Tag: 1960s

Invasion of the Neptune Men (宇宙快速船, Koji Ota, 1961)

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Japan was well on the way to economic recovery by 1961, but the newly prosperous society also gave rise to other anxieties and most particularly in the light of the Cold War and space race with the nation fearful of falling behind in scientific development. Or at least, that’s something that particularly bothers the young heroes of Koji Ota’s kids tokusatsu, Invasion of the Neptune Men (宇宙快速船, Uchu Kaisokusen), in which the nation’s failure to build a space rocket is conflated with its traditional visions of masculinity. 

At least, the boys all agree that Tachibana (Shinichi Chiba), a young scientist who runs a kind of club with them at the research facility where he works, is pretty great but also a bit of a wimp who failed to stand up to some bullies who were hassling him at a local cinema. They think it would be better if he were cool, re-imagining him as a kind of tokusatsu hero named “Iron Sharp” for whom they even come up with a theme song. As part of their club activities watching satellites, the kids accidentally stumble across a spaceship belonging to Neptune men who are planning to invade though obviously as they are children no one really believes them until the Neptune men start causing other forms of destruction. 

Attacked, the kids are saved by the hero they themselves made up flying in on a car/plane/spaceship though he too doesn’t really have a lot time for them and the kids don’t even really notice he looks a lot like Tachibana who is noticeably absent from the lab whenever he’s around. Even so, this being a kids film the major the problem is that no one else takes the boys very seriously, save Tachibana himself, leaving them to save the day on their own while the grown-ups argue amongst themselves. 

Getting people to argue amongst themselves turns out to be part of the aliens’ mission in exploiting Cold War paranoia to start world war three. The first attack results in a mushroom cloud which must have been fairly painful symbolism though the Americans immediately blame Russia who blame the US in return asking if they’re really intent on starting a nuclear war. The kids wonder why grownups are always so suspicious of other countries, hinting at a desire for a less xenophobic society eventually echoed in the calls for worldwide unity to defeat the Neptune men while otherwise repeatedly emphasising that Japan can’t be left behind by the US and Russia in the space race. 

Then again, there is something quite troubling in the fact that the invading Neptune men who’ve taken on human form appear as soldiers but wearing prominent feminine makeup, re-echoing the boys’ concerns regarding science and masculinity while introducing a seemingly unintentional dose of homophobia into the threat posed by the aliens who otherwise wield destructive nuclear powers echoing the atomic bomb in using their ray guns to vaporise their targets who then leave shadow imprints of themselves where they disappeared. The main weapon used to combat them is science, Tachibana and his boss, the father of one of the boys, coming up with an ingenious electric shield and then a series of magnetic rockets which allow them to shoot down the Neptunian’s ship. 

In this case, science is the “good” force that combats the “bad” use of nuclear weapons this time rendered alien rather than manmade therefore neutering the debate surrounding their use and the responsibilities involved with their discovery. Tachibana, the thinly disguised Iron Sharp, then becomes a hero of science racing round in his custom car and largely defeating the Neptunians through a more primal kind of hand to hand violence while embodying the kind of cool masculinity the boys the otherwise feared he lacked which is to say that unlike his real life guise, Iron Sharp is perfectly capable of standing up to “bullies” like extraterrestrial invaders. Reusing some of the effects footage from The Last War, the film emphasises the need for world unity and the end of the Cold War, but also sells a slightly contradictory, mildly nationalist message insisting that Japan can’t fall far behind technologically or will essentially be at the mercy of Russia and America, Tachibana having travelled to Moscow to assist with the creation of a new spaceship. Spurred on by their adventures, the kids all vow to become great inventors protecting Japan through their innovations, going on to explore Mars and Venus hinting at a new sense of possibility in the post-war society but also mindful of its geopolitical realities.

The Threat (脅迫, Kinji Fukasaku, 1966)

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An ambitious executive is confronted with the emasculating nature of the salaryman dream when escaped convicts invade his home in an early thriller from Kinji Fukasaku, The Threat (脅迫, Odoshi). The threat in this case is to his family and implicitly his manhood in his ability or otherwise to protect them while accepting that his aspirational life has come at the expense of his integrity and left him, ironically, hostage to the whims of his superiors.

This much is obvious from the opening sequence which takes place at a wedding where Misawa (Rentaro Mikuni) is giving a speech congratulating two employees on their marriage. Misawa’s speech is long and boring, as such speeches tend to be, and according to some of the other guests disingenuous in giving glowing reports of two ordinary office workers while skirting around the elephant in the room which is that Misawa has played matchmaker to convince an ambitious junior to marry his boss’ mistress for appearance’s sake. As Misawa himself has done, the employee has sacrificed a vision of masculinity for professional gain in accepting that his wife’s body will “belong” to another man and it is the boss who will continue sleeping with her. 

The only person not aware what’s going on is Misawa’s naive wife, Hiroko (Masumi Harukawa), who enjoyed the wedding and remarked that the couple seemed very well suited giving rise to an ironic laugh from Misawa who of course knows that not to be the case. They return by car to a nice-looking home but one that stands alone at the end of a street preceded by a series of vacant lots presumably available to other similarly aspirant salarymen yet to make a purchase. Shortly after they arrive, two men force their way in and insist on staying explaining that they are the pair of escaped death row convicts that have been in the papers and are in fact in the middle of a kidnapping having taken the grandson of a prominent doctor with the intention of using the ransom money to illicitly board a ship and leave the country. 

