Tag: 1947

One Wonderful Sunday (素晴らしき日曜日, Akira Kurosawa, 1947)

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A young couple attempt to have a nice day out in Tokyo for only 35 yen but eventually discover something much more valuable in Akira Kurosawa’s surprisingly upbeat voyage through the backstreets of the post-war city, One Wonderful Sunday (素晴らしき日曜日, Subarashiki Nichiyobi). Though it may begin with frustration and progress to abject despair, the film allows its dejected heroes to find renewed hope for the future in the ashes of their defeat if only through the power of make-believe. 

Yuzo (Isao Numasaki) and Masako (Chieko Nakakita) are a young(ish) couple who’ve been together since before the war but are unable to marry because their precarious financial situation prevents them from finding a home in which they can live together. Though they are each in full employment, Masako currently lives with her sister and Yuzo with a friend. They can only spend Sundays together, but this particular Sunday Yuzo is fulled with frustration and resentment. He has only 15 yen, not much of a date as he tells Masako with irritation explaining that she’s had a wasted journey. She reveals that she has 20, but Yuzo has his male pride and is reluctant to take “a woman’s money” while internally humiliated not to be able to take her out on the town. Just before she had arrived, Yuzo had stared at an abandoned cigarette butt on the pavement. His desire soon overcame his shame. He picked it up and smoked it, only for Masako to bat it out of his hand as if insisting that he’s better than that. 

For her part, Masako is defiantly upbeat. Perhaps she’s putting on a brave face for Yuzo, but does her best to buoy his spirits so they can have a nice day together. It may be her only nice day all week. While she looks forward, he cannot move beyond the dissatisfying present. Masako begins by suggesting they check out a show home advertised on a billboard as a new kind of residence which is cheaper to build and available for only 100,000 yen for the first 100 buyers. She imagines how their life might be together in this space, while Yuzo merely sulks in the corner and points out the shoddiness of the build amid declining modern standards. It’s advertised as affordable, but they can’t afford it. Meanwhile, another man wanders in with a woman who is clearly his mistress. She exclaims that the place is a dump, “I hate matchbox houses”, while he agrees that it’s cheap for a reason and you get what you pay for. Presumably he already owns a home where his wife and family live and is about to drop a small fortune on a discreet love nest while his mistress, not unreasonably, attempts to haggle her way up to something a bit more fancy. Yuzo knows he won’t ever be able to afford even this “inexpensive” home that a wealthy man disdains as not worthy of his bit on the side. They’ve just come from seeing a crummy flat a few streets away which Masako asks directions to only to be put off by the doorman who warns them that the flat isn’t even really habitable and the landlord is heartless but they couldn’t afford that either even on the assumption they would both keep working (which depending on Masako’s job might not possible once she marries).

The landscape around them is in ruins. Yuzo and Masako wander through a bombed out city not yet ready for reconstruction looking for somewhere to stay out of the cold without eating into their 35 yen. He wants to give up and go home, but she convinces him to attend a concert of the music they heard on their first date before the war only when they get there all the cheaper tickets have been bought up by touts who sell them on at 50% markup. Beaten up for challenging the touts’ uncompromising cynicism, Yuzo hits rock bottom returning to his flat in a rundown tenement where a woman mopping the corridor gives Masako serious side eye. Frustrated, he tries to pressure her into premarital sex, her rock bottom coming a few minutes later when she firstly leaves in outrage and then returns as if admitting that their situation will never improve. 

“The war destroyed that dream” Yuzo had said of Masako’s attempt to rekindle his hopes for the future in the plan they made to open a cafe together after they married, but the reality of their mutual defeat finally seems to inspire defiance in the face of the world’s hostility. On their journey through the city, they’d encountered a ragged street kid who thought them fools after they refused his offer of ten yen for one of their rice balls and simply gave it to him out of human kindness. Yuzo felt himself a fool after trying to visit an old friend who’s done well for himself with a swanky cabaret bar only to be rebuffed and see his own image reflected in a mirror with his threadbare overcoat and battered hat juxtaposed with the image of a fine young couple eyeing him with disdain and suspicion. In the end Masako can only appeal to us, breaking the fourth wall in a moment reminiscent of Peter Pan asking us to clap if we believe in fairies as she tries to revive Yuzo’s sense of naive possibility to conduct an unfinished symphony of their imagined life together in a happier future of post-war Japan. Refusing to give in to their baser instincts, to become cynical and selfish or else simply to give up, this wonderful Sunday does seem to have given them a childish sense of hope that better days are on their way and until then there’s always next week. 

