Japan Society New York will celebrate the work of late director Shinji Somai who remains criminally neglected outside of his home nation with the first North American retrospective running April 28 to May 13. Featuring seven of the director’s features, the series showcases both the teen idol movies with which he may be most closely associated internationally, and gritty adult dramas such as The Catch and Love Hotel.
Shinji Somai’s 1983 opus of fishermen at home on the waves and at sea on land is a complex examination of masculinity but also of fatherhood in a rapidly declining world filled with arcane ritual and ancient thought. Review.
Melancholy drama following the turbulent romantic relationship between a failed businessman pursued by yakuza and the former sex worker with whom he shared a traumatic night some years previously. Review.
Friday, May 5 at 8:30 PM / Saturday, May 13 at 2:00 PM
Fable-like tale of a mountain man who comes to the city in search of the girlfriend who never came home after leaving to study accounting. Sucked into a bizarre underworld of gladiatorial floorshows and voiceless opera singers, he quickly finds himself lost in the soulless metropolis of Bubble-era Tokyo.
Saturday, April 29 at 2:00 PM / Saturday, May 13 at 5:00 PM
Classic teen movie in which a trio of school friends set off to rescue their school bully after he’s kidnapped by yakuza. Starring a young Masatoshi Nagase in his film debut. Review.
Iconic teen drama starring Hiroko Yakushimaru as a high school girl who unexpectedly inherits a yakuza clan when her father dies suddenly and finds herself trying to contend with adolescent angst and underworld intrigue. Review.
Somai’s Bubble-era exploration of idol exploitation has an almost prescient quality in its otherwise fantasy-driven tale of an aspiring model killed after diving out of a car to escape a lascivious exec but then given a second chance to live a “normal” life. Review.
Seminal teen drama in which a collection of high school students experience a literal storm of adolescence while trapped in their school thanks to a severe typhoon.
Rites of Passage: The Films of Shinji Somai runs at Japan Society New York April 28 to May 13. Tickets priced at $15 / $12 students & seniors, and $10 Japan Society Members (Typhoon Club+Opening Night Party: $18/$15/$14) are on sale now via the official website while you can also keep up with all the year-round events by following Japan Society Film on Facebook, Instagram, and Twitter.
With Plan 75 about to open in US cinemas, we sat down with director Chie Hayakawa to discuss her thoughts on the implications of her dystopian festival hit.
So I thought maybe we could start with talking a little about your path into filmmaking?
Chie Hayakawa: I studied photography in New York in art college. And then I was thinking about studying filmmaking in Japan or working as an assistant director on set after graduating college in New York but then I found out that I was pregnant so I had to change my life plan although I really wanted to get into the film industry. Becoming a film director was my lifelong dream since I was 13 years old, but I couldn’t really spend time on it in my 20s and early 30s. After giving birth to two kids and raising them in New York I came back to Japan and started working at a broadcasting company but I still wanted to make a film so I went to film school at night for a year while still doing my full-time job. My thesis film got into Cinéfondation in Cannes in 2014. That opened up doors for me to get into the film industry. Then I got to work on one of the segments of Ten Years Japan in 2018. I quit my job and became a full-time director.
So you got the job on Ten Years Japan through the short film that got into Cannes?
Yes. It was a student film called Niagra that got into the student section in Cannes. Until then I didn’t know anyone in the film industry but after going to Cannes I started meeting producers and taking part in filmmakers workshops so gradually I got to know people and I met this producer who was working for Ten Years Japan. She asked me if I wanted to apply for a closed competition for young directors to come up with a story for the anthology. At the time I already had the concept of Plan 75 as a feature film, but I thought it fit the concept of Ten Years Japan because it’s a story about the future of Japan after 10 years so I decided to make a shorter version first as a kind of pilot.
One I thing I noticed is that the short and feature end in quite similar ways with the civil servant who’s been working for Plan 75 but is conflicted stands with his family looking out at the plot where his house will be while all this bright sunshine is coming towards him, and at the end of Plan 75 Michi also has bright sunshine coming towards her, but the kinds of “hope” they’re finding are very different. Was that something you reflected on when you were making the film?
Yes, in the short version it’s not really a “hopeful” ending because he knows his guilt. His family looks happy from the outside but both of them know what they’ve done to the mother so have to live with the guilt for the rest of their lives. It’s kind of a dark ending because they’re the only ones who know what they’ve done. The emptiness of the place is a kind of symbol or a trace of the people who left there, maybe they went to Plan75 to make space for the younger people to take over. So the ending of the short version is very dark.
But in the feature film with Michi looking at the sunrise it’s not exactly a “happy” ending because Plan75 will keep existing. One small hope is the fact that Michi chose to live by herself, she made the choice. That’s the kind of hope that I wanted to convey. She found the beauty of life by watching the sunrise and decided to continue to live. It’s not because she was scared of being dead, but she’s upset about the inhuman way people have to die in that facility because she witnessed the old man dying alone without dignity. She got really upset watching it and realised this isn’t the right thing for people to do. So that kind of anger made her change her mind. She’s strong willed and decides what she wants based on what she wants to do . That’s a big change for her because before she only thought about others, she didn’t want to be a burden to anyone. She changes her attitude at the end so the ending is more hopeful than in the shorter version.
When you were in the process of expanding the short into a feature, what led you to switch the main focus from a young man to an elderly woman?
Actually I had five main characters when I first thought about the film. But when I had to make the short version first I thought five was too much, so I focussed on one person, the salesman. Then when I expanded to feature I narrowed down to three main characters. Michi was already in my mind when I first made the short version.
Obviously Chieko Baisho is a fantastically famous actress in Japan and very much loved, did you always have her in mind for the role? What was it like working with her, how did she come to be involved with the project?
