SEKIGAHARA

Reimagining the Decisive Battle that Defined Japan’s Future

Venue(s): Toho Cinemas Roppongi Hills
From August 26, 2017. Screening schedule changes day by day. Please check at the theater site.
Language: Japanese with English subtitles.
Official website: wwwsp.sekigahara-movie.com/
Theater website: hlo.tohotheater.jp/net/schedule/009/TNPI2000J01.do
Trailer: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=L98V5YBHbTI


Title: 関ヶ原 (Sekigahara)
Director: Masato Harada (原田眞人)
Duration: 149 min

Master storyteller Masato Harada (Kamikaze Taxi, Chronicle of My Mother, The Emperor in August) delves into one of Japanese history’s watershed episodes, and emerges with a powerful reinterpretation that completely overturns our conventional understanding of its key players, Mitsunari Ishida and Ieyasu Tokugawa.

Working with a sprawling cast and shooting in locations where the battle of Sekigahara actually took place, he transforms the fateful conflict between the two men into a war pitting justice for the greater good vs. absolute power for the chosen few.

Harada casts his frequent muse, Koji Yakusho, as the bloated, nail-biting, self-serving opportunist (that would be Ieyasu), and megastar Junichi Okada as his real hero, Mitsunari, the love-struck champion of truth. Among other standouts in a sprawling cast are Takehiro Hira as Sakon Shima, Mitsunari’s righthand warrior.

Directing just his second jidaigeki period drama (after 2015’s Kakekomi), and adapting a 3-volume, 1,500-page novel of the same name, Harada populates Sekigahara with a teeming assortment of historic characters and enough political intrigue, Machiavellian maneuvering and exciting ninja action for an entire miniseries. But his focus is resolutely on the motives and strategies of the two men whose forces would meet for the final showdown in a foggy Gifu valley: Mitsunari and Ieyasu.

The historically decisive battle of Sekigahara was fought on a single day in 1600 and lasted just six hours. But 30,000 of the 150,000 forces in the Eastern and Western Armies did not survive, and its outcome brought to an end the centuries-long Warring States period. By 1603, the victor was named shogun and ushered in the peace, stability and growth that would last throughout the 260 years of the Edo period.

Shortly after the film opens, Hideyoshi Toyotomi (Kenichi Takito), the samurai who had almost completed the unification process begun by Nobunaga Oda, is on his deathbed. His devoted acolyte, Mitsunari (Okada), vows to protect Hideyoshi’s 5-year-old heir until he is old enough to rule, but the cunning, power-hungry Ieyasu (Yakusho, never better) has other ideas. Hideyoshi’s hold on western Japan has been weakened by a series of costly invasions of Korea, while Ieyasu has become the largest landowner in eastern Japan. With Hideyoshi gone, he begins consolidating his expanded power base, forging alliances with notable daimyo families and hatching plots with his servant-conspiracy partner to undermine Toyotomi clan rule.

Mitsunari cannot compete with Ieyasu’s record as a military general, but he won’t stand by as the older man gains dangerous ground. Stolid but determined to persist in his belief that justice alone can create a world without chaos, he enlists the help of Sakon Shima (Hira, in a star-making performance), the “most honorable samurai in the land,” and the two set about rallying support. He also begins to rely on intelligence reports from the comely ninja Hatsume (Kasumi Arimura), whom he had saved from death and soon falls in love with. But she goes on an errand for him just as Ieyasu is gathering his troops. Mitsunari’s Western Army outnumbers his rival’s Eastern Army and victory should be assured. But fate intervenes in unforeseen ways…

Toho Cinemas Roppongi

Photos: ©2017 "Sekigahara" Film Partners All Rights Reserved