Tag: 1960s

Shinobi no Mono 3: Resurrection (新・忍びの者, Kazuo Mori, 1963)

Posted on by

At the end of the second film in the Shinobi no Mono series, Goemon (Raizo Ichikawa) was led away to be boiled alive in oil after failing to assassinate Hideyoshi Toyotomi. Obviously, Goemon did not actually die, but exchanged places with a condemned prisoner thanks to the machinations of Hanzo Hattori (Saburo Date) which is a clear diversion from the accepted historical narrative to which the film otherwise remains more or less faithful. However, in this instalment more than all the others, Goemon is very much a shadow figure, pale and gaunt, who appears much less frequently on screen and mainly relies on stoking the fires of an already simmering succession conflict in the Toyotomi camp.

At this point, Hideyoshi has already made himself de facto leader of a unified Japan having been made the “kampaku”, advisor to the emperor, only to cede that position in favour of his adopted heir, Hidetsugu (Junichiro Narita) taking the title of “Taiko.” Hideyoshi has been childless for many years which is why he adopted his nephew, but the birth of his son by blood has dangerously unbalanced the palace order with Hidetsugu increasingly certain he’s become surplus to requirements. Meanwhile, in an effort to secure his position Hideyoshi has also embarked on an ambitious plan to conquer Korea as a means of getting to Ming China and circumventing the tributary requirements necessary for trading with it. 

This plan necessarily means that they need more money with Hideyoshi calling an end to all building and renovation projects including that of a Buddhist temple playing into the series’ themes about hubris in the face of Buddha though by this point Goemon too has lost faith in Buddhism in the clear absence of karmic retribution. As Ieyasu (Masao Mishima) points out, this works out well for him as it will stir discord among local lords who will be forced to squeeze their already exploited subjects even more earning nothing more than their resentment which will then blow back on oblivious Hideyoshi.  

Thus Goemon’s role mostly involves sneaking in and telling various people that others are plotting against them and they’d be better to get ahead of it. A secondary theme throughout the series has been a sense of powerlessness which is perhaps inevitable in a historical narrative in which we already know all of the outcomes. Ieyasu scoffs at Goemon, remarking that he thinks he’s walking his own path but is really being manipulated into walking that which Ieyasu has set down for him, though Goemon effectively rejects this stating at the conclusion that as Ieyasu believed he was using him he was also using Ieyasu to achieve his revenge on Hideyoshi for the death of his wife and son. In the historical narrative, Hideyoshi dies of a sudden illness as he does here with Goemon lamenting that his revenge is frustrated by the fact that Hideyoshi is now old and frail though he achieves it through symbolically cutting off his bloodline but explaining to him that Hideyoshi will not become the heir to anything because Ieyasu will be taking the role he has so patiently waited for. Hideyoshi has in any case perhaps disqualified himself as the father of a nation by wilfully sacrificing his adopted son, Hidetsugu, who was ordered to commit suicide to avoid any challenge to Hideyori after becoming desperate and debauched in the knowledge that his days were likely numbered anyway.

In any case, Goemon perhaps declares himself free in asking why he should care who’s in charge after Hanzo once again tries to recruit him to work for a now triumphant Ieyasu whose long years of simply waiting for everyone else to die have paid off. This is what passes for a happy ending in that he has thrown off the corrupt authority of the feudal era and discovered a way to live outside of it as a “free” man though as others point out the system hasn’t changed. Poor peasants continue to be exploited by lords who are greedy but also themselves oppressed by an equally ruler playing petty games of personal power. Fittingly, ninja tricks mainly revolve around smoke bombs and the covert use of noxious fumes to weaken the opposition as they creep in to spread their poison. Never shedding the series’ nihilistic tone, the film ends on a moment of ambivalent positivity albeit one of exile as Goemon declines the invitation to the fold instead wandering off for a life of hidden freedom in the shadows of a still corrupt society. 

Shinobi no Mono 2: Vengeance (続・忍びの者, Satsuo Yamamoto, 1963)

Posted on by

Though Goemon might have thought himself free of his ninja past at the conclusion of the first film, he was unfortunately mistaken. Shinobi no Mono 2: Vengeance (続・忍びの者, Zoku Shinobi no Mono) sees him trying to live quietly with Maki and their son in a cabin in the woods, but Nobunaga is more powerful than ever. He’s wiped out the Iga ninja and is currently hunting down stragglers. Try as he might, what Goemon discovers the impossibility of living outside of the chaos of the feudal era. 

After he’s caught and suffers a family tragedy, Goemon and Maki (Shiho Fujimura) move to her home village in Saiga which is the last refuge of the Ikko rebels who oppose Nobunaga. This time around, the film, based on the novel by Tomoyoshi Murayama, even more depicts the ninja as backstage actors silently shuffling history into place. Thus Goemon takes advantage of a rift between the steady Mitsuhide (So Yamamura) and loose cannon Nobunaga (Tomisabur0 Wakayama) in an attempt to push him into rebellion. But what he may discover is that even with one tyrant gone, another will soon rise in its place. Hideyoshi (Eijiro Tono) seems to be forever lurking in the background, while Ieyasu makes a few experiences explaining that he intends to wait it out, allowing his rivals to destroy each other so he can swoop down and snatch the throne at minimal cost. 

