Blood and Bones

Chi to hone

Japan

2004

140 Min

Color

1.85:1

Japanese, Korean

Currently 3.3/5 Stars.
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SCR Sogil Yan, Yoichi Sai, Wui Sin Chong

CAST Kyoka Suzuki, Hirofumi Arai, Susumu Terajima, Takeshi Kitano, Jô Odagiri, Tomoko Tabata, Yutaka Matsushige, Mari Hamada, Yuko Nakamura, Atsushi Itō

In 1923, the Korean teenager Kim Shun-Pei moves from Cheju Island, in South Korea, to Osaka, in Japan. Along the years, he becomes a cruel, greedy and violent man and builds a factory of kamaboko, processed seafood products, in his poor Korean-Japanese community exploiting his employees. He makes fortune, abuses and destroys the lives of his wife and family, having many mistresses and children and showing no respect to anybody. Later he closes the factory, lending the money with high interests and becoming a loan shark. His hatred behavior remains until his last breath, alone in North Korea. –IMDb

Director

Yoichi Sai

Yoichi Sai (born 6 July 1949 in Nagano Prefecture, Japan) is a Japanese film director. His mother is Japanese and his father is Zainichi Korean（Korean Japanese）.

Sai’s 2004 film Chi to hone won four Japanese Academy Awards, including two for Sai himself, for Best Director and Best Screenplay. He had previously received two nominations in the same categories for Tsuki wa dotchi ni dete iru. In 1999 he shot Buta no mukui (The Pig’s Retribution), a film set in the lavish natural scenery of Okinawa, inspired by the 1996 Akutagawa Prize-winning eponymous novel by Eiki Matayoshi. The film won the Don Quixote prize at Locarno International Film Festival in 1999.

Sai won the award for Best Screenplay at the 11th Yokohama Film Festival for A Sign Days.

As an actor, he appeared in Nagisa Oshima’s 1999 film Taboo. He is the current president of the Directors Guild of Japan. —Wikipedia

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Tyler Aikens

10Jan11

A dull movie on an important topic.

Blue K, Custodian of the Cinema

8May10

A flawed film, but one that speaks to me on a painful and an intimate level. I have personally witnessed the lives of many older Korean men who internalized so much anger due to the sense of emasculation they felt at having lost their nation due to the Japanese annexation. Men who speak Japanese as fluently or better than Korean, who were never fully integrated into Japanese society...

crmantao and Arsaib like this

Musidora

8May10

I really want to watch "Chi to Hone" but at the same time it's one of the films I most fear to see.

dBainy

16Mar10

One of my favorite Takeshi films. Couple of reasons: 1. Realism. As a Korean immigrant to Japan prior to WWII, Shun-pei had virtually no choice but to join the Japanese Imperial Army to "fight" Koreans. Namely, rape, kill, and pillage innocent Koreans. Horrors he witnessed from the war where he was forced to kill his own people, made him numb, ruthless and determined. 2. HIs will was forever shaped by history.

Samuel Dupont-Foisy likes this