Tag: 1950s

The Crowded Train (満員電車, Kon Ichikawa, 1957)

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The Japan of 1957 moves like clockwork in Kon Ichikawa’s absurdist satire, The Crowded Train (満員電車, Manin densha). You can’t expect a seat to be there just because you want to sit down, according to go-getter Tamio, you have to fight for your place on the crowded train that is the post-war economy. His horologist father raised him to prize things like order, precision, and self-reliance, yet the irony is that in a nation like this, if everyone else’s clocks are wrong and only yours are correct, you may be better off resetting them.

Nevertheless, Tamio (Hiroshi Kawaguchi) comes to think of himself as part of the machine and does his best to slot himself into the rhythms of contemporary urban life. People move around in the same way as the bottles manufactured at the brewery where Tamio gets a job after graduating from a top university. But he soon learns fitting into the system requires a degree of compromise. On his first day at the office, he’s told off by his new boss for being overly efficient. He finished all his work before 10:30, but his daily quota is fixed and his productivity only makes things difficult for others. The head of brewery anticipates that increasing automation will allow them to increase efficiency through shedding personnel, only the unions and cultural practice won’t let them. Tamio is one of only three people was recruited for his skills. The other seven joining with him are nepotism hires that will likely drain resources due to their lack of ability, but will be promoted anyway because of their connections. 

In any case, he might have hoped for a better job after graduating from such a good university. A rational man like his father, Tamio meticulously works out how much he can expect to earn over a lifetime subtracting things likes taxes, insurance, and the costs of raising a family. It turns out, the salaryman life is rather disappointing and there’s relatively little reward at the end of it. His constant toothaches and mounting health problems are manifestations of his anxiety and buried desperation. He lives in a company dorm with no furniture surrounded by long corridors of identical rooms. Everyone leaves at the same time every morning to take their place on the train. His colleague Sarai (Eiji Funakoshi) tries to make friends with him, but also explains how most of the other men in the building have been ruined in one way or another by the salaryman life. One has returned to the dorm after his wife left him. Another has a heart condition, but has run through his sick leave and has no choice but to return to work. Tamio only got his position because the previous occupant of his room jumped from the window. 

Sarai says that he held off on making friends with Tamio because he was afraid of him. Graduates overthink things, he says, and are ill suited to the regimented life of a salaryman. The film opens with another kind of conveyor belt visualising the expansion of the educational sector beginning with a handful of graduates in the Meiji era to the present day in which there are so many the ceremony has to take place outdoors in the rain. Tamio loses his job after falling into a coma for month without giving prior notice and is told by a friend he asks for help that they just don’t need graduates from top universities. He’s eventually only able to get a job as a school caretaker by leaving his degree off resume, but is then abruptly fired when they find out. Despite the system apparently overproducing graduates it has no need for, all the teachers want their kids to university and are open to Tamio’s plan to set up school to teach people how to get in.

Meanwhile, Tamio’s father has since entered a mental institution and is apparently very happy there. Everyone else is mad except for me, he claims, but also appreciates the sense of order and precision he couldn’t find in the outside world. The doctors find it impossible tell patients apart from visitors suggesting lack of division between sanity and madness, while Tamio’s father had originally accused his mother of insanity simply for being cheerful. Cheerfulness or insanity seem to be the only ways out of this impossible situation as Tamio desperately tries to hold the roof on his shack during a storm while his mother is just happy to be able to live with her son and hopeful that her husband will get “better” so they can all live together again. “There is always another school year ahead of you,” the head teacher of the primary school tells his new charges somewhat omniously, suggesting that they too are destined to spend their lives fighting for a seat on a packed-out train with no clear destination.

Mr. Pu (プーサン, Kon Ichikawa, 1953)

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Perhaps ironically, film censorship under the American Occupation was just as heavy as it had been under the wartime authorities if tilting in a different direction. Depicting the feudal past and straitened present were equally discouraged, as was anything that showed the Occupation forces in a less than ideal light. These restrictions were, however, lifted when the Occupation came to an end in 1952 and Kon Ichikawa’s adaptation of the comic strip by Taizo Yokoyama, Pu-san (プーサン), is a relatively early attempt to address this second round of post-war chaos characterised by high unemployment and defeated hopes for the future.

Yokoyama apparently settled on the nickname “Pu-san” just because it sounded funny, though the strip later moved away from the title character to focus more on an ensemble. That may be why the name is never mentioned during the film which also incorporates elements from another Yokoyama strip, Miss Ganko. The film then focuses on mild-mannered maths teacher Noro (Yunosuke Ito), a widower and war veteran living in a boarding house where he has developed a crush on the landlady’s daughter, Kanko (Fubuki Koshiji). Noro is the sort of person destined to suffer in life as evidenced by the opening sequence in which he is almost run over by a truck, but actually ends up injuring himself by becoming entangled with a fire hydrant in his botched attempt to move out of the way.

Nevertheless, he is really at the centre of a collection of people who are struggling amid the difficult economic environment of the early 1950s in which the nation still has not fully emerged from post-war privation. His boss at the school where he works (Daisuke Kato) is clearly exploiting his nature as someone unlikely to complain about ill-treatment by asking him to work both the day and night shift for no additional pay while forgoing a pay rise he suggests he may later to give to the other teachers. Noro goes along with it because he thinks it’s better to have a job than not and others are hard to come by. His students, meanwhile, are ideologically volatile, flirting with communism or trying to defend the nascent capitalism of the democratic society. It’s one of his students that invites him to the May Day march which leads to him being caught up in the “Bloody May Day Incident” of 1952 in which the police fired on protesters opposing the Anpo security treaty killing two and injuring 2,300 people.

