There's No Movie for This

No guns here: A still from Kurosawa's The Hidden Fortress (image ganked
from somewhere on the web; original owned by Toho Pictures, no doubt)

I had one very specific goal in mind when I set out to plan Sowing Ghosts: I wanted to set the story prior to 1543. That was the year in which the Japanese got their first look at matchlock firearms*.

Over the next decade and change these  hinawajū effected a great change in the way the Japanese fought one another, a change I did not want to see reflected in the story I was telling. The year 1543 also stands as a placeholder for the fifteenth-century contact between Japan and Europe.

And I definitely did not want any Europeans in this story. I've read too many stories supposedly about early modern Japan in which the viewpoint character is European. (Don't get me started about that Tom Cruise movie.) Nor did I want any guns. I'm as fascinated by firearms as many males are, but they had no place in the story I wanted to tell.


Movies can often serve as a useful source of information when looking for background detail to inform one's reading of historical fiction (say, just for an example, Sowing Ghosts). But when I decided to write a blog post pointing out some examples of movies readers could watch the better to inform their reading, I stumbled across a problem.

There are no movies set in the period about which I'm writing.

I suppose it's not helpful that the first half of the Sengoku Jidai isn't well documented... in any language. But surely accurate world-building has little to do with making movies. Otherwise there'd be no such thing as the Hollywood western. Whatever the cause, there are no movies I know of set during the Ōnin War (1467-1477) despite what I think of as great potential† for storytelling in that decade.

Kurosawa Akira is said to have loved the Sengoku Jidai, and certainly a lot of his most famous movies are set during the period. But all of these are set during the last half-century or so of the period. This means guns, guns everywhere. Even the bandit gang in Seven Samurai has guns.‡

(I think my favourite Kurosawa film is Yojimbo, and that one is actually set in the middle of the nineteenth century, during the decline of the Tokugawa Shogunate. And many other famous jidaigeki films are set during the relatively peaceful Edo period of Tokugawa rule; see the numerous versions of The Forty-Seven Ronin for example.)

So if I had to recommend one of these not-quite-accurate movies to someone wanting to know a bit more about the world of Sowing Ghosts, which would it be?

Fortunately (because this has already gone on long enough) that's an easy question to answer: The Hidden Fortress. (The Criterion version translates the title as (The Three Villains of) The Hidden Fortress.) The period in which it's set is indeterminate, but I'm guessing somewhere in the 1560s or 1570s: there are guns but they don't play a huge part in the story. Whereas one of the set-pieces of the film displays a style of bushi warfare one doesn't often see in movies.

Check out the still at the top of this post. It shows Mifune Toshiro and Fujita Susumu about to engage in a duel armed with... lances. Shades of Ivanhoe!

During the period before the introduction of firearms, the yari (best translated as "lance" even though it looks more like a spear**) was the primary battlefield weapon of a bushi. So it is apt, and honestly quite cool, to watch the scene in which the two warriors battle it out with bladed weapons that aren't swords.

On top of this, Hidden Fortress is also unusual in featuring peasant protagonists (peasants are important in Seven Samurai as well, but not in quite the same way) and in showing at least a little bit of what life was like during a period in which there was no real government in Japan and the warriors were mostly out for themselves. Hidden Fortress isn't the perfect exemplar of early sixteenth-century Kyoto, but it's probably the closest I'll get to that.

*Though the matchlocks were carried by Portuguese adventurers, the ship they were on was Chinese and the guns themselves probably made in a Portuguese colony, Malacca, on the west coast of Malaysia. The Japanese had known about firearms for about two hundred years by this time (they were first demonstrated to them by the Chinese) but I haven't seen any evidence that these primitive hand-cannon were actually used in Japan.

†You want conflict? This is all about conflict, baby. Furthermore, if you look closely you'll see that much of this war more closely resembles drug-gang turf wars than anything else.

‡I have read that Seven Samurai is set in the mid-1580s. That's the time Toyotomi Hideyoshi was completing the unification of Japan and setting in motion his famous "sword hunt" that culminated in the rigid stratification of Japan's class system... a stratification that would not have accepted Hideyoshi himself: he was the son of a peasant.

**Since you ask, spears are intended to be thrown, and lances are not. Since the yari was used for thrusting and stabbing, it is much more the equivalent of a European cavalry lance (think 19th century here, not 15th) than of a spear.