| The Columbia Journal of Asia

Editor-in-Chief’s Note: This article marks the first of our “Forum Event” series—a series of articles written by editorial staff to record and reflect on the Columbia Journal of Asia’s organized events. Through this series, we hope to extend the influence of our events beyond in-person participants by inviting readers to engage with the ideas and dialogues generated.

On March 27th, 2025, the Columbia Journal of Asia held a screening of "Lone Wolf and Cub: Sword of Vengeance" (1972), introduced by Dr. Stephen Choi, followed by a moderated discussion by Editor-In-Chief Isabel Andreatta and Academic Editor Thomas Wang. Managing Editor Ethan Kuperman and Deputy Managing Editor Shilpa Kesavan reflect on the evening and share their thoughts.

“Daigorō, you may choose your own way. Choose this dōtanuki sword and you’ll join me in the way of the assassin. Choose this ball, and I’ll send you to your mother in the nether world…Now, choose!” Adorned in a child-sized shiro-shōzoku 白装束 (a white kimono customarily worn before committing seppuku or ritualized suicide), Daigorō, the “cub,” clumsily crawls towards two meticulously placed objects that will determine his fate: the ball on the left and the sword on the right. In one of the few selective scenes in which silence is disrupted by an instrumental soundtrack, the solitary plucking of a shamisen string lingers, stretching into an agonizing silence.

Lone Wolf and Cub (子連れ狼, lit. “wolf who has a child with him”), written by Kazuo Koike and illustrated by Goseki Kojima, is a Japanese manga that follows the journey of the ruthless rōnin (a masterless samurai) Ogami Ittō, known as the “lone wolf,” and his young son Daigorō, the “cub.” Set in the Edo period, Lone Wolf and the Cub is a story of survival, corruption, and revenge, but notably, it is also a story of human injustices, fatherhood, and grief.

The Lone Wolf and Cub manga was serialized in Weekly Manga Action in 1970 and ran until 1976. Starting only three years earlier, Weekly Manga Action was arguably the first magazine centered around seinen manga, a genre targeted to young men much more violent and eroticized than its shōnen (adolescent boy) counterpart. A major commercial success both in Japan and abroad, the manga inspired a series of six film adaptations released from 1972 to 1974, as well as a popular television series adaptation. Its influence was so far-reaching that it created its own genre of adult criminals and vigilantes protecting a child companion, with Hollywood examples such as Léon and Mathilda in Léon: The Professional (1994) and Gloria and Phil in Gloria (1980), where the trope is subverted by starring a female criminal. This cross-cultural appeal raises a critical question: What does the juxtaposition of violence with young children seek to do, and what does it accomplish?

Dr. Stephen Choi opened our screening of Lone Wolf and Cub: Sword of Vengeance (1972)—the first in a series of six films adapting the manga—with this question. In particular, what is the role of the “cub” in “wolf and cub”? In the original manga, Daigorō’s happy-go-lucky demeanor and endearing presence create moments of emotional levity amidst the oppressively grim and violent setting. Pragmatically, Daigorō serves as a weapon, often using his intellect to aid Ittō in fights, and even allowing himself—if we assume he has the capacity to consent—to get kidnapped and nearly drowned as bait to defeat opponents. Analogously in the film, Daigorō cleverly uses a mirror to blind an opponent during a duel. Throughout the story, there appears to be a mutual, unspoken understanding between Daigorō and Ittō that allows them to operate as one weaponized, unified being, with Daigorō serving as an extension of Ittō.

The inclusion of Daigorō can also be situated in a historical context where children were increasingly present in Japanese media. Post-war 1950s Japan saw a sharp increase in birth rates, followed by a second wave of baby boomers during the economic growth of the 70s. Consequently, more media was marketed towards and centered around children and parents. The 1969 film Boy considers the child as a tool, as the young title character is forced by his abusive father to commit scams. The critically acclaimed Family Game (1983) satirizes the growing academic pressure and competition in Japan, centering a tutor who uses eccentric and aggressive methods in order for his junior high tutee to meet his family’s high educational expectations.

Therefore, on the one hand, we can interpret Daigorō as organically emerging from a historical era of Japan that was increasingly interested in the presence and perspectives of children. On the other hand, we can also interpret Daigorō as a narrative device used to expand an adult-oriented film genre interested in exploring the psychology of the adult protagonist through the child. Seen through this lens, the inclusion of a child offers a new take on the samurai genre that softens the stoic lone samurai by forcing him to assume the subversive role of caretaker. Perhaps unintentionally, Lone Wolf and Cub consequently introduced new images of hyper-masculinity that also made space for fatherhood and child-rearing. However, as Dr. Choi pointed out, there is a more sinister implication of Daigorō’s inclusion: the presence of a child can also serve as justification for gratuitous violence, affirming the righteousness of a protagonist whose decisions might otherwise seem morally fraught.

After the screening, Isabel Andreatta, our Editor-in-Chief, and Thomas Wang, an Academic Editor, led a thought-provoking discussion about their views of the film, framing it comparatively in multiple cultural contexts (e.g., in tandem with the samurai media of Akira Kurosawa and against the classic American Western genre) and addressing questions of interpretation, lens, and audience gaze.

Isabel noted that there’s a similarity between the cinematic archetype of the Japanese samurai and the American cowboy in each of their cultural spheres. It seems like each both represents a cultural likeness, a trace of a culturally stable past, that’s still inexorably othered from the present. In conversation with today’s film screening, however, things become more complicated when considering how the samurai is viewed from a foreign gaze or, to be more specific, from the gaze of a student at a foreign university fifty years later. What kind of associative qualities does the samurai, as a historical figure portrayed in media, a social class, and a cultural ensign, evoke for us?

The conversation then turned to the child—Stephen’s specialty—centered on Daigorō or the “cub” as a political actor under the auspices of Ogami Ittō. The film begins with Itto’s execution of a child daimyō, placing the child in a context in which it has political and social power, or agency, which is quashed by Ittō's unsympathetic decapitation. After Ittō's family is murdered by the Ura-Yagyū clan in their attempt to usurp the position of shogunate executioner, his own son, Daigorō, serves as the implement by which he chose whether to follow his kin in death or set out on a path to vengeance. Ittō treats Daigorō as the sole source of veracity of his moral inclinations, vindicating his sense of samurai morality. In a way, Daigorō, perhaps arbitrarily from our point of view, guides Ittō's actions and calibrates his moral compass throughout the film, and that political capacity comes from Ittō's own willingness to sanctify and subsequently functionalize his son.

Stephen went on to close the discussion by considering the problem of the audience. The Lone Wolf and the Cub was intended for the predominantly male seinen audiences of late 20th-century Japan. He agreed with Isabel that viewing and analyzing it as foreign university students wouldn’t quite have been par for the course. Yet, we followed the interiority of characters like Ittō being displaced onto the child, we internalized and rationalized (at least in part) Ittō’s samurai values, and in doing so, we inserted ourselves into a moral and political framework distant from our present social context. This raises some broader questions: What was the purpose of these kinds of films? How do we interpret them now? Why do we continue to screen them even today? And why are we still drawn to them? We, as curious students, recreational movie watchers, and organizers of the screening, invite you to think about these questions with us.

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Forum Event: Reflecting on the Child in "Lone Wolf and Cub: Sword of Vengeance" (1972)