  On the outskirts of the town of Furukawa, the blind masseur and master blade-slinger Zatoichi encounters one-armed Chinese martial artist Wang Kang and a young boy.
Discovering that the pari are on the run from the corrupt local Samurai, murderers of the boy's parents, Zatoichi agrees to guide them to a nearby temple. Unforutenately, things are never that easy fro the blind man, as he becomes entangled in the struggle to save not only these two, but also the lives of the people they come across.
When the situation worsens, Zatoichi may discover that his greatest enemy is not the men sent to kill the party, but Wang Kang and the lack of a common language between the two of them. As the crisis escalates, the two master swordsmen will find themselves in a confrontation where only one will walk away alive! OK, first, when will bandits learn never to try and ambush Ichi while he is walking through tall grass? The last two hundred guys that tried that ended up dead. Will they never learn? The movie starts showing a family of Chinese performers traveling in Japan. This was interesting because they were speaking Chinese, so on the right side of the screen there was the Japanese subtitles running vertically. So I was distracted trying to read both the English subtitles and the Japanese subtitles. I gave up quickly though.
The family meets and befriends Wang, who is going to a temple to demonstrate his martial arts. The group ran into an official procession, and like the other travelers on the road, prostrated themselves. You just did that when samurai went by, or else... Well, the son of the performers had a kite that blew towards the procession and he rushed after it. Bad idea. One of the samurai was about to cut him down when Wang sprang into action. Well the samurai go berserk and start killing everyone, including the performers.
The samurai want no witnesses. You might be wondering where Ichi comes in. Right about now. He finds the boy wandering and helps him. Eventually, Wang, after doing some kung fu ass-kicking, finds Ichi and the boy. Well, it seems Wang only speaks Chinese, so there is a lot of miscommunication between he and Zatoichi. Some pretty funny stuff. They end up hiding at the home of a family, who witnessed the slaughter, but escaped.
About that time a gang boss enters the picture. Damn gang bosses! This boss wants to find the fugitives because if he does, his gang we be allowed to assist in the fief's procession to the capital, Edo. Being given this honor will raise the rank both of himself and his organization. Long story short, the boss finds out that the family is hiding Wang and the boy and kills the family, all but the daughter, then tells her that Ichi sold them out, something she eventually passes on to Wang.
So more misunderstanding ensues, though not of the humorous kind. It is very, very deadly. It was pretty interesting to see kung fu alongside Ichi's sword. Apparently urlLink Yu Wang , who played Wang Kang, was famous for playing the One Armed Swordsman in a series of kung fu movies, so having him meet Ichi was a big deal at the time. I liked the character of Wang Kang, and the scenes where he and Ichi try to communicate were very good.
There was a bit of a cheesy, heavy handed moral of "if only we could understand each other, we could get along," but despite that, it was a good movie. 
