Tag: 1945

Sanshiro Sugata Part Two (續 姿三四郎, Akira Kurosawa, 1945)

Posted on by

Sanshiro Sugata had not especially pleased the censors who took a scalpel to it, excising a few elements they found problematic, but the film proved popular enough with audiences for the government to commission a sequel. Apparently somewhat reluctantly, Akira Kurosawa returned to the world of Sanshiro Sugata picking up almost in real time two years later with a conflicted Sanshiro (Susumu Fujita) still wandering around Yokohama avoiding the woman he loves whose father may have died due to injuries inflicted on him during his fight with Sanshiro. Yet where the first film had essentially presented a spiritual odyssey through the medium of judo, part two is a much more nakedly propagandistic affair. 

It some ways it’s a little ironic that Sanshiro has almost become a folk hero who stands up for the oppressed Japanese against the looming threat of Western imperialism as mediated through the contest between Japanese martial arts and American boxing. The film opens with a drunken American sailor berating the teenage boy pulling his rickshaw and eventually attacking him only to run into Sanshiro and get a swift hiding. The thankful boy recognises his name and decides that he wants to learn judo too so he can defend himself against external threat, but Sanshiro isn’t sure he should be teaching anyone because he still has a lot to learn and is otherwise unable to escape his guilt over having contributed to the deaths of others through the practice of his art. His internalised shame is only deepened when he’s asked to participate in a spectacle match against a top American boxer and declines only to be told off by the guy who decided to accept. He used to be a jiujitsu champ, but ever since Sanshiro brought about the judo revolution no one cares about jiujitsu anymore and it’s ruined his livelihood. 

There is it seems a degree of shame in fighting for money, but more so in fighting for the entertainment of others. When Sanshiro visits the boxing ring, the sport is depicted as vulgar and primitive. The baying crowd are there largely for blood, riled up by the violent spectacle and eager to see a man in the extremities of a bodily struggle. For Sanshiro, it’s a depressing and offensive sight and to participate in it is to bring shame on Japanese martial arts. Meanwhile, the judo school is also threatened by two thuggish brothers keen to prove the superiority of karate over judo by defeating Sanshiro. They are also brothers of the first film’s villain Higaki who was reformed after his fight with Sanshiro but has since apparently fallen into ill health and listlessness, but so certain that Sanshiro is the only man who can save Japanese martial arts that he gives him the secrets of his brothers’ techniques. 

The final battle mimics that of the first film save taking place amid heavy snow and howling wind. Sanshiro once wins over his opponents through his kindness, taking them into the warm and looking after them until they begin to recover. One of the brothers briefly picks up a meat cleaver before thinking better of it as the two of them grin and admit defeat. Yet Sanshiro’s real battle is indeed against the American imperialists, wilfully breaking Yano’s cardinal rules by deciding to agree to the spectacle fight and easily defeating the American boxer who ends up just passing out from the force of Sanshiro’s aura. The jiujitsu practitioner who seemed to resent him before breaks down in tears and offers his sincere thanks to Sanshiro for standing up for Japan against the Americans.

The contemporary context is clear, this time around judo is much less about spirituality than it is about victory as much as Sanshiro likes to say that it isn’t winning and losing that’s important. Sanshiro becomes the saviour of Japanese martial arts, now endangered by the rising popularity of Western boxing, but also indirectly of the Japanese people in standing up against an encroaching external threat in direct contrast to the slimy Fubiki (Ichiro Sugai), a dandyish interpreter to the Americans forever dressed in foppish suits and seemingly content to do their bidding. “You haven’t changed at all,” Yano scoffs of Sanshiro’s two years of fruitless travelling and it’s clear he still has a lot to learn, putting his romance with the long-suffering Sayo once again “on the back burner”, while remaining true to himself even if not quite the monster the children sing of, a relentlessly honest man and seemingly the lone defender giving hope to an increasingly anxious Japan.

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

Posted on by

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. 

