Category: Japan

Beneath the Shadow (影裏, Keishi Ohtomo, 2020)

Posted on by

“There’s nothing wrong with leaving it a mystery” the enigmatic presence at the centre of Keishi Ohtomo’s Beneath the Shadow (影裏, Eiri) advises the hero as he vows to look into the unexpected appearance of a fish found swimming in the wrong river. Best known for mainstream blockbusters such as the Rurouni Kenshin series, March Comes in Like a Lion, and Museum, Ohtomo shits towards an arthouse register in adapting the Akutagawa Prize-winning novella by Shinsuke Numata which is in a sense obsessed with the unseen, the hidden details of life and secret sides we all have that are perhaps intended to protect but also leave us vulnerable. 

Konno (Go Ayano), an introverted man in his 30s, has just been transferred to rural Morioka by the pharmaceuticals company at which he works. He keeps himself to himself and largely spends his time caring for a Jasmine plant which appears to have some especial yet unexplained significance. It’s at work that he first encounters the enigmatic Hiasa (Ryuhei Matsuda), reminding him that theirs is a non-smoking building only to discover that Hiasa isn’t the sort to care very much about rules. For some reason or other, Hiasa takes a liking to Konno, turning up at his house with sake, teaching him how to fish, and going on what to anyone else look like dates. Yet when winter comes Hiasa abruptly quits his job and disappears without a word, resurfacing a few months later with a better haircut and a sharp suit explaining that he’s now a top salesman for a suspicious insurance company designed to help pay for expensive ceremonies such as weddings or more commonly funerals. The two men resume their friendship, but soon enough Hiasa again disappears. Only when he’s contacted by a co-worker (Mariko Tsutsui) after the earthquake hoping to find him because it turns out he owes her a large some of money does Konno begin to reflect on how little he might really have known this man he thought a friend. 

“Right from the start you have to groom it so it’s tantalised” Hiasa later explains, operating on several metaphorical levels but talking quite literally about lighting a fire. Konno has to wonder if that’s all it really was, if Hiasa is just a manipulative sociopath playing a long game, getting him on side in case he’d be useful later. When he resurfaces after his first absence, Hiasa eventually asks Konno to sign for one of his policies claiming that he’s one away from his quota and will be getting the can if he can’t fill it despite having talked a big game in proudly showing off a commendation he’d won as a top salesman when he turned up on Konno’s doorstep. “What you see is where the light hit for an instant, no more than that. When you look at someone you should look at the other side, the part where the shadow is deepest”, Hiasa had pointedly told him during a heated fireside conflagration, seemingly hurt as if in the moment he had wanted to be seen and is disappointed to be met with Konno’s irritated rejection, fed up with his mixed signals and distance both emotional and physical. 

Yet Konno is also himself living half in shadow as a closeted man choosing not to disclose his sexuality to those around him. A meeting with an old friend who has since transitioned presumably having embraced her own essential self raises further questions about the reasons he accepted the transfer to Morioka as if he too, like Hiasa, wanted to disappear from his old life and reinvent himself somewhere new, he’s just done it in a more conventional way. Even in contemporary Japan which is in some ways very old fashioned when it comes to the technology of everyday life and with a strong belief in personal privacy it’s surprisingly easy to just vanish at the best of times, but even his family members who are in no hurry to find him wonder if Hiasa may simply have used the cover of disaster to disappear for good. His conflicted brother (Ken Yasuda) affirms he thinks he’s probably alive because he’s “someone who can survive anywhere” which in the way he’s putting it is not much of a character reference. 

The conclusion Konno seems to come to, in a happier epilogue some years later, is that Hiasa himself was perhaps a fish swimming in the wrong waters, unable to adapt to the world around him. Perhaps it’s alright for him to remain a mystery because a mystery was what he was. Konno, by contrast, sets himself free apparently less gloomy, no longer living half in shadow, even if still hung up on the one that got away. A slow burn affair, Beneath the Shadow eventually refuses conflagration in favour of something cooler in accepting that you never really know anyone, perhaps not even yourself, even when you peer into the darkest part of the shadow. In the end you just have to let it go, “the cycle keeps repeating”. 

Beneath the Shadow streams in the US via the Smart Cinema app until Sept. 12 as part of this year’s New York Asian Film festival.

Original trailer (no subtitles)

Family Bond (太陽の家, Hajime Gonno, 2020)

Posted on by

“All I ever wanted was to make everyone happy” claims the father at the centre of Hajime Gonno’s Family Bond (太陽の家, Taiyo no Ie). Once again placing the modern family under the microscope, Gonno’s take is perhaps more traditional than most taking a largely uncritical stance against its extremely patriarchal patriarch whose heart might be in the right place even if his extremely outdated vision of idealised masculinity continues to undermine the idea of family that he is endeavouring to build. 

A manly man, Shingo (Tsuyoshi Nagabuchi) proudly introduces himself as a “Master Builder”, tearing up some revised blueprints from his excited newlywed clients who admittedly unreasonably have proposed major changes to the design at the groundbreaking ceremony on their new home. Such fits of artistic temperament are apparently not uncommon, Shingo’s understanding wife Misaki (Naoko Iijima) profusely apologising and later talking him down while reminding him that he might be a master craftsman but he also runs a business and his family need to eat. Shingo prides himself on being a paterfamilias, subscribing to a traditional ideal of masculinity in which a man must be strong to protect his family, and most particularly his women, but that protection extends in the main to the physical. As Misaki later complains, he largely does what he likes because family means no consequences, rarely bothering to consider the feelings of others in his impulsive drive to live in a thoroughly manly way. 

