Japanese Fighting Girl: The New School
NARRATOR:
So, I got into anime relatively
late in life, and it was a lateral move,
from an existing interest in science fiction movies. As a big fan of The Matrix,
of course my first anime
was Ghost in the Shell. And I liked Trinity,
but wow, the Major? Now, there was
a helicopter-wrangling, tank-wrassling straight shooter And unlike what I was used to,
she wasn’t alone. There’s her cousin Deunan Knute
in Appleseed, Priss and the Knight Sabers
in Bubblegum Crisis, Nausicaa, Battle Angel Alita, Armitage III,
the Dirty Pair, Gall Force, Iria: Zeiram the Animation. It’s an embarrassment
of riches. An embarrassment. The creator of the Major is a
mangaka called Masamune Shirow, who’s perhaps as known
for Ghost in the Shell as he is for pretty
out-there pornographic art. The cynical read
into the prevalence of action heroines in anime is not the unreasonable one,
that as Peggy Olsen says… -Sex sells.
-…especially to the perceived
demographic at the time. Maybe the most famous
of these such characters is Rei from Neo Gentleman–
Neon Genit… Evangelon, which is where the sexual
component becomes more taboo and yet more widespread. You’ll find her on the cover
of an academic text entitled Beautiful Fighting
Girl by Tamaki Saito, which is more about
otaku psychology, but it’s amazing
that there can be so many of these
“fighting girls” that one can approach it
like an epidemic. One that’s spread
to Japanese video games, Japanese… movies? Well, okay,
there’s Lady Snowblood, Sister Street Fighter,
stuff like that. Great stuff. Meiko Kaji,
Etsuko Shihomi, amazing. but if we’re talking
about quantity, they’re outliers compared
to their animated counterparts, and to the amount
of star power in, say, contemporary Hong Kong
action cinema. Now, I realize Hong Kong
and China have martial arts traditions,
but Japan does, too. It’s possible
to make movies about karate. Either way, there’s a gap here. What’s going on? What happened to the live-action
Japanese fighting girl? How could something
with such an obvious appeal, to otakus, action fans–
whoever– be so rare? (Rina Takeda speaking Japanese) (speaking Japanese) She kicks high. NARRATOR:
This is Rina Takeda, a black belt in karate
here making her cinematic debut in 2009’s High Kick Girl,
directed by Fuyuhiko Nishi. Despite the exclamation-pointed
title, High Kick Girl is stoic, with a relaxed camera
like the respectful spectator at a live martial arts
demonstration. Not a lot of music,
not a lot of dialogue. One of the first things
you’ll notice is the slow-motion replay,
like a sports broadcast, which is impressive without
CG enhancement or quick cuts. Like, these hits have to land.
Strangely, though, these replays are not cut
seamlessly into the sequence, but instead call attention
to themselves. This has to be
on purpose, like, cleared of certain
formalistic elements, this is not a movie,
it’s a demo reel. Our story begins here
because High Kick Girl would seem to be a conscious
effort to launch the career of an actual, factual
Japanese fighting girl. It’s a rare kind of movie,
but not unprecedented. If you remember,
Steven Seagal’s first movie opens with
autobiographical information about his being an actual
aikido instructor based in Japan– I mean,
a secret CIA special agent. Right off the bat, Rina Takeda is a commanding presence
on screen. All the more so
that she was 17 at the time. I like that she’s an asshole. She knows she’s good at this, and she’s gonna let
everyone else know. But listen, kiddo,
that’s not how karate works. Like an old-school
kung fu movie, High Kick Girl espouses
a martial arts philosophy, in this case that karate
is not meant for fighting but self-defense. So says her karate master, played by real-life
karate master Tatsuya Naka, who apparently won
the kumite in 1992. I guess this is why there
aren’t a lot of karate movies. I mean, if the project
of High Kick Girl is to promote Rina Takeda
as an action star, it’s kind of an odd note. I’d say it becomes
downright frustrating when, as part of her learning
this martial philosophy, she’s sidelined in the second
half of her own movie, in favor of Naka. I mean, he’s cool and all, but far less unique
as a high kick man. Following her debut, and like with Steven Seagal’s
early career, Takeda enjoyed a run
of similar-sounding movies, such as 2011’s Karate Girl and 2011’s
The Kunoichi: Ninja Girl. So, a successful launch
in one regard, but maybe she’s being typecast. She’s an action guy, but
is this all she wants to do? In interviews, she expresses
her enthusiasm for Jackie Chan and says she’d love
to work with him someday. Director Noboru Iguchi
gave her the next best thing: the lead role in a zany horror
movie with Chan-style comedy. The result is 2012’s
Dead Sushi, a deliberately silly movie made in the waning days
of the splatterpunk era. By this point, we’d already
had Ichi the Killer, Tokyo Gore Police
and Iguchi’s own Machine Girl, so the prospect of killer sushi
almost seems quaint. It’s like she just missed the
boat for the craziest stuff, but she’s great
in a comedic role. And of course,
slapstick can be pretty brutal. After she beats up
her first opponent, she just starts stomping
his face for a little bit. (speaking Japanese) Takeda makes the most
of this opportunity, but it’s still