Because Noro is an unlucky person, a photograph of him at the event is published in the newspaper which leads to him being fired from his job. He’s then thrown into a world of job hunters jostling for work outside the employment office with seemingly hundreds of applicants for every position. Many assume him to be further up the queue because he is a university graduate, but it’s clear that things like that no longer really matter in the post-war society and may even hinder his prospects. The job he eventually finds, thanks to his landlady’s recommendation which she only gets for him with the expectation of being able to raise his rent, is working as a deliveryman for a sewing machine company. 

After the war, Singer Sewing Machines gave the patent for the Singer 15 to Japanese factories so that those which once manufactured munitions could transition to making sewing machines. However, most in the film seem to be aware that these factories are actually still making bullets for machine guns, which turns out to be the case at the factory where Noro gets a job. Japan’s post-war recovery will largely be powered by manufacturing munitions and military equipment to be used in the Korean War. This leaves Noro understandably conflicted and leads to an ongoing sense of confusion about the nature of this new “pacifist” and “democratic society”, though he justifies himself that his is only a light crime as his complicity extends only to the delivery and not to the manufacture of these deadly weapons. The ranks of the protestors at the May Day march are contrasted with those of soldiers once again marching through the streets. Harried doctor Tezuka (Isao Kimura), sick of having to rush through patients, has apparently joined the Self Defence Forces instead. 

“Miss Stubborn” Kanko, by contrast, has a good job in a bank and though she goes on a kind of date with Noro, has fallen in love with a colleague she wishes to marry. Her mother objects to the match because her boyfriend is only a middle-school graduate, but as Kanko points out he’s had a steady job and worked his way up since he was 16. A university degree might not mean very much at the present time and those who entered employment earlier might actually have a head start. In a rather cruel moment, Noro overhears Kanko tell her mother that university graduates like him are “boring” while simultaneously suggesting they take part back of the area he’s currently renting to rent out separately without reducing his rent so they can make more money. Her father, an accountant who’s ironically never made enough to pay tax, has made himself ill through overwork leaving them largely dependent on rental income. Kanko intends to continue to working after marriage, though expects that her husband will eventually be promoted to a position offering a salary that will support a family.

This is not a realistic prospect for Noro, who has now essentially been cast aside by the post-war society. His hopes of romantic fulfilment with Kanko have been dashed, exposing his vision for a rosy future as nothing more than a delusional fantasy. Caught between idealistic students who have been, like him, displaced in the new democratic era, and amoral capitalists like his former boss and landlady, he has little other choice but to retreat into the mist of an uncertain future. Unexplored subplots including a sleazy right-wing politician’s collusion with the bank manager, hint at a still murkier world of backroom deals ruled by self-interest that betrays the “democratic” ideals of the new society along with those of a man mild-mannered man like Noro who can only survive by embracing his troubles with good humour.

Last Days of the Samurai (琴の爪, Hiromichi Horikawa, 1957)

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Adapted from the final part of Mayama Seika’s cycle of kabuki plays recounting the story of the 47 ronin, Hiromichi Horikawa’s Last Days of the Samurai (琴の爪, Koto no Tsume) follows the avengers in the days after the Ako raid as they await their fate knowing that they will likely be condemned to die. Essentially a romantic tragedy, the tale focuses on Jurozaemon Isogai (Senjaku Nakamura) whose samurai resolve seems a little too solid to the men’s leader, Kuronosuke Oishi (Matsumoto Hakuo I), who worries that it may be an all too vulnerable artifice. 

Jurozaemon is the most dispassionate or perhaps pessimistic of the men. Though the ronin are held in high regard by the people, the opening scenes see street vendors cashing in by renaming their products such things as “Loyal Retainer Rice Cakes” along with a young man being arrested for committing a similar act of revenge, and the men are assured that the shogunate is urgently searching for an excuse to pardon or exile them, Jurozaemon is certain they will die. He thinks their jailor, a kind man named Den’emon, was only trying to boost their morale and that the fact they have been sent flowers by the powers that be is coded message designed to let them know that their death sentences have already been issued.

While the other men express their anxieties, Jurozaemon alone remains stoic, which is what worries Oishi. He fears this may be an act of bravado on Jurozaemon’s part designed to mask his internal conflict and that, therefore, if they are called on to commit ritual suicide, his resolve may crumble and embarrass them all in death. It’s the question of Jurozaemon’s resolve that is at the heart of the play as it faces a challenge from a young woman, Omino (Chikage Ogi), to whom he had once been engaged. Jurozaemon laughs off the affair and tells Oishi that Omino means nothing to him. He says that he only agreed to marry her for strategic reasons in service of their revenge plot and points out that Oishi did the same with several women himself. Oishi does not deny this, but does admit that even if his primary reason for associating with them was not romance, he did enjoy their company. He wonders if Jurozaemon is playing down his feelings for this woman and if they will eventually cause him to waver in reluctance to leave this mortal life behind.

