One of the most surprising things about Kajiro Yamamoto’s defiantly silly comedy Roppa’s Honeymoon (ロッパの新婚旅行) is how devoid it seems to be of political import with no overt patriotic content or references to the ongoing conflict even if the central messages of the necessity of enduring hardship are otherwise very on brand. Likewise and contrary to expectation, the film is clearly influenced by Hollywood comedies and heavily features American ragtime music presented largely without prejudice.
In fact it’s the confrontation of these different influences which eventually sparks a crisis between father and son. As the film opens, beer magnate Garamasa is sitting in his bath practicing his gidayu recitation with the help of a shamisen player in an adjacent room, but his idiot son Ichiro (Roppa Furukawa) keeps singing “stupid Western songs,” which is very annoying for him but apparently not enough to actually get out of his bath which is why he rings an employee and gets him to ring Ichiro to tell him to shut up. This seems in part to be a slightly subversive gag poking fun at fat cat CEOs with Garamasa weirdly berating the staff member for being lazy and suggesting that he’s probably only just got up despite it being already 7am even if Garasama himself is still in the bath. The employee has, however, been busily at work for quite some time and spends the rest of the film toadying up to Garamasa. Later on, Yamamoto includes a similar gag in which a maid is forced to run back and forth between Ichiro’s annex and Garamasa’s office to deliver messages between the two.
In any case, Garamasa’s grand plan to get his son to be quiet is to marry him off to someone who also likes Western music which is why he visits a pair of servants he actually kicked out of the house when they decided to get married 20 years previously but have since opened a shop selling Western records. They suggest a young woman, Eiko, known as the nightingale of Japan (real life opera singer Hamako Watanabe) who is also a member of the nobility and the daughter of one of Garamasa’s friends, yet Ichiro has been seeing a young woman, Chiyo, who works in an oden restaurant and in fact finds out he is “engaged” from the same newspaper article she does. Eventually he makes the decision to run away from home and elope only to flounder while being entirely ill-equipped to live a “normal” life in which he must attempt to support himself financially.
Star Roppa Furukawa was himself a member of the aristocracy and one of a small number of performers popular enough in the 1930s that their names were often inserted into the titles of the files in which they appeared even if their characters did not share it. Roppa was well known for his rather comical face, round and a little pudgy with big round glasses which seem to capture something of the zeitgeist of the interwar years. He was also an excellent singer and the film is quite notable for its use of an ironic song in which Roppa narrates his “honeymoon” in which he and Chiyo are forced to move several times, first sitting in their living room on the back of a truck before their belongings slowly decrease from truck to cart to hand. Chiyo is eventually forced to return to work at the oden restaurant while the relationship suffers because of Ichiro’s refusal to do a common man’’s job. Ironically, he is disturbed by the singing of Eiko who lives close by and on visiting to tell her to be quiet is talked into buying a pair of charity concert tickets.
Chiyo actually approves because she doesn’t like the idea of people looking down on them for not having the money to pay, but is then jealous, insisting that she’ll pay for the tickets herself while forbidding Ichiro to go. It’s this that forces him to accept a job he previously thought demeaning as the leader of a marching band singing a ragtime-themed jingle for a brand of toothpaste. All of this absurd silliness might be thought too trivial for the early 1940s in which censorship concerns usually some kind of patriotic content (aside from gidayu) but there is a message to be found in Garamasa’s eventual acceptance of their relationship in which he thanks Chiyo for introducing his son to hardship and thereby making a man of him as reminding the audience that a little bit of suffering is character building though doubtless they don’t have such wealthy parents to bail them out nor can they really look forward to better days any time soon. In any case it paints a rather rosy of picture of life in the early ‘40s, harking back to a distinctly ‘30s brand of foppish comedy with Ichiro a kind of Bertie Wooster suddenly plunged into “real” life and realising being the stupid son of a CEO obsessed with gidayu recitative wasn’t so bad after all.
The well known Natsume Soseki novel, Botchan, tells the story of an arrogant, middle class Tokyoite who reluctantly accepts a teaching job at a rural school where he relentlessly mocks the locals’ funny accent and looks down on his oikish pupils all the while dreaming of his loyal family nanny. Hiroshi Shimizu’s Nobuko (信子) is almost an inverted picture of Soseki’s work as its titular heroine travels from the country to a posh girls’ boarding school bringing her country bumpkin accent and no nonsense attitude with her. Like Botchan, though for very different reasons, Nobuko also finds herself at odds with the school system but remains idealistic enough to recommend a positive change in the educational environment.
Long thought lost, Tuition (수업료, Su-eop-ryo) is an unusual example of Korean film made during the Japanese colonial period. Released in 1940, the film depicts the lives of ordinary people facing hardship during difficult economic conditions though there is no reference made to the ongoing military situation. The story itself is inspired by a prize winning effort by a real life school boy who was doubtless experiencing something similar to the trials of Yeong-dal, however, directors Choi In-gyu and Bang Han-joon made several subversive changes to the script at the filming stage in an attempt to get around the censorship regulations.
Windows on Worlds 