a movie about killer sushi, and even if you can
physically fight sushi, it’s probably not
gonna look super cool. Danger Dolls is more like it. This is a 2014 Takeda movie
where, after the Cold War, American President
Ronald Reagan outlawed guns, and we cut to present day Japan where cops are chasing
a criminal, and everybody’s
wielding swords. Our heroes are four young women
who protect the world from supernatural bad guys
they refer to as “filthy invaders…” What? And for their next mission,
they have to go undercover as pop idols
so as not to arouse suspicion. I may have spoken too soon. It turns out that these
invaders are not monsters but rather people
who have crossed over from a parallel dimension, in which their parallel selves
are already idols. That doesn’t make sense. And I don’t mean
the “parallel dimension” part because that’s the buy-in, after, you know,
alternate history and supernatural bad guys,
but sci-fi has rules. There’s a way of doing things. Clearly, this is understood,
because in typical fashion, the Danger Dolls answer
to an adult male handler, who’s introduced by admonishing
them for doing their jobs– that is so cliché– and then tells them to go
undercover as idols. So it’s a pretty big
coincidence that their parallel selves
are idols, too. And then it doesn’t even matter
that they’re idols because they get
found out immediately. The fact that they’ve been
murdering these parallel people the whole time is the kind of
twist on the formula that I could see in one of
those “toku after dark” shows, so that’s kind of cool, but… I mean, look at this movie. It’s directed
by Shusuke Kaneko, who’s better known
for the ’90s Gamera movies, which didn’t have the biggest
budgets in the world, but looked good. Danger Dolls
has the ultimate hallmark of a low-budget movie:
they filmed it in the woods. With a handheld camera, long takes
without any close-ups, feature-light costumes,
overall, it’s got that “edited on a MacBook”
sort of feel. And look at this, this is like
the worst death I’ve ever seen. She clearly puts the sword
behind his head, and then he turns–
showing there’s no wound– and there’s no blood
on the sword. In fact, there’s no blood
in this entire movie. W-Why are we pulling punches? For Rina Takeda’s part, indeed,
this is a step backwards. As her character Ray,
she’s on an even footing with her opponents, meaning
there are fewer opportunities for being an asshole. If anything, she’s timid? This is what happens
when a regular guy introduces himself as
a reporter and steps forward. She steps back. She doesn’t just say, “I live to see you eat that
contract, but I hope you leave enough room for my fist,
because I’m going to ram it into your stomach
and break your goddamn spine.” This movie didn’t
cause me outright harm, but it did not induce
a serious viewing. There were some eyerolls
and guffaws, when I consider myself to be a
polite patron of the pop arts. At the baseline,
the characters are… thin? Which is unfortunate, because
it’s about a unit of people, so you’d think that would mean relationships
and interpersonal conflict. Well, this unit
mostly just shouts in motivational-poster phrases. And then there’s the action, in which you’re gonna see
a lot of cool moves– I can’t dispute that– but
these moves exist in isolation. Who are these people
they’re fighting? There’s no friction, there’s
no narrative to the action. Because this environment
is an open expanse, there are no props,
there’s no sense of direction. I might as well be watching
a marathon of Instagram skits by Jiang the taekwondo master. I’m still gonna be awestruck, but I’m not gonna mistake this
for a movie. And that leads us
to the question beyond the simple mechanics
whose dereliction altogether produces a “bad movie”:
what is the point of this? I know I’m watching
Danger Dolls because I’m trying to get a sense for Rina Takeda
as an action star, but what about the filmmakers? What are they
trying to do here? There are shades of franchise potential,
but everybody dies at the end. And even though they sort of
pass the baton to their parallel dimension
counterparts, the thematic endgame
is a renunciation of violence. -Karate master strikes again.
-♪ Kumite, kumite ♪ But even this is impacted,
because part of Ray’s arc is to proclaim that,
unlike her enemies, she has free will and
fights because she chooses to. But what she chooses
to fight for is to be able to stop fighting. Wow, these Danger Dolls
are so cool how they kick ass, but they disagree. That just makes me speechless. After this point,
Takeda’s filmography gets a little less hyperlinky, but some of these
are not action parts. To scratch that itch,
she’d have to go abroad and take part
in Hong Kong projects, which does put her closer
to Jackie Chan. She’s going
where the action is. Despite the initial push, these movies
just weren’t enough to establish a lasting market
at home for Takeda to thrive. This is like a talent drain
on a micro-scale. Can we do better next time? This is Kaede Aono,
a black belt in karate here making her cinematic debut
in 2014’s High Kick Angels, written by Fuyuhiko Nishi. It’s an action comedy
about students whose film project
is interrupted when bad guys invade
their school. Call me a sucker, but productions
within productions never fail to make me laugh. You got Dangeresque.
