Category: Japan

Helpless (ヘルプレス, Shinji Aoyama, 1996)

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A title card close to the beginning of Shinji Aoyama’s debut film Helpless (ヘルプレス) lets us know that this drama which spans a single day takes place on Sept. 10, 1989. It is indeed late summer for most of the protagonists, refugees from the Showa era living on borrowed time in Heisei and intensely resentful towards the contemporary society which appears to have no place for them while the glamour of the Bubble economy does not appear to have trickled down to their peaceful provincial existence. 

Yakuza, for example, are very much associated with the post-war past and one-armed foot soldier Yasuo (Ken Mitsuishi) is an old-school street thug who can’t accept that his former boss literally is as dead as the institution itself. He’s met at a train station by two former associates, but it’s clear the older at least is awkward around him finally telling Yasuo not to call “too often”. “It’s nice to be normal,” Yasuo sneers, realising his former comrade has gone straight and lives an ordinary life as a regular businessman which is why he really wants nothing to do with his yakuza past. Yasuo takes his as more than just a personal betrayal and shoots him dead with his own gun.

He is quite literally helpless, there’s no place for him in the contemporary society and his only hope is killing his old boss, who is already dead, so he can go back to prison. The only sticking point his younger sister Yuri (Kaori Tsuji) who has learning difficulties and had been living in residential care. Another of Yasuo’s former associates now longer a yakuza, Kenji (Tadanobu Asano), is similarly caring for his father who is in hospital for serious medical treatment. Kenji’s father hums the Internationale to himself and seems to have been consumed by the failure of his personal revolution muttering about blast furnaces while at home Kenji looks out on the now rusty aspirations of another “new era” in a moribund steel plant. He lies to his father that he has a received a job offer from there. 

The two men seem destined to collide, Kenji’s numbed resignation and Yasuo’s irrational rage, though it’s Kenji who later snaps after learning that his father has hanged himself while he was busy taking care of Yasuo’s sister. Even an old classmate he runs into is filled with resentment, talking about taking his “revenge” at the class reunion by poisoning the punch. He says he “forgives” Kenji because he once helped him find his PE kit, though Kenji claims he did it mostly for selfish reasons.The chef at the roadside diner where they wait for Yasuo also seems to be henpecked by his wife who calls him “weaker than a woman.” Kenji later says that he killed them because they ridiculed him, tipped over the edge by his own insecurity and sense of futility. 

Yasuo discovers something similar after being stopped at a roadblock, a policeman expressing sympathy that “they forgot about a punk like you.” Yasuo points the gun at his own head, discovering one last bullet, but it’s not quite clear what happens after that. Yasuo was a wandering ghost anyway, a man of the Showa era haunting the streets of Heisei with a mission to kill a man like himself already dead. On the severed arm Kenji later discovers in his bag, there’s a tattoo of a skull and the motto “help me” which might speak for them all desperately looking for some kind of way out but finding little support. 

But then again, Kenji proves unexpectedly kind caring for Yuri even while Yasuo selfishly considers a double suicide. Dressed in white though also in a T-shirt featuring the cover for Nirvana’s Nevermind which was released in 1991, Kenji is the light and Yasuo the dark despite their mutual violence one bound by nihilism and the other a strange positivity blithely searching for an escaped rabbit just as helpless as he himself may be. Filled with ironic whimsy the film takes place in a purgatorial space inhabited by those displaced by the Bubble who no longer have anything to pin their hopes on while living on borrowed time in a late summer rapidly drawing to a close. 

Ghost Cat Anzu (化け猫あんずちゃん, Yoko Kuno & Nobuhiro Yamashita, 2024)

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It can be comforting, in a way, to think that this world is deeper than we often think it is and that we live surrounded by ancient spirits who touch our lives in ways we never suspect. All of this is, however, a little more palpable in Iketeru, the town of eternal summer, where the heroine of Yoko Kuno and Nobuhiro Yamashita’s animation Ghost Cat Anzu (化け猫あんずちゃん, Bakemono Anzu-chan) is unceremoniously dumped by her feckless father as he attempts to sort out some persistent trouble with loan sharks. 

Of course, to a girl from Tokyo who hoped to spend the summer break with her cram school crush, being sent to a temple to stay with an estranged grandfather it’s not even clear she has ever met before is not a whole lot of fun. But then as Karin (Noa Goto) says, she’s used to being alone, which might be why she takes against the giant ghost cat, Anzu (Mirai Moriyama), who lives like a human but obviously isn’t one. The funny thing about Iketeru is that no one finds Anzu’s existence odd, if at times troublesome. He’s even patiently arrested by a pair of policemen for not having a proper license for his moped which he didn’t think he needed because, after all, he’s a ghost and also a cat. A pair of little boys who’ve formed their own gang called “The Contrarians” to “defy society” call him “aniki” like some kind of yakuza boss and try to recruit him though being in a gang seems like too much bother for Anzu, which is something he has in common in Karin. 