One Wonderful Sunday screens at the BFI Southbank, London on 3rd & 15th January 2023 as part of the Kurosawa season.

Record of a Tenement Gentleman (長屋紳士録, Yasujiro Ozu, 1947)

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There are no real villains in the world of Ozu, though the immediate post-war world does its best to create them despite the best efforts of those quietly trying to live amidst the devastation. The misleadingly titled Record of a Tenement Gentleman (長屋紳士録, Nagaya Shinshiroku), the Japanese title a more ironic “a tenement who’s who”, is, like Hen in the Wind, a kind of manifesto statement for the postwar era only a much warmer one which looks forward to Ozu’s celebrated family dramas as its decidedly frosty heroine finds her emotional floodgates breached by the unexpected arrival of a problematic little boy. 

The little boy, Kohei (Hohi Aoki), is brought home by tenement gentleman Tashiro (Chishu Ryu) who found him wandering around in the town after becoming separated from his father. Tashiro’s roommate Tamekichi (Reikichi Kawamura) is unwilling to shelter the boy and so they decide to foist him on the grumpy old woman opposite, Tane (Choko Iida), who doesn’t want him either but is left with little choice. Tane is quickly angry with the boy because he wets the bed, ruining her spare futon, and tries to convince another neighbour who already has three children to take him in instead but is tricked into taking him back to the place he was previously living after Tamekichi rigs a game of straws. Travelling with him in the hope of finding his father, Tane wanders bombed out Tokyo and comes to the conclusion that Kohei’s dad has most likely abandoned him. 

A widow with no other family, or so it would seem, Tane is a cold and wily woman supporting herself with a small tenement shop. A sharp contrast is drawn when a childhood friend of hers, Kiku (Mitsuko Yoshikawa), arrives to ask about the best way to acquire a hose and shares some dorayaki sweets which have become a rare luxury in an age of rationing and privation. Kiku has married well and become a fine lady, not quite boasting but obviously very pleased with the walnut dressing table she had made with the mirror Tane helped her get on a previous occasion. Still, Tane is not embittered or especially unhappy just cynical and used to practicality. She didn’t see herself as the maternal type and had been intent mainly on ensuring her own survival.

Even so, she is touched and saddened to think a man might abandon his child even if she herself did not want to be burdened with him. She often scolds Kohei, frightening him with her stern expression, but later apologises when Tameshiro takes the blame for supposedly eating some of the persimmons Tane was drying at the window, even handing him the remaining fruit from the line. Talking with Kiku she recalls her own childhood as happy and carefree, tugging on her parents’ sleeves asking for pocket money while Kohei’s pockets are filled with cigarette butts and nails for the carpenter father Tane is sure has abandoned his son. This last fact is the one that finally touches her heart. Despite his fear and his hurt, Kohei has continued to think of his father and has been selflessly collecting little presents on his behalf to give to him when they are reunited. 

The innocence and selflessness of children is further emphasised by the son of a neighbour winning a prize in the lottery leading some of the other residents to insist that children are more likely to win precisely because they enter with a pure heart not with the intention of winning or monetary gain. Tane tries the theory out by making Kohei buy a lottery ticket with money Kiku had given him as a treat but of course he doesn’t win and Tane is upset, blaming him for not being as goodhearted as she’d assumed, but later giving him the money back when he bursts into tears (which is something he does often, perhaps understandably but out of keeping with the mentality of the times). Nevertheless, despite herself Tane becomes fond of the boy and even begins to think about adopting him as her own son. 

Eventually Kohei’s father returns, but Tane’s conversion is so complete and absolute that the tears she cries are not in lament for herself but in happiness to know that the boy’s father was not the awful man she thought he was but a doting parent distraught at the thought of his missing son. She is moved by the happiness they must feel in their reunion and realises that her time with Kohei has taught her many things, not least among them that she has allowed the times to cool her heart. The post-war world, the ruins and devastation we can glimpse beyond the tenement, has forced people to become self-interested, little caring if others starve so long as they aren’t hungry. She regrets that she wasn’t warmer to the boy when he arrived, and wishes we could all be more like children kind to others without thinking of ourselves. Cementing what would come to be his iconic signature style, Ozu ends, somewhat uncharacteristically, on a melancholy scene of street children, a crowd of war orphans abandoned by the society which created them through militarist folly. As much a chronicle of everyday life in the ruins of a major city, Record of a Tenement Gentleman is also an unsubtle argument for post-war humanism in a society it sees as in danger of failing to learn from past mistakes. 