Who this is? NARRATOR:
It’s an easy in for star
Miyahara Kanon, though as we’ll find,
she doesn’t need any help. Her character Sakura
is a martial arts otaku, who also likes Jackie Chan,
and as with all otaku, she’s consumed
by her obsessions. She’s begun to think of herself
as her fictional character, and when the bad guys come in,
her friends all assume she’s gonna
do something stupid. The bad guys, by the way, led by Dragon Mom
from Super Inframan. This was idol, actress
and one-time Samus Aran Chisato Morishita’s last role
before she retired and went into politics. Last October, she was part
of a record-breaking influx of women into the Lower House. I don’t know
where I was going with this. She keeps her henchman
schoolgirl on a collar that constrains her power. Apart from
the fetishistic appeal embedded in the premise, with high kicks
equating to panty flashes, this movie is actually
pretty down-to-business rather than fully exploitative. The characters
are broadly defined but nevertheless extant. In the beginning, they talk about
this cool girl named Maki, and when we finally see her,
she gets a cool introduction. We see her the way
the other girls see her, and Sakura in particular
is a big fan. Both Kanon and Aono are great, but I also have to highlight
Mayu Kawamoto, who appears to have retired
from acting. Her character’s style
is actually the most practical
of the three, if Maki’s high kicks
are incredible but risky, and Sakura’s brawling reflects
her headstrong character. The school actually makes
for a great setting, with plenty of sliding over
tables, and props, of course. Most of them silly. For these girls especially, making their debuts
in a feature film, High Kick Angels
is a labor of love. You don’t perform this well
in an action movie if you don’t believe in it. This is where success stories
are born, with a group of passionate
people coming together and making things like Ong-Bak, The Raid, and Japan’s
own Versus. Star-making indies. High Kick Angels was
successful enough to reach me, but why isn’t it
on that same level? Why didn’t Miyahara Kanon
and Kaede Aono become the face of Japanese
action like Tak Sakaguchi? I mean, this is round two
for Fuyuhiko Nishi. My guess, while High Kick Angels is fun, functional,
it doesn’t specialize. The Protector
has that famous oner. The Raid is super violent. In one scene, Ip Man gave birth to a four-film series
with spin-offs. We’re still thinking about that
scene almost 20 years later, and it’s at least three things:
the technical excellence, which was also the case for the earlier fight
with Riki-Oh, but it’s also character. This is the first time
we see Ip Man lose his cool. And third, the sheer volume
of “Oh, shit” moments. By contrast, High Kick Angels
is an action comedy– the bane of anybody who
appreciates action heroines– and so while the girls
do awesome things, the movie is mostly a trifle. The character work
comes from when they stop believing in themselves and they have to learn
to believe in themselves. That’s not gonna be enough to put weight
behind the high kicks. I do like that Maki’s plan
to inspire everyone is to just beat up Sakura. It’s crazy, too, because
look at how many stunt people there are in these scenes. The talent is obviously here
and willing. While not a major
crossover success, High Kick Angels became
sort of a summer camp, as Kanon and Aono have
remained friends ever since. I think they, like,
opened a gym together? I don’t know if it’s still
around, but that’s so cool. I just love that they-they,
they’re still friends. That’s so awesome. As actors, they reunited
in 2017 for a curious movie entitled Asura Girl:
A Blood-C Tale. Oh, man,
I wish I could tell you this was my first run-in
with the Bloodiverse. As the story goes, the
president of Production IG– the animation studio behind Ghost in the
Shell and Psycho-Pass– asked Mamoru Oshii
to come up with a new I.P. He delegated this task
to two of his understudies, Junichi Fujisaku
and Kenji Kamiyama, the latter of which directed the recent
Lord of the Rings anime and one of the greatest
TV shows of all time, Moribito:
Guardian of the Spirit. Together, these two guys came
up with something astounding. Brace yourself:
“girl in a sailor suit” and “samurai sword,” which is pretty much Blood
in a nutshell, beginning life as a theatrical
short film in the year 2000 before branching out
into manga, TV shows and live-action films. Asura Girl is the second
of such films, following 2009’s
Blood: The Last Vampire, with Jun Ji-hyun
as half-vampire vampire hunter Saya. That movie was difficult
to distinguish from other anime
adaptations of the era. This movie
is a different breed. Right away, you can tell, it’s got something
stuck somewhere. You know, in most movies,
functional cinematography is determined
by the relationship between the subject
and its surroundings. We can see people here, but we don’t really know
where they are. And the camera’s always sitting
at this weird profile angle, like a sitcom. Miyahara Kanon
takes up the Saya role, here dressed in a sailor suit
I have to imagine is anachronistic to 1937. Not sailor suits themselves, but one that looks
like Senketsu. So, in this remote village,
there have been disappearances which the locals believe to be
a curse, but a contingent of Imperial Japanese
agents disagrees and generally
causes a nuisance. You know what,
this setup kind of reminds me of Michael Mann’s The Keep. There’s a movie
that watching this movie has robbed me of rewatching. Only Saya knows
that it’s a vampire, and the vampire
is none other than Ran, played by Kaede Aono.