But he too has his ninja such as the legendary Hanzo Hattori (Saburo Date) who arrives to complicate the intrigue and tempt Goemon away from his attempts to live a normal life. Interestingly enough, one of the factors leading to Nobunaga’s downfall is his disregard for Buddhism in frequently burning temples associated with ninja along with everyone inside them. Burning with a desire for vengeance, Goemon describes Nobunaga as inhuman, a demon, though he also embodies the vagaries of the feudal era in which no one is really free. Nobunaga has built a large castle estate for himself while ordinary people continue to suffer under onerous demands from local lords. Hideyoshi has also done something similar in an attempt to bolster his status and prepare for his own inevitable bid for national hegemony. 

The implication is that though the constant warfare of the Sengoku era is of course bad for farmers in particular, the political machinations which revolve around the egos of three men are far removed from the lives of ordinary people. Even so, the code of the ninja continues to be severe as we’re reminded that love and human happiness are not permitted to them. A female ninja spy working for Hanzo is despatched to Nobunaga’s castle to seduce his retainer Ranmaru but is cautioned that she must not allow her heart to be stirred. Predictably this seems to be a promise she couldn’t keep, eventually dying alongside him during an all out attack on the castle. 

Goemon discovers something much the same in encountering further losses and personal tragedies, but takes on a somewhat crazed persona in his continuing pursuit of Nobunaga, grinning wildly amid the fires of his burning castle while taunting Nobunaga that he is the ghost of the Iga ninjas he has killed. Then again, he’s laid low by his own ninja tricks on discovering that Hideyoshi has had a special “nightingale floor” installed that lets out a song whenever someone crosses it, instantly ruining his attempt to infiltrate the castle. “The days when a few ninja could control the fate of the world are over,” Ieyasu ironically reflects though perhaps signalling the transition he embodies from the chaos of the Sengoku era to the oppress peace of the Tokugawa shogunate.

Somehow even bleaker than its predecessor, Yamamoto deepens the sense of nihilistic dread with increasing scenes of surreal violence and human cruelty from a baby been thrown on a fire to a dying commander teetering on his one leg and holding out just long enough to gesture at a sign requesting vengeance against those who have wronged him. Echoing the fate of the real Goemon, dubbed the Robin Hood of Japan for his tendency to steal from the rich to give to the poor, the conclusion is in its own way shocking but then again perhaps not for there can be no other in this incredibly duplicitous world of constant cruelty and petty violence. 

Ninja, A Band of Assassins (忍びの者, Satsuo Yamamoto, 1962)

Posted on by

Ninja in Japanese cinema had largely been relegated to the realms of childish fantasy prior to Satsuo Yamamoto’s Ninja, A Band of Assassins (忍びの者, Shinobi no Mono) which cast a distinctly less heroic light on the famed mercenary spies of the feudal era. Indeed, there’s something reminiscent of the cult of militarism in the repressive nature of the ninja code and the hero Goemon’s (Raizo Ichikawa) original allegiance to it despite his father’s wariness and attempt to warn him that human happiness has no place in the life of a ninja. 

As the leader of Goemon’s clan, Sandayu (Yunosuke Ito), explains the ninja are obliged to serve whichever lords require their service, but he refuses to work with Oda Nobunaga (Tomisaburo Wakayama, billed as Kenzaburo Jo) owing to his famous animosity towards them. He even goes so far as to call Nobunaga a greater threat to the ninja than demons or devils. Opening in 1573, the film takes place at a tumultuous moment as Nobunaga continues to solidify his plan to unite the whole of the land under his banner by absorbing or defeating rival clans. The pre-credits sequence finds Goemon playing dead on a battlefield surrounded by ominous crows and encountering another ninja from a rival clan, Kizaru (Ko Nishimura), who has become a more literal kind of vulture in stealing from the dead.

Stealing is against the ninja code and something of which the young and idealistic Goemon fiercely disapproves. Nevertheless, in a cruel irony he’s forced to become a burglar in an effort to raise funds for more weapons to combat Nobunaga whom he has also been ordered to assassinate in return for his life after having been caught having an affair with Sandayu’s wife, Inone (Kyoko Kishida). Goemon is inspired by the legendary figure dubbed the Japanese Robin Hood for his mission stealing money from the rich to give to the poor, but here is far from heroic. When his affair with Inone is discovered by a servant, Goemon kills him to maintain the silence. He then believes that Inone has also been killed after falling into a well and attempts to flee the scene only to be confronted by Sandayu. 

Only too late does to he begin to understand what his father tried to warn him about, that the code of the ninja is cruel and unforgiving. It cannot grant him pride or happiness despite the self-satisfied glow he feels on having been singled out by Sandayu as a protege. A ninja must be ready to sever all ties to those he loves and endure intense torture without speaking. If caught in an impossible situation he must scar his face and take his own life as one of Goemon’s acquaintances eventually does after being captured by Nobunaga. Goemon assumes he has no reason to be afraid because he is the most skilled ninja in the garrison and a single ninja can take down a fortress all on his own, but in reality he is powerless, merely a puppet manipulated by Sandayu for his own ends. After falling in love with a sex worker, Maki (Shiho Fujimura), he grows tired of his missions, gives up on burglary, and makes no move to assassinate Nobunaga but is pursued by Sandayu’s minions, the irony being that not even a ninja can escape from the confined space of ninjadom.

