Set at the end of the Meiji era, The Chess Master is a rags-to-riches tale of an Osaka sandal maker whose passion for shôgi, a Japanese form of chess, is the bane of his impoverished family's existence, until a series of tense matches with the shôgi master proves his efforts well spent. A major success in 1948, and evidence of a postwar comeback for veteran director Daisuke Ito, The Chess Master is cited by Noël Burch in “To the Distant Observer” as “a masterpiece of its kind. Splendidly acted by the great star of silent films Tsumasaburo Bando, whose eccentric, dynamic style prefigures that of Toshiro Mifune in the later films of Kurosawa.... The film was shot entirely in studio, and boasts elaborate, atmospheric street-settings in the spirit of the ‘poetic realism' of the French 1930s and 1940s, a style very much in favour, it seems, among film-makers of all persuasions in this period. The final shot, in which the ageing master Sakuta has returned to the Osaka slum street where he lived in poverty at the beginning of the film, and stands gazing through the fog at a great electrically lit tower in the distance, while urchins are playing shôgi in the foreground, is a double emblem of faith in the future of industrial capitalism and of democracy, a faith so essential to the ideological edifice being hastily built during those difficult years....”