Naked and covered in soap suds having been caught in the bath, Misawa is fairly powerless to resist and can only hope to appease the men hoping they will leave when their business is done. His acquiescence lowers his estimation in the eyes of his young son, Masao (Pepe Hozumi), who later calls him a coward and is forever doing things to annoy the kidnappers such as attempting to raise the alarm with visitors by smashing a glass or speaking out against them while Misawa vacillates between going along with the kidnapper’s demands or defying them to contact the police. After failing to retrieve the money when ordered to act as the bag man, Misawa stays out trying to find another way to get the cash and Masao wonders if he’ll come back or will in fact abandon them and seek safety on his own. Misawa really is tempted, darting onto a train out of the city his eyes flitting between the sorry scene of a small boy with a tearstained face tugging the sleeves of his father who seems to have fallen down drunk on the station steps, and a woman across from him breastfeeding an infant. He gets off the train only at the last minute as it begins to leave the station as if suddenly remembering his role as a father and a husband and deciding to make a stand to reclaim his patriarchal masculinity. 

The brainier of the kidnappers, Kawanishi (Ko Nishimura), had described Misawa as a like robot, idly playing with Masao’s scalextrics insisting that he could only follow the path they were laying down for him much as he’d already been railroaded by the salaryman dream. During a car ride Kawanishi had asked Misawa what he’d done in the war. Misawa replied that he was in the army, but had not killed anyone. Kawanishi jokes that he’d probably never raped a woman either, but to that Misawa gives no answer. Realising that the other kidnapper, Sabu (Hideo Murota), had tried to rape Hiroko he turns his anger towards her rather than the kidnappers striking her across the face and later raping her himself avenging his wounded masculinity on the body his of wife while unable to stand up to either of the other men. 

Kawanishi giggles and describes him as exactly the kind of man he assumed him to be but he’s both wrong and right. Misawa had been spineless, insecure in the masculinity he largely defined through corporate success though as Kawanishi points out most of what’s in the house is likely being paid for in instalments meaning that technically none of it’s actually his. He defined his position as a father as that of a provider, ensuring a comfortable life his wife and son rather than placing importance on his ability to protect them physically from the more rarefied threats of the contemporary society such as crime and violence. On leaving the train, another symbol of the path laid down for him both by the salaryman existence and by Kawanishi, he is able to reclaim a more primal side of his manhood in formulating a plan of resistance to lure the kidnappers away from his wife and son. 

But then in another sense, it’s Hiroko who is the most defiant often telling the kidnappers exactly what she thinks of them while taking care of the kidnapped baby and doing what she can to mitigate this awful and impossible situation in light of her husband’s ineffectuality and possible disregard. She is the one who finally tells Kawanishi that she no longer cares if he kills her but she refuses bow to his authority and he no longer has any control over her. Even so, the film’s conclusion is founded on Misawa’s reacceptance of his paternity in a literal embrace of his son, redefining his vision of masculinity as seen through the prism of that he wishes to convey to Masao as an image of proper manhood. Fukasaku sets Misawa adrift in a confusing city lit by corporatising neon in which the spectre of the Mitsubishi building seems to haunt him amid the urgent montage and tilting angles of the director’s signature style still in the process of refinement as Misawa contemplates how to negotiate the return of his own kidnapped family from the clutches of a consumerist society. 

The Desperate (どろ犬, Takaharu Saeki, 1964)

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A bruiser cop railing against the system is pulled towards the dark side in Takaharu Saeki’s icy noir, The Desperate (どろ犬, Doro Inu). Adapted from a novel by Shoji Yuki, the film is one of only two Saeki directed in an otherwise lengthy career mainly spent in television and captures an eerie sense of existential dread as its detective hero sinks to even greater depths in a quest for self preservation while kicking back against the hypocrisies of the post-war society. 

As one officer puts it, Sugai (Minoru Oki) is one of many veteran officers who can’t adjust to new codes of justice in the democratic era. In the film’s opening sequence, he’s pulled aside and warned about using excessive force on a suspect only to counter that he knows the guy’s guilty so he doesn’t see what the problem is. Sugai had been particularly motivated about this case as the victim was an 18-year-old girl raped after accepting a lift from a stranger. She was so traumatised that she could hardly speak but did remember the registration plate of the car. She’d only been working because her father lost his factory job though he appears to have begun drinking and is abusive towards his daughter for her silence, later coming to the station to drop the charges after being paid off by the suspect’s lawyer. The legal definition of rape in this era is founded not on an idea of consent but whether violence was involved and the victim can be proved to have resisted physically. The guilty party, Tomita (Hideo Murota) claims that nothing illegal transpired in his car and then walks away with a smirk when his lawyer gets him off the hook. It’s all too much for Sugai to bear, resentful that the rich and powerful are now effectively above the law thanks to legislation he feels ties his hands as a police officer. 

It’s at this point he runs into petty yakuza Yamaguchi (Ko Nishimura) whom he’s been trying to turn as an informant, unwisely mouthing off about his dissatisfaction with contemporary law enforcement only for Yamaguchi to turn the tables and effectively blackmail him having discovered that Sugai has begun a relationship with the estranged wife of an imprisoned gangster. In an act of petty revenge and desperation, Sugai leaks info on “guilty” suspects who weren’t charged to Yamaguchi who exacts financial justice by extorting them for money while threatening to expose their immorality. 

Disappointed in him, the gangster’s wife, Chiyo (Chisako Hara), exclaims that Sugai’s no different from her husband and in truth he isn’t. Part of Sugai’s resentment lies in the fact his wife left him for another man while he was on a stakeout, frightened by his violence and insisting that she hated detectives. His old-fashioned police tactics include taking suspects to the dojo where beats the living daylights out of them. Later he tells another, more earnest officer, he reminds him of himself when he was younger implying that he has become corrupted by the times and the impossibility of justice, particularly for young women whom he feels an urge to protect, in a world ruled by money and status. He may feel some pangs of guilt for a rookie who is unfairly fingered as the mole on the grounds that he and Yamaguchi were originally from the same area and had a past acquaintance, but in the end is happy enough to scapegoat him for his wrongdoing while he continues trying to dig himself out a hole but falling still further into the abyss. 