In one sense, neither Oishi nor Jurozaemon express regret for using women in this way, but, at the same time, the almost crazed devotion of koto-player Omino forces them to reckon with the ethical dimensions of their actions. Unable to understand why Jurozaemon suddenly walked out on her, she demands to be let into the compound to see him. It’s imperative to her that she find out what his true feelings really were, if he ever really loved her or was only using her for his mission of revenge. Unable to gain entry, she eventually convinces her father’s friend Den’emon (Ganjiro Nakamura) to sneak her in dressed as a boy, but unfortunately, her disguise fools no one. Nevertheless, on learning that they are to die, Oishi relents and has Jurozaemon brought to her, perhaps hoping to answer the question for himself. Jurozaemon, however, treats her coldly and says that he was only using her. It seems that he does this as a means of protecting her, hoping that she will go on to lead a long and happy life with someone else rather than join him in his ritual suicide. 

The question is therefore answered to the point of perfection in that Jurozaemon is unshaken in his samurai resolve while allowed the poetic expression of his human feelings in having kept one of Omino’s koto picks on his person until the moment of his death. Horikawa keeps the deaths off screen with only a retainer calling out the names of those who are to die, lending them an elegiac quality that restores their righteousness rather than condemning the absurdity of their deaths. One of Toho’s 60-minute “Diamond” B-movie series, the film mixes an ironic humour in the men’s consternation realising they don’t actually know how to commit seppuku because none of them have ever seen it, to the sudden emergence of 47 ronin merchandise, with the gentle melancholy of tragic romance and the effects of these men’s obsessive revenge on those they’ve left behind.

Age of Nudity (素ッ裸の年令, Seijun Suzuki, 1959)

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Stylistically speaking, Seijun Suzuki’s Age of Nudity (素ッ裸の年令, Suppadaka no Nenrei) is one of the least interesting of his early phase and features only brief moments of innovation such as using the cameo effect for Sabu’s flashback and elements of his taste for surrealism with unexpected cutting between events. It does however have something a little more interesting to say about the world of 1959 through the eyes of someone in the process of becoming an angry young man.

The film opens with Sabu (Saburo Fujimaki) in his school uniform gazing at motorbikes and exclaiming that adulthood must be wonderful because you can ride a bike whenever you want. Ken (Keiichiro Akagi), the leader of a group of mainly orphaned delinquents, shows him that he could do that now. His gang make a habit of “borrowing” bikes and makes money through reckless drag races. Ken’s instructions that the bikes must be returned afterwards is symbolic of his desire to live a more honest life. When Sabu gets involved with actual crimes such as robbing a local food stand, he becomes very angry with him for compromising his more noble vision of what this group should be. 

But Ken is also working with a newspaper reporter and selling him insider stories about pre-teen “delinquents” . It seems as if every day is a slow news day in the Japan in 1959, and the reporter continues to plant scare stories in an effort to create a moral panic about feral children. Ken seems to think that he’ll keep them out of it and not actually report on anything too back that directly involves them, but of course his conviction is naive. Nevertheless, he convinces himself that he’s doing it all for the group so he can get money to buy a fishing boat and support everyone through honest work. But at the same time the fact that it’s the newspapers echoes the ways in which these children have been pushed out of society, while also ironic in that the reason Sabu loses his pair round is because he’s unfairly called a troublemaker when trying to get a reluctant customer to finally pay her bill.

The newspaper round incident bears out the ways in which Sabu is unable to control his temper and his frustration often turns to violence. The reporter asks a friend of his at school hoping he will badmouth him, but the only says that he’s not a bad kid, it’s just that his family’s poor. What Sabu most wants is to stay in school, but his parents won’t pay and his mother even says that he’s getting above himself. Poor people like them don’t go to school they just work. But Sabu’s desire to break that barrier is thwarted by social prejudice and the frustration it arises in him. He first looks up to Ken as a role model, but is also the most betrayed on realising that it was Ken who leaked info on them to the press and that he’s planning to take their share of the loot and make a new life for himself alone in the country.

Humiliated after having been betrayed by the newspaper man, Ken then reverts to Sabu’s way of thinking, that as old as he gets this society won’t respect him. So perhaps he no longer needs to respect it or to stick to the nobility he was trying to teach the kids. Adulthood won’t be what we expected, he tells Yoko, as if he had thought that on turning 20 he’d suddenly be more respected and that he’d be able to forge his own future by buying a boat and becoming a fisherman. The film’s title does not translate particularly well, but the nuance is more like “the naked age” where age refers to that of a person rather than to an era. Sabu goes to the beach and marvels that everyone is “naked”, or rather that they’re all scantily clad in swimwear, and are therefore all the same with the divisions of class and wealth temporarily dissolves. But at the same time it’s more that he himself is naked in that he’s at his most raw and vulnerable. He feels himself to be alone, and has no role models to look to for how he should live his life. Resenting his father for bowing and screaming and his mother for her lack of ambition, he wants more for himself but also can’t find a way to get it. 

The fact that Ken is eventually killed in a fiery crash signals him out as a false prophet. The person the children should have been listening to was the homeless old man (Bokuzen Hidari) who appears in a vision of beatific pastorally at the film’s conclusion posed on a green hill with the sun behind him. Though the children sometimes make fun of him for his disability and what they see as a failure at life, the old man laughs it off and is constantly happy living in a tent with his little dog. He encourages the children and gives them helpful advice that helps to overcome the failures of their birth parents, while his presence suggests that true happiness is to be found only on escaping contemporary capitalist society. Sabu too perhaps comes to a similar conclusion, realising that their “independence” is an illusion when they have to compromise themselves morally in order to earn money. Ken may have given them false hope, but perhaps the old man is different in living his own “independent” life defined by humanism and simplicity free from the constraints of a society which only values and status.