See, that’s fun! Oh, my God, there’s a rape
scene. What the fuck? For a movie that’s,
like, not-at-all R-rated, it’s a little aggressive. Which is ironic, because
Blood-C has a reputation for being extremely R-rated. But in Saya’s
first fight scene, she just beats everybody up. You have a sword! I guess you don’t want
to destroy the costumes or narrow down the cast or reset all
the practical blood effects. You could always go CG. It
worked out so well last time! If this movie could’ve at least
given Kanon a super bloody sword vs. vampires scene, I don’t know that this video
would need to exist. As it is, we’ll have to assess
the material she’s given, and well, that’s gonna be
difficult. Because of the cinematography
and blocking, we don’t see a lot of her
performance. And most of her dialogue
is just repeating her basic character motivation
anyway, but she does come on strong with the spare instances
of comedy, which shouldn’t be unexpected
at this point. This is also some reunion,
by the way, as Kanon and Aono barely have
any scenes together. I like the idea of a vampire
hunter encountering a vampire under unusual circumstances, like, maybe they become
friends first– that would be cool–
but this movie prefers to focus on the relationship
between the vampire hunter and the vampire’s brother. Not much of a relationship,
either, they just tend to occupy the same static
frames at the same time. In the end,
the climactic battle is just a bunch
of sword swipes, barely captured by the camera,
scored with terrible music and interrupted constantly
by bullshit. I know these two are
better than this, I just saw. Okay, now, this is the worst
death I have ever seen. And once again, he turns around
to show you there’s no wound. (crying):
What did I do to deserve this? Well,
Asura Girl: A Blood-C Tale seems to be the outgrowth
of a stage production, in which Kanon and Aono
play the same roles. So, in truth, I don’t know if this is a low-budget
horror movie or a high-budget taping,
except that the actual taping looks way better
than this movie. Kanon would go on
to do two sequels, and Aono would return
to the stage as the Major
in a theatrical adaptation of Ghost in the Shell: Arise. But this is when
Kanon’s career especially starts to get eclectic. The year following Asura Girl, she appeared
as a contestant on Sasuke, the all-female spin-off
of Ninja Warrior. She managed
to clear her first stage, but ran out of time
on the second. Dude, that’s so crazy. That would be like seeing
some CBS sitcom guy show up on Survivor. That’s why we have
celebrity versions. If anything, it’s supposed
to be the other way around, like Jamie Chung and The Miz, or the guy
who makes The White Lotus. Yeah, I’m just saying bullshit
so I can show as much of Kanon’s
run as possible. Yeah! Here’s where it gets
even crazier. At least as far back as 2022, Kanon’s been working regularly
as a ring girl for professional
kickboxing events. I can’t even come up
with an analogy for that one. And then, in 2023, she decides to get in the ring
for an actual bout. Now, I understand
that she’s been doing karate since she was a kid,
but come on. She’s an actress– she knocked
her opponent out in 39 seconds. (cough) Asura Girl: A Blood-C Tale is
one of the best vampire movies I’ve ever seen– Uh, sir?
Could you not stand directly in front of the actress’s face,
please? In the interim, Kanon has also found success
on the small screen with tokusatsu shows
like Kamen Rider Amazons and, if I’m pronouncing this
correctly, Kamen Rider Gotchard, where she plays a bad guy. She’s also a bad guy in 2019’s
Blackfox: Age of the Ninja, the live-action prequel
to an anime movie called Blackfox. With that sort of introduction,
surely we can expect another low-budget bruiser. This one even does
what High Kick Angels so assiduously avoided, which is that terrible
color correction endemic to Japanese genre films. To be honest, though,
this movie’s okay. It benefits from following
a very simple story with movements understood
by the screenwriter at an almost instinctual level. But forest for the trees, man, it’s also a ninja movie
without any ninja. When one clan decides
to attack another, this is what it looks like. I know what it’s supposed
to look like. One of the best depictions
of ninja I’ve ever seen comes from a Chinese movie,
Curse of the Golden Flower. Now That’s Ninja. Our main character is Rikka,
and she’s a ninja whose whole thing is she
doesn’t want to kill anybody, which again,
would seem to run counter to prevailing ninja wisdom. Kanon plays
one of the evil henchmen, and while her performance is just as untuned
as everyone else’s, the villainy influences
her fighting style in a way that shows development
from High Kick Angels. She’s faster
and she hits harder, and most importantly,
she does cool things. See, now we’re verging
on Ip Man territory. But we’re still at the border,
because she’s trapped in this anti-ninja ninja thing,
and is that something people are really
gonna get excited about? Like, it’s a fine,
inoffensive movie, but when I think about
a crossover success for a Japanese movie
of this vintage, I think of 13 Assassins,
which was extremely violent. Now, as Peggy Olsen knows, violence is not the only thing
that sells, but it’s eye-catching,
and it’s concrete. How do you pitch a movie
like Blackfox: Age of the Ninja to someone who has the option
of watching anything else, including 13 Assassins and that scene
in Curse of the Golden Flower? Shadow also
had some good ninjas. That movie is nutso. Something that strikes me about a lot of the movies
we’ve discussed so far is the incidence
of the word “girl” or something similar
in the English titles. Rina Takeda was
the High Kick Girl from the producer
of Shaolin Girl, and would go on
to be Karate Girl, Ninja Girl
and one of the Danger Dolls; Aono and Kanon
were High Kick Angels, those Asura Girl sequels
were called Blood Club Dolls. It’s no surprise that a lot of
these actresses got their start playing high school girls– sometimes
as high school girls– because there’s a market
for that. It’s what nerds like
Kenji Kamiyama think is cool. But once these actresses,
you know, graduate high school, what’s left for them? Stage plays,
Sasuke, kickboxing, baseball, Hong Kong,
opening a gym? When I think about why an actor
hasn’t broken out yet in a way I believe they
ought to, the easiest answer is that they simply
don’t come to mind. If you were writing
an action movie about a detective