Sugai is merely trying to save his own skin, but those around him are desperate too. His opposite number, Toku (Hisashi Igawa) is desperate to clear his name, while Chiyo is desperate for what she describes as a proper marriage to a proper man while seemingly kept captive in the apartment Sugai rents for her on his meagre police salary but does not live in himself. She wants to work and has an innocent desire to buy him some better shoes that he otherwise resents in its implied challenge to his masculinity that he evidently cannot afford all this additional expense coupled with the strain of keeping his problematic relationship with a gangster’s wife secret from his employers. In the end he claims that the problem was he couldn’t escape from being a detective, pushed into desperate acts of destruction as a man now exiled from his times unable to move on from post-war chaos into a newly democratic, consumerist Japan. Saeki ends his fatalistic vision with an image of a train reeling backwards, echoing the degree to which Sugai has lost control of his life and himself no longer a detective but only a man without a moral compass whose path can only lead in one direction. 

The Passionate Spinster (結婚相談, Ko Nakahira, 1965)

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A woman still unmarried at the comparatively late age of 30 begins to go out of her mind while on a hellish descent into vice and crime in Ko Nakahira’s darkly comic satire, The Passionate Spinster (結婚相談, Kekkon Sodan). Shimako (Izumi Ashikawa) begins to feel as if her existence has no value as a single woman who has already aged out of the arranged marriage market, pressured by her family members to settle down and with seemingly no possibility of supporting herself as an independent woman almost as if such a thing could not exist even in the more enlightened world of 1965.

Shimako’s age is her primary problem. We often see her using some kind anti-aging device on her face and reapplying her makeup but as others reveal men in search of marriage are looking for women in their early 20s as is soon confirmed to her when she decides to visit a matchmaking agency after attending the wedding of a close friend, Mikiko (Michiyo Yokoyama), at which she is made to feel like something of an embarrassment giggled at by her younger coworkers who regard her with thinly concealed pity. As a voiceover explains, far more women sign up to matchmaking agencies than men while the age range is typically late 20s. Men’s only condition is that the woman be young, while women are mainly concerned with a man’s height and educational background. Shimako is not particularly picky and simply lists that she’d prefer a man of over 170cm in height, under 35 years old, and a university graduate but despite the beauty with which she is often credited she soon discovers that being over 30 is a deal breaker for most. 

The first man she meets remarks to the matchmaker that she looks “young” for her age and then inappropriately adds that she must be virgin, but eventually decides to marry a 24-year-old woman introduced by his boss. The second, a farmer with an interest in electronics, makes her an offer but is quickly vetoed by his family who feel that there must simply be something wrong with a woman who remains unmarried at 30. The last man the matchmaker, Tonobe (Sadako Sawamura), suggests is a 50-year-old widower named Hidaka (Tatsuo Matsushita) whom Shimako only considers out of desperation but later warms to uncomfortably because he reminds her of the father she lost in the war. Hidaka tells he that once they marry he will be a “father” to her too while taking this as a firm promise Shimako ends up sleeping with him to seal the deal. 

It’s with this that she damns herself, driven into a near nervous breakdown on realising that Hidaka may have been just another married man using a dating agency for extramarital sex. Then again, she’s told this by Tonobe who as it turns out, despite her frequent claims of being “not a yakuza” and concern for her agency’s reputation fearing she will be accused of running an illicit sex ring, is actually doing exactly that. Shimako accepted money from Hidaka and in so doing could be taken for a sex worker. Reminding her that sex work is against the law, Tonobe essentially blackmails Shimako into quitting her office job to work for the agency full time as a call girl, “protected” and “observed” by her two goons one of whom the agency’s other girl, Asako (Michiko Sasamori), suggests is actually Tonobe’s husband. 

In another kind of film, Shimako’s new line of work may have proved liberating, freeing her from the patriarchal ideals surrounding marriage, but it’s true enough that she falls into in a dangerous underworld as a virtual slave of the increasingly monstrous Tonobe whose demonic laughter begins to ring in Shimako’s ears along with all the criticism she’s received from men so far regarding her age. She seeks romantic escape after bumping into office lothario Takabayashi (Masaya Takahashi) who ironically asks her to pose as his fiancée to help him get rid of a problematic bar hostess who’s latched on to him. He promises to marry her too, only it soon transpires that he has massive debts and has been embezzling money from the company which he fears will soon be discovered because of an unexpected merger. Just as Hidaka had offered to become her father, Takabayashi likens her to his mother adding that he was never breast fed. 

With somewhat incestuous overturns, the lines between to blur between the ideals of wife and motherhood as Shimako becomes in effect responsible for a failed man pledging that she will use her body to pay off the debt that Takabayashi owes so that he won’t be prosecuted while believing that he will actually marry her. But her body belongs to Tonobe who reminds her that though she doesn’t care who she marries (an odd comment considering how they met) uncompensated romance is against the rules and she must now be punished in being sent to a further level of hell in essentially being offered up to an ogre in a remote Western-style mansion. Taking on gothic overtones, Shimako unexpectedly finds a kind of fulfilment while essentially embodying maternity in fulfilling the oedipal desires of a young man apparently driven mad who immediately tells her that avatars of his mother have appeared in this place before ominously adding that he has killed all the “fake” ones. Shimako later tells his sympathetic mother that her son was the best of the men she’s met while doing this kind of work and the first she’s slept with whose feelings were pure. 

