Sanshô Dayû (1954), known as Sanshô the Baliff in English, is a beloved Japanese period drama about the journey of life and the journey of a man, Zushiô, over earth and water, in search of his loved ones. It is the story of family love and the sacrifice of a courageous woman, Anju, to ensure that at least part of her family would have an opportunity to be reunited. Be warned that this film is a tear-jerker of the first magnitude.

Historical Background: Although Akira Kurosawa is undoubtedly the Japanese director best known to Western audiences, the mantle of most beloved director in Japan itself may very well belong instead to Kenji Mizoguchi (1898-1956). He made his first film at the age of 24 in 1922 and went on to make a total of 86 despite dying of leukemia at the relatively young age of 58. Eighty-six films in 34 years is an average of 2.5 per career year. Outside of Japan, Mizoguchi is best known for three films from the 1950’s, Life of Oharu (1952), Ugetsu (1953), and Sanshô Dayû (1954), during which time he was making films designed to be more accessible for Western audiences while retaining the fundamentally Japanese character of his works.

Mizoguchi was born the son of a poor carpenter. His mother died when he was still a teen and his sister was sold as a geisha. It is probably because of these loses of the principal females in his early life that Mizoguchi developed a strong empathy for women and propounded feminist ideals. Most of his films center on female characters – usually having to bear monumental sufferings but emerging with their spirit intact. Sanshô Dayû is one exception, centering most especially of the male protagonist, Zushiô, but nevertheless featuring two women in fundamentally important roles – his mother and his sister.

The Story: The beloved Governor of the Tango district of Japan is a man of courage, principle, and compassion. He has defied an order from the military command to supply additional men for conscription because there are already too few hands to tend the fields and the populace is at risk of starvation if more men are sent. For disobeying the order from his superior, The Governor is removed from his position and sent into exile in a remote province. He must leave behind his wife, Tamaki (Kinuyo Tanaka), son Zushiô (Masahiko Kato), and daughter Anju (Keiko Enami). He leaves his son with a family heirloom, a statue of the Goddess of Merci, and three pieces of wisdom that he wants his son to incorporate. Zushiô repeats these lessons to ensure that he has learned them.

Without mercy, a man is not a human being.

Be hard on yourself but merciful to others.

Men are created equal. Everyone is entitled to happiness.

Tamaki, Zushiô, and Anju and the children’s old nurse must undertake a dangerous journey to the province where the father now lives. They soon find themselves passing through a region where slave traders and bandits abound and residents have been forbidden to take in travelers. They decide to make a shelter in a great cotton grass field for the night. Zushiô and Anju gather branches and reeds together. While tugging together on one branch it snaps and the two break into laughter as they fall to the ground. A seemingly kindly woman who lives locally discovers their campsite and invites them to stay with her. She feeds them and urges them to travel by boat in the morning because the roads are too dangerous. In the morning, it turns out that the woman has betrayed them to slave traders. Tamaki and her children are separated. She will be sent to Sado Island and sold into prostitution. The children are sold to a local slave owner, Sanshô Dayû (Eitarô Shindô). They have been reduced from their noble birth to a subhuman status.

Zushiô and Anju have trouble adjusting initially to the hard work and cruel treatment but provide much needed support for one another. They also get some much needed moral encouragement from Taro, the adult son of Sanshô, but a decent man who rejects his father’s inhumanity. They get encouragement, as well, from Namiji (Noriko Tachibana), a slave woman, who becomes their surrogate mother. When she tries to escape because “they reminded me of my own children back home”, she is branded on the forehead with a hot iron.

