The Oath of the Sword, a.k.a. Katana:The Oath of the Sword (Japanese American Film Corporation, Sawyer Film Mart, 1914)

by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2026 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved

Last night (Sunday, October 11) Turner Classic Movies did a quirky double bill of two movies set in Japan, one of which was actually filmed there while the other was made in Hollywood with Japanese actors (aside from one token white “ringer”) imported for the purpose. The film was The Oath of the Sword (though the title is sometimes prefaced by Katana, after the sort of sword involved). It was made in 1914 as the first production of the Japanese American Film Company (JAFC), an independent studio formed by Japanese-American businesspeople who contributed a fund of $200,000 in seed capital. They did this just as Hollywood was becoming established as the center of American filmmaking. They hired a white director, Frank Shaw, but imported their cast from the Japanese stage. The Oath of the Sword has a simple story (no writer is credited) about Masao (Tomi Mori) and his girlfriend Hisa (Hisa Numa), who grew up together in a small fishing village in Japan and seemed destined for marriage and family. Only Masao decided he first wanted to attend college in the U.S. (our first hint of these ambitions is a Japanese-English language text he’s shown studying), so he takes a ship to the San Francisco Bay Area and does a full four-year undergraduate program at UC Berkeley. While he’s doing that and excelling not only at academics but swimming (though the swim race we see him compete in is held not in a pool but in the open ocean off a beach, and we don’t get to see any hot beefcake shots like the ones we got of Keye Luke when he played an Olympic swimmer in the 1936 film Charlie Chan at the Olympics). Meanwhile, Hisa is lonely at home, missing Masao. Her father Gombei (Kohano Akashi) extracts a promise from her on his deathbed saying that if she ever commits a sin she’ll have to kill herself with his katana sword. Unfortunately, shortly after he dies a white sailor named Captain Dean is shipwrecked off the Japanese coast. Hisa rescues him and brings him to her home. Ultimately they fall in love and even get married and have a child, despite the warnings of Hisa’s brother (Yutaka Abe) that by breaking her pledge to Masao she’ll have to kill herself with her father’s sword.

When Masao returns to his Japanese village and discovers his former fiancée not only married to someone else but having borne him a child, naturally he’s upset; he corners Dean at the beach and, after proclaiming that he will return him to the sea from which Hisa had saved him, holds him under until he drowns. He returns to Hisa’s home, but too late: she’s just impaled herself on dad’s old katana sword and is on her way out of this world by the time he arrives. So after all his efforts to better himself by getting a Western education, Masao has destroyed his life’s prospects by his jealousy and Hisa has taken her own life because of that stupid curse her dad laid on her. Though this is a 1914 movie, and an independently produced one at that, it’s relatively sophisticated filmmaking for the time. Shaw doesn’t shoot many out-and-out closeups but he and his uncredited cinematographer at least move the camera once in a while and show the action from a variety of angles instead of keeping it rooted in one spot and staging the scenes as static tableaux, as all too many early film directors did. The shot of Hisa appearing to Masao via double exposure to express his loneliness for her is especially moving and impressive. Oddly, for all but one of the principals this seems to be their only film credit; the exception is Yutaka Abe, who played Hisa’s brother and stayed on in Hollywood. He played the manservant of villain Sessue Hayakawa in Cecil B. DeMille’s The Cheat (1915) and stayed on in L.A. for six years, during which he racked up a number of acting credits, sometimes “Anglicizing” his name as Jack Yutaka Abbe, or just Jack Abbe. Between 1921 and 1925 Abe moved back to Japan and became a director, working as such until he retired in 1961 and died in 1977. This especially seems odd because at least two of the three leading actors, Abe and Hisa Numa, give relatively understated performance; Tomi Mori is the only one who does the big sorts of semaphore hand gestures and facial grimaces most people who’ve never seen a silent movie start-to-finish think they were all acted like. One oddity about The Oath of the Sword is that a print sat in the vaults of the George Eastman House in Rochester, New. York literally for decades. No one knew it was there, though at some point the Eastman House’s technicians transferred it from highly unstable, flammable nitrate stock to safety film. Then in the early 21st century someone exploring the Eastman House’s holdings in search of something else stumbled on this quirky and important three-reel film (about half an hour) and got it revived and ultimately listed on the National Film Registry as historically significant.