Through this expressionist sequence which takes place during a gothic, violent storm surrounded by pictures of the Madonna, Shimako undergoes the first of her rebirths in effect giving birth to herself as a woman no longer quite so concerned with the necessity of being married though the film strongly implies she soon maybe. Her maternity is later reconfirmed when she unexpectedly reunites with her former boss, possibly the only “good” man seen in the film in having embraced his own paternity while caring for a wife with a longterm illness and raising his two children. His wife having died, when Shimako meets him again it’s almost as if she were meeting her own father in the memory she described to Hidaka though he is much closer to her in age while also unlikely to have any strong feelings either way regarding either her being over 30 or the scandals surrounding everything that happened to her after quitting the company. 

The film may suggest that it’s partly Shimako who is “old-fashioned”, something she later accuses her mother of being once she discovers that Shimako has been engaging in a sexual relationship with Takabayashi on only the promise of marriage, in contrasting her with the slightly younger Sakata (Kaoru Hama) who scoffs that she wants to put off her (already confirmed) marriage because she’s only 23 and wants to have a little fun first later seen in a nightclub with a gang of rough-looking guys who nearly cart off a near comatose Shimako, but then stops short of actually critiquing the institution of marriage only suggesting that Shimako’s intense anxiety was misplaced because the right man would have come along eventually. It may expose the matchmaking agency for what is really is and in its way fight back against the archaism of the arranged marriage along with the patriarchal social system and its intrinsic ageism but leans towards the view that a woman’s value lies in maternity in positioning Shimako to become a stepmother rather than simply a wife. Nakahira shoots with a noirish intensity before descending into a gothic eeriness in the demonic laughter of the incredibly sleazy Tonobe and creepiness of the mansion even if what Shimako discovers there is perversely a kind of purity that finally allows her to reclaim an image of herself as a pure woman even in the depths of her degradation. 

Here Because of You (君たちがいて僕がいた, Ryuichi Takamori, 1964)

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“The strength of our modern generation is that we never let anything get us down, and we’ll go after what we want without a moment’s hesitation.” The heroine of Ryuichi Takamori’s cheerful teen comedy Here Because of You (君たちがいて僕がいた, Kimitachi ga Ite Boku ga Ita) encapsulates a sense of post-war youth while trying to convince a sullen friend to join her in standing up to injustice when their teacher is smeared in the press, but he for his own reasons remains indignant and defeatist certain that nothing they do will make any difference. 

Essentially a vehicle for Toei teen stars Chiyoko Honma and Kazuo Funaki, the film is like many similarly themed youth movies of the time a progressive appeal to a new generation intent on rebelling against the social conservatism of their parents along with the injustice and inequality that accompanied it. The villain of the piece is the father of one of the students, Akira (Masaaki Sakai), who has become wealthy and is intent on throwing his weight around. Tanaka (Ken Sudo) wants his son to go to the best university in Japan and does not take kindly to the advice of his teacher, Mr. Yamabuki (Sonny Chiba), that Akira is just not up to it academically and putting so much pressure on him to achieve something which is almost certainly beyond him will only make the boy suffer. 

Akira is one of those kids with his head in the clouds who isn’t particularly good at anything. School is in general a torture for him and he himself knows that Tokyo University is not a possibility though he’s prepared to do his best if only his father would lower his expectations and let him apply to a college that is more within his capabilities. Both Tanaka and Mr. Yamabuki are however partially at fault when Akira is injured during a PE lesson that he was supposed to be excused from, Tanaka having told him not to participate in sports but to spend the lesson doing extra study instead. Mr. Yamabuki had thought that Akira had just not been applying himself, but a combination of a lack of physical agility due to being kept off PE and being encouraged to push himself further than he should lead to him falling from some climbing bars and spraining his ankle.

As might be expected, Tanaka is not happy and even asks for a second opinion on his son’s minor leg injury while deepening his grudge against Yamabuki. Tanaka also has a minor grudge against fellow student Hiroshi (Kazuo Funaki) who threw a bucket of frogs at him (to which he is allergic) for reasons Hiroshi doesn’t fully understand after hearing him kick off about Akira’s college prospects. It’s Hiroshi who fulfils the role of rebellious youth in the angry impulsivity that he often cannot explain. He’s been saying he doesn’t want to go to college but it’s because his older sister was forced to leave education during in middle school because of the family’s poverty and has become a geisha in order to pay for his tuition. Yamabuki and Hiroshi’s sister Yukiko (Junko Miyazono) develop a fondness for each other while discussing Hiroshi’s education, and it’s this suggestion of there being some impropriety in a schoolteacher dating a geisha that Tanaka takes to papers in effort to get Yamabuki fired. 

Meanwhile, Hiroshi’s cheerful classmate Chieko (Chiyoko Honma) has also developed a crush of Yamabuki. Claiming that she intends to marry him, she goes so far as to turn up at his house and insist on doing his laundry but he quite reasonably tells her that as an adult man his wife would have to be an adult woman. Surprisingly, she gets over it quite quickly and realises that Hiroshi is a much better match for her instead, but nevertheless springs into action when Yamabuki is unfairly smeared in the press. Even she is originally scandalised by the suggestion that her long widowed mother (Mieko Takamine) may have feelings for a local doctor (Shuji Sano), but soon comes round to the idea that there’s nothing wrong with it if she has just as there’s no problem with a teacher dating a geisha. She claims she would be more offended if each of them were forced to deny their feelings for each other because of social propriety and is intensely annoyed by the network of local corruption she uncovers in investigating the origins of the false news report which also suggests Yamabuki may have been inappropriately carrying on with a student, presumably herself. 

