Yamato Takeru

Yamato Takeru (1994)
Toho Studios
Director: Ōkawara Takao, Kawakita Kōichi (special effects)
Also known as: Orochi, the Eight-Headed Dragon (the American direct-to-video title).

Readers may recall that back in 1959, Toho Studios filmed a lavish adaptation of the legend of Prince Yamato Takeru. This film featured superstar actor Mifune Toshirō and a substantial dose of nationalism and was marketed in a celebratory way as the studio’s thousandth production. It included some of the foundational stories of Shintō mythology by way of plot background, hence its original title, The Birth of Japan, and its English language title, The Three Treasures, both of which put the focus of the audience onto those origin stories.

In fact, you might want to take another look at the blog entry for that film, just to remind yourself of all the details of the story. And then forget all about them.

Yamato Takeru is a very different adaptation. The title, for a start, throws the focus back onto the hero of the main narrative – The Three Treasures was a hero-driven adventure movie too, but Yamato Takeru makes it more personally about the prince. Meanwhile, the Anglo title, Orochi, the Eight-Headed Dragon, emphasises for the benefit of American fans of Godzilla that this is a movie with a giant monster in it. In fact, this is quite a kaiju-heavy movie, boasting two new creations in prominent set pieces as well as the legendary Yamata no Orochi in a much expanded role.

I can’t find any suggestion that this was marketed as a big celebratory film or prestige production for Toho. If it had been filmed in 1992 as planned, it could have marked the studio’s 60th anniversary, but script rewrites pushed it back by two years. Nor are there any casting coups on a par with Mifune, although we’ll look at the lead cast after the plot synopsis. This appears simply to have been a fantasy action blockbuster, not some kind of grand cultural statement but a bit of lurid entertainment.

Before we start on the plot, it’s worth just reminding ourselves about the famous “three treasures”, also sometimes referred to as the crown jewels of Japan. These are the bronze mirror Yata no Kagami, the sword Kusanagi no Tsurugi and the magatama, or comma-shaped stone bead, Yasakani no Magatama. According to legend, all three of these were given by the sun god Amaterasu to the grandfather of the first Emperor of Yamato. At least one of them, the sword, also passed through the hands of Yamato Takeru – it’s because of his exploits that the sword has its present name, the “Grass-Cutting Sword”, prior to which it was called Ame no Murakumo no Tsurugi, the “Heavenly Sword of Gathering Clouds”. Watch out for the echoes of these three sacred objects in the synopsis that follows.

The film opens with a male voiceover in English describing the void that preceded the creation of the universe. This gives way to a female voiceover in Japanese describing the birth of the Shintō gods and, eventually, the creation of Japan by Izanami and Izanagi. This is all delivered over astronomical imagery that seems to relate it to the Big Bang, the appearance of the stars and the formation of the Sun and the Earth.

(The use of the different narrators and languages is obviously a deliberate choice, but I’m damned if I know what the significance of it is.)

Several thousand years later...

Twin sons are born to the Emperor Keikō, the 12th Emperor of the Yamato dynasty, and his wife. (We’re never told about any other wives or any other sons. This is bad news for the 13th Emperor, who doesn’t seem to exist in this film’s continuity.) The younger son, Ousu, is immediately targeted by the Emperor’s advisor Tsukinoya, who tells the Emperor that twins are unlucky and the younger twin especially so. No one knows where Tsukinoya came from, but he magically made it rain this one time so the Emperor trusts him, even though he’s very, very blatantly evil. He secretly serves Tsukuyomi, a god who’s been locked inside a structure made of ice or some other crystalline substance that looks like a UFO and is currently floating through space. Having persuaded the Emperor to order Ousu’s death, he takes the baby in a basket to the top of a high cliff and drops it over the edge. Baby Ousu is saved by the White Bird of Heaven, the messenger of the sun god Amaterasu (although it’s a very metallic bird – the Steel Peacock of Heaven might be a more appropriate name). The White Bird catches the basket and drops it off at the Ise Shrine, where the Emperor’s sister Princess Yamato is the head priestess of Amaterasu, and she raises Ousu herself.

We fast forward ten years. Ousu is taught Shintō doctrine by his aunt and combat skills by his two mentors (and, let’s be honest, comedy sidekicks), Seiryu, an older man with a magic rope, and Genbu, a middle-aged man with a spear. We hear Princess Yamato telling Ousu about the three gods who were born to Izanagi after he returned from the underworld. She claims these are the three most important of all the gods (so pay attention, this might be important later) – Amaterasu, the god of the heavens; Susanoo, the god of the seas; and Tsukuyomi, the god of the underworld.