This world is so steeped in secrecy that nothing is as it seems and Goemon discovers the rug pulled out from under him in more ways than one before beginning to realise that Sandayu has deliberately engineered his downfall and was most likely behind his father’s murder in an attempt to get his hands on his recipe for gunpowder which is, as Nobunaga says, the future of warfare. Nevertheless, even within its commitment to realism the film contains plenty of ninja tricks from sudden appearances to superhuman leaps and expert shuriken throwing and grappling hooks.  The sense of melancholy futility implied by the presence of the crows in the opening scenes never recedes, Yamamoto frequently descending into mists as Goemon sinks into his confusion and eventual disillusionment with the tenets of ninjadom. Rival ninja clans more obsessed with their reputation and status vie for the head of Nobunga while all Goemon wants is the right to live a quiet life with Maki though that’s something that largely cannot be found amid the constant chaos of the feudal era. 

Golden Eyes (100発100中 黄金の眼, Jun Fukuda, 1968)

Posted on by

Three years after taking down illegal arms dealers, “Interpol” agent Andrew Hoshino (Akira Takarada) returns with another globetrotting adventure, this time concerning a missing coin worth a great deal to an amoral gold smuggler. Ironfinger had appeared in the midst of Bond-mania and boasted a script by none other than Kichachi Okamoto which was full of cartoonish fun and surreal humour as Andy made use of a series of spy gadgets to aid him in his cause. The similarly Bond-referencing sequel, Golden Eyes (100発100中 黄金の眼, Hyappatsu Hyakuchu: Ogon no Me) , attempts something much the same but perhaps without so much of Okamoto’s trademark sophisticated silliness. 

This time the action opens in Beirut where a chauffeur is being hunted by a man in a helicopter as he attempts to escape through the sand dunes. Skewered by a giant grappling hook, the driver’s body is apparently then deposited on the roof of a hotel, causing not a little embarrassment to gold smuggling kingpin Stonefeller (see what they did there?) who is already quite worried about attracting the attention of the local police. Meanwhile, Andy happens to be in Beirut on another “vacation”, having fun driving the owner of a shooting game in an arcade out of his mind before he runs into a little girl who tells him that she’s looking for an assassin to avenge the death of her father, the body deposited on the hotel roof. All she can afford to pay him is the silver dollar her dad gave her as a keepsake before he died, but it’s good enough for the kindhearted Andy who decides to get justice for the little girl no matter what. Just then, however, an attempt is made on his life by means of a bomb hidden in a bouquet given to him by pretty Japanese singer Mitsuko (Tomomi Sawa) who is in Beirut to find wealthy men to finance her love of rally car racing. 

The major antagonist is an ancient American “industrialist” with a dog called Sinbad who thinks that the gold must flow and that he’s doing a public service delivering it to Japan where its absence only highlights the “backwardness” of the Japanese state. Stonefeller is also blind but an ace sniper thanks to a directional microphone in place of a sight on his rifle. In any case, though Stonefeller is the kingpin, the true “villain” is Kurokawa (Yoshio Tsuchiya) who is responsible for the death of the little girl’s father, killed while thought to be in possession of the missing gold coin. The coin later makes villains of the two Beiruti gangsters working with Stonefeller who end up chasing after Kurokawa to try and retrieve it while Andy, mysterious “reporter” Ruby (Bibari Maeda), and earnest detective Tezuka (Makoto Sato) do their best to stop them. 

The international villainy may reflect a certain anxiety about Japan’s increasingly global role, rising economy prosperity, and relationship with the Americans, but it’s also a little guilty of exoticisation in its Middle Eastern setting with the majority of Beiruties played by Japanese actors in awkward brown face. An early, spectacular set piece sees Andy and Tezuka beset by Stonefeller’s goons swarming over the dunes dressed as mothers pushing prams which turn out to be fitted with machine guns while Andy sets up a complex stunt which sets off two abandoned weapons with a single pistol shot to take down the bad guys. 

Mitsuko, meanwhile, seems to be a symbol of out of control celebrity, an aspiring singer taking part in rally races sponsored by the Japan Economic Council dedicated to fuel efficiency. She is content to be discovered with a dead body because of all the free publicity it’s about to buy her, but more than holds her own when in a difficult situation with the amoral Kurokawa, perhaps a representative of unbridled capitalist greed. Almost blown up with flowers, encased in plaster like a giant mummy, and delivered poisoned gas by room service, Andy maintains an ambiguous cool while still making constant references to his dear French mama waiting for him at home in Paris. As expected, no one except for Tezuka has been quite honest about their intentions or identities, but it hardly seems to matter as they work together while pursuing their own angles to get their hands on the coin and stop the Stonefellers of the world messing around in their economy. 

Industrial Spy (産業スパイ, Eiichi Kudo, 1968)

Posted on by

Cynical corporate spies find themselves in a battle of wits when one attempts to use the other in a psychedelic effort from Eiichi Kudo, Industrial Spy (産業スパイ, Sangyo Spy). A deliberate attempt to hop on to an ongoing trend sparked Bond mania and the success of Daiei’s “Black” series, along with the novels of Toshiyuki Kajiyama which inspired them, the film was intended as the first in a franchise vehicle for Tatsuo Umemiya whose Youth of the Night series had run out of steam. 

