Takeshi Kitano became Japan’s most internationally celebrated director of the 1990s and beyond by a kind of serendipity.
In the previous decade Kitano had become a ubiquitous media presence, first as a member of the popular manzai (comic duo) act Two Beats and then as a ferociously productive, fearlessly iconoclastic multi-talent.
As “Beat Takeshi” – the stage name he adopted for his manzai career, he played the sharp-tongued wisecracker, be it as the MC of a current affairs program or the titular host of Takeshi’s Castle, a wacky game show in which contestants competed in various challenges, with Kitano presiding as the mock castle’s “count.” The show aired from 1986 to 1990 on the TBS network and had a long afterlife in many international versions.
Meanwhile, Kitano was acting in TV dramas and films, with a role as a brutal POW camp guard in Oshima Nagisa’s 1983 Merry Christmas Mr. Lawrence raising his international profile. “Whenever I appeared on screen audiences would start laughing no matter what role I was in,” Kitano told this writer in a 1998 interview. “It took about fifteen years for audiences to regard me as something other than a comedian.”
In 1989, producer Okuyama Kazuyuki asked Kitano to direct Violent Cop, a hard-boiled film veteran director Fukasaku Kinji had exited due to a scheduling conflict. Kitano accepted the offer, though he had never sat in the director’s chair. “In the beginning I didn’t know very much how to move the camera and so on,” he commented in the same interview. “So [Violent Cop] turned out looking like a souvenir snapshot.”
But the critics raved about this film starring Kitano as a violence-prone, revenge-seeking cop and he was awarded the Best Director prize at the Yokohama Film Festival. Also, Violent Cop earned 780 million yen (US$6.5 million) at the box office – not bad for a first-time director, though Kitano’s national celebrity undoubtedly gave the film a boost.
In the films that followed Kitano developed a distinctive style characterized by long takes, limited camera movement, dry humor, clipped dialogue and, in films featuring gangsters and cops, sudden outbursts of violence. In contrast to the many Japanese directors who filmed street fights and gun battles with tough guys rising phoenix-like after being hit with blows or bullets, Kitano showed punched or shot characters dropping like puppets whose strings have been cut. This, Kitano told me, was simply realistic. Growing up in a tough Tokyo neighborhood, he said, he would often see yakuza fighting each other: “Usually it would be over in one punch,” he added.
In his films Kitano usually took the starring role, be it as the psychotic gangster in Boiling Point (1991) or the sardonic gang sub-boss in Sonatine (1993), and was usually the one delivering the blows. Call it directorial ego-tripping, but Kitano was a strong on-screen presence: cool but intense, stoic but volatile. And after a 1994 motor scooter accident that nearly killed him, his damaged face served as a mask that could frighten or intimidate, though his puckish sense of humor never left him.
Abroad, however, Kitano and his films were largely unknown until Sonatine screened in the Un Certain Regard section of the 1993 Cannes Film Festival and in that year’s London Film Festival. Some viewers were unimpressed – French star Alain Delon complained that “[Kitano] is not an actor – he only has three facial expressions” – while others praised Kitano’s film about a gang war in Okinawa, which mixed comedy (gangsters sumo wrestling on a beach) and violence (Kitano’s mad dog character blasting a banquet hall full of gangsters with an assault rifle) in ways fresh and disturbing. Kitano acquired an enthusiastic overseas following, including director Quentin Tarantino, who later released the film on his own DVD label.
In Japan, though, Sonatine was a flop, earning back less than one-fifth of its 500 million yen (US$4 million) budget, though composer Joe Hisaishi, a frequent future collaborator with Kitano, received a Japan Academy Prize for his minimalist score.
Kitano next released Getting Any? (1995), a goofball comedy about the quest of the halfwit hero, playing by Kitano disciple Dankan, to have sex by any means necessary, and Kids Return (1996), a poignant drama about two buddies who drop out of high school, one to become a boxer and the other a gangster, but are laid low by their personal demons.
With his seventh film, Hana-bi, Kitano broke free of the “cult director” label and ascended to the international cinematic heights. A spare, elegiac, violent drama about a cop (Kitano) who goes rogue after his partner (Osugi Ren) is half-paralyzed by a gangster’s bullet, Hana-bi won the Golden Lion at the 1997 Venice Film Festival. This accolade, which had last been awarded to a Japanese film in 1958 (Inagaki Hiroshi’s Rickshaw Man), made Kitano a globally celebrated auteur, while raising his critical stock at home. The Kinema Junpo magazine critics’ poll named Hana-bi the best Japanese film of the year and Kurosawa Akira included it in his list of 100 best films of all time, a passing of the torch from a giant of Japanese cinema’s Golden Age.
Kitano’s own assessment of the film was more modest: Comparing Hana-bi to an entrance exam for a public university, he told me, “I think I scored an average of sixty points on all the subjects and passed.”
That has since proven to be his highest score, at least as far as international awards go. Several of his later films were selected for Cannes and Venice, but none walked away with the biggest prizes.
His one attempt at an “international” film – the 2000 yakuza-goes-to-LA actioner Brother – was bashed by critics and disappointed at the box office, but not long after Kitano finally hit the jackpot with The Blind Swordsman: Zatoichi, his 2003 take on the iconic Zatoichi franchise about a wandering blind swordsman. With Kitano playing the blonde-haired lead, this quirky, action-packed film earned 2.85 billion yen (US$24 million) in Japan – a career high and the fifth-best total for the year among domestic releases.
Kitano followed up with the hit Outrage trilogy about high-body-count gang wars. The final installment, the 2017 Outrage Coda, starring Kitano as an old-school gangster who kills with all the emotion of a roach exterminator, made a respectable 1.59 billion yen (US$13.5 million). It recycled familiar tropes from earlier Kitano films, including the stolid, take-no-prisoners persona of its hero. And he has not made a film since.
In the current millennium others have contested Kitano’s crown as Japan’s most eminent working director. Kore-eda Hirokazu won the Cannes Palme d’Or in 2018 for his dark family drama Shoplifters and Hamaguchi Ryusuke garnered four Oscar nominations, including Best Picture, for his 2021 drama Drive My Car.
“He is still a filmmaker worth following,” says Aaron Gerow, a Yale professor and Japanese film scholar who wrote a 2008 book on Kitano. “But one doesn’t see him leading Japanese cinema like he used to, and fewer young filmmakers appear who want to emulate his recent work. He is not radically questioning Japanese film like he did before, and thus his work doesn’t speak on a meta-level like it used to.”
For all that, Kitano is still a master whose work has endured. That outcome would have sounded like a fairy tale in the early 1970s, when he was a struggling comic plying his trade at a strip joint in Asakusa, a rowdy Tokyo entertainment district. That period of his life has since been turned into Asakusa Kid, a 2021 Netflix film directed by comedian Gekidan Hitori and based on Kitano’s memoir of the same title, with the young Kitano being played by Yagira Yuya. Will it be his valedictory? Chances are Kitano, whose energy and ambition once seemed limitless, will supply one of his own.
* As Mr Takeshi Kitano is recognized worldwide by this name, we take exception to the Japanese family name - personal name rule.
Mark Schilling