That’s perhaps one reason why he walks off the site of the traditional woodframe house he’s being paid to build to have coffee with a pretty young woman, Mei (Ryoko Hirosue), who as it turns out has an ulterior motive in that she wants to sell him an insurance policy. Despite all his life claiming that insurance is for cowards, Shingo signs as gesture of patriarchal solidarity helping out a struggling single mother while perhaps harbouring sightly less altruistic intensions. Nevertheless, it’s her son Ryusei that he’s eventually taken by, struck by the loneliness in his eyes as a boy without a father and taking it upon himself to fulfil that role. For her part, Mei is disturbingly unconcerned by this strange, over friendly, middle-aged man with a strong interest in her young son, encouraging Ryusei to hang out with him expressly because Shingo signed a policy with her as if she were in a sense loaning him out in exchange. In any case, it’s difficult to believe a modern woman would be entirely happy about Shingo’s well-meaning fathering, transmitting this extremely problematic, toxic masculinity to a new generation in instructing Ryusei that he needs to get strong because it’s a man’s responsibility to “protect womenfolk” and Ryusei’s to protect his mother as the man of the house. 

These outdated chauvinistic ideas also undermine his relationships with his wife and children, teenage daughter Kanna (Mayu Yamaguchi) resentful at his bond with a random little boy whom he seems to be grooming as a replacement son and potential heir having already alienated his adopted son and apprentice Takashi (Eita Nagayama). Kanna, studying to become an architect, resents her father for his sexism, largely ignoring her because she is a girl and therefore in his eyes unable to assume the family business. Takashi meanwhile resents him because he sent him off to apprentice as a plasterer rather than training him in carpentry as if suggesting he didn’t have what it takes to become a master builder himself. Both of them are hurt by his desire to simply get a new son in its implication that they were never good enough, a feeling compounded by the fact that they are both adopted. Shingo later signals something similar himself when Ryusei’s estranged birth father resurfaces, immediately backing off believing that he couldn’t win against blood as if that really is everything. 

“It’s all a big lie” Kanna and Takashi yell on different occasions trying to get through to their irritatingly distant father whose manly code means he doesn’t engage with emotion or feel the need to respond to their distress, eventually striking Kanna for her disrespect and kicking her out of the house. Of course, he doesn’t really mean it but it’s just another example of the ways his problematic manliness continues to destroy his relationships, Takashi also apparently harbouring resentment towards him for his unreconstructed chauvinism in his many affairs believing his desire to help Mei is just him getting up to his old tricks again. What Shingo discovers however is that he’ll have to literally repair his family through building it anew by helping Mei and Ryusei do the same as her estranged husband reassumes his male responsibility to protect his family. In essence, he’s forced to accept the family he has rather than chasing a better one, drawing a clear divide in building a house for Ryusei and his parents which is separate from his own while entreating his children to return to him through getting them to help build it. Shingo might not have changed, still defiantly patriarchal, but he has perhaps begun to accept that family is a mutual construct that requires strong support. In the end you have to build it together or the structure won’t hold.

Family Bond streams in the US via the Smart Cinema app Aug. 28 to Sept. 12 as part of this year’s New York Asian Film festival.

Original trailer (no subtitles)

Escape from Japan (日本脱出, Kiju Yoshida, 1964)

Posted on by

Like many directors of his generation, Kiju (Yoshishige) Yoshida began his career at Shochiku working on the studio’s characteristically inoffensive fare before being promoted as one of their youth voices through which they hoped to capture a similar audience to that attracted by Nikkatsu’s Sun Tribe movies. Yoshida’s films may have spoken to youth but they were perhaps not quite what the studio was looking for nor the kinds of projects that he really wanted to work on, which is one reason why 1964’s Escape from Japan (日本脱出, Nihon Dasshutsu), an anarchic B-movie crime thriller of intense paranoia all maddening angles and claustrophobic composition, was his last for Shochiku, the final straw being their decision to change the ending without telling him and release the film while he was away on honeymoon. 

Set very much in the present, the film opens with a young man miming to American jazz which turns out to be part of the floor show being performed by the band on the stage below for whom he is a reluctant roadie. Tatsuo (Yasushi Suzuki) dreams of going to America to rediscover “real jazz” and subsequently bring it back to Japan. He has the strange idea that America is a true meritocracy where his talent will be recognised, unlike Japan where it is impossible for him to succeed because he is not particularly good looking or possessed of “star quality”. Feeling himself indebted to the band’s drug-addled drummer Takashi (Kyosuke Machida) for helping him get the roadie gig with the false promise of becoming a singer, Tatsuo agrees to help him commit an elaborate robbery of the “turkish bath” (low level sex services and precursor to the modern “soaplands”) where his girlfriend Yasue (Miyuki Kuwano) works. Only it all goes wrong. The guys kill a policeman during the escape, and the other hotheaded member of the gang becomes convinced that Yasue may talk now that they’ve got involved with murder so they should finish her off too by forcing her to take an overdose of sleeping pills. 

Absolutely everyone is desperate to escape Japan for various different reasons. Tatsuo because of his obsession with American jazz and the freedom it represents to him coupled with the sense of impotence he feels in an oppressive society which refuses to recognise his talent because he doesn’t look the part. He jokes with his next-door neighbour, a sex worker who has redecorated her apartment in anticipation of impressing the tourists arriving for the Olympics, that he envies women and wishes he could find a “sponsor” to take him to the States, but later can offer only the explanation that Japan doesn’t interest him when probed over why he was so desperate to leave. 

“Korea or anywhere else, it’s better than Japan” Yasue later adds, consoling Tatsuo as she informs him that their escape plan won’t work because all of the US military planes are being diverted to Korea to bring in extra help for the Olympics. Bundled into a van filled with chicken carcases as a potential stowaway, he discovers another escapee – a Korean trying to go “home”, or rather to the North (presumably having missed out on the post-war “repatriation” programs) where he claims there are lots of opportunities for young people only to lose his temper when Tatsuo explains that he wants to become a jazz singer. He doesn’t want decadent wastrels in his communist paradise and would rather Tatsuo not mess up his country. Yet they are each already dependent on the Americans even for their escape, making use of military corruption networks and getting Yasue’s friend’s GI squeeze into trouble through exposing his black-marketeering. 

