The life of a samurai is to some extent dependent on ritual. It’s as much a performance as anything else, yet, unlike a play, these actions often have very real and destructive consequences that result in bloodshed or exile. Though absurd and arbitrary, it’s adhering to this code of ethics that makes one a samurai, and once set in motion the consequences of a particular action proceed with inevitability. One cannot, in the end, escape one’s duty or destiny even by resigning samurai status.
This is really the idea at the centre of Takashi Minamoto’s Samurai Vengeance (木挽町のあだ討ち, Kobikicho no Adauchi) in which a playwright conspires to take the blood out of revenge and finds largely that the conditions are met for the samurai world to continue on without incident. The fact that the act of vengeance is essentially theatre is clear from the opening sequence in which fallen samurai theatre director Kinji (Ken Watanabe) orders the spotlight-like lanterns to be turned on the scene of a young man who has raised his sword against an older one he holds responsible for the death of his father. The action takes place adjacent to a theatre where a performance of the 47 Ronin, one of the most famous tales of vengeance in Japanese history, has just concluded, and this is, in a way, a continuation of that. Attracted by the commotion, a crowd has started to gather around the two men that becomes both audience and witness to this act of performative justice.
But then the film wrong-foots us slightly, and we realise the central mystery is not to do with the staged performance itself, but the true identity of the man who has come around asking questions about it. Kase (Tasuku Emoto) too is playing a role, in this appearing as a bumbling, Kindaichi-like presence claiming to be a friend of the dead man, Sakubei (Kazuki Kitamura), who to some extent did not really exist having been giving an entirely new persona to suit the narrative of the staged revenge plot. Though Kase claims to have been kicked out of his clan and become a ronin himself, which explains why he has no money and is always hungry, he is later revealed to be a clan investigator who has fallen foul of the authorities after attempting to expose the corruption of a senior retainer.
Though the rules of samurai society may be strict, they can be gamed by those ruthless enough to subvert them for their own ends. This seems to be something that Lady Tae, the mother of the revenge-seeking Kikunosuke (Kento Nagao), knew all too well and understanding the performative nature of samurai justice, turned to her old friend Kinji to save her son from falling victim to the cruelty of their class. At only 17, Kikunosuke is a slender and effete young man of delicate features and sensibility. He does not appear to be suited to the harshness of samurai mores and being forced to take the head of a man who not only saved his life but is someone he’s been close to since the day he was born would likely destroy him.
His fragility is signalled in the fact he first appears dressed as a woman in a beautiful red kimono passed down from a retired onnagata to the current holder of his name. As they say, the world of the theatre is like another country and a place where those who do not otherwise fit into Edo society can be accepted. Kikuosuke’s vulnerability and the unfairness of his plight endear him to the members of the theatre company who all feel an instinctive need to protect him. Indeed, Kikuosuke himself says that he is sorry to have to leave the theatre behind and will never forget the six months that he has spent there. It may be that he is much more suited to living in this environment which is the antithesis of samurai rigidity. In the end, the symbolic need for “vengeance” is satisfied without actual bloodshed. Though those in power know this to be so, they accept it and decline to ask further questions, but still the samurai world continues as it is and others will not be so lucky as to avoid paying with their lives for offending its exceedingly arbitrary values.
Samurai Vengeance screens as part of this year’s Toronto Japanese Film Festival.
In recent years, Dante Lam has busied himself with a particular brand of Mainland propaganda actioner. Operation Hadal (蛟龙行动, Jiāolóng Xíngdòng) is intended as a kind of thematic sequel to earlier hits Operation Red Sea and Operation Mekong each of which featured the Chinese military springing into action to defend Chinese citizens from a plausible geopolitical threat while reminding the world at large that China will rise to defend itself and its citizens wherever they may be.
All of which makes Operation Hadal a rather curious addition to the franchise. Unlike previous instalments, it’s set in the near future and revolves around round a completely ridiculous plot to blow up a volcano and destabilise East Asia with a series of what look to be natural disasters. Or so it would seem, the narrative is often incoherent and difficult to follow. If it were any other Chinese military propaganda film, it would doubtless want to show off the capabilities of the nuclear submarine at the film’s centre. The film even includes a quote from Chairman Mao in 1970 that the nation should hurry up and build nuclear submarines as soon as possible, but it’s not all that clear if this sort of submarine actually exists yet and the qualities the crew are most excited about on boarding the brand-new ship are that it’s much more spacious and comfortable to live in, while the fact that it’s much quieter and, therefore, can evade detection more easily is added as an after thought.
Meanwhile, Captain Zhao Qing (Zhang Hanyu) is seen to make some questionable command decisions such as playing the harmonica on deck in a moment of crisis which is one thing that seems to have particularly upset the target audience. Zhang clarified that the tune he’s playing is a navy song and is intended as a call to arms for the submarine officers, though it doesn’t really play out that way and feels more like a misplaced homage to the western. Chinese technology is even eclipsed at times with the team finding themselves bogged down fighting robot dogs controlled by the other side, the so-called State of Siekerman, which at any rate seems to populated largely by people with American accents.
