Author’s note. Before we begin, I wish to thank the following individuals for their contributions to this article: Ed Godziszewski, for generously sharing research and memorabilia from his collection, all of which is marked as such in captions; Mariko Godziszewski, for translating research material; and Erik Homenick, for sharing information and fact-checking my comments on Akira Ifukube’s scores for The Three Treasures (1959) and Buddha (1961).

In the 1950s, Japanese cinema entered what remains one of its most productive and financially lucrative chapters—and in the process completed its resurrection from a slump inflicted the previous decade by war and censorship. Prior to 1941, the island nation had been one of the two largest film producers in the world (second only to the United States), with an average annual output of five hundred movies.¹ But as tensions mounted between Japan and the western world, film stock and other resources shrank—the government even required studios to suspend filming a full twenty-four hours each month to conserve electricity²—before virtually disappearing after the outbreak of the Pacific War. In 1941, Japanese motion pictures decreased by more than half, plummeting from 497 to 232. In 1942, the number slipped even further, to eighty-seven, then sixty-one in 1943; and by the end of 1945—by which time Japan had surrendered to the Allied Powers and entered a seven-year occupation by the Americans—a mere twenty-six saw release.³ The nation’s film industry at this point became liberated from the imperial military censorship that had restricted content in the late ‘30s and early ‘40s but now had to meet approval from foreign censors aiming to eliminate nationalism, militarism, and feudalism from the arts.⁴

By the next decade, Occupation censorship was slackening and would stop altogether when the Americans relinquished governance of Japan in 1952. Bans on subjects once considered taboo were lifted. Executives who’d been recommended for permanent industry expulsion (including Toho’s Iwao Mori) were restored to leadership roles before the Occupation ended. Film production rapidly increased (the annual output rose from 156 movies in 1949 to 215 the following year) before reaching a figure comparable to the pre-1941 average: 514 Japanese features were produced in 1956.⁵ The 1950s also witnessed a local demand for Japanese movies still unsurpassed to this day: a whopping 1.13 billion movie tickets were sold⁶ between 504 titles in 1958.⁷ (A Ministry of Trade and Industry survey likewise found that the average Japanese attended between twelve and twenty movies a year.)⁸ And this is to say nothing of the multitude of pictures that were making waves overseas. Toho’s rival company Daiei, in particular, was scoring great reviews and winning prizes at international festivals. Akira Kurosawa’s Rashomon (1950) famously took home the Gold Lion award at the 1952 Venice International Film Festival; the same organization gave Kenji Mizoguchi’s Ugetsu (1953) the Silver Lion the following year; and Teinosuke Kinugasa’s Gate of Hell (1953) won the 1954 Cannes Film Festival’s Grand Prix—as well as Best Costume Design and Best Foreign Language Film at the 1955 American Academy Awards.

Meantime, Toho was striking international gold of its own. Ishiro Honda’s monster picture Godzilla attracted 9.6 million Japanese ticket-buyers⁹ before reaching the United States in a redacted form called Godzilla, King of the Monsters! The success of Godzilla paved the way to further Toho genre pictures—including Rodan (1956), The Mysterians (1957), H-Man (1958), and Battle in Outer Space (1959), all directed by Honda—which similarly landed international distribution deals. Reviews tended to be mixed if not outright negative (the New York Times’s Bosley Crowther labeled King of the Monsters! “cheap cinematic horror-stuff”;¹⁰ Howard Thompson in the same publication decried The Mysterians as a “mess”),¹¹ but the films were bona fide money-makers, fiscally surpassing their Daiei counterparts. King of the Monsters!, for instance, played in more than four thousand U.S. theaters and amassed over $700,000 in profits; Daiei’s better-received output, meantime, remained confined, in great part, to the arthouse circuit.¹²

Left to right: Yoko Tsukasa, Kinuyo Tanaka, and Toshiro Mifune in a still for The Three Treasures. Image courtesy of Ed Godziszewski.

