The small band of warriors fighting heroically against overwhelming odds has been a staple of story and legend since the Battle of Thermopylae and beyond. (The Neanderthals may have told their own tales about valiant battles with more numerous Cro-magnons.)
Given the enduring popularity of such stories with movie audiences around the world, including Japan, it’s somewhat strange that the siege of Oshi Castle in 1590, in which 500 defenders held off an army of 20,000, has only recently inspired a film.
But as Higuchi Shinji and Inudo Isshin’s period actioner The Floating Castle makes clear, the leader of the castle defenders was no John “The Alamo” Wayne. In their telling of the story, based on Wada Ryo’s novel, the local lord, Nagachika Narita (Nomura Mansai), is a happy-go-lucky eccentric who takes an un-samurai-like interest in the peasantry, to their delight and his retainers’ disdain.
When warlord Hideyoshi Toyotomi and his generals plot their campaign against the Hojo Clan, of which Nagachika is an ally, they confidently and contemptuously expect Oshi Castle and its oddball lord to surrender without a fight (especially after a high official from Nagachika’s domain tells them so personally). But he doesn’t and the story of how he and his samurai mount a tenacious defense is told with surprising and funny twists.
Despite this seemingly unobjectionable material, the film’s original September 2011 release was pushed back nearly a year following the earthquake and tsunami that devastated northern Japan on March 11, 2011. The reason: When the general of the besieging army, Mitsunari Ishida (Kamiji Yusuke), unleashes the waters of a nearby river to flood out the defenders, the CGI walls of water look uncomfortably like the 3.11 tsunami that swept away entire towns – and these scenes of destruction were judged to be too upsetting for local audiences in the immediate aftermath of the disaster. When the film was finally released in November 2012, however, it became a box office hit, earning 2.84 billion yen.
As spectacular as its effects may be, supervised by CGI specialist Higuchi, the film’s human drama and comedy are arguably more interesting. The castle defenders, from Nagachika to the fiery woman warrior Chidori (Ashida Mana), may be larger – or sillier – than life at times, but they are also not stock genre figures, just as Nagachika’s stratagems are not in the usual feudal lord’s playbook.
Also, the attackers are hardly united behind the blustering Mitsunari, who is outwardly confident of victory, but inwardly fearful of an embarrassment that would destroy his career. In fact they come to rather admire their smart, feisty foes and are even treated to a most unusual entertainment by one of them, though its conclusion is not what they were counting on. As Nagachika might have said, whatever keeps your castle afloat…