There is no clear reason why the State of Siekerman wants to destroy Asia with a series of “mid-sized nuclear bombs”, though there is division within the armed forces with some objecting to the plan because it will necessarily destroy the ecoculture of the area which is beneficial for the rest of the planet, leading to a mutiny by those who are in favour of blowing everything up. This sense of division is perhaps supposed to contrast with the intense unity of Chinese forces, in the same way as the friendship between Zhao Qing and the Admiral back on land is contrasted with that of the two State of Siekerman commanders who disagree about strategy.
The film’s biggest weakness is, however, a lack of characterisation among the Jiaolong team who are often indistinguishable due to the heavy equipment they are wearing. Interpersonal drama comes in the form of a man hung up on the death of a friend in a previous mission and his relationship with his fallen comrade’s son that is probably intended as a touching advocation of filial piety but largely gets lost among the chaotic action. The fact that everything comes down to one officer’s listening ability doesn’t seem like a very good advert for Chinese technology, if perhaps praising the abilities of rank and file soldiers to rise to the occasion. Subpar CGI often gets in the way of the action sequences which are the central draw, leaving the film quite literally all sea with no clear idea of what it’s trying to do. Where the violence of Operation Red Sea was realistic and horrifying, there’s a slightly camp quality with villains being dispatched by hatchets to the head or else popped by sliding doors. It’s not much of an advertisement for Chinese military prowess and never really discovers the sense of patriotic heroism that films like these generally rely on.
Operation Hadal is released on Digital in the US on 16th June courtesy of Well Go USA.
A pure-hearted politician finds himself falling for an uncompromising teacher in Jeon Man-bae’s nonsense comedy Romantic President (피아노 치는 대통령, Piano chineun daetongnyeong). This president is indeed “romantic” in the sense that he is an idealised vision of a political leader. The film doesn’t go into his politics at all and it’s ambiguous where he belongs on the political divide. Instead, he is depicted as a man of integrity who is good and kind. In short, the kind of political leader that might not really exist in real life.
Min-wook (Ahn Sung-ki) first appears in disguise having gone undercover to talk to a group of homeless people living at the station. While talking to them, he himself is harassed by a policeman overstepping the bounds of his authority. The policeman calls the men “trash” and says that they disgust ordinary people. Little knowing who he is, the policeman bullies Min-wook who then identifies himself by striking the same pose as on as his campaign photo.
Something similar happens later when Min-wook decides to take a day driving a taxi in order to get closer to the people he is supposed to be serving. All of which marks him out as someone who is genuinely interested in the lives of the electorate and how to make them better. Though references are made to other political scandals, Min-wook seems to be held to a different standard and is a figure of integrity and incorruptibility. This is, however, why his romance is so dangerous in that It complicates his image and the secrecy involved because of his position makes it seem like he’s done something wrong or that there is an illicit quality to his relationship with schoolteacher Eun-soo (Choi Ji-woo). However, at the film’s conclusion, Min-wook admits that the “piano-playing president” was a persona he constructed for the purpose of winning the election, which is to say inauthentic. He has been lying all along, but his romance with Eun-soo has made it impossible for him to continue with the subterfuge. Only by being his true self can he gain romantic fulfilment even if it comes at the cost of his political career.
For her part, Eun-soo may also be harbouring a secret that paints her as something of a political rebel and possible extremist. She has failed to keep a job for more than six months because of her eccentric behaviour and intense interest in teaching in which, like Min-wook, she is invested in her pupils lives and wants to do what she can to make them better. On arrival at her new school she poses as a pupil to find out the class gossip and then becomes determined to save Young-hee (Im Soo-jung) who has become a delinquent little knowing she is the president’s daughter. No one else is willing to go against the Blue House with the consequence that Young-hee has become drunk on power, rebelling in the hope that someone will push back. Eun-soo is that person and soon earns Young-hee’s trust precisely because of the genuine interest she takes in her that is undaunted by her father’s position.
Young-hee too responds to authenticity and gradually becomes more authentic herself through her interactions with Eun-soo. Nevertheless, at the same time, the film suggests that society remains judgemental and is not always prepared to recognise an individual’s authentic identity. Eun-soo’s roommate is a transwoman who is repeatedly deadnamed and then eventually outed by the invasive press when Eun-soo’s relationship with Min-wook is exposed. Nevertheless, Eun-soo strives to protect her friend while accepting that she may have to deny her feelings to protect Min-wook’s position.
