“Any movie that I make, I always think: ‘What is a human being?’” director Kazuya Shiraishi shares as he reflects on his latest project Bushido. The samurai period drama, or jidaigeki, tells the story of ronin Yanagida Kakunoshin (Tsuyoshi Kuanagi) who has fallen into poverty but has found peace in a humble living with his daughter Kinu (Kaya Kiyohara) playing Go and helping others with the game.

It perfectly encompasses Shiraishi’s desire to examine what humans are all about, as he puts it. If anything, it is inevitable for him: “In the end, whatever I do, it always comes down to these things.”

Bushido is based on rakugo storytelling, a traditional form of Japanese verbal entertainment. It inspired Shiraishi to create the tale of Kakunoshin and his quest to protect his and his daughter’s honour when he is falsely accused of stealing money from a local merchant. 

“This all started from rakugo, rakugo from about 200 years ago,” the director says. “Within the genre of rakugo there was one story that talked about the importance of pride for samurai and how they were very proud people, so I had that as a starting point. I also took into consideration some of the contrasts and contradictions of modern society, and I added elements of revenge. So this is how it came about.”

The film itself is very deliberately paced, opting to tell the story in a slow and meaningful way rather than over relying on action and violence. This was deliberate, as Shirashi shares: “For the first half of the movie I just created the story of human emotions and human relationships, having the merchant and samurai play Go together. 

“And then there’s a change of pace at the beginning of the second half, and you have revenge, vengeance. But in the end I wanted to bring it back to this emotional level, which is how I brought it in the final part of the movie. This was all calculated from the very beginning when I decided to create the story”

Filmed at the Toei Uzumasa Studio and Shochiku Studio in Kyoto, the home of many jidaigeki over the decades, Shiraishi was keen to create a narrative that perfectly encapsulated the spirit of rakugo. To do that the director decided to hone in on one aspect: Go. 

The sport is an integral part of the history of rakugo, Shiraishi explains: “Go is very well used as a theme in many rakugo stories. That is because the game of Go is highly addictive, and so you really lose yourself while you’re playing the game. I think that that makes this game extremely interesting.”

But, even so, Shirashi had the challenge of making the game understandable even for audiences who have no familiarity with it.

“It was extremely difficult to portray that in a movie,” the director goes on. “Because it’s not like chess or other games where you have the pawns that you can easily move around and understand what’s happening.

“In this case, it was really difficult to express what one is doing with the pieces, and so I had a professional Go player work with me. We decided, one by one, the pieces that needed to be moved. I think that they are rather well accepted and this is because, in the moment, they translate very well in English, and in other languages, for any possible culture.”

The story of Kakunoshin is brought to life by Kusanagi, who the director describes as “perhaps one of the most famous idols in Japan” after he came up in the entertainment industry through his work with J-pop group SMAP. 

“He decided to build his career from that and he became a very skilled actor, so skilled that now we could say that he’s the best representative of Japanese cinema,” Shiraishi says. “This time around the story is of a fallen samurai who still has his pride and his elegance, and I thought that Kusanagi was the best person to portray this character.”

“When we talk about SMAP,” he goes on. “We have to say that they were the biggest group at that time in the entertainment business, they were the biggest to the point that even though they disbanded they nevertheless remained the top runners of the entertainment world in Japan.”

With such a high-profile actor like Kusanagi on board, Shiraishi needed to find the right person to match his energy and prowess in the role of Kakunoshin’s sworn enemy Hyogo Shibata. The samurai is the reason for Kakunoshin’s ruined reputation, and he returns from hiding to share fresh accusations against his former counterpart in Bushido.

The director managed to match Kusanagi’s energy by casting Takumi Saito, who he most recently worked with on Last of the Wolves. Shiraishi’s reasoning for picking Saito as the adversary may seem rather unexpected, though: “We can say by all means that Takumi Saito is perhaps one of the most handsome men of the Japanese movie industry, I’ve made many movies with him so I can say that.

“Each movie we’ve worked together on I could always trust him as an actor and because I wanted to cast somebody who would come in at the very end of the movie, I needed someone cool, and so this is why I decided that he was the perfect person.”

What was most important to Shiraishi though was paying homage to what came before, and just like he did with Yakuza movies with his Blood of Wolves duology the director has taken influence from the jidaigeki genre to both embody its style but also brought something new to the table.

“I too enjoy a lot of jidaigeki,” the director says as he reflects on celebrating the genre with Bushido. “When I have time, I watch as many as possible. I also wanted to tell the story of nagaya, or longhouses, in my film. Nagaya were the places you see Kakunoshin living. They’re narrow premises, they’re very small and they were featured in movies like Akahige (Red Beard) by Kurosawa Akira, for example.”

While he says he thinks that The Blood of Wolves is the film that “loves him back the most”, Shiraishi feels that all his movies are like his children. So it’s hard to choose a favourite amongst them because they each gave him a unique experience, especially given the way they allow him to celebrate genres he grew up with.

“I have to say that a big influence comes from my memories of the movies that I used to watch as a child,” the director says. “There were many classic movies that I watched, but of course, if I were to make a movie that uses exactly the same classic style I would lose to what was already made in the past.

“I always think that I need to somehow modernise them, to put something into the story to renew the genre, to change it into something which is new. So I take a genre and then I develop, and develop the story in my way.”

So, with the Yakuza genre and samurai period drama behind him, the question remains: what should he try to tackle next? Luckily, Shiraishi knows exactly what he’d like to try and do: “I’m not done, I won’t say Godzilla but still I think that I would like to take on one of those Kaiju movies.”

Written and interviewed by Roxy Simons

Featured image © 2024 Alice BL Durigatto

_{*** The interview took place at this year’s Far East Film Festival in Udine, Italy.}

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