Ten years pass and Zushiô (Yoshiaki Hanayagi) and Anju (Kyôko Kagawa) have grown into adulthood. He is twenty-three and she eighteen. Zushiô has forgotten the teachings of his father and, instead, curries Sanshô’s favor by aiding in the disciplining of the other slaves. When an old man attempts to escape, it is Zushiô who brands him. When Namiji grows deathly ill, Sanshô orders that she be dumped in the forest to die. The task of delivering her there falls to Zushiô and Anju and a guard. Namiji is set down on the forest floor. Anju provides her with a wine to hold onto, the other end of which is attached to a statue of Buddha – a kind of umbilical cord to the afterlife. Zushiô and Anju are given permission to construct a canopy to protect Namiji from rain.

While cutting reeds and branches, Zushiô and Anju and fall to the ground just as they had years earlier during the last night with their mother. This chance flashback reawakens Zushiô’s memories of his mother and his father’s words of wisdom. Zushiô suggests that they attempt an escape, but Anju points out that two of them together would have little change of escape. She advises him to head for the monastery. She will stay behind to deceive the guard and delay pursuit. Anju tells the guard that Zushiô will follow shortly and suggests they return to the manor. She knows that she will be tortured and under torture unable to withhold the truth. She walks calmly and majestically into the nearby lake and drowns herself. Ripples gently spread from where she went under.

Zushiô reaches the monastery where Taro now lives, having realized that he could not follow in his father’s footsteps. Taro hides him from the pursuers and provides him with a letter of petition to the Prime Minister. Ignored by the Prime Minister initially, Zushiô gains access when the Prime Minister recognizes the Goddess of Mercy heirloom as the one given by one of his own ancestors to Zushiô’s father. Zushiô’s father has since become something of a legendary hero for his adherence to principle. Unfortunately, his father had died less than a year ago. The Prime Minister elevates Zushiô to his rightful social status and appoints him as the new Governor of Tango district.

Zushiô immediately decrees that the sale or trade in human beings is outlawed in all of Tango district. He knows that this exceeds his authority (he only has jurisdiction over government lands, not private manors), but he will have time to enforce his decree before resigning. He has Sanshô and all of his family arrested and exiled, freeing his former fellow slaves. He is heartbroken to discover, however, the sacrifice made by Anju.

Zushiô will now seek out the only other member of his family who may be living – his mother. He travels to Sado Island – not as a Governor but as an ordinary man. He is told that she is believed to have died in a tidal wave. He goes down to the sea and finds an old man harvesting seaweed. He recalls the tidal wave that killed most who were on the beach, but Zushiô hears the song of longing that his mother sings, yearning for Zushiô and Anju. She has grown very old and is broken and blind. He greets her but she has been fooled before by others and won’t believe him. He hands her the Goddess of Mercy heirloom which she caresses to discover its identity and his. They embrace and, after a few moments, the camera pans to the seaweed harvester at work and then to the everlasting sea.

Themes: The style of Sanshô the Baliff is distinctly Japanese. Like other Asian cultures, Japanese philosophy emphasizes the circular and continuous nature of life more than the linear construct of Western philosophy and literature that features beginnings and endings. Sanshô establishes this theme during the opening credits, which are superimposed over ancient stones barely rising above the surface of the earth, which in Japanese tradition symbolize memories, traditions, ancestors, and the continuity of life and time. The story to be told is identified as follows: “The origin of this legend of Sanshô Dayû, the Baliff, goes back to medieval times when Japan had not yet emerged from the Dark Ages and mankind had yet to awaken as human beings.” It is set in what Westerners call the eleventh century A.D. Later in the film, the ancient stones reappear to introduce a skip ahead in time of ten years. The story is introduced in a way that suggests picking up on a narrative already in progress. Later, the film ends by cutting from the central characters to an unrelated man harvesting seaweed and then to an image of the eternal sea. Continuity is also seen in Zushiô ultimately becoming the quality of man that his father had been. When characters important to the story die, they seem to melt into the environment. Anju’s death scene is especially remarkable in that respect. She walks serenely and gracefully into the lake, disappears masked by the mist, and we are left to ponder the ever widening ripples on the lake which demonstrate the continuity of her influence of the world she once inhabited. Water, in oriental philosophies, is symbolic of the continuity of existence in the way in cycles through the atmosphere, streams, and the seas.