Despite all the silliness and zany antics, the film has a degree of earnestness at its heart in which it believes that it shouldn’t be wrong to express one’s true feelings. Authority figures can fall in love too, and it’s better for everyone if they do, otherwise you end up with the toxic combination of power and unhappiness that causes the policeman to abuse his authority to bully the homeless. Even so, the irony is that on becoming Min-wook’s official partner, Eun-soo must again play another role, radically altering her appearance to conform to the image of the president’s wife. Nevertheless, once authentically embraced, their love is accepted by the wider society which is then itself improved as a result.
Sometimes people come into your life for a short time and then move on. Perhaps you won’t see them again, though the effect they have on you remains profound. Takaki is still hung up on a girl he met during his childhood and subsequently lost touch with to the extent that he has become isolated and emotionally distant. In remaking Makoto Shinkai’s anime 5 Centimeters per Second ( 秒速5センチメートル), Yoshiyuki Okuyama homes in on a sense of urban alienation and a longing for something greater that transcends ordinary life before arriving at an acceptance that sometimes there is no greater meaning beyond a pleasant memory.
Takaki (Yuzu Aoki) feels as if he’s looking for the feeling he’s lost while living in a soulless urban environment and doing a job that, as someone later says, isn’t all that much fun but not particularly taxing either. It’s clear that he wants something more out of life, but at the same time has become afraid to connect with people. As a child, he moved around a lot and so developed a habit of avoiding getting into relationships in order to avoid the pain of separation. As an adult, he never stays in one place for too long and is always moving on, quitting one job after another and moving to new parts of the city. He has a kind of girlfriend, but keeps her at arms’ length emotionally and is not seriously invested in the relationship.
The irony is that he and Akari (Mitsuki Takahata) bonded over the experience of being transfer students, but where Takaki has become a kind of nomad, Akari has begun to settle down with a regular job in a book shop. Though the film is told mostly from Takaki’s perspective, it seems that she has decided their youthful connection is something that belongs in the past as a comforting memory rather than a promise that will one day be fulfilled. She may think of Takaki from time to time, but also hopes that he has moved on and is living in the present rather than being hung up on the romantic ideal of their childhood connection.
TV news broadcasts discussing space probes that are destined to continue travelling in different directions echo the course of their relationship. Takaki assumes it’s an orbit and that their paths are destined to cross again eventually, when really their childhood friendship was a kind of launch point after which the distance between them would only grow. Their paths do indeed cross at times with several near misses at reconnection, but they remain liminal presences in each other’s lives.
The implication is that Takaki has retreated into a fantasy of idealised romance to avoid dealing the emotional difficulties of adult life, while for Akari the memory of her childhood friendship with Takaki has allowed her to move on into a more settled adulthood in which she is willing to accept the possibility of painful separations while putting down roots and forging relationships with those around her. Living through the illusionary “end of the world” affords Takaki a kind of rebirth in which he can learn to let go of the past and begin to move on by opening himself up to those around him.
Okuyama captures Takaki’s sense of alienation while finding beauty in the world that surrounds him, from the spaces of urban loneliness to the crisp white snow and cherry blossom tree that Takaki believes is his salvation. The environment both reflects his anxieties and feelings of isolation, and is at times a barrier to his reconnection with Akari, but is also a source of hope for the future that the impending end of the world will not in fact come to be. Takaki’s 30th birthday is rather a kind of coming full circle and the launch point for adulthood in which he can finally move on from idealised first love and begin to open himself up to all the joy and pain that life has to offer.
5 Centimeters per Second screened as part of this year’s Nippon Connection
Kanna (Takako Matsu) married Kakeru (Hokuto Matsumura) after a whirlwind romance and to begin with they were blissfully happy, but the pressures of modern life soon placed a strain on their relationship and 15 years later they had just signed divorce papers when Kakeru was killed in a tragic train station accident. Left behind alone, Kanna can’t help reassessing their marriage and wondering what went wrong. When she drives through a tunnel undergoing structural repairs and emerges on the day she and Kakeru first met, it seems like a golden opportunity to rewrite the past and possibly save both Kakeru and her miserable marriage.
A quirky time loop romance, First Kiss (ファーストキス 1ST KISS) is essentially a portrait of grief as Kanna constantly returns to the past in an attempt to understand the present. The Kanna of the present day is a stand-offish middle-aged woman who hates people and animals. Though she still lives in the apartment she shared with Kakeru, it’s a cold cluttered space that seems to echo her internal depression. Her marriage began to fall apart when Kakeru gave up his dreams of studying dinosaurs to get a real grown-up job as a married man, having been told by his professor that a real man must provide for his family. His corporate persona slowly made him miserable to the extent that he bought a bed for the spare room and began sleeping in there. By the end, the pair were living parallel lives, eating breakfast separately and barely exchanging a word.
Given this opportunity to reconnect with the Kakeru she fell in love with, Kanna becomes determined to save him by tweaking the timeline so he never goes to the station on that day, but each time she returns home to his photo on the altar. After an incredibly insensitive visit from Ritsu (Riho Yoshioka), a woman Kakeru was being lined up to marry, who basically blames her for making Kakeru miserable and failing to look after him, Kanna wonders if the best solution isn’t that he never meets her at all but drifts into a marriage with Ritsu, remaining at the university working with her father. That way, he’d still be alive, as if Kakeru choosing her were a deviation from the original turn of events and she were merely restoring it at the cost of her own romantic fulfilment.