But the funny thing is, Anzu isn’t really so different from her father in that he too can be somewhat irresponsible. Though he knows he shouldn’t, he spends the money he was keeping for her on pachinko hoping to win big but predictably loses it all. He gets over excited about jobs that pay 3000 yen (£15) a day and overcooks food he’s dropped on the floor because it’ll burn off all the dirt. But like Karin, Anzu can be a little standoffish and it isn’t even until her arrival that he starts to interact with some of the other supernatural creatures in the area who appear to have already set up some kind of club. Having invited them over, Anzu complains they didn’t pay him enough attention and he won’t invite them again while Karin asserts that they seemed “nice”. Though Anzu himself has not yet quite taken to her, the yokai are touched by her tragic circumstances and feelings of abandonment so decide to do what they can to help her. 

Part of Karin’s problem is that she’s still struggling to come to terms with her mother’s death three years previously. Iketeiru calls itself the town of eternal summer, but the summer in Japan is synonymous with the Bon festival during which this world and the other are at their closest and the spirits of the departed may temporarily return. Thus the town itself is a liminal space caught between the living and the dead which the mortal and supernatural co-exist in a very tangible way even if Karin’s eventual descent into hell involves jumping into a broken toilet in a Tokyo columbarium. Even so, she eventually finds herself squaring off against the King of Hell himself in the middle of the Bon festival while straddling the worlds of the living and dead and discovering the will to go on living which is perhaps what the town’s name may actually mean. 

In that sense, it’s a place Karin discovers as much as it’s home to cure her sense of rootless abandonment. The rotoscoped animation and live-recorded dialogue lend a sense of uncanniness to the beautifully animated backgrounds which effortlessly evoke a sense of serenity in the timelessness of a summer in small-town Japan. The juxtaposition of the ancient and the modern, Jizo playing Nintendo Switch, yokai working at the golf course which is perhaps a manifestation of the disruption wrought on the natural world by human endeavour, echo a kind of cosmic irony but also an odd kind of warmth in the strangeness of the world around us with its immortal cat spirits and friendly supernatural creatures that seems a far cry from the sterility of the city with its violent loan sharks and indifferent friends. 

Trailer (English subtitles)

The Woman in the Rumour (噂の女, Kenji Mizoguchi, 1954)

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A mother and daughter find themselves deceived by the same man, each hemmed in by realities which cannot be altered but eventually coming to a place of mutual understanding that allows them to restore their relationship not only as parent and child but as women in Kenji Mizoguchi’s 1954 melodrama, The Woman in the Rumour (噂の女, Uwasa no Onna). The first question we might ask ourselves is to which of the women the title refers, or indeed to which rumour, though in a sense rumours matter little for either of them when the problem is the constraints which each of them feel as women in the contemporary society. 

Even so, the sense of shame is evident when Yukiko (Yoshiko Kuga) is brought back to the geisha house run by her mother Hatsuko (Kinuyo Tanaka) after having attempted to take her own life in Tokyo. As we learn, the reason for her despair is in part heartbreak. She had been engaged but her fiancé’s family convinced him to end their relationship when they discovered that her mother ran a geisha house. Thus the suicide attempt is also a reflection of her sense of futility. She will always be the daughter of a woman who earned her living in the sex trade. This is a fact that cannot be changed and may lead her to think that her situation is hopeless because the same thing is likely to happen again leaving her unable to marry in a society in which there are few options for a single woman to make a life for herself not to mention the loneliness of living without romantic love. 

Hatsuko, meanwhile, is uncertain how seriously she should take the situation in part believing that it’s a product of youthful naivety in her daughter’s first romantic heartbreak. When a young doctor with whom she is close, Matoba (Tomoemon Otani), explains to her that Yukiko is depressed because she feels deep shame, self-loathing, and hopelessness due to her mother’s occupation, Hatsuko struggles to understand it and does not fully believe him. Nevertheless, she took care to bring her daughter up largely outside of the geisha world, sending Yukiko to Tokyo to study music implying that she herself to some degree sees her work as improper. The other girls view Yukiko with a degree of disdain, realising that her refinement was bought with their exploitation and noticing her animosity towards them. 

Hatsuko is mother both to Yukiko and the young women under her care who are always quick to point out that this is one of the better geisha houses because they are well looked after. When one of the women, Usugumo (Kimiko Tachibana), is taken ill, Hatusko calls in the doctor and allows her time off to rest which likely would not be granted at another house. She is reluctant to send her to hospital, but would if the situation called for it. In a sense it’s this solicitation that eventually allows Yukiko to find accommodation with her mother’s profession as she grows closer to the other women while nursing Usugumo herself and comes to understand their particular circumstances that have left them no choice but to live as geisha. Usugumo is reluctant to go to hospital because she is worried about the money she’d usually send to her sister Chiyoko (Sachiko Mine) who works the family farm and cares for their sickly father, but when she dies Chiyoko herself is left with little option other than to petition the geisha house to take her sister’s place. 