Another related pair of core themes of Sanshô the Baliff are the importance of compassion and the moral imperative against slavery . The father of Zushiô and Anju teaches that “Without mercy, a man is not a human being.” As we are told at the very beginning, this is the story of the awakening of human beings and the emergence from the Dark Ages in which slavery was standard practice. Sanshô the Baliff emphasizes that it is sometimes necessary to adhere to moral principals rather than the letter of the law when fundamental injustices are codified in law.

Production Values: One of the distinctive techniques of Mizoguchi as a director is an emphasis on diagonal composition. Many frames have lines that stretch across the diagonal rather than mainly horizontally or vertically. Mizoguchi also avoids framing in the manner of much of French cinema, preferring to create the sense of the scene extending in all directions, left, right, backward, and forward, from what is seen. This reinforces the Japanese emphasis on spacial and temporal continuity. The movements of characters likewise often proceed on the diagonal of the picture.

Mizoguchi was also a master of camera movement. He featured extended shots, which can often only be accomplished effectively through fluid camera movement. Mizogushi used a lot of crane shots to provide aerial perspectives. Most of the shots in Mizogushi films are from a distance rather than close-ups. This contributes to distanciation which is in keeping with the oriental view of detachment.

Another favorite tactic of Mizoguchi was rhyming – parallels between events in two or more different segments of the story. One example occurs at the nadir of Zushiô’s progression as an individual, when he brands, at the instruction of Sanshô, an old man who attempted to escape. The next scene shows Zushiô’s mother, Tamaki, having her Achilles tendon severed as punishment for attempting to escape from Sado Island. Rhyming mutilations. In each of these painful scenes, Mizoguchi demonstrates his artistry and sensitivity by having the camera focus not on the mutilations but the horror of the respective observers. Sometimes violence is more effectively depicted artistically than graphically, although the point seems to be lost on Hollywood and on Mel Gibson in particular.

Kinuyo Tanaka is considered by many to be the greatest Japanese actress ever. She has that uncanny knack for suggesting simultaneously vulnerability and great interior strength. Her other credits include such films as The Life of Oharu (1952), Ugetsu (1953) and The Ballad of Narayama (1958). Yoshjiaki Hanayagi as the adult Zushiô was not especially to my liking. He lacked the qualities of a hero – at least as I’ve come to expect from my vantage point in the Western world. Were his performance better, I would have given this film five stars instead of four. Kyôko Kagawa was magnificent as the adult Anju. Her other film appearances include Tokyo Story (1953), The Bad Sleep Well (1960), and High and Low (1963). Eitarô Shindô was very convincing as the bad guy. His other work included Sisters of the Gion (1936), Drunken Angel (1948), and The Life of Oharu (1952).

Bottom-Line: Sanshô Dayû won the Golden Lion at the Venice film festival in 1954. This is an oddly named film, considering that Sanshô is the villain and gets far less screen time than either Zushiô or Anju. The final mesmerizing scene of Sanshô the Baliff is almost unbearable in its emotional intensity. Some film critics cite it as one of the most perfect scenes in film history. I highly recommend this beautiful film. It is in Japanese with English subtitles and has a running time of 125 minutes.


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You might want to check out these other excellent films from Japan:

The Ballad of Narayama
The Burmese Harp
Chushingura
Drunken Angel
The Eel
Floating Weeds
Gate of Hell
The Hidden Fortress
High and Low
Ikiru
Kagemusha
Kwaidan
Ran
Rashômon
Red Beard
Samurai 1: Musashi Miyamoto
Sanjuro
The Seven Samurai
Shall We Dance?
Stray Dog
The Woman in the Dunes
Yojimbo

Recommended:
Yes

Video Occasion: Fit for Friday Evening
Suitability For Children: Suitable for Children Age 13 and Older