Jidaigeki: Period Drama

This name originally meant the opposite of what it means now. It's said to start in 1923, when Shochiku billed A Woman and Pirates as a 'jidaigeki eiga' — a 'new-era drama film.' The term borrowed from kabuki's jidaimono, but as advertising copy it meant 'a drama of the new age' — a pitch for something different from what came before. It shortened to jidaigeki, and today the word means the exact opposite: a drama set in an old era. This map has several stories about names — insults, generational labels, a bomb — and here, time itself flipped the meaning. The substance came from an earthquake. Studios that gathered in Kyoto polished the stylized art of the sword fight. Tsumasaburo Bando, Denjiro Okochi, Kanjuro Arashi, Chiezo Kataoka, Utaemon Ichikawa, Kazuo Hasegawa — the actors known as the 'six great stars of jidaigeki.' This way of staging swordplay later passed through Akira Kurosawa and became part of the vocabulary of action filmmaking worldwide. On the left side of this map, a line runs back and forth to the western. That current starts here.