Tag: 1960s

Black Report (黒の報告書, Yasuzo Masumura, 1963)

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When an overworked prosecutor is handed a murder case, his colleagues tell him he’s lucked out. Election fraud and bribery are dead ends, one says. They hire fancy lawyers, public prosecutors don’t stand a chance. But with a murder, it ought to be fairly straightforward to get a conviction. They are however fateful words, as Kido (Ken Utsui) finds himself squaring off against a ruthless opponent willing to subvert the law in all ways possible in order to get his client off the hook, 

Part of Daiei’s “Black” series, Yasuzo Masumura’s Black Report (黒の報告書, Kuro no Hokokusho) is another in a line of films from the 1960s expressing a lack of confidence in a justice system that is increasingly compromised by social inequality. Kido has 200 cases on his docket. They’ve received seven new ones just this morning, and he’s under pressure to get through them quickly. His boss has told him that a successful conclusion of the murder case will get him a promotion and a transfer to Tokyo. They’ve recently failed to secure convictions in two previous cases, which means the boss’ reputation is on the line and they urgently need to correct the record. Make no mistake, these are the good guys from the film’s perspective, but it’s also true that there’s 99.9% conviction rate in Japan. Losing cases is something that isn’t meant to happen and an embarrassment for law enforcement. 

As his colleague said, however, there is an inequality when it comes to accessing justice given that wealthy people can afford to hire fancy lawyers, while poorer ones can’t and are at a disadvantage. After pinpointing their suspect, Kido is dismayed to find himself up against corrupt lawyer Yamamuro (Eitaro Ozawa) who is willing to use every dirty trick in the book, even buying off witnesses to lie on the stand. Meanwhile, one of Kido’s central arguments relies on leveraging a conventional view of morality in claiming that the suspect, Hitomi (Shigeru Koyama), committed the crime in part because he was having an affair with victim’s wife, Miyuki (Mieko Kondo). The dead man, Kakimoto, had been a womaniser himself, while Miyuki was his second wife and a former bar hostess. In the judgemental atmosphere of the times she is perceived as a woman of low moral character. 

But as Kido’s friend points out, proving things like affairs isn’t particularly easy and even if Miyuki and Hitomi are morally flawed people, that doesn’t make them murderers. Kido is essentially trying them for the wrong “crime” while leveraging salacious gossip and hearsay to bolster his case. His other main argument is that Hitomi killed Kakimoto in order to be able to keep money he had placed with him to earn high interest through illegal loans. Kakimoto had embezzled the money from his company and at some point needed to replace it. This again signals the corrupting influence of money in the post-war society as men like Hitomi take advantage of of people’s desperation through issuing high interest loans, while others like Kakimoto game the system in order to satisfy their greed. Kakimoto does after all seem to have been given to excess with his womanising lifestyle.

Miyuki seems to have taken against Kakimoto’s secretary Ayako (Junko Kano), believing she and Kakimoto were having an affair. Though Ayako declares herself outraged and says that she intends to avenge Kakimoto’s death, even she is eventually corrupted by the possibility of inheriting money from his will along with hush money from Miyuki. Similarly, Kakimoto’s resentful son seems to have come into money recently, having his bought the building where his theatre troupe rehearses. Pretty much everyone else seems to have loathed Kakimoto, so there’s little sympathy for his death and tremendous interest in what’s going to happen to his riches.

It never really occurs to Kido that his case could fall apart if everyone suddenly changed their story on the stand, which is what proceeds to happen. Yet, Kido maintains his faith in the justice system, certain the judges will find their way to the truth without fully considering the fact he’s built an incomplete case and left openings for Yamamuro to undermine it through bribing and intimidating witnesses. Kido seems to think he’ll win just because he’s on the side of righteousness, but the world doesn’t work like that. The film ends on a note of anxiety in which it appears the guilty parties are going to get off scot-free while Kido is exiled from the city, transferred to the provinces in Aomori rather to Tokyo with his career in ruins. Nevertheless, his faith in the justice system to right itself remains absolute as he declares himself ready to trust people again having been reassured by his prosecutor friend and police mentor that they will ensure justice is served so that he can once again return to a world less morally corrupt.

Trailer (English subtitles)

The Insect Woman (にっぽん昆虫記, Shohei Imamura, 1963)

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“What other way is there?” a young woman says to her mother, little understanding that what she so casually tells her quietly crushes her mother’s view of herself as if her long years of suffering had all been for nothing while exposing her justification that everything she had done was to save her daughter from her own fate as not strictly true. The opening scenes of Shohei Imamura’s The Insect Woman (にっぽん昆虫記, Nippon Konchuki) follow a bug stubbornly traversing rough terrain, slipping, pushing onward, overcoming obstacles, yet not really getting anywhere.

The bug’s journey is echoed in Tome’s (Sachiko Hidari) return to the village at the end of the film, now an ageing woman struggling with mountain roads after long years spent in the city and finally snapping her geta leaving her barefoot on rocky ground. Like that of the bug, Tome’s life seems to be a flat circle in which history repeats itself inexorably. The film opens in 1918 as Tome is born out of wedlock to a promiscuous woman who has entered a common law union with a man who appears to have learning difficulties. Chuji (Kazuo Kitamura) may or may not be her biological father, but has an attachment to Tome. As a child, she had asked him whether they are “married” seeing as they sleep together, and he had said that they were. There is definitely more than humouring a little girl’s silly question in his reply, while he flies into jealous rages when there is talk of marrying off the older Tome to the local landlord’s son. 

