Used primarily in the garden of Katsumoto’s Tokyo home, in the Temple courtyard of his country residence, and to augment a natural forest bordering the great battlefield, more than 150 individual cherry trees were built by the production. Constructed as wooden trunks on portable stands, each tree had sets of removable "seasonal" branches so it could be dressed for spring, winter, summer or fall – often changing within a single day of shooting.
Kilvert, an Oscar nominee for her art direction on Legends of the Fall, adapted an existing set on the Warner Bros. Studios backlot in Burbank perhaps best known as Waltons’ pond, from the 1970s television series The Waltons, and also used for Gilligan’s Island, to create Katsumoto’s Tokyo residence. The ready-made lagoon was transformed into a reflection pond alongside Katsumoto’s house but the house itself had to be built in its entirety as well as a bridge spanning the pond and serving as a planked path to the front entrance. While not a replica of a specific building, the architecture and materials were based on traditional design and standard dimensions for a proper Samurai or upper-class residence.
This set involved ingenious mobile platforms allowing for a wide range of camera movement, including one mounted on a huge crane. As the site of an important skirmish, Katsumoto’s home had to be sturdy enough to sustain the action but breakable enough to depict the damage realistically. As Kilvert acknowledges, "My work is not entirely about the design, it’s about the workability of the situation. If we anticipate an action sequence, we map it out and decide how much of the set needs to be break-away and how much needs to be sturdier, how many takes we might need and so on."
Meanwhile, within shouting distance of Katsumoto’s backlot residence, the production designer created a 19th century Tokyo thoroughfare on the Studio’s famed New York Street, teeming with shopkeepers and patrons in kimonos bartering for food, housewares and fabric as visiting Westerners perused their wares and the more exotic sights such as rickshaws and Geishas borne in opulent palanquins. Delicate Japanese screens and lanterns intermingled with new brick buildings and telegraph wires crossed under prayer flags, as the traditional society began to integrate more modern and distinctly Western influences.
"This area that became known as the Ginza district had to encompass about a year’s worth of change, from 1876 to 1877," Kilvert explains. "Japan was going through a major transformation at this time, as all the European nations moved in to establish a foothold in what they assumed would be a lucrative market. Everybody was there – the English, French, Spanish, Germans – you heard many languages and we reflected that in the signs on the buildings." Often, that meant seeing the anomalous spelling "Tokio" on storefronts, which Kilvert faithfully reproduced.
Kilvert adds that Japanese-style buildings still dominated the Tokyo street because "architecture changed more slowly, as it tends to do," but that Western-style red brick construction was becoming a more common sight. "Even now, if you go to Tokyo’s Ginza district you see the remnants of these buildings. Later, they discovered that this material didn’t suit the climate at all but for a while they were all the rage."
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