trapped in a skyscraper with a bunch of bad guys,
and I said, “Oh, I’ve got the perfect lead” and showed you
a random Japanese actress, you’d look at me
like I was an asshole and the detective would
probably end up being a guy. But there are Japanese
actresses who want to do this– some who want to just do
everything, it seems– and we’re failing them. If they want to do action,
they have to seek out these tiny, niche projects that
aren’t gonna scrape together even a moderate budget. And then if that movie blows, it’s like, “Oh, great,
that was our one chance.” But every now and again,
I suppose, you get lucky. Moving fully
into the 2020s now, I’d like to tell you
about Baby Assassins. And when I say “I’d like to,” it is literally all I can
think about any of the time. But wait a minute,
wasn’t I just crying about titles like this? In fact, the original title
is “Baby Valkyries,” which is also gendered,
but less ironic. With “Baby Assassins,”
it sounds like there’s gonna be some sort of contradiction
between these young women and their chosen profession. Well, that might require
a plot and character, and that’s not what
we’re going for here. But let’s back it up a second. Saori Izawa is a martial artist and stunt performer
with a résumé long and impressive enough
to eventually double on one of the biggest
action movies in the world,
John Wick: Chapter 4. In 2021,
she got her breakout role when director Yugo Sakamoto teamed up with action legend
Kensuke Sonomura. Now, Sakamoto proved his
bona fides earlier that year with the excitingly titled
A Janitor, but the addition of Sonomura
lends Baby Assassins that frenetic
fight choreography which you might’ve seen
in the wild because it’s just so crazy. Sonomura and Izawa are a match
made in action heaven. She’s so good,
and finally, with this, it’s Ip Man giving that
Japanese guy the hundred hands. I can sell this. Even if it’s another silly
movie about some girls, it doesn’t have to be
so prescriptive. These are not good guys, or even badasses
with hearts of gold. They’re straight-up sociopaths. So while Rina Takeda
is always learning the lesson that violence
is not the answer, and Miyahara Kanon never
packs as much of a punch in her movies as she does in
real life, the Baby Assassins are extremely violent
and very casual about it. That’s different,
that’s noticeable. And partly thanks
to the unique fighting style– like pencak silat in The Raid
or gun fu in John Wick– these movies really caught on. It helps, of course,
that they’re also really good. But I don’t know if I’d call
them really good action movies. What I’ve come to value is the
downtime between the action, because of the interplay
between the two characters: Izawa’s Mahiro and Chisato,
played by Akari Takaishi. In her J-drama Falling Student
and Irresponsible Teacher, which is a romance between
a high school student and– well, we don’t have
to get into it– Takaishi proved
that she could play a shy, troubled girl
with pathos and deadpan humor, but if that’s all
you’d seen of her, I don’t think
she’d be on the shortlist for the next big action movie. It’s in Baby Assassins that she
really gets to run wild. Chisato is the more upbeat
and energetic of the two, possibly making her sociopathy
more shocking. It is such a compelling,
unpredictable performance. It seems like she’s making
countless micro-decisions about her posture,
about where to look, about how much to be twitching. I love this face she’s making because she’s so happy
about cake. And that freakout
in the second movie after losing a game of shogi. But what’s really stuck with me is a smaller moment
in the first movie, in the maid cafe. So, the story is: these assassins
have to get part-time jobs for some unknown reason. Although the socially awkward
Mahiro struggles with the audition
for the maid cafe, Chisato finds
that she’s a good fit. It actually seems like
she may have found her people, and it’s surprisingly sweet. But then these yakuza guys
got to come in, including one played by
Yasukaze Motomiya, who you might recognize from
The Man Who Erased His Name. This scene is such an exercise
in action filmmaking: the hidden badass, you know,
when the guy you thought was an accountant
or a beekeeper is like, “I’m not an accountant
or a beekeeper!” Or a maid, in this case. Now, in a more
conventional movie, there would’ve been
some sort of rivalry or politics in the maid cafe, like in the strip club
in Anora, which would make
Chisato’s reveal more impactful
for everyone else, and that is missing. I kind of get this feeling that
Yugo Sakamoto is a director who’s, like,
never seen a movie. But when Chisato
tells everybody to leave, there’s some actual pain
in her voice. Hayaku!
(“Hurry!”) NARRATOR:
She really liked this job
and maybe even these people, and now it’s over. And of course,
Takaishi is also a natural with the action,
which is amazing, because there’s nothing
natural about it. Even as Takaishi
broadens her filmography, she hasn’t abandoned the genre, having done so many
Baby Assassins projects over the past few years
as well as Kensuke Sonomura’s third directorial feature,
Ghost Killer. Izawa, of course,
is more of the action insider, but keeps popping up
in unexpected places. Not so surprisingly,
she features in a Sakamoto short film,
2022’s “Heaven’s Rush,” but she’s also a go-to
for music videos, some of which don’t feature
martial arts at all. Here she is on stage with
a band called Wasureranneyo. I’d be curious to know
why she’s so popular in the Japanese music scene, other than who else could you
possibly find who’d be cooler? She’s also been involved
in the marketing for the video game
Assassin’s Creed Shadows and the manga series
Sakamoto Days, with an ad that has
Mahiro’s laidback vibe. It’s the sort of work
that’s consistent with her action reels
which predate Baby Assassins, so I hope she’s doing
these things for fun and not because
they already made three Baby Assassins movies, and what,
are they gonna make four? God, I hope so.
There’s also a TV show. Obviously, Chad Stahelski
already knows she can do
John Wick-style action, and while her performance
as Mahiro is more reserved
than Takaishi’s, I think she more than
holds her own. In movies with such
unorthodox storytelling, her quiet, subtle expressions
do a lot of heavy lifting. She’s ready to go. Whatever
it is. Sky’s the limit. I couldn’t ask
for a better showcase of two talented actresses. This is the new standard.
