A Bloody Spear at Mt. Fuji

A key work of post-war Japanese cinema. As decisively as Kurosawa before him, Uchida broke the conventions of the chambara or sword fight film with his witty, loose-limbed A Bloody Spear at Mount Fuji, the first work he made after returning from eight years in Manchuria. His sojourn there, under the spell of the crazed militarist Amakasu Masahiko who ran the Manchurian Film Cooperative, suggests how easily Uchida slipped from the romantic leftist populism of his pre-war social critiques to an uneasy admiration for bushido values, for empire, emperor and warrior ‘ethics’. Bloody Spear marks Uchida’s post-war return to Japanese cinema and to progressive principles, but his homecoming is markedly ambivalent in its values. As Craig Watts has written, ‘both progressive and nostalgic, humanistic and nationalistic, peaceful and violent, A Bloody Spear at Mount Fuji, like the Japanese experience in Manchuria, is an aggressive conglomeration of extremes.’ From its shambling ‘on the road’ opening, scored with jaunty jazz and marked by a flagrantly artificial setting and welter of incident, to its Shane-like ending, the film takes in a remarkable range of characters and classes, of tones and traditions. Its narrative has a peculiar stalling quality, as though Uchida were determined to suspend the expectations of the samurai film by deferring the violence forever. Full of subplots and spin-offs, scatology, sentimentality, and social satire, this simple tale, about a samurai delivering a tea cup to Edo, becomes a sprawling, digressive epic whose culmination – a fight to the death amongst gushing sake barrels – shocked the Japanese audiences of its time with its sheer vehemence. (JQ)