Despite having a pecuniary advantage over its rival, Toho wound up emulating one of Daiei’s successes. All of their rival’s award-winners thus far had been period pieces, and Gate of Hell earned considerable praise for its color photography (“of a richness and harmony that matches that of any film we’ve ever seen,” proclaimed Crowther).¹³ Toho imported the Eastmancolor brand of film stock used on that picture and channeled $500,000 and six months of production into Hiroshi Inagaki’s Samurai I: Musashi Miyamoto (1954). Assistant director Jun Fukuda recalled that the use of color lengthened shooting and that “210 warriors on horseback, and 800 samurai extras” populated what was accurately labeled by the press “the second most expensive motion picture to be produced in Japan.”¹⁴ The only film to surpass it at the time was Kurosawa’s Seven Samurai (1954), which cost between $556¹⁵-580,000¹⁶ and was shot over 148 days in the span of a year.¹⁷ By contrast, the average Japanese picture was budgeted at $50,000 and completed in just thirty days.¹⁸

Toho’s aspirations paid off when Musashi Miyamoto traveled to the United States under the title Samurai (The Legend of Musashi) and followed in Gate of Hell’s footsteps by winning the Oscar for Best Foreign Film. Director Inagaki made two sequels—Samurai II: Duel at Ichijoji Temple (1955) and Samurai III: Duel at Ganryu Island (1956)—and was occasionally thereafter assigned to spectacles for which the studio had high hopes. In 1958, he remade his own 1943 film Muhomatsu, the Rickshaw Man (in similarly rich color) and won the Gold Lion at Venice. And the following year, he was attached to an even more exorbitant production, one to which everything in the past nine years—the liberation of film content, the influx of entertainment-hungry audiences, the broadening appeal of Japanese cinema and special effects—seemed to be pointing.

Toho’s methods for gathering story ideas in the 1950s and ‘60s were many. In addition to buying the rights to literary works—à la Fumiko Hayashi’s unfinished novel Repast, which became a 1951 Mikio Naruse film starring Setsuko Hara¹⁹—the planning department sought pitches from anyone under Toho employment and from there either turned over promising submissions to screenwriters or commissioned authors to develop them. (Ishiro Honda’s 1961 film Mothra began when three authors were hired to write a foundational novella from which Shinichi Sekizawa fashioned his script.)²⁰ In still other cases, the front office made public announcements, such as when Iwao Mori declared via the message board of Weekly Shincho magazine that Toho was taking suggestions for new films. One of the responses came from Enza Theatre Company actor Seiji Ikeda, who proposed, “Why not make a film about Japanese mythology?”²¹

Lobby card. Image courtesy of Ed Godziszewski.

The idea was timely, as Toho surely knew about the grand-scale biblical epics that had emerged from Hollywood in recent years—as well as the profits many of them scored. Among these was Henry Koster’s The Robe (1953), which grossed $32 million worldwide.²² A few years later, Cecil B. DeMille’s The Ten Commandments (1956) dazzled audiences with its pageantry and dynamic special effects, made $31.3 million in the U.S. and an additional $32.9 million via foreign markets, and ultimately grossed nearly ten times its budget.²³ Japan had its own lore on which to base spectacle, and as film historian Stuart Galbraith IV has written, “films [like this] gave them a chance to show off their resources, in terms of both talent and technical wizardry.”²⁴ And so, Toho planned²⁵ what an English language press sheet would in time call “the Japanese equivalent of The Ten Commandments.”²⁶ Perhaps due to the international acclaim of his previous films, Toho assigned Hiroshi Inagaki to direct and granted him a budget of ¥250 million.²⁷

In developing their film, Inagaki and his team consulted the ancient chronicles Kojiki and Nihon Shoki. From these eighth-century texts, screenwriters Ryuzo Kikushima and Toshio Yasumi developed a story about the legendary Prince Ousu, who is falsely accused of murdering his brother and sent by his father, the emperor, on a series of perilous missions. Scattered amid his battles and adventures are interludes dramatizing Japan’s mythological origins and famous events involving the gods—namely how the deity Susanoo caused the world to lose access to the sun and subsequently slew the eight-headed dragon Yamata no Orochi. With Occupation censorship gone, Toho was free to make a movie with feudalistic elements (e.g., Ousu’s loyalty to the emperor) and swordplay that’d been restricted in the immediate postwar era.