Just as her mother had, Tome also has a child out of wedlock, though the father can only be Shuzo, the man her family intended her to marry in part in settlement of a longstanding debt. Tome’s early life is defined by the lingering feudalism of the rural society in which her family are serfs beholden to the whims of the landlord. The older women in the village call her away from her factory job which she says she is doing for the war effort to help on the landlord’s farm. Though she is assured she is only required to do farm work, she is raped by Shuzo who urges her to submit to him and serve her country in another way by letting him have his way with her as he will soon be going off to die for the emperor. Tome then becomes his woman, but not actually his legal wife while this justification wears a little thin when it is revealed that Shuzo has another woman and child already and thus will likely not marry her. When she becomes pregnant and Chuji beats Shuzo up, Tome is sent back to her family to have the baby. It turns out to be a girl and the older women have a brief conversation about whether to let it die as female babies are worthless and resources are scarce. This seems to run contrary to rural wisdom seen in other films such as Imamura’s later The Ballad of Narayama in which, grim as it is, male children are often exposed as girls at least can be sold, though possibly not any longer in the new democratic society.

Nevertheless, Tome insists on keeping her baby though feels out of place among her family and returns to the factory where he she has an affair with the married foreman who gets her into trade unionism and then complains that she’s too militant about the labour movement when he gets promoted to assistant manager. Tome bristles at his hypocrisy, but later abandons her ideals herself and becomes an exploiter of women after moving to the city. After visiting a shady cult to overcome her sense of guilt after a child she was looking after who reminded her of her own faraway daughter died in accident, Tome meets a devotee who complains that all of the contemporary society’s ills are caused by a lack of religious rigour, yet is actually running a brothel staffed by “amateur” sex workers to which she forcibly recruits Tome by locking her in a room with a customer. 

Just as Tome schemes by dobbing her new boss in to the police so she can start up her own business using the women as call girls posing as one half of a regular couple to avoid police detection, so she is later betrayed by her own prodigy. Tome’s travel from her rural hometown to Tokyo mimics the nation’s transition from an agrarian to an urban society mired in post-war corruption as seen in the cynical and exploitive conditions at the brothel in which the madam takes almost all the money for herself, deducting large amounts for things like kimonos and room and board, while the “amateur” sex workers prepare blood vials to convince the customers they are virgins. Tome always states that her goal is to earn enough money so that she, Chuji, and her daughter Nobuko who have been shunned by the family, could live together but though she becomes quite wealthy and sends large amounts of money home she makes no real attempt to bring them with her or to go back to the village. 

A grown-up Nobuko (Jitsuko Yoshimura) later comes to her and asks for money because some of the local youngsters are trying to start a collective farm in the wake of land reforms that redistributed landlords’ lands and ended serfdom. Tome is distressed to know that Nobuko has dropped out of school though Tome has been sending her money for the fees, realising that Nobuko will not escape the village through education nor through marrying a nice professional husband and moving to the city. In fact, Nobuko follows in the footsteps of her mother and grandmother by conceiving a child of uncertain lineage out of wedlock after being coaxed into a sexual relationship with her mother’s former lover, Karasawa (Seizaburo Kawazu), a once-prominent businessman who has fallen on hard times. He agrees to lend her the money for the farm on the condition that she make herself sexually available to him twice a week. He eventually asks her to stay and run a shop he owns instead. Nobuko agrees, but actually runs off with the money for the farm and returns to her boyfriend Yoshiji. Like Chuji, he also questions the paternity of her child, but seems to have accepted the fact it may not be his while agreeing to raise it. Tome, meanwhile, returns to the village on Karasawa’s behalf planning to tell Yoshiji about Nobuko’s life in the city in an attempt to force her to return to him.

In blowing Karasawa off and taking the money to invest in the farm, Nobuko may have broken the cycle in another way in shaking off male authority and rejecting the consumerism of the urban society, though her farm is also envisioned as a money-making business that will make them rich rather than purely self-sufficient. Another passenger on the train Tome is travelling on remarks that the rice tastes better because they have had good harvests, bearing out Nobuko’s optimism for the future. Yet in other ways, Tome is merely a passive everywoman largely oblivious to the history happening all around her. She misses the emperor’s speech announcing the end of the war while sick from malnutrition and canoodling with her lover. A former union organiser she ironically gets caught up in the Matsukawa train derailment that was blamed on the Communist Party and Japan National Railway Union which the authorities desperately wanted to crush. As an older woman, she runs into the 1960 Anpo protests, but is irritated because they disrupt her cab journey costing her time and money. She may have been corrupted by the urban, amoral capitalism of the post-war society, but is neither good nor bad, just herself and someone doing what they can to survive. 

Imamura had said that he wanted to challenge the image of suffering womanhood seen in golden age cinema. Self-sacrificing heroines such as those in Naruse’s Floating Clouds or Mizoguchi’s Life of Oharu don’t really exist, he explained. His heroines were strong and outlived men, just like Tome who tries to carve out a kind of independence for herself, but eventually finds it taken from her by other women trying to do the same. Imamura had been prevented from making another film for three years after going over budget on Pigs and Battleships, but returns with a bold new stylistic experiment using freeze fames and ironic composition to depict the “messiness” of Tome’s life in all of its moral ambiguities, victories, and defeats.

The Ghost Cat of Otama Pond (怪猫 お玉が池, Yoshihiro Ishikawa, 1960)

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Ghost cat films can often be about the ways in which the unresolved past continues to echo in the modern era. The curse is not lifted by vanquishing the evil spirit, but only by coming to an accommodation with and making recompense for wrongdoing in the distant past. This is especially the case when the film involves bookending sequences set in the modern day as in Yoshihiro Ishikawa’s Ghost Cat of Otama Pond (怪猫 お玉が池, Kaibyo Otama-ga-ike) in which a young couple accidentally become trapped within the orbit of a vengeful spirit after stopping off on their journey to get their parents’ approval for their marriage.