As such, he stars as a jaded young man working as a corporate spy stealing trade secrets on behalf of rival companies. He does not infiltrate them by gaining employment, but makes use of connections, seducing women in administrative positions, and setting honey traps for blackmailing executives sometimes even using his own girlfriend Masami (Reiko Oshida). His main justification is consumerist desire. He tells Masami that if they want nice things they have to take them. They weren’t born with a silver spoon in their mouths, so they can’t afford to act refined and expect what they want to come to them. They have to do whatever it takes or resign themselves to a life of poverty. Masami, however, is beginning to tire of this arrangement and is hurt, more than anything else, when she realises that Kogure has only bought her a new handbag, necklace, clothes and shoes to head off his guilt because he’s about to ask her to sleep with the director of a project to create an experimental engine as part of a job he’s been manipulated into by Sawada (Fumio Watanabe), the head investigator of Nisshin Industries. 

Rather childishly, Sawada convinces him to take the job basically by implying it’s too difficult for him. “There are secrets you just can’t steal,” he sighs, knowing that it’s like catnip to a man like Kogure who can’t resist a challenge even if he’s paying him less than a third of what he asked for. But Kogure has badly underestimated Sawada. When Kogure returns for his payment, he realises that Sawada sold the trade secrets back to the same company he stole them from to curry favour in the hope of worming his way in so he could take it over.  

Both men are in differing ways unsatisfied with their circumstances. Kogure resents his poverty and wants to be allowed into the increasingly consumerist society of Japan’s high prosperity era, but at the same time he isn’t especially greedy. Sawada tells him he’s doing this because money alone is no longer enough for a man to live a full life in the modern era, he must obtain a powerful position too. All Kogure wants is to sleep with the woman he loves, eat good food, and have a good time. Which is to say he only wants to be comfortable rather than wealthy but feels that that life is unattainable to him outside of his current underhanded occupation. Poignantly, after asking Masami to sleep with his mark to obtain information, he realises that he actually does love her and resolves to marry her after the job is done. But for her this was the final straw and she only did as he asked so she’d hate him enough to leave. 

Nevertheless, on learning he was tricked by Sawada, Kogure vows revenge by deliberately messing up Sawada’s plans to win a bid for a dam project on behalf of Nisshin by setting up a rival candidate and getting hold of their offer so they can make a better one. Only, Sawada always seems to be one step ahead and is even more ruthless than he is. While Kogure mourns Masami and is full of regret, pondering how he might win her back while his more straight-laced corporate lackey friend decides it’s time to shoot his shot, Sawada breaks up with his actual girlfriend to foil Kogure’s plan to photograph them together and blackmail him after he’s cynically married the disabled granddaughter of the Chuo Electric CEO who is mediating the dam bid. The older Mr Matsui (Takashi Shimura) is not completely blind to Sawada’s schemes, but blames himself for his granddaughter’s injury and believes it will be difficult for her to marry, so he’s willing to compromise himself corporately if only Sawada will ensure his granddaughter’s happiness.

Of course, that’s not really very high on Sawada’s list and only ever a means to an end. In this, he’s slightly different from Kogure who is equally heartless in some ways, humiliating a young woman who took an interest in him because she was of no use and he thought her cheap and vulgar, but clearly still has some vestige of human emotion even while realising he should probably let his friend chase Masami if he really loves her because she’s better off with him and his steady if dull corporate existence. In the end, though, neither man gets what he really wants and both ultimately lose out on both the money and the prize with Kogure vowing revenge against new enemies by whom he feels, a little unfairly, betrayed. Nevertheless, by ending with some monochrome stock footage of workers at the station, Anpo protestors being beaten by the police, and shots of US jet fighters, Kudo implies Kogure’s actions are a kind of rebellion against capitalism itself and the contemporary state of Japanese society even as he too becomes just another face in the crowd, an anonymous cog in this great shuffling machine.

Heat Wave Island (かげろう, Kaneto Shindo, 1969)

Posted on by

The death of a bar owner in Onomichi sparks a complex investigation into the condition of the islands surrounding the Seto Inland Sea in Kaneto Shindo’s darkly ironic crime drama, Heatwave Island (かげろう, Kagero). Produced by Kindai Eiga Kyokai, the independent production company founded by Shindo, Kozaburo Yoshimura, and the ubiquitous Taiji Tonoyama, the central thesis is that industrialisation has poisoned the waters surrounding the Japanese heartland, but also that the collection of weird islands had their share of darkness to begin with.

Indeed, having solved the crime, unusually chipper detective Oishi (Rokko Toura) states that it was the island that killed her. “Your traditions turned an island woman’s life to ruin,” he tells the very compromised village chief (Taiji Tonoyama) who refused to let a woman leave the island to seek medical treatment for her baby because of a taboo about setting sail on the night of a shipwreck. That’s not so much a supernatural fear or practical concern as much as a pact between islanders who have been killing shipwreck survivors and looting their boats. Nevertheless, the woman is eventually forced off the island when the men who killed her husband begin fighting over her body. The village chief tells her she has to go to preserve the “unity” of the island while her child, who survived but with brain damage, will be cared for by the other islanders.