The Fellows Who Ate the Elephant (象を喰つた連中, Kozaburo Yoshimura, 1947)

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The Japan of 1947 was one still very much caught up in post-war chaos. In the cities, most particularly, hunger was a major problem. The Fellows Who Ate the Elephant (象を喰つた連中, Zo wo Kutta Renchu) may have a title that strongly recalls the screwball comedies of the ’30s, but is less slapstick comedy than dark satire in its central premise that a bunch of idiot mad scientists might actually eat a deceased elephant in extreme dedication to “mottainai” waste not want not philosophy coupled with the justification that all is permissible in the name of science. 

The elephant is, apparently, the last in Japan and was the childhood friend of zookeeper Yamashita (Chishu Ryu) who brought him all the way over the mountains from Thailand after the war. “Shiro-chan” is very ill with some kind of elephant cold but for some reason the doctors the zoo uses aren’t vets specialising in large, exotic animals but virologists. While they stand around apparently mystified, Yamashita enquires after the professor he usually deals with but is told that, despite being over 60 years of age, he’s currently away on honeymoon after marrying a very young and extremely beautiful woman. Sadly, Shiro doesn’t make it. The professor is saddened to learn of the death from the paper and wonders if it might have been a virus similar to one which attacks hoofed animals like donkeys and horses but is not usually found in Japan (Shiro is Thai after all). 

This is relevant because the disease is fatal and contagious but does not usually pass to humans and is only a risk if you come into direct contact with it, like say if you eat meat from an infected animal. No one would eat an elephant though so there’s nothing to worry about. Enter extremely unpleasant mad scientist Wada (Shinichi Himori) who decides that science dictates they must find out if it’s sanitary to eat elephant meat. Though Wada ropes in fellow scientist Baba (Yasumi Hara) with his scientific justifications, he tricks the other two into eating some without telling them what it is. Unforgivably, he even gives some to Yamashita and seems to get a kick out of feeding him his own childhood friend when Yamashita had only come on instruction from his boss to apologise for being over emotional the day before. Yamashita leaves feeling sick after Wada tells him what he was eating for additional effect, but his wife (Chiyoko Fumiya) later remembers a story he told her about fellow elephant drivers in Thailand who ate some elephant meat from an infected animal and were dead within 30 hours. 

After hearing Yamashita’s concerns, the scientists begin investigating and indeed find cases of people dying after eating contaminated meat. The only cure is the serum they use to treat the horse infection the professor mentioned, but it seems nowhere has any in stock (the disease is rare in Japan after all). The idiot scientists come to the conclusion they will die in exactly 30 hours’ time and decide to put their affairs in order rather than consult an actual doctor who might be able to help them. This mostly involves trying to explain their foolishness to their wives. Watanabe (Takashi Kanda) is a father of three with another child on the way. He regrets that he hasn’t been present enough in his family life and has failed to adequately provide for his wife who he will shortly be leaving to raise four children alone. Nomura (Toru Abe) meanwhile is an uxorious newlywed constantly worried that his wife (Kyoko Asagiri), who already dislikes Wada for being a bad influence on her husband, will not be able to bear the anxiety of knowing he may soon die. Baba who has only his parents retreats back to his old country home to apologise for not being a better son. 

Wada, meanwhile, moans about everyone else’s understandable desires to comfort their wives and families. He criticises Yamashita for trying to excuse himself because he’d rather go home and have dinner with his wife, while mocking Nomura for being a henpecked husband. This might partly be because he has no wife or family of his own and is currently chasing after Tomie (Akemi Sora), a maid at his boarding house, who seems pretty indifferent or even hostile to his attentions, joking that she’d celebrate on hearing of his demise. She eventually agrees to go out with him, but only if he really dies. Other than the wives, no-one quite believes the guys’ bizarre story. Baba’s parents even try to stop him going back to Tokyo when a potential cure is located in case he goes “even more mad”. 

In these trying times, the idea that someone might try to eat a dead elephant is perhaps not quite as ridiculous as it might first seem. The act of trying it, however, also plays into the constant critiques of bad or irresponsible science which are a mainstay of films in the immediate post-war era. Wada knows that he can and so he doesn’t bother to think about if he should, spinning tales of Jenner and Koch as if they’re about to make some grand lifesaving discovery. His brush with death does at least begin to humble him as he finally accepts responsibility for the unexpected consequences of his cruel prank, realising that as a man with no wife or family it should perhaps be him if anyone is going to have to make a sacrifice. Finally someone manages to get through to the professor on the phone who tells them they’re all very stupid and haven’t thought of something perfectly obvious that makes all their panicking completely pointless, but at least the surreal 30-hour near death experience has brought out a warmer side of Wada and given a few irresponsible scientists a quick lesson in social responsibility. 

