century buildings) suggest stability and permanence, even as Tokugawa power will survive for only five more years. No less ironic is Shinoda’s bold, rhythmic alternation of close-ups and long shots in the fencing scene; this technique adds a formal, ritualistic quality to the match, another ironic comment on the passing nature of the world of the warrior.

A swish pan reflects Sasaki’s defeated perspective. Dazed, he looks up to watch a blurred Kiyokawa walking away, victorious. Sasaki’s motive for dedicating himself to Kiyokawa’s destruction is established not as political, based on his convictions as to the merits of the Shogunate, but as personal, retaliation for the humiliation Kiyokawa caused him. No less are Kiyokawa’s motives for joining the Imperial party as much personal as ideological.

It rankles with Kiyokawa that his plan for outwitting the foreigners is not taken seriously because of his low rank, and that his status does not warrant his possession of a seven-star sword. One samurai expresses outrage that Kiyokawa should carry a sword which had been mortgaged by a poor samurai of more noble origins than himself.

“It isn’t the sword that makes the man, it’s his calibre,” Kiyokawa replies. A man’s getting ahead should depend upon his courage and ability, not on birth. With Kiyokawa’s demand for democratic rights, the film is entirely sympathetic. Yet Kiyokawa also carries Shinoda’s irony in his idealism; he represents democratic views that will no more prevail under the rule of the Emperor Meiji than they did under the Tokugawas. The historical Ryoma favoured Western ideas because he despised feudalism and desired a modern, democratic Japan. Shinoda’s Kiyokawa, hating also the injustices of the shogunate, better reflects the film’s perspective with its suggestion that the Restoration would not be true to the ideals Ryoma represented, but would carry the feudal ideas of the past into the supposedly anti-feudal present.

Kiyokawa is pardoned in the first scene. A third of the way through the film Shinoda then depicts the murder itself. Kiyokawa’s violence is revealed to be both an accident and a foreshadowing of his coming impetuosity. A police official and shogunate spy provokes him and his followers, accusing them of blocking a narrow street.

His sword flashing, Kiyokawa swiftly beheads the man; the grinning head is then frozen in mid-air, while the policeman’s blood splashes over Kiyokawa. Far from glorying in this feat of swordsmanship, Kiyokawa flees, pursued by an angry rock-throwing mob. In a long, entirely unheroic scene, Kiyokawa runs for his life, his sword still unsheathed. Shinoda bleeds out all sound, so that TAKEMITSU Toru’s discordant music complements the unpredictable and unrelenting violence that consumed the society at the period of the Bakumatsu. The jarring music refuses the spectator complacency and reflects a society tumbling into moral chaos.

Takemitsu’s music is joined in this sequence by the sound of flapping wings as a flock of birds ascends into the air to a freeze frame before Kiyokawa’s relentless path. The same man who once hesitated to take a human life, even if the man was an “enemy”, has murdered someone for taunting him. So Shinoda chronicles Kiyokawa’s moral decline.

The police force of the shogunate now pursues Kiyokawa. When they do not discover him at home, they torture his chief disciple, and his mistress, Oren. She accepts the pain, adding a small smile when she realizes that the sword the police display is not Kiyokawa’s. Oren’s loyalty and silence are a measure of Kiyokawa’s loving nature. A wipe spares the spectator the spectacle of Oren’s death.

Only after she is dead is Oren’s perspective dramatised because it is her death that in part accounts for Kiyokawa’s later actions. In his effort to understand the man whom he is determined to murder, Sasaki has searched for documents. At first, he refuses to read Oren’s diary, the words of a former prostitute. When Sasaki changes his mind, another side of Kiyokawa emerges.

In Oren, Shinoda offers a sympathetic portrait of a Tokugawa woman. Condemned to life as a prostitute, the barred windows of the brothel reflecting her social imprisonment, Oren protested furiously and had to be forced to entertain Kiyokawa, her first customer. He, in turn, needed not a mere sexual partner, but someone in whom to confide his deepest pain, how he was denied entrance to the Academy despite his superior abilities.

The violence of their first sexual encounters is contrasted with a shot of two dolls, male and female, Emperor and Empress, traditionally displayed on March 3rd, Doll’s Festival (hina matsuri). Snow falls. Having been purchased out of bondage by Kiyokawa, Oren appears with a serene, satisfied expression on her face, at once conveying the affectionate and respectful relationship that has developed between them.