Yet all the woman wants is to return to the island to live with her child after gaining the money to build a big house where everyone can see it. Some justification is given for the island’s cruelty in that it has essentially been starved out by post-war industrialisation. The fishing industry is dying, and the island terrain is only suited for growing wheat and potatoes, making farming unviable as a commercial enterprise. A man from another island says that as the salt fields were closed down factories arose in their place and leaked pollution into the surrounding seas, killing off all the fish. He is now bedridden due to industrial illness having worked on Poison Gas Island during the war. His wife now works in one of the “enemy” factories. “That’s how we survive,” he laments of the faustian pact between rural communities and large corporations. 

In any case, most of the young people have been forced into the cities in one way or another where they often lack the skills to find well-paying work and end up in crime and the nightlife industry. The late bar owner, Otoyo (Nobuko Otowa), was herself once from an island village, as was her bar girl Michiko (Toyama Masako). Both of them are dreaming of better lives while filled with a sense of futility. A young man who gave up on fishing to work in factories is injured in a workplace incident and is prevented from leaving hospital until he can pay his extortionate medical bills which the company evidently isn’t going to cover.

The irony is that Oishi is from a farming background too. Rich kids don’t become detectives, Otoyo points out. A poor man’s son commits a crime, and a poor man’s son will catch him, she adds signalling the ways in which the poor work against each other rather than their common enemies such as the exploitative corporations which have ruined the beautiful natural scenery of Japan’s islands along with their traditional communities. Then again, Oishi is a slightly compromised figure in other ways too. He probably shouldn’t be investigating this case given that he used to drink in Otoyo’s bar and seems to have a crush on her, which interferes with his ability to accept some of the less pleasant things they begin to find out about her past. He also has more than a fatherly interest in young Michiko and is unwilling to accept she could be involved with the crime having taken out a sizeable advance on her salary to care for her father who is also bedridden following a stroke.

The implication is that these murders are more like earthquakes, an inevitable result of friction between people caused by conflicting societal forces. Oishi concludes his investigation, but it only seems to result in a further fracture that severs the connection between the islands and the mainland, leaving another woman in a state of limbo waiting for someone who may or may not return. The convoluted, island-hopping mystery taking place under the blazing sun of a sticky summer has its degrees of absurdity, from the weirdness of these retreating cultures to the poignant presence of the dog, who alone seemed to want justice for Otoyo, who, whatever her other faults may have been, was always kind to him when others often weren’t.

Memoir of Japanese Assassinations (日本暗殺秘録, Sadao Nakajima, 1969)

Posted on by

According to the narrator of Sadao Nakajima’s artistically daring Memoir of Japanese Assassins (日本暗殺秘録, Nihon ansatsu hiroku) the practice of assassination had got so out of hand in the early years of Meiji that the emperor was forced to institute a law banning it while accepting responsibility for the lawlessness his imperfect governance had produced. But by opening with the Sakurada Gate Indecent from 1860, the film seems to be asking what went wrong in Meiji and why the assassinations have still not stopped with the implication that more may be on their way in rather febrile political atmosphere of the late 1960s in the run up to the renewal of the Anpo security treaty with Asama Sanso still a few years away.

The answer to the question that it presents, is that oppression has still not ended in Japan and that most of these assassinations took place because people had enough of difficult social conditions those in power little did to address. However, the first few pre-20th century  assassinations which are presented in the form of short vignettes, are largely a product of the confusion of the bakumatsu era as reactionaries attempt to halt Japan’s increasing openness to the wider world and what they see as a loss of national identity and sovereignty. The implication is that this sense of ideological conflict is a direct cause of the nationalism that defined the first half of the 20th century. 

It’s not until we reach the early 1920s that the secondary cause of Japan’s dire economic situation rears its head as the right-wing nationalist leader of Righteousness Corps of the Divine Land (Bunta Sugawara), a society dedicated to workers’ rights, assassinates the head of a family-run conglomerate he accuses of feeding on the blood on the common man. From this incident we can see that it is not as easy to draw a line between left and right in terms of political ideology as it might be at other times or in other nations as otherwise nationalist forces share ideas that might lean more towards socialist ideals. Ikki Kita whose philosophy informed the February 26th Incident that ends the film described himself as socialist, but is also regarded by some as the architect of Japanese fascism. With the so-called “Showa Restoration”, he advocated for the elimination of private property and a doctrine of socialism from above in which the emperor would assist in the reorganisation of society. Which is to say, the clarification of the Meiji Restoration actually meant.

In any case, it’s easy to see the reasons that these ideas caught hold and that concepts such as “revolution” were a counter to the persistent hopelessness of the depression and the extreme poverty of Japanese society while the large conglomerates prospered through trading with the United States. The bulk of the film focuses on Onuma who assassinated Junnosuke Inoue in 1932 as part of an intended reign of terror known as the League of Blood instituted by the far right Nichizen Buddhism cult led by Nissho Inoue (Chiezo Kataoka),. Onuma was still alive at the time the film was made and apparently acted as a consultant. Played by a fresh-faced Shinichi Chiba, he’s depicted as an earnest young man who is driven into the ground by the increasingly capitalist mentality of the 1920s, a time of high unemployment and frequent labour disputes only exacerbated by the Great Depression. 

