Review: Buichi Saito's "Plains Wanderer"

Japan Society's film series "No Borders, No Limits: 1960s Nikkatsu Action Cinema" continues with Buichi Saito's 1960 feature Plains Wanderer, screening on March 14 at 7:30. The fifth installment of a popular nine-part series, Plains Wanderer is a sterling example of the "Eastern Western" genre, a popular staple of Nikkatsu action films. These films used the iconography of the American Western, but added unique characteristics of Japanese culture and history, and in the case of Plains Wanderer, crossed it with the gangster film genre. Akira Kobayashi, one of Nikkatsu's biggest stars, played the wanderer in this series, a lone hero who drifts into various towns, a figure akin to those played by Randolph Scott in Budd Boetticher's westerns, although Kobayashi was far less taciturn and stoic than Scott.

Taki (Kobayashi), a wandering, singing cowboy, comes upon a village in Hokkaido populated by the Ainu, aboriginal people of Japan. He brings in tow Nobuo (Toshio Egi), a boy abandoned by his mother, whom Taki is searching for. Taki becomes drawn into the conflict the villagers are having with Kodo (Nobuo Kaneko), a rapacious bar owner and developer, who wants to take over their land for tourist construction. Also in the mix is Junko (Ruriko Asaoka), the owner of an arts and crafts shop selling Ainu craftworks, and who is conducting an anthropological study of the Ainu. Her interest is not merely an intellectual one; she loves and wants to protect these people. Her father-in-law Kiyosato (Yuzo Kiura) has mortgaged the Ainu land to Kodo, and he struggles to pay back the loan, but it is soon becomes clear that Kodo is less interested in being repaid than in making profit off the Ainu village land. Junko is engaged to Shigeru, Kiyosato's dimwitted son. Her doubts about the impending marriage are only exacerbated by the arrival of the dashing Taki. Also complicating matters is Junko's friend Setsu (Mari Shiraki), an Ainu village girl who is in love with Shigeru.