Phoenix (不死鳥, Keisuke Kinoshita, 1947)

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“Life is about facing your loneliness” according to the heroine of Keisuke Kinoshita’s Phoenix (不死鳥, Fushicho), a woman who’s known her share of suffering but has learned to endure. She knows not only war widows are lonely, and she’s not the only war widow, so she’s doing her best to be as happy as one can be under the circumstances. As much about its nation’s rebirth from the ashes, Phoenix is also quietly subversive in its critique of outdated social conventions and enthusiasm for a woman’s right to seek her independence rather than rely on the support of the traditional family. 

In 1947, Sayoko (Kinuyo Tanaka) is a much loved daughter-in-law and mother to Ken, who is about to celebrate his fourth birthday. She takes care of the household and looks after the numerous Yasaka siblings while putting up with her sometimes grumpy father-in-law (Isamu Kosugi) who harshly scolds little Ken when he throws a stone through the side window but feels guilty about it afterwards and vows to come home with sweets to make it up to him. Life with the Yasakas is peaceful and happy, though the present crisis, which isn’t really a crisis so much as a matter for consideration, is the potential marriage of younger son Yuji (Akira Yamanouchi) who has been wanting to marry his girlfriend Yoko but had been worried both that his parents would object to him trying to choose his own bride without their input, and that bringing another young woman into the house as a new wife might be insensitive, leaving Sayoko feeling sad and unwelcome. 

Yuji’s mother tells him that he doesn’t need to worry on either point, she and his father have long been in favour of the marriage which hints at something of a sea change in contemporary social attitudes. In Sayoko’s flashbacks to her early courtship, we see Shinichi (Keiji Sada), her later husband, bring her to his family home with the intention of introducing her to his parents as his future bride, but his father won’t even see her, loudly shouting that Shinichi should immediately ask her to leave. His objections are largely feudal in nature, Shinichi is the oldest son and his marriage is therefore of great importance to the family name. Not only does he not know anything about Sayoko, whom he basically calls a loose woman for daring to date while in high school, but he deeply resents that Shinichi has gone behind his back, defied his authority, and tried to arrange his own marriage without his father’s input. 

Despite the clear intention of the pair to continue their association with or without his consent, Mr. Yasaka continues to object. Shinichi insists that “nothing can separate us” despite knowing that he has already enlisted for the army and will shortly be leaving for the war. Sayoko holds the line, resisting even when her father dies and pushy relatives try to railroad her into an arranged marriage which will benefit them financially, and supporting her younger brother who is spared the war but only because he is already in the later stages of incurable TB.

Mr. Yasaka’s objections gain more weight with the war’s intensity. With her brother on his deathbed, he turns up to ask Sayoko not to see Shinichi on his brief leave before he’s shipped abroad during which they plan to get married because he thinks it’s irresponsible for his son to marry a woman knowing there is a good chance he will leave her a widow. Overwhelmed by the scale of her tragedies, Sayoko has had enough, rounding on Mr. Yasaka and letting him know that his concerns are moot because every healthy young man is in the same position and if he’d only given up his stubborn insistence that Shinichi has wronged him by undercutting his authority and given his consent to their marriage at any point during the last six years he wouldn’t have had to come here on this day with her brother dying in the next room to tell her that she shouldn’t marry the man she loves because her marriage is somehow his decision to make. 

Mr. Yasaka is clearly moved by Sayoko’s distress, moving to comfort her but then withdrawing and getting up to leave without saying anything. Petitioned again by Sayoko’s faithful housekeeper, he catches sight of the blooming flowers Sayoko has grown in adversity and is minded to reconsider. Several years later we can see that Mr. Yasaka has grown fond of Sayoko and his grandson even if he has a bit of temper, while she is very happy as a member of their family and not at all minded to remarry despite their desire for her to lead a fulfilling life. That is, as she tells Yuji encouraging him not to feel bashful about his bride, not because of a romantic notion of faithfulness or being hung up on old memories, but for the practical reason that she has nowhere else to go, or at least she is certain there is nowhere where she would be so happy. Later, however, she hopes to open a shop of her own and strive for her independence together with her son rather than remaining dependent on her husband’s family or marrying again for practical rather than emotional reasons.

Shinichi had been fond of talking about the life they’d lead once the war was over, that they’d only be apart for a few years and then never again, but the war stole their future from them as it did for so many other young people whom the film was doubtless intended to comfort. Nevertheless, Sayoko is forever telling people how happy she is. Mr. Yasaka seems to have relented, is going to let his younger son marry a woman of his choosing, and the younger siblings are all bright and cheerful. The future looks rosy, and Sayoko is going to do her best to enjoy it, striving for independence in a now less restrictive society. 