The tranquility of the shots of Oren is broken by the excitement attending the news that Mito samurai have assassinated Premier Ii; in history, Ii was murdered on March 24, 1860 by angry Mito samurai whose Lord Nariaki had been humiliated by Ii, as once more politics is reduced to the personal.

Shinoda depicts Oren writing in her diary, a literate, articulate woman, who will become another sacrifice to the historical maelstrom. Oren’s diary also reveals how Kiyokawa returned home the night of the murder, tormented by what he had done. He leans against a ladder, as if fixed to a cross. “Blood splashed! Blood splashed!” Kiyokawa cries out in anguish.

Both the scene of Oren’s sexual initiation, and that of her consoling of Kiyokawa, culminate in a freeze frame. The last is followed by a cut to the present with Sasaki slamming Oren’s diary shut. “I can, I can kill him!” he exults. Discovering in Oren’s diary that Kiyokawa had regretted the murder, that he had exposed his vulnerability, Sasaki becomes confident that he can kill his enemy. Kiyokawa’s very humanity proves to be his undoing.

Oren has died for nothing because Kiyokawa is pardoned. The film’s tribute to her comes in a letter Kiyokawa writes to his parents, one reflecting his freedom from class snobbery. Insisting that they ignore her low status, he requests that they pray for her every morning and evening: “everyone praised her as a good person.”

Another perspective is offered by Ryoma, who is depicted fishing while the world explodes behind him. “None can understand him,” Ryoma says of Kiyokawa, a man he cannot help but admire as “a genius who instantly mastered every subject.” The flashbacks from Ryoma’s point of view open the trajectory of Kiyokawa’s moral deterioration. They first meet when Kiyokawa recognizes Ryoma on a street and suggests that they dine together. “I’m going to start a war”, Kiyokawa confides. He has gathered a band of free samurai to “rise in revolt”.

“What a feeling it is, nothing is more exciting than to command an army!” Kiyokawa says. Ryoma remains sceptical.

The gruesome historical massacre at the Teradaya Inn follows, a long scene in which neither Ryoma nor Kiyokawa participate. Punctuating the nonstop killing is a murder accomplished by a samurai running through and murdering with his sword, two people, one an ally, the other an “enemy” whom he has pinned to the wall. Again blood splashes. Waitresses scream in fear.

The next morning, Ryoma surveys the wreckage: torn, blood-splattered shoji, the ground drenched with blood. Ryoma then removes his sword, picks up an abandoned koto, and sings of the vanity of human life, and of the senselessness of men killing to gain power over others: “Why must you tie/Your colt to a tree/Should the colt want to go free/Blossoms will all die.” Ryoma’s song reflects Shinoda’s own nihilism. (“This is a nihilist film!” the scriptwriter of Shinoda’s previous work, Pale Flower (Kawaita hana, 1963), had exclaimed).

The Teradaya incident heralds the change in Kiyokawa, the loss of his idealism following Oren’s death, and his descent into ruthlessness. His student complains that, power-hungry, he refuses to share recognition with others. A cut to a shot of a spotlit Sasaki practicing in the dark is more theatrical than cinematic, and reflects Shinoda’s study of theatre history at Waseda University. The camera begins to circle Sasaki, only for this short take abruptly to conclude with a fade to black. Even as it reflects director Shinoda’s disgust with Sasaki, the juxtaposition renders the two – Sasaki and Kiyokawa – as moral equivalents.

Kiyokawa’s disciples are incredulous when they discover that he is raising an army on behalf of the shogunate, and attack him. Kiyokawa winds up killing a boy whose life he had once saved. A montage of reaction shots, including one of Sasaki, reveal shock as Kiyokawa finishes the boy off, exhibiting no emotion; Shinoda endorses their horror by removing all sound.

Kiyokawa now leads an unruly army on a march to Kyoto, ostensibly to do battle with the forces loyal to the Emperor. In a starling reversal, however, he suddenly announces that he is waiting for an Imperial order. Remaining awake all night in this seemingly quixotic ploy, he sits upright, his hands rigidly around his sword.

The truth is that by now Kiyokawa supports neither shogunate nor Emperor. Laughing, he will call the entire charade “omoshiroi,” an ironic Japanese word meaning “interesting.” It is clear that should the message not have arrived, he would not have minded dying.