But at the same time, she’s falling in love with Kakeru all over again with the unexpected bonus that he too is drawn to her 45-year-old self despite being unaware of their romantic history. Her inability to change the past in any significant way seems to suggest that there are some things that are fixed and can never be altered, but within that you are free to decide how you live now and what you do with your life. It’s not so much about when you die or how long you live so much as making the best of the time that is given to you rather than spending it mired in resentment and misery. Aside from the status of her mission, returning to the past begins to brighten Kanna’s life, allowing her to enjoy interacting with people and be a part of the world again.
These are all also ways of allowing her to deal with her grief while reclaiming her marriage and saving Kakeru in a different way by preventing him from losing sight of himself and giving in to misery. Falling in love is about finding things you like about each other, Kanna tells the youthful Kakeru, but marriage is about discovering all the ways you drive each other crazy. Kakeru’s tendency to pick at her about leaving lights on hints at the way financial concerns eroded their relationship along with the outdated social pressure placed on Kakeru to be a “real man” by supporting his family financially though a “proper” salaryman job. Kanna filing his death certificate next to an excited couple registering their marriage seems to ram the message home that, as Kakeru says, life is short and the most important thing is to use the time well. Whatever else happens, you do have a choice how you live today, and even if you suffer later, the pain will be easier to bear with fewer regrets.
Consumed by rural ennui, three teenage girls set on a dramatic plan for escape in Takashi Koyama’s darkly comic youth drama, All Greens (万事快調〈オール・グリーンズ). The title turns out to be apt, not only in ironically referencing the drugs at the film’s centre, but also that the girls are all still fairly naive and just trying to figure out their place in the world. Whatever that may turn out to be, it’s clear that each of them is constrained by their circumstances from abusive fathers to absent parents and outdated patriarchal ideals.
The reduced horizons of their lives are evident in Hidemi’s (Sara Minami) description of the school as a place where everyone’s either given up on exams or is too poor to access better education. She and Mako (Mizuki Yoshida) seem to resent popular girl Milk (Natsuki Deguchi) and her seemingly perfect life, but are unaware that circumstances are similar to theirs or that she too is longing to escape this dead-end town. Hidemi is sick of her abusive father and submissive mother and finds release through rap music. Mako wants to be a manga artist, but is under pressure from her family who expect her to marry a man to take over their farm. And Milk has become a mother to her mother who appears to have had a mental breakdown following the death of her husband, a nuclear plant worker caught up in a radioactive incident.
The attitude of Mako’s family may seem excessively old-fashioned, but seems to reflect the traditional culture of the village. When the teacher warns their class about a flasher, he tells the girls to travel in groups and avoid going home alone while ensuring their skirts are not too short as if that had anything to do with the likelihood of being flashed. The three girls are briefly united when they witness a woman and her small child being dumped in the middle of an intersection by an abusive spouse. They hear later that the woman snapped, killed her abusive husband and burnt his house down before drowning herself and her daughter in the river. Each of them fear ending up like this woman, as if the village itself were an abusive spouse from whom they can’t escape. Hidemi’s dreams of rap stardom are even disrupted when she’s offered a promising opportunity with a “beat master” who first tells her he’s quitting the business because he’s getting married and needs a more stable line of work, and then matter-of-factly says that the job is conditional on sleeping with him. He even tried to drug her drink, but Hidemi has a healthy level of suspicion regarding men who offer help, so she switched their drinks which is how she finds out he has a safe full of marijuana seeds.
The drugs offer a more literal kind of escape in the prospect of a small business the three girls could operate illicitly together without really thinking about the consequences beyond the hope of making enough money to leave town. Later they bring in two fellow students who need money because they are gay and want to move in together to escape their oppressive families, though Hidemi’s assertion that karma isn’t real may seem hubristic while playing into her sense of the world as a lawless place in which there are no real consequences for anything because she’s used to seeing bad guys get away with their crimes. In trying their luck in the big city, however, the girls find themselves out of their depth as their small-town gangster dreams implode in the face of the realities of urban crime.
In the end, the only real answer may be to burn it all down, but the sense of solidarity between the girls has at least given them the courage to chase their dreams even if they may still prove elusive. As the fumes make their way through the school, it provokes a sense of liberation as the old codes of conformity begin to dissolve and people say what they really feel. It may be only temporary and perhaps lead nowhere at all, but for the moment at least the road ahead is wide open.