A Toho pressbook further indicates an attempt at nationalistic appeal. “For the so-called ‘postwar generation,’ unfamiliar with Japan’s ancient myths and often lacking a deep cultural foundation, a beautiful romance […] can instill a sense of national pride and joy in being Japanese. For parents, it is a film well worth showing to their children—not as moral instruction, but as emotional education.”²⁸ This fits in with an alternate account of the movie’s conception: that the project had been recommended by the Ministry of Education.²⁹ (As scholar David McNeill has written, “The American occupation of 1945-51 ended Shinto’s status as a state religion and attempted to banish its influence from Japan’s public sphere, notably its emphasis on a pure racial identity linked to the emperor. The core element of this belief, ruthlessly enforced through the education system, was the emperor’s divine status as a direct descendant of the sun goddess Amaterasu. Though weakened, however, Shinto conservatives in Japan ‘were simply biding their time’ until they could restore its rightful place in Japanese society.”)³⁰

Kikushima and Yasumi ended up writing six drafts of their script before The Birth of Japan—known internationally as The Three Treasures—went before the cameras, advertised as Toho’s 1000th production.³¹

Promotional artwork. Image courtesy of Ed Godziszewski.

Toho’s investment is plainly evident on screen. Much of the story takes place outdoors or on massive sets representing palaces, shrines (a full-scale replica of Ise Grand Shrine was erected in western Kanagawa Prefecture), and the various domains of the gods. In contrast to the hundreds of extras in Musashi Miyamoto, The Three Treasures required “5,000 costumes, 800 suits of armor, 1,200 swords, 1,600 bows and spears, 800 earthenware items, and 12,000 crowns and ornaments.” Director Inagaki’s interest in composite shots—and special effects virtuoso Eiji Tsuburaya’s ever-growing innovation—led to a new optical printer technique called the Versatile Process, wherein a 35mm negative was inflated to 70mm and then reduced back to 35mm once the necessary shot elements had been integrated. The result made compositing as seamless as possible, though it cost so much that the process was only used once in the film.³²

A great deal of money went toward Tsuburaya’s special effects. In the movie’s three hours, Ousu encounters typhoons and wildfires—the latter required flames to be tricked into shots of Toshiro Mifune and Yoko Tsukasa running amid fields of high grass—and the picture culminates with a volcanic eruption wherein an animated bird flutters above sheets of molten rock sweeping away entire armies. Another major set piece involved the earlier mentioned encounter with Orochi. While the dragon appears in just a brief mid-movie sequence, its inclusion allowed Tsuburaya to devise startling images reflecting the handcrafted nature and resourceful filmmaking that have made Japanese special effects beloved around the world. In shooting Orochi’s grand appearance (wherein the dragon emerges from a river), Tsuburaya and his team experimented with camera playback. The monster prop was filmed submerging while the crew dumped gallons of water on it from above. When the footage was played in reverse, the impression was that of an unworldly force sucking water out of the river just before the monster’s eight heads appeared.

Behind-the-scenes still of the Yamata no Orochi puppet. Image courtesy of Ed Godziszewski.

As the sequence continues, Orochi—represented by a five-meter-long puppet controlled by compressed air and piano wires³³—presses toward shore. There it imbibes from drums of sake placed by Susanoo and eventually falls asleep. What follows is an ambitious action piece wherein the filmmakers dramatically put their own spin on the source material. In several tellings in the Kojiki and Nihon Shoki, Susanoo cut the sleeping dragon into pieces.³⁴ In The Three Treasures, the human-sized deity has no sooner stepped into view when Orochi’s blue eyes turn aglow and all eight heads come to vicious life, snapping their jaws like a row of cobras. Susanoo waves his sword and theatrically gesticulates before drawing the creature into the branches of a tree, where the heads become ensnared and strangle to death. The results are visually uneven—certain shots of Orochi are dazzling; others feature the heads lifelessly wobbling and bumping into one another—but highly atmospheric and make for one of the movie’s standout sequences.