To that extent, the fact that they keep walking in circles and always end up back at the lake might hint at their mutual sense of anxiety about their decision to marry. “What will marriage be like if you’re like this now?” Tadahiko (Shozaburo Date) asks in exasperation, accusing Keiko (Noriko Kitazawa) of being “difficult” as she blames him for the decision to come to the lake in the first place and insists she’s too tired to continue walking. Their relationship is further strained by the lingering possibility that the parents may object to the marriage and that arriving late for their visit might not help their chances.

Their situation is mirrored in the circumstances that led to the creation of the ghost cat as related to Tadahiko by a local priest whom he consults after Keiko falls into a coma near the ruined house where they take shelter. Long ago, their ancestors Yochimaru (Shozaburo Date) and Kozasa (Noriko Kitazawa) were in love and wanted to marry, but their families were sworn enemies who strongly opposed the union. When Yachimaru was sent to serve in the capital swearing to call for Kozasa once he’d established himself, her villainous father Gensai (Yoichi Numata) moved against Yachimaru’s father Shinbei (Akira Nakamura) who had been attempting to protest the unreasonable taxes levied against local peasants who were on the verge of causing unrest. Consequently, they killed him and dumped his body in the pond. Shinbei’s beloved cat Tama drank some of his blood and became a ghost cat hellbent on avenging its master.

Tama is quite a popular name for a cat, but in this case it seems to be that it got its name from the lake where it was found which hints at a deeper origin story for this vengeful spirit. Unlike that in other similar films, it seems to have the power to manipulate people physically, at least to a degree, and also to pull them into an alternate reality as happens to Keiko during her coma when she is transported back to the Edo era before the house fell into ruins. It also seems to collect and unify various desires for vengeance though all against Gensai and his allies including the corrupt magistrate and entitled son Gorota (Hiroshi Shinguji). Though it originates with the death of Shinbei, the ghost cat later mainly takes the form of Kozasa after she drowns herself in the pond having been bewitched and seen the ghost of Yachimaru. 

In the end, this curse is only resolvable through the relationship between Keiko and Tadahiko. The ghost cat is vanquished by natural forces putting an end to the curse and releasing Keiko from her coma. After undergoing this experience, they are able to find their way back from the lake as Tadahiko resolves that they will still get married no matter what their parents say in direct contrast with Yachimaru and Kozasa who were constrained by samurai mores and unable to defy their families. In the modern era, they are free to live in the city and do as they please without needing to pay much attention to these outdated rituals, and so the ghost cat’s curse is no longer necessary as the rift is healed with their union just as if Yachimaru and Kozasa were finally united. Ishikawa conjures a suitably gothic, eerie atmosphere around the misty lake achieving ghost effects mainly through lighting in which they take on a familiar greenish hue. Away from the lake, however, it becomes more difficult to tell who is a ghost and who alive, while the ghost cat manipulates those that have wronged it into harming those they love and by extension themselves until finally laid to rest by a new generation resolving to leave the past behind.

Trailer (no subtitles)

Lady Sazen and the Drenched Swallow Sword (女左膳　濡れ燕片手斬り, Kimiyoshi Yasuda, 1969)

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A one-armed, one-eyed swordswoman finds herself fighting a war on two fronts after rescuing a young woman running away from mistreatment while herself pursued by a venal lord determined to get his hands on her ancestral blade in Kimiyoshi Yasuda’s jidaigeki adventure Lady Sazen and the Drenched Swallow Sword (女左膳　濡れ燕片手斬り, Onna Sazen: Nuretsubame Katate Giri). This wasn’t the first time the classic character of Tange Sazen had been re-envisioned as a woman, though it does appear to have been an attempt by Daiei to launch a Toei-style female-led period action series even if no further instalments were ever made.

Nicknamed “Lady Sazen”, Okin (Michiyo Yasuda) lives in a small shack with the former retainer, Gosuke (Yusaku Terashima), who raised her, and Yasu, a little boy they seem to have taken in. Gosuke provides for them by weaving baskets, while it remains true Okin occupies an awkward space in Edo-era society. Having lost an arm and bearing a large scar over one eye which is no longer functional, Okin likely could not marry even if she wanted to, nor are there any occupations which are open to her which is why the only way that she can make money is by participating in the male world of sword fighting and gambling, much to Gosuke’s disapproval. It’s also why she’s branded monstrous by her opponents simply for being a woman who is able to use a sword.

A mysterious wanderer remarks that it might have been better had she been born a man, a sentiment with which Okin agrees even as the man jokingly complains about her lack of femininity and subsequent inability to offer the customary hospitality to a guest. She also speaks roughly and drinks sake directly from a gourd. Nevertheless, she sympathises with Omitsu (Natsuko Oka) precisely because of the similarity in their life stories as two women wronged by the patriarchal samurai order. Omitsu was promised advancement through serving at the castle, but was then essentially trafficked by the Minister for Temples and Shrines who sent her to the corrupt priest at Hojoji temple where she was pressed into sex work. Having attempted to escape, she returns home to discover both her parents have been murdered after reusing to give up her location. Okin’s parents were similarly murdered by a greedy lord who demanded her father give up his sword and killed him when he refused.

