These dates demonstrate how the franchise can be used as a means of charting Japanese cinema history, via the shifts in production practices and audience preferences which affected the Zatoichi series and numerous other film and TV texts.
As a guide, this book compiles critiques and analyses of each and every one of Zatoichi's 26 films shot between 1962 and 1989. They were already published, in Spanish, in my blog "Alucine Cinéfago".
... Zatōichi, the Japanese keep people with disabilities at home or institutionalized. Who is Zatōichi, and what does this cultural icon symbolize in terms of disability in Japan? Zatōichi is a fictional blind masseur with exceptional ...
... Zatōichi, who is so powerful he has the luxury, the ending implies, to choose to be blind. Kitano declared, 'I really hate [Katsu's] kind of earthy human dramas',20 so the Zatōichi he created was, in his own words, 'the biggest evil ...
... Zardoz see Boorman, John Zatoichi Challenged / Zatōichi chikemuri kaidô see Misumi, Kenji Zatoichi Meets Yojimbo / Zatôichi to Yôjinbô see Okamoto, Kihachi Zatoichi on the Road / Zatōichi kenkatabi see Yasuda, Kimiyoshi Zatoichi's Cane ...
... ZATŌICHI 1974. JPN :Zatōichi Monogatari. PRD : Suguru Kadoya. DIR : Kazuo Mori, Yoshiyuki Kuroda, Shintarō Katsu, Kenji Misu- mi, Mikiyoshi Yasuda, Tokuzō Tanaka, Junji Kurata, Akira Inoue. SCR: HajimeTakaishi,KinyaNaoi,Fumi Taka ...
... Zatōichi, the blind swordsman, was perhaps the most resilient, with twenty‐six films between 1962 and 1989, and a television series (Zatōichi Monogatari) that was produced from 1974 to 1979. Katsu Shintaro played the eponymous hero ...
... Zatōichi senryōkubi/ Zatoichiand theChest ofGold / Zatoichi's1000‒ryo Bounty (lit.) Zatōichi abaredako/Zatoichi's Flashing Sword / Zatoichi: A Tough Kite (lit.) Nemuri Kyōshirō: Joyōken/ Kyoshiro Nemuri: Swordof Seduction / Sleepy Eyes ...
... Zatōichi's adventures. But what the fiction about Zatōichi suggests is that he was special— and, by extension, that blind people were unique in the Tokugawa period. There is truth to this latter interpretation. In that era in Japanese ...