Titles and opening (no subtitles)

Snow Trail (銀嶺の果て, Senkichi Taniguchi, 1947)

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The cinema of the immediate post-war era might in a sense be aspirational, but it rarely shies away from hardship or from the sometimes difficult choices which had to be made both in terms of individual survival and the future direction of a society. Remembered chiefly for featuring the debut of screen legend Toshiro Mifune, Senkichi Taniguchi’s Snow Trail (銀嶺の果て, Ginrei no Hate) is less a crime doesn’t pay story than it is an affirmation that it’s never too late to turn back and that people who do “bad” things aren’t always “bad”, only troubled and desperate, but can be guided back towards the right path by the power of simple human goodness. 

As the film opens, a trio of thieves commits a daring bank robbery and then heads off on the run intending to hideout in the mountains posing as tourists on a skiing trip. To facilitate their ruse, they’ve cut off communication by fiddling with radios and disabling telephones but two young men with too much time on their hands have already heard about the robbery and figured out the three suspicious gentlemen might be the fugitive criminals. In another picture, the two young guys would be the bumbling heroes, mistaken in their assumption that their world has been invaded by crime and probably finding romantic disappointment before heading home. This time however their guess is correct and their investigation has placed them in danger. The leader, Nojiri (Takashi Shimura), whips out a gun on a collection of drunken labourers and forces them out of their clothes and into the hot spring so the gang can make their escape further up the mountain, eventually taking refuge in a tiny lodge run by a philosophical grandpa (Kokuten Kōdo) and his cheerful teenage granddaughter (Setsuko Wakayama).

The police are in hot pursuit, but it is by nature which we will be judged. After leaving the hotel, the trio stop briefly in a ranger’s hut where hotheaded youngster Eijima (Toshiro Mifune) suggests splitting up. Nojiri divides the loot, giving each their promised share, but the other guy, Takasugi (Yoshio Kosugi), objects. He doesn’t want to go it alone and resents being forced to make his own way, even wondering out loud how long they’d get if they gave themselves up now. After a fight knocks Takasugi out, Eijima is keen to leave him behind, but he ends up spelling his own doom when he fires his gun at the police and provokes an avalanche.  

Later the patient grandfather tells us that the “mighty mountain punishes the bad”, and Takasugi is presumably its first victim, paying the price for panic and cowardice. Meanwhile, Nojiri and Eijima find themselves playing tourists once again in the mountain lodge where Nojiri is touched by the simple innocence of the young girl and her grandfather and Eijima paces around impatiently like a caged animal, cruelly killing the little girl’s prized carrier pigeon in case it takes it upon itself to signal the authorities. Threatening the girl’s life, Eijima convinces another guest, Honda (Akitake Kono), to guide them safely over the mountains to escape, but becomes increasingly paranoid that he will be betrayed, knowing he does not have the skills to survive alone in this environment. 

Nojiri meanwhile is drawn back towards humanity. Already softened by Harue, the cheerful young woman at the lodge who innocently offers him honey tea and reminds him of his own daughter who passed away at a similar age, he remains conflicted in their coercion of Honda and even more chastened after Honda saves both of their lives when Nojiri slips breaking own his arm in the process. Later, Nojiri asks him why he helped them rather than just cutting the rope and escaping. He replies that all he did was respect the code of the mountains. “The rope that ties one life to another must never be touched” he tells him. 

In an unexpected twist, Nojiri’s humanity is reawakened by a song filled with nostalgia but it isn’t Furusato or Akatombo, it’s “My Old Kentucky Home” played in an instrumental version on Harue’s portable record player, previously used by Honda who performed a silly dance to tune of Oh Suzannah. The choice of music perhaps echoes the movie’s Hollywood inspiration, but otherwise follows the pattern of other similarly themed contemporary crime movies in which the hero is eventually redeemed by connecting with his own childhood innocence through the “furusato” spirit. Still able to find this essential goodness within himself, the mountain has judged Nojiri favourably, proving that as grandpa says he isn’t a “bad” person even if he’s made “bad” choices. Filled with a new respect for the ropes that bind one human to another, he is allowed to return to the world presumably to live a more connected existence cheerfully helping others rather than remaining selfishly alone.