Three Women of the North (北の三人, Kiyoshi Saeki, 1945)

Posted on by

Film was the primary medium for propaganda and Japan had been pumping out increasingly patriotic fare under the National Policy programme since the late 1930s but what’s interesting about those which appeared towards the war’s end is that they do not try to sugarcoat the situation or pretend that the conflict is going well, rather they use the encroaching sense of desperation as an additional motivator to get all hands on deck. Released on Aug. 5, 1945, Three Women of the North (北の三人, Kita no Sannin) was the last propaganda film to be produced and the only film currently screening when the war ended on Aug. 15. Of course, after that it was swiftly withdrawn by the Occupation forces never to be seen again except perhaps as a historical document. 

Like The Most Beautiful, the film skews accidentally feminist in its focus on three female radio operators who seem to be regarded as something of pioneers in the field. After encountering technical issues, a plane with a top secret mission is guided into an airfield in Aomori by nothing more than the voice of radio operator Sumiko (Setsuko Hara) yet on landing the pilot expresses surprise apparently stunned that a young woman would be able to perform such a stellar job. The sexist attitudes seem almost set up so they can be shot down, the pilot is quickly corrected by the ground control chief (Takashi Shimura) who explains “nowadays women can become excellent radio operators.”

Of course, this is born of necessity seeing as at this late stage there is a huge untapped resource of young and widowed middle-aged women previously discouraged from getting directly involved with the war effort. In earlier propaganda films, the most important thing a woman could do was get married and particularly to a young man who was going to the war, but this time a conflict develops between two of the women, Yoshie (Hideko Takamine) and Sumiko, because Sumiko declined to marry Yoshie’s brother Kazuo before he left because she too wanted to do her bit for the war effort and would not have been able to do so as a married woman. On learning from Yoshie that Kazuo has been killed after volunteering to lead a suicide mission, she breaks down in tears and cries that she should have married him but Yoshie, who has forgiven her on learning of her patriotic reasoning, tells her that she has done the right thing and her brother would be proud of her for serving her country. 

Meanwhile, at another airfield even deeper into the frozen north their friend Akiko (Hisako Yamane) has a developed a fondness for a research scientist but their romance is of course frustrated by the war. In a moment of fraught emotion, he tells her that he will be returning after delivering his findings and she should wait for him there which is almost to say that they will be granted their romantic resolution once the war is over. The curious thing is that Hara (Shin Saburi) is a weather scientist whose cloud forecasts have apparently been very useful to the pilots. A slightly strange diversion sees the film try to argue that at this point the greatest threat to the Japanese war effort is the weather, which aside from sounding like a very British excuse makes very little sense even if it is obviously a factor in mission success. 

The radio operators obviously can’t do much about the weather, but they can pull together with plucky spirit dedicating themselves to the national good and giving all to the war effort. While Sumiko and Yoshie are having their emotional confrontation they’re interrupted by a trio of young women who were supposed to be getting a radio demonstration from Sumiko but they’ve come to say they can’t make it because one of the other girl’s mothers has been taken ill so they’re walking up the snowy mountain to the observatory in the middle of the night to send her back and take over her shift. When the radio operator on the special flight is taken down by pneumonia (the weather, again), Yoshie volunteers insisting that she’s prepared if the worst should happen but on landing remarks that she couldn’t have got through it without Sumiko and Akiko on the other end of the line resting their success on female solidarity. Though it’s clear the film was made on a shoe string it does feature special effects by none other than Eiji Tsuburaya along with some well conceived action sequences that lend an uncomfortably thrilling note to this extremely late entry into the realms of propaganda filmmaking. 