Tatsuo and Yasue find they have more in common than they first thought, both “deceived” by those like Takashi who turned out to be a feckless married man and father-to-be risking not only his own future but that of his unborn child solely to fuel his escapist drug habit (which was perhaps the reason for the lengthy hospital stay from which he had just returned). Yasue was just trying to save up enough money to open a hairdresser’s in her hometown, but Takashi told her he was a “famous jazz drummer” and presumably sold her the same kind of empty dreams as he did Tatsuo. Giving up on her own future, realising that even in America the sex trade is all that’s waiting for her, Yasue tries to engineer Tatsuo’s escape but he, traumatised by his crimes, descends further into crazed paranoia, eventually finding himself right in the middle of the Olympics opening ceremony. This is event is supposed to put Japan back on the map as a rehabilitated modern nation, but perhaps all it’s doing is creating an elaborate smokescreen to disguise all the reasons a man like Tatsuo and a woman like Yasue might want to be just about anywhere else. Yoshida seems unimpressed with the modern nation and its awkward relationship with the Americans, perhaps a controversial point in the immediate run up to the games. Shochiku neutered his attempt to depict a man driven to madness by the impossibilities of his times, but a sense of that madness remains as Tatsuo finds himself on the run and eventually suspended neither here nor there, trapped in a perpetual limbo of frustration and futility.

Original trailer (no subtitles)

Immortal Love (永遠の人, Keisuke Kinoshita, 1961)

Posted on by

Patriarchal feudalism destroys not only the life of an innocent young woman but all of those around her in Keisuke Kinoshita’s embittered romantic melodrama Immortal Love (永遠の人, Eien no Hito). Scored to the impassioned beat of an incongruous flamenco and spanning almost thirty years of turbulent history from the tightening years of militarism to Anpo protests, Immortal Love finds its heroine imprisoned by the system within which she was raised but determining to free her children from the legacy of feudalism even while knowing that she traps herself in her intense resentment towards her husband and everything he represents. 

Heibei (Tatsuya Nakadai), the wealthy son of the village chief, returns home from military service in Manchuria after sustaining an injury that will leave him walking with crutches for the rest of his life. Though his father tells him that his is an honourable discharge and has organised a small parade complete with flag waving and a band to greet him, it’s obvious that Heibei feels ashamed to have returned home wounded and is unhappy that his father has made such a fuss. He’s doubly unhappy at his welcome home party on hearing the gossip that local beauty Sadako (Hideko Takamine) is in love with farmer’s son Takashi (Keiji Sada) to whom Heibei has always felt inferior, something which is only exacerbated by the fact Takashi is also at the front and apparently acquitting himself well. Cruelly calling her over, he tells Sadako that he met Takashi at a field hospital but that he was about to go off to a big battle so could very well be dead. 

Heibei’s true feelings, if you could call them that, remain unclear. Later, justifying himself, he claims that he really did care for Sadako and that all of his subsequent “immoral” acts were committed out of a love he was ill equipped to express, but that first night at the party it seems obvious that he only wants her because he knows she is Takashi’s. He tries to assault her when she is massaging his wounded leg, attempts to court her, and then finally resorts to rape with the help of his father who keeps Sadako’s dad occupied by forcing him to drink sake as his guest while making veiled threats about the status of his tenancy. Heibei had made a formal proposal which Sadako was about to turn down, further humiliating him, despite the pressure he’d piled on by threatening to throw Takashi’s brother off his land and potentially kicking her family off theirs too. By raping her and tricking her father into agreeing to the marriage he forces her to accept, wielding his feudal privilege like a weapon. 

Shortly before the marriage, Takashi returns on leave, a heroic soldier painted in glory. He too is resentful and heartbroken to learn that Sadako is to marry to Heibei, eventually hearing the truth of it from his brother. Sadako tries to kill herself rather than be forced into marriage with her rapist, and avoids seeing Takashi in thinking she is now “impure” and can no longer be his wife. Takashi assures her she is wrong, and that even if Heibei thinks he has “stolen” her in taking her by force, he can simply take her back. He proposes they elope, but fails to turn up, leaving Sadako standing sadly at the roadside until her father arrives with a letter explaining that Takashi has reconsidered and advises her to accept a life of material comfort as Heibei’s wife rather than one of hardship with him. 

Forced to marry the man who raped her, Sadako lives in quiet resentment, bearing three children the first of which she struggles to love because he is the result of the rape which condemned her to her present life of misery. Years later, Sadako learns that Takashi married too when his wife Tomoko (Nobuko Otowa) is evacuated to the village to stay with his brother. Heibei, ever cruel, offers Tomoko a job as a household servant, revelling in the idea that Takashi’s first love and current wife are both under his roof, telling her all about their strange romantic history and setting her at odds with Sadako whom she too resents knowing that her husband has never loved her because he can’t give up on his first love. A twisted bond arises between Heibei and Tomoko, united in resentment of Takashi and Sadako, but Heibei eventually tries to rape her too, once again trying to take what Takashi has, or possibly destroy it.  