Though he had been a bright and attentive student, Onuma was forced to leave education because of his father’s early death and thereafter worked a series of causal jobs before leaving a position at a kimono dyers because of their callous treatment of another employee who was forced to embezzle money because his mother was ill and he was denied a loan by the boss who justifies his position by stating that he’s already given the man several advances on his salary. Onuma’s brother also resigned from his job to take responsibility for failing to spot someone else’s embezzlement, leading Onuma to conclude that being honest gets you nowhere in this morally corrupt society. This is rammed home for him at his next job at a cake baker’s where he becomes almost part of the family and draws closer to the maid, Takako (Junko Fuji). The boss intends to rapidly expand the business by building a bigger factory hoping to capitalise on the coronation of the new emperor. Staking everything on the factory, he takes out loans from loan sharks but fails to get a business permit from the police later remarking that he was naive thinking he could do business honestly not realising that the police expected a bribe.

Tuberculosis and the death of a girl who like him could not afford medical treatment further leave Onuma feeling resentful and hopeless leading to a suicide attempt after which he is born again in Nichiren Buddhism and becomes a servant to Nissho. It’s easy to see how Nichiren could offer an escape to young men like him who burn with rage and a desire to change society, though in essence it’s no different from the militarism that was growing in parallel being rooted in nationalist ideology and for the early part at least centred in the military. The May 15 Incident saw the military and members of the League of Blood assassinate the prime minister to enact the Showa Restoration and reorganise society. The revolution failed, but the 11 young officers who took part in received little punishment, furthering cause of the militarism, while directly contributing to the February 26th Incident which though it also achieved little further cemented the power of the military over the government. 

Though imperialism is subtly presented as another form of injustice as the nation spends money on warmongering while the people starve, the film straddles an awkward line in struggling to avoid glorifying the actions of the far right in painting Onuma and leader of the February 26th Incident Isobe (Koji Tsuruta) as dashing, idealistic heroes whose only wish was to save Japan and remake it in a way they believed to be better. This was pretty much the antithesis of what Nakajima intended, though it was picked up by some as a piece of right-wing propaganda. The film courted controversy both with Toei studio bosses and the government who ordered Nakajima to soften the excerpts from Isobe’s diary fearing they were too incendiary, though Nakajima had already shot the footage and was forced to find a compromise. Toei as a studio did rather lean towards the conservative and especially in its yakuza films which is perhaps unavoidable given that yakuza organisation did often have strongly nationalistic sensibilities. Accordingly, the film stars almost their entire roster of Toei’s yakuza and ninkyo eiga stars from Tomisaburo Wakayama to Ken Takakura and Koji Tsuruta along with Junko Fuji as as Onuma’s love interest who is eventually forced into sex work because of the economic conditions of the 1920s, and perhaps comes with some of that baggage. Its closing question, however, given the fact that all these assignations achieved almost nothing of what they were intended to, seems to be posited at the current society mired in the Anpo protests and the declining student movement to ask how else society might be changed and revolution enacted to create a fairer society for all through an ideology that could end this cycle of political violence.

Classmates (あゝ同期の桜, Sadao Nakajima, 1967)

Posted on by

There had been films that dealt with the war before, but it was really with the generational shift that occurred among filmmakers in the mid-1960s that there was a greater willingness to reckon with the wartime past. Sadao Nakajima’s Classmates (あゝ同期の桜, Aa Doki no Sakura) was the first in a planned trilogy of war films at Toei, which was in other ways a studio that often leaned towards the right with its steady output of yakuza films, and most likely for that reason struggled to gain approval from studio heads. Taking its name from the military academy song, the film was inspired by a collection of essays put together from the letters and diaries kamikaze pilots had left behind. Nakajima had seen some of the letters sent back by the brother of a school friend, and reading them again on publication was determined to turn them into the film.

Nevertheless, only 25 years on from the end of the war it remained a sensitive topic. The film follows the men of the 14th class of reserve students who had previously had their draft notices deferred until they finished university but were now called up early because the war was going so badly. The majority of these men were allocated to kamikaze units and subsequently died in suicide attacks on US warships, though they received little in the way of training and mostly failed to hit their targets due to having limited fight experience. 

What might seem most surprising is that several of the men voice their opposition to the war along with the realisation that Japan is going to lose. Early on in training, one man deserts but the others are reminded that to do so amounts to treason and once caught, deserters will be executed by firing squad. This turns out not quite to be the case. Shiratori (Hiroki Matsukata), the resigned hero, encounters Taki (Mitsuki Kanemitsu) in Okinawa. where he’s working as ground staff. He’s insensible and appears to have lost his mind. The man working with him suggests that he was tortured so badly that it’s left him in a vacant state, though he’s still deployed for mindless tasks because they just don’t have the manpower.

Part of the reason for that is that they keep ordering people to die in a validation of the death cult that is militarism. On their arrival, the instructor tells the men he will have them all die, because dying for the emperor is their duty and destiny. The top brass insist this is the only way to win the war even though it’s counterproductive in that they’re running out of aircraft and skilled pilots even if one officer callously remarks that they have an endless supply of bodies. There’s also no real reason to send the planes up with two pilots as opposed to one, but they leave fully manned. The suicide missions are supposedly “voluntary”, but the men can’t really refuse due to a combination of peer pressure and military order.

