The Three Treasures

The Three Treasures (1959)
Toho Studios
Director: Inagaki Hiroshi, Tsuburaya Eiji (special effects)

Also known as: The Birth of Japan – a literal translation of the Japanese title.

A change of pace this week, as we look at a film sometimes described as the Japanese equivalent of a Biblical epic. I’m not sure that that’s exactly accurate. It does include some re-enacted mythological tales, but it mostly centres on Yamato Takeru, a figure more on a par with King Arthur or Robin Hood – a legendary folk hero who may have been based on a real person but who is widely treated as fictional. The adventures of the English folk heroes have been retold many times, sometimes with an emphasis on a presumed “historical authenticity” and sometimes as flat-out fantasy, and the same’s true of Yamato Takeru.

This film is on the “period piece” end of the spectrum. It has an air of the prestige production about it. It’s not one of Toho’s anniversary specials – the studio was founded in 1932 – but it was marketed as their thousandth film.

What’s a prestigious pseudo-historical epic doing in this blog? It does have a daikaiju in it – which was featured on promotional posters as if it were an important plot element – but only in one short scene, and that’s one of the cutaway mythological scenes. But it’s here because it lays some of the groundwork for later movies (the kaiju-laden fantasy Yamato Takeru (1994) and the kaiju movies featuring King Ghidorah), because it’s just interesting in its own right and because I think it’s worth thinking about a movie that, in the middle of these other Japanese and American atomic creature features, reminds us that supernatural giant monsters are also available.

The broad strokes of the story can be found in two texts, the Kojiki and the Nihon Shoki, which were composed roughly a generation apart more than 1300 years ago. Both were intended to legitimise the Imperial rule of the House of Yamato by tracing its ancestry back to the gods, and both include Imperial genealogies (compare with the “begat” sections of the Judaeo-Christian Bible) with occasional asides as well as mythological tales now considered part of Shintō belief. The biographies of the first 25 emperors – up to about the start of the sixth century CE – aren’t generally taken to be historical fact.

Ōtarashihiko, the Emperor Keikō, is listed as the 12th Emperor of the Yamato line. Ousu no Mikoto (the “Mikoto” suffix indicating that he’s a prince), later called Yamato Takeru, was one of Emperor Keikō’s sons, but not himself an Emperor. (He had a brother called Ōusu – don’t get them confused!) His son, Tarashinakatsuhiko, was number 14, the Emperor Chūai. The missing link, lucky 13, is Wakatarashihiko, the Emperor Seimu, Yamato Takeru’s half-brother.

Both books pause in their begatting to detail Yamato Takeru’s adventures, although the Nihon Shoki attributes about half of them to his father instead.

(A properly indexed, searchable, online copy of an English translation of the Nihon Shoki can be found here – the relevant part is Vol I, Book VII, pages 188 to 216. The Kojiki can be found here as a collection of scanned pages in need of some volunteer editors – the begatting pauses between pages 204 and 223. Both translations were made in the 19th century. Both write the prince’s name as Wo-usu (and his confusing brother as Oho-usu), the Nihon Shoki calls him “Yamato-dake” and the Kojiki “Yamato-take”. The film calls him “Yamato Takeru” – I assume this is a question of archaic and modern forms of Japanese.)

As for the Anglophone market title, The Three Treasures: these are the Imperial Regalia of Japan, three ancient ceremonial objects used during coronations. The Japanese crown jewels, if you like. They are a mirror, a sword and a magatama (a comma-shaped stone bead) that were handed down from the sun god Amaterasu to the first Emperor’s grandfather, and at one point they passed through Yamato Takeru’s hands. In fact, one of them is used in one of his adventures.

Yes, I’m about to give a spoiler warning for a 1300-year-old account of an even older legend. Humour me, will you?

(Note: I'll be formatting the cutaway mythological parts like this.)

The movie opens with a narrated staging of the Shintō creation story, in which the gods create the landmass of Japan and two gods are sent down to populate it. (This would be the “Birth of Japan” referred to in the original title.)

We then cut to discover the narrator is an old woman entertaining the people of a small town while they wait for their beloved Prince Ousu and his friends to return from hunting. Ousu is told that his brother Ōusu has disappeared with a young woman he was supposed to be escorting to his father as a concubine. Ousu finds them both canoodling in a house, apparently right there in the town. He gives Ōusu a thrashing but tells him to exile himself.