The protagonist’s experience is so harsh and the story is very dark but I didn’t want her to look miserable. I wanted her to seem strong in her spirit even though she is in a difficult situation so the audience would feel more compassion for her. They will naturally feel that they don’t want her to die so I wanted someone who could make this role believable as an old lady who still has a job at the age of 78. A lot of the actresses in that age group in Japan look beautiful, like movie stars, but Chieko Baisho is an actress who can play ordinary people. She can play believable characters so I immediately thought of her as someone who could play this role but she’s a legendary actress in Japan and I’m a first time director. It’s not all that likely that such a well-known actress will star in an indie film for a new director, but she read the script and said she wanted to meet the director before deciding whether to accept the role or not. We had a meeting and I explained to her the concept and why I wanted to make this film along with who Michi is. We had a really nice conversation. She said it’s also good for me as a director to know about her current physical condition and that’s why she wanted us to meet. She’s very professional and she knows what’s best for the film. I was really amazed by how she is still so professionally generous. Then a few days later she accepted the role so that’s how she became involved with the project.
I thought that was something that was very interesting, that you deliberately chose someone who absolutely wasn’t the kind of person that Plan 75 was targeting. When Michi’s let go from the hotel she loses not only a means of supporting herself but her social outlet as well. I wondered if you could talk a little about the contradictory ways in which older people viewed, on the one hand regarded as a “drain on resources” but on the other people don’t like to see them employed at such a late stage of their lives?
Yes it’s contradictory. The attitude is changing compared to when I was a child. Back then we showed more respect towards the elderly and people thought living long was a good thing. But these days many people including the elderly themselves feel that being old could be a burden to society so it’s more difficult emotionally for the elderly to live. They’re really afraid of becoming a burden to others or to their family. In the old days it was natural that everyone take care of the elderly so they still have a degree of mixed feelings. That’s why some people say that the elderly shouldn’t work at that age but in this film I wanted to put that element in a sarcastic way. People may say that they feel compassion to the elderly, they feel sorry them that they have to work, but there’s some people that cannot stop working because they don’t have enough pension or any family so need to support themselves. So what I wanted to show is that many people lack the imagination to understand other people’s situation.
When you think of it that way, something like Plan 75 seems like an inevitable conclusion in a society in which social worth is only defined by “productivity” where people who aren’t seen as “contributing” are excluded from the system entirely, either just abandoned or actively eliminated. We see Hiromu trying out devices to keep homeless people from sleeping on park benches and there’s a poster later on that says you don’t even need a fixed address to apply for Plan 75. Do you think we’re already moving more quickly towards the sort of world where something like Plan75becomes a possibility than most people would like to think?
I think so. The things Hiromu was trying out on the public bench have been in use in Japan for more than 20 years. When I came back from the States, I was so surprised when I noticed them. It was so obvious that they wanted to get rid of the homeless people. What scared me is the people actually making things like that don’t feel guilty about what they’re doing. They’re doing it because it’s their job. That kind of insensitivity and lack of imagination are likely to create a system like Plan 75. That kind of atmosphere already exists in Japanese society.
The film opened with a reference to a real life event in which a young man went on a mass killing spree against disabled people and said that it was for the “social good” because he thought they were a “drain on society”, but obviously when that happened in reality it was rightly condemned straight away. I just wondered why in the film the government decides to listen to the killer and introduce legislation that’s in line with what he was asking for?
It’s not so much that the government listens to what he says, they use the incident to make people understand and accept this kind of system. The government would say that this kind of incident or violent act should be prevented by having a system like this. What the killer does and Plan 75 look very different, in general, but when you look carefully what they said under this concept it’s exactly the same. But people tend to forget, or cannot see the truth or realise what’s going on. So the government uses that situation and says we should prevent such violence towards the elderly by creating this kind of system. It could solve the situation. That’s what they will say.
It’s quite interesting too that the the man who commits the crime channels all of his resentment towards “the elderly” without challenging the government or the social system. Could you talk a little about why you think that might be?
Yes it actually happened in real life. There’s a growing hatred towards the elderly from the other generations because they think they are paying more money for tax to support the great amount of elderly and also the media and television fuel the anxiety of people about being old. So somehow the hatred, anger, and anxiety towards the social system is directed towards the elderly not to the government. That’s a very strange phenomena, I feel. Young people’s anger tends to go directly to the elderly in real life.
Plan 75 must be very expensive to run. The government has all these resources geared towards helping people to die but they aren’t really prepared to use them to help people live. There’s a particularly irony there in the case of Hiromu’s uncle who couldn’t really have a family life of his own because he was living this very nomadic lifestyle travelling all over Japan working on various construction projects in the post-war era, but he feels abandoned by the society that he helped rebuild and enrols in Plan 75 on his 75th birthday. Hiromu’s boss thinks that’s a very “noble” thing for him to have done, but I was wondering how you see it?
Especially the older generation have the strong mind for contribution to the country and people died for the nation during the war. Devoting their lives to the emperor and the country was a virtue. Hiromu’s uncle was a close generation to these people so he naturally feels that he wants to contribute to society, that’s why he’s been giving blood donations and he’s very proud of having helped to rebuild the country by working in construction. He has a lot of pride in his contribution and in being beneficial to the country. For him using Plan 75 is another form of contribution. So that’s why I wanted to have that particular character.
Plan 75 has quite an insidious quality in that it’s framed as a voluntary programme but there’s a huge amount of social pressure to participate. The money they give the applicants is not a large enough amount to act as an enticement, but taking it makes it much harder psychologically to change your mind, while the call centre system leverages a sense of loneliness among the older generation but the call centre staff are told not to get too close in case the elderly person begins to feel more connected to life and decides to drop out. How do the elderly people themselves react, do a lot of them feel the same as Hiromu’s uncle that its good and noble to sacrifice themselves for the younger generation or are there some like the old man who angrily shuts the the television showing the Plan 75 ad down who might feel privately resentful?
There are several kinds of people. Maybe some will feel very upset about Plan 75 and being treated like a burden on society although they are the generation who built the Japanese economy, and also the people who recognise how inhuman the system is. And on the other hand there is a certain group of people who are willing to sacrifice themselves for the younger generation and the society. They want to feel useful and be nice people for them. And then there’s another group of people who think about themselves. When they think about being old, they are very scared about being in trouble if they get sick, or they get dementia or become a burden to their family or don’t have enough money to live, if they live alone in an apartment who is going to find them if they die? They have a lot of anxiety so they like the idea of Plan 75 to have that option for their own security. it doesn’t mean that they want to get rid of elderly people, they just want to have that option for themselves. So there are many layers of people who feel differently about this system, that’s why it’s so complicated.