(Tsukuyomi is more commonly presented as the god of the Moon, the counterpart to Amaterasu’s Sun. I can’t find anything other than this film that connects him to the Shintō underworld, or that suggests he’s evil. The fact that he’s the Moon god will, however, have a bearing on developments later in this film.)

There’s a cave in the woods that Ousu is forbidden to enter. One night he enters it and discovers that it’s a kind of portal into a strange otherworld. He finds himself in a stone chamber dominated by a large statue of a bull-headed humanoid holding a mirror and a sword. There’s also a sword sticking up out of a cubic stone in the middle of the room, which he tries to remove but can’t. A voice ostensibly coming from the statue tells him that one day he will hold three “lights” (or perhaps... Three Treasures?) and on that day, he will become a warrior of the gods. He’s expelled from the chamber and wakes up holding a jade magatama. He takes to wearing the magatama as a pendant.

Fast forward again. Ousu is now an adult, and the Emperor has been persuaded by his wife to pardon him and summon him back to the Imperial court. When Tsukinoya magically attacks him in his room, his magatama glows and his face contorts, taking on a more demonic look, and he’s suddenly able to defend himself against Tsukinoya by firing green energy blasts out of his eyes. The Emperor is only told that Ousu has attacked Tsukinoya, and reprimands him for causing trouble. Later, his mother sickens and dies and his brother Ōusu blames him. Ōusu attacks Ousu with a sword and Ousu is obliged to defend himself by again using the power of his magatama. This apparently leaves Ōusu dead, and Ousu is blamed for the deaths of his mother and his brother.

(Tsukinoya later claims to have killed both of them; it’s not a stretch to accept that he cursed Ousu’s mother, but in the brother’s case I think we have to assume Ousu’s laser eye attack wasn’t fatal and Tsukinoya finished him off while no one was looking.)

To get rid of the troublesome Ousu, the Emperor sends him off alone on an apparent suicide mission to subdue the neighbouring Kumaso territory. His two sidekicks/mentors join him along the way. They pause at a shrine that seems to be affiliated to the one at Ise, and here they meet Oto-tachibana. (Ousu will end up habitually referring to her simply as “Oto”.) She’s a priestess at the shrine, but she attacks the travellers, believing them to be responsible for the recent theft of the shrine’s holy mirror. To be clear, she attacks them with a combination of throwing knives and wuxia-style flying kung fu. She also has magical powers – by grunting something that sounds suspiciously like “Om!” and throwing a couple of hand gestures, she can launch fireballs from her hands. (She’s very much not the delicate damsel of The Three Treasures, but a kick-ass action hero in her own right.) Once the misunderstanding is cleared up, the head priestess of the shrine tells the travellers about the missing mirror, which is tied to a prophesy about the White Bird of Heaven saving the world. When the three travellers head out the next morning, Oto asks to join them. She’s wearing the battle costume of Amaterasu (!) which has been handed down across the generations at the shrine and which includes a red jerkin and leather skirt, forearm braces and a very fetching pair of knee-length boots.

Our heroes arrive within sight of the Kumaso palace, apparently built on the slopes of an active volcano, where preparations are underway for a party. Only women are being allowed into the palace grounds. Oto gains entry to the palace and scouts around, but she’s discovered by Kumaso (not one of the Kumaso brothers – there’s only one Kumaso in this film) and, after a brief fight, is captured and prepared for sacrifice to the volcano god Kumaso-gami. Meanwhile, the other three have scaled the palace walls and Ousu has gone undercover as a female dancer at that evening’s banquet. In this film, Kumaso does notice the veiled Ousu glaring at him and calls him out. Seiryu and Genbu hold off Kumaso’s soldiers while the two battle it out. Ousu kills the lone Kumaso after a lengthy sword fight, during which Kumaso dubs him Yamato Takeru.

The prince and his pals then race to rescue Oto from a scene strangely reminiscent of King Kong (1933), and they all fight Kumaso-gami. Kumaso-gami is a cheap suitmation Balrog. Through the magic of special effects – an early example in Japanese cinema of CGI morphing – its hands become weapons, first a bow and arrows and then a large sword. It also grows stony skeletal wings during the fight. It has a third eye, a feature which is echoed in the emblem on the armour Kumaso was wearing. Yamato Takeru eventually blows it up with his magatama-powered green laser eyes. The shrine’s holy mirror immediately manifests in his hands – Oto speculates that the whole business might have been set up by Amaterasu all along.

