Windows on Worlds

Perhaps ironically, film censorship under the American Occupation was just as heavy as it had been under the wartime authorities if tilting in a different direction. Depicting the feudal past and straitened present were equally discouraged, as was anything that showed the Occupation forces in a less than ideal light. These restrictions were, however, lifted when the Occupation came to an end in 1952 and Kon Ichikawa’s adaptation of the comic strip by Taizo Yokoyama, Pu-san (プーサン), is a relatively early attempt to address this second round of post-war chaos characterised by high unemployment and defeated hopes for the future.

Yokoyama apparently settled on the nickname “Pu-san” just because it sounded funny, though the strip later moved away from the title character to focus more on an ensemble. That may be why the name is never mentioned during the film which also incorporates elements from another Yokoyama strip, Miss Ganko. The film then focuses on mild-mannered maths teacher Noro (Yunosuke Ito), a widower and war veteran living in a boarding house where he has developed a crush on the landlady’s daughter, Kanko (Fubuki Koshiji). Noro is the sort of person destined to suffer in life as evidenced by the opening sequence in which he is almost run over by a truck, but actually ends up injuring himself by becoming entangled with a fire hydrant in his botched attempt to move out of the way.

Nevertheless, he is really at the centre of a collection of people who are struggling amid the difficult economic environment of the early 1950s in which the nation still has not fully emerged from post-war privation. His boss at the school where he works (Daisuke Kato) is clearly exploiting his nature as someone unlikely to complain about ill-treatment by asking him to work both the day and night shift for no additional pay while forgoing a pay rise he suggests he may later to give to the other teachers. Noro goes along with it because he thinks it’s better to have a job than not and others are hard to come by. His students, meanwhile, are ideologically volatile, flirting with communism or trying to defend the nascent capitalism of the democratic society. It’s one of his students that invites him to the May Day march which leads to him being caught up in the “Bloody May Day Incident” of 1952 in which the police fired on protesters opposing the Anpo security treaty killing two and injuring 2,300 people.

Because Noro is an unlucky person, a photograph of him at the event is published in the newspaper which leads to him being fired from his job. He’s then thrown into a world of job hunters jostling for work outside the employment office with seemingly hundreds of applicants for every position. Many assume him to be further up the queue because he is a university graduate, but it’s clear that things like that no longer really matter in the post-war society and may even hinder his prospects. The job he eventually finds, thanks to his landlady’s recommendation which she only gets for him with the expectation of being able to raise his rent, is working as a deliveryman for a sewing machine company. 

After the war, Singer Sewing Machines gave the patent for the Singer 15 to Japanese factories so that those which once manufactured munitions could transition to making sewing machines. However, most in the film seem to be aware that these factories are actually still making bullets for machine guns, which turns out to be the case at the factory where Noro gets a job. Japan’s post-war recovery will largely be powered by manufacturing munitions and military equipment to be used in the Korean War. This leaves Noro understandably conflicted and leads to an ongoing sense of confusion about the nature of this new “pacifist” and “democratic society”, though he justifies himself that his is only a light crime as his complicity extends only to the delivery and not to the manufacture of these deadly weapons. The ranks of the protestors at the May Day march are contrasted with those of soldiers once again marching through the streets. Harried doctor Tezuka (Isao Kimura), sick of having to rush through patients, has apparently joined the Self Defence Forces instead. 

“Miss Stubborn” Kanko, by contrast, has a good job in a bank and though she goes on a kind of date with Noro, has fallen in love with a colleague she wishes to marry. Her mother objects to the match because her boyfriend is only a middle-school graduate, but as Kanko points out he’s had a steady job and worked his way up since he was 16. A university degree might not mean very much at the present time and those who entered employment earlier might actually have a head start. In a rather cruel moment, Noro overhears Kanko tell her mother that university graduates like him are “boring” while simultaneously suggesting they take part back of the area he’s currently renting to rent out separately without reducing his rent so they can make more money. Her father, an accountant who’s ironically never made enough to pay tax, has made himself ill through overwork leaving them largely dependent on rental income. Kanko intends to continue to working after marriage, though expects that her husband will eventually be promoted to a position offering a salary that will support a family.

This is not a realistic prospect for Noro, who has now essentially been cast aside by the post-war society. His hopes of romantic fulfilment with Kanko have been dashed, exposing his vision for a rosy future as nothing more than a delusional fantasy. Caught between idealistic students who have been, like him, displaced in the new democratic era, and amoral capitalists like his former boss and landlady, he has little other choice but to retreat into the mist of an uncertain future. Unexplored subplots including a sleazy right-wing politician’s collusion with the bank manager, hint at a still murkier world of backroom deals ruled by self-interest that betrays the “democratic” ideals of the new society along with those of a man mild-mannered man like Noro who can only survive by embracing his troubles with good humour.