In some ways Hiromu’s just doing his job and it doesn’t occur to him what the implications are, and the same for the call centre assistant Yoko. They don’t give it a lot more thought than that until they interact with someone more personally. Do you think something like Plan 75 is only really a possibility because society has already become very disconnected?
Yes, it’s one of the reasons that a system like Plan 75 is easily accepted and a lot of people demand to have it. One of the problems here is the lack of compassion for others. If Hiromu or Yoko could imagine what would happen to these old people after they step out from the office they wouldn’t be able to keep doing their jobs. And also the people, not only the people working in the system, but also the people who accept it including me and the audience, they are just too ignorant or too insensitive or too apathetic to what’s happening in the society and what the government is trying do. We have to be more keen to what’s going on in society.
There’s quite a strong contrast there as well with the Filipina careworker who even after she’s come to Japan has a very warm community around her who are very willing to help, but at the same time because she’s living overseas she isn’t able to care for her own family and with so many healthcare workers travelling abroad where the wages are higher it means there are fewer resources available in the Philippines. I was wondering if you could talk a little about the contrast between the two cultures?
Yes, the reason I wanted to have Maria’s character as a Filipina is because I think Filipino people have a strong bond between the community and family. I heard that they don’t really have old people’s homes in the Philippines because it’s common that the family take care of the elderly. If someone needs help, everyone like family and friends tries to help them without any hesitation. But in Japan we tend to hesitate to ask for help because we don’t want to be a burden to others. There’s a very strong pressure or psychological characteristic of Japanese people and we’re losing a community bond. More and more people are becoming apathetic to others so I wanted to make that contrast between Japanese people and Filipino people. Filipino people in Japan even though they’re living in a foreign country they have a strong bond and make a community, they go to church and they try to help each other even though they’re not family. So that’s why I wanted to have Maria’s character, and also Maria is the only person in this film who acts based on what she believes. Other Japanese characters act based on the rules and what others will think. They try to read the atmosphere and cannot act based on their will. So that’s a big contrast between Filipino and Japanese culture in this film.
The film has been very successful on the festival circuit and has been shown in many different countries, I wondered if you noticed a different reaction in Japan and elsewhere and particularly in the Philippines?
I found a difference in the Philippines compared to other countries. The Philippines is the only place where people said Plan 75 will not happen in our country. That’s what they said, it would never happen. But other countries they said could happen, so I was surprised and happy to hear the Philippine people say that. That was very interesting.
You touched on this a little bit before that you wanted the feature film to have a more hopeful ending, even though obviously Plan 75 still exists and the society itself hasn’t changed. Will society walk back from Plan 75 or will it continue on the same path to Plan65, Plan55 and so on?
Maybe instead of going down in age to 65 or 60, the government will try to open the gate wider to include disabled people or sick people, the poor in that kind of way. That’s why I made the 75 in the title logo blurred, I wonder if you noticed it? In the opening scene the number in the Plan 75 logo is blurred, it means that it could expand to include other people the government or society feels are “useless”, or “unproductive”.
It looks like we’re getting to the end of our time so I’ll just ask one final question. Are you working on something else right now, what are you up to next?
Yes I’m working on my next film. Because Plan 75 is kind of an issue-driven film I wanted to make something really different next. So I’m working on the story of a teenage girl. It’s a kind of coming of age story based on my personal childhood experiences about a girl who makes a promise to her dying father.
Plan 75 opens in New York on April 21 with director Chie Hayakawa in attendance for a series of post-screening Q&As at IFC Center April 21 – 23. The film will also open in LA on May 5 with a wider US release to follow courtesy of KimStim.
“Who are you? Why are you here?” both questions that might occur to anyone at any point in their lives, but don’t seem to bother the hero of Kazuyoshi Kumakiri’s off the wall B-movie thriller #Manhole (#マンホール) until he’s been trapped underground long enough to realise that his literal fall from grace might not be an accident after all. An existential journey deep into the soul of a seemingly blessed salaryman, Kumakiri’s defiantly absurdist drama is part social satire revolving around fluctuating identity in the social media age and meditation on the inevitability of karmic retribution.
Shunsuke (Yuto Nakajima) does indeed seem to have it all. A successful estate agent, he’s about to get married and even has a baby on the way, only on his way home from a “surprise” party hosted by his work colleagues the night before his wedding he somehow manages to fall down an open manhole in the middle of Shibuya and becomes trapped there. His attempts to simply climb out are frustrated by a nasty gash on his thigh and a broken ladder while no one seems to be able to hear his cries for help. Though his phone still works, the only person who picks up when he calls is a former girlfriend, Mai (Nao), whom he threw over to court the boss’ daughter five years previously which makes it somewhat awkward to ask for help.
As we can gradually gather, Shunsuke is not really a great guy and is in part in a hole of his own making. Even so, you can’t really confine someone to a hole just for being one. To begin with he busies himself with trying to solve various hole-related problems such as a leaking gas pipe with the salaryman tools at his disposal like the tiny of roll of sellotape in his pencil case or the cigarette lighter he was gifted by suspiciously aloof colleague Kase (Kento Nagayama) as a wedding present though there’s not much he can do about the weird foam or various animal corpses that surround him.
It’s at this point he decides to enlist the help of the internet in setting up a profile on Twitter-like social media app Pecker where he identifies himself as “Manhole Girl” under the rationale that people are more likely to rush to the rescue of a pretty young woman than a 30-year-old salaryman who had too much to drink and fell in a hole. His readiness to do this hints at his internal duplicity and a confident sense of entitlement. It doesn’t seem to occur to him that whoever comes to his rescue might decide not to bother on discovering the truth. In any case, he soon becomes Pecker’s main character with engaged netizens keen to help him figure out where he is and, once it becomes clear it might not be an accident, who put him there. But claiming to be his own sister he’s also confronted with sordid speculation about his personal life and character that reveal there might be quite a few people who privately hoped he’d someday disappear down a hole in the ground and never come back up again.