Despite his success, the Emperor still won't forgive Yamato Takeru. He’s summoned away from the court by Princess Yamato, who warns him that the evil god Tsukuyomi is returning. She’s been fending off magical attacks on the Ise Shrine using the holy flints of Amaterasu (which were gifted to the prince and served another purpose in The Three Treasures). She tells Yamato Takeru the tale of Yamata no Orochi, which on this occasion involves Tsukuyomi taking on the form of the eight-headed dragon and trying to destroy Earth to spite Amaterasu. (This is illustrated with some scenes of Orochi superimposed on footage of volcanic eruptions, as well as an extremely badly staged effects shot in which Orochi descends from space towards Earth and casts a very crisp shadow on what is obviously a painted flat. The rest of the tale is depicted in a series of stone friezes, including a UFO and astronomical imagery.) Susanoo defeats Orochi and pulls a sword out of its tail, as we might expect, then Izanagi imprisons Tsukuyomi in ice and casts him into space. Princess Yamato asks the prince to bring her the Orochi sword, Ame no Murakumo no Tsurugi, from the palace so that she can seal it away in the shrine and thwart Tsukuyomi.

(Note the complete turnaround from The Three Treasures, in which the princess gave Yamato Takeru the sword and claimed it had been sent to her from the palace. We won’t see it cutting any grass in this film either.)

Yamato Takeru steals the sword and is chased from the palace by the Emperor’s guards, but he gives them the slip. Oto catches up with him and the pair walk along the coast towards the shrine. As they do so, Tsukinoya raises a storm and a sea monster to attack them. It’s unnamed in the film, but secondary sources name the kaiju “Kaishin Mūba” – “Kaishin” translates as “Sea-God”, and “Mūba” seems to just be a proper name. The Kaishin is a reptilian creature with pointy teeth, glowing yellow eyes, a lot of tentacles and fins all round its head and down its back and arms. It also has a third eye, from which it can fire a green energy beam. It snatches Yamato Takeru with a tentacle and tries to drown him. Oto rescues him but is dragged down herself – Yamato Takeru watches as she and the kaiju magically disintegrate. As he mourns Oto on the beach, Yamato Takeru is attacked by Tsukinoya and both men are fatally wounded in the struggle. Tsukinoya lives long enough to take the sword and send it to the Moon. As he dies, it’s revealed that he was one of Orochi’s giant fangs masquerading as a man all along.

Tsukuyomi has arrived on the Moon, broken out of his ice UFO and manifested some armour. Receiving the sword seems to give him a considerable power-up, represented by a lot of electrical crackling in the style of He-Man (1983-85). He creates a stony palace on the Moon and starts to rain fireballs down on Earth.

Yamato Takeru wakes up in the strange otherworld where he first acquired his magatama. This time, there’s a humanoid figure sitting on the statue’s lap, wearing a metallic bull mask and holding a sword. He calls himself Bull-Head, lord of the underworld.

(What he says sounds like “Gozu Daino”, which looks like a reference to the mythological figure of Gozu. Usually partnered with the horse-headed Mezu, ox-headed Gozu is an usher of hell brought into Japanese folklore from Chinese Buddhism. Spoiler alert – this character isn’t really Gozu.)

To test Yamato Takeru, the figure draws a sword and launches himself at him. Yamato Takeru soon loses his own sword but is able to get to the sword he’d previously seen in the middle of the chamber and, in a very Arthurian moment, pull it from its stone. It glows green and hums just like Luke Skywalker’s light sabre. A bolt of energy from the sword splits the figure’s bull mask and he reveals himself to actually be the god Susanoo. The sword that Yamato Takeru has now laid claim to is Orochi no Karasai no Tsurugi, the only sword that can defeat Tsukuyomi.

(Well... the actors pretty definitely say “Karasai”, and online secondary sources back that up. But it would make an awful lot more sense if they were actually saying “Karasabi”. The History of Japan website says that Orochi no Karasabi is one of the recorded names of the sword Susanoo used to kill Yamata no Orochi, before pulling the other sword out of its tail. I can’t find a source to back that up – the Nihon Shoki uses one of the other names, and the Kojiki doesn’t seem to name that sword at all – but I’ll take it on trust. Google Translate tells me that “Orochi no Karasabi” means “The Great Snake’s Beginnings”. It says that “Orochi no Karasai” means “The Great Snake’s Spicy Vegetables”. Possibly there’s another interpretation I don’t know about. Possibly Susanoo said “Karasabi” but swallowed the “b”.)

