Japanese Swordfighters and American Gunfighters

Abstract

Like so many Japanese critical terms, gendai-geki and jidai-geki are simultaneously precise and loose categorizations for the two major megagenres of Japanese films. Gendai-geki generally refers to motion pictures which have a setting contemporaneous with the time of filming. Jidai-geki is not the Japanese equivalent of such general English language terms as historical drama, costume drama, or period drama. It primarily refers to films set in the latter part of the Tokugawa era, from the early 1600's to 1867. Stories with earlier historical settings are also jidai-geki but these are rare. The proper period of the jidai-geki ends with the beginning of the Meiji Restoration in 1868. Jidai-geki plots usually center on swordsmen of fictional, legendary, or actual historical origin. These same heroes often appear in the popular printed fiction of the Tokugawa and Meiji periods. This kind of adventure story still has many readers in Japan. In addition to these literary sources, naniwabushi, kodan, and other kinds of oral narrative transmitted by individual storytellers are other major jidai-geki sources. Unlike the Kabuki theater which moved from its popular origins to become an aesthetic entertainment, these balladmongers today remain common entertainers without any aura of fine culture. Kabuki furnishes almost no film stories but many of its plot elements reoccur in jidai-geki. These same plot elements are equally common to traditional ballads, popular fiction, and Shinkokigeki (New National Drama) which took heroic tales set in the late feudal era and staged them with representational realistic techniques borrowed from Shimpa and Shingeki. Shinkokugeki did not try to rework Kabuki plays into its realistic style. Instead its playwrights fashioned their scripts from the more violent stories of the oral narrative traditions. The emphasis was on maximum melodramatic thrills. The highlights of Shinkokugeki performances are elaborate athletic swordfights that exploit all possible gory variations in a manner that suggests berserk Grand Guignol. In contrast, Kabuki swordfights-not nearly as numerous as those of Shinkokugeki-are a form of dance called tachimawari. In classic tachima-

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