The Oath of the Sword

The Oath of the Sword is an American silent film produced in 1914 by Frank Shaw. It is the oldest extant film currently known to be produced and performed by Asian Americans. It was selected by the National Film Preservation Board for inclusion in the Library of Congress' National Film Registry in 2025.^[1]

Masao (Mori) and Hisa (Numa) are young lovers separated as Masao leaves Japan to attend college at the University of California, Berkeley. While Masao attends Berkeley, Hisa cares for her ailing father, meeting and becoming pregnant with another man. When Masao returns from Berkeley four years later, the resulting love triangle ends in tragedy as Japanese morals clash with modern American beliefs.^[2][3]

• Tomi Mori as Masao
• Hisa Numa as Hisa
• Yutaka Abe as Hisa’s brother
• Kohano Akashi as Gombei

The Oath of the Sword was produced by the Japanese American Film Company (JAFC), an independent production company established in Los Angeles by Japanese American businessmen who invested US$200,000 in seed capital to produce commercial, educational, and industrial features primarily for the Japanese American community even prior to the establishment of Hollywood as a cinema capitol. They brought over several stage actors from Japan, including Mori and Numa to form the basis of their stock company, who also attracted foreign sales of their work in Japan. The JAFC was created in the hope of introducing and normalizing Japanese immigration to the United States.^[4][5]

The three-reel silent drama primarily filmed on location in Berkeley, California and on the University of California campus, and was distributed by Sawyer Film Mart in the United States. Yutaka Abe (jp), who plays in a supporting role, was relatively unknown when the film was released. He would go on to appear in Cecil B. DeMille's 1915 film The Cheat, as well as in pioneering Chinese-American director James B. Leong's 1921 film Lotus Blossom, before returning to Japan to become a successful film director in his own right, with some 70 credits over a 35 year career to his name.^[6]

Like many films of the silent film era, especially those that largely failed to find commercial success at the time, it was long considered lost. Denise Khor, an associate professor of Asian American studies at Northeastern University culled historical newspapers and trade journals attempting to compile a list of early films made by Japanese Americans for her book, Transpacific Convergences, and sought to find a surviving print of any JA film to watch herself. In 2016, she finally came upon a print of The Oath of the Sword at the George Eastman Museum in Rochester, New York. Acquired by the museum in 1963, the original film print was too deteriorated to work with, but a safety print made from the original in 1980 was miraculously intact, and allowed Khor to restore the work together with the George Eastman Museum through a grant from the National Film Preservation Foundation.^[4][7]

The restored film premiered at the Academy Museum of Motion Pictures in 2023, and was inducted in the Library of Congress' National Film Registry in 2025.^[8][9]

• Benshi (弁士) - The Japanese practice of providing live narration to silent films
• Momijigari (film) - The oldest known surviving Japanese film (1899)
• National Film Archive of Japan - An institution specializing in preserving and exhibiting the film heritage of Japan

• The Oath of the Sword at Asian Movie Pulse
• The Oath of the Sword at IMDb
• The Oath of the Sword at Letterboxd
• The Oath of the Sword at National Film Preservation Foundation