Susanoo tells Yamato Takeru he and Oto, born at the same time, were put on Earth to kill Tsukuyomi. The strange power Yamato Takeru has been wielding, which lets him shoot lasers out of his eyes and makes his face turn all demonic, is in fact Susanoo's "wild spirit". What’s more, Oto contains the spirit of Amaterasu (which might explain her fireball powers). Susanoo sends Yamato Takeru and Oto back to the world of the living, and they materialise inside Tsukuyomi’s palace on the Moon. After some swordplay, Yamato Takeru defeats Tsukuyomi with a combination of his “wild power”, the sword and Amaterasu’s mirror. Tsukuyomi disintegrates and his palace collapses, but he reappears in the form of Yamata no Orochi.

Orochi has red skin, the expected number of necks, a large body and one large foot visible on either side. The body is pretty obviously moving forward on wheels. (This might be a comedown for kaiju connoisseurs after the manoeuvrability of King Ghidorah, but then again Ghidorah only had three heads – Orochi needs something bigger and less flexible to support eight of them. And hey, this is still more of Orochi than we saw in The Three Treasures.) Its heads look similar in shape to Ghidorah's, but quite a bit more spiny. Each of them breathes out an honest-to-goodness jet of fire. It has no wings. It seems to have a tail, but only the one.

Yamato Takeru and Oto are cornered on the lunar surface, but all of a sudden the White Bird of Heaven appears. Our heroes spend some time on its back, attacking Orochi from the air. When the tide turns and they’re flung into space, Yamato Takeru’s magatama, the mirror and the sword begin to glow – the “three lights” he was told he would possess. He and Oto merge somehow to become the promised “warrior of the gods”, which turns out to be a rather chubby mecha. It has the same metallic look as the White Bird and some obvious sun imagery on its helmet. It’s able to manifest a pair of golden wings, a force shield decorated with mystic symbols, a big sword and a spear at will. Once Orochi is destroyed, the giant mecha separates back out into the White Bird, Yamato Takeru and Oto. They find Tsukuyomi still alive but unconscious. In voiceover only, Susanoo tells Yamato Takeru to seal Tsukuyomi's essence inside his magatama and throw it into space. Why not just kill him if he's evil, asks Oto. Susanoo replies that Tsukuyomi will bring joy to humanity next time he returns, because "gods are like that". (If ever a voiceover shrugged, this one does.) The defeat of Tsukuyomi is reflected in the passing of a solar eclipse back in Japan (a very literal interaction of the Sun and Moon). Yamato Takeru and Oto fly home on the White Bird of Heaven and presumably live happily ever after.

The Three Treasures embellished the legend of Yamato Takeru, and one of those embellishments is picked up here: the inclusion of a villain the audience can boo, an advisor to the Emperor who connives against the prince. There, the advisor was an uncle of the Emperor’s younger sons trying to manoeuvre his relatives onto the throne. Here, the other sons are pruned from the plot and so, instead of being an ambitious political manipulator, the villain becomes a sorcerer who serves the film’s supernatural antagonist. He thus also serves the overall shift of tone from the plausibly historical to the whimsically fantastic. This mutation of the legend is a bit like how the British legends of Robin Hood or King Arthur have been added to and changed over the centuries, as well as the tonal shifts of successive film and TV adaptations. If Toho ever makes a third film adaptation of the legend, it’ll be interesting to see if the insertion of Tsukuyomi or any of the other fantasy elements are carried over into that.

And fantasy is very much the order of the day here. As a folkloric adaptation, Yamato Takeru is much more Robin of Sherwood (1984-86) than Arthur of the Britons (1972-73). I think it might be best understood in the context of the occasional American fantasy films of the previous decade, such as Legend (1985), which also ends with a supernatural villain banished but not entirely defeated; Ladyhawke (1985), which also ends with a dramatic shot of a solar eclipse; or Willow (1988), an ensemble adventure which I think most closely matches the tone of this film. (And like those movies, it seemed like a good idea but didn’t perform well at the box office.) It also owes something to the popular fantasy-tinged science fiction cinema of earlier years. The Star Wars (1977) optical effects business in the sword fights is obvious to the point of shamelessness. I think there’s also a clear debt to Superman (1978) in the title visuals and in Tsukuyomi’s crystal UFO. (Sadly, his lunar castle is no Fortress of Solitude.) Closer to home, the metallic look of Amaterasu’s messenger bird and the gods’ warrior champion suggests an attempt to appeal to fans of the mecha-heavy boys’-own variety of anime. All the “gods as alien astronauts” stuff fits neatly alongside the similar ethos of Princess from the Moon (1987) and the von Dänikenism of some of the later Shōwa era Godzilla movies – it was a tried and tested trope, the filmmakers had every reason to believe it would work this time too.