The Mother Tree (怪談乳房榎, Goro Kadono, 1958)

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An amoral ronin worms his way into the home of a famous painter with the intention of stealing his wife in Goro Kadono’s eerie tale of ghostly revenge, The Mother Tree (怪談乳房榎, Kaidan Chibusa Enoki). As might be expected, it doesn’t go particularly well for him. He is, though, perhaps a symbol of the latent fear of social interlopers and those displaced within the Edo-era class system. Namihei (Asao Matsumoto) claims that he was let go by his master for being too interested in painting, though is otherwise focused on short-term gains and causing destruction.

Shigenobu (Akira Nakamura) is said to be “the greatest artist in Edo”, and is certainly very much in demand. He is father to an infant son, Mayotaro, and husband to devoted wife Kise (Katsuko Wakasugi). He appears to be a good man, if a little scatterbrained and hugely overworked, which is one reason why he was grateful to take on a pupil. The irony is that both Kise and the family’s maid Hana (Keiko Hasegawa) remark on what a nice guy Namihei is and how glad they are to have him in the household. He’s even good with the baby who apparently likes to be held by him. All of which suggests that he might have actually had talent for painting and could probably have succeeded Shigenobu, in time, if hadn’t been such a terrible person. 

Unfortunately, however, Namihei reminds Shigenobu that he promised to paint a freeze for a temple some distance away and had sort of forgotten about it. An impulsive soul, Shigenobu decides he’d better leave right away if only to shake off this sense of unfulfilled obligation that’s been plaguing him. He entrusts the women of the household to Namihei in his absence and has no reason to fear any harm may come to them while he’s away. Namihei, however, attempts to rape Kise as soon as he leaves. Though she resists him, he threatens to kill her son and she is forced to give in to a prolonged period of sexual exploitation.

This is actually quite a dangerous move on Namihei’s part considering that the penalty for adultery under Tokugawa law is death, which might be why he finally ends up killing Hana after she witnesses Kise being abused and tries to help her. Namihei evidently doesn’t have a long-term plan for how all this is supposed to pan out and panics on hearing that Shigenobu will be returning much earlier than he expected. The irony may be that Shigenobu intended to paint eyes that might see into the next world and eventually becomes a vengeful ghost after being brutally murdered by Namihei, though was unable to see his treachery. Evidently never having read a ghost story himself, Namihei dumps the body in a pond, which is all but guaranteed to come back and haunt him. “Though you kill me, I will not die,” Shigenobu curses, vowing that he cannot pass on while his dragons lack eyes. 

What might be surprising is that neither of the vengeful ghosts blame Kise for her plight or seek revenge against her. The rage of a vengeful ghost can often be indiscriminate, but both Shigenobu and Hana seem to understand that Kise has been abused by Namihei and only submitted to him out of maternal devotion in the desire to have her son. Namihei’s transgression aims at straight at the concept of motherhood and with it the entire social order. Having displaced Shigenobu, Mayotaro now seems a nuisance to him. He believes he’s conquered Kise by fear and no longer needs this leverage to control her now her husband is dead.

It is mainly fear that causes people to behave in strange ways. Namihei orders their servant Shosuke (Hiroshi Hayashi) to kill Mayotaro, telling Kise that he is to be sent to a noble samurai family that will assist in his social advancement. Kise seems to go along with this, despite having sworn to raise Mayotaro to take revenge. Shosuke is unable to resist after Namihei threatens him with death, but places Mayotoyo by the Mother Tree which had once nourished him. Following her husband’s murder, Kise’s milk had dried up in shock as if echoing this attempt on her maternity which was then restored by the ancient natural authority of the tree. 

That it’s the Buddhist priest that becomes a figure of moral authority and goodness positions Buddhism as the counter to the amoral nihilism of men like Namihei. Having been struck by Namihei, Kise leaves her son in the priest’s care who will raise him not for revenge but peace and forgiveness. This might run counter to the Shinto-inflected role of the Mother Tree as a symbol of the power of nature, but ultimately suggests that true righteousness is found in Buddhism and its values. Namihei pays for his amoral venality after being tormented by spirits appearing as flaming orbs. Japanese ghosts rarely harm humans directly, but cause them to hurt themselves through fear and madness. That he ultimately kills Kise despite Shigenobu’s telling her to raise their son suggests that she is being punished too, though none of this was her fault and it is really she who puts end to Namihei’s reign of terror. With his death, order is, in a sense, restored as Shigenobu returns to put the eyes on his dragons who can indeed see a better world free of greed or cruelty. 

Pure Emotions of the Sea (海の純情, Seijun Suzuki, 1956)

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Directed under his birth name Seitaro, Seijun Suzuki’s second film Pure Emotions of the Sea (海の純情, Umi no Junjo) is essentially a vehicle for pop star Hachiro Kasuga who plays a character with the same and sings several of his popular hits including Otomi-san which eventually sold over a million copies. Perhaps precisely because of its nature as a 45-minute programme picture, Suzuki was able to get away with quite a lot of the nonsense that would become his signature style in an otherwise anarchic tale of a romantically troubled whaler and the improbable number of women who love him.