There is a degree of homoerotic tension that arises between Omitsu and Okin as the pair settle in to a kind of domesticity, yet the film hints at a potential romance with sometime enemy Eizaburo (Kojiro Hongo) who has been sent by his lord who is obsessed with swords to get hold of Okin’s. Eizaburo later gives up on the idea after finding out her family history, but is also beholden to samurai mores especially when he learns his sister is to be sent to the corrupt priest as part of his lord’s plan to win favour and possible promotion from the high priest. As Okin now lives outside of samurai society, she cannot restore order within it, but is determined to use public pressure to flush the wrongdoers out by exposing the corruption through a series of pamphlets. The priest, however, is able to simply blame everything on his former co-conspirator thanks to the fact he has already installed his daughter as the shogun’s mistress. 

The unseen Lady Osode wields power in a different way, even if on the surface it looks like she too is being trafficked by her father. Refreshingly enough, Okin’s abilities as a one-armed swordswoman are totally respected. Though she may sometimes fight alongside men or they may provide assistance to her by buying time for her to escape, they never try to take over or get in her way. Rather, they treat her as an equal who is not in need of their protection. Though Eizaburo vows to give up the sword and abandon his samurai status, this is something that Okin can ever do because her duty lies in protecting her familial legacy in the form of the blade inherited from her father. She may be to a degree feminised in assuming a maternal position over Yasu, but maintains her independence in once again taking to the road in search of new adventures.

Bridge of Japan (日本橋, Kon Ichikawa, 1956)

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Punishment Room, released in 1956 as Daiei’s attempt to get in on the Sun Tribe phenomenon, had provoked a moral panic that brought the whole short-lived movement to a close. In considering his next film, Ichikawa consulted with Daiei executive Matsutaro Kawaguchi, who is also the father of Punishment Room’s star Hiroshi Kawaguchi, and was offered the chance to direct one of two relatively safe and subdued literary adaptations, either Izumi Kyoka’s Nihonbashi, or Kafu Nagai’s Okamezasa. Ichikawa chose Nihonbashi (日本橋), though his wife and screenwriter Natto Wada feared adapting it maybe beyond her capabilities.

The film is generally known under the The Bridge of Japan in English-speaking territories. This is either an attempt to suggest a wider thematic importance that extends across the nation, or an overly literal translation of a place name. In any case, the significance of Nihonbashi is that, during the time the film is set, it was known as an area where there were many high-class geisha houses. On the other hand, Izumi was well known for incorporating supernatural themes in his work, which  is why the film opens like a ghost story with the curtain rising on a dark and gloomy alleyway through which a geisha walks until she finally dissolves leaving only a creepy song and the sound of her geta rattling along on the cobbles. 

The messages seems to be that this is a place that consumes women. The ghost is said to be that of Owaka who, according to rumour, cheated on her husband who left her after which she died of tuberculosis. Ambitious geisha Okoh (Chikage Awashima) has just moved into Owaka’s former giesha house, apparently unperturbed by its grim history or the the possibility that it is effectively cursed. Geisha come to a miserable end if they act selfishly, according to one of Okoh’s clients who will essentially prove correct further sealing Okoh’s unhappy fate. As is common in these tales she has an entirely one-sided rivalry with local favourite Kiyoha (Fujiko Yamamoto) who her is total opposite in terms of personality. Kiyoha is kind, gentle, and dislikes her life as a geisha, not because she disapproves of it, but because of the moral compromises it requires her to make and the happiness that it denies her.

She has taking a liking to a regular customer, university professor Shin, but when he asks her to marry him, she has no choice but to refuse. Then again, Shin’s proposal is seemingly driven by his incestuous desire for his older sister, who, perhaps having realised this, has disappeared from his life apparently in shame in having become the mistress of a married man to provide for his education. Shin then bears out a sense of hypocrisy in the relationship between men and geisha in that he insists he has never seen has as one but only as his sister who was of course another woman sexually exploited for material gain. As Kiyoha is unable to marry him because she must also financially support her mother and an illegitimate daughter, as well as being indebted to her primary patron, they will not meet again as a geisha and a client.

Okoh, meanwhile, has a tendency to pick up things Kiyoha as dropped as a way of getting back her meaning she is now determined to become Shin’s lover, though he is not interested in her. After she helps in him out with a predicament with a local policeman in which she claims to be his wife, she really considerers herself to be so, though again one-sidedly. She then faces the same thing with a clingy client, Daikichi, she nicknames “Red Bear,” who has convinced himself, one-sidedly, that she is his wife despite also having a legal wife and child.

Red Bear is presented somewhat grotesquely and really takes on the position of a monster within the story. He was once a wealthy seafood wholesaler from Hokkaido who set up shop in Tokyo before an economic downturn which has also impacted the geisha world. This, along with his foolish infatuation with Okoh has ruined him financially and may also have contributed to the later death of his wife which leads him to abandon his infant son ironically dropping him off at Kiyoha’s knowing she will care for him though she rejected Red Bear on the grounds of his ugliness. Driven into a kind of madness, he now subsists on grubs and maggots that live on his distinctive but poorly made bearskin coat.

Okoh is also driven into madness when Shin decides to become a wandering pilgrim and search for his sister in order to ease the tension between Okoh, Red Bear, and Kiyoha. For her, Shin may represent a way out of this geisha world as a respectable man’s wife, something which is otherwise unobtainable to her. While in some senses, a geisha could claim greater independence as a single woman through running her own house rather than being dependent on a patron, she may also be denied the possibility of a settled domestic life or romantic fulfilment. Even if Kiyoha cannot escape her life as a geisha, she does at least have her daughter and comes to dote on Red Bear’s son, though without knowing who his parents were. 