(In the Kojiki, he brutally kills Ōusu. Perhaps the makers of The Three Treasures wanted to present a more humane hero. In this film, Ōusu’s an older brother, which matches the Kojiki – in the Nihon Shoki they’re twins. Their mother’s dead and the Emperor’s already had children with his second Empress, but clearly he wants concubines too.)

The scene moves to the Imperial court, where we meet two of the Emperor’s many other children: the effete Wakatarashi (the future Emperor Seimu!) and the younger, unimpressive Iogi. We also meet the Emperor’s trusted advisor Otomo, who is blatantly shady. Otomo is the brother of the second Empress and thus the uncle of Wakatarashi and Iogi, and spends his time conniving to put his relatives first in the line of succession. To that end, he stirs things up between the Emperor and Ousu, to try and get him out of the picture. This is made easier by the fact that Ōusu’s disappeared and Ousu is willing to let everyone believe he killed him for his treason. Otomo will later meet secretly with Ōusu, who wants to return from exile, and kill him himself.

(The character of Otomo has been completely made up to give this film a villain you can boo. In the Kojiki, the Emperor is unsettled by his son’s violence and keeps sending him out to war on his own initiative. In the Nihon Shoki, there’s no bad feeling between father and son.)

The Emperor is persuaded to send Ousu to defeat the neighbouring Kumaso warlords and subdue their territory with a small army. Along the way they stop in Mie Prefecture at the Grand Shrine of Ise (a real place!), dedicated to the sun god Amaterasu, where Ousu’s aunt Princess Yamato is the chief priestess. Here Ousu meets Princess Ototachibana, also a priestess there, who gives him a holy mirror as a gift. Princess Yamato gives him a pouch which he must only open when in danger.

Ousu enters the Kumaso court disguised as a serving woman at a banquet, where he spends long minutes staring daggers at the two Kumaso brothers on their thrones. The younger Kumaso is suspicious – apparently he’s the one with the brains. Kumaso senior not only doesn’t notice Ousu’s death stare but finds him attractive and beckons him over. Ousu immediately kills the older brother and kills the younger Kumaso in a showy sword fight. As he dies, Kumaso gives Ousu the formal name Yamato Takeru – “the bravest of Yamato”.

So now the prince is dangerous and proud, telling everyone to call him Yamato Takeru. Otomo persuades the Emperor to send him and his army away again, to subdue the lands to the East, even though they haven't rested. Yamato Takeru is upset about this. Later, in the town forum, he hears the old woman relating the tale of how the sun god Amaterasu got upset once.

The storm god Susanoo, Amaterasu’s brother, upsets her with an ill-advised prank and she seals herself in a cave. Because she’s the sun god, this means heaven is left without any light or heat. In order to trick her out of the cave, the other gods pretend to throw a party for their new sun god – in fact, a mirror and a necklace of curved stone beads hung on a tree. Amaterasu comes out to see what the noise is about and is amused to see her own reflection on the fake god.

(The film presents this tale and just leaves it hanging there, but in fact it’s a vital part of the story, because it’s the origin story of the three treasures. Japanese viewers might be expected to know this, but mugs like us have to do our own research. Recall that the three treasures are a mirror, a sword and a curved bead. Two of those – the mirror and the magatama – appear here as part of the decoration of the fake god. In the legend, Susanoo later gave Amaterasu the sword to apologise for his prank. We’ll see Yamato Takeru receive the sword, and find out where it came from, in just a minute. Remember that mirror Ototachibana gave him at Amaterasu’s shrine? It’s meant to be that mirror. Sorry to say, the magatama is not pointed out and we will not see Yamato Takeru acquire it on his travels – well, you can’t have everything, can you?)

(Did I mention this film is three hours long? There’s an intermission right here.)

Yamato Takeru goes to see his auntie at the Grand Shrine of Ise and sobs that his father obviously doesn’t love him and wants him dead. She rebukes him for sulking by telling him a tale about the storm god Susanoo sulking.

Once upon a time, Susanoo threw a tantrum because he couldn’t visit his mother Izanami, formerly one of the two Earth-populating gods but now dead and an underworld god. He cried so much that his tears used up all the water in the world and caused a drought.

