The Battle of Sekigahara was fought on Oct. 21, 1600, and changed the course of Japanese history. Tokugawa Ieyasu and his Army of the East won an overwhelming victory over the Army of the West led by Ishida Mitsunari, resulting in the political unification of the country and the rule of the Tokugawa shogunate for the next 260 years.
The battle has never been depicted in its entirety on screen, however, until Masato Harada tackled it for his new epic "Sekigahara," based on Ryotaro Shiba's classic three-volume historical novel.
Seeing it at the Foreign Correspondents' Club of Japan with Harada and star Takehiro Hira in attendance, I could understand why previous generations of filmmakers had balked at the challenge; the complex lead-up to the battle and the massive conflict itself, with the two armies totaling almost 180,000 men, hardly lent themselves to the simple good-and-evil binary of popular cinema.