The Love of the Actress Sumako (女優須磨子の恋, Kenji Mizoguchi, 1947)

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vlcsnap-2019-03-27-01h39m45s435The Taisho era was, like that of the post-war, a time both of confusion and possibility in which the young, in particular, looked for new paths and new freedoms as the world got wider and ideas flowed in from every corner of the globe. In The Love of the Actress Sumako (女優須磨子の恋, Joyu Sumako no koi), the second of a loose trilogy films about female emancipation, Kenji Mizoguchi took the real life story of a pioneering actress of Western theatre and used it to explore the progress of lack there of in terms of social freedoms not only for women but for artists and for society as a whole.

We begin in late Meiji as theatre director Shimamura (So Yamamura) fights to establish a foothold of Western-style “art theatre”, moving away from the theatricality of kabuki for something more immediate and naturalistic. He has, however, a problem in that as women were not allowed to take to the kabuki stage all of his students are male and casting a man to play a woman’s role would run counter to his desires to create a truly representative theatre. It is therefore lucky that he runs into Sumako Matsui (Kinuyo Tanaka) – a feisty, determined young woman who had divorced her first husband for infidelity and then left the second when he complained about her desire to pursue a career on the stage. In Sumako, Shimamura finds a muse and the ideal woman to portray the extremely controversial figure of Nora in his dream production of Ibsen’s incendiary A Doll’s House.

Shimamura casts Sumako because he sees in her some of Nora’s defiance and eventual desire to be free from illusionary social constraints, but it is in fact he who ends up embodying her spirit in real life. Somewhat feminised, Shimamura is in a difficult position in having married into his wife’s family, leaving him without real agency inside his own home as evidenced by his mild opposition to his daughter’s arranged marriage. While he wishes that his daughter be happy and if possible marry for love, Shimamura’s wife is very much of the old school and wants to make the best possible match in terms of financial gain and social status, viewing emotional compatibility as a low priority (the daughter herself as relatively little say). Unwisely falling in love with Sumako, it is he who eventually decides to follow Nora’s example by walking out not only on his family but also on the theatre company. He does this not quite because the scales have been lifted from his eyes – he was never under any illusion that his arranged marriage was “real” and there is of course an accepted degree of performance involved in all such unions, but because he finally sees possibility enough in his love for Sumako and the viability of emotionally honest Western art to allow him to break free of outdated feudal ideas of familial obligation.

Nevertheless, making a career as an artist is a difficult prospect in any age and Shimamura’s emotional freedom quickly becomes tied up with that of his art. Sumako’s Nora proves a hit (in the last year of Meiji), but he is ahead of his times both in terms of his liberal, left-wing philosophy and his determination to embrace modern drama in a still traditional society. The roles we see Sumako perform, including that in Tolstoy’s Resurrection which was another of those that helped to make her name, are all from proto-feminist plays which revolve around women who, like herself, had chosen to challenge the patriarchal status quo in pursuit of their own freedom and agency. Shimamura’s wife makes no secret of her outrage to her husband’s desire to stage A Doll’s House, viewing Nora’s decision as “selfish” and perhaps of a subversion of every notion she associates with idealised femininity. Though not so far apart in age, Sumako is a woman of Taisho who left not one but two unfulfilling marriages and is determined to forge her own path even if that path eventually leads her to subsume her own desires within those of her lover as the pair attempt to put their social revolution on the stage.

The revolution, however, does not quite take off. Despite good early notices, Shimamura’s Art Theatre company quickly runs into trouble. Faced with financial ruin, he does what any sensible theatre producer would do – he begins to prioritise bums on seats and acknowledges that if he’s to keep his company afloat and facilitate his dream of making Western theatre a success in Japan he’ll have to compromise his artistic aims  by putting on some populist plays. Of course, this sudden concession to commercial demands does not go down well with all and some of his hardline actors begin to leave in protest not just of his selling out but of his twinned desire to make Sumako his star.

Tellingly, the pair are eventually forced out of Japan entirely to tour the beginnings of empire from Korea to China and on to Taiwan. Their ideas are too radical and their society not quite ready for their messages even if not initially as hostile as it would later become. Shimamura works himself to the bone trying to keep his dream alive, eventually damaging his health. Sumako remains somewhat petulant about being forced into an itinerant lifestyle while her onstage personas come increasingly to influence her offstage life until it is said of her that her performance is “no longer an interpretation but an extension of reality”. In this, Sumako has, in a sense, achieved Shimamura’s dreams of a truly naturalistic theatre, but it comes at a cost, as perhaps all art does, and, Mizoguchi seems to suggest, becomes a kind of sacrifice laid down to a society still too rigid and unforgiving to appreciate its sincerity. Nevertheless, their boldness, as fruitless as it was, has started a flame which others intend to keep burning, eventually becoming a beacon for another new world looking to rebuild itself better and freer than before.