As chairman of the parent teacher association, Tanaka tries to railroad the headmaster into firing Yamabuki by holding a kangaroo court at which Yamabuki is prevented from speaking in his own defence all while his character is assassinated. But the kids, who previously witnessed a drunken Tanaka harassing Yukiko, aren’t having any of it and abandon their lessons to surround the meeting vowing that they’ll go on hunger strike if they aren’t listened to which won’t look very good in the national papers. What they bring about is a kind of democratic revolution in which the corrupt authority of Tanaka is deposed in favour of the more evenhanded chairpersonship of Chieko’s grandmother who turns out to be the oldest person in the room at 63. The children will not be ordered around or told what to think and will stand up to injustice where they find it, which is very bad news for those like Tanaka who are used to getting their way because of their privilege and social status. It’s all very wholesome and innocent, perfectly in keeping with the zeitgeist while remaining cheerful and upbeat even with Hiroshi’s continued brooding until Chieko finally manages to win him over. A charming teen musical adventure with a handful of songs performed by its idol stars, the film’s infectious energy is difficult to beat.

Portrait of Hell (地獄変, Shiro Toyoda, 1969)

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Asked to paint a vision of heaven, an artist replies that he cannot because he sees it nowhere in this present society. “Over my body and my life, you have absolute authority. But you can never command my artist’s soul,” he spits back at his corrupt lord, but in many ways the lord can command his soul as an artist for he creates the world he reflects for all that he attempts to manipulate him as a man and one he assumes to be far inferior to himself. 

Shiro Toyoda’s adaptation of the classic horror story by Ryunosuke Akutagawa, Portrait of Hell (地獄変, Jigokuhen) opens with a brief voiceover narration that explains that this story takes place almost 1000 years ago in the Heian era when the Fujiwara clan was at the height of its power. But after so long at the top of the tree, the Fujiwara have become both restless and indifferent in their complacency. “The common people live lives of hopeless despair,” the narrator explains outlining the Fujiwara’s inability to govern as even minor natural disasters give rise to famines and corpses litter the streets. Even nobles now live “lives of perpetual dread” having gained a sense of their own impermanence. 

Lord Horikawa (Yorozuya Kinnosuke) is however seemingly oblivious to the suffering of his people. Yoshihide (Tatsuya Nakadai), a Korean painter, tells him that his problem is everyone tells him what he wants to hear (because they fear for their lives) rather than what is actually happening. During the opening sequence, Horikawa had abruptly decided to leave a public celebration. An old man appeals to some of the guards for money, but they roughly beat him and he is later trampled to death by Horikawa’s frightened bull which had become loose during a storm. The old man dies cursing him, exclaiming that “he has treated us like slaves. I have become no better than an animal.” Horikawa had been told that the man used his last dying breath to remark on what an honour it was to be trampled by the lord’s bull. Yoshihide paints a picture that drives a court lady out of her mind featuring the corpse of the old man under a cherry tree that seems so vivid to her that it emanates a stench of death. Horikawa doesn’t like it much either, and its uncanny realism unsettles his mind. He thinks he sees the ghost lying in wait for him in his own bed and orders Yoshihide to dismantle the painting as if that would make the ghost disappear. 

Horikawa believes the “ghost” is a manifestation of Yoshihide’s rage rather than his own guilt or incompetence. Yoshihide certainly does not like the world the lord has made, replying that he has seen hell everywhere in the cities and the villages while there is no heaven to be had which is why he cannot paint it. Yet Yoshihide and the lord are almost perfect mirrors of each other. Yoshihide is also rigid and superior. He prides himself on being Korean, pointing out that the foundations of the court and of modern learning were all brought over by Korean scholars even if Horikawa claims to have “improved” upon them. Yet some of his fellow painters worry that the style their Korean ancestors worked so hard to perfect has been eclipsed by Japanese influence while secretly considering returning to Korea which has now become prosperous unlike the conditions in Japan. 

Horikawa later slips and calls Yoshihide a stupid “foreigner” making plain his contempt despite describing him as the greatest artist of his generation which is why he’s commissioned this piece of art in the first place even though he had described all of his previous pieces “ugly” while objecting to their attempt to show him how rotten his kingdom has become. Yet Horikawa is correct when he says that it’s Yoshihide’s “infernal arrogance” that has provoked his downfall. Having caught his daughter Yoshika (Yoko Naito) with one of his pupils, he locked her in a shed and exclaimed that no other man would have her. If he had not done so, she may never have come to the attentions of the lord and suffered her eventual degradation at his hand, nor would Yoshihide have been so easily manipulated into a obsessive desire to effectively depict the depths of hell. 

Yoshihide is some kind of method artist who insists he can only paint what he sees. Thus he goes to great lengths to observe hellish cruelty, tying up an apprentice boy in chains and torturing him with snakes, his eyes burning with a fiery intensity. His tragedy is that he comes to realise that the painting reflects not the world but himself. He is hell, hell is here. While his daughter burns, he looks on impassively only to be outdone by her pet monkey who in a gesture of selfless love leaps into the flames. Even so, Horikawa praises the finished painting as a masterpiece, “an impressive depiction of the hell that is our life,” commenting somewhat ironically on the current conditions within his fiefdom. Only latterly does he notice his own role within it, suddenly consumed by his hellishness as if dragged own into the flames despite himself. 

Toyoda shoots in the manner of a classic ghost story, making fantastic use of ghostly effects as Horikawa finds himself haunted by the spirits of those he’s wronged. At times, the screen fills with red light as if soaked in blood or baked in the hellish glow of slow burning flames. He flips between the icy blues of Horikawa’s estate, and the stifling ochre that seems to surround Yoshihide who does after all feed off all this strife rather than seeking to cure it. The two men end up in an impossible game of brinksmanship from which neither can back down, two “arrogant” rivals blindly creating a hell for those around them through their selfishness and vanity. “Life is more hellish than hell itself” runs a final quote from Akutagawa, laying bare the tale’s essential irony in our inability to recognise the hell we create for ourselves and others through our own arrogance and fear.