Not all memories are nice, according to the heroine of the latest film by Yoji Yamada, Tokyo Taxi (TOKYOタクシー). A remake of the film Driving Madeleine, the action follows a glamorous older woman (Chieko Baisho) as she enlists a middle-aged taxi driver (Takuya Kimura) to drive her around Tokyo with the final destination being a care home that she has reluctantly decided to move in to. As such, it’s really journey through the stations of her life, but also about Japan as it was 60 years ago and the Japan of today.
After all, it wasn’t all plain sailing, Sumire insists as taxi driver Koji escorts her to a series of Tokyo landmarks each with a link to her past. It’s clear that one some level the care home has come to symbolise death for Sumire who has made the decision to go there, but still drags her feet. On their eventual arrival, she begs Koji to take her to a hotel instead while he ties to coax her like a child, certain that there’s no real point trying to postpone the inevitable.
There is, however, something quite touching about this path towards the acceptance of mortality given that this is director Yoji Yamada’s 91st film, made when he was already 94. Star Chieko Baisho is similarly 84. The pair have worked together for over 60 years and it was apparently the desire to make one more film with Baisho that pushed Yamada to keep going despite no longer quite having the stamina to direct a major motion picture. The film also marks the 130th anniversary of Yamada’s home studio, Shochiku, bringing things neatly full circle.
Still, there’s a fair amount of sadness in Sumire’s passage from her father’s death in the fire bombing of Tokyo to losing her first love and experiencing domestic violence. Speaking of her youth, Sumire remarks that not everything was bad in those days, but a lot of things certainly were and some of them have not changed so much as one might hope all this time later. Back then, violence was something a wife was expected to endure and in itself not considered grounds for ending a marriage. Sumire’s husband picked her precisely because her circumstances made her an easy target for his bullying leaving her with few options for escaping her abusive relationship.
For his part, Koji too is somewhat lost as he meanders on the way to the care home. His daughter Nana (Runa Nakashima) may have the opportunity to attend a prestigious music college, but it won’t come cheap. He agreed before really thinking it through, and now can’t face the possibility of standing in the way of Nana’s dreams. But when he reaches out to his sister for help, she tells him that music school is just for rich people’s children with the implication that he’s getting above himself and should just accept that things like that aren’t meant for people like them. Reflecting a contemporary class divide, Koji’s quest nevertheless bears out a father’s love for his daughter as he racks his brains trying to think of ways to come up with the money so that she can chase her dreams in the way that he never could.
It’s this simple desire that allows him to bond with Sumire who, as it turns out, was never someone who felt compelled to accept the status quo and was prepared to take drastic action to challenge circumstances that actively impeded her happiness. As they weave through a Tokyo that often seems entirely foreign and unrecognisable, simple human kindness and the connections between people have remained constant. Koji does his best to get Sumire safely to her destination while patiently listening to her story and gradually opening up with his own. Beginning in the stomping grounds of Tora-san and ending up in an idyllic setting by the sea, the film, in a way, elegises the careers of both director and star with the acceptance of an ending still to come, though perhaps not quite yet. “The sun is setting,” Sumire remarks with accidental profundity, but there’s beauty still to be found even this twilight in simple acts of human kindness and compassion that will never themselves fade away.
When they think about Tatsuya Nakadai, most people associate him first with Masaki Kobayashi and then perhaps with Akira Kurosawa. Some might also say Kon Ichikawa or Mikio Naruse. But really, the second most important director in terms of Nakadai’s career was undoubtedly Kihachi Okamoto. Just through a historical accident, Okamoto has become best known in the English-speaking word for a film that is entirely atypical in terms of the rest of his career. In fact Sword of Doom was forced on Okamoto by his home studio Toho who were extremely dissatisfied with the film you’re about to see, Age of Assassins, to the extent they withheld it from release for a few months for being “too mad”.
When they finally did release it, it was as part of a double bill with a documentary about rally racing called Explosion Course directed by Hiroshi Teshigahara, who made Face of Another, that they didn’t anticipate there being much of an audience for and in fact the screenings were very poorly attended, partly because they didn’t promote the film in any way, which was a disappointment for Okamoto. Some cinemas stopped screening it after three days and Nakadai also became persona non grata at the studio.
In any case, Sword of Doom is best for its extreme nihilism as expressed through Nakadai’s chilling central performance, but if you look at the rest of Okamoto’s career what he specialised in was zany comedy and cartoonish crime movies. His films are incredibly playful and absurdist, often making little literal sense. Even something like The Elegant Life of Mr Everyman intended as a more conventional salaryman comedy is anarchic and ironic featuring animated sequences and rapid editing. If you look at his earlier crime thrillers, they’re often full of fun and silliness like heavily stylised fight scenes or shootouts in children’s playgrounds.
Even so, with Age of Assassins, he really does push it to the limit and the film is in some ways about the art of chaos. The project had originally been put together at Nikkatsu and Okamoto was handed a completed script he was instructed not to tamper with but he did make a few small changes that contributed to the anarchic quality of the film. Mad scientist Mizorogi claims that all great men were a little crazy in some way, which is why he’s been training the patients at his psychiatric hospital to become assassins.