Hachiro is the harpoon operator on a whale boat, but it’s mainly women’s hearts that he seems to be piercing. While he seems to have feelings for captain’s daughter Kazue (Toshie Takada), he also attracts the attentions of Miyoko (Tomoko Ko), daughter of the head of the shipping company, local sex worker Yumi (Miki Odagiri), and “judo-geisha” Suzugiku (Kyoko Akemi). His various encounters encourage him to swear off women, but this is quite a small town and he can’t avoid them entirely. Eventually, Miyoko suggests that perhaps she, Yumi, and Suzugiku could divide Hachiro in three with Yumi taking his money, Suzugiku his heart, and Miyoko his throat for his singing voice. After some rather macabre discussions about how to get his heart out of his body, they settle on a time share arrangement instead with each of them having Hachiro for eight hours of the day, though Hachiro’s thoughts don’t seem to enter into it.

Conversely, ambitious rudder-operator Goro is interested in all these women too, though for largely cynical reasons. With the captain’s position weakened he’s angling to take over, though is unpopular with just about everyone except Yumi who feigns taking her own life to get his attention when he starts trying to woo Suzugiku, who doesn’t like him at all. He seems to be a kind of parody of the ambitious salaryman, even giving hair tonic to his balding boss in the hope of currying favour. The other sailors, however, seem to see Hachiro as a natural successor, though the captain isn’t so sure and particularly hates his habit of singing all the time. There’s a minor irony in the fact that Suzugiku often carries a portable radio to listen to Hachiro’s songs, making her a representative of modernity rather than the emblem of traditional culture one might expect a geisha to be. She even plays records of Hachiro rather than playing the shamisen much to Captain Eizo’s (Jushiro Kobayashi) consternation. According to him, geisha aren’t what they used to be. Not only are there “judo-geisha” but dancing geisha and mahjong geisha too.

Eizo’s grumpiness and harsh treatment of his men is one reason given for the boat’s declining fortunes, with Hachiro posited as a more cheerful presence who could boot their morale, though he’s more dopey than anything else and preoccupied with his romantic difficulties. Thus it’s not surprising that Eizo’s position is under threat or that he mildly resents Hachiro though picking up on his daughter’s obvious fondness for him. Nevertheless, he will eventually have to make way for the next generation, handing his captain’s jacket over to Hachiro in addition to accepting him as a potential son-in-law.

Suzuki, however, takes a rather roundabout route to get there embracing an absurdist sensibility and sense of cartoonish fun. He opens the film with an ethnographic voiceover reminiscent of a travel programme and then cuts to Miyoko away at university studying whales and introducing herself to the camera as a kind of guide to the weird fishing village, though she is not the protagonist of the film and only resurfaces halfway through as a love rival. He also adds in surrealist touches such as frequent cuts to classical statues during Suzugiku’s judo routine. When she shows off her techniques, she throws Goro straight through a wall leaving a man-shaped hole behind, while she later deflects his romantic attentions by punting him right to the top of a tall tower at the beach. Suzuki also uses small stretches of whale-themed animation to add to the childish sense of fun while simultaneously ignoring the bloodiness of Hachiro’s job as a whale hunter. Probably, he could only get away with all this precisely because it was a 45-minute kayo eiga pop song movie intended as a programme filler, but still there are hints at what would become his signature style in his distinctive composition and absurdist sense of humour.

Disobedience (親不孝通り, Yasuzo Masumura, 1958)

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After finding out his older sister has had an abortion after her lover tells her he has no interest in marriage, a college student vows revenge in Yasuzo Masumura’s Disobedience (親不孝通り, Oyafuko Dori). The film’s Japanese title translates as something like “lack of filial piety street” and refers to an area where youth congregates to misbehave, bringing shame on their families with their debauched behaviour. It’s into this world that the cynical hero attempts to drag the sheltered heroine as part of his revenge plot while she apparently decides to stick with him even after he raped her during a college camping trip.

It is though notable that neither of them have much parental input to begin with. Kaneko’s (Hitomi Nozoe) mother has died and we’re told that their father spends all his time with a mistress and never comes home leaving her in the care of older brother Shuichi (Eiji Funakoshi), a salaryman. It’s not exactly clear where Katsuya’s (Hiroshi Kawaguchi) mother is, only that she lives somewhere else and occasionally writes while he is technically in the care of his older sister Akie (Yoko Katsuragi) who works as a tailor in a boutique store selling western fashions. Akie had been carrying on an affair with Shuichi she assumed would lead to marriage and was initially happy about the pregnancy only to be blindsided by Shuichi’s reaction. When he tells her that he has no intention to marry, she realises that the relationship is at a dead end and that an abortion is her only real option given the situation.

The irony is that Katsuya resents Shuichi for failing to take responsibility as a man and vows to take revenge by doing the same thing to his sister and seeing how he likes that. Though Akie points out that it’s nothing to do with Kaneko and tries to stop him, Katsuya is hellbent on playing the cad to make a point. Of course, he may also resent Shuichi, an executive salaryman, precisely because of the position he is in. There has been an economic downturn and he’s having trouble securing a job for after his university graduation. Some companies have halted recruitment entirely and another of Katsuya’s friends has already been through 11 unsuccessful interviews. Other young men have taken to politics, protesting new authoritarian legislation and investing in socialism. Katsuya and friends find this to be disingenuous, assuming it’s just another shrewd move to get on the ladder by finding employment in government or unions. The salaryman dream is a fairly new post-war invention, but it seems to be dying already and Katsuya can’t even really see what his education was for. He tells Kaneko that he only studies well enough to pass so that he can get a good job and the point of life is to figure out how to make money. If he can’t do that, then his life is meaningless and futile. That might be why he spends his time scamming entitled Americans (the only people with money), beating them at bowling, and hanging out in jazz bars. Though the Occupation is long over, the film has a strong but subtle sense of anti-Americanism as symbolised by the aeroplane flying above as Katsuya rapes Kaneko out in the mountains. 