Despite her despair and loathing for her husband, Sadako tries to rise above it and always makes a point of treating Tomoko with respect and kindness even when she is cruel. Later on the road, she tells her not to worry, that what she grieves isn’t Takashi but the life she lived before. Heibei is perhaps also a victim of the system, his masculinity undermined by his brash father while his sense of inferiority is exacerbated by his disability, but he is also innately cruel and selfish. There’s strange perversion in the act of healing which closes the film in that it forces Sadako to ask for an apology from Heibei, the man who raped her and ruined her life, for using his abuse as an “excuse” to go on hating him all these long years. Heibei characteristically paints himself as the victim, branding Sadako a cold and unfeeling woman, wondering who will look after him now that he has been abandoned by all his children. He tells her that his feelings were sincere even if his acts were immoral, implicitly blaming her for the abuse that he inflicted, but Sadako merely accuses him of romanticising the past in trying to justify this internecine bid for vengeance that ruined the lives of at least four people as a frustrated love story. 

“You and I may never be reconciled until one of us dies” Heibei admits, while Sadako tearfully tells a dying Takashi that it’s not too late for her to try to be happy. Tomoko was able to reconcile with her son and apparently lived out the last of her days in contentment. Naoko (Yukiko Fuji), Sadako’s daughter, eventually married Takashi’s son Yutaka (Akira Ishihama), breaking with the past both in rejecting the feudal class structure within which she was raised in marrying a working class man, and the patriarchal in ignoring her cruel father’s authority. A kind of healing has been achieved, freeing the younger generation from the cursed family legacy which claims that their ancestral wealth was gained by a literal betrayal of thousands of peasant farmers at the time of the siege of Osaka in 1615. The corruption of the war and a culture of hypermasculinty is visited on Sadako in the violent trauma of the rape, an event which echoes through not only her life but perhaps her children’s too. It is not she who should be asking for forgiveness, but she does perhaps begin to find it in herself, in making a kind of peace with the past which at least cuts the cord, allowing the younger generation to escape the net of feudal oppression for a brighter, freer, post-war future.

Immortal Love is available to stream in the US via the Criterion Channel.

Original trailer (no subtitles)

Inferno of Torture (徳川いれずみ師：責め地獄, Teruo Ishii, 1969)

Posted on by

“There’s no hope for us anymore” cries the hero, redeeming himself with one last act of humanity before allowing himself to be consumed by the flames of Edo-era barbarity. Another tale of feudal exploitation, Teruo Ishii’s Inferno of Torture (徳川いれずみ師：責め地獄, Tokugawa Irezumi-shi: Seme Jigoku) opens with an otherwise unrelated scene of female crucifixion followed by an elaborate beheading, presenting both of these events with a degree of historical authenticity they do not perhaps possess. Nevertheless, his central tale which turns out to be less about two women than two men, turns on the exploitation of female bodies, subtly suggesting that the modern society is itself founded on female exploitation. 

Though dropping the portmanteau structure frequently employed in the Joys of Torture series, Ishii returns from the prologue with the end of the first arc in which the presumed heroine, Yumi (Yumiko Katayama), makes a stealthy visit to a ghostly cemetery in which she trashes the grave of a man named Genzo (Shinichiro Hayashi), digs him up and dismembers his body to retrieve a key we later see him swallow which she hopes will unlock her womanhood currently imprisoned by an ornate chastity belt, only the key doesn’t fit. 

Flashing back again, we see Yumi forced into sex work in payment of a debt and imprisoned in a labyrinthine brothel which specialises in bondage and torture under the guidance of lesbian madam Oryu* (Mieko Fujimoto) and her samurai fixer Samejima (Haruo Tanaka). The brothel’s USP is in its tattooed women which neatly leads us into the main narrative as Yumi’s body becomes a battleground contested by two men, top tattoo artists in search of the perfect canvas in order to win, ironically, the hand of their master’s pure and innocent daughter Osuzu (Masumi Tachibana). 

Horihide (Teruo Yoshida) and Osuzu are in love, but the dark and brooding Horitatsu (Asao Koike) is determined to frustrate his rival’s desires by becoming the successor to Osuzu’s dying father, the tattooist Horigoro. The “hori” which prefixes each of the men’s names relates to the process of tattooing and comes from the verb to chisel, hinting at the way they prick and channel their desires into the canvas which is human skin. Horihide is our “hero”, described by Horigoro as the light to Horitatsu’s dark, Horitatsu currently making more of an impact with his designs of violent intensity, but each of them is in a very real way content to use and exploit the bodies of women without their full consent in order to practice their art. It is essentially an act of violence if not of “torture”. 

Meanwhile, Oryu and Samejima are profiting off their “merchandise” more directly in participating in the trafficking of tattooed ladies to lecherous foreigners displaying an early fetishisation of Asian women. This being late Edo, Japan is still in its isolationist period in which fraternising with foreigners was illegal which is why the action eventually takes us to Nagasaki and the Dutch trading port of Dejima, here presented as a nexus of corruption, where Samejima and Oryu prove themselves very much in league with foreign powers dealing with powerful businessman Clayton (Yusuf Hoffman), despite his name apparently a Dutchman, and his Chinese associates. Like Nikkatsu’s borderless action films of the ‘50s and ‘60s, Inferno of Torture indulges in an unpleasant Sinophobia which culminates in a chase through a crowded Chinese wet market in which we catch sight of dogs hanging bound ready for the slaughter in similar poses to those of the women in the brothel, not to mention thrusting snakes, before being confronted by a basket full of adorable puppies presumably headed for a dark destination, while we finally rediscover Hidetatsu collapsed in an opium den after being forcibly addicted by Oryu as a means of control. 

