The Paths Of Zatoichi

The Paths of Zatoichi charts the history and influence of the Japanese film and television franchise about Zatoichi the blind swordsman. The franchise is comprised of 29 films and 100 TV episodes (starring the famous Shintaro Katsu, who starred in 26 of the 29 feature films). They all follow the adventures of a blind masseur in medieval Japan, who wanders from village to village and often has to defend himself with his deadly sword skills. The first film was released in 1962 and the most recent in 2010. 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. Zatoichi signifies a huge area of Japanese film history which has largely been ignored in much existing scholarly research, and yet it can reveal much about the appeal of long-running characters, franchises, and their constant adaptation and influence within global popular culture.

This collection combines adaptation and disability studies to examine the ways that popular cultural remakes, reboots, and adaptations navigate representations of mental disability and health. The chapters analyze the ways that narratives of disability are framed not only by worldviews but also by the media which structure and inform them.

For film lovers and scholars, an essential resource and reference guide.

This study examines the significance of the archetypal heroes and heroines of Japanese cinema and traces both their prior development in literature, drama, and folklore, and their subsequent variations in popular culture.

Cinema of Swords is a history, guide, and love letter to over four hundred movies and television shows featuring swashbucklers: knights, pirates, samurai, Vikings, gladiators, outlaw heroes like Zorro and Robin Hood, and anyone else who lives by the blade and solves their problems with the point of a sword. Though swordplay thrives as a mainstay of current pop culture—whether Game of Thrones or Lord of the Rings or Star Wars—swashbuckling was if anything even more ubiquitous during Hollywood’s classic period, from its foundations in the Silent Era up through the savage bursts of fantasy films in the ‘80s. With this huge cinematic backlist of classics now available online and on-demand, Cinema of Swords traces the roots and branches of this unruly genre, highlighting classics of the form and pointing fans toward thrilling new gems they never knew existed. With wry summaries and criticism from swordplay expert Lawrence Ellsworth, this comprehensive guidebook is perfect as a reference work or as a dazzling Hollywood history to be read end-to-end.

Zatoichi is a Japanese literary and cinematographic character whose adventures are set in the 19th century (around 1830-1840). He is a wandering swordsman who has the particularity of being blind. Despite his blindness, he is capable of facing numerous enemies (who sometimes attack him simultaneously) and of being victorious in numerous battles. He always travels walking with his cane stick, which also serves as a sword - Inside there is a sharp blade. Zatoichi is shrewd and cunning, as well as wise and compassionate at the same time; he feels a strong responsibility to protect the humble. His auditory faculties are highly developed, and he also possesses a "sixth sense" that helps to get him out of more than one trouble. The character was created by novelist Kan Shimozawa (1892-1968), who published a series of books starring Zatoichi. Later the adaptations to the big screen would come, starring Shintaro Katsu (1931-1997). This great actor belonged to a dynasty of traditional Kabuki theater performers. In cinema he would specialize in the typically Japanese genre of chanbara or jidaigeki ("samurai" films, which used to be set in the Tokugawa era). 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". These films, based on Shimozawa's stories, were directed by different filmmakers, but the protagonist is always Shintaro Katsu.The purpose of this compilation is to offer chanbara fans a review of the blind swordsman's film career. Zatoichi is very popular in his country of origin (in recent years the famous Takeshi Kitano returned to the character for one of his productions), but also in the West he has a huge community of fans.

Modelling of information is necessary in developing information systems. Information is acquired from many sources, by using various methods and tools. It must be recognized, conceptualized, and conceptually organized efficiently so that users can easily understand and use it. Modelling is needed to understand, explain, organize, predict, and reason on information. It also helps to master the role and functions of components of information systems. Modelling can be performed with many different purposes in mind, at different levels, and by using different notions and different background theories. It can be made by emphasizing users' conceptual understanding of information on a domain level, on an algorithmic level, or on representation levels. On each level, the objects and structures used on them are different, and different rules govern the behavior on them. Therefore the notions, rules, theories, languages, and methods for modelling on different levels are also different. It will be useful if we can develop theories and methodologies for modelling, to be used in different situations, because databases, knowledge bases, and repositories in knowledge management systems, developed on the basis of models and used to technically store information, are growing day by day. In this publication, the interest is focused on modelling of information, and one of the central topics is modelling of time. Scientific and technical papers of high quality are brought together in this book.

Like its predecessors, Directory of World Cinema: Japan 3 endeavours to move scholarly criticism of Japanese film out of the academy and into the hands of cinephiles the world over. This volume will be warmly welcomed by those with an interest in Japanese cinema that extends beyond its established names to equally remarkable filmmakers who have yet to receive such rigorous attention.