But for Kaneko the situation is not much different. The young women complain it’s even harder for them to secure employment. Katsuya dismisses Kaneko’s university education by calling it a bridal academy, though most of the women lament that marriage is the ultimate job and perhaps the point of university for them is meeting a husband, just as it’s securing employment for Katsuya. Later, when he confronts Shuichi, Katsuya describes Kaneko as damaged goods now that she’s no longer a virgin and is currently carrying a child for which he accepts no responsibility. That may be one reason that she decides to stick with her rapist, realising that her situation is now impossible given it may be difficult for her to marry someone else while supporting herself financially as a single woman is not yet a viable option. By pursuing a relationship with Katsuya, she reasserts control over the situation along with the narrative of what happened between them on the mountains. 

On learning the truth, however, she makes a different decision from Akie in declaring that she will drop out of university and move to Osaka to live with an aunt and raise the baby alone there, declaring that she has decided to go on loving Katsuya no matter what he might think about it. Kaneko’s decision prompts a reversal of Akie’s thinking too. Though she had decided to be independent, starting her own business rather than planning for marriage, she returns to Shuichi and suggests they should get back together. To her the idea of running her own business and being married seem incompatible. Chastened by this whole affair, Shuichi’s thinking seems to have reversed too, to the extent that he decides to marry Akie after all, while Katsuya also decides to accept responsibility and go to Osaka with Kaneko where they will marry and stay together forever. It’s a strange “happy” ending, though it’s difficult to see how these marriages could ever really be happy given the circumstances that led to them and the discordant music that strikes over an ironic Merry Christmas sign as the film comes to an end suggests they probably won’t be. Nevertheless, the ending reverses a lack of filial piety in the shift toward conservatism through heteronormative marriages and the formation of new families as Katsuya, at least, takes responsibility for his paternity and exits the nihilistic world of clubs, bars, and bowling alleys in which his friends remain trapped.

Murder on the Last Train (終電車の死美人, Tsuneo Kobayashi, 1955)

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Rather than the hard-boiled tale the title may suggest, Murder on the Last Train (終電車の死美人, Shudensha no Shi Bijin) seems to be one of a number of films made in the early post-war era designed to improve the reputation of the police force. Just as in Bullet Hole Underground, we’re shown several scenes showcasing police technology and depicting detectives as men of science rather than an authoritarian force extracting confessions and pressuring suspects. The film went on to inspire a long-running series of police procedurals, and is shot in the style of a documentary lending an air of realism to its tale of murder, desperation, and spiralling debt.

Yet all the police know in the beginning is that a young woman has been found dead on the last train out of the city at its final stop of Mitaka. Times being what they are, they don’t even know who she is, and have only slim leads to go on such as the possible sighting of a middle-aged man running away across the tracks, though it was dark and raining so no one can be quite sure. Nevertheless, we quickly see the law enforcement machine spring into action. The call centre is alerted and arranges for detectives from the top murder squad to attend the scene. The narrator tells us that they are ready to respond at any time of day or night, and that, like a pack of wolves after their prey, they will not rest until they’ve apprehended the guilty party. The way this and the closing statement are phrased makes it sound a little like the squad is sort of eager for a murder to occur to have something to do, which probably isn’t the intention but does make them seem a little blood thirsty. Especially as one of the policemen we’re introduced to is said to care about nothing other than murder. 

Nevertheless, the narrator introduces us to all of the squad members who each have their quirks from the henpecked husband to the former monk. There’s a running gag that they can’t get anything done at their office because of constant noise outside from advertisements, festivals, and children singing. Despite all of their technological advances, all they can really do to begin with is wander round Mitaka with photos of the victim along with one of a man found inside a locket she was carrying, asking local people if they know them. They can only assume the woman must have lived in Mitaka because she was presumably killed between the previous stop and the train’s final destination, but there are other reasons she may not have alighted earlier. 

The trail eventually leads them to a land broker, Hayakawa (Eijiro Tono), who has a solid alibi but is acting in an incredibly suspicious way. He also turns out to be in mountains of debt, and may have been acting recklessly trying to right himself financially, while a young man he’s acquainted with, Saburo, may have equally been hooked on the idea of living the high life on stolen money. Another man has been embezzling from his company with no real explanation given as to why save possibly trying to get himself into a financial position appropriate for marriage. The implication that this economy is still a crime factory filled with desperate people who do anything they can either to escape their straitened circumstances or protect what they have.

That might be one reason the police, who all seem very nice and, in general, treat suspects and witnesses kindly and with respect, are keen to get away from the idea the murder may have been a random crime perpetrated by someone trying to ease their frustration or strike back against society. People can feel reassured that this young woman’s death can be explained because it means they are in less danger from a threatening world. The policemen are also there to provide that reassurance, suggesting that any crime that occurs will be swept away neatly, without really dwelling on the other implications of a super-powered police force. The narrator explains that most crimes are committed simply, and for simple reasons, which is comforting, in a way, but also not. In any case, the central message is that modern law enforcement is scientific and compassionate, and the police force a well-oiled machine designed to protect all citizens from the threat of crime wherever and whenever it may arise.

