The Hard Life of a Treasure

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A young man finds fame and fortune playing women in kabuki performances in 2025's Kokuho (国宝, "Living National Treasure"), the highest grossing live action Japanese film of all time. That still puts it well behind several anime and American movies in Japan but it's certainly a milestone, and a surprising one, especially considering the film is not a family film. It's been playing for about half a year now and tickets at the cinema a couple blocks from me are still regularly sold out. I finally had to buy a ticket a day in advance to see it. Yet I'm guessing you, western reader, have never even heard of this movie. What's all the fuss about?

I half expected the theatre to be mostly empty when I arrived. I thought maybe they were using the strategy of some recent religious films in the US, of certain generous patrons buying up tickets for showings in order to inflate the box office, but the theatre was not mostly empty, it was about two thirds full. There have also been those suspiciously successful propaganda films in China over the past several years. Is Kokuho propaganda? Yes, though it's contrary to the more worrisome recent political trends in Japan. I think people going to this movie are basically voting for a certain vision of Japanese national identity contrary to the rising tides of xenophobia and homophobia.

But is it any good? It's competently made. The director is, significantly, of Korean decent. Lee Sang-il retains a Korean name although he was raised in Japan. The fact that the public is supporting a film made by a man of foreign blood reflects a rejection of the anti-foreigner rhetoric growing in prominence in recent years, particularly anti-Korean rhetoric.

The film also hearkens back to a time when Japanese attitudes about gender were much different. Ironically, the homophobia one encounters in Japan nowadays borrows from western conceptualisations of gender. As the film shows, it would not have been out of the way for a yakuza boss to patronise kabuki "onnagata" performers, men who specialised in female roles. The practice began in the 17th century when it was decided that female performers incited too much lust in the male audience, though the introduction of men and boys in the roles of women resulted in some same sex relationships. You won't see that in Kokuho. Instead, the main character, Kikuo, is a tough guy, a son of a yakuza, no less, who gets violent when a guy from the audience tries to put his hands on him.

Cinephiles will doubtlessly by now be thinking of Farewell My Concubine, the 1993 Chinese film about a man who becomes famous for playing women in the Beijing Opera. I have no doubt that Farewell My Concubine provided Kokuho with its basic blueprint. Kikuo's yakuza father dying at the beginning of film before he's taken in by a kabuki master is similar to Cheng Dieyi, the protagonist of Farewell My Concubine, being taken in by the Beijing Opera troupe after being abandoned by his prostitute mother. In both stories, there's the traditional link between the performing arts and the criminal underworld, collectively known as "the floating world".

Watanabe Ken plays the kabuki master whom we meet visiting Kikuo's father before he becomes Kikuo's master. What a revelation to see Watanabe in a Japanese film again. All the years of his stilted, stiff line deliveries in American films melted away and he was that lively fellow from Tampopo again. It goes to show just how hard English is, I don't think Watanabe ever really learned it.

A crucial difference between Farewell My Concubine and Kokuho is that Farewell My Concubine was an arthouse film. It was made during that remarkable thaw period of the '90s when a slew of movies from China captivated foreign cinephiles with their unvarnished historical perspectives on the terror and destruction wrought by ideological regimes in China throughout the 20th century. Kokuho, on the other hand, is intended as a cultural affirmation in service to an empowered faction. So, despite its attitude about foreigners and performative gender roles, it's a deeply conservative film. One can see that in its uniform position for female characters in submissive roles but also in its focus on the suffering of the characters it's exhorting the audience to respect.

Both Farewell My Concubine and Kokuho, like nearly all movies about the backstage life of theatre performers, owes a debt to Powell and Pressburger's The Red Shoes and I would have advised the makers of Kokuho to draw some influence from the breadth of emotional experience depicted in that film. Kokuho starts to feel very one-note by the end and, with a run time of around three hours, it can get to be quite gruelling as we watch the characters scream at each other in the street or deal with limbs that had to be severed due to gangrene. Farewell My Concubine has a lot of that, too, but it was counterbalanced by a sensuality that Kokuho lacks. Ultimately, Kokuho is more interesting for what it was intended to be than for what it is.

There's a small but significant role in the film for real life kabuki actor Nakamura Ganjiro IV. Cinephiles are better acquainted with Nakamura Ganjiro II, grandfather of the man we see in Kokuho, although stage names, as we see in Kokuho, are not necessarily a blood inheritance. Nakamura Ganjiro II had several prominent roles in the Golden Age of Japanese Cinema. You may have seen him in movies by Naruse Mikio, Kon Ichikawa, or Ozu Yasujiro. In fact, in Ozu's 1959 film, Floating Weeds, he appears as the leader of a kabuki troupe alongside Kyo Machiko, a woman playing women in kabuki. In 1959. But nevermind that now.

Kokuho is now in theatres in Japan.