What film got you hooked?

A continuing feature that asks prominent cinephiles "What film got you hooked on Japanese cinema?"

The Seven Samurai/ The Funeral
by Mark Schilling


The director who got me started on Japanese films was Kurosawa Akira, the one who got me hooked was Itami Juzo. The first Japanese film I ever saw, in my university days, was "The Seven Samurai," which I found enormously entertaining and wise. Kurosawa was making an Eastern Western, with John Ford as an inspiration, but he was also making a film about the heart of the samurai ethos. Shimura Takashi showed us how the best of the samurai lived, Mifune Toshiro, how they died.

But by the time I came to Japan, in 1975, Kurosawa was already a figure of Japanese cinema's past. I dutifully studied the script of "Kagemusha" for months, so I could puzzle out its medieval language on the screen, but the film struck me as monument building. In other words, the sort of thing a ruler -- or master director -- does at the end of his reign.

When I saw Itami's "The Funeral" in 1984 -- his first film and in some ways his best -- I had an entirely different reaction. Here was a contemporary director making a film about contemporary Japan with a sharp satirical knife that may have had a Western design, but no Westerner could have sliced and diced the foibles of modern Japanese society with Itami's acuity and skill.

Also, his characters were, not heroes from another age, but modern people whose language, motives and failings I could understand. I became a fan -- and started looking for other Japanese films as smart and funny and well made. I'm still looking.

Mark Schilling has been reviewing films for The Japan Times since 1989 as well as being the Japan correspondent for Variety. His writing on Japanese film has appeared in The Asian Wall Street Journal, the Japan edition of Newsweek, USA Today, Interview, Winds, The Japan Quarterly and Kinema Junpo. He has published four books, “The Encyclopedia of Japanese Pop Culture”, “Contemporary Japanese Film”, “The Yakuza Movie Book: A Guide to Japanese Gangster Films”, and “No Borders, No Limits: Nikkatsu Action Cinema”. He is based in Tokyo, Japan.