 At a fork in the road, the blind swordsman/humble masseur/wandering gambler Zatoichi tosses a pierced coin & catches it with a toothpick through the hole. He then feels it to find out it's tails, thus takes the fork to his own hometown where he hasn't been in twenty-three years.
So begins Zatoichi's Conspiracy (Shin Zatoichi monogatari: Kasama no chimatsuri! 1973). Because there's no actual conspiracy on Zatoichi's part, the episode is occasionally known by other names, including A Blood Festival at Kasama.
Ichi the prodigal son soon discovers that Oshige the "old aunty" who raised him has died. After Ichi left the village, Oshige raised one more orphan, Omiyo (Yukiyo Toake). Ichi never knew her, but meeting her for the first time, he instantly feels she is his sister, & she is happy to at long last meet her brother.
Her aging grandfather Sakubei is played by the great character actor Takashi Shimura, who despises the yakuza world, & though Ichi is part of the world, he well knows Sakubei is right, & so he does not reside with his sister but goes to stay alone in Oshige's abandoned tumble-down.
 We are introduced one by one to the episode's key players, most of whom, but not quite all, are the familiar archetypes played over & over again in the long-running series.
Shinbei (Eiji Okada) is a crooked rice merchant in cahoots with the yakuza gang & a corrupt magistrate (Kei Sato). Peasants pay taxes in measures of rice, but the magistrate & rice merchant have worked out a system that forces the peasants to overpay even if it means too little rice remaining to eat. In consequence the peasants have fallen deeper & deeper into debt, both for back taxes & for high-interest loans from Shinbei.
Shobei is a two-faced investment broker from Edo who had been born in the same village as Ichi, & has returned during their time of hardship, hunger, & over taxation, pretending to be eager to help everyone out of the goodness of his heart & for his good memories of childhood in Kasama.
The villagers embrace him as a savior when he pays their debts, but Shobei's mission is strictly one of greed, as he wants to gain complete control of a rock quarry that has provided income to the village for generations.
He & Ichi were childhood playmates & Ichi tries to awaken sincerity in the man. Alas, he is also a rapist of virgins, & asks the local yakuza boss to fetch for him Ichi's sister.
Besides so many villains, Ichi also meets Yuri (Rei Yokoyama), a woman wanderer with four "husbands," her loyal followers. She seems quite interested in Zatoichi, perhaps wanting to add him to her collection of concubators (masculine for of concubines).
 Being the twenty-fifth feature film, many a critic has assumed that that the scriptwriters were running out of new ideas. The present script is a lot less well constructed than most. Even with the largely familiar character array, Zatoichi's Conspiracy could-of-should-of been a decent episode, but it's not.
The potentially novel ingredient of Ichi discovering his sister Omiyo is played no differently than if she were one of the many other helpless damsels he assists along his travels. The woman wanderer Yuri travelling with her concubators is the one character that seems totally original rather than yet another variant seen in most Zatoichi episodes. But her story just peddles along for a little while & gets lost.
To impress himself upon & frighten the bad magistrate, Ichi repeats one of his standard sword-tricks. He cuts a candle, the tip of which, still burning, rests on the edge of his sword. This is a nice trick, the more so because historically a method of sword training.
In actual training methods, a student, blindfolded, would sit on knees between flickering candles, locate them by sound alone, & perform a quick iai draw to snuff each candle. One of the things that makes Zatoichi's blind sword style credible is the fact that samurai did learn how to duel in complete darkness. Night-defense of castle hallways involved first the snuffing of candles so that invaders could not find their way about as easily as could those familiar with the layout. Ichi's skills, then, grow out of something that has historical validity.
 Though the story has been overall tepid, there is always the expectation of a wonderfully violent conclusion. Unfortunately, even the climactic choreography is below par.
There is an effective degree of tension as to whether or when Ichi can bring himself to kill a childhood friend who has grown up to be a wicked greedy man & rapist. But the script lets Ichi off the hook for making any decision when Shobei trips, falls, & accidentally kills himself.
There's also a standard-issue ronin who might have been more than a half-second opponent for Ichi, but is summarily cut down. The rest of Ichi's opponents are unskilled nobodies who really can't fight back. Ichi's ability to kill frightened rascals isn't his finest trait.
The "big" gag of the episode is the clincher for this being quite possibly the worst episode ever. Ichi, trapped in the rice storage house, needs a plan. The plan turns out to be that he ties himself up inside a small bail of rice. We don't see how he did that, since to get inside the tidy bail really wasn't possible. It was a bit like hiding inside a Campbell's soup can; even a little guy wouldn't fit, let alone large Ichi.
Nevertheless, he's in one of the bails, & at a useful moment he cuts himself out of it, stands up ghoulishly with rice falling from his broad shoulders, & proceeds to kill everyone.
The combination of comparatively mediocre fight choreography, lack of even a token difficult opponent, & the moronic impossibility of him climbing inside a little rice bail, well.... It's difficult to believe Katsu, his own producer, could let any of this get past the scripting stage.
 Among the episodes Katsu-shin made with his own company are a couple that fall far short of the best produced by Daiei Studios.
The poorer Katsu productions include Zatoichi vs Yojimbo & Zatoich Meets the One-Armed Man, both following more the "wolfman vs frankenstein" recipe, poorly sustained by the scripts.
But Katsu also produced one of the finest of the whole series, Zatoichi in Desperation, as downbeat & startling as Ichi stories ever got, & directed by Katsu to boot.
Zatoichi's Conspiracy was to be the last feature for a long time (a twenty-sixth episode would eventually be added as capper). Had the series not continued on television we might've been justified to assume one of the greatest action-series the world has ever seen had finally run out of steam, & went out with a squeek instead of enormous fanfare.
But the television series turned out to be more like perfect little mini-movies instead of tv shows. So it simply isn't true that the character had been run into the ground. So I am left to suppose that already the creative juices were aimed at getting the series to the small screen, & Zatoichi's Conspiracy fulfilled existing obligations for feature films without it being given the attention it required.
copyright © by Paghat the Ratgirl
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