Around this time, like much of the world, Japanese cinema was falling for Bond mania and as you’ll see the assassins all have their own particular gadgets while Nakadai’s character undergoes a transformation to become a super suave Bond-style spy. Spoofs like these were common at Toho at the time in films like Jun Fukuda’s Ironfinger, which was scripted by Okamoto, and its sequel Golden Eyes. They also had a long-running series starring Tatsuya Mihashi called International Secret Police that was also strangely obsessed with Interpol.
These films were more about exploring Japan’s place on the global stage during the era of high prosperity, but Age of Assassins is more interested in conditions in Japan itself. The evil organisation at the centre is the The Greater Japan Population Control Council which believes that the nation is becoming overpopulated and measures need to be taken to reduce population growth. It’s ironic to think about now when the same arguments are being made for declining population, but the film expresses similar anxieties to something like Yuzo Kawashima’s Burden of Love that the post-war baby boom has placed too much pressure on resources and is hampering economic prosperity.
Nevertheless, the Council don’t necessarily want to limit the number of births in case they accidentally prevent someone “important” being born, rather they think “useless” people should step aside. This idea of categorising certain people as “useless” is also a critique of the increasing capitalist high prosperity era in which people are only valued for their productivity and those who are not seen to contribute or contribute only in a way that is not seen as useful are seen as actively harmful to the wider society.
Kikyo is chosen at random but perhaps it’s not difficult to see why some might have considered him “useless”. It’s a very different look for Nakadai than most people are used to. He’s introduced with these milk-bottle bottom glasses and a bad case of athlete’s foot while seemingly obsessed with his mother. Yet Nakadai actually said that this is closer to his real self than most of his other film roles. Since he was young he had the nickname “Moya” which means “myst” because he was so absent-minded. He’d known Okamoto since he was an assistant director and the pair were quite close friends. Nakadai even had a cameo in Okamoto’s debut film, All About Marriage, that was a romantic comedy vehicle for pop star Izumi Yukimura. Nakadai called Okamoto “the Buddha” as opposed to “the demon” Kobayashi because he never told him off on set about his acting. Okamoto apparently wanted to make a film that was different from work Nakadai was doing with people like Akira Kurosawa and Masaki Kobayashi that showcased his comical side and silly sense of humour, which wasn’t something that Nakadai got to do very often. Nakadai even said that he didn’t have to do a lot of preparation for the role because he was basically just playing himself. Even so, his smooth transition to supercool spy has you wondering which is his real persona.
In addition to the spy plot, we also have the B-movie style Macguffin of the missing necklace, Cleopatra’s Tears. For some reason, the female lead working a magazine is a common element in genre films with pair forming an investigative couple, though really we have a trio in this case with the inclusion of Otomo Bill. Reiko Dan who plays Keiko was a quite a popular actress at Toho starring in the Shacho series of salaryman comedies as well in films for Akira Kurosawa and Naruse. Like Nakadai, Hideo Suzanaka who plays Otomo Bill also trained at the Haiyuza theatre company and specialised in comedy and was one of Okamoto’s regular actors though he often also appeared in tokusatsu movies.
Hideyo Amamoto who plays the mad scientist is also quite an interesting person, best known in Japan for playing another made scientist, Dr Shinigami in the first series of Kamen Rider. In fact, he used to wear a skull cap, cape, and boots just as his normal clothes and appeared in a lot of films dressed that way. He worked with Okamoto quite a lot and bore a physical resemblance to him so sometimes children would spot them sand shout things like “there are two Dr Shingamis” which didn’t impress Okamoto very much. Amamoto was also obsessed with Spain publishing several books about it and Mizorogi’s duel with Kikyo is where they tie their hands together and fight with knives is apparently a Spanish-style duel in homage to that. The really striking thing about this film, though, as you’ll see is the wonderful production design such as Mizorogi’s all-white, art deco lair with cells on either side. There really isn’t anything quite like this, a riot of cartoonish inventiveness and satirical hokum that defies any kind of explanation. I do hope you’ll enjoy it.
Yasujiro Ozu liked to describe himself as a simple tofu maker. Daniel Raim’s documentary The Ozu Diaries uses the director’s own writings to probe into his professional life and gain a personal insight into his career while interviewing prominent contemporary filmmakers such as Kiyoshi Kurosawa, Tsai Ming-Liang, and Wim Wenders. It is though important to note that it is an edited selection of the diaries that were discovered in the early 90s and skips over other aspects of his life such as the rumours of his homosexuality and wartime service, though Ozu had requested that some of his wartime diaries never be made public.
Nevertheless, much time is given over to his bond with director Sadao Yamanaka. Only three of Yamanaka’s films survive, but he was closely associated with the left-wing tendency film movement and was let go by Shochiku for those reasons, losing his exemption from the draft and consequently being shipped off to Manchuria where he passed away of dysentery. His last words to his friends were “make good films” which is something Ozu seems to have taken to heart and continued filmmaking in part to fulfil Yamanaka’s dream.