On seeing Chiyoko sitting on the step and pleading to be taken on, another of the women laments as she’s leaving that she wonders when there will be no more need for women like them. The geisha world is perhaps an unchangeable reality, just like Yukiko’s birth and her mother’s age. The rumours that surround Hatsuko are to do with her closeness with Matoba with whom she has clearly been in an intimate relationship, dreaming of becoming his wife and even considering selling the geisha house to buy a large property where they could live together as a couple while he runs a private clinic. Matoba predictably decides he prefers the younger Yukiko, Hatsuko increasingly desperate after overhearing their conversation about leaving her behind to move to Tokyo together where Matoba ponders finishing his education. The play they’ve gone to see almost feels like a personal attack as an actor intones that feelings of love at 20 are fine but at 60 it’s merely shameful. “Even carp know better than to fall in love at this age”, he adds, the old woman a figure of ridicule in her romantic delusion leaving Hatsuko feeling both humiliated and resentful.

When Hatsuko finally confronts Matoba, she does it as a scorned woman rather than as a mother, while Yukiko in turn first turns on her rather than Matoba even as she begins to realise the reality of the situation that the man who seduced her had been using her mother for his own gain in total disregard of her feelings. In short, even if Hatsuko were not her mother which certainly makes this a very complicated situation, he is not the sort of man she’d want to make a life with. Acutely aware of her own experiences of heartbreak, she fears for her mother’s wellbeing and comes to an understanding of her as a woman while accepting that “men are all alike” and in that at least perhaps her mother’s profession is the most honest of all. Mutually betrayed, mother and daughter are able to repair their familial bonds while Yukiko finds herself taking refuge in the geisha house as a space of female solidarity and bulwark against a cruel and patriarchal society. 

The Gesuidouz (ザ・ゲスイドウズ, Kenichi Ugana, 2024)

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According to Hanako, vocalist of the band The Gesuidouz (ザ・ゲスイドウズ), punk is “like this miso soup”. She later describes the soup as soothing, made by her bandmate Santaro who turns out to be an unexpectedly dab hand in the kitchen, though in many ways the band’s selling point is that they aren’t very good at anything, least of all music. Even so, and quite crucially, they have one devoted, though otherwise anonymous fan who comes to all their gigs and dances wildly which just goes to prove that the old lady who becomes a kind of muse to them was right when she said there was probably someone out there to whom their music meant more than anything. 

But Hanako is writing under the shadow of death because she’s just turned 26 and is convinced she’s going to join the 27 club which means she has a very limited window to achieve her musical destiny. Perhaps in a way it’s a kind of quarter life crisis, or the sense of desperation that can be felt while young that time is already running out and you still haven’t made anything of your life. You still don’t know who you are or what you want to be and in Hanako’s case, no one has much faith her except her bandmates who stoically excuse their lack of audience under the rationale that everyone’s very busy these days and they should make sure to consult the calendar when they’re booking gigs. 

In fact, her manager’s the least supportive of all. He calls the band “rubbish” though casually admitting the may have forgotten to even release their album though it’s true that no one’s buying it. He’s the one that talks them into taking part in a government-backed scheme to encourage young people to move to the country in exchange for a stipend and place to live. But the weird thing is, unlike the indifference they felt in the city, the local community embrace their eccentricity and support their music even if they find it difficult to see what’s good about it. Despite describing the place where she lives as a “shithole”, the old lady listens patiently to Hanako’s tall tales about headlining Glastonbury while arranging gigs for them to play for such esteemed audiences as the local cows while bemused elderly resents look on stony faced but ultimately supportive. After all, as the old lady says, it’s a rare gift to create something so amazing that other people don’t understand it.

Though obsessed with horror films, darkness, and death, Hanako is strangely touched by country warmth and almost seems to tear up on the simple gift of a bunch of leeks after working in the fields. In a funny way, this village is actually quite like Glastonbury, a small rural settlement with a down-to-earth new age sensibility that suddenly erupts with music even if in this case on a much smaller scale. The old lady who becomes in a way a future echo of Hanako might be the most punk of all, joyfully living her little life in the shithole she’s never been outside of but welcoming these weird youngsters with patience, warmth, and acceptance which eventually allows Hanako to find a way back to herself and to art leading to a kind of rebirth in contrast to the death she was convinced was waiting for her. 