Even before his ordeal, Kumakiri often frames Shunsuke looking at his own reflection hinting at a lack of self-recognition in the images that he sees of himself. Of course, he doesn’t know who any of the helpful netizens are either because most of them don’t use their “real” names or profile pictures that are actually of “themselves” just as he pulled a picture of a cute girl off the internet to create the Manhole Girl persona. He can’t even be sure of the identity of the people he speaks to on the phone, and wonders if Mai really did come to look for him when she says she’s been all over Shibuya and couldn’t find any open manholes.
For a while it really does seem like he’s in “a completely different place”, some alternate dimension of existential purgatory. The sense of eeriness is only deepened by the strong blue-green lighting and ominous clouds above the hole that obscure the image of the full moon which, in the urban absence of stars and the disruption of his GPS seemingly caused by an unknown force, are all he has to go on in trying to figure out where exactly he is. Few will be prepared for the answer, though as some may expect Shunsuke knew all along for as much as it’s a “real” place it’s also a part of himself he sought to deny. Kumakiri excels in capturing the claustrophobic otherworldliness of Shunsuke’s near literal hell hole while mining a deep seam of cynical dark humour and anarchic absurdity culminating in an incredibly ironic and deliciously wry use of cheerful 1960s hit Sukiyaki.
Director Yasushi Sasaki is most likely best remembered for his post-war work at Toei where he specialised in jidaigeki and musicals, frequently working with tentpole star Hibari Misora on her period drama vehicles. He began his career, however, at Shochiku in 1929 as an assistant to Hiroshi Shimizu, later working with Yasujiro Ozu before being promoted as a director in his own right and gaining a reputation as a skilled producer of musical dramas with the release of Lovers’ Duet in 1939 which starred a young Mieko Takamine as an aspiring singer.
Released in the same year, New Woman Question and Answer (新女性問答, Shin Josei Mondo) is by contrast a high-minded melodrama and rather surprising for the world of 1939, playing much more like the new constitution films appearing after the after such as Victory of Women which would unfortunately prove the last appearance from star Michiko Kuwano who sadly passed away on set during filming. At heart a female friendship drama, the film takes aim at the snobbery and lack of compassion among a group of upper-middleclass women while offering a slightly contradictory yet progressive view of the place of women in a changing society.
As the film opens, seven former high school friends are having a small party with one member, Michiko (Kuniko Miyake), set to resign from their club intending to give up her university studies in order care for her ailing father and prepare to get married. Michiko’s marriage scandalises her friends in part because it’s a love match, but Toki (Michiko Kuwano) is horrified to realise on seeing her fiancé’s photo that the man Michiko intends to marry is her sister’s boyfriend, Murakawa. Murakawa indeed breaks up with Oyo (Hiroko Kawasaki), a geisha, brushing off their relationship as casual and meaningless while insisting that he has to think of his future which is why he’s marrying the wealthy Michiko. Toki first talks to her sister who is stoical and self sacrificing before having it out with an unrepentant Murakawa and then directly with Michiko who refuses to break the engagement viewing it only as a trivial matter of his having broken up with another woman to be with her.
What she says, however, is less forgivable bluntly stating that she doesn’t think a geisha’s life should be equal to her own. It apparently rings no alarm bells for her that Murakawa frequents the red light district, or that if he can treat another woman so callously he might not be good husband material, she simply sees a geisha as not worth worrying about. Michiko had kept her sister’s occupation a secret from her friends fearing just such judgement, telling them that Oyo works in a beauty parlour, and is therefore unable to explain why she and Michiko have fallen out or why she chooses not to attend the wedding. While they think Oyo is a working woman they universally admire her, yet on accidentally discovering the truth they soon change their tune, one young woman having an intense prejudice against geishas for having “deceived” her father for some reason never thinking perhaps that’s something she should have taken up with him. While some are only disappointed that Michiko kept the truth from them, the group eventually disowns her after making a series of offensively judgemental remarks only to be taken to task by Oyo’s less patient friend who returns that “no geisha could be so heartless” as to break a friendship over such trivial prudery.
Even so the film sees the need to offer additional justifications for Oyo’s decision to become a geisha in order to put her sister through college, insisting that her goal of becoming a lawyer is also necessary in order to satisfy the dying wish of her father who died in prison after being deceived in business. Nevertheless the women are eventually forced to face their unfair prejudices, if only through the education they receive on entering the work force and finally understanding how the “real world” works, restoring their sense of female solidarity and extending it also to the ranks of geisha as they join in with the girls’ club song while celebrating Toki’s promotion to the bar.
This does seem to be an age in which it becomes possible for a woman to become independent, earning a university degree and entering a profession which will allow her to support herself though this more progressive message is somewhat walked back during the closing moments in which Toki herself ponders getting married, her companions reminding her that “the duty of a housewife matters most of all” even while affirming that there is no problem with her continuing to work as a married woman. Meanwhile, as Michiko’s friendly neighbour later laments a woman is sunk with an unreliable husband as Murakawa turns out to be having married her for her money only to discover there was none and leave her only with note explaining he intends to go travelling for a couple of years. She first states that she intends to work and support herself waiting for her husband’s return only to discover she is pregnant and thereafter reliant on the goodwill of her former servants. She discovers that the only viable line of work open to her is as a bar hostess, ironically adjacent to the geisha whose lives she had previously believed to have been so unequal to her own.
Nevertheless, the rather neat conclusion sees her reunited with Murakawa who had not only abandoned her but returned and asked for money, attempting to kidnap their baby when she objected to his attempt to install himself in her new life and thereafter landing her with a murder charge against which she is defended by the newly qualified Toki despite what appears to be a fairly massive conflict of interest. The triumph is both a victory of female friendship overcoming even the most unbridgeable of rifts and an awkward concession to the conservative status quo which demands a restoration of the traditional marriage insisting that Murakawa has now reformed in accepting his responsibilities while also reinforcing the class barriers against which the film had otherwise argued in the eventual union of the two servants one of whom had long been in love with Michiko. In any case despite its contradictions, New Woman Question and Answer provides a surprisingly progressive view of women’s rights and opportunities in the contemporary society affording them not only agency but the possibility at least of independence and personal romantic fulfilment of their own choosing.