Short clip featuring Sumako’s performance as Carmen.

Marriage (結婚, Keisuke Kinoshita, 1947)

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Marriage DVD coverGenerally speaking, the heroes in the world of Keisuke Kinoshita are those who stick steadfastly to their principles and refuse to become corrupted by the world around them. This is all very well but perhaps somewhat idealistic given the pressures of the post-war world. 1947’s Marriage (結婚, Kekkon) finds the director working with scriptwriter Kaneto Shindo whose view of humanity was perhaps a little more pragmatic than Kinoshita’s and therefore recasts his heroes as essentially good people who eventually come to the conclusion that their moral rigidity is causing more unhappiness than compromise might and that an acceptance of complicity may in fact be the only possible way forward.

Fumie (Kinuyo Tanaka) became engaged to Sugawara (Ken Uehara) before he went away to war and the couple have been waiting to marry ever since. Though Sugawara returned promptly, unharmed, and seems to be in regular employment, they have been unable to formalise their union because Fumie and her sister are the only members of her family currently working which means that they cannot do without her paycheck. Things begin to look up when Fumie’s father Kohei (Eijiro Tono), formerly an accountant who lost his job when his previous employer went bust, runs into an acquaintance who’s now the owner of a successful restaurant. Shimamoto (Eitaro Ozawa) promises him a job which has the family overjoyed, not least Fumie who may now finally be able to marry, but their happiness is to be short lived. Kohei realises that Shimamoto’s business is built on underhanded practices intertwined with black market profiteering and wants no part of it. The two men argue. Kohei refuses the job and storms out. Fumie is back to square one.

Though Sugawara reiterates that he understands the demands of the situation they find themselves in and will wait as long as is necessary, he too is under pressure from his family to bring the matter to a suitable conclusion. Sugawara’s mother is in poor health and wants to see him settled before she goes. She understands that he has someone in mind, but would rather he marry as soon as possible even if that means marrying someone else entirely – for example, a lovely girl from the village whose omiai photo his aunt has helpfully delivered. Sugawara bears all of this with good grace, but stands firm in insisting he will wait for Fumie even if that means he never marries at all.

The dilemmas are two fold and occur across two generations. Fumie finds herself torn between a duty to her family who are now almost entirely dependent on her as a breadwinner, and her romantic desire to become Sugawara’s wife – a promise made before the war which the post-war world conspires to make impossible. Despite their dire circumstances, the Matsukawas are a happy family doing their best to muddle through though there is obvious tension between teenage son Kei (Shozo Suzuki) and his father over Kohei’s rigid refusal to compromise himself as the times seem to demand. Kinoshita captures the atmosphere of a precarious household with easy confidence, an icy silence descending as Kohei returns with a face like thunder making plain that his job opportunity has not worked out as planned. Everyone is upset and disappointed, but no one has the energy for an argument and so silence is all there is.

Fumie becomes ever more conflicted, especially after a strained meeting with Sugawara’s aunt who seems nice enough but drops a few hints about the girl waiting in the country and Sugawara’s sickly mother. She begins to wonder if her romantic dreams are selfish in a world so wracked with ruin that it seems unlikely that she will ever be in a position to marry. Perhaps it would be more responsible, or just less painful, to end things with Sugawara for good so that he at least can move on. As things stand, the couple only have their Sundays which are endlessly prolonged with additional activities to put off the time that they must part as long as possible. The destabilising visit from the aunt is followed by an awkward, almost celebratory dinner in which sake pushes difficult emotions to the fore. Fumie vacillates, unable to dance she eventually decides to give things a go, affirming that she will simply hold onto and follow Sugawara – seemingly unaware of the wider implications of her statement. During the dance, however, in which she is literally swept off her feet, she changes her mind again, shamed by her brief moment of joy into feeling selfish and self involved as if all those around her suffer in service of her eventual romantic fulfilment.

Where Kinoshita might have introduced a deus ex machina in which the Matsukawas would be the beneficiaries of divine reward for their selfless goodness, Shindo makes way for a more realistic (though perhaps equally melodramatic) solution in which Kohei reassumes his role of the head of the family and chooses his daughter’s happiness over his principles. As such he recognises that he must make the sacrifice that will save them all in abandoning moral righteousness and becoming complicit with the murkiness of the world in which he lives. Pragmatism, this time, wins out but only as a lesser evil in which a compromise is made in the favour of happiness which might, in a round about way, produce a greater change in an already unhappy world.