Victory Song (必勝歌, Masahiro Makino, Kenji Mizoguchi, Hiroshi Shimizu, Tomotaka Tasaka, Tatsuo Osone, Koichi Takagi, Tetsuo Ichikawa, 1945)

Posted on by Leave a comment

vlcsnap-2017-08-01-00h21m20s082Completed in 1945, Victory Song (必勝歌, Hisshoka) is a strangely optimistic title for this full on propaganda effort intended to show how ordinary people were still working hard for the Emperor and refusing to read the writing on the wall. Like all propaganda films it is supposed to reinforce the views of the ruling regime, encourage conformity, and raise morale yet there are also tiny background hints of ongoing suffering which must be endured. Composed of 13 parts, Victory Song pictures the lives of ordinary people from all walks of life though all, of course, in some way connected with the military or the war effort more generally. Seven directors worked on the film – Masahiro Makino, Kenji Mizoguchi, Hiroshi Shimizu, Tomotaka Tasaka, Tatsuo Osone, Koichi Takagi, and Tetsuo Ichikawa, and it appears to have been a speedy production, made for little money though starring some of the studio’s biggest stars in smallish roles.

The first scenes make plain the propagandistic intentions by starting in 660BC with a pledge of protection for the descendants of Amaterasu – ancestral mother goddess of Japan. Flash forward to 1941 and her sons are doing their best. Stock footage gives way to soldiers in the Asian jungle, taking a brief respite from the fighting to console each other with thoughts of home which is presumably where most of these small stories of resilience come from.

The soldiers appear to come from all backgrounds, the youngest of them seeming to be just a young boy whose strongest memory of home is his mother’s face. They chat cheerfully about their hometowns, never betraying any sense of fear, boredom or fatigue but the commander suddenly announces that they’re all “going home” until the next attack – taking a brief voyage of memory back to the motherland.

Within this framing sequence, the ordinary people of Japan go about their ordinary lives with cheerful forbearance. A young man cares for his parents after his older brother has given his life for the Emperor, serving on the home front by working himself so hard there’s a danger of going overboard and rendering himself out of action. His father argues that as long as everyone in Japan works as hard as they can, they can never be defeated. Community comes to the rescue again when a train gets stuck in the snow and the entire village gets out of bed to free it.

While the adults are giving it their all, the children are preparing to become fine subjects of the Emperor, training their minds and bodies to be of the most use whilst singing patriotic songs and performing military drills. Another segment finds the children praising their parents for their bravery, playing and roughhousing like any children would, but a hint of darkness emerges when a group of boys plays at war with their toy aeroplane. One little boy, Yuichi, has applied for the young pilots school without talking it over with his parents because he didn’t want them to be sad about him going away. His father, at least, is proud of him but upset at not being consulted. Practically measuring him up for the uniform, Yuichi’s father marvels at all the “young pilots” in the village – a chilling note seeing as none of these boys can be more than ten years old.

While the men go to war the women are at home waiting. Another persistent question relates to the fate of unmarried women – a positive motion for an arranged engagement is disrupted by the receipt of a draft card, prompting the male side to suggest they call the whole thing off. The woman, however, points out that every young man is in this position and she doesn’t see the point in expecting the worst. Life must go on, women must get married, and men must go to war. All of these things must be accepted without thinking too hard about it or there will be nothing for these gallant men to come home to.

The difficulties of wartime life extend to the fear and destruction of air raids, though a news report of the fire bombing of Tokyo reminds us that it could all have been much worse if it weren’t for the valiant efforts of the pilots and ground based defence forces keeping the threat from the skies at a minimum. Other reports detail dive bombing of hospital convoys while the wounded die happily knowing they’ve done their duty. Likewise the “special attack squad” prepare to meet their fates with stoicism and determination while their relatives are treated with especial esteem.

Interspersed with the vignettes and stock footage there are songs and dances bringing both entertainment and inspiration. The final message is one of resilience and unity, that Japan stands together to defend its ancient homeland in devotion to its Emperor, but then such a message would hardly be necessarily if the situation were brighter. Brief allusions are made to rationing, to the destruction and constant loss of life but these are all things which must be born for the glorious future. There is, however, much more stock put in remaining positive than there is in trying to deny the ongoing desperation. As propaganda films go, this one may backfire but does perhaps shine a light on the unspoken anxieties of ordinary people facing an extraordinary situation.

Final scenes including the “Victory Song” itself

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MmJAaU8sJuo