A noble-hearted samurai on the run falls for a fireman’s sister in Kiyoshi Saeki’s hugely enjoyable jidaigeki musical adventure Cantankerous Edo (大江戸喧嘩纏, Oedo Kenka Matoi). Another vehicle for Hibari Misora and samurai movie star Hashizo Okawa, Saeki’s wholesome drama finds its heroes not only standing up to the oppressions of a rigid class system but also taking on a bunch of entitled sumo wrestlers intent on throwing their weight around having apparently lost sight of the tenets of traditional sumo wrestling such as fighting for justice and having a kind heart.
To begin at the beginning, however, young samurai Shinzaburo (Hashizo Okawa) is on the run believing that he has accidentally killed another man who attacked him in order to clear the path towards his fiancée, Otae (Hiroko Sakuramachi), whom he wasn’t going to marry anyway because he realised she was in love with someone else and wanted to help marry him instead. Having escaped to Edo, he takes refuge inside a parade of firemen lead by Tatsugoro (Ryutaro Otomo) and his feisty sister Oyuki (Hibari Misora) who decide to take him in after hearing his story. Adopting the simpler, common name of “Shinza” he begins life as a fireman and gradually falls for Oyuki but remains a wanted man constantly dodging the attentions of his uncle, the local inquisitor, and the magistrates.
More a vehicle for Okawa than Misora who plays a relatively subdued role save for boldly stealing the standard and climbing a roof herself when the others are delayed, Cantankerous Edo takes aim not particularly at a corrupt social order but of the oppressive nature of class divisions as Shinza discovers a sense of freedom and possibility he was previously denied as a samurai while living as a common man. It’s this desire for personal autonomy and the freedom to follow one’s heart that led to his exile from his clan, unwilling to marry a woman he knew not only did not love him but in fact loved someone else and would have been forever miserable if forced to marry him out of duty alone. “The life of a samurai who has to be somebody or not to suit another’s convenience is utterly stupid” he bluntly tells his uncle and Otae’s father, “how you cling onto family status, heritage, and honour. All that fuss, I hate it.” he adds before turning to Otae and encouraging her too to stand up to her father and insist on marrying the man she loves rather than be traded to another.
Meanwhile, the two women exchange some contradictory messages about the nature of class and womanhood, the samurai lady Otae confessing that she isn’t sure she’s strong enough to fight for love in the face of tradition and filial duty in contrast to Oyuki’s spirited defence of Shinza the fireman insisting that firemen don’t think about such trivial things as name or family status before throwing themselves into harm’s way for the public good. “All women are weak” Otae sighs, Oyuki replying that they need to be strong for the men they love, “that’s what it means to be a woman”. Love may be in this sense a force of liberation, destabilising the social order but also a means of improving it, yet it still reduces women to a supporting role ironically as perhaps the film does to Misora who in contrast to some of her feistier performances takes something of a back seat.
Romance aside, the main drama revolves around a conflict between the local sumo wrestlers who have turned into thuggish louts under their boorish leader Yotsuguruma (Nakajiro Tomita), taking against the fireman and forever spoiling for a fight. The samurai proving unexpectedly understanding, the sumo wrestlers become the main source of oppression in usurping a class status they don’t really have. The noble Tatusgoro tries to stave off the fight insisting that they aren’t brawling yakuza but responsible firemen here to serve the public good and should save their energy for fighting fires rather than their obnoxious neighbours. Nevertheless the fight cannot be held off forever. Tatsugoro is forced to redefine the nature of “fire” after hearing a warning bell informing him one of his men is in grave danger unable to manage their anger anymore.
Saeki’s jidaigeki musical has surprisingly good production values for a Toei programmer, making space for a few songs along the way celebrating the valour of the firemen while Oyuki meditates on her potentially impossible romance and the perils of love across the class divide. While the conclusion may end up ironically reinforcing the hierarchical society, it does however make the case for the right to romantic freedom along with the necessity of human compassion in the face of inconsiderate arrogance and intimidation.
Note: This film is sometimes titled “Fight Festival in Edo” but according to Eirin’s database, the official English-language title is “Cantankerous Edo”. Rather confusingly, a very similar film with a very similar title (大江戸喧嘩まつり) was produced in colour at Toei in 1961 and is known as “Fight Festival in Edo” in English. Meanwhile, Hibari Misora also starred in another colour film with a very similar storyline in 1958 (唄祭りかんざし纏) which is known as “Girl with the Fire Banner” in English but listed as “Festival of Song” on Eirin’s database.
Junya Sato’s The Last Kamikaze (最後の特攻隊, Saigo no Tokkotai) opens with a title card explaining that it has nothing to do with the life of Matome Ugaki, which seems disingenuous at best given that the narrative has tremendous similarities with his life. In any case, 25 years after the war in a very different Japan which is perhaps becoming more willing to reexamine its wartime history, Sato’s film nevertheless walks an ambivalent line clearly rejecting the idea of the kamikaze special attack squadrons as absurd and inhuman yet simultaneously glorifying the deaths of the men who willingly took part in them.
For sympathetic Captain Munakata (Koji Tsuruta) the issue is one of consent and willingness more than it is of essential immorality. Placed in charge of the very first suicide attack, he elects to go himself rather than ask someone else but is first overruled before deciding to go anyway after appealing for volunteers and coming up one short. His general, Yashiro (Bontaro Miake), who had voiced his opposition to the policy in the opening sequence reminding his own commander than even when men were given impossible missions in previous wars they were always ordered to return home if possible, takes the unprecedented step of climbing into an aircraft himself in an act of protest insisting that this be the last and final time that men were ordered to their deaths. The mission, however, does not succeed. All of the pilots bar Yashiro are shot down before reaching their targets while Munakata, injured and having lost sight of the general, aborts his mission and returns to base only to face censure from his superior officers.
Sent back to Japan, he wrestles with himself over whether his decision was one of cowardice and he turned back because he was afraid to die rather than, as he justifies, because he did not want to die in vain and did what he thought was right. Far from cowardice, it may have taken more courage for him to ignore his orders and choose to live yet there must also be a part of him that believes dying to be heroic if not to do so is to be a coward. As the situation continues to decline and suicide attacks become the only real strategy, Munakata is recalled for an ironic mission of heading the escort squad designed to protect the pilots from enemy attack so they can reach their targets. He first turns this down too not wanting to be an angel of death but is finally convinced to accept on the grounds that the men will die anyway and at least this way their deaths will have meaning.