Meanwhile, the militarism is played down. That the prince is sent to subdue the Kumaso territory all on his own (with the help of the three companions he meets along the way) might look like a cost-saving measure, but it’s closer to the original legend. There’s no suggestion in the Kojiki that the Emperor sent him off with an army, although he does seem to have had a household entourage with him, and the entire final battle in The Three Treasures was invented for that film.

The Three Treasures, surprisingly given the Anglo title under which Toho marketed it, downplayed its presentation of Japan’s crown jewels to the point that you’d only spot two of them if you knew your Shintō mythology and knew to look for them. The sword Kusanagi no Tsurugi, pulled by Susanoo from the tail of Yamata no Orochi, was the only one of the three that really featured in the movie. Yamato Takeru makes a great deal out of the “three lights” the prince will wield on the day he transforms into the Michelin Gundam, and you’d be forgiven for thinking these ought to be the famous three objects. And at first glance they do appear to be, but it’s more complicated than that. The mirror from Amaterasu’s shrine is presumably still in Yamato Takeru’s possession after he returns to Earth, so that seems to be a lock. We do see Yamato Takeru picking up the Kusanagi no Tsurugi after the big fight, while Tsukuyomi is lying inert on the ground – I don’t think he’s holding it on the journey home, but it’s plausible that he took it back. But it wasn’t one of the “three lights” – that was the other sword, the one the prince took from Susanoo. And the magatama, which is absolutely central to the plot, ends up tumbling away into space, so it clearly isn’t meant to be the Yasakani no Magatama. Granted, the Yasakani no Magatama is supposed to be sacred to Amaterasu while the prince’s magatama in the movie was a conduit for Susanoo’s power, so it would have been a stretch in any case to identify it with the Imperial treasure.

The expansion of Oto-tachibana’s role from the intermittent love interest who drowns herself to appease the gods to a kick-ass female lead who survives the movie is another significant change to the legend that I hope will influence future adaptations. I’d note again that women were the source of a substantial proportion of Japanese box office takings in the 90s, and this change to the text is in line with the foregrounding of strong female characters in the contemporary Godzilla movies. Toho would have wanted to make their fantasy blockbuster as marketable as possible. They also presumably wanted to get the most out of their lead actress, who deserved nothing less.

Yamato Takeru doesn’t boast a big name superstar in the way The Three Treasures did, but it could be considered a vehicle for two bankable stars. Both of them were about a decade into their film careers and had already starred in fantasy films for Toho, and both are on good form here. Prince Ousu, a.k.a. Yamato Takeru, is played by Takashima Masahiro, who played the Pteranodon enthusiast, G-Force dropout and "goofball" hero Aoki in Godzilla vs Mechagodzilla (1993) and would go on to appear in the next and last film in the Heisei Godzilla series. The priestess/princess Oto-tachibana is played by Sawaguchi Yasuko, who was also the only speaking female actor in The Return of Godzilla (1984) and Princess Kaguya in Princess from the Moon (1987). Among the other cast, watch out for Abe Hiroshi, playing Tsukuyomi, who will go on to play a villainous role in a later Godzilla movie.

All in all, this film is a classic 90s mix of the spectacular and the cheap-looking. (I say “cheap-looking”, knowing that it actually went over budget.) The CGI, still cutting edge at the time, has dated a bit. It’s most obvious in the fight scene with Kumaso-gami but subtler in scenes like the build-up to the heroes’ transformation in the climactic battle, and I’m sure there are other instances so subtle that I haven’t spotted them. I’m not entirely sure whether some of the visual effects were computer generated or classic optical effects. The shot of Yamata no Orochi approaching Earth in the related tale of olden times is astonishingly bad, but the practical kaiju effects in the rest of the movie are executed well. The music is cheerfully bombastic, with one catchy cue that’s reused on every single fight scene – it’s a bit like the stock music used in dramatic scenes in Star Trek (1966-69). There’s no very good reason why I should like this movie more than The Three Treasures, but I do. Quite apart from being an hour shorter and thus not outstaying its welcome, it’s just more fun.