(That’s it, that’s the whole story. It’s by far the shortest cutaway tale in the film. I like to imagine that in some parallel world, Princess Yamato might have introduced this to the prince as The Tale of How Susanoo Whined Like a Little Bastard. Also worth noting that Yamato Takeru and Susanoo are both played by the same actor, but this is the first point in the film at which the prince is compared directly with the god.)

Because her pep talk didn’t work, Princess Yamato gives Yamato Takeru the sacred sword Murakumo no Tsurugi (“the sword of gathering clouds”) and, lying through her teeth, tells him his father sent it for him. He’s delighted by this and goes back to where his army are camping, where he tells them the sword’s origin story.

Susanoo has been temporarily banished to Earth. (This is not related to his tantrum, but because of the prank he played on Amaterasu. These cutaway tales aren’t quite in chronological order.) On his travels, he meets a family of demigods with one daughter living by a lake. They used to have eight daughters, but each year the giant eight-headed serpent Yamata no Orochi appears and takes one away. (This is it, folks, the moment you’ve been waiting for!) Susanoo leaves out eight large bowls full of sake, one for each head, and sure enough, when Yamata no Orochi turns up that night it goes straight for the sake. Susanoo fights it while it’s drunk and sleepy, trapping its heads in a tree and hacking them off with his sword. He then cuts open Yamata no Orochi’s tail and finds a really big golden sword inside it. This is the Murakumo no Tsurugi. We’re told that Susanoo later married the surviving daughter and gave the sword to Amaterasu.

Orochi has reptilian green skin, dead eyes, eight long necks with little frills just behind each head, and a thick tail with eight short pronged offshoots. This is all we ever see of it – its body and legs, assuming it has those, stay in the water. It looks a bit like the lovechild of the Loch Ness Monster and the Hydra.

There follows a bit of romantic drama. Ototachibana follows Yamato Takeru but tries to reject him, because she's sworn to the shrine and if she hooks up with him it would anger the gods. Yamato Takeru throws down the sacred mirror (and we don’t see anyone pick it up again). He becomes engaged to Princess Miyazu, the daughter of the ruler of Owari, but leaves her behind to continue on his mission to pacify the Eastern lands. Ototachibana catches up with him again in the Ainu territory near Mt Fuji whose ruler has already been approached by Otomo’s henchmen and told to kill Yamato Takeru. The two are trapped in a burning field, but escape when Yamato Takeru uses the Orochi sword to cut down a clearing in the grass. Remember the pouch his auntie gave him earlier in the film? He pulls two flints out of this and uses them to pre-burn a safe path out of the field. His army kills the ruler and his army. Yamato Takeru renames the Orochi sword Kusanagi no Tsurugi (“the sword of grass-cutting”) and sends it to his abandoned fiancée.

Yamato Takeru decides that he and his army should return to Yamato while they’re at sea. When he orders his men to turn their ships around, they spontaneously sing a song about how great their homeland is and how much they miss it. (This is a song called the Kunishinobi-uta, taken directly from the books. The Kojiki says Yamato Takeru composed it, while the Nihon Shoki ascribes it to his father, the Emperor Keikō.) A storm batters their ships and sinks a couple. Ototachibana declares that this is a sign of the gods’ anger and throws herself into the sea to appease them, at which point the storm does indeed clear up.

Back in Yamato, the Imperial army led by Otomo's own son ambushes Yamato Takeru's army and a large battle ensues. Yamato Takeru delivers a rousing nationalist speech (which may give some clue as to the film's intentions) to his last remaining soldier, whose name is Yakumo, before they make their last stand. Yamato Takeru is killed, but his soul becomes a white swan that apparently causes a volcanic eruption and tsunami that wipes out Otomo's forces.

(This is a huge departure from the books, in which Yamato Takeru offends a mountain god, falls sick and dies without ever returning home. There’s no battle and no eruption, but the detail of his soul becoming a white bird is lifted from the books – it’s seen emerging from his mausoleum some time later. Note also that there’s no suggestion of where the future 14th Emperor comes from. His mother’s supposed to be called Futaji-no-iri or Futachi-iri, and we haven’t met her.)

Despite last being seen nearly dead and at the mercy of Otomo's forces, Yakumo and several of his comrades seemingly return to their families in full health. Seeing the white swan in the sky, they all run to follow it.