Munakata was greeted on his return to Japan by the sight of his father (Chishu Ryu) being carted off by the military police for expressing anti-war views, stopping only to tell him that people should be true to their own beliefs. Nevertheless, even if Munataka objects to the tokkotai strategy he does not oppose it only emphasise that the men should should be willing and resolved rather than forced or bullied. There is indeed a shade of toxic masculinity in the constant cries of cowardice along with a shaming culture that insists a man who refuses to give his life for his country is not a real man. Munakata comes to the rescue of a young recruit, Yoshikawa (Atsushi Watanabe), who twice returns from a tokkotai mission claiming engine trouble but does not try to save him only to petition his superiors that he be given ground duty until such time as he gets used to the idea of dying. Because of Munakata’s kindness in saving him from a suicide attempt after being rejected by the mother he worried for if he were to die, Yoshikawa is pushed towards a “hero’s death” that does at least help to change the mind of Yashiro’s zealot son (Ken Takakura) who knew nothing of the reasons behind his father’s suicide and believed wholeheartedly in the necessity of the special attack squadrons.
The younger Yashiro’s rationale had been that to show compassion to a man like Yoshikawa was to shame the memories of the men who had already died, yet even in realising the futility of the gesture he still resolves to proceed towards his own death as do others like him such as a student who had been against the war and ironically consents to the suicide mission in order to end it more quickly. “There’s nowhere to run to” Yoshikawa’s mother (Shizuko Kasagi) had said on his attempted desertion, echoing the words of another that there was no escape from this war, while poignantly crying over her son’s ashes that she wishes she had raised him to be a coward. The human cost is brought fully home as the families storm the airfield fence in an attempt to wave goodbye to their loved ones as they prepare for their glorious deaths, another pilot reflecting on the fact that each of these men is someone’s precious son rendered little more than cannon fodder in an unwinnable war. Even with the escort squads, only 30% of the special attacks succeed. Most of the pilots are so young and inexperienced that even assuming they survive the anti-aircraft fire they are incapable of hitting their targets.
To add insult to injury, Munakata returns from his final mission to an empty airfield where a drunken engineer (Tomisaburo Wakayama) explains to him that the war is over and the generals knew it 10 days earlier but still sent these men to their deaths anyway. Overcome with remorse, Munakata posits his own suicide mission but is instructed to live on behalf of all those who died only to take off and fly into a technicolor sunset as Sato switches from the period appropriate black and white to vibrant colour elegising Munakata’s death while lending it an otherwise uncomfortable heroism. Casting ninkyo eiga icons Koji Tsuruta and Ken Takakura as the infinitely noble yet conflicted pilots and employing jitsuroku-esque narratorial voice to offer historical context the majority of the audience probably does not strictly need, Sato rams home the righteousness of these men while casting them as victims of their times trying their best to be true to what they believe but finding little prospect of escape from the absurdity of war.
Where is the line between justice and vengeance? The grieving father at the centre of Anshul Chauhan’s December (赦し, Yurushi) is determined that the teenage girl who stabbed his daughter to death should never leave prison, but what he wants is a kind of equivalent exchange in that the person who stole his future along with his child’s should have no right to one herself. A more mainstream effort than either of his previous films Bad Poetry Tokyo and Kontora each of which dealt with similarly thorny themes, Chauhan’s unusually tense courtroom drama is the latest to put the legal system on trial while asking difficult questions about grief, guilt, and what exactly it is we mean when we talk about “justice”.
Seven years previously, 17-year-old Kana (Ryo Matsuura) stabbed her classmate Emi (Kanon Narumi) multiple times in a frenzied attack that resulted in her death. She was sentenced to 20 years in prison and has never attempted to deny her crime. It isn’t she who has asked for her sentence to be reviewed but an independent lawyer, Sato (Toru Kizu), who claims he’s doing it for “justice” though as Kana points out might have half an eye on compensation money she’d be able to claim for wrongful imprisonment if the case were successful. Sato seems to think it will be on the grounds that Kana was unfairly tried as an adult, mitigating circumstances were never brought to the defence’s attention, and the judge’s sentencing was swayed by personal feeling placing it outside of conventional guidelines that should be applied in cases like these.
For Emi’s parents, Katsu (Shogen) and Sumiko (Megumi), the appeal is a slap in the face. The couple have separated and while Sumiko has attempted to move on with her life, marrying a man she met in a support group for bereaved parents, Katsu has become a bitter alcoholic living a purgatorial existence of almost total inertia. Outraged, he is determined to make sure that Kana never leaves prison and is only sorry that she could not receive the death sentence because of her age, while Sumiko would rather not be involved at all, uncertain that she would be able to endure the emotionally draining process of another court case. They settle on presenting a united front, but discover that to do so is also to put themselves on trial while being confronted by a past neither has ever really faced.
The strain on Sumiko is evident as she walks along along a bridge at night and peers over the edge as if about to jump. She later learns that Kana had a mother too who did in fact take her own life after selling everything she owned to pay the compensation money that is used against them in court to imply that they’ve already been served “justice” in the form of monetary recompense from the defendant’s family which ought to declare the matter closed. Unlike Katsu, Sumiko had said her goal wasn’t vengeance but only to make sure that no other mother suffers as she has done, yet another mother already has for she lost a daughter too. Kana meanwhile has no one left to turn to even if she were released, she will have to make a new life for herself alone. Kana is herself victimised by an unforgiving society, the subtext suggesting that she was bullied for being the daughter of a single mother who was unable to fully care for her or provide the kind of material comfort children like Emi receive. The “happy family home” Katsu accuses her of destroying is also a symbol of everything Kana was denied but she did not kill out of jealousy or resentment only, ironically, to escape a kind of imprisonment and free herself of an oppressive bully.
Katsu says he’d kill her himself if he had the chance, but as Sumiko points out then he’d just end up in prison for the rest of his life with only his “righteousness” to comfort him. How could he claim to be any better? As Sato says, emotion has no place in a court of law. That’s why the law the exists and we mediate “justice” through a dispassionate third party to ensure the sentence is fair and not merely “vengeance”. Katsu certainly sees himself as a righteous man. In a repeated motif, Chauhan shows him taking the long way round by walking on the pathways of the grid-like forecourt leading to the courthouse while others hurriedly take the direct route crossing the squares at a diagonal angle. For him the answer is only ever black and white and he is very certain of his truths, but also blinded by his pain and unable to see that his desire for vengeance is more for himself than it is for Emi.