“This is a house of horrors” the Chinese gang leader tells a group of women bought by Samejima from a prison and promised a life of wealth and ease as geisha catering to high class clients. It’s difficult to tell if Ishii is critiquing Edo-era misogyny or that of the present day, or merely revelling in it with increasingly perverse scenes of sexual violence and degradation which continually imply that women have no role or value outside of reflecting the desires of men while those who try to claim their own agency are brutally put down by an inherently misogynistic, patriarchal society. After a Count of Monte Cristo-esque subplot in which Horihide is framed for murder but escapes to plot his revenge, the psychedelic final showdown returns us to the tattooists’ artistic face off as they again weaponise female bodies to embody their own ambitions, Horihide turning a blameless young woman into an iridescent peacock to get back at her father. Nevertheless, he finally reassumes his humanity in ending his mission of vengeance before it takes more innocent lives while accepting that he may now be too corrupted to return to his former life. Elegantly composed often unconsciously recalling the keyhole in Yumi’s chastity belt as it imprisons women within the peephole of the frame, Inferno of Torture ends exactly as it began, with a scene of grim and ironic punishment in which the female form is itself obliterated. 

Inferno of Torture is available on blu-ray from Arrow Video in a set which also includes an in-depth commentary from Tom Mes discussing the treatment of the various actresses involved with the series, Ishii, and Toei in general; Jasper Sharp’s Miskatonic lecture Erotic Grotesque Nonsense & the Foundations of Japan’s Cult Counterculture; and a booklet featuring new writing by Chris D.

Original trailer (no subtitles)

*This character’s name is rendered as “Oryu” in the subtitles but “Otatsu” (different ways of reading the same character which means “dragon”) in the accompanying booklet.

Bad Girl (非行少女, Kirio Urayama, 1963)

Posted on by

“It’s all because of poverty” according to the not-quite hero of Kirio Urayama’s Bad Girl (非行少女, Hiko shojo), and he’s right to an extent but then again not. Following his factory tale Cupola, Where the Furnaces Glow, Urayama shifts further into social realism, exploring small-town life at a midpoint in the post-war era in which the economic prosperity which was beginning to take root in a Tokyo about to host the Olympic Games had not yet been evenly distributed. The titular “bad girl” of the title is no Nikkatsu delinquent, merely a lonely young woman undermined by parental neglect and societal disdain who scandalously smokes, drinks, and steals the things she could never hope to afford. 

Wakae (Masako Izumi) claims she does these things in part because she hates her step-mother (Sumie Sasaki) whom she blames for her own mother’s death after returning from the hospital to tell her father that her mother had died only to find him with another woman. Emotionally neglected, she spends her time in bars enjoying the attentions of men without perhaps understanding the dangers. It’s in trying to escape two young toughs who think they haven’t got what they paid for when they took her to the cinema that Wakae runs into childhood friend Saburo (Mitsuo Hamada), recently returned from Tokyo after the factory he was working at went bust. Now 21, Saburo has a little education and was hoping for an office job but discovers that positions are generally open only to new graduates and is advised that his best option is to work for his brother (Asao Koike) with whom he does not get on. 

Where his brother is currently running for political office on a conservative ticket, Saburo is of a more liberal, progressive outlook, thinking back on the divisions in the town caused by protests against an American artillery test site which once occupied the local beach. He is extremely concerned that Wakae has been skipping school and is keen to help her study, even giving her money to help pay the fees as well as buying her a fashionable skirt to replace the worn through trousers which left her too ashamed to go. Unfortunately, Wakae loses the money after she’s accosted by a delinquent boy who tries to press her into sex work, leaving her both unable to attend school and embarrassed to see Saburo who is the only one encouraging her to think that she is worth something and can have a bright future. 

Poverty is in itself only one problem, the wider one being that everyone has already decided that Wakae is “bad girl” and that bad girls aren’t worth anything. Her disinterested father (Jun Hamamura) and stepmother are content to send her to her aunt who wants to make her a geisha, reinforcing an image of herself as somehow unfit for regular society and suited only to sex work. After losing Saburo’s money, she tries to rob the school but is caught by a caretaker who feigns sympathy but later offers her money for sex and then tells everyone that she tried it on with him so he wouldn’t turn her in. This coupled with a misunderstanding that she frittered away the money he gave her for the fees makes even Saburo lose faith in her, convincing him that they must have some time apart after he agrees to take a job on the chicken farm of a family friend to get away from his brother’s conservative authoritarianism. 

After accidentally setting fire to a chicken coop, Wakae is sent to a home for troubled children which turns out to be perhaps the best thing for her. Although she does not immediately bond with some of the other residents, she finds there what she never had at home – a supportive family, while the couple who run the facility do their best to instil confidence by teaching her skills that will allow her to reintegrate into regular society. Even there, however, members of the board are primed to write her off as a lost cause, just another “bad girl” not worth the effort. Only the head of the facility argues the problem is that no one’s ever given her a chance and if no one ever does then she’ll never have the opportunity to prove them wrong. 

Meanwhile, many of the other girls find themselves in the same position. Wakae’s friend Tomiko (Shizuka Yoshida) who ran away when she discovered that her parents were going to sell her, believes her future is hopeless because she’ll never be able to escape the “bad girl” label, but given courage by her time at the centre Wakae is able to tell her to stay strong, because you’ll never know if you don’t try. Wakae becomes an uncomfortable standard-bearer for the others, her eventual graduation another sign of hope but also perhaps a burden in knowing that if she fails to capitalise on her success she will only deepen their sense of despair. 

Yet her path forward begins to take her away from Saburo who makes a late night, romantic visit to the centre to apologise and tell her he’ll be waiting for her when she gets out. After a crisis of his own in which he too commits a crime in an attempt to buy a better future only to return beaten both literally and spiritually, Saburo has perhaps given in, agreed to work for his ultraconservative brother and bought his line of earnest hard work as the only path towards salvation. Wakae decides to take a promising job offer in Osaka and to leave without saying goodbye in case Saburo tries to convince her to stay local. That’s something he eventually tries to do in a last minute station dash, leaving Wakae torn and confused, enduring a public breakdown in a train station cafe literally stuck between one place and another. 