Her parting with Shin (Ryûji Shinagawa), who does not belong in this world and has undergone a religious conversion in deciding to become a monk permanently having given up on looking for his sister and symbolically accepting Okoh as his wife, is then bittersweet but not as much of a tragedy as the fate of Okoh. The geisha house appears to have been purified, released from its cursed legacy under the ownership of Kiyoha even if geisha gossiping about the constant flow of people in this ever changing area. The alleyway which was once dark and gloomy, is now brightly lit and has lost its sense of ominousness, if otherwise seeming rather ordinary.

This was Ichikawa’s first colour film, though in order to recreate Izumi’s world he decided on a broadly grey colour palate for the props and sets, recreating all of the Meiji-era setting only to burn it down for real during the fiery climax. At that time, filming in colour also required additional lighting which meant that it was stiflingly hot on set. They eventually had to purchase industrial size air coolers of the kind that were only used in cafes, pushing up the production budget which was already high considering the painstaking attention to detail in the historical sets which included laying actual tracks to recreate the Meiji-era street car. Nevertheless, it all pays off in the exquisite visuals that bring that bring this world to life in all of its defeated hopes and melancholy. 

The Lightning Sword (抜打ち鴉, Bin Kato, 1962)

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A wandering samurai comes to the rescue of a young boy in search of his father in a jidaigeki adventure from Bin Kato, The Lightning Sword (抜打ち鴉, Nukiuchi Garasu). Starring Tomisaburo Wakayama in an early leading role still billed as Kenzaburo Jo, the film takes place in a slightly liminal space following those who have already fallen from the samurai world, some of whom may be able to return and others not. They are all, however, in search of something from absent fathers to runaway sisters and lost loves.

Shinjiro is on the road looking for the man for ran off with his younger sister Fumie with whom he has now lost touch, Tokunosuke (Shigeru Amachi). Unbeknownst to him, they cross paths at a roadside food stall, but Shinjiro is distracted by the presence of a little boy no more than seven or eight apparently travelling alone in search of his father now that his mother has died. On hearing this story, another man, Takuro, gets up so abruptly he leaves his sweets behind. Fearing that this man plans to rob the boy, Shinjiro goes after him and the three of them ending up going in search of Takichi’s father together.

Takuro’s intention to rob a small boy of all the money he has in the world, which admittedly seems to be quite a lot as his mother sewed koban into his kimono before she died, bears out the venality and cruelty of this rather cut-throat world. Nevertheless, Takuro is not all bad despite swiping Shinjiro’s (empty) wallet instead and is motivated to try helping a young woman escape from a brothel though he had no relationship with her and ends up losing a finger for his pains. The antagonist Tokunosuke, meanwhile, has apparently sold Shinjiro’s sister into sexual slavery and used the money for his own amusement such as drink and other women. Nevertheless, he appears to regret his decision and is filled with self-loathing as if his poor conduct were a kind of self-harm. He is minded to redeem Fumie and sells his own life to yakuza boss Tokusaburo to get the considerably large sum of 25 ryo to do so.

Even Tokusaburo is not completely heartless though ruled by greed and ambition. When Shinjiro arrives and shows him the letter from Takichi’s mother, Tokusaburo admits that he is the man named in it but denies that he ever knew her and insists he is not the boy’s father. He does this in part because he has married the daughter of his current boss and is planning not only to take over the gang but knock out their rivals and assume control over the area. To do this, he goes so far as to kill another woman he had been in a relationship with but betrayed to marry the boss’ daughter because she threatens his path to success.

But, on the other hand, denying his son seems to be something painful for him. As he says after killing Oharu, if he has denied his son to take over the gang, killing her is no big deal. He does finally acknowledge Takichi, but only when dying as a final means of making amends when it’s clear that he has failed in his ambitions. Shinjiro, meanwhile, is kindhearted and compassionate. Even on meeting Tokunosuke, he realises that he does not want to kill him because it would bring his sister pain. He protects the boy though it does not benefit him in any way, and also rescues the brother of a woman he seems to have fallen in love with but had to leave due his important revenge business. Having rescued his sister, he leaves her with Oryo and resists the cruelty of this world by forming a new family outside it. Though the events it depicts may be bleak, the film is lighthearted rather than nihilistic and allows simple human kindness and decency to triumph over venal usurpers like Tokusaburo. Elegantly lensed as one would expect of a Daiei production, the fight scenes are also impressive in terms of scale and choreography, though its real power lies in its essential good-heartedness and compassion even for its villains.

Trailer (no subtitles)

Art of Assassination (女殺し屋　牝犬, Yoshio Inoue, 1969)

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Kyoko Enami joined Daiei in 1959 and became one of its biggest stars seven years later when she played the lead in the 17-part Woman Gambler series that continued until 1971. The Art of Assassination (女殺し屋　牝犬, Onna koroshiya: Mesu Inu) shares many of the same members of the creative team while adapted from a novel by Shinji Fujiwara and written by Mitsuro Otaki who had adapted the Raizo Ichikawa vehicle Killer’s Key. Set in the present day, the film seems to be setting up another long-running series for Enami in its hints at the backstory of its hit woman heroine, though it appears not to have gone any further. 

In any case, the film anticipates the paranoia cinema of the coming decade as the ice cool Kayo (Kyoko Enami) finds herself mixed up in shady political intrigue when a yakuza working for a regular company hires her to take out a would-be-whistle-blower. Tobita, a corrupt politician in cahoots with Toyo Trading CEO Abe, has evidently been up to no good and possibly unwisely chose to freeze out one of his co-conspirators, Ishizuka. Ishizuka has now been released from prison and is minded to spill the beans on their whole operation, so Tobita wants him taken out before he can reveal his explosive memo. 