Sisters (姉妹, Miyoji Ieki, 1955)

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Two sisters find their paths diverging amid the changing society of post-war Japan in Miyoji Ieki’s adaptation of the autobiographical novel by Fumi Kuroyanagi, Sisters (姉妹, Kyodai). Updated to the present day and co-scripted by Kaneto Shindo, the film paints the sisters as representing a generational divide with the older, much more conservative of the girls is drawn to a traditional lifestyle while equally corrupted by the city in her conversion to Christianity, while the younger is a truth-telling free spirit deciding that she doesn’t want that kind of life and will find a husband for herself if indeed she ever decides to marry.

The Kondo family is evidently quite progressive in that they are not wealthy but have chosen to send both of their older daughters to study at middle and high school in the town where they lodge with their mother’s sister (Yuko Mochizuki). They also have three younger brothers who have stayed with their parents in the village, while their father (Akitake Kono) works at a hydroelectric dam. The fact that he works at a power plant aligns him with the post-war recovery which is largely built on the back of these new engineering endeavours, but there is little discussion of the ways in which they’ve changed and disrupted rural life. 

As New Year approaches, everyone is looking forward to them meeting their end of the year challenge so they’ll get a 1000 yen bonus only for a sudden outage to occur on the deadline day. The older sister, Keiko (Hitomi Nozoe), becomes fond of a worker named Oka (Taketoshi Naito) who is part of the labour movement and often sings Russian songs but is an economic migrant from another town living frugally while sending most of his pay back to his mother and siblings. He is already supporting a family, and therefore has no prospect of marriage for the foreseeable future. Even if he and Keiko have taken a liking to each other, they each accept the practical reality and agree that it is better that Keiko accept an arranged match her parents have set up for her with a young man who works in a bank. The groom’s occupation echoes the increasing urbanisation of the nation, as the parents clearly believe the marriage will buy Keiko a much more comfortable life in a higher social class even if Keiko seems to want to stay in the village.

While they lived in the town, Keiko converted to Christianity out of loneliness because she could talk to God any time she wanted. Toshiko (Hitomi Nakahara), the younger sister, points out it might have been a better idea to make friends who were a bit more local, but despite appearances Keiko seems better suited to a more old-fashioned way of life. Christianity reinforces her conservatism in that she hopes to always be pure and correct and takes against those she does not think to be. On their visit home, the girls witness a young woman they know be beaten by her husband who is much older than her. Keiko takes against the woman and rudely leaves her home. Later the woman is beaten again because her husband discovers a young man in their home. No additional explanations are sought, the woman is assumed to have been involved with another man more her own age, but surprisingly some of the villagers speak in her defence telling her husband he’s being unreasonable and raising the double standard that men do this sort of thing all the time. The woman tells Keiko to be careful whom she chooses for a husband. She came to this village never having met the man she would marry, and now she’s stuck here with a child. Her only ray of light is that she will raise her son to be a better man than his father. 

Keiko’s future happiness depends entirely on the nature of a man she doesn’t know. In the town, the girls had been somewhat disillusioned when their long-absent uncle Ginzaburo (Jun Tatara) returns home from working away and they catch him drunk in the street cavorting with geisha. This is really a double betrayal, not only stepping out their aunt, but selfishly spending what little money they have on trivial pleasures for himself. But like an inverted picture of village life, their aunt seems not to mind and accept it as just something men do. The same uncle is also picked up for illegal gambling, which is more of problem in a practical sense aside from additional evidence of this moral failings. 

All of these experiences have certainly soured Toshiko’s view of marriage, and most particularly of arranged ones which are something that belongs to the older Japan that Keiko still inhabits. A worker at the plant asks Keiko if she’ll be going to university, but she replies that girls in her family don’t and that she’d rather be married. Toshiko, meanwhile, on witnessing the suffering of those around her and most particularly the poor decides she’d rather be a doctor or politician to try and change society. She supports the strikers at the plant who are protesting against job cuts, but also says they should have resisted more when the protests fail as if they were somehow at fault in their lack of commitment. Her father’s reaction to failing to stop the lay-offs is to stop Toshiko going on her school trip because the other workers’ children can’t even go to school now their fathers have been let go, which doesn’t really make sense and is not really fair, though he is also worried about his job amid this very changeable society. 

For Toshiko’s part, she remains staunchly of the village but is ironically more suited to life in the town, which is to say the future. People are always telling her that she speaks her mind too often and that people in the town aren’t as forgiving as those in the village, but she continues to speak as she finds and indifferent to censure. Keiko criticises her for behaving like a boy, wearing rustic work clothes and chopping wood while they’re home for New Year and not helping out with the domestic work like cooking and cleaning which she thinks of as a daughter’s duty. Toshiko develops a friendship with a wealthy girl from school who apparently likes her more than a friend and asks her to be her first kiss, lending a queer-coded dimension to Toshiko’s rejection of traditional gender roles and desire for a more independent life in the town. 

She recognises both that greater class disparities exist in the urban environment than they did in the village, but also feels sorry for her friend who shares the same name but is trapped by her privilege. When Toshiko visits their home, it’s clear the girl’s mother looks down on her because she’s not of their social class, while Toshiko’s friend has an older sister and younger brother with apparent disabilities that the family keeps hidden away in shame. Meanwhile, the sisters become aquatinted with an elderly couple who are both disabled themselves while their daughter is ill with TB. Without thinking, Toshiko uses a slur word to describe a disabled person when talking about her friend’s family without thinking about the fact that the father is also blind. They don’t mind at all, but if even Toshiko is thoughtless enough to use a word like that it only reinforces the prejudice of the world around her.