Of course, that all comes from a talking dog giving life advice through he medium of pithy quotes and song lyrics divined through automatic writing while practicing calligraphy. With frequent references to classic horror films, the film is an ode to the strangeness of country life but also its borderless horizons and sense of community solidarity alien to Hanako’s lonely life in Tokyo. But tellingly this is a paradise destined to be lost as the band finds success separating them from the environment that made them successful, fostering their art but also their souls with its gentle sense of acceptance. Often hilarious in its matter of factness, Kenichi Ugana’s anarchic dramedy has true punk spirit which is to say there’s nothing more punk rock than a good bowl of miso soup crafted with wholesome practicality and an altruistic desire for mutual happiness.

The Gesuidouz screens 30th November as part of this year’s London International Fantastic Film Festival (LIFFF)

Original trailer (English subtitles)

THE KILLER GOLDFISH (Yukihiko Tsutsumi, 2024)

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“Did the goldfish have a grudge against your husband?” It is a very strange question, but the policeman admits he has to ask it because he knows his contact at Public Security’s Extraordinary Unit will ask him if he asked. Goldfish aren’t something you’d ordinarily think of as dangerous, but perhaps they’re sick of being cooped up in tiny bowls, denied the whole ocean, so they’ve decided to fight back against humanity? Either that or, as Public Security agent Erika (Eriko Oka) suspects, someone is using them to exact a very particular kind of revenge.

Helmed by one of the premier directors of mainstream contemporary Japanese film, Yukihiko Tsutusmi’s The Killer Goldfish is not the schlockfest its name may suggest but a hark back to the anarchic conspiracy thrillers of the 90s. In fact, it’s produced by a director collective, Super Sapienss, of which Tsutsumi is a member alongside Katsuyuki Motohiro, best known for the Bayside Shakedown series, and Yuichi Sato (Kisaragi) which aims to shake off the inertia of the contemporary Japanese film industry by taking charge of the entire process so they can make the kind of films they want. 

You have to admit, it might be difficult to get a production committee to sign off on a such an outlandish series of events that only begins with murderous goldfish and eventually spins off into a far reaching conspiracy involving superhumans, psychic powers, neanderthal migration, missing high school students, a young woman who is somehow connected psychically with goldfishkind, and long-haired jizo that can stir up human appetites to the point of mass destruction. Erika has a feeling all of this is connected, but she doesn’t quite yet know how save that this world is apparently full of strange crimes to the extent that the powers that be are well aware of them but they prefer to keep quiet and let the Extraordinary Unit handle them.

In any case, the action proceeds X-Files style as Erika teams up with sceptical cop Yukine to try to solve the mystery and avoid any more fishy crimes in the future. This conspiracy is it seems located at the nexus of the primaeval and sophisticated, neanderthal rage delivered into the contemporary society in the opening scenes via our ubiquitous technology with a secret symbol broadcasting into the minds of those born to receive it. A professor digs up evidence that suggests early man arrived in Japan earlier than previously thought and is invited on a daytime talk show only to cause consternation with the obscene quality of his find, while further clues are bizarrely delivered through a love island-style reality dating show and its caddish heartthrob contestant. Making contact with the suspect eventually entails solving a riddle, messaging them on social media, and then completing an online questionnaire.

Nevertheless, these superhumans are apparently so because of their primaeval genetic makeup that places them outside of contemporary notions of civility. Their atavistic qualities render them, like the goldfish, constrained by the limitations of contemporary society from which they long to break free. Even so, their sensibilities seem to align with a problematic seem of historical nationalism that lends them an edge of danger aside from their potential connection to the unexplained goldfish murders which in themselves may indicate a rebellion against entrenched patriarchy given that they seem to target only middle-aged men. 

These ideas may be fleshed out more fully in the accompanying manga, also produced by Super Sapienss, or explained in the Chapter Two alluded to in the title card following the post-credit sequence but otherwise have an unconstrained, freewheeling quality rocketing between the primaeval past and the ultra modernity of reality television and social media conspiracy. The film makes frequent use of animation to express transformation or transportation between these worlds along with another that may exist in a less visible dimension, and has an unexpected freshness that belies Tsutsumi’s long career in the industry. The script by Hoarder on the Border director Takayuki Kayano similarly has an anarchic sensibility which is both retro and ultra-contemporary blending buddy cop procedural with zany horror comedy and an unfolding sense of unease in modern society. It’s fair to say that with The Killer Goldfish Super Sapienss has made good on its mission statement to disrupt the status quo of mainstream Japanese cinema with hopefully more to come in Chapter 2.

THE KILLER GOLDFISH screens 26th November as part of this year’s London International Fantastic Film Festival (LIFFF)

Original trailer (English subtitles)

The Faceless Dead (行旅死亡人, Kishu Izuchi, 2009)

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If you suddenly got a phone call one day to tell you that someone with your name living at your address had been taken ill, how would you feel? Sponsored by the Japan Journalist College, Kishu Izuchi’s mystery drama The Faceless Dead (行旅死亡人, Koryo Shibonin) sends its aspiring investigative reporter through a murky world of crime and identity theft to discover why someone would need to discard their name and live a life of constant inconvenience in an ever modernising society. 