When one pilot, Nanjo (Isao Natsuyagi), returns to base having been unable to reach his target, he’s immediately set upon by the others as a coward and a traitor. They accuse him of being afraid to die, leaving him feeling ashamed and frustrated by a sense of injustice while admitting that he didn’t want to die like a dog. He knows that he would not be able to go on living afterwards if he simply didn’t go through with it because the stigma of being a coward who let other men die so he could live would always be upon him. Eventually, he becomes so determined to prove himself that he insists on getting right back in his plane once it’s repaired and then blows himself up on the runway to prove a point.

Nanjo’s case is all the more poignant because he was a new father whose son was born after he was called up. He appears to have married quickly against his parents’ wishes and is now anxious that his family won’t accept his wife and child who will be left alone when he dies. His wife (Yoshiko Sakuma) desperately tries to see him to show him the baby, but manages only a few seconds before he’s forced to return to the barracks. Given a little more time, she brings a wedding dress for the impromptu ceremony they presumably skipped before, but ends up tearing it and giving Nanjo a strip as a kind of good-luck charm though like everything else it’s a gesture filled with futility.

It’s this sense of futility and resignation that seems to overtake Shiratori who knows he cannot escape his fate. To desert to is be killed anyway or to experience a spiritual death like Taki. He had introduced a friend, Hanzawa (Shinichi Chiba), to his sister and the two had become close, but he is forced to abruptly break up with her because he knows it’s unfair to string her along when he’s been sentenced to death. Reiko (Sumiko Fuji) will lose her brother and her boyfriend on the same day. Hanzawa and the other men visit a brothel on the night before their mission where they are treated as “gods”, though he sees only irony in the situation in which they are more like human sacrifices offered in prayer for an impossible victory. Their deaths will have no real meaning and are really only intended to instil fear in the enemy and weaken their morale rather than cause actual material damage to their fighting capability. Making use of stock footage, Nakajima freeze frames a plane in flight and points out at that point the men inside were still alive before cutting to a title card confirming the war ended just four months later. The title card at the beginning dedicated the film to the souls of those who died in the Pacific War, though it’s perhaps as quietly angry as it was permitted to be in 1967 in the senseless sacrifice of these men’s lives who were shamed, tricked, or forced at gunpoint into their cockpits and told they were disposable while those who stayed on the ground cheered and whooped at the grim spectacle of death.

Full Ship (滿船 / 만선, Kim Soo-yong, 1967)

Posted on by

Released two years earlier, Kim Soo-Yong’s The Seashore Village had focused on the lives of women left behind while their husbands went to sea. Full Ship (滿船 / 만선, Manseon), meanwhile, more closely examines the lives of the men themselves along with the increasing pull towards modernity as this very traditional way of life becomes ever more precarious. Based on a play and another of Kim’s literary films, it nevertheless flies close to the wind in subtly challenging the effect that feudalistic capitalism has on each of these men’s lives as they find themselves dependent on the whims of the shipowner.

As Gom-chi (Kim Seung-ho) says, he’s fifty years old and he’s spent his life captaining someone else’s boat. Yet, he’s spent a lot of it toadying for the shipowner and justifying his reluctance to pay the fisherman by citing the shipowner’s expenses which include fuel for the boat, paying the union, and mending nets. The shipowner claims that he lives off debts and the fishermen actually owe him because he’s been lending them money and expects them to pay him back. Some of the other men suggest holding a gut ritual in his honour, but it’s unclear whether the shipowner is really as strapped as he says or merely hoarding all the money for himself. He dresses in fancy hanbok and looks more like a feudal lord than a contemporary business owner. When the fishermen do indeed come in with full boats and expect they’ll finally be getting what they’re owned, they receive only sacks of rotten hulled barely rather than rice. Still, most of them feel they have no choice than to suck up to the shipowner with even Gom-chi agreeing there are expenses to pay while drunkenly letting slip that he has savings and plans to buy his own boat only for the shipowner to find out and ban him from going to sea until he pays up what he owes.

Which is all to say, they’re between a rock and a hard place though “sea-crazy” Gom-chi holds tight to this way of life and has become estranged from his oldest surviving son Do-sam (Namkoong Won) who refuses to become a fisherman while Gom-chi’s wife, who has just given birth to a late baby though already in middle age, is opposed to letting their newborn grow up to go sea. They’ve already lost two sons to the waves, while Gom-chi’s father and grandfather were taken by the waters. To his mind, a fisherman dying at sea is merely going home and Do-sam is a failure and a coward for not following the tradition. 

He blames this on the fact that Do-sam left the island to do his military service and has become corrupted after seeing a different way of life on land. Another man who escaped the island, Beom-soe (Park Noh-sik), has returned wearing a suit and looking like a successful businessman, though as we later discover he’s on the run for a crime committed in the city, symbolising what the end results of this urban corruption may be. Seul-seul (Nam Jeong-im), Gom-chi’s daughter, is also tempted by the city while travelling there to sell goods though almost run over by a bicyclist on her arrival demonstrating its many dangers. People stare and laugh at them, as if the island women with their old-fashioned hanbok had emerged from another world. They laugh at Seul-seul too when she gives in to temptation and gets her hair set and styled into a beehive paid for by her boyfriend Yeon-cheol (Shin Young-kyun) who has also resisted the sea in favour of starting an innovative pearl farming business which is starting to pay off, though Gom-chi still seems resistant to their marriage. Beom-soe is taken with Seul-seul’s island innocence and tries to convince her to come with him with fancy presents from the city of soaps, perfumes, and silk, but she continues to resist him as if sensing that his urban success is not to be trusted. 