Eighteen Years in Prison (懲役十八年, Tai Kato, 1967)

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Genre star Noburu Ando had a certain cachet in that he had been a yakuza prior to becoming an actor. He had in fact been the head of his own gang which at its high point had over 300 members and controlled much of the lucrative Shibuya nightlife scene. His first onscreen appearance was in a gangster movie in which he played himself. Rather than the jitsuroku epics he would later become associated with, Tai Kato’s Eighteen Years in Prison (懲役十八年, Choueki Juhachi Nen) essentially casts him in a ninkyo role as a noble if compromised former captain of the kamikaze squad who finds himself caught between the contradictions of post-war Japan and the American occupation. 

Indeed, in this as in many other yakuza movies set during the immediate post-war era, the Americans are really just the biggest gang. Suffering with survivor’s guilt, Captain Kawada (Noboru Ando) has set up an association together with former comrade Tsukada (Asao Koike) to look after he dependent relatives of men who fell in war. To do this, he has to resort to criminality raiding American boats for supplies such as sugar and rice which he redistributes to war widows and their families. His ultimate goal is amassing enough money to buy a patch of land in the town centre and do away with the black market which exploits the vulnerable replacing it with a legitimate market so the surviving family members can set up businesses to support themselves. 

Around this time, the association manages to track down the younger sister of one of their men who died as a kamikaze, Hisako (Hiroko Sakuramachi ), and discovers she is living in desperation having lost the family home to aerial bombing. As her mother is seriously ill and she needs money for food and medical treatment, Hisako contemplates turning to sex work and is almost assaulted by a gang of drunk and abusive American servicemen from whom she is rescued by a passing Kawada. This incident makes plain his resentment towards the occupation and sense that it is the American influence that is wilfully suppressing the efforts of the Japanese people to rebuild their society. It’s this resentment that lends a note of justification to Kawada’s decision to rob a nearby factory of valuable copper wire to get the money to save Hisako’s mother thereby saving her from falling into sex work and thereafter helping to achieve their ultimate goal of building the market. The raid, however, goes wrong. Kawada sends an injured Tsukada back to the association and is arrested.

In prison he discovers only more corrupt authority in which guards beat and torture prisoners, just another bigger gang. He finds out that block warden Hanya (Tomisaburo Wakayama) is actively accepting bribes and in cahoots with some of the inmates that attempt to terrorise newbies to the point that one attempts suicide by swallowing glass though Hanya refuses to call for help forcing Kawada and some of the other men to pull the alarm themselves. The sources of moral authority lie in the new college-educated deputy warden recently returned from five years as a POW in Manila, and a veteran yakuza with a grudge against Hanya who apparently had his girlfriend raped leading to her suicide. 

Though the film is titled eighteen years in prison, Kawada becomes eligible for parole in 1952 which is of course the year the occupation ends. By this point he discovers that Tsukada has abandoned their idealistic mission and turned full yakuza, building an immense red-light district on the land they bought for the market and making himself rich through the violent trafficking and exploitation of women. Eventually confronted, he tries to convince Kawada that the world has changed, that the post-war years of privation are over and that he sees only “the ghost of a nation that lost the war” rather than burgeoning new economy stimulated by the Korean War and an ironically a repositioned America now no longer occupiers but still somehow influential if leaving a vacuum a man like Tsukada may step into. It’s no coincidence that he threatens Hisako with deportation to a brothel in Okinawa he’s set up to service American servicemen in a place where the conditions of occupation are still largely in place. 

Tsukada clearly feels that he need have no more responsibility for his wartime conduct, roundly telling Kawada that the families of the fallen are not his responsibility and should “stop leeching off other people and start working for a living”. Hisako’s long lost younger brother Kenichi (Masaomi Kondo) who ended up alone on the streets after being conscripted as a student factory worker and returning to find his home in ashes, turns the blame back on the authorities reminding them that it’s their fault, they started the war the cost him his home and family and turned him into the half-crazed man of violence who immediately introduces himself as “King” on moving up from a juvie prison. Much of Kawada’s prison life is then given over to saving Kenichi, a representative of the next generation, from becoming mired in a life of nihilistic crime. 

In many ways, he remains a squad leader trying to atone for having sent so many young men to die by accepting the responsibility for their families while trying to protect those left behind from the vagaries of the post-war era including the amoral capitalism represented by the infinitely corrupt Tsukada. Dressed in a military uniform ironically pinched from an American soldier he goes on the rampage knowing that he has to deal with Tsukada himself in order to defend the post-war future from those like him who’ve apparently learned nothing much at all even from such recent history. Shooting from his characteristically low angles, Kato explores the seedy underbelly of the beginnings of the economic miracle while his noble hero does his best to offer a course correction to those who have already forgotten their responsibility not just to others but to those they left behind.

The Whale God (鯨神, Tokuzo Tanaka, 1962)

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“You’re all mad” the hero of Tokuzo Tanaka’s The Whale God (鯨神, Kujiragami) finally exclaims, perhaps in a sense cured of the overwhelming mania that has defined his life but only at the cost of it. Adapted from the Akutagawa Prize-winning novel by Koichiro Uno which owes a significant debt to Moby Dick, Tanaka’s tokusatsu-adjacent drama is part haunting morality tale cautioning against the destructive absurdity of obsessive vengeance, and a kind of treatise on life in traditional village at a moment of eclipse as the burgeoning modernity of early Meiji washes up on its shores. 