Saburo had complained that his problem was that he didn’t know what to do, confused by the volatile post-war society. Rather than a source of salvation he becomes a feckless suitor who can offer only a vague ideal of “love”, unable to protect Wakae and perhaps selfishly holding her back. As she tells him, she has made her decision, but ironically lacks agency. Her destiny is still to an extent in Saburo’s hands in his desire either to trap or free her. Meanwhile, there is also something insidiously uncomfortable in the fact that the only way to escape her “bad girl” image is by becoming economically productive, redeeming herself through honest hard work, while the desire to reject the label so totally also tacitly reinforces the idea of there being such a thing as a “bad girl” and that “bad girls” are worthless. Perhaps Saburo’s brother wins after all in his aspirational conservatism and its insistence on properness and industry. Nevertheless, Urayama leaves Wakae in a better place than we found her, given the confidence to pursue an individual destiny in the knowledge that she is not worthless, is deserving of love and happiness, and has a place to which to return as she makes her way into a promising post-war future.

Monster SeaFood Wars (三大怪獣グルメ, Minoru Kawasaki, 2020) [Fantasia 2020]

Posted on by

Ever wondered what happens to a fallen kaiju? After Godzilla and friends have ransacked the city, there’s certainly a lot of cleaning up to do but disposing of kaiju corpses isn’t something your average monster movie gives a lot of thought to. According to Monster SeaFood Wars (三大怪獣グルメ, San Daikaiju Gourmet), there’s surprisingly good eating to be had in monster meat and when it comes to taking down a giant squid, perhaps it’s better to ask a chef rather than a scientist or the boffins from the Ministry of Defence. 

Switching between documentary sequences featuring talking heads looking back on the bizarre events and the events themselves, Monster SeaFood Wars follows scientist/sushi shop heir Yuta (Keisuke Ueda) who accidentally unleashes three giant kaiju on the city of Tokyo after he’s knocked off his bike while delivering some prize seafood to the local temple as an offering. In addition to being the heir to a sushi shop, Yuta is also a scientist apparently obsessed with giant monsters which he describes as “cute” and had been working on a serum, Setap Z, to turn ordinary foodstuffs giant in order to end world hunger. Before you know it, angry octopus Takolla and his frenemy Ikalla are on the rampage through the city. 

Of course, Yuta is the prime suspect which is perhaps why he somewhat arrogantly describes himself as the “biggest victim” while reluctantly agreeing to help out SMAT, Seafood Monster Attack Team, as they try to figure out how to mitigate the effect of Setap Z and stop the kaiju assault but is further irritated by being denied a spot on the team as a full member. Meanwhile, he’s also facing off against rival scientist Hikoma (Yuya Asato) who impresses with an obvious idea, vinegar, while charming Yuta’s childhood friend and unrequited crush Nana (Ayano Christie Yoshida) who now works for the Ministry of Defence and has only contempt for the weirdo monster geek. 

Yuta’s plan had been to let Takolla and Ikalla duke it out, assuming Takolla would win and then they’d somehow lure him into a giant octopus trap. Hikoma meanwhile suggests giant rice vinegar cannons, regular missiles already having proved ineffective against the sea creatures’ springy flesh. Hikoma’s plan would have worked, had it not been for the sudden and unexpected return of Kanilla whose hard shell protects him against the corrosive effects of the vinegar. During the fight, however, some of Takolla’s tentacles are chopped off, chunks of meaty white flesh falling to the ground as SMAT commander Hibiki (Ryo Kinomoto) unconsciously licks his lips. 

While very much a classic kaiju movie, Monster SeaFood Wars has its tongue firmly in its cheek, scaling back on the monster-fighting action for some gentle satire as the gang find they just can’t resist the urge find out what kaiju tastes like. The answer is surprisingly good, with the effect that kaiju meat becomes the latest culinary trend. “Forget bubble tea” one commentator says, monstrous squid is where it’s at. The TV news also comes in for a kicking with its placard unveiling confirming the kaiju’s name as well as a state of the nation address from an Abe-esque PM using the crisis to further his quest to “take back Japan” while speaking in a distinctly squeaky voice.

Meanwhile, drunk salarymen complain about their exploitative working conditions, joking that they’d need to be eight-armed octopuses to get through the amount of work expected of them only for Takolla to appear out of nowhere and slap them down seconds after they’ve made a few inappropriate remarks to some passing young ladies. Aside from the kaiju, the big bad does seem to be pervasive sexism with Ministry of Defence employee Nana often relegated to little more than eye candy and eventually the subject of an offensive bet between the icy Yuta and slick Hikoma whose equally sexist cheesy lines actually seem to impress her. 

Yuta, however, gets the chance to redeem himself by revealing that the really did make the formula to help starving people in Africa rather than just because he actively wanted to usher in the great kaiju apocalypse, owning his legacy as the son of a sushi shop while his best friend Niima (Shojiro Yokoi) has a few surprises of his own up his sleeve which prove that the best person to have at a giant octopus is a skilled chef. Of course Setap Z turns out to cause a few additional problems, accidentally spreading itself around after hitting the mosquito population, while it seems the villain is not quite done with their desire to misuse the serum, hinting at a possible sequel. A humorous but never mocking take on the classic tokusatsu, Monster SeaFood Wars pits culinary science against the giant monster threat and discovers that all you need to save the world is a good cook.

Monster SeaFood Wars streams in Canada from 20th August to 2nd September as part of this year’s online edition of Fantasia International Film Festival.