As she explains in her opening voiceover, Misaki’s dream is to become an investigative reporter working on important social issues exposing scandals such as contaminated blood supplies, mislabelled food, and people trafficking but has found little interest from publishers when pitching her ideas. Currently she regards herself as a “job-hopper” working part-time at a local supermarket which has recently been taken over by a larger conglomerate intent on introducing a new creepily cult-like corporate mentality. With her lease about to expire, Misaki is feeling desperate only to receive a weird phone call from another apartment building informing her that “Misaki Takigawa” has been taken ill and is currently in hospital. Obviously this comes as quite a surprise to Misaki as she tries to explain she is Misaki Takigawa and she feels fine to the dumbfounded man on the phone. On venturing to the hospital to find out what’s going on she discovers that the person using her identity to rent a flat is a woman she worked with at a publishing company some years ago, Yasuko. 

Misaki can’t figure out why or how Yasuko would be using her name and documentation but is both curious and feeling a sense of obligation to find out not least because Yasuko also had a bank book with a substantial amount of money in it that’s in her name. Her quest leads her on a meandering path discovering that it obviously wasn’t the first time the woman she knew as Yasuko who had always seemed kind and honest had been living under an assumed name even though it’s something quite difficult and inconvenient to do in contemporary Japan because it makes it all but impossible to access medical care, rent an apartment, or even get a mobile phone all of which require verified documentation. Having access to Misaki’s employment record presumably enabled her to get what she needed to sign a lease and open a bank account in her name and perhaps explains one reason why she elected not to get treatment when a routine workplace checkup highlighted possible medical concerns, the other reason being a sense of guilt which also explains why she chose to live in austerity saving all her money and later instructing Misaki to send it to an older couple living in a remote country village. 

More and more, Misaki is forced to admit that she really didn’t know Yasuko at all even if she felt indebted towards her for having taken her under her wing at her first job, or perhaps that she did in a sense know “Yasuko”, the persona she had adopted at the time, but not the woman underneath it. Apparently based on a real case, Misaki’s quest for the truth takes a rather dark turn that eventually intersects with the weird company that has taken over her supermarket intent on turning all its workers into soulless drones who live only to serve, the boss ominously instructing his subordinate to inject their new philosophy directly into the arms of the unenthusiastic shop staff after failing to achieve their desired sales goals. 

Maybe you could say it was all done for love and Yasuko is simply a hopeless romantic willing to sacrifice her identity but not her life in order reclaim past happiness but even if every life has a price as she reflects in a moment of desperation you can’t simply buy someone else’s no matter how much you’ve lost or suffered in the one you’ve been given. Through her quest to ascertain Yasuko’s true identity along with the original one, Misaki is forced to reflect on and reconsider her relationships with others as well as her own identity while hoping to prove her journalistic skills investigating this very strange and ultimately sad case as borne out by the post-credits sequence which finds her, perhaps strangely, still working at the supermarket trying to organise her life goals around her financial responsibilities in an intransigent society. 

Original trailer (no subtitles)

Wild Ducks and Green Onions (カモとねぎ, Senkichi Taniguchi, 1968)

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Outside of Japan, Senkichi Taniguchi is most likely best known as the director of Toshiro Mifune’s debut film Snow Trail, or else as the screenwriter of one of Akira Kurosawa’s lesser known works The Silent Duel. Yet throughout the 1960s, he also made a series of silly comedies including Wild Ducks and Green Onions (カモとねぎ, Kamo to Negi), an absurd crime caper revolving around a gentleman thief’s attempts to plot the perfect crime while assisted by two bumbling henchmen and a young woman with a hidden agenda.

The film’s Japanese title is likely inspired by a proverb, “a duck comes carrying an onion” which means something close to “there’s a sucker born every minute” though it might be up for debate who exactly is the sucker here. In any case, dapper mastermind Nobukichi (Masayuki Mori) has plotted the perfect heist which involves rigging a speedboat race by nobbling the propellers on two of the four boats and then betting accordingly. So far so good, but the enigmatic Mami (Mako Midori) has been watching their every move and is able to swipe the bag containing the money before henchmen Yosuke (Hideo Sunazuka) and Kyuhei (Tadao Takashima) can return it to their boss who for once has agreed to an equal split. The guys eventually track her down, but she tells them she spent the money on bail for her husband but it turns out he left the police station with two other women and hasn’t been seen since. The gang then determine to track him down to get the money back, but become involved in several other scams along the way. 

