Samurai Hustle

Today I watched a pretty fun film from 2014 called Samurai Hustle (also known in English as Mission Impossible: Samurai). It’s a jidaigeki (period drama) comedy about a daimyo who is called on to return to Edo to see the shogun until difficult circumstances. My wife watched it a few days ago, and wanted to watch it again with me, and I gotta say I quite liked it. Even though it’s set up as a comedy, you do learn a lot about how samurai families needed to travel to Edo every two years and everything that came along with it, and it led her to start investigating just how her ancestor’s went about doing the same thing (she has samurai blood on both sides for her family). A sequel to the film, Samurai Hustle Returns, was just released in Japan last week.