Only by accepting a painful truth can he begin to move past his grief, despite himself moved by Kana’s quiet dignity in which she admits her responsibility and suggests that she will never really be “free” even if she is released. What she offers, in her way, is peace allowing the bereaved parents to bring an end to their ordeal or least enter a new phase in their grief which allows them to move forward in memory rather than remaining trapped within the unresolved past. Perhaps in the end that’s what we mean by “justice”, a just peace with no more recrimination only sorrow and regret with renewed possibility for the future.
Japan has a relatively high recidivism rate with 50% of those released from prison convicted of reoffending within five years. To some this figure simply proves that “criminals“ are, as one woman puts it, “an entirely different race” who have no place in mainstream society and can never be rehabilitated. In many ways it’s a vicious circle, those who’ve spent time in prison are rejected on their release and unable to find steady employment have no other option than to return to criminality in order to support themselves. Atsushi Funahashi’s socially-minded docudrama The Burden of the Past (過去負う者, Kako Ou Mono) explores this contradiction through the stories of a series of former prisoners and the organisation that attempts to help them reintegrate into mainstream society, Change.
“Change” might in some ways be an ironic name, placing a demand on the people they’re trying to help that implies they are necessarily at fault for their involvement with criminality. The well-meaning staff members are committed to helping the former prisoners reform, but are otherwise powerless to address the systemic social circumstances that led them into crime while prioritising the individual and advocating for conventionality as the only path towards a settled life. That said, each of the people the film spotlights are involved in quite specific kinds of crimes which lean towards the individualistic with only the backstories of Taku, who killed a teenage boy in a hit and run but is also revealed to be dealing with unresolved trauma from childhood physical abuse, and Ai who turned to drug use to overcome her problems with interpersonal communication, loosely explored.
It is however Ai who suffers most from the hypocritical attitudes of mainstream society. After being taken on as a cleaner she encounters a man smoking who ironically reveals to her that he used to smoke pot but was never caught which is perhaps the only difference between them but on explaining that she spent time in prison for possession of crystal meth he calls her “a real mess” and a “junkie”, telling her that she has no right to hope for a future and should have stayed in jail. His rant results in Ai going temporarily missing with a fear that she may being using drugs again to overcome her sense of hopelessness. Her circumstances are dictated by her existing sense of alienation in her inability to communicate, something which could have been better addressed either by finding ways for her to communicate more effectively or for encouraging others to accommodate her way of communicating rather than insist she conform to theirs.
Yet it’s clear that the issue is more to do with the stigmatisation of criminality than it is about any fear of potential reoffending as the team from Change discover on talking to a man hoping to recruit a large number of people quickly for pandemic-related cleaning services. The first issue is that he specifically mentions hiring women seeing as it’s a job in cleaning, but also that he says he’ll have to discuss with his boss about hiring people who’ve been involved with sexual or drug-related crimes rather than those which might present a more practical anxiety such as theft, violence, or fraud.
Close to the end of the film, Change stages a play featuring some of the former prisoners which ends in a confrontational Q&A session in which members of the audience direct their anger towards not only the cast but Change itself for helping them rather than focussing on the welfare of victims of crime. Change also receives a fair amount of harassment, as do a couple who live close by and complain that they feel personally uncomfortable knowing that people with criminal pasts are wandering around where they live while also bringing up that it’s bringing down the price of their property. One of the case workers tries to explain that they’re trying to stop the cycle of recidivism, which would result in lower crime all round and less chance of becoming a victim, but the audience members cannot see her point. They simply feel that these people are not quite human by virtue of their transgression and are in some way weak or defective for being unable to control their impulses or emotions. It may be a comforting thought, to believe these people are so different from oneself is to deny that anyone at anytime could become involved with a crime for a variety of different reasons. After all, laws are socially constructed device for defining conventional morality and what’s considered “criminal” today may not be tomorrow or vice vera.
But then how do we deal with those whose crimes are so deeply offensive to a conventionally held morality that they cannot really be forgiven? Misumi is a former teacher convicted of an indecent act with a child and fears that he may end up reoffending. He obviously cannot return to his previous employment, and given the nature of his crime can find no other but also must find a way to live. Many at the Q&A session seem to feel that those who’ve been convicted of crimes should be segregated into an alternate prison society so that they do not corrupt the mainstream, but this is in its own way a social death sentence that effectively says they no longer deserve to live even if unlike the extreme case of Misumi their “crimes” were relatively minor and of the sort many others may have committed and faced no penalty for.
Still, Funahashi doesn’t exactly let Change off the hook suggesting that they are overly idealistic and fundamentally ill-equipped to deal with some of the more serious problems the former prisoners face especially those that would benefit from more comprehensive psychological care. He does though criticise the justice system in which the prison sentence is essentially a fine that’s paid in time and is geared towards punishment rather than rehabilitation leaving the prisoners no different on their release than they were when incarcerated some like Taku still not having fully addressed or accepted their crime and therefore unable to move on with their lives. In any case, the conclusion seems to imply that simple acts of human trust and compassion can go a long way helping to restore a former prisoner’s self-esteem and allowing them to process the realities of their crimes so that they can avoid committing them again even if it is also society which must change.
The unresolved past conspires against present happiness in the supernaturally-tinged second feature from Chihiro Ito, Side By Side (サイド バイ サイド 隣にいる人, Side by Side: Tonari ni Iru Hito). Ito began her career as a screenwriter often working with director Isao Yukisada penning the screenplay for his 2004 junai mega hit Crying Out Love in the Center of the World before making directorial debut just last year with In Her Room, produced by Yukisada and selected for the Tokyo International Film Festival. Like many of the films Ito scripted, Side by Side bears an unusual sensitivity and gentleness of spirit in the way it sees the world which may in its way be filled with pain and longing but also warmth and light even if some may ultimately feel that they can never become a part of it.