Or the first standard. Surely, it’s gonna be
smooth sailing from here on out because surely the Japanese film industry
saw this and said, “Hey,
let’s just do that now,” but they were smart about it,
they were smart about it. Unlike in Hollywood
where they looked at the success
of John Wick and tried to shoehorn gun fu
into everything, they had a nuanced response
and put real money and talent like Sakamoto
behind these actresses. Talent that knows how to appeal
to an international audience without making compromises, without selling out
and playing on Western stereotypes about
“crazy Japan.” Fuck that. I mean, look, man, you do what
you want to do, and I think you’re pretty genuine about it,
but don’t feel like it’s a fucking obligation. Surely– surely–
nothing bad is about to happen. I’m a huge fan of Ultraman. Love Ultraman.
But you know, in theory, because I’ve only seen
a handful of episodes from the original show. In fact, I’d never watched
an entire show until 2023, with Ultraman Blazar, which happened
to feature on YouTube. That was quite the coup,
and I really appreciated that as Godzilla
is getting more CGI, Tsuburaya Productions
is holding the torch for rubber suits. These monsters look fantastic. But I’d be lying if I said they
were the reason I was watching. I don’t remember now,
but I have to imagine I just stumbled
onto Konomi Naito thanks to the Instagram
algorithm. You know, I may be terrified
of new technology, but the algorithm
is how I found out about my beloved Julie Estelle
and The Night Comes for Us. Maybe it wasn’t such
a bad thing, especially in light of later
developments like NFTs and A.I. No, it’s very bad, too. So, Konomi Naito
is an actress who also appears to be
a black belt in karate. She teaches
self-defense classes and choreographs action scenes where she beats up
all her students. And she seems cool? See, I’m actually just
guessing about all of this because I don’t know
anything about her. You know, I’ve never gotten
to hear and understand anything Miyahara Kanon
has ever said that wasn’t scripted because these guys
aren’t like K-pop idols. They’re on all these
international platforms, but there’s no expectation
of an international audience, and that breaks my heart. Also breaking my heart, Naito had precious
few opportunities to lay the karate
on people in Blazar– or aliens,
as the case may be. Ugh, dude. We used to build shit
in this country. We used to make movies
like Zeiram. But like Kanon, Naito is
another one who stays busy. If you do follow her
on Instagram, you’ll see horseback riding, traditional Japanese stuff,
Korean language lessons and horrifying acupuncture. Man, where does she find
the time for all this stuff? Oh, right,
by not being in action movies. Okay, look, I might be
stretching this premise. I’m not saying hobbies are bad, or certainly that these women
should only do things that I’m interested in, but this is an incomplete
math equation. She does karate so well that she’s teaching it
to other people. She’s an actress
who’s appeared on television. She does not do karate
on television. How does that make sense? Ultraman Blazar
also stars Himena Tsukimiya, who now goes by her
actual name Himena Yamada, and I wouldn’t have even
thought to mention her, until I found out that she was
gonna star in a movie called Shogun’s Ninja
this year. I mean, she didn’t do
a lot of action on the show, so I never considered her for the next big action movie.
Hmm. I might’ve even passed over
Yamada regardless to spare myself
the embarrassment of this hypocrisy, but for the fact that
in Shogun’s Ninja, she stars opposite none other
than Miyahara Kanon. Nice! But let’s back it up again,
because as it turns out, Yamada is just as much
of an action stalwart. In the 2018 movie Red Blade, she’s one part
of a kunoichi sister duo who trains our lead character in the ruthless ways
of the ninja. That sounds okay, right? That sounds like
a reasonable story. Okay, this movie opens
with ten minutes of Tak Sakaguchi fighting ninja
in the forest. Ten minutes! After that fucking ordeal, we find ourselves
in present-day Japan where a sad-sack high school
girl finds a magic book that transports her
into some sort of semi-mythical ninja dimension
where she wants to learn how to be a ninja
so she can get revenge on the fact that her father
was made to be a scapegoat for his company. I-I don’t even know
where to begin with that. What the fuck
did I even just say? So it’s like Godzilla’s Revenge
crossed with those videos you watch in middle school where a student
goes back in time and meets historical figures. This one’s trying
to be more of a drama, which is a change of pace,
but it’s just unpleasant. Before we know
who any of these people are, they’re yelling and screaming
at each other. It’s the appearance
of a dramatic story but with none of the substance. Some of the ninja action
is surprisingly ninja, with weapons and stealth
and teamwork, which is criminally underused. Yamada performs admirably. She’s clearly got
the physical stamina, as we can see in some
of these long takes. Conversely,
her character is totally weak. I mean, the movie
simply does not believe in its action heroines. They play second fiddle
to Sakaguchi, and the ratio of them
beating up the bad guys to getting beaten up
by the bad guys, you know, the numbers
just aren’t crunching. If anything,
this movie is on the other end of the exploitation spectrum,
too. Lots of
voyeuristic photography, and that’s a counterproductive
design philosophy, if you want to call it that. For however much the filmmakers
wanted to make a movie about cool ladies doing cool things, they also want
to ogle these ladies. So it’s no fucking surprise that they have
basically no character. The light of Ip Man is fading as we fall
further down the abyss hole. Yamada’s character