Another promotion-worthy gimmick (also akin to the Hollywood epics) was the decision to cram The Three Treasures with talent familiar and new. The movie’s prologue called for two young gods to forge the Japanese islands, and so the studio held auditions to find a pair of fresh faces, ultimately selecting newcomers Hiroyuki Wakita and Keiko Muramatsu.³⁵ The remainder of the cast was populated with every star, character actor, and bit player Toho could get their hands on. Popular leading man Toshiro Mifune even assumed a dual role, playing both Prince Ousu and Susanoo. Casting Mifune might’ve been a calculated move, as he was not only cherished by Japanese moviegoers but a recognizable face internationally—having starred in Rashomon as well as Inagaki’s award-winners Musashi Miyamoto and Muhomatsu. As Ousu, he capitalizes on his usual screen persona—that of a tough guy with a heart of gold—and as Susanoo showcases the larger-than-life persona through which he’d become known to foreign audiences.

Mifune has three love interests: Ousu juggles affection for two women played by Yoko Tsukasa and Kyoko Kagawa, while Misa Uehara—Kurosawa’s ingénue from The Hidden Fortress (1958)—plays a princess whom Susanoo saves from Orochi. The supporting cast, meanwhile, is loaded with such recognizable faces as Kinuyo Tanaka, Akira Takarada, Akira Kubo, Eijiro Tono, Jun Tazaki, Akihiko Hirata, Koji Tsurata, Takashi Shimura (giving a juicily hammy performance as a villainous warlord), Chieko Nakakita (wife of producer Tomoyuki Tanaka), Haruko Sugimura, Yu Fujiki, and Kumi Mizuno. Daiei star and kabuki actor Ganjiro Nakamura made an appearance as the emperor, and Toho all too appropriately cast the luminous Setsuko Hara in the role of sun goddess Amaterasu. In one of the movie’s extra-narrative sequences, Hara’s character, who brings sunlight to the world, conceals herself in a cave, prompting her fellow immortals—more great talents like Daisuke Kato appear here—to stage a dance to lure her out.

When it came to scoring The Three Treasures, composer Akira Ifukube recognized his task to create music befitting a story set in his country’s ancient past. He studied, for instance, the yamatogoto (a six or seven-stringed zither believed to be native to Japan) and punctuated his rousing opening title cue with choir lyrics written in an ancient Japanese dialect. The composer also adapts certain themes between scenarios, at one point transforming his main title into a piece of diegetic music: one of Ousu’s soldiers plays the melody on his flute. Those who know Ifukube’s broader work will discover familiarity in certain tracks: an assassination is underscored by a tremolo string effect not unlike the track that plays at the start of Takao Okawara’s Godzilla vs. Destoroyah (1995). Ifukube ultimately wrote more than 160 pages of sheet music for The Three Treasures—an exceptional quantity, even when taking into account the three-hour run time (by contrast, the score for the ninety-six-minute Godzilla spanned 32 pages)—and the orchestra was so large a total of seven microphones were needed for recording.³⁶

Ad mat from the Toho pressbook containing suggestions for marquees. Despite its limited appearance in the movie, Yamata no Orochi became a key advertising visual. Theaters were encouraged to insert electrical lights into the eyes of placards depicting the dragon to “enhance nighttime visibility and also have strong daytime impact” and to hang the prop so that the beast projected “outward from the theater’s rooftop, giving a dynamic, attention-grabbing effect.”
Image courtesy of Ed Godziszewski.

The Three Treasures premiered on the first of November 1959,³⁷ following a massive promotional campaign. “Unlike the short-lived marketing campaigns typical of most Japanese films,” stated the Toho pressbook, “this project adopts a long-term, structured publicity plan modeled on major foreign releases.” Among the staged events was a 1,720-kilometer sacred flame relay that started at Takachiho and traversed—via a four-scooter entourage—to Toho Studios in Tokyo. (The relay was covered by the national press, and the flame itself became a prop in the earlier mentioned dance scene.) Toho press material also announced a Naming Ceremony—for which parents could apply to have their newborns christened by Toshiro Mifune and Yoko Tsukasa—and proposed “coordination with Toho’s branch offices and theaters [to] hold photo exhibitions at department stores, community centers, and schools. Plans are underway to loan actual costumes and props used in filming.”³⁸