The implication is that if the old couple lived in the village, there would be people around to help them, but in the town everyone is anonymous and indifferent. The state should be filling in for the community, but it isn’t and there’s no one to help the vulnerable in the increasingly capitalistic post-war society. The irony is that Uncle Ginzaburo says everything was better in the war and that Japan can’t survive without conflict, while the fact the economy is improving in the mid-1950s is entirely due to the stimulus of the Korean War. Even so, Toshiko remains generous of spirit. She doesn’t agree with her sister’s decision and is worried for her, but also agrees that they can only be true to themselves and follow their own paths. This is what Keiko has chosen, no matter how it might turn out, while Toshiko has rejected it, insisting she’ll find her own husband if she wants one and vowing to be useful and fight injustice in the wider world whatever form that may take. She wishes her sister good luck as she watches her disappear over the horizon, and sets off on her own path into a future that’s equally of her own choosing.

Passport to Darkness (暗黒の旅券, Seijun Suzuki, 1959)

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Another of Seijun Suzuki’s early Nikkatsu noirs, Passport to Darkness (暗黒の旅券, Ankoku no Ryoken) starts out like The Lady Vanishes and then turns into the 39 Steps while drawing influence from hardboiled Hollywood movies such as The Big Sleep. It is, however, very much about the confusing landscape of late 1950s Japan in which nothing is quite as it seems and shady forces are constantly operating in the background out of view. “Darkness can descend on our lives just like that, can’t it?” the hero remarks, “there’s only so much an individual can do,” he sighs, “who’s going to protect us?”

Probably not the policeman, who replies that that’s just how Japan is now. Though, in general, the police are doing something even if there are hints they’re also mixed up in this swirling darkness. They don’t really hang on to jazz trumpeter Ibuki (Ryoji Hayama) as a suspect for very long, though they do keep him under a watchful eye just in case. Ibuki marries the singer from his nightclub band and is about to depart on his honeymoon, an all expenses paid gift from his bosses, when he gets off the train to look for a friend who’s running late, Moriwaki. When he gets back on the train, his new wife, Hiromi, is nowhere to be found.

Rather than thinking she may ironically have got off the train to look for him and not made it back on, Ibuki jumps to the conclusion that she’s got cold feet and jilted him before their honeymoon. Though he gets off at the next station, he’s too embarrassed to call any of his friends fearing they’ll make fun of him for being a guy whose wife left right after the wedding. It’s this sense of insecurity that makes him a little less sympathetic, thinking mostly about himself rather than seriously considering something may have happened to Hiromi or that she’s just on the next train. That’s probably why he doesn’t do anything sensible, like going back to their apartment to see if she’s there, and only makes cryptic phone calls before asking a friend to meet him in a bar and explaining the situation. He spends the evening on an endless pub crawl supposedly looking for her while drowning his sorrows. When does eventually get home, he discovers Hiromi dead in their flat having been strangled with a tie. Obviously, this makes him the prime suspect, though the police are unusually open to the idea someone else was involved.

Ibuki turns private detective trying to work out what happened to Hiromi and who might have wanted to hurt her. The police tell him there was heroin in her handbag and they therefore suspect the crime has something to do with drugs, but that doesn’t add up with the Hiromi that Ibuki knew. Either they’re wrong, or Hiromi was somehow hiding a massive drug problem from him and maybe he didn’t know her at all. This sense of uncertainty is echoed in Suzuki’s dreamlike aesethetic which already leans towards the surreal. When the club MC announces Ibuki’s marriage onstage, he dissolves to be replaced by Moriwaki who hands the pair their honeymoon tickets suggesting that sudden appearances, disappearances, and missing time are common in this world. Later Ibuki listens to a secret conversation through a wall of jagged glass echoing the confusing nature of the story he’s beginning to trace.

That story itself largely revolves around drugs and displacement. Hiromi had been looking for her missing brother with the police suggesting he’d probably become a yakuza and might not be worth looking for. Others are motivated solely by a determination to liberate their loved ones from a drug addiction that has been forced on them as a means of control by an organisation that’s dealing drugs from bar called Tsubo on which Ibuki stumbled during his drunken pub crawl. One of the ringleaders, Ishimaru, is said to be from a zaibatsu family, which the heir to a large conglomerate and a member of the economic elite. He mentions a past in the navy and his conversation steers toward the nationalist, lending a nasty flavour to his already shady activities.

Eventually the trail leads back to a Frenchman named Franc and a “gay boy”, to use the parlance of the time, named Kenny who is also trapped due to being a drug user. It’s not particularly unusual to see places like these, essentially host bars where men pay to drink with effeminate male hosts, in films of the time, but Passport to Darkness is particularly sympathetic towards the community. It’s clear that the evil is drugs and that Kenny is an innocent who’s been swept into intrigue. Gay bars and gay people are just normal parts of life, not evidence of a seedy underbelly or the moral turpitude of the post-war society. What is rather surprising is that the film features a kiss between two men, which is pretty progressive for 1959.

Nevertheless, as Ibuki says, there’s not much the individual can do defend against the forces of darkness and even some of his closest friends turned out to be no good, while those he doubted were actually on his side. He keeps getting mysterious letters warning him off all signed “K” which is inconvenient, because most of the people he knows have a claim to the initial, and really it could be anyone. There doesn’t seem to be a clear answer to the question of who is going to take responsibility, but Ibuki simply goes back to his life, deciding music is the best way to honour Hiromi’s memory by playing American jazz in a bar that’s mainly frequented by an international clientele hinting at the nation’s new global ambitions.