The Sanada Warriors

In the 1960s Toei Studio was Yakuza Central and Tai Kato was the chief exponent and innovator of this popular genre. American audiences equate the yakuza with the contemporary gangster, but the classic yakuza setting is more akin to the western, with swordplay more than gunplay, silk not seersucker, and honor not anarchy in the teeming gambling underworld. This allowed Tai Kato to indulge his passion for historical drama, as well as for startling realism and audacious camerawork. It also shows us yakuza’s roots in the samurai (chambara) film, in which Toei specialized. Kato contributed to the chambara revival after the Occupation ban on this genre’s “feudal values” was lifted. The evolution from samurai to yakuza was effected by a societal change-when swords were outlawed (in 1868), only outlaws had swords. Ergo, the outlaw hero, for whom duty (giri) and humanity (ninjo) were frequently in conflict.In the low-budget quickies that were in demand during the second Golden Age of Japanese cinema, constraint was the mother of invention and personal style for Kato. Not only did he favor “the natural beauty of the face” over makeup, and gesture over genre codes, he created what some call a cinema of excess: one-shot sequences of extraordinary lyricism and power, flat wide-angle framing, and his most famous trait, the low-angle shot which breaks up the scene and sometimes the body into its components. All in all, closer to Sergio Leone than to Ozu. Koshi Ueno wrote of Kato’s “desire to look at things which are difficult to see from a normal viewing position. His desire to look is also a desire to show.” —BAM/PFA