Uzumasa Kyoto Village

This guide to Uzumasa Kyoto Village traces the career of Seizo Fukumoto, a stuntman famous across Japan for the art of dying convincingly onscreen, who started here as a teenager in 1959 when Toei's studio churned out samurai films by the hundreds. It follows the technique called tate, blending swordplay and kabuki timing that shaped sword fights far beyond Japan, and the studio's gamble in 1975 to open its closed film sets to the public once the samurai boom collapsed. That gamble paid off almost instantly, drawing over seventy thousand visitors through the gates in its first three days.