To Trap a Kidnapper and Toei Tokyo｜The Speed That Survived Toei's Decline

Among the film studios, Toei was an overwhelming presence: from the mid-1960s through the 1970s it held sway with ninkyo (任侠) films, tales of chivalrous outlaws, and with yakuza films. But the stars who had carried it grew older, and society, having passed through the political season of the 1970s, was about to enter the bubble years. In the middle of all this, the gap between what the public wanted and what Toei did best grew steadily more visible.

It was then, at a Toei that had lost its former momentum, that a single film was made: To Trap a Kidnapper (1982). Released in September 1982, it runs a full 134 minutes. Anyone used to what people call a Toei film will find this long picture, long for Toei, surprising.

That is because Toei’s force once lay not only in its actors and its films but in its production crews and in the running of the company itself, and the sheer strength of that force sparked young people who were carrying a grudge against society, setting off a great movement in cinema.

It gets a little complicated here. When I say Toei, the momentum belonged to the Toei Kyoto Studio, not to Toei Tokyo. And To Trap a Kidnapper was made by Toei Tokyo in partnership with Nippon Television, and released by them.

Even so, watching this film, what made me feel it still had something of Toei in it, though it is so unlike a Toei picture, was its speed. Looking back, Toei had been turning out yakuza films one after another, and when the limits of their popularity came into sight, it switched to the jitsuroku (実録) line, true-account films, taking the yakuza wars then being fought across the country as its motifs and building a production system fast enough to start shooting as soon as something happened.

In other words, they had the power to sense, before anyone else, the changes in society and the movements people were likely to care about, and to mass-produce at a speed no other studio could match. This was the vitality of Toei’s golden age. But once audiences tired of that too, from the mid to late 1970s, Toei lost much of its momentum.

To Trap a Kidnapper, on the other hand, is a film that shows this Toei speed still alive in the 1980s, even in a slump. For it was made from the material of a real kidnapping of a small child that took place in January 1980 in Takarazuka, Hyogo Prefecture.

Even counting the cast, there is none of the old Toei heat. You can see that it was made instead quietly, evenly, as if tracing the kidnapping step by step. Of course, this was also an age when television networks like Nippon Television were coming in as co-producers, so it could not be Toei’s one-man show as before, and I sense that, in the Tokyo manner, a compromise was struck on that front.

Still, what draws my attention to this film is that I noticed the sensibility that built the Toei brand, which made an era and was gone in an instant, still handed down in works like this. Put the other way round, the more you find Toei’s ninkyo and yakuza films hard to get into, the better an approach it may be to start with To Trap a Kidnapper.