The film similarly explores his relationship with screenwriter Kogo Noda and paints Ozu as a larger-than-life figure who liked to drink and have a good time which is, perhaps, slightly at odds with the extreme control involved with his filmmaking. Likewise, recollections from actress Kinuyo Tanaka suggest a deep passion for cinema as she describes feeling as if he really loved her while they were making a film together to the extent that she began to think about marriage, but it was all over once the film was completed.
For his part, Ozu’s diaries also reveal that he was wary of casting Setsuko Hara because the industry wisdom at the time was that she couldn’t act. Yet the subtlety of her performance perfectly suited his aesthetic which is why he went on to cast her in so many films and particularly the Noriko trilogy. He also seems to have been adept at working with children and had a fairly unusual approach of interviewing parents to find out how they naturally behaved at home and then building the performance around that as recounted by a former child actor, now an elderly man himself.
In terms of his filmmaking technique, the films suggests that he held off so long on making a talkie because he wanted to truly master silent films and avoid using sound as a gimmick, while it may also have been a kind of solidarity with the benshi whose place in film exhibition was being destroyed by talking pictures. In Japan, though films also had intertitles, it was common for silent films to be narrated by a storyteller known as a benshi. Benshi could become stars in their own right and in fact be a bigger draw than the film, but still everyone wanted to chase the new with sound.
Other than perhaps in his 30s films, the suggestion is that Ozu was like a tofu maker more interested in perfecting his craft than with constant innovation. The film characterises him as carrying a profound sense of loss not only resulting from his wartime experiences, but from his childhood separation with his father. It’s this sense of loss that lends poignancy to films like Tokyo Story and echoes his preoccupation with the breaking and remaking of families. Archive photos and testimony meanwhile speak of his close relationship with his mother and the childlike way the pair of them used to play together. Ozu’s cinematic philosophy seems to be borne out in a passage about the lotus and the mud, that the post-war reality was muddy and chaotic, but there was still great beauty in it too and it was the artist’s duty to seek out both. The film seems to suggest that this was true for his life too, depicting him as an essentially melancholy man who also liked to drink and have a good time while dedicating himself to perfecting his art.
Black River is a good place to start this retrospective as, though it’s not his first film, it is the first time Nakadai played a prominent role on screen. His cinema career, however, began a little ignominiously with a small gig as an extra on Seven Samurai having been sent there by the acting school he was training at at the time. He had obviously never been involved with a period film before and Akira Kurosawa actually yelled at him that he “walked funny” and didn’t know how to move like a samurai. He was only in one scene all he needed to do was walk across the set, but Kurosawa kept making him redo it from 9am to 3pm before finally giving up.
Nakadai seems to have taken this quite badly and made a vow that he was going to become a great actor so he could turn down all of Kurosawa’s films, so he was quite reluctant to work with him again. He rebuffed all of Kurosawa’s attempts to do so and only accepted the role in Yojimbo when Kurosawa reached out to him personally, having apparently remembered him from Seven Samurai. Presumably, he’d either learned to walk like a samurai by that point, though he’d mainly done films set in the present day, or Kurosawa didn’t mind because his character in Yojimbo after all represents a kind of modernity.
In any case, Nakadai got his start in films proper after he was spotted playing Oswald in Ibsen’s Ghosts by actress Umeji Tsukioka who recommended him to her husband, the director Umetsugu Inoue, and he made his film debut in Pheonix in 1956 in which Tsukioka starred. He then played several small parts in other films before playing what’s really his first prominent role Masaki Kobayashi’s Black River, which is the film you’re about to see, after being recommended to the director by a friend of his who was an executive at Haiyuza theatre company where Nakadai had trained and continued to work.
Throughout his career, Nakadai was primarily a theatre actor. Though he was highly sought by each of the big five studios during Japan’s golden age, Shochiku, Toho, Nikkatsu, Toei, and Daei, he never signed an exclusive contract and preferred to remain freelance meaning that he was in the enviable position of having a lot of control over which projects he participated in. While the studio system was in place, the Big Five’s business model was largely based around a roster of exclusive stars that they slotted into whichever project they thought would suit them. If a director wanted to use an actor from another studio, they’d have to come to some sort of agreement which could be quite difficult to work out. But as Nakadai was freelance, he could work with any of the studios he wanted and was able to play a wide variety of roles rather than by literally type cast as a leading man or character actor or limited one particular genre.