Despite having been able to rob them blind, all the men seem to be under the impression that Mami is a brainless airhead though she later reveals herself to speak fluent English and in fact comes up with a few scams of her own that are better than Nobukichi’s whom the guys refer to as “Cap’n”. Nevertheless, the guys only tolerate her because they need to find her husband though all’s not quite as it seems. Kyuhei in particular seems to have a rather misogynistic streak and is somewhat jealous that Nobukichi gets to have Mami to himself though he remains a perfect gentleman, sleeping on the sofa and giving her the bed. But it’s Kyuhei’s lascivious nature that eventually gets them into trouble when he tries to drag a reluctant Yosuke into a cinema screening pink films only to be pulled aside by some kind of anti-delinquency brigade who read off some unconvincing statistics stating that 80% of young male sex offenders are fans of pink films. 

This annoys them so much they decide to scam the organiser, Tomiko (Hisano Yamaoka), by appealing to her vanity and tricking her association, which is dedicated to conservative family values, into watching (and apparently enjoying) a porn film on school premises believing it to be an “educational movie”. Tomiko in some senses represents the forces of order against which the gang are rebelling, though she’ll get her revenge in time. In any case, they find a more worthy target after travelling to a seaside town and encountering the daughter of a man who has been poisoned by industrial pollution while the local factory insists everything is within “safe limits” and they aren’t the cause of the sickness spreading across the area. 

Conducting another expert heist to steal the secret documents to prove otherwise, Nobukichi could make a lot of money blackmailing the factory owner but instead gives the report to the man’s daughter so she can pursue justice and compensation for her father much to the chagrin of Mami and proving that it isn’t all about the money after all. Then again, he has another document that, once translated by Mami, reveals the factory has actually been producing Napalm for the Americans which is a bit of a grey area as far as the constitution is concerned. This time, they play a nasty trick on the heartless factory owner (Eijiro Tono) though he is hardly remorseful and in fact was too greedy to pay their blackmail money despite the vast sums it would cost him if the news ever got out. 

Despite its silliness and absurdity, the film takes an ironic swipe at serious issues of the day such as scandals like the Minamata disease and Mary Whitehouse-esque social campaigners ranting about a decline in morals while simultaneously enjoying the platform that protesting them grants them. In some ways, the gang themselves exist as a kind of rebellion against the salaryman society with their various scams presented as silly games targeting faceless or ridiculous figures who can either afford to lose the money or were ripe for a comeuppance though in the end, crime doesn’t really pay either and the gang find themselves hoist by their own petards, robbed of enjoying their ill-gotten gains by unexpected twists of fate. Very much of its time the film has a kind of charm in its whimsical score and pastel colours but has lingering darkness in its threats of unexploded bombs and hidden Okinawan torture facilities in a society increasingly ruled by amoral capitalists.

An Inn in Tokyo (東京の宿, Yasujiro Ozu, 1935)

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Yasujiro Ozu was perhaps most at home in the genial world of the shomingeki in which everyone is comfortable enough and the problems, such as they are, are emotional rather than practical. He was also, however, an exacting chronicler of his times and unafraid, even in the tightening world of 1935, to explore life on the margins of a society on the brink of crisis. A proto-neorealist take on depression-era fatherhood, An Inn in Tokyo (東京の宿, Tokyo no Yado) finds that there are good people everywhere, but also that people can be good and make bad decisions even in their goodness. 

Kihachi (Takeshi Sakamoto), a widowed father of two boys, is unemployed and looking for work. He tells the guard at a factory that he is a skilled lathe operator, but the man doesn’t even look up from his paper as he unsympathetically tells him to be on his way. Remaining polite, Kihachi thanks him for his time and returns to his sons who are obviously disappointed and mildly irritated by the “mean” guard. The boys look on sadly as other children go off to school and tell their dad they aren’t hungry because they know he has no money for food and do not want to depress him further after being turned down for yet another job. 

We don’t know exactly what landed Kihachi in the circumstances he’s currently in, what happened to his wife, or why he lost his last job but we can probably guess the economic depression is to blame for most of it. The guard at the factory ignores him because he has no work to give and perhaps Kihachi isn’t the first to ask. The small family has been lodging at the titular “inn”, sleeping in a communal room while their resources dwindle. After losing all their possessions, they face the choice of whether to go for dinner and sleep in a field or go hungry and return to the inn. They opt for food, only for the heavens to open, but on this occasion rain is perhaps their salvation because it enables them to run into an old friend, Tsune (Choko Iida), who is able to put them up for a while and help Kihachi find work. 

Meanwhile, on the road the family bumps into a widow and her daughter who are in much the same situation only, as must be obvious, hers is much more serious because if Kihachi cannot find honest work then it may be near impossible for a woman with a child. Mrs. Otaka (Yoshiko Okada) and her daughter Kimiko are staying in the same inn and the children quickly become friends. “Childhood is the best time of life” Kihachi wistfully laments as they watch the kids play, “Children are lovely”. Mrs. Otaka agrees that it’s difficult with a little girl, but that she also keeps her going. The boys too are resilient and positive, the oldest Zenko cheerfully insisting that everything will be alright tomorrow while his father’s attempt to comfort Mrs. Otaka with the claim that things work out in the end cannot help but ring hollow. 

