The Man Called Japan’s Claude Lelouch
In 1967, Japanese director Kōichi Saitō made a striking debut. Critics who saw *Joe’s Whisper* unanimously called him “Japan’s Claude Lelouch.” What did they find in common between the French visual poet and this emerging Japanese director?
Claude Lelouch won the Palme d’Or at Cannes with *A Man and a Woman* (1966), drawing worldwide attention. His hallmarks were fluid camerawork, memorable music, and above all their perfect union. Francis Lai’s score remains beloved in film history.
Saitō earned the comparison precisely through this fusion. Though a low-budget independent film, *Joe’s Whisper* felt unlike conventional Japanese cinema through polished imagery and effective music. Trained as a still photographer, he composed every frame beautifully and layered music over it to create a poetic world.
Their similarity went beyond technique. Both treated film as a composite art and image and music as equal partners. Music was another narrative language, not accompaniment. This philosophical agreement connected them most deeply.
From the late 1960s into the early 1970s cinema changed worldwide through the French New Wave, Italian neorealism, and New Hollywood. In Japan, declining studios and rising independents encouraged young artists to seek freedom beyond existing frameworks.
Saitō embodied the era. Sensitive to overseas movements, he pursued uniquely Japanese aesthetics. From Lelouch he learned an attitude as well as technique: unite commerce with art, popularity with experiment, and express emotion through music and image within Japanese culture.
From Group Sounds to Folk Music: Diverse Musical Expression
Music choice was crucial in Saitō’s films. His broad approach ranged from cutting-edge pop to Japanese tradition, and that flexibility powered their musical appeal.
Late-1960s Japan experienced a Group Sounds boom with Beatles-influenced bands including the Tigers, Spiders, and Tempters. Saitō quickly recognized and incorporated its possibilities.
Early Shochiku films *The Little Snack* (1968) and *Fallen Leaves and Kisses* (1969) used GS songs to visualize youthful energy. Rhythm expressed impatience and melody the sweetness and sadness of love; music conveyed inner life rather than period atmosphere alone.
His adventure extended beyond pop. *The Rendezvous* (1972) used lyrical orchestral music by Yasushi Miyagawa. Against wintry Hokuriku, it expressed fugitives’ isolation and love, sometimes quiet and sometimes passionate, resonating with images and stirring viewers.
That year, Takurō Yoshida’s “From Today Until Tomorrow” became the theme of *Journey into Solitude*. At a time when folk captured young Japan, its simple guitar and introspective words matched a girl traveling through Shikoku. Saitō organically incorporated musical currents into his world.
*Tsugaru Folk Song* (1973) foregrounded traditional Tsugaru shamisen. Performances by masters including Chikuzan Takahashi formed the film’s spine; the forceful sound voiced people facing severe nature and evoked nostalgia for Japan’s primal landscape.
Saitō especially valued local music. Folk songs and festival music expressed the deep relationship between land and people, not merely regional color.
He maintained a restrained but effective balance: music neither overwhelmed imagery nor became mere background. Each supported and elevated the other into a poetic world.
Synchronizing Image and Music
Saitō’s greatest hallmark was perfect synchronization of image and music—not simply adding a score, but combining them organically into new expression.
Music has been essential since silent film and became more integrated with talkies, yet was often subordinate to image.
Saitō and Lelouch broke that relationship. Music converses with images, sometimes leading and sometimes following, rather than explaining them.
Miyagawa’s music in *The Rendezvous* exemplifies this. On a train through snow, tempo synchronizes with motion; on a beach, waves and music blend until natural and artificial sound blur, leaving viewers between reality and fantasy.
In *Journey into Solitude*, Yoshida’s song enters at pivotal points, with timing, volume, lyrics, and images carefully calculated. Near the journey’s end it gradually fades in to express changing emotion.
In *Tsugaru Folk Song*, shamisen sometimes leads and sometimes accompanies. Fierce playing mixes with wind in a blizzard, while delicate tones reveal psychology indoors.
Especially notable is Saitō’s use of *ma*, the Japanese interval: music stopping, silence, and music returning deepen resonance and engrave images in memory.
He treated wind, waves, rain, birds, and insects as music rather than mere effects. The Sea of Japan in *The Rendezvous*, summer insects in *Journey into Solitude*, and blizzard in *Tsugaru Folk Song* fuse with or contrast against music to enrich sound.
Such fusion required directing with music in mind from filming. Saitō often played it on set so actors felt the rhythm, then edited cuts to tempos and phrases and sometimes chose footage filmed to music.
The Modern Inheritance of Poetic Imagery
Saitō’s poetic fusion greatly influenced Japanese cinema and continues in contemporary filmmakers.
Shunji Iwai openly acknowledges Saitō’s influence. *Love Letter* (1995) and *Hana and Alice* (2004) unite visual beauty and music; in *All About Lily Chou-Chou* (2001), they jointly express complex adolescent emotion.
Kiyoshi Kurosawa developed this poetics differently. In *Cure* (1997) and *Pulse* (2001), he blurs environmental sound and music into a world combining anxiety and beauty.
Hirokazu Kore-eda’s *Nobody Knows* (2004) and *Like Father, Like Son* (2013) minimize music while using natural and ambient sound, echoing Saitō’s restrained, effective aesthetic of *ma*.
Younger directors inherit it too. Kōji Fukada’s *Harmonium* (2016) builds narrative tension between image and music, while Naoko Yamada’s animated *Liz and the Blue Bird* (2018) poetically portrays girls through classical music and image.
The influence extends to Asian directors such as Hou Hsiao-hsien, Lee Chang-dong, and Jia Zhangke, whose films also show poetic fusion.
Digital technology has made fusion more complex, but Saitō’s principle—treat each medium equally and create poetry through union—endures.
Saitō’s encounter with Lelouch revealed universal expressive possibility beyond simple influence. Across borders and languages, emotion through images and music reaches people directly, explaining his lasting appeal.
Streaming, smartphones, and VR have transformed twenty-first-century viewing, yet technology does not diminish the power of a poetic audiovisual moment. New artists will keep exploring the horizon he opened.
Called “Japan’s Claude Lelouch,” Saitō was no imitator but an artist who established Japanese visual poetics. Through music and image he expressed Japanese land and emotion in a universal language. His legacy continues developing and teaches us their limitless possibilities.