That’s why you’ll see the Shochiku logo before Black River which was the home studio of director Masaki Kobayashi, while The Age of Assassins was made for Toho which was the home studio of Kihachi Okamoto. During the days of studio system, the Big Five would also train their own directors in house and there was no real other way to become a mainstream film director without joining a studio and working your way up from assistant director. That said, the interesting thing about Masaki Kobayashi is that he was a relative of the great star Kinuyo Tanaka who had also spent most of her career at Shochiku before breaking her exclusive contract following the backlash on her return from an American tour in 1949. She also went freelance in order to work with a wider variety of directors and later pursue a career as one herself.
The working relationship between Nakadai and Kobayashi was the most important in terms of their cinema work to the point that Nakadai really became a stand-in for Kobayashi on many of his films and especially his magnum opus The Human Condition. They were, however, from quite different generations. Kobayashi joined Shochiku as an assistant director after graduating from Waseda University in 1941 but was drafted not long after and left for the war though he regarded himself as a pacifist and resisted by refusing all promotions above the rank of private despite being considered a capable soldier. He spent about a year in a prisoner of war camp after the war ended and only returned to Japan 1946 to discover his father and older brother had died, while he was professionally disadvantaged as other directors who were exempt from the draft and had continued working throughout the war had leapfrogged ahead of him. He ended up serving as an assistant to Keisuke Kinoshita who was only a couple of years older than he was, though they got on really well and Kobayashi had a lot of admiration fro Kinoshita’s work who had, after all, been quite a close collaborator with Kinuyo Tanaka.
That might explain why his first couple of films were more regular Shochiku fare. The studio specialised in “shomingeki” or films that revolved around the lives of ordinary, lower-middle-class urbanites. It wasn’t until his third film, Thick-Walled Room that he began to address the themes that were more personal to him such as Japan’s wartime legacy and the struggle of the individual against a corrupt system. But The Thick-Walled Room which dealt with the still sensitive topic of wartime atrocities proved too controversial for Shochiku, which is not a studio that generally tolerates controversy. Consequently The Thick-Walled Room was shelved for a few years for fear of offending the Americans though the Occupation was already over and Kobayashi had to go back to making films that were much more typical of the studio’s style.
After testing the waters with cynical baseball drama I Will Buy You, Black River may be Kobayashi’s second attempt to work on material that directly interested him. Scripted by Zenzo Matsuyama, the film explores on the radiating corruption of US military bases in the post-Occupation society through the lives of those drawn into its nexus of violence and immortality. It opens with an American plane noisily zooming overhead above sleazy clubs with Western names catering American servicemen. Sex workers line the streets and it’s clear that the entire area is economically dependent on the base for its survival. Caught between those living in a rundown slum area and red-light district are recently arrived student Nishida and pure-hearted waitress Shizuko neither of whom feel they belong in this environment. Nishida is a student who’s chosen to live out here to save a few pennies, but at heart thinks he’s much better than the other residents at the tenement. Shizuko is attracted to him because he seems different and represents a link back to a more middle-class, respectable vision of Japan, but ends up being raped by local gangster Killer Joe who represents post-war moral decline in his wilful collaboration with the Americans. She’ll spend the rest of the film trying to retrieve the parasol that Joe took from her that represents innocence, while struggling with herself, unable to understand her attraction to the man who raped her despite her fear of him and his violence towards her.
Ineko Arima who plays Shizuko is another interesting case in that she actively fought for more control over the kind of roles she played even within the studio system. She started out playing male roles at Takarazuka Review and made her film debut in a Takarazuka Review film for Toho. Before moving to Shochiku she co-founded the independent production company Ninjin Club with fellow actresses Keiko Kishi and Yoshiko Kuga that aimed to circumvent the studio system and provide more creative freedom for actresses in particular. Ninjin Club is also one of the production companies listed for this film alongside Shochiku.
You actually might not recognise her to begin with because she’s wearing this amazing set of false teeth that give her a rather grotesque appearance, but the slum landlady is played by Isuzu Yamada, a star of the 1930s who mainly worked at Toho and often worked with Mizoguchi and Naruse. She had also gone freelance at this point having left Toho during the labour dispute that erupted in the mid-40s, so you could say that these are all very appropriate stars for a Masaki Kobayashi film in each having in some way rebelled against the corrupt studio system, even if Kobayashi himself was more or less complicit with it.
The landlady’s grotesquery provides an interesting counter to the amorality of Joe and his backer who are in cahoots with the Americans and want to knock the tenement down to build a love hotel. She is merely someone whose worst instincts have been indulged by the post-war moral decline as she gleefully teams up with Joe in the hope of many a bit more money from selling her apartment block, little caring that most of the residents have nowhere else to go and are only living here because they can’t afford anything better. The resistance, led by Korean communist Mr Kim, in the end proves ineffective and it seems there really is no solution other than violence to deal with a man like Joe, though in taking him out one would only damn oneself. Nevertheless, the film does not particularly blame the Americans so much as the Japanese for allowing themselves to be corrupted in this way and permitting this state of lawlessness to exist in which a man like Joe is free to behave as he does with no real consequences. I do hope you’ll enjoy it.
Windows on Worlds 