Zenko is quite literally burdened by his father’s failure in that it is he who is expected to carry the small parcel which contains all of their worldly possessions. Later he tries to delegate the responsibility to his younger brother, an act which backfires causing the bundle to be lost. They try to help out by catching stray dogs they can turn in to the police for 40 yen as part of an anti-rabies drive, but they are also children and want what other children have which is why Zenko makes an irresponsible decision to spend the money from catching a dog on a fancy cap he took a liking to after seeing another boy at the inn wearing one. Kihachi is obviously displeased, catching a dog means they can eat and they don’t have money for frivolous things like caps but we hear from his old friend Tsune that he has his irresponsible sides too as evidenced by his longing for sake while the boys long only for wholesome meals rather than sweet treats.

Nevertheless Kichachi is a good man, as Mrs. Otaka later says. He takes a liking to the widow which might be somewhat insensitive to Tsune who has by this point taken him in and started to help him put his life back on track while taking care of the kids, but his desire to help her also has an unpleasantly conservative streak. On learning she’s taken a job at a bar he rants at her in disappointment, exclaiming that he didn’t think she was that sort of woman and wondering why she suffered so long only to finally give in to sex work. Her tearful justifications that her daughter is ill fail to move him. He tells her to quit the bar and get money some other way, which seems unrealistic and even more so in the absence of a good friend like Tsune, who seems to have made a decent life for herself as an independent woman, to miraculously sort everything out. He tries asking Tsune for money, but she worries he’s up to no good and doesn’t want to enable him messing up his life just as he’s getting himself sorted, and so he makes a terrible and frankly irresponsible decision which places his own children in jeopardy solely to “save” Mrs. Otaka from becoming a fallen woman. Leaving the women behind to pick up the pieces and take care of the children, he trudges off alone, a fugitive father exiled from his family and at the mercy of an increasingly indifferent society. 

The Homeless (無宿 やどなし, Koichi Saito, 1974)

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Two men are released from prison on the same day. One, dressed in a 1920s-style white suit and straw hat, tries to befriend the other, in black kimono and geta, but he ignores him. Soon, they arrive at a fork in the road. The man in the kimono walks down a well worn grass path cut between the fields while the man in white, looking back and a little disappointed, continues along the modern roadway making his way towards civilisation.

In some ways, the heroes of Koichi Saito’s The Homeless (無宿 やどなし, Yadonashi) are embodiments of past and future. Jokichi (Ken Takakura), the kimonoed man in black, chooses the path of vengeance. On his release from prison, he learns that his gang leader older brother has been killed while his sister was sold to a brothel. He goes there to find her, but is told that she is already dead. The madam says she died of a chronic illness and that she did for her what she could but treating such a cruel disease is only throwing good money after bad. Sakie (Meiko Kaji), a sex worker who appears to have a childlike quality and possibly impaired mental state, tells a different story claiming the madam had Jokichi’s sister killed for reasons she doesn’t explain but may have more to do with the drama going on with Jokichi’s gang than a desire to cut costs and her losses. 

Gen (Shintaro Katsu), meanwhile, seemingly chooses the path of prosperity. He returns to his wife, Ume (Murasaki Fujima), who is a member of a moribund theatrical troupe, and asks her to return to him what he believes is a treasure map marking the location where his father saw a ship sink during the Russo-Japanese war that may be filled with gold. On finding out Jokichi used to be a diver, Gen becomes determined to bring him onto his mission but Jokichi is set on revenge firstly on a man called Senzo (Noboru Ando) he thinks killed his sister and then on whoever ordered the hit on his brother. This bad news for Gen who realises that if he achieves his vengeance, Jokichi won’t be available to help retrieve the gold because he’ll be in prison so he starts by warning Senzo that his past’s about to catch up with him. 

But it’s also Gen that helps Jokichi escape from the rival gang by suggesting he help rescue Sakie from her indentured servitude as sex worker. Childlike and ethereal, Sakie claims not to remember where she was from and has a simple desire to see the sea which represents to her a kind of freedom while for each of the men it may in fact form a kind of border they will eventually be backed up against and unable to escape. Though Sakie develops a fondness for Jokichi, and then begins to love Gen after he ends up taking care of her along the road, the three form a relationship that seems more fraternal or perhaps even forged on the homoerotic tension between the two men who light their cigarettes one from the other and finally find a home on an idyllic beach where they devote themselves to the search for buried treasure.

Sakie may say that the real treasure is her new life of freedom and warmth, but the hint of riches the two men find is itself rooted in warfare and imperialism which are the same forces by which they were each displaced amid the rising militarism of the 1930s. The three of them remain homeless in this environment, unable to fit into the changing society and by degrees exiled from it. An early title of the film was apparently Jingi no Okite (仁義の掟) which means “the law of honour and humanity” and that is in a way what Jokichi is bound by in his desire for vengeance, while Gen is clearly an anarchistic force unable to submit himself to authority and lusting after a more prosperous modernity. Sakie meanwhile is powerless as a woman with few rights, sold into sex work and technically a fugitive from the gang-backed brothel that owned her contract.