The relationship between Tobita, who is shameless in his corruption, Toyo Trading, and corporatising yakuza outfit Kijima Industries bears out a contemporary uneasiness regarding the interplay between politics, violence, and big business in the age of high prosperity. Kayo’s friend Mika works as an advertising model and has become the mistress of Toyo boss Abe to further her career. She tells Kayo that it was her dream to have her own place and live a life of luxury, which she’s ironically achieved through promoting consumerism and commodifying herself as Abe’s mistress. When Kayo is later forced to kill him, rather insensitively in Mika’s apartment, Mika seems less emotionally wounded by Abe’s death or shocked by learning the truth of her friend’s identity, than filled with despair that Kayo has now shattered her dreams. She won’t be getting any more work from Toyo nor will Abe be paying for her apartment, so she might lose everything she’s worked so build. 

Kayo, by contrast, dresses in a kimono for her cover job running a cafe and presents as the exact opposite of a modern girl like Mika. Her favourite weapon is a chunky emerald ring that conceals an extendable needle she uses to silently take out her targets. She is only really able to operate in this way precisely because of her femininity. She manages to kill Ishizuka while he’s arrogantly lounging around in a public pool at the hotel where he’s holed up by swimming under his lilo and puncturing his neck from below. This way of dispatching her targets necessarily means she has to get in close and is able to do so precisely because no suspects her. She is, however, prepared to use guns where necessary and is meticulous in her work while seemingly having no inner personality outside of her identity as a contract killer. Mika thinks they’re friends, but Kayo uses her without a second thought and seems only mildly guilty about getting her involved, placing a share of the bounty in front of her by way of compensation.

The film flirts with a backstory, offering a few flashbacks to Kayo as a child sitting in a pool of blood, but never explains any further. It seems Kayo’s coolness is a trauma response, but this job has her feeling very annoyed. As she says, it’s the first time she’s ever killed for rage rather than money and demands vengeance from those who’ve doubled crossed her. In that sense, it doesn’t really matter that her ultimate targets are the evils of the age from corrupt politicians to amoral capitalists and disingenuous yakuza because her quest is personal and driven and her own particular code of ethics, but it does nevertheless say something about contemporary anxieties. That Daiei chose to advertise this using a poster with Enami in a swimsuit, which does admittedly appear in the film, along with the Japanese title (Female Killer: Bitch) which makes the film sound a little more salacious than it actually is, suggests they may have had a different audience in mind from their usual fare, but it is a shame that Enami did not get the opportunity to further flesh out this ultra-cool heroine.

Warrior of the Wind (風の武士, Tai Kato, 1964)

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Mysterious forces swirl around a hidden village deep in the mountains said to contain copious amounts of gold in Tai Kato’s adaptation of the Ryotaro Shiba novel, Warrior of the Wind (風の武士, Kaze no Bushi). Though billed as a ninja movie (the film’s poster prominently features jidaigeki star Hashizo Okawa in ninja wraps with a shuriken in his hand), the film is really more of a historical romance in which a feckless young man finds new purpose through a love that is destined to remain unfulfilled.

Shinzo’s (Hashizo Okawa) main problem is that he is a second son and at the tail end of the Edo era, which means he has no real prospects in life. As the film opens, he is still in bed in the afternoon when he has to be woken by his indulgent older sister who nevertheless needles him about his complicated love life. A bit of a Don Juan, Shinzo has been romancing a young woman from a local inn, Osei (Naoko Kubo), but has also fallen for the daughter of a dojo master, Ochino (Hiroko Sakuramachi). In order to woo her, he’s got a part-time job as an instructor and faces rivalry both personal and professional with his colleague, Koriki (Minoru Oki), who is also interested in Ochino though she appears not to like him. 

Later, Osei describes their relationship as being more of a friends with benefits situation, though it’s clear that she is really in love with Shinzo but doubts that he takes it as seriously as she does. The implication is that she feels this romance to be impossible because of the class difference between them. Shinzo’s romantic interest in her may be precisely because he is only a second son, but even so he likely will not marry her because she is not noblewoman. Conversely, Ochino doubts Shinzo’s sincerity when he makes overtures to her knowing that he is technically still in a relationship with Osei and is unsure whether or not she can trust him despite her obvious attraction. This element of romantic confusion adds to the pervasive sense of mistrust that colours the late-Edo society in which it is impossible to tell whose side anyone is really on when even individuals struggle to define their own authentic identity. Rounding out the chaos, Shinzo is also pursued by a woman working with mysterious shogunate agent The Cat, who says she no longer knows who she is anymore and asks Shinzo to make love to her in the aim of finding out.

Shinzo too is given a mission on behalf of the shogun. As his brother says, this ought to be what finally gives his life purpose. The way to serve a lord is to carry one’s orders, as Shinzo is old after asking too many questions. But conversely, it seems to be that he finds purpose more in saving Ochino and the eventual mutual recognition of their feelings than he does in fulfilling his purpose as a samurai lord. It turns out that both the shogunate and the Kishu clan want to take over the village because it was said to have amassed vast amounts of gold, which, aside from the desire to possess it themselves, makes them a threat to the shogunate in the event they are gathering funds for a rebellion. The village is only thought to have 200 residents, though they are believed to be remnants of the once-powerful Heike clan who fled into the mountains.

Ochino’s “true identity” is then that of a Heike princess, but she again sets her authentic identity through love in making the decision to give herself bodily to Shinzo and take no other husband despite knowing she must return alone to the hidden Brigadoon-style village and thereby identifying herself as “Shinzo’s wife”. Koriki had attempted to make her his wife in nature through rape, which she seems to have escaped, despite Koriki’s taunting Shinzo with claims that he has already “made her a woman”. In her resistance, Ochino has asserted her own right to autonomy while otherwise assuming her position as leader of the clan, which has also now defeated the threat of invasion and conquest.