Titles and opening (no subtitles)

Once More (今ひとたびの, Heinosuke Gosho, 1947)

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(c) 東宝

Gosho once more posterOf the Japanese golden age directors, there were few who’d “happily” gone along with the requirements of making films under a militarist regime. Heinosuke Gosho, however, must rank among the most recalcitrant in his unwavering refusal to compromise his convictions in order to preserve his career. Most of the scripts he submitted to the censor’s board were rejected in the preliminary stages though he was able to ruffle a few feathers with the few films he did manage to make if only for his skilful ability to skirt around the promised propagandistic overtones. It also “helped” that Gosho had become seriously ill with tuberculosis in 1937 which perhaps protected him from official interference and, in any case, removed him from the film industry for three years while he recovered. Nevertheless, he felt keenly that he and others had a duty and an opportunity to turn the tables in the post-war era, advancing the ideology of humanism to create a better, fairer world than the one which had descended into so much ugliness and chaos.

In fact one of the reasons Gosho decided to film Once More (今ひとたびの, Ima Hitotabi no) in 1947 under the American occupation was to counter the view held among some young people that there had been no active opposition to militarism. Gosho and his screenwriter Keinosuke Uekusa chose to adapt a heavily political novel by Jun Takami which painted itself as a romantic tragedy of resistance in which its leftist heroes find themselves carrying the legacy of defeat onward into the post-war world. Gosho depoliticises Takami’s tale and reconstructs it as a romantic melodrama with a more positive resolution, but is careful to preserve the fierce idealism of the conscientious students relentlessly protesting Japanese Imperialism whilst trying to advance the course of social justice in an increasingly oppressive environment.

The tale begins in 1936 as a group of students prepares to graduate. Nogami (Ichiro Ryuzaki), a doctor, has turned down a lucrative university post to minister to the poor. Unlike his friends Tanaka (Koji Kawamura) and Kambara (Hyo Kitazawa), Nogami is not an activist or left wing agitator but has a strong belief in humanistic socialism and a conviction that he has a duty to ensure his skills are available to those who need them most. Invited to a play directed by Kambara which is being performed to raise money for socialist causes, Nogami accidentally wanders into the dressing room of the leading lady – Akiko (Mieko Takamine), a wealthy socialite, and falls in love at first sight. Akiko too takes a liking to Nogami and invites him to her birthday party despite his rather odd behaviour after the play, but he finds it impossible to get on with her upperclass friends and eventually leaves. The pair advance and retreat, but their romance is frustrated by the times in which they live, politics, and their own senses of personal integrity which encourage them to willingly sacrifice their happiness in acknowledgement of living in an unhappy world.

Despite their original, electric attraction the obstacles surrounding the love of Akiko and Nogami may seem insurmountable, chief among them being the obvious class difference between the pair. Nogami, somewhat contrary to his humanistic ideals, has a mild prejudice against the bourgeoise, believing them to be selfish, unfeeling, and existing in their own bubble hermetically sealed away from the kind of suffering he sees everyday at the clinic. Yet he cannot forget Akiko who harbours no prejudice towards him because of his humble origins (though her friends and family make no secret of theirs) and feels similarly about her own social class, overcome with guilt that she lives in such comfort while others suffer. Eventually Akiko joins the cause, becoming a left-wing agitator and even getting herself arrested and branded a “Red Lady” in the papers (further annoying her very confused social circle). Unlike Nogami she is also subject to a kind of social and gender based oppression in which she is under constant pressure to marry her longstanding fiancé, Sakon (Haruo Tanaka), and conform to the requirements of her position. Nogami is “free” to choose to live a life of selfless altruism in a way that Akiko is not and will struggle to be throughout the rest of the picture.

Yet time and again it is the times which frustrate their romance. Akiko and Nogami repeatedly make plans to meet, but one of them is arrested and prevented from arriving leaving the other assuming the worst – that they have been abandoned, romantically and ideologically. Matters aren’t helped by Nogami’s natural diffidence and awkwardness coupled with his rigid code of honour which makes it impossible for him to pursue Akiko in any normal way, leaving her confused and later at the mercy of her controlling family. In the end it is their own senses of personal integrity which prevent their union, as a friend bound for the front points out when he, essentially, tells them to get over themselves and embrace happiness rather than overthinking an emotional response and ruining it in the process.

As much as Gosho’s central tenet could be boiled down to “don’t think, feel”, he does argue for compassionate rationality and considered fairness and understanding between people. Thus he removes the Marxist overtones from the original novel because his conflicts aren’t “political” but between justice and injustice; he simply sees unfairness and opposes it, placing his faith in the absolute truth of positive emotion and human connection to eradicate the false barriers of rational civility and irrational oppression. For Gosho, love wins, every time.