(In shifting Yamato Takeru’s death to the battlefield, bringing the appearance of the bird back to that same day and having his doomed soldiers reappear at home without any explanation to lead their families in chasing after it, the film makes this whole final scene questionable. Is it meant to be real or a metaphor? Are we supposed to tie it back to Yamato Takeru’s “I have a dream” speech? Is this meant to be a call to the audience to follow his lead?)

This film’s full of familiar faces. The elder Kumaso brother – the cruel but stupid one – is played by Shimura Takashi, who played Dr Yamane in the first two Godzilla movies. Takarada Akira, who played the romantic part of Ogata in Godzilla, is seen briefly as Prince Wakatarashi. Many more pop up in blink-and-you’ll-miss-them bit parts.

Yamato Takeru himself is played by Mifune Toshirō, the superstar of Kurosawa's acclaimed samurai films and probably one of the most recognisable Japanese actors outside Japan. He’s an incredible catch for a fantasy movie, even if it is being framed as a respectable period drama. I gather he wasn’t too fussed about it – he’s on record as saying that the films he made with Kurosawa were the only ones he was proud of. Nonetheless, he returned to the historical/fantasy genre to play the bamboo cutter in Princess from the Moon (1987), another Toho movie with a token kaiju that drew on popular folklore.

I wonder if any ambivalent feeling on Mifune’s part had an effect on his performance here, because he’s highly theatrical in a way he isn’t in the Kurosawa films, scowling through his lines and striking dramatic poses all over the place. It could just be that in the Yamato Takeru scenes he’s deliberately echoing the larger-than-life performance he gives in his other role as Susanoo. (The dramatic poses are notably the same.) All the cutaway tales of the gods are obviously recorded indoors on a soundstage and look artificial, which contrasts profoundly with the "real" scenes, many of them ostensibly outdoors. Mifune bringing some of that unreality into his performance as Yamato Takeru might strengthen the connection being made between the folk hero and the god, but at a cost. There’s a fair bit of over-the-top acting around him – his soldiers indulge in plenty of belly-clutching and "ho ho ho!" acting, and Shimura’s turn as Kumaso senior is quite a ripe one.

The film looks beautiful, and the special effects support it well. There are some very nice model ships and some subtle optical effects. The composite shots in the grand finale are a mixed bag, but some of them are astonishingly good.

And so we move on to the significance of this, Toho’s thousandth cinematic production.

People sometimes talk about overtones of nationalism in some of the Godzilla movies, and for the most part I can’t see it. When they’re not all about the monster fights, the Godzilla movies tend to be quite humble parables with no glorious triumphalism in the offing (although we’ve recently seen one possible counter-example). But in this film, I see it – the hero speech near the end is a dead giveaway. The folk hero talking about taking a Japan that’s lost its way and rebuilding it the way it used to be in the good old days ought to set alarm bells ringing. He starts off by imagining a Japan without suffering and that sounds nice, but then he starts in on “strength and joy” and it starts to feel awkward again. And throwing in a made-up treacherous adversary is a move awfully close to the “stab in the back” narrative favoured by nationalist demagogues and politicians.

But it’s not clear who the guilty party is supposed to be, given both Otomo’s nephews and Yamato Takeru are part of the direct lineage of Japan’s incumbent Imperial House. Maybe it isn’t a question of people but of ideologies. Wakatarashi and Iogi, tainted by association with their wicked uncle, are timid stay-at-homes, while the noble Yamato Takeru is out with his army forcibly subduing the neighbours. Maybe the film’s promoting a specifically militaristic kind of nationalism.

The kindest interpretation I can think of is that the filmmakers were thinking of the then ongoing American military occupation of Iwo Jima and the islands of Okinawa Prefecture. Perhaps Yamato Takeru’s dream of a reinvigorated Japan was simply meant to conjure up visions of a Japan not partially controlled by the US Army. I mean, maybe the writers, producers and director really were wishing for Japan to re-arm and re-invade its Pacific neighbours, but I’d prefer to think that’s not the case. (And there’s nothing else in any of their CVs that would really indicate that.)

And the eight-headed serpent Yamata no Orochi, what’s the significance of that? Well, look, y’know... sometimes a cigar’s just a cigar.