Bloodier and more visceral than some of Kato’s other jidaigeki adventures, the film is surprisingly gory in places with bloodspurts hitting the camera and blood trailing from flying shuriken. The violence of the action scenes is conveyed through frenetic editing and the use of POV-style closeups from the perception of the aggressor that often see the victim reeling from a blow seemingly delivered by the camera itself or else staring in horror. Visions of oddly positioned corpses add the sense of absurdity in this internecine world of intrigue and mystery where, it seems, love is the only truth but even so must itself then be denied in order to preserve the precarious order of the bakumatsu society.

Trailer (English subtitles)

Salsali, You Didn’t Know (007 폭소판 살사리 몰랐지?, Kim Hwa-rang, 1966)

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Gwang-sik (Seo Young-chun, a popular comedian nicknamed “Salsal”) is the very definition of someone who’s seen too many movies. The film opens with him playing a joke on his boss by messing around with a chocolate gun and stabbing a mannequin after becoming obsessed with the world of James Bond. Gwang-sik’s fixation echoes the kind of Bond-mania that was sweeping the globe, but has an additional flavour in the Korea of the 1960s that was ever watchful for North Korean communist spies. The title cards preceding the film even include a number to contact if you catch one or want to turn yourself in.

Nevertheless, Gwang-sik’s interest in 007 has a pulpier quality in which he sees himself as a kind of justice-minded vigilante and indulges in various gimmicks such as attaching knives to the bottom of his boots. The knife boots, however, turn out to be fairly impractical, getting stuck in a wall and making him a sitting duck for his enemies. Though they might fall for his chocolate gun, it doesn’t take them long to figure out that Gwang-sik is a complete idiot bumbling his way through life. He does, however, seem to have luck on his side. After going on the run with no money and promising to help a young lady who was robbed but also needs to get to Busan, Gwang-sik enters an amateur boxing competition despite weighing almost nothing and somehow ends up winning just on a fluke. 

He has a rather camp, effeminate quality that is finally fulfilled when he cross-dresses to go undercover as a dancer at a cabaret bar in order to unmask the criminals who robbed the jewellery store where he works. While he continues to read Casino Royale and idolise the hyper-masculinity of James Bond, the scenes at the cabaret bar seem inspired more Some Like it Hot as Gwang-sik unwittingly breaks hearts all over Busan and gets to do some very nifty dancing. For the avoidance of doubt, his relationship with Myeong-ja, the woman he met in Daegu, originally remains chaste, but she takes a liking to him for exactly that reason and, despite her appearing to be into the cross-dressing, they eventually become a heteronormative couple after Gwang-sik has solved the mystery and reclaimed his masculinity by putting on a stylish leather jacket.

Though he makes constant references to the Korean War which mark him out as being from a slightly older generation than Myeong-ja, Gwang-sik seems caught between old and new Koreas by virtue of his job at the jewellery shop. Seong-ja, the unwilling scammer and Myeong-ja’s sister, carries out a complicated heist by trying to buy 950,000 won’s worth of jewellery suggesting that the economic situation has developed to the extent that it’s produced a new class of super rich people willing to spend this kind of money, which as someone later says is enough to buy a house in a nice part of town, on something inessential purely as a status symbol. She claims that she’s been robbed, as Myeong-ja is actually later hinting the growing wealth disparity and that there are still those trapped and desperate at the end of the economic ladder. Seong-ja herself is only doing all of this because she wanted to get enough money to send her sister to university, but has since fallen into crime and immorality and is now afraid to face her, leaving the two sisters on either side of a dividing line.

Meanwhile, she makes an unwitting co-conspirator of an acupuncturist who says he treats mental illness by telling him that Gwang-sik is her brother-in-law who literally lost his mind when she inherited her late husband’s estate instead of him. Now, she says, he just goes around asking everyone he meets for money and rants about cheques and promissory notes. Swayed by her 10,000 won certified cheque deposit, the acupuncturist seems to take all of this at face value and even describes the brother-in-law’s condition as a modern malady that causes people to become obsessed with money and consumerism. Ironically enough, Gwang-sik ends up “arresting” two men for counterfeiting currency they intended to circulate in the city as if symbolising the essential meaninglessness of money as a concept, though it’s all anyone’s after.

Seon-ja turns out to be working for a kingpin (Heo Jang-gang) who runs a swanky nightclub whom she appears to despise. No matter how much she regrets her choices, she is already too corrupted and cannot be allowed to join the new society like her sister Myeong-ja. Most of the film is taken up with silliness and Gwang-sik’s anarchic spy craft in which he has the ability to turn any situation to his advantage, uttering his iconic catchphrase, “Surprise! Salsali.” and behaving more like a hero from a classic serial rather than international spy James Bond, who didn’t really do a lot of crime prevention or protecting civilians in the course of his work. Nevertheless, the film ends on a note of reconciliation as Gwang-sik’s boss patches things up with the acupuncturist. Both men look on from a paternal position, supportive, if a little embarrassed by Gwang-sik’s intention to marry and wishing the new couple well for their future having fully transitioned into the contemporary society.