As beautiful as the beach is, we have the feeling that in some senses the three of them are already dead and living in their temporary paradise. Indeed, the past eventually catches up with them as if these three homeless fugitives cannot be allowed to survive in resistance to an authoritarian culture. Their existence is elegised by the beautifully composed cinematography along with the childlike rapport between the two men and the sense of domesticity which arises between the trio before reality bites and even their beachside idyll is invaded by the forces of darkness.

Original trailer (no subtitles)

Tengu Priest (お坊主天狗, Yasushi Sasaki, 1962)

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Disparate denizens of Edo are united in one thing in Yasushi Sasaki’s light hearted jidaigeki, Tengu Priest (お坊主天狗, Obozu tengu), revenge. Like many jidaigeki, what they really want is revenge against the evils of feudalism to which they have each fallen victim, but also acknowledge that they have found something better in being outside it in the solidarity that exists between them as outsiders free from the obligations of samurai society if also with loose ends waiting to be tied.

Once a hatamoto with a 1000 Koku stipend, Obo Kichiza (Chiezo Kataoka) is now a much feared figure keeping order in Edo. When some yakuza toughs are hassling the geisha Kozome (Hibari Misora) at the theatre, insisting that she serve them sake even as she reminds them she’s off the clock, one look from him stops them dead though Kichizo is also impressed with Kozome’s nerve. Like him, Kozome is also in Edo for revenge. Formerly a samurai’s daughter, she became a geisha to look for the man who killed her father in a stupid quarrel over a fencing duel. Kichiza, meanwhile, seeks revenge against the local lord, Honda Etsu (Masao Mishima), who killed his father in a fit of temper when he ordered him to commit seppuku for causing his son-in-law to fall off his horse but he refused. 

Loyal retainer Kinpei (Ryutaro Otomo) had begged for his forgiveness and insisted that he could get Etsu to reform but three years have passed and not only has he bribed his way to head office but his behaviour has declined still further. We see him cruelly cut down a maid seemingly for no reason, simply ordering his men to get rid of the body. Etsu has a reputation for random violence while drunk, but as he is the lord, there are no real consequences for him. His retainers cover up his crimes, and Kinpei’s sole attempt to talk some sense into him goes nowhere, meanwhile his chief adviser Shichinosuke (Sentaro Fushimi) is basically running the show telling others the lord is not in his right mind and cannot make decisions so he must make them for him.

They are all, including Etsu himself, victims of the feudal order in which the systems of power are necessarily corrupt. In his yakuza persona, Kichiza has struck up a friendship with another geisha, Kozuru (Naoko Kubo), who was actually a lady in waiting working as a maid at his estate. She has long been in love with him, but the class difference would have made any union impossible. Ironically, she remarks to Kozome that even in their present state they are still a Hatamoto and a lady in waiting so she dare not express her love for him. Only once his revenge is concluded and he’s fully abandoned his samurai status can Kichiza truly be free to embrace a relationship with Kozuru while conversely Kozome regains her life as a samurai’s daughter by avenging the death of her father.

Kozome asks for Kichiza’s help to track down the target of her revenge, but he also respects her wishes and understands that it’s something she must do herself as does eccentric sword sharpener Shinzaburo (Hashizo Okawa ) who actively stands back so she, another wronged woman, can stick the knife in. Hibari Misora’s role in the film is smaller than one might expect as her revenge subplot is secondary to Kichiza’s and she has relatively little screen time with only a brief musical sequence during a naginata dance though she does participate in the high octane final showdown in which all grievances are exorcised and a kind of order returned to the samurai realm even if it must be destroyed to so as Kinpei resolves to protect both the lives and livelihoods of their many retainers and the integrity of Kichiza, going so far as to congratulate Kozome on the successful completion of her revenge. 

Yet what made the whole thing possible was Kichiza’s own band of outlaw drifters whom he allowed to live in his home he later says just so that they would have a place to come and be together so that they might more easily reintegrate into mainstream society. He might have lost his domain and samurai status but has discovered something better in this accidental community. They may be in a sense almost like retainers to him, but if so they stay by choice rather than obligation and help out of a genuine sense of loyalty and affection. In essence, in taking his revenge, he frees himself from the oppressive nature of the samurai code and is able to live like an ordinary man lamenting that if only he and Kinpei had both been ronin they could have enjoyed their time together for longer. Lighthearted and cheerful despite its dark themes, the film is nevertheless a condemnation of the hypocrisies and abuses of a feudal society in which freedom is to be found only among those who live outside it.