''Sansho the Bailiff'' is a ''jidai-geki'', or historical film, set in the Heian period of feudal Japan. A virtuous governor is banished by a feudal lord to a far-off province. His wife and children are sent to live with her brother. Several years later, the wife, Tamaki (Kinuyo Tanaka), and children, Zushiō and Anju, journey to his exiled land, but are tricked on the journey by a treacherous priestess. The mother is sold into prostitution in Sado, Niigata and the children are sold by slave traders to a manorial estate in which slaves are brutalized, working under horrific conditions and branded when they try to escape. The estate, protected under the Udaijin, is administered by the eponymous Sanshō (Eitarō Shindō), a bailiff (or Stewardship). Sanshō's son Tarō (Akitake Kōno), the second-in-charge, is a much more humane master, and he convinces the two they must survive in the manor before they can escape to find their mother.