The publicity paid off, as The Three Treasures attracted a reputed twenty million spectators³⁹ and made the most money of Toho’s seventy-seven movies that year. (However, the numbers reflecting its gross tend to vary between sources, with some citing ¥344.32 million⁴⁰ while Tetsu Nakamura’s liner notes for the score’s 2009 Toho Music CD claim a figure of ¥600 million.)⁴¹ Inagaki’s epic became the second most successful Japanese feature of 1959, trailing the Teiji Matsuda Chushingura produced by Toei,⁴² and went on to win Japan Technical Film Awards for its cinematography, art direction, and special techniques.⁴³ And just as The Three Treasures took a degree of inspiration from Hollywood, so too did the movie in question seemingly pave the way to another Japanese epic. Donald Richie’s book A Hundred Years of Japanese Film: A Concise History, with a Selective Guide to Videos and DVDs speculates that Daiei was emulating The Three Treasures when they made Kenji Misumi’s Buddha (1961), itself similarly packed “with every star on the lot.”⁴⁴

Buddha shares a link to the Toho film under discussion in that it also features a score by Akira Ifukube. For lyrics, the composer once again turned to a dialect not used in everyday Japanese—in this case, Pali, the liturgical language of Buddhism—and he cannibalized music from his 1953 ballet Shaka, about the life of the Buddha. And whereas Ifukube’s Three Treasures score demanded seven microphones for recording, his Buddha music was performed by the Tokyo Symphony Orchestra—a massive upgrade from the in-house orchestras and independent contractors that usually performed his film music. However, Buddha ended up being a source of embarrassment for the composer. He didn’t accompany the music tapes to London, where they were sent for mixing, and was dismayed to find them integrated into the movie at an unevocatively low volume. In 1989, the composer reworked the Shaka music a second time for his three-movement orchestral composition Symphonic Ode: Gotama the Buddha.⁴⁵ Ifukube biographer Erik Homenick told the author of this essay: “I almost wonder if his Gotama the Buddha score in 1989 was an attempt at righting the wrongs of how the music appeared in the Buddha film: to present it as an orchestral suite so people could hear it more as he intended it to be heard.”

Left to right: French and Spanish posters. Images courtesy of Ed Godziszewski.

According to a February 1960 document titled “About the Overseas Version of The Three Treasures,” Toho prepared two alternate cuts of the titular film. One was a condensed edit featuring narration by Hiroshi Takahashi that became the standard version for later showings in Japan; venues where it appeared include the 1982 Toho Half-Century Masterpiece Fair as well as a TBS Television broadcast on March 5, 1988. The film was similarly edited into an “overseas version” (also featuring narration by Takahashi),⁴⁶ which may or may not have been the same as an American cut⁴⁷ that premiered in Los Angeles in December 1960. While Stuart Galbraith IV claims the Japanese original didn’t enjoy “rave reviews,”⁴⁸ the U.S. cut garnered a degree of appreciation among western critics. Most enthusiastic was Variety, which championed the “lavish, visually meticulous account of Japan’s mythological heritage” and had especially glowing words for Eiji Tsuburaya: “His execution of the story’s demanding visual aspects […] are spectacularly lifelike.” “Already noted for their miniature, color and special effects work, these Japanese artisans have set a new standard for themselves with this effort.”⁴⁹ The Los Angeles Examiner was less enthusiastic (“the studio failed to include one important ingredient, a story to grip your interest”) but nonetheless praised the “stunning color, […] the artistry of many individual scenes, and […] such spectacular special effects as an eight-headed dragon and an earth-heaving volcanic eruption.”⁵⁰

Despite Variety’s belief that The Three Treasures could “with proper handling make some sort of a showing as a general theatrical attraction,”⁵¹ the picture played on the U.S. arthouse circuit.⁵² If Toho had aspirations of it taking home foreign prizes, this too didn’t come to fruition. However, The Three Treasures—in its original three-hour cut—did lend itself to a humanitarian cause in 1960 when the Honolulu Business College Alumni Association screened the picture for ten days to raise Christmas fund money for needy families in the Hawaiian city.⁵³

Promotional tie-in with the meat packing company Takegishi Ham Shokai. Image courtesy of Ed Godziszewski.

