Kosaku Yamashita's The Great Casino (1968) Portrays the Japanese Heart in Full

This week, I have chosen a single film.

The Japanese heart has been lost. Now that every place of belonging has been broken by the state and society and people have been left in isolation, I feel that rather than seeking a “new story,” we need to turn our eyes to the heart of the past.

Yet the heart cannot be defined. It is not something AI can tell you if you ask. It is boundless and vast, and it reveals itself in a different form each time. Moreover, the heart changes with the relationships that a place gives rise to. It is only later that it was cultivated into the concepts of various schools of thought.

The culmination of these long years is the source of what later came to be spoken of as “the Japanese heart.” Sadly, though, it is something already lost, and it will not come back. Ours is an unstable age that allows no time for nostalgia for the past or even for grief, an age in which nations, towns, and peoples change in an instant. If we who live in its midst are to speak of the “future,” we must first dig down into where we ourselves stand.

Is there, then, any way left for us today to understand the past? Sadly, it has died out of this world, but not very long ago. In fact, “the heart of the past” survived until only about half a century ago. Its decisive form is engraved on film.

That film is The Great Casino (1968). It is the finest living textbook, one that everyone concerned with culture, history, or thought should see. Frankly, everything is portrayed in it far more richly and deeply than in hundreds of books on the Japanese heart. The way it portrays them is so masterful that it leaves me speechless.

Facing oneself, resolve, love between a man and a woman, the bond between men, the consideration between women, the bond of master and disciple who have entrusted their lives to each other, and the rifts and feelings that cannot be avoided when one lives by a code. As far as I know, there is no other work that has made the heart of this country so manifest and portrayed it so completely in a single piece.

Mencius (372–289 BC) once taught that benevolence, righteousness, propriety, and wisdom were the “Four Sprouts” of the heart. Later, the Former Han Confucian Dong Zhongshu (179–104 BC) connected them with the theory of yin and yang and the five phases and added trustworthiness to establish the “five constant virtues” of benevolence, righteousness, propriety, wisdom, and trustworthiness. Moreover, the Book of Rites, one of the foundational scriptures of Confucianism, records the “Seven Emotions” of joy, anger, sorrow, fear, love, hatred, and desire as “feelings that people have from birth without being taught.”

These had a deep influence on the spiritual structure of the Japanese, and the five constant virtues and the seven emotions, made Japanese, were richly nurtured in the archipelago. All of them are present in this one film. It is hard to believe, and it has gone beyond anything that can be discussed as a film.

The work itself is without question one of the masterpieces of Toei, the studio that excelled at ninkyo films, the chivalrous yakuza film. It was directed by Kosaku Yamashita, and it became the turning point toward the “Toei yakuza film,” which burst into full bloom from here, as the genre moved from chivalry to the yakuza. Koji Tsuruta stars as Nakai, Tomisaburo Wakayama plays his sworn brother Matsuda, Shinichiro Mikami plays Matsuda’s younger brother Otokichi, Junko Fuji plays Matsuda’s wife Hiroe, Hiroko Sakuramachi plays Nakai’s wife Tsuyako, and Hiroshi Nawa leads as Ishido, who stands opposed yet has reached a state where he is no enemy. Their “hearts” cross, and true feeling is born from them and fades again, all enfolded without separation, reflecting the real Japanese heart.

This work cannot be spoken of in words. For the sake of what lies ahead, please do watch it and savor the heart engraved in it.