actually dies partway through, which meant I had to watch
the rest of this movie for no reason. Afterwards,
the girls are crying like “Why don’t you care
that she died?” And Tak Sakaguchi is like,
“That is the way of the ninja.” Shouldn’t they already know
that? How are they even ninja? Like, ninja training is just
fucking around in the woods for a little bit,
it’s a fucking laugh. If it’s not a comedy, why doesn’t this movie
take itself seriously? So, Shogun’s Ninja is directed by a fella
named Koichi Sakamoto– no relation to Yugo, I assume–
and I trust him to take care of Yamada more
than the crew behind Red Blade. For one thing, he directed
Blackfox: Age of the Ninja. He actually works
with Kanon a lot, having directed episodes
of Kamen Rider Gotchard. In 2023,
they reunited for a movie. This one is called…
Ninja vs. Shark. Goddamn it. Look, if you’re
the kind of person who sees a title like Ninja vs. Shark, and says,
“That sounds awesome!” that’s okay. That’s okay. Maybe you rent this
with your buddies and get a pizza and get high– that’s a legitimate
moviegoing experience. Maybe not the most attentive, and from the perspective
of the filmmaker, it’s a positively
masochistic exercise. It’s this whole SyFy Channel
Original Pictures “bad on purpose” racket
meant to invite scorn. “Oh, my God, it’s so dumb. Who
would make a movie so dumb?!” Despite the surface-level
similarities to something like Sharknado, Ninja vs. Shark
also isn’t a comedy. Actually, it’s more like a
SciFi Channel Original Picture, if you know what I mean. Silly but not cynical. And I appreciate that Sakamoto
sees enough range in Kanon to cast
her in villainous roles. In this one,
she’s an evil ninja who wants to fuck and kill
the main character guy, and she is going really hard. Dude, your eyes are gonna
pop out of your sockets. But that’s the movie she’s in. If she were to rein it in
even a little, she’d be out of place,
because this movie also has to contain
a shark-fighting ninja. A title like Shogun’s Ninja suggests something
more straightforward. We’ve run the gamut,
between no-bullshit movies like High Kick Girl to movies full of bullshit
like Red Blade. For our purposes here, I think the former
is the most helpful, though it does run the risk
of being dry. Shogun’s Ninja is about
two somewhat unrelated things happening simultaneously. Our heroines are Kagaribi
and Okyo, played by Yamada
and Kanon respectively, the last members of a disgraced
clan who as children watched their leader
cut down before them and swore vengeance
against the Yagyu. Over at the lord’s castle,
it seems that the shogun’s proclivities
for men are threatening
the Tokugawa bloodline, prompting extreme members
of his circle to abduct concubines
to bear a son. One of those prospective
concubines is Oran, an acquaintance of Kagaribi
and Okyo’s, whose subsequent attempts
at rescue reveal that the Yagyu clan
has embedded itself in the shogunate. So, while these two threads
do come together, I say they’re somewhat
unrelated for thematic reasons. We have two separate arcs. The two heroines
have to learn to get along, and Oran helps the shogun
follow his heart. In a literal sense, these two arcs dovetail when,
in one scene, Kagaribi and Okyo
settle their differences in order to aid the shogun. But let’s take a closer look. Why do they have
to settle their differences in the first place? Well, after losing Oran, they argue
and then come to blows. Kagaribi doesn’t like
that Okyo is so headstrong while Okyo doesn’t like
that Kagaribi is so passive. But this is all happening
really quickly, with a lot of telling
and not showing. For a brief counter-example, you notice that whenever
Walt and Jesse fight on Breaking Bad,
they don’t have to say what it is they don’t like
about each other. Well-understood tensions
have been simmering and now they’re boiling over. And when these two walk out
on each other, they’re not abandoning
a super compelling relationship. In their natural state,
they mostly just bicker. What do we lose
when we lose this friendship? We should be losing
the meat and potatoes, the double dragon action. We should understand and
maybe even fear that neither is as strong
as they are together. We’d need to see that first, but in the opening,
they fight pretty separately. Compare this scene
to one later on where they beat up
this pickpocket guy. This is easily my favorite
fight scene in the movie, if you can even call it
a fight scene, because it’s consistent
with the lighthearted tone and demonstrates
an unspoken bond. Like, come on, guys, ninja is so much more
than just the outfits, with the zigzagging and you
don’t know what’s going on and then you get stabbed. You even talk about it,
but I want to see it. I just want something more
tactical, more thoughtful. The climactic fight
is a pretty good example. Of this, anyway, because when
Kagaribi meets the final boss, she’s like “Oh, it’s you,
you’re the object of my lifelong revenge.” It’s all just happening
by accident. Realizing that this guy has
an unbeatable sword technique, the two ninja decide
to neutralize the sword. Not overly complex,
but fight choreography can sometimes seem arbitrary, so having a discrete goal
beyond “harm” lends purpose and readability
to each move. We know what’s happening
and why. And they’re working as a team. Unfortunately,
to reach this point, they kind of just had
to air their grievances– change nothing about
themselves in response– and decide that they were ready
for the final fight. Like, Okyo loses two fights
to this character Akane, and for their final match,
literally nothing has changed. There was no training montage,
no revelation, no technique newly unlocked. Like, yeah, we’re hitting
all the major beats, they’re all in order,
but there’s nothing in between. Who is Akane to Okyo other than
an especially tough opponent? What did she take from her?