The Three Treasures was a milestone for Hiroshi Inagaki, who allegedly stated after the last foot of film was shot: “This is the greatest picture I have ever directed, and I am afraid it punctuates the zenith of my career as a motion picture director.”⁵⁴ However, his time behind the camera—including for star-studded epics—wasn’t over. In 1962, Toho tasked him with the latest film version of the Chushingura story. At 208 minutes, it surpassed The Three Treasures in length and used many of the same actors, including Toshiro Mifune and Setsuko Hara, the latter of whom shortly thereafter retired from cinema. Advertised as “the best [period drama] ever,” Chushingura ranked tenth among 1962 Japan’s most successful releases and fourth among Toho’s movies that year.⁵⁵ Inagaki continued directing until 1970, by which time his country’s motion picture industry was entrenched in a phase where monumental epics like The Three Treasures had become a rarity.

With the mass proliferation of television in the 1960s—and the influx of free entertainment suddenly available at home—the golden age of Japanese cinema steadily came to a close. Audiences that once bought twelve to twenty movie tickets a month ventured to the theater less often; the attendance record of 1.13 billion set in 1958 was cut almost in half by 1962 and continued falling from there.⁵⁶ The year Inagaki retired, television existed in ninety-five percent of Japanese households,⁵⁷ and the average person spent three hours a day glued to the proverbial One-Eyed Monster.⁵⁸ The mass reduction in audiences led to layoffs, slashed budgets, and the shrinking of both the studios and their resources. Toho itself started making TV programs in 1964,⁵⁹ and period dramas migrated to television in the same decade.⁶⁰ From here on, the major studios became less willing to take chances on pricy, star-packed spectacles. (Kurosawa once had luck persuading Toho to finance—however reluctantly sometimes—his movies, but he later became dependent on bank loans and foreign producers and admirers.)

Still, Toho, and even certain members of the Three Treasures production, were not yet done with the myths on which the film was based. Akira Ifukube re-encountered the Susanoo-versus-Orochi narrative on Yugo Serikawa’s The Little Prince and the Eight-Headed Dragon (1963), made for Toei, which also marked his sole time scoring animation. He’d later be considered for 1994’s Yamato Takeru, another live-action Toho flick inspired by the Kojiki, until director Takao Okawara opted for a different composer, Kiyoko Ogino.⁶¹ This abominably directed travesty injected a considerable amount of science fiction into the mythological tale and reimagined Orochi as an evil god’s monster form. Initially conceived as the inaugural entry of a trilogy, Yamato Takeru underperformed at the box office, and its two sequels never went before the cameras.⁶²

Even though it wasn’t an adaptation of the famous myths, Ishiro Honda’s Ghidorah the Three-Headed Monster (1964) featured Eiji Tsuburaya’s team returning to the concept of a multi-headed dragon. The first draft of Shinichi Sekizawa’s script described the eponymous monster as possessing “a horn on its dragon-like head, with [a] sharp beak, and [a] Griffin-like body and giant wings,” but in the end it was decided to film a “modern take on Yamata no Orochi” combined with influence from the hydra and winged horse of Greek mythology.⁶³ Comparing The Three Treasures to Ghidorah is retroactively fun: one realizes the mythological serpent represented the stepping stone Tsuburaya needed to realize King Ghidorah with such astonishing virtuosity. In 2001, Shusuke Kaneko’s Godzilla, Mothra and King Ghidorah: Giant Monsters All-Out Attack reimagined the latter creature as an eight-headed dragon that hasn’t fully grown. And in 2024, a veteran from The Three Treasures’s modeling team, the late Keizo Murase, made his own Orochi for his directorial debut Brush of the God.