Original trailer (no subtitles)

Crazy Samurai Musashi (狂武蔵, Yuji Shimomura, 2020) [Fantasia 2020]

Posted on by 1 Comment

Action star Tak Sakaguchi rose to fame in Ryuhei Kitamura’s low budget zombie movie Versus, thereafter starring in a series of similarly pitched splatter and exploitation films as well as appearing in long running tokusatsu series Kamen Rider and making his own directorial debut with manga adaptation Be a Man! Samurai School in 2008. Much to fans’ disappointment, Sakaguchi announced his retirement as a performer in 2013, but has since made several high profile returns to the big screen including Yuji Shimomura’s Re:Born in which he played a former JSDF elite soldier living quietly in the countryside until an old enemy tracked him down. 

Again emerging from semi-retirement, Crazy Samurai Musashi (狂武蔵, Kurui Musashi) sees Sakaguchi reunite with Shimomura to play the most famous of legendary samurai Miyamoto Musashi in an all out action fest including a 77-minute one cut assault during which he singlehandedly kills 588 men. Unsurprisingly light on dialogue, the film credits Sion Sono with original concept and Atsuki Tomori with screenplay who do at least add a little context which frames this, to an extent, as a tale of merciless samurai hypocrisy and the fallacy of “honour” as a code for living. 

As the film opens, a small boy stares in wonder at a white butterfly before being reminded that he has, as the head of this clan, apparently challenged the great Miyamoto Musashi to a duel in revenge for his murder of two of their previous leaders. Affable retainer Chusuke (Kenta Yamazaki) tells the boy not to worry, he’s not going to let anything happen to him, but stops short of explaining that he’s really just a kind of bait. Nevertheless, Chusuke has his reservations about their plan. After all, it’s not very befitting of a samurai’s honour to challenge someone to a private duel but invite 400 retainers to the surprise party. 400 against one seems faintly ridiculous. It might even be embarrassing if anyone else finds out, but then as the priest (Yosuke Saito) says you can just kill them too. In any case, while Chusuke is talking to the priest and the mercenaries are busy arguing with the retainers, Miyamoto Musashi sneaks through the perimeter and fells the small boy who is technically the “leader” of the clan with one flying sword blow, kickstarting a scene of utter carnage as he attempts to fight his way out of the compound.   

“How many more?” Musashi asks in exasperation during a momentary pause, later doing a few calculations. He thought there’d be about 70, but it feels like he’s killed a few more than that. True to form, the samurai warriors largely follow the protocols of honour. They fight one-on-on, and only at the end does anyone attempt to attack Musashi from behind. He makes swift work of them, taking each man out with maximum economy, occasionally challenged by complete randomers who apparently aren’t even part of the clan, they just really don’t like him. Though necessarily repetitive, Shimomura’s innovative, non-stop fight choreography follows a realtime, broadly naturalistic logic in which duels are generally brutish and short. Musashi begins to tire as he continues to fight for his life, taking brief breaks for water, food, and existential questioning, before heading back into the fray. 

“Duty? Honour? Who gives a crap? I just wanna win” he later says in what is simultaneously a rejection and an embodiment of the samurai code. “I’ll die one day anyway” Musashi chuckles to himself before rejoining the fight, wilfully embracing the nihilism of the samurai existence that allowed him to kill a child without thinking twice. Chusuke failed to protect his honour, or save his clan, his earnestness perhaps betrayed by his mentor’s underhandedness in unwisely hiring vast numbers of mercenaries and sending his own unprepared students, many of whom simply flee (a wise decision), to face off against an unstoppable killing machine. Paradoxically, Miyamoto Musashi will survive because he doesn’t care about playing fair, he may not even care about surviving, all he wants is to win. “A kid who knows nothing of war”, Chusuke’s stubborn insistence on illusionary samurai honour will lead only to more suffering and violence while all Musashi can do is sigh in resignation and ready his sword. 

Crazy Samurai Musashi streams in Canada from 20th August to 2nd September as part of this year’s online edition of Fantasia International Film Festival.

International trailer (English subtitles)

Tokyo Chorus (東京の合唱, Yasujiro Ozu, 1931)

Posted on by

“Tokyo – city of the unemployed” runs a rather unexpected caption part way through Yasujiro Ozu’s depression-era silent comedy, Tokyo Chorus (東京の合唱, Tokyo no Chorus). Putting an unconventional spin on the reality of the contemporary capital, Ozu nevertheless retreats into his favourite themes as good people attempt to remain cheerful in the face of increasing adversity while embracing an often latent interest in class politics as the hero finds himself losing out at the hands of heartless capitalists when he alone is brave enough to stand up for a friend treated unfairly. 

Ozu opens however with an amusing prologue set some years before the main action in which the hero, Okajima (Tokihiko Okada), is a poor student goofing off during a military-style drill. While another boy arrives late to practice and is mocked for having arrived in geta, Okajima’s problem is that he didn’t want to take his jacket off because he isn’t wearing a shirt. A little less well off than some of the others, he brazens things out by ribbing the teacher, Mr. Omura (Tatsuo Saito). Flashforward some years and Okajima has become an insurance clerk, married with three children. His oldest child, a son, is desperate for a bicycle because the other kids have one and as Okajima is supposed to be getting his bonus today, the parents have decided to give in. 

Things do not, however,  go quite to plan. After picking up his pay packet, Okajima gets talking with an old timer who laments he’s just been fired. He thinks it’s because he sold some unlucky policies in which the beneficiary died shortly after signing the paperwork, but it seems obvious to Okajima that they’re firing him because they don’t want to pay his pension. He talks things over with the other employees who all agree it’s unfair, but is the only one brave enough to march into the boss’ office and say so. Unfortunately, Okajima gets nowhere and loses his own job in the proccess. Dejected, he buys his son a much cheaper scooter on the way home but the boy is unimpressed, as is his wife (Emiko Yagumo) when he hands her his notice of termination. 

