Every day, on every television network, someone in Japan gets the shaft.
“You traitor!” the angry lord tells the enemy samurai accused of jumping to the winning side in battle.
Cut to a close-up of the cornered warrior’s neck as the lord presses his sword down and . . . (cue special effects for geyser of blood).
This was on NHK, Japan’s classy state-run television network that broadcasts samurai dramas twice a week at 8 p.m.
Every other night of the week, one of the five commercial television networks returns to Japan’s days of yore, when men were men, women were women, swords were legal and male-pattern baldness was easy to hide.
It is the ultimate cliche about Japan that samurai dramas are actually popular. With eight samurai shows broadcast during prime time, and dozens more in reruns, a head is getting whacked off just about every time you turn on the TV.
Commander: “Lord, we have conquered the castle! We’ll ask the enemy lord to kill himself in honor. So may we save his wife, children and soldiers?” Lord: “Well, we’ll save them.”
Tough life, sure, but for the Japanese there always has been something comforting about knowing your place in society and fulfilling your obligations. That was how life worked back in the 17th Century. You were a samurai or a farmer, a craftsman or a merchant. Violate class strictures and . . . (cue special effects for geyser of blood).
An element of this class system — minus the neck wounds — exists in Japan today, where nearly all adults carry a business card. When two people meet, they exchange cards and immediately know who is a boss and who is an underling, and therefore who ranks higher so who needs to bow deeper and use the polite verb form. Violate these class strictures and . . . no bloodshed, but everyone gets really embarrassed.
From this anthropological perspective, the samurai drama is to Japan what the Hollywood western is to America: a window into the national psyche.
If individualism and the frontier spirit run to the heart of America’s personality, as well as defining the western genre, then the samurai show represents the true Japan.
“It’s a touchstone,” said actress Sayoko Ninomiya, who has appeared on dozens of samurai dramas over the years. “People get a feeling of comfort from seeing the old Japanese style.”
The old ways are fading
On the streets of Tokyo today, women occasionally wear kimonos for a day of shopping, but they are more commonly seen at weddings. In general, though, the old way of life as it’s depicted in the samurai dramas is fading away.
For example, once everyone in the neighborhood went to the public bathhouse for a daily soak. It was there — under the watchful eye of elders — that children were socialized. They learned about respect and good manners.
But today everyone can afford his or her own bathtub, children play video games alone, and many old people complain the young are spoiled and selfish.
To TV director Kazuo Ikehiro, these changes are bad news for samurai dramas. The audience who feels the strongest nostalgia for traditional Japan is getting older and is not being replaced.
The samurai genre is slowly dying, he believes.
“People like me, in my 60s, still watch, and my father — who’s in his 80s — still watch,” said Ikehiro. “These are people who have experienced a lot in life. But among young people, I don’t see much interest. They’re anti-government and anti-power. They don’t really enjoy watching shows about samurais, about people who hold real power.”
The ratings are still good for samurai dramas, but their popularity is nothing like during the 1960s, when more than two dozen shows were in production.
The more pressing problem is demographics. As in the United States, advertisers want to attract young, affluent viewers. This is not an issue for non-commercial NHK, but for the commercial networks, it’s clearly big trouble.
Bleak offerings
A look at television in Japan is to view a vast wasteland of juvenile programming. Besides documentaries and occasional American TV series such as “The X-Files” and “ER,” the typical prime time show is a bizarre hybrid of a game show and a talk show aimed at the Japanese equivalent of the Beavis and Butthead crowd.
Often, it’s a gabfest for minor celebrities and oleaginous hosts who whoop and holler as contestants embarrass themselves for fame and prizes. On any given night, it’s men wearing pink bunny suits throwing darts or young women in bikinis competing to see who can sit in a tub of frigid water the longest.
The most disturbing recent example, on at 8 p.m. one Saturday, when many children surely were watching, was a pseudo-parody that involved two gangs of young men wearing silly face masks and taking turns smacking each other on the head with large plastic fans in time to disco music. As one participant took a vicious blow to the forehead and crumpled to the ground in pain, the announcer hooted, “Hoo boy! We haven’t seen a knockout like that in six months!”
How do you compete against this when your show is about a guy who’s been dead for 300 years?
Enter the Mouse Woman
The network strategy has been to try to update the samurai dramas to make them a little more relevant to modern Japanese life. If you are thinking of John Belushi on “Saturday Night Live” as “Samurai TV Repairman,” you are not far off.
Recently there was a short-lived show about a samurai detective, and another called “Samurai Lawyer.” Industry purists cringed, because the detective show was too comedic and the lawyer show was a historical sham — there were no attorneys in the days of samurais.
“We thought young people could relate to it, but it didn’t work,” said Junichi Hanawa, producer of the show.
Hanawa, who works for the TV Asahi network, has had better success retooling another of the more venerable samurai dramas, called “Kin-san.” To give it an edge, the show added a new character this season and renamed the program “Kin-san vs. the Mouse Woman.”
Kin-san is a powerful samurai who controls Edo — old Tokyo. The Mouse Woman is a mysterious character who runs a restaurant by day but stealthily creeps around at night making mischief.
Kin-san’s shtick is that he’s a lord who administers justice, but he also has a secret identity as a playboy with an elaborate tattoo on his shoulder.
In the climax of each week’s show, Kin-san confronts a villain, who denies participation in the crime. Yet in the back of the bad guy’s mind is the question about that mysterious tattooed figure who happened on the scene as the murder was being committed.
“So,” begins Kin-san, “you deny any part in this wicked deed. But,” he continues, creeping forward for maximum dramatic effect, “on that moonlit night at the temple, you can’t say you don’t remember seeing . . . this!!!”
With a dramatic flourish, Kin-san rips open his kimono cape to reveal the shoulder tattoo of cherry blossoms.
The villain shudders, then ‘fesses up.
It’s a poor imitation of classic Japanese period films like Akira Kurosawa’s “The Seven Samurai,” but compared to men wearing bunny suits, it’s high-brow stuff.
Hiroki Matsukata, the classically trained actor who stars as Kin-san — the sixth actor to portray the role in the 26-year-old series — is in his 50s, but like Sean Connery, he’s still a tough guy.
To keep his samurai spirit in fighting shape, Matsukata can be seen after hours in Kyoto — where the series is filmed — cruising around in a Mercedes-Benz on his way to restaurants and geisha bars, where he drinks everyone else under the table.
Matsukata has his own concerns about the Samurai dramas: Young actors don’t want to follow in his footsteps.
“I learned how to ride a horse, how to use a sword, how to move,” he said. “I learned it from my seniors. Today’s young actors don’t want to learn.”
Ninomiya, the actress who guest starred in a recent episode of “Kin-san,” said all the actors work hard to get the historical nuances correct. To keep in character, she frequently wears a kimono on her days off.
“Kin-san” — along with several other samurai shows — is filmed at Toei Studios in Kyoto, which specializes in period dramas.
Hanawa, the producer, said the industry is concerned about the future of the samurai dramas, but he believes they will not disappear because at least one element of the samurai’s appeal will never fade: “They carry swords, and we’re not allowed to.”