It’s fair to say that Hiroshi Inagaki’s 1959 epic reached its financial and technical goals more successfully than its artistic ones. Despite Toho’s stated attempt to promote “the grand and noble romantic spirit of the Japanese people,”⁶⁴ the film’s power and entertainment value emerge through its atmosphere and lavish presentation, and what pleasure the characters offer derives from the joy in recognizing faces more than the writing. (A contemporary review in the San Francisco Examiner is perhaps accurate in stating Inagaki “is no DeMille in this instance. But he thinks big.”)⁶⁵ Nevertheless, The Three Treasures is impressive and, regarding its place in Japanese movie history, endlessly fascinating. A great many things had to fall into place for Toho to mount this colossal undertaking, and the results arrived at the most appropriate time—at the tail end of an era when, as Tetsu Nakamura recalled, “cinema was still regarded as the king of popular entertainment.”⁶⁶

References and footnotes:

1. Yomota Inuhiko. Translated by Philip Kaffen. What Is Japanese Cinema? A History. New York: Columbia University Press, 2019, p. 72
2. High, Peter B. The Imperial Screen: Japanese Film Culture in the Fifteen Years’ War, 1931-1945. Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 2003, p. 293
3. Yamane Sadao. “Rhythm of Emotions: Mikio Naruse during the Prewar to War Years” in Hasumi Shigehiko and Yamane Sadao (eds.) Mikio Naruse. Madrid: Festival Internacional de Cine de San Sebastián, Filmoteca Española, 1998, p. 44
4. Hirano Kyoko. Mr. Smith Goes to Tokyo: Japanese Cinema Under the American Occupation, 1945-1952. Washington, D.C.: Smithsonian Institution Press, 1992, pp. 5-6
5. Galbraith, Stuart, IV. The Japanese Filmography: A Complete Reference Work to 209 Filmmakers and the More Than 1250 Films Released in the United States, 1900-1994. Jefferson: McFarland & Company, Inc., 1996, p. 469
6. Yomota, p. 109
7. Galbraith, p. 469
8. Anderson, Joseph L. and Donald Richie. The Japanese Film: Art and Industry (Expanded Edition). Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1982, p. 412
9. Ryfle, Steve. Japan’s Favorite Mon-Star: The Unauthorized Biography of “The Big G.” Toronto: ECW Press, 1998, p. 310
10. Crowther, Bosley. “Screen: Horror Import; ‘Godzilla’ a Japanese Film, Is at State.” The New York Times, 28 April 1956
11. Thompson, Howard. “Screen: A Double Bill; ‘Watusi’ Arrives With ‘The Mysterians.’” The New York Times, 2 July 1959
12. Jampel, Dave. “Japanese Arters Wow Critics, But Horror Films Get Coin.” Variety (April 1959), p. 46
13. Crowther, Bosley. “The Screen in Review.” The New York Times, 14 December 1954
14. Galbraith, Stuart, IV. The Emperor and the Wolf: The Lives and Films of Akira Kurosawa and Toshiro Mifune. New York: Faber & Faber, 2002, p. 203
15. “Top Budget Jap Film Took 130 Shooting Days.” Variety (April 1954), p. 14
16. Ryfle, Steve and Ed Godziszewski. Ishiro Honda: A Life in Film, from Godzilla to Kurosawa. Middletown: Wesleyan University Press, p. 105
17. Galbraith, The Emperor and the Wolf, p. 190
18. “Top Budget Jap Film Took 130 Shooting Days.”
19. Hasumi Shigehiko and Yamane Sadao. “Mikio Naruse in Japanese Cinema History.” Mikio Naruse, p. 18
20. Milner, David. Translated by Yoshihiko Shibata and Yuuko Honda-Yun. Ishiro Honda: His Final Interview. Toho Kingdom, 19 December 2022
21. Nakamura Tetsu. Liner notes for The Three Treasures Toho Music CD booklet, p. 4
22. “Ten Films Gross $106,850,000.” Variety (November 1955), p. 5
23. Block, Alex Ben and Lucy Autrey Wilson (eds.) George Lucas’s Blockbusting: A Decade-by-Decade Survey of Timeless Movies Including Untold Secrets of Their Financial and Cultural Success. New York: Dey Street Books, 2010, p. 237
24. Galbraith, The Emperor and the Wolf, p. 271