But the Emperor’s message does come in time. Kiyokawa’s fingers must be pried from his sword, so tightly has he held on. At the mention of the Emperor, everyone in this ronin-filled shot bows and falls to his knees, even Sasaki. “Swiftly restore order, bring peace,” are the meaningless, vacuous words of the Emperor. They are words that bring everyone in the shot, except Kiyokawa and Sasaki, to tears, and some to sobs. So director Shinoda satirises the Emperor worship that reduces men to subservience and to incoherence.

Celebrating his Pyrrhic victory, Kiyokawa talks of a “Kiyokawa shogunate.” His closest and most loyal disciple has sent a note, revealing that he can no longer follow him: “Master, forgive my selfishness (willfulness).” Kiyokawa writes a haiku on a fan, trumpeting his willingness to go forward to the end: “Heading the van I’ll be/Till I die in glee/So straight is the path/To the Imperial plea.”

While his followers translate his haiku into song and dance, Kiyokawa moves to the window. He tears up his disciple’s letter and scatters the torn pages as Sasaki, below, watches. Shinoda told me he considers this the most important scene in Assassination. When Kiyokawa stares out the window, “it is at this moment that his despair begins. Power has brought him no satisfaction, no fulfillment.” He was interested in “the dark parts of people,” Shinoda has remarked. Requested by Sight and Sound magazine to list his ten favourite films, he chose, he said, “from those which depict hell exhibited in the world.” Of Japanese films, he included Mizoguchi’s Ugetsu monogatari, and Kurosawa’s Ran.

Montage sequences of rampaging ronin follow; wipes punctuate the shots of violent attacks on nameless people. When Kiyokawa is informed, he remains with his back to the camera, oblivious, lost to humanity. A high overhead shot reveals an exquisite sea of open paper umbrellas, its lyricism in sharp contrast to the action; in the rain Kiyokawa personally assassinates those who had been captured. The shot contains as well biographical resonance: Shinoda’s mother’s family were in the umbrella business and, he has said, that shot “shows a bit of personal nostalgia for this past.”

Near the end of the film, a samurai, dressed in Napoleonic military gear, wonders whether Kiyokawa remains alive. “He’s only a common samurai even if he received an Imperial order,” he sneers. Class distinctions will persist into the new era. The samurai who will dominate Japan in the coming century will also preside over her militarist period, assisting as Japan attempts to create a “Greater East Asia Co-Prosperity Zone,” endorsed by an acquiescent Emperor.

Shinoda is now ready to complete the downward spiral of Kiyokawa’s life. The hand-held camera reflects his unsteady gait. Now alcoholic, he frequents brothels. A prostitute accosts him on the street, to return the straw hat he had left behind. Nothing matters. The only sound is that of his geta. A scene at the “Peony” is shot entirely from Kiyokawa’s point of view, even as we don’t see him at all. We do hear his voice as he calls a prostitute “Oren!” In daylight, Shinoda zooms ironically in to a freeze frame of Kiyokawa’s sword, now useless to him.

A rare dissolve transports the spectator to the final scene, also filmed with a shaky hand-held camera. A quick tilt down to Kiyokawa’s feet collides with Shinoda’s use of slow motion as Kiyokawa falls. Blood splashes profusely onto Sasaki’s face as for the final time Shinoda enlists the image of blood splashing to embody his own perspective on the struggles of the Bakumatsu and that cruel and senseless violence that led to the restoration of the Emperor Meiji.

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The final freeze frame is to Kiyokawa’s straw hat, his disguise, even as he has been lost to his own best self. In these freeze frames, in the point of view shots with a hand-held camera, in the subjective use of sound, Shinoda reiterates his departure from the realism of his predecessors. “Reality is not what interests me”, Shinoda once said. “I begin with reality and see what higher idea comes out of it.”

Confirming Kiyokawa’s moral decline is the voice-over narration which reports that, after his death, the ground beneath him smelled of sake. The violence of the ending of Assassination, completing an unbroken cycle, denies any redeeming effect to the Meiji Restoration, suggesting that the violence of the past will only move seamlessly into the new era.

Director ICHIKAWA Kon called Assassination Shinoda’s best film, “a brilliant and absorbing historical chronicle in which the reasons for the collapse of the government of the Tokugawa shoguns are subtly investigated.” Assassination is both a powerful psychological portrait and a rich historical study, rendering unfounded the charge that Shinoda’s treatment of history is “cursory.” His first mature film, Assassination remains among his finest.