But, on the other hand, some seem to think it would be better to take their chances on land than continue with this harsh way of life. The film opens with a funeral in which a half-crazed old woman asks why they’re burying her son when he told her in a dream that he was alive just lost at sea. After a storm, Gom-chi comes back shouting of full boats, but they’re full of dead men drowned by the shipowner’s greed though he only complains about the damage to his vessel. Even the shamaness is a little bit corrupt, telling Do-sam’s mother that it would be inauspicious for him to marry because she’s having an affair with him herself, though prayers and rituals to the Dragon King are all they really have to protect them. Trapped between the sea and encroaching modernity that promises only more exploitation and misery, they have, as the poetic bookending narration suggests, only the life-giving, life-taking waters to turn to.

The Man Without a Map (燃えつきた地図, Hiroshi Teshigahara, 1968)

Posted on by

Hired to find a missing person no one really wants found, a detective begins to chase his own tail amid the impersonal vistas of the contemporary city in Hiroshi Teshigahara’s The Man Without a Map (燃えつきた地図, Moetsukita chizu). The fourth and final in his series of Kobo Abe adaptations and the only one in colour, the film’s Japanese title “burned-up map” may also, in its way, refer to the city of Tokyo which appears blurred out and indistinct in the sepia-tinted opening and is thereafter frequently shot from above as a depersonalised space where anonymous cars shuttle along highways like so many ants moving in rhythm with the momentum of the metropolis.

We follow a nameless detective (Shintaro Katsu) as he’s charged with investigating the disappearance of a 43-year-old salaryman, Hiroshi Nemuro, who turns out to have myriad other personalities and hasn’t been seen for six months. The man’s wife, Mrs Nemuro (Etsuko Ichihara), is not terribly helpful and the detective comes to wonder if the investigation itself is intended to further disguise the man’s whereabouts and prove that he really is a “missing person”. Yet this Tokyo is full of “missing people” including the detective who, we later learn, is a kind of fugitive himself. He apparently walked out on his wife (Tamao Nakamura), the owner of a successful boutique, because he couldn’t find his place there any more. He was once a salaryman too, and became a detective because it was the furthest thing he could think of from a regular job. 

It confuses him that no one really seems to be interested in where Nemuro is or if he’s alright, only in the reason behind his disappearance. The more he chases him, the more he begins to take on Nemuro’s characteristics as if he were intended to slide into the space Nemuro has vacated. Toru Takemitsu’s eerie harpsichord score only seems to add to the hauntingly gothic quality of this quest. The question is whether such a thing as identity even exists any more. The detective puts on Nemuro’’s jacket, though it’s too small, and is mistaken for him, while a colleague of Nemuro’s insists that he’s seen him in the street and is sure it was Nemuro simply because of the unusual colour of his suit without ever seeing his face. Tashiro (Kiyoshi Atsumi) tells the detective that Nemuro had a secret hobby taking nude photos at a specialist club that caters to such things. The two of them are confident they’ve identified the woman in the picture based on her haircut, but the girl they speaks laughs and takes off her wig explaining that she was merely asked to wear it, so the woman in the photo could be anyone, including Nemuro’s own wife.

Nemuro apparently had a series of hobbies for which he’d obtained certificates because he said that having them helped him to feel anchored in his life, though he’s apparently unmoored now. Like the detective, he may have been trying on different personalities from car mechanic to school teacher looking for the right fit and a place he felt he belonged in rebellion against the depersonalisation of the salaryman society in which one man in a suit is as good as another. The detective finds an opposite number in the missing man’s brother-in-law (Osamu Okawa), a very modern, apparently gay gangster connected with a network of male sex workers sold on to influential elites, and a commune of similarly displaced people working as casual labourers that is overcome with corporate thugs and eventually trashed.

The trashing of the commune may have something to do with a man named Maeda who is a councillor in a town no one’s heard of, but was possibly involved in some shady business over which Nemuro may have been intending to blackmail him or blow a whistle with the assistance of his brother-in-law who helped him land a big contract at work. The more the detective investigates, the more confused he becomes. It’s impossible to follow the case as we might expect in a conventional noir thriller, but we’re not supposed to be looking at Nemuro’s disappearance so much as the detective’s gradually fracturing sense of self as he becomes lost in the anonymous city. He sees himself bury Mrs Nemuro in leaves only for her body somehow reduce itself to its component parts and sink into the street. Later her face is superimposed on the buildings as if she were looking down on him while he is lost and alone. Nemuro’s face also appears on buildings, though more as a metaphor as if the salaryman and the office building were one and the same and the reason the detective can’t find him is because he doesn’t really exist as a concrete identity. The detective spots a dead cat in the road and laments that he never thought to ask its name, but will try to think up a good one later. He might as well be talking about himself, now displaced, unmoored, and pursued among the city streets, a man without a map lost amid the simulacrum of an imaginary city.