Tanaka opens with a brief prologue in which an elderly man is killed attempting to destroy the “Whale God” only for his son to swear vengeance before being killed himself. The man’s mother instructs his sons to vow revenge, 10 years passing before she sends the oldest one out against the whale. He is also killed, instantly. The last of his line, young Shaki (Kojiro Hongo) is burdened with this piece of filial responsibility, forced to bear the weight of his family’s vengeance while the village elder (Takashi Shimura), a samurai, wants to ensure the Whale God’s destruction and offers up his own daughter, Toyo (Kyoko Enami), along with his lands and title to any who can bring him the snout of the whale. Shaki throws himself forward though he has little desire for the prize obsessed only with vengeance, while another challenger soon appears, Kishu (Shintaro Katsu), a uncouth drifter deciding to hang around after confirming that the offer is open to all no matter their origins. 

Origins do, however, matter. The village elder instructs Kishu to step back lest he spear his “stinking guts” for failing to know his place, a commoner with the temerity to encroach on a samurai’s personal space. The two men, Shaki and Kishu, in a sense represent two halves one whole, one resigned and contemplative and the other rough and greedy. Kishu attempts to challenge Shaki directly but is rebuffed, later settling for besting him through raping his girlfriend, Ei (Shiho Fujimura), who conceives a child as a consequence of the attack but somehow manages to keep the pregnancy entirely secret. Both the woman and the whale become a surrogate battleground for a contest of masculinity, Kishu symbolically ahead in having violated Ei while Shaki remained too consumed with vengeance to have consummated their union. 

Toyo, meanwhile, the samurai’s daughter, insists that she won’t be “the prize for a fisherman’s ambition”, rejecting the idea of becoming the wife of a lowly villager which would of course mean for her great shame. Nevertheless, she is as powerless as Shaki in her inability to shake off patriarchal authority or refuse her duty to obey her father’s orders even as he tells her it’s all a cruel joke, he doesn’t believe that any fisherman could kill the Whale God and survive. Nevertheless she develops a fascination with Shaki and is intensely offended to discover that he wants no part of her father’s bargain and has in fact married Ei claiming her child as his own. He does this in part in order to ensure that someone will exist in order to avenge his own death which he is sure is coming at the fins of the Whale God, resigned with fatalistic nihilism to the ancestral curse which has haunted him for almost all his life living only for vengeance. 

Yet he does in fact manage to kill the Whale God and live, if only for a brief time but long enough to hear Toyo echo that she must marry the man who killed the god in accordance with her father’s promise despite knowing he is already married with a child. His curse lifted, he understands that the whole village is affected by a kind of madness no longer understanding why a samurai’s daughter would agree to marry a man she didn’t love who was not her social equal. In a beatific state, he reflects on his rivalry with Kishu whom he comes to believe deliberately sacrificed himself in order to assure Shaki a survival he does not appear to want in order to ensure his own child would have a father. Discomfortingly, he asks Ei to forgive Kishu because of this fact, little acknowledging her suffering and reducing her once again to a token traded between men in their now concluded battle for masculine dominance. 

An old man having escaped the village’s madness had encouraged Shaki not to die for nothing, to live his life in rejection of his mother’s fatalistic deathbed instruction only to live until you die. In achieving his vengeance he reaches a kind of apotheosis becoming a Christ-like figure sacrificed on behalf of the village which has been liberated of the tyranny of the Whale God even if the Whale God has been exposed as merely a larger than average sea creature. Meanwhile, we can also see that modernity is hovering on the outskirts, the whale’s arrival is signalled by telegraph while Shaki’s childhood friend Kasuke (Yosuke Takemura) alone is able to see through the village’s “madness” leaving to study medicine in Nagasaki. When he returns a year later, Shaki relents and asks him to take his sister with him away from the maddening village towards a more enlightened land. 

The village is also surprisingly enough Christian, though the new religion does not seem to have eclipsed their traditional beliefs or practices. The fishermen still perform a ritual dance before a whale hunt and continue to demand vengeance against the Whale God even when cautioned against it. Shooting in intense gloominess Tanaka emphasises the sense of spiritual dread that accompanies this “ludicrous” vendetta, the village seemingly always cloaked in darkness as if awaiting its own destruction eventually hastened by the elder’s transgressive offering which in itself represents a small revolution that would make a peasant a king and therefore implode a feudal order that is already on its way out. The elder wants vengeance for glory, Kishu wants vengeance for gold, but only Shaki desires vengeance for peace and later wins it only to have nothing left to live for, ominously telling Ei to raise their son to become “a proud whaler”. Making great use of miniatures, Tanaka’s parabolic drama may park itself in the realms of tokusatsu but is in its own way stranger, and darker, yet also poetic in its examination of destructive obsession, traditional masculinity, feudalistic patriarchy, and existential futility through the story of a young man born to die for a father’s transgressive failures. 

Original trailer (no subtitles)

A Man and a Gisaeng (남자와 기생, Shim Wu-seob, 1969)

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Under the authoritarian regime of Park Chung-hee, Korean Cinema was subject to increasingly stringent censorship and film was seen as an important means of moral instruction. The central message behind Shim Wu-seob’s raucous comedy A Man and a Gisaeng (남자와 기생, Namjawa Gisaeng) is that a man should be faithful to his family and avoid the double betrayal represented by drinking in the company of women which fritters away financial security and endangers his relationship with his wife. Yet the film is also subversive despite the underlying conservative message in making a mockery of so-called “traditional” gender roles.