25. In the course of researching this article, I encountered contradictory information as to how long The Three Treasures was in the planning stage. The English language press sheet claims the movie required “six years of research and preparation,” whereas Tetsu Nakamura’s liner notes for the Toho Music CD release of Akira Ifukube’s score claim preparation transpired over the year after Mori made his posting on the Weekly Shincho message board. My own speculation is that the one-year time frame seems likely; six years sounds like promotable hyperbole.
26. English language press sheet for The Three Treasures.
27. Nakamura, p. 4
28. Toho pressbook for The Three Treasures.
29. Galbraith, Stuart, IV. The Toho Studios Story: A History and Complete Filmography. Lanham: Scarecrow Press, Inc., 2008, p. 161
30. McNeill, David. “Back to the Future: Shinto, Ise and Japan’s New Moral Education.” Asia-Pacific Journal, 15 December 2013
31. Nakamura, p. 4
32. Ibid, p. 5
33. Ibid.
34. The Nihon Shoki contains numerous, slightly differing tellings of Susanoo’s killing of Orochi. Most write that Susanoo attacked the dragon after it fell asleep. One, however, never mentions the sake trap and simply says Susanoo drew his sword and slew the beast.
35. Nakamura, p. 5
36. Personal correspondence with Akira Ifukube biographer Erik Homenick.
37. Galbraith, The Emperor and the Wolf, p. 273
38. Toho pressbook
39. Nakamura, p. 6
40. LeMay, John. The Big Book of Japanese Giant Monster Movies: Showa Completion (1954-1989). Roswell: Bicep Books, 2020, p. 54
41. Nakamura, p. 5
42. Galbraith, The Emperor and the Wolf, p. 273
43. Nakamura, p. 5
44. Richie, Donald. A Hundred Years of Japanese Film: A Concise History, with a Selective Guide to DVDs and Videos. New York: Kodansha International, Ltd., 2001, p. 178
45. Personal correspondence with Erik Homenick.
46. Nakamura, p. 5
47. In fairness to the reader, I wish to admit that I’ve only seen Inagaki’s original three-hour version and have read various documents and texts that, collectively, seem to indicate more than one alternate cut was made as the film traversed to foreign markets. The Toho English language press sheet refers to a cut spanning 115 minutes, and this is the cut that I assume to be the “overseas version” mentioned above. By contrast, the United States version is stated, in Variety’s review, to have been 111 minutes, which—if accurate—would make it a third, entirely separate cut. But having seen neither, I cannot confirm. Stuart Galbraith IV’s book The Toho Studios Story claims an English-dubbed version was also produced but contains no information regarding its length, date of release, or markets.
48. Galbraith, The Emperor and the Wolf, p. 273
49. ‘Tube.’ “The Three Treasures.” Variety (December 1960), p. 4
50. Desick, S.A. “‘Treasures’ Epic Japanese Film.” Los Angeles Examiner, December 26, 1960, 3:19 — quoted in Galbraith, The Emperor and the Wolf, p. 274
51. ‘Tube,’ Variety, p. 4
52. Ragone, August. Eiji Tsuburaya: Master of Monsters. San Francisco: Chronicle Books, LLC, 2014, p. 56
53. “HBC Grads to Sponsor Showing of Japanese Film.” Honolulu Star-Advertiser, 25 October 1960, p. 9
54. English language program.
55. Galbraith, The Emperor and the Wolf, pp. 336-38
56. Galbraith, The Japanese Filmography, p. 471
57. Anderson and Richie, p. 451
58. “Editorial: The power of television still strong despite smartphone era.” The Mainichi, 13 May 2019
59. Ryfle and Godziszewski, p. 237
60. Schilling, Mark. Contemporary Japanese Film. Boston: Weatherhill, 1999, p. 15
61. Milner, David. Translated by Yoshihiko Shibata. “Takao Okawara Interview II.” Accessed 9 November 2025
62. England, Norman. Ring of Fear: Dispatches from the Trenches of Japanese Genre Film Sets. Tokyo: iD Books, 2023, p. 62
63. “Ishiro Honda: His Last Interview”; Stewardson, Christopher. Ghidorah, the Three-Headed Monster. Liverpool: Liverpool University Press, 2025, pp. 46-8
64. Toho pressbook
65. Eichelbaum, Stanley. “Mifune in Japanese Spectacular: Rio Opens ‘3 Treasures.’ The San Francisco Examiner, 1 November 1962, p. 30
66. Nakamura, p. 6