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A Note on Japanese Names

This website reproduces Japanese proper names using the most common transliteration system (including diacritical marks for certain vowels), but in Japanese rather than Western name order: that is, surname first, given name last. The only exceptions are rare “anglicized” Japanese names: for example, the directors best-known today as “Thomas Kurihara” and “Henry Kotani” (which were not, of course, those individuals’ names at birth). Thus, our subject’s name appears as “Uchida Tomu,” rather than the more common “Tomu Uchida.” (Through force of habit, I may occasionally have slipped and included some proper names in the “wrong” – that is, Western – order… but I’m only human.)

The question of proper names leads me inevitably to the following topic…

The Name of This Website

IUTAS (pronounced “eye-you-tis”) is an acronym that stands for “The International Uchida Tomu Appreciation Society,” with the director’s name, as noted above, appearing in Japanese order, surname first.

By an interesting coincidence, “IUTAS” is also a real word… in Latin. “Iūtus” is the (masculine) perfect passive participle of “iuvō,” a Latin verb meaning “to help” or “to aid”: in other words, it means “helped, aided, having been helped or aided.” “Iūtās” is thus the accusative feminine plural inflection of the participle “iūtus.” I’ve no idea how you would use that in a Latin sentence, since I don’t speak Latin any more than I speak Japanese. But the sense would possibly imply an action in which more than one female (women or girls) are being helped or aided… and perhaps that’s appropriate for an artist as sensitive to the plight of women in Japan as Uchida was.

A Note on Historical Periods

My subject’s 50-year career has been divided by me into three historical periods: “prewar,” “wartime” and “postwar.” The “postwar” part is easy to define: anything that occurred after the Japanese surrender in August 1945 that ended World War II. The other two parts are a bit trickier. For the purposes of this website, I define “wartime” as the period from the Pearl Harbor attack, when Japan (and America) entered the already-in-progress World War, to the surrender, and I define “prewar,” as far as it relates to my subject’s career, as the 21-year period between his entry into the film world in 1920 and the Japanese attack on Hawaii.

Of course, I’m perfectly aware that Japan was at war, at first with Manchuria (from 1931), then with all of China (from 1937), and finally with the Allies, during the almost 14-year period between the Mukden Incident of September 1931 – a false-flag operation that served as the pretext for Japan’s invasion of Manchuria – and August 1945. Thus, it could be argued that the “prewar” part of Uchida’s career ought to be limited to the period between 1920 and September 1931.

But in the film industry, as in the other arts, a certain degree of creative freedom was still possible well into the 1930s, at least until the passage of the Film Law in the spring of 1939, when a whole different national dynamic took hold, which then went into overdrive after the Japanese government’s attack on the United States in late 1941. Up to the mid-to-late 1930s, therefore, films that were very critical of society were still possible (including some that Uchida himself directed during that era), which was certainly not the case from 1939 to the end of the war. So that’s the rationale by which I’ve divided my subject’s career as I have.

Cast and Crew Notes

Within the blog pages on the individual films, I have included, after the Synopsis or Plot Highlights, Notes on the Cast and/or Crew of the films, giving a sense of the achievements and career arcs of Uchida’s collaborators – actors, writers and technicians – within the overall context of Japanese Cinema. Please note that, in cases when an actor or crew member had worked with Uchida on more than one movie, with rare exceptions I’ve included the profile of that individual within the blog page corresponding to the first film for which they worked for Uchida, but not those of subsequent films. Thus, the profile of Kataoka Chiezō appears in the blog page for A Bloody Spear at Mount Fuji, his very first film for the director, but not in the blog pages for the many later Uchida films in which that actor appears. Similarly, my profile of Mikuni Rentarō appears only in his Uchida debut, A Hole of My Own Making, and not in any of the subsequent movies in which Uchida cast him.

A Note on My Ratings

For each of the 24 films either reviewed or scheduled to be reviewed on this site (I’ve counted the Sword in the Moonlight and Miyamoto Musashi series as one film each), I’ve appended the personal rating I’ve assigned to that film on the Internet Movie Database (IMDB). In the case of the four most obscure extant films, I appear to be the only visitor to IMDB who has ever rated them. Again, these ratings are merely an expression of my personal opinion and not an attempt to establish some sort of official “canon” of Uchida masterpieces. What these ratings signify, in my own mind, is as follows:

Rating Number	Meaning	Number of Films
10	Masterpiece! Classic! Great!	6, including one fragment
9	Exceptional	5, including one fragment
8	Excellent	4, including the Sword in the Moonlight trilogy
7	Good	6, including one short subject and the five-part Miyamoto Musashi series
6	Mediocre, but with a few strong scenes	3, two of which are fragments and one of which is a short subject
5	Failure	None
4	Poor	None
3	Very poor	None
2	Dreadful	None
1	Horrible	None

It should be noted that of all of the Uchida films I’ve seen so far, I’ve given none a rating lower than 6, and have give the 6 rating to only three of them. Most of the extant films I haven’t yet seen – e.g., Rebellion from Below – seem to be very well-regarded by the few fans and scholars in Japan who’ve seen them, so I’d be very surprised if I reacted unfavorably to them when I do eventually get around to tracking them down.

The high quality of the extant films is very impressive. Some of the most awful films ever made have been directed by acknowledged masters, but as far as I can tell, Uchida’s work seems to have been more or less consistently intelligent and tasteful, if not always outstanding. On the other hand, we’ll almost certainly never know how good (or not) Uchida’s many lost films of the prewar era were.

A Note on Spoilers

All the blog posts included on this site contain a Synopsis or Plot Highlights section, which reveals major plot points about the films described, including their endings. Furthermore, each post includes a Commentary and Analysis section, in which those major plot points, and usually the ending as well, are discussed in detail. It’s impossible to discuss films, particularly Uchida’s movies, intelligently without revealing these details, so those readers who have not yet seen the films (that is, most readers) should be forewarned.

For those with access to a particular Uchida film they plan to see, it would probably be best to view it first with a fresh eye, and read my blog post about it afterwards.