Miyama (Kentaro Sakaguchi) is indeed a haunted man in more ways that one, though the most obvious is that he’s continually followed around by a blond man dressed in black (Kodai Asaka) who says nothing but just stares blankly much like Miyama himself. Working as a physiotherapist, Miyama travels the country and often discovers that the physical pain his patients experience is linked to an emotional trauma as manifested in the various ghosts he sees around them which don’t seem to speak to him. Having left the city of Tokyo where he was raised, he wandered around before eventually finding a home with the welcoming nurse Shiori (Mikako Ichikawa) and her young daughter Mimi (Ameri Isomura) in a tranquil rural village in picturesque Nagano. Yet there are ways in which Miyama doesn’t seem to fit inside the familial environment, almost like a ghost himself somehow there and also not.
The ghosts are in their way a visual representation of the unresolved past that endangers the new family Miyama has begun to build with Shiori and Mimi but fears he can never really be a part of. Shiori recalls seeing a light fitting in a film that she wants to hang over their dinner table to bathe it in the warm light of family, but is unable to find it even with Miyama’s help. It’s she that makes the rather unusual decision to invite a another ghost of Miyama’s past into their home in the gothic vision that is Riko (Asuka Saito), a woman Miyama “abandoned” who has since experienced some kind of breakdown and is then “abandoned” once again by another man who may or may not be the father of the child she is carrying. The unconditional love and support of Shiori and her daughter begin to bring Riko back to life, no longer dressing all in black and eating only white-coloured foods as colour and warmth are slowly returned to her.
Even so, there are times it becomes difficult to tell the living from the “dead” when even Miyama seems like a ghost dressed all in white haunting his own life with his eerie stillness and not quite vacant eyes but those which express, as someone later puts it, a deep regret in his past. Like everyone else he struggles to emerge from past trauma in parental abandonment and physical abuse while acknowledging that his father suffered as a child and passed that suffering on to him because he did not know how to be a father. Miyama doesn’t know how to be a father either which is perhaps why he fears the depths of his new relationships and his role as a paternal figure while filled with shame and regret for those he failed in the past.
But then there are others so undeniably alive such as Shiori and her daughter, often dressed in a vibrant yellow and basking in the warm sunshine which streams through the large windows of Shiori’s beautifully designed home. The family take solace in the beauty and comfort of the natural world, protected by its rhythms and the serenity it often offers them. Miyama may feel that he can never recover from his past and has no right to be drawn to this one solitary source of light, as Shiori describes it, like the bugs he is forever trying to keep out of the house but in the end gives them something else in the unconventional family that arises founded on human compassion and unconditional love that asks few questions and simply accepts those who are willing to accept it.
The gangster code slowly consumes series of men each trying to do the right thing but hamstrung by the actions of others in Kosaku Yamashita’s yakuza tragedy, The Pledge (博奕打ち外伝, Bakuchiuchi Gaiden). It is indeed a promise between brothers which damns them all, but the roots of it lie in repressed emotion and a desire to protect other people’s feelings by keeping a destructive secret while trying to satisfy oneself that one has behaved properly even if no one else understands.
The battleground is Wakamatsu, Kyushu, where outsider Egawa (Koji Tsuruta) has united the local boatmen and is undercutting the prices of a rival gang led by Omuro (Tomisaburo Wakayama). While Omuro is out of town, his right-hand man Taki (Hiroki Matsukata) has decided to take advantage of a minor squabble between some of his guys and Egawa’s to initiate a small scale turf war hoping to take the river back under their control. He does this by kidnapping Egawa’s younger brother Masakazu (Goro Ibuki) to lure him to their headquarters alone, something of which Omuro does not approve on his return but decides to go with as an excuse to bring his rivalry with Egawa to a head. Just as the pair are squaring off, a mutual friend, Hanai (Ken Takakura), arrives and intervenes convincing the two men to lay down their arms for the moment at least.
It could be argued that it is this interrupted fight that is resolved in the film’s conclusion if only by inexorable fate. In a repeated motif, Omuro keeps to the code and is exasperated and disapproving of Taki’s underhanded tactics but accepts the responsibility for them himself knowing that Taki acted only on his behalf and his recklessness is only an expression of his love for him. There is indeed something homoerotic in the relationship between the two men as Omuro cradles a wounded Taki and attempts to comfort him that the fault is all his own, while resolving to accept Taki’s actions and build on them rather than try to deescalate or try to apologise.
The real crisis occurs when the boss, approaching 60 which represents the full circle of a life, decides to name Omuro as a successor rather than the anticipated Hanai. Hanai stoically accepts though intending to leave the gang and travel to another part of Japan but other members of the clan are perplexed, little understanding the boss’ decision in feeling that Omuro is not of good character whereas Hanai is easily the better choice. As it transpires, the boss has made his decision deliberately in order to mitigate the fact that Hanai is secretly his illegitimate son whose origins he has kept secret in deference to his legal wife. He chooses not to name him as a successor in order to avoid causing him problems in his later life while justifying himself that he has not made the decision for dynastic reasons or out of simple favouritism. Yet the relationship between the two men, father and son, is raw and painful if founded on a deep understanding that leaves them unable to meet each other directly with emotional honesty.
Because of his father’s decision, Hanai forces Egawa to promise that he will not antagonise Omuro which leads to problems in his own gang with his men angry and confused, unable to understand why Egawa is letting Omuro walk all over him. Compounding the problem, Egawa’s errant brother Tetsu (Bunta Sugawara) returns unexpectedly and as Egawa cannot tell him about the pledge without disclosing Hanai’s secret, thinks his brother is being messed around and raids Omuro’s offices to reclaim money he had extorted from Egawa. He learns the truth from devoted geisha Hideko (Yuko Hama) who is deeply in love with Egawa yet largely unable to act on it again because of the gangster code while pledging that she’d sooner die and prove her devotion to him than summit herself to Taki, who is also in love with her, even when he threatens her with a knife.
The yakuza code dictates that Omuro must die though he is little more than a passive antagonist all too willing to accept the evil deeds that Taki did on his behalf because of the code of loyalty though he would not have dared to do them himself. Secrecy and repressed emotion drag all into a dark web of self-destructive violence until reaching their inevitable conclusion and perhaps bringing one cycle to a close if only in the birth of another.
Windows on Worlds 