What does she represent? I’m in an awkward position because it’s in
my muscle memory to criticize
every female-led action movie that isn’t Julie Estelle
putting a blade through Hannah al-Rashid’s
throat– and that’s not even
a female-led action movie– but I genuinely appreciate that Koichi Sakamoto
has built this stable home for a lot of these
Japanese action stars. In addition to casting Kanon
multiple times, he’s also brought in
Fumi Taniguchi from Kamen Rider Gotchard. And then there’s
Akane’s actress, Julia or “Juria” Nagano, who’s another
one of these guys. Okay, let’s see,
she’s a karate black belt– that’s like the minimum
at this point– but she’s also a nurse
and a professional wrestler? And a YouTuber. Here she is hanging out with kickboxing
sensation Panchan Rina. Here she is hanging out
with Kaede Aono. (speaking Japanese) NARRATOR:
Maybe Koichi Sakamoto
doesn’t make movies for me, but he makes movies for them, and if everyone’s happy
with that arrangement, I can be, too. One thing, though. No blood again. I’m no expert, but I hear that
swords are cutting weapons. When you get hit by a sword,
you don’t just fall over. That, to me, is the great
mystery in all of this. I get that I might be asking
for an excessive, say, Indonesian level of gore, but
why in so many of these movies is there no blood at all? Well, another recurring theme
is cute outfits. Sailor suits, boob windows,
ninja gear like Dead or Alive. I think the Japanese fighting
girl as she currently exists is meant to be looked at
as much as anything else. They’re cute or they’re sexy, and that’s why people
make these movies and that’s why people
watch these movies. That’s why they’re
never too serious and never too bloody,
unless that’s the gag. And maybe these guys like being
cute and sexy, that’s fine, but they should also be able
to do literally anything else, short of being
in Baby Assassins 4. Maybe the mistake I’m making is in assuming that the market
for these movies has aspirations
beyond its built-in audience. I do think High Kick Girl and Angels were meant
to launch the careers of their respective stars,
and they succeeded, just not at
the one in a million levels of The Raid guys, who showed up
in Star Wars not long after. It doesn’t always have
to end in Hollywood. I mean, they were in Star Wars
for, like, a second. My dream is that any one of the actresses
I’ve talked about here, or all of them, can star in a big-budget
Japanese action movie with zero content restrictions
or restrictions of any kind like The Night Comes for Us
or Twilight of the Warriors. Now, in the latter case,
the studio logos ran for, like, a minute and a half, so you know those producers
went hat in hand to every dentist in Hong Kong. And The Night Comes for Us
is a Netflix movie. Over the past couple of years, with success stories
like Drive My Car, Godzilla Minus One,
FX’s Shogun and Shohei Ohtani, there’s been this narrative
of a comeback for Japanese pop culture, and you can’t have a comeback
without a going-away. In movies specifically,
a perceived decline in quality can be seen in flashpoints from 2004’s
live-action Devilman, which Beat Takeshi called “one of the four most
stupid movies ever made,” and ’22’s What to Do
with the Dead Kaiju?, basically thought of
as the next Devilman. I’ve seen opposing viewpoints
online. I mean, the 2000s in America
were a disaster, but we only talk about
There Will Be Blood and No Country for Old Men. Not to mention, when
the Japanese economy collapsed in the early ’90s, the anime
boom was already underway, and the burgeoning
home video market allowed the independent scene
to flourish. So there’s no
direct correlation between the cheap genre movies
we see today and there simply
not being a lot of money in the Japanese film industry. One thing is without dispute: there’s not a lot of money
in these movies. The Koichi Sakamoto
ninja stuff especially seemed to recycle costumes and even shoot at
the same locations, with that one thoroughfare
looking like the open-air museums
you see on YouTube. Maybe that’s why they never,
like, break stuff? I don’t know
what kind of strings come along with
foreign investment, but the billions of dollars
flowing into Korean productions for Netflix
has paid out dividends, at least in terms
of what I’m talking about here. We don’t really have
Korean action stars, other than Don Lee,
but we do have stars in a more profound way
than ever before. I mean, look at Lee Byung-hun,
who’s far better known as the Front Man
than as Storm Shadow. And sometimes, every once
in a while, a Park Shin-hye or a Han So-hee will do action,
and it looks so fucking good. Ugh, my kingdom for– well, for Kingdom season three
with Jun Ji-hyun– but if Konomi Naito or Kaede
Aono could look like this? So, that’s where we are. The disappearance
of the Japanese fighting girl in live-action film is a combination of several
factors– money, mission, the fact that all these
filmmakers are dudes– but I want to stress
that the talent is there. It’s so obvious to me, even if the movies themselves often struggle
to articulate that. Thanks for watching.
If you enjoyed this video, there’s more over at the blog,
WithEyesEast.com. I tell you, making this video
was a rabbit hole. I just kept discovering
new titles and new actresses. I really wasn’t even gonna
mention Himena Yamada if not for Shogun’s Ninja, and then,
watching that movie it’s like, “Oh, I remember her
from Ninja vs. Shark.” And Julia– or Juria–
Nagano really is amazing, but at that point, I just
couldn’t keep adding segments for fear of what
I might uncover next. But that’s really encouraging. And in the future,
I’ll have to find a space to talk about Meiko Kaji,
Etsuko Shihomi and one of my
favorites, Haruka Ayase, who was Balsa
in the live-action Moribito. Seriously,
that show is super good. If you take
nothing else away… I should also note that, uh, Falling Student
and Irresponsible Teacher is actually pretty good, too.
Or Read: https://witheyeseast.com/2025/04/15/japanese-fighting-girl-the-new-school/
One of the things I really like about anime is the incidence of cool action ladies, but I’m astonished that this doesn’t translate to non-anime Japanese media. I seem to remember a movie from long ago, about a girl who kicks high…
Introduction: 00:00
Rina Takeda: 02:00
Kaede Aono and Miyahara Kanon: 09:28
Saori Izawa and Akari Takaishi: 21:13
Konomi Naito and Himena Yamada: 26:51
In Conclusion: 37:23