This is more like it - slashtastic sashimi-Western entertainment. The gymnastically-challenged swordsman is Wang Kang or To-jin-san, a Chinese 'outside person' who falls spectacularly foul of Shogun etiquette almost as soon as he arrives in the land of the rising bodycount (It goes up much faster and earlier here than it did in Zatoichi meets Yojimbo.)
The visitor brings a fighting technique akin to wire-free wire fu, sort of Buzz Aldrin meets Jet Li, a spectacle of sheer silliness that took me back to Monkey and The Water Margin. (There's one amusing moment when he's fighting with his empty left sleeve on fire.) The Martial Arts genre has certainly come a long way since the seventies!
Soon Wang Kang has teamed up with Ichi the blind masseur, that mostly deadly of ill-mannered buffoons, a partnership differently-able to take on all of bosses Sugita and Tobei's yakuza goons and the entire Nambu samurai clan. However, due to unresolved linguistic difficulties that unfortunately peak just when anyone who might have translated for them is already dead, the two embark on a fight to the death. (Apparently Wang Kang wins in the Hong Kong version. Not in this one though - the literal transaltion of the title is Zatoichi: Destroy the Chinese Sword! Poor Wang Kang's sword is broken to start with.)
Mayhem seems to cling to Zatoichi like an American to the notion that his country is a force for good in the world. If I saw him shuffling into my town I know what I'd do...get out quick.
Ah, the Japanese - you either love them or loathe them. I'm definitely in the former category, though I can see why some people can get a bit weirded out. Over the weekend I was reading Haruki Murakami's collection of stories entitled The Elephant Vanishes and I came across a metaphor which reminded me of AA Gill's quip that the Japanese are "the people that aliens might be if they learnt Human by correspondence course and wanted to slip in unnoticed.":
"Time oozed through the dark like a lead weight in a fish's gut". huh?
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