It is of course a good and proper thing that Okajima stood up for colleague, but he’s lost out because of his pride, smugly explaining to his wife that he was in the right while arguing with his boss and resentfully refusing to admit the irresponsibility of his actions as a husband and a father. Pride becomes a persistent secondary concern as he tries to find another steady job in the economically straitened world of 1931. Despite telling his colleague he envied him for his job as a sandwichboard man and claiming that having a college degree makes him overqualified for casual work, Okajima struggles with himself intellectually knowing that any job will do to feed his family but embarrassed in having to resort to work he feels is beneath him. When he runs into Mr. Omura and he offers to help him with a job in the curry rice restaurant he now owns after retiring from teaching, Okajima is conflicted, telling him he won’t accept help if it’s offered out of pity but only if extended in friendship. When his wife spots him out delivering leaflets, however, she is scandalised and humiliated rather than proud or grateful, only later coming round and agreeing to help out in the Omuras’ restaurant herself. 

Meanwhile, family life is obviously strained by their ongoing financial predicament. When their daughter is taken ill and needs hospital treatment, Mrs. Okajima is upset to discover that her husband sold all her kimonos to pay the fees, their eyes aflash with anger and despair as they put on a brave face for the children but eventually brightening as they continue on with a family game of pat-a-cake. Despite her distress, Mrs. Okaijma maintains faith in her husband and the family is as happy as it can be under the circumstances. At a reunion organised for some of his former students now no longer the rambunctious young men they were at the film’s opening but wistful for the spent freedoms of their youth, Omura makes a toast hoping that everyone continues to prosper through “hard-work and self-reliance”, but it is the mutual solidarity which Okajima showed when he stood up for his mistreated colleague which eventually proves his salvation. Humbled by his experiences, no longer looking down on honest work, he gets the offer of another job which is not quite of the kind he was hoping for, but is perhaps a new start even if it means leaving Tokyo, city of the unemployed, behind for the greener pastures of provincial Tochigi and a simpler, but perhaps kinder, existence. 

Blueprint of Murder (暗黒街の弾痕, Kihachi Okamoto, 1961)

Posted on by

Alongside its trademark tokusatsu Toho also had a sideline in genre-hopping B-movie comedy of which Kichachi Okamoto’s Blueprint of Murder (暗黒街の弾痕, Ankokugai no Dankon) is a prime example. Playing into a zeitgeisty anxiety about corporate corruption which led to several series of films revolving around industrial espionage such as Yasuzo Masumura’s Giants & Toys and the later Black Test Car, Okamoto’s ironic take on noir and globalisation anticipates the spy spoofs Toho would produce in the wake of Bond fever while quietly also perhaps poking fun at Nikkatsu’s crime melodramas.

The film opens with a young man, Kusaka (Ko Mishima), and his boss Komatsu (Ichiro Nakatani) testing an experimental car engine that would be ultra efficient and cheap to produce. The test goes well, but Kusaka is run off the road on the journey home, caught between a truck and a mysterious man on a motorcycle. Meanwhile, Kusaka’s brother Jiro (Yuzo Kayama), a whale hunter, is busy working on a new kind of harpoon when he gets a telegram from an old friend telling him to come home right away because his brother is dead. On meeting with Komatsu, Jiro starts to think perhaps his brother’s death wasn’t an accident. It seems there are a lot of people interested in this technology, some of whom would rather it not see the light because cheap, efficient engines are not good news for the oil industry. 

Hearing that Kusaka was recieving threatening letters, Jiro wonders why he wouldn’t go to the police, but Komatsu points out that it would have made no difference. Firstly, the police rarely get involved with cases of corporate espionage, and secondly if they did the blackmailers would win anyway because if there were a court case they would have to make full disclosure of their plans. Jiro tries going to the police himself and showing them that he has evidence, as well as the “instinct of a whale hunter”, which suggests that his brother was murdered, but nonchalant policeman Azuma (Tatsuya Mihashi) doesn’t seem very interested. Teaming up with an old uni friend, Sudo (Makoto Sato), who now runs some kind of scandal rag newspaper and is well connected around town, Jiro tries to investigate but soon becomes entangled in a complicated web of corporate intrigue.

Sudo, whose paper seems to be on the verge of bankruptcy, has some sort of game going with corrupt businessman Otori (Seizaburo Kawazu) who runs Goei Economic Reporting Agency which was one of three companies bidding for Komatsu’s engine. Later, Sudo’s main squeeze Tomiko (Kumi Mizuno) also tries to blackmail Otori by posing as the daughter of a man he drove to suicide after poaching technology from his company. Played at his own game, Otori is extremely disturbed to have this traumatic incident thrust in his face, and it quickly becomes clear that although he was onboard with various kinds of corporate duplicity, he had his lines and is worried to think someone might have crossed them on his behalf. 

Otori is right to worry, they are coming for him too. Eventually unmasked, it will come as no surprise to know that the big boss is from Hong Kong making this another quiet instance of Sinophobia betraying an essential anxiety about a newly global Japan. Meanwhile, Jiro’s problems are closer to home. He starts to doubt Sudo, warned off him as man only interested in money, and witnessing him play every angle to his own advantage. Sudo may be playing his own game but has his friend’s interest at heart and is simply trying to protect him from endangering himself in a world he does not understand. 

Rather than the fulfilment of a dangled romance, what we’re left with is the restoration of the friendship between the two men in which they ultimately re-inhabit their innocent student selves complete with a surreal game of air baseball while Tomiko and Komatsu’s sister Kyoko (Mie Hama) cheer excitedly from the sidelines. Okamoto throws in a killer punchline to an early whale hunting gag while piling on the absurdist humour in characteristic style with one unexpected pay off after another even as the guys find themselves in an increasingly murky world of corporate double cross, femme fatale nightclub singers with their own identical minions/backing bands, and rowdy gangsters while trying to ensure the little guy is still free to innovate outside of consumerist concerns.  

Original trailer (no subtitles)