Japan Week films, anime and noh links

In addition to sixteen nominations^[1], the film garnered the following awards:

• Award of the Japanese Academy for "Best Art Direction" to Mitsuo Degawa and Yoshinobu Nishioka


• Hochi Film Award for "Best Actress" to Takako Matsu


• Mainichi Film Concours for "Best Supporting Actress" to Tomoko Tabata

With deep wounds, Seibei limps home as fast as he could. Kayano and Ito rush to him in the courtyard, happy to see otou-san (father).

Tomoe is there, waiting in the house. They have an emotional reunion.

His movies have won the Best Picture award at the Japanese Academy Awards four times: in 1977 for The Yellow Hankerchief (幸福の黄色いハンカチ Shiawase no Kiiroi Hankachi), in 1991 for My Sons (息子 Musuko), in 1993 for A Class to Remember (学校　Gakkō), and in 2002 for The Twilight Samurai (たそがれ清兵衛 Tasogare Seibei). In 2003 The Twilight Samurai was nominated for the 76th Academy Awards' Best Foreign Language Film.

His 2004 film, The Hidden Blade (Kakushi Ken Oni no Tsume), was nominated for sixteen awards and won three.

"The movie's success in Japan was due to the middle-aged and elderly Japanese who identified themselves with Seibei's life," the director, Yoji Yamada, said at a news conference.

"While Japan today is in chaos, I wanted to show that there was an age in which Japanese lived with confidence,"

Yoji Yamada, who directed "Bushi," expressed the gist of the comments (though not their over-the-top tenor) by saying, "He knows how to work in a group." It was Kimura's character that was being honored, not his acting chops.

There's something of a period drama boom now, but unlike "Tasogare Seibei," many of the new period dramas use computer graphics to create fantasy elements. They aren't about realism at all.

Yes, that kind of fantastic film is popular. Also, there are a lot of horror films now. In troubled times like these, more films like that tend to get made -- fantasy and horror. People want to escape, and that's what they go for.

That worries me -- how will people from other countries react? But we're living in anxious times, when people everywhere don't know what is going to happen next. What is the Bush administration going to do? Will they start a war? That is certainly worrying. Why have things come to this pass? Why can't this be settled by the United Nations? Why do we have to have this sort of international conflict? What is going to happen if a war starts?

People from Iran and other Islamic counties who took part in February's Berlin Film Festival certainly felt this sort of anxiety. The world has come to a strange and unpleasant pass. So in that sense, I think people abroad will be able to relate to the film, even though Americans and Europeans don't feel the same economic anxiety as Japanese.

But while the martial-arts-trained Sanada impressed more with his sword skills, Nagase is more convincingly the pacifist at heart who turns to violence only out of extreme necessity -- but knows how to mete it out. The sense of banked fires that can flare up, which Yamada deployed to good effect in the earlier film, is still present, though Nagase, now pushing 40 and no longer the wild kid, really seems to mean it when he says he wants a quiet life with the woman he loves.

When the world is going mad around you, carving out a small oasis of sanity is no mean feat. Sometimes it helps to have a hidden blade.

Kimura disappears into his role more completely than I would have thought possible, while Dan, a former Star performer in the Takarazuka revue, is a revelation -- thoroughly professional, refreshingly natural. Not an aughties idol or diva, but an actress who could have walked in from a Mizoguchi film.