The Lost Alibi (黒い画集　あるサラリーマンの証言, Hiromichi Horikawa, 1960)

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“What did I do to deserve this?” the hero of Hiromichi Horikawa’s The Lost Alibi (黒い画集　あるサラリーマンの証言, Kuroi Gashu: Aru Sarariman no Shogen) ironically asks himself, as if he assumed the answer to be “nothing at all”. Adapted from one of Seicho Matsumoto’s “Black Album” novellas, as in much noir fiction even small transgressions can have drastic consequences and even a step out of line can seriously derail an otherwise ordinary life. Ishino’s (Keiju Kobayashi) dilemma is that he knows if he speaks the truth he may damn himself and ruin the “boring, routine” life he’d built, but if he says nothing another man may pay with his life for a crime he didn’t commit. 

The film’s Japanese title is “testimony of a salaryman,” and that’s really want Ishino is giving in his opening voice over. He explains that he’s a high-ranking executive on a good salary living a fairly successful life working not at the top company in his field but the second best, which he’s fine with. He gets on with his boss precisely because he’s not interested in his job and is even hopeful he could stay on past retirement if he wanted to for that exact reason. But on the other hand, he’s 42 and has 13 years until he’s able to retire. He has no more ambition and his life is essentially on autopilot. All he has to do is stay the course for the next decade or so and everything will be fine.

But when he leaves the office, Ishino doesn’t go straight home as he tells his colleague he will when refusing an invitation, but hangs out in the city drinking and playing pachinko before going to see his mistress, Chieko (Chisako Hara), one of the secretaries working in his office. The affair may be a way of rebelling against his ordinary life or of playing with fire knowing that he could lose everything if his sexual transgression were exposed. Then again, he tells his wife he’s been to the cinema on his own, which in some ways isn’t all that different from having an affair seeing as he’s still skipped out on his domestic responsibilities and left her home alone to look after the children.

The film is mildly critical of this modern salaryman tendency in drawing a direct link between a series of murders of women who were home alone, as if their men had left them vulnerable by vacating the domestic space. Ishino’s wife Kuniko (Chieko Nakakita) even says that she feels a little afraid seeing as she’s home on her own all day while the children are at school and Ishino at work. Ishino suggests they get a dog and in the back of his mind wonders if he should get one for Chieko too. It’s not immediately clear what she is getting out of this affair, though it seems fairly likely that Ishino is paying for her upkeep which is why it’s so easy for him to force her move after they’re unwittingly dragged into the spotlight when the accused man, Sugiyama (Masao Oda), tries to use Ishino as an alibi after bumping into him in the street leaving Chieko’s apartment.

Sugiyama is his neighbour and Ishino only knows him on nodding terms, but he’s immediately worried that he may expose him. After all, he regards this as a low-class area he had no real reason to visit and does not want to have to explain what he was doing there. It doesn’t occur to him that his neighbour may not have wanted to either, if he not been accused of murder. The situation looks quite bad for Sugiyama given that the police have a lot of circumstantial evidence against him, though Ishino alone knows that Sugiyama didn’t do it because he really did see him at a time that makes it difficult to place him at the scene of the crime. But Ishino denies that he was ever there. Those around Ishino seem to condone the idea that he should just keep quiet. He’s under no obligation to help Sugiyama and it’s really nothing to do with him, anyway.

But the irony is that as things spiral out of control even Ishino seems to believe in the absolute power of a confirmatory witness. When he imagines himself talking to the police, the policeman doesn’t believe him because he lied the first time and the information is inconvenient to his case. He tells Ishino that his confession isn’t worth anything without a secondary witness to back it up, meaning he’d have to produce Chieko. It doesn’t really occur to Ishino that if he had told the truth to begin with the police might have been discreet about it. After all, admitting you were with another person whose reputation you do not wish to compromise seems to work well in crime novels. When he finds himself blackmailed by a student living in Chieko’s building, he too tries to get the student’s friend to come as a witness, bizarrely thinking that having someone else there ought to provide security seeing as he could also go to the police and accuse him of extortion if something went wrong never quite thinking that the friend might simply lie just as he did. 

A kind of comparison is indeed being drawn between Ishino and Matsuzaki (Tatsuyoshi Ehara), the student, who is painted as someone with a bad character who has got himself into debt not solely because of his economic circumstances but greed and an irresponsibility with money. Matsuzaki also behaves in an inappropriate way with Chieko in making passive-aggressive romantic overtures and becoming angry when she brushes them off, later basically forcing himself on her having just threatened blackmail. They are each in their way symptoms of post-war moral decline in their intense selfishness. Ishino has achieved the salaryman dream, but now he feels hemmed in by it and empty inside. Matsuzaki, meanwhile, is greedy and amoral, desperate enough to resort to loan sharks and blackmail while chasing the dream that Ishino has already achieved all too easily. 

But the truth is that Ishino had done a lot to deserve this, and got off fairly lightly in the end. A single moral transgression can snowball, and it’s true enough that none of this would have happened if he hadn’t had the affair in the first place. If he’d only told the truth about it, Sugiyama may not have had to go to trial and it would never have come out. If Sugiyama had been executed for this crime, Ishino would be a murderer, and maybe twice over as the person who killed the woman, and maybe several others, may have gone on to kill again until someone finally caught them, if ever. He’s endangered his wife and family, quite literally in physical terms, but also their future and wellbeing given the possibility of his reputation being ruined leading to losing his job while his children would suffer the stigma of his disgrace. He felt conflicted, chased to the brink and even considering suicide knowing his cowardice could condemn Sugiyama to death, but still chose the path of extreme selfishness which seems to be that which defines the post-war era. Even when all’s said and done, he can’t help thinking it’s all a little unfair. All he did was cheat on his wife and lie about it, why is he the one losing everything? But in the end, that’s exactly why. He cheated the salaryman dream, and the retribution was swift. Only too late did he realise the value of his “boring, routine” life of easy comfort in the increasingly compromised post-war society.

Trailer (no subtitles)