Indeed, the film’s very thesis is that men are weak and women are strong. The men visit who gisaeng appear to have done so to reaffirm their dominant masculinity through their financial power in essentially paying women to be subservient towards them. Yet the gisaeng themselves are fully in control of the game they are playing as one makes clear when she tells a drunken businessman off after he gets handsy with her. She reminds him that a gisaeng is a person too, not a doll to be played with, and when he doesn’t listen she gets up and leaves proving who it is that has the upper hand in this situation. All the businessman can do is splutter and threaten the otherwise mild-mannered male manager. 

The hero’s boss, Heo (Heo Jang-gang), is a henpecked husband who visits gisaeng as a means of escape from his domineering wife (Do Kum-bong) who punishes him like a child. He asks Tae-ho (Gu Bong-Seo) to resign after catching him sitting at his desk darning socks to earn extra money and though it might be perfectly reasonable to fire an employee for brazenly doing another job on company time, Heo mainly lets him go because of his unmanliness. Tae-ho is a fully domesticated man who does work traditionally regarded as “feminine” in taking in sewing and looking after all of the domestic tasks such as cooking and cleaning as a “maternal” figure to his younger sister Tae-suk (Kim Chung-ja) who is then depicted as “manly” in her mastery of martial arts. 

It quickly becomes clear that the “effeminate” man Tae-ho is the film’s strongest character and the only one largely in control of his circumstances. He agrees to become a gisaeng partly because he needs to earn money after being fired, but also he claims as a “joke” before committing himself to punishing men who neglect their duty to their families by shaming them into changing their behaviour as he largely does with Heo who, bizarrely, develops a fascination with Tae-ho’s gisaeng persona San-wol as she apparently reminds him of the first love he was prevented from marrying because of her family’s disapproval. 

The gender subversion is in essence the joke, but there are also constant hints that it might not be and Tae-ho’s female persona is also authentic, not least among them the music cues which are extremely ironic. For example, the melody of “Don’t Fence Me In” plays over Tae-ho at the house of gisaeng, as do the strains of “Nature Boy” which also hint at a validation of Tae-ho’s expression of femininity. Before being fired, Tae-ho tells Heo that he’s repressing himself and it isn’t good for him, and there is a (joking) suggestion in the final scenes that Heo’s attraction to San-wol is partly born of her seeming masculinity. He did indeed unwittingly appreciate a drag performance from Tae-ho’s queer-coded musician friend, after all.

It’s also possible to read Heo’s reunion with his wife as a new appreciation for her own “masculine” qualities in her capacity to dominate him even if the film simultaneously suggests that the role of a “good wife” is to offer “affection” to her husband and if the husband visits gisaeng it’s the wife’s fault for not giving it to him. Even so, what the film’s conclusion implies is closer to a rebalancing than might be expected in allowing Jeong-mi, the gisaeng with whom Tae-ho falls in love to counter any suggestion of queerness, to open her own shop as an independent woman pursuing a relationship with Tae-ho who is then a travelling salesmen selling cosmetics. Jeong-mi asks Tae-ho to give up “knitting” before they get married which would signal a remasculinisation, but Tae-suk, though dressing in a more feminine fashion to meet her in-laws, is not directly asked to give up Taekwondo and it seems that her fiancé appreciates her feistiness rather than seeking to soften it. Even Heo’s wife if seeming more cheerful has not given up control in their marriage despite her own drag experience in the gisaeng house yet their relationship is now considered “repaired”. “Traditional” gender roles have ostensibly been reaffirmed, Heo’s marriage is saved and both Tae-ho and his sister are about to marry, but they’ve also been subverted and redefined in unexpected ways. Some of this may only be possible because A Man and a Gisaeng is an absurd comedy of the kind Shim was known for, but it nevertheless hints at an underlying plea for greater social freedom in an authoritarian era. 

A Man and a Gisaeng screened as part of this year’s Queer East .

Being Two Isn’t Easy (私は二歳, Kon Ichikawa, 1962)

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With the Olympics still two years away, the Japanese economy had begun to improve by 1962 and the salaryman dream was on the horizon for all. But for young couples trying to make it in the post-war society things were perhaps far from easy and having more to want coupled with the anxieties of a newly consumerist society only left them with additional burdens. A surprisingly moving evocation of the cycle of life, Kon Ichikawa’s Being Two Isn’t Easy (私は二歳, Watashi wa Nisai) is as much about the trials and tribulations of its toddler hero’s parents as they try to navigate their new roles in a world which now seems fraught with potential dangers. 

This difference in perspective is brought home in the opening sequence in which soon-to-be two Taro (Hiro Suzuki) recalls his own birth in a slightly creepy voiceover, lamenting his mother cooing over him excited that he is smiling for her though he is not yet able to focus and has no idea the vague shadow above him is his mother or even what a mother is. His smiling is simply involuntary muscle contraction as he learns how to manipulate his body. Nevertheless, little Taro is a definite handful taxing his poor mother Chiyo (Fujiko Yamamoto) with frequent attempts to escape, managing to get out of the apartment and start climbing the stairs the instant she’s turned her back. “Always finding fault, that’s why grown-ups are unhappy” Taro complains, irritated that even though he’s quite proud of himself for figuring out not only how to undo the screws on his playpen but the string his parents had tied around it for extra protection, he’s not received any praise or congratulation and it feels like they’re annoyed with him. 

The landlord alerted by the commotion somewhat ironically remarks that “Japanese houses are best for Japanese babies” (being at least usually all on one level even if they also sometimes have their share of dangerously precipitous staircases), implicitly criticising the new high rise society. There do indeed seem to be dangers everywhere. Another baby playing on the balcony eventually falls because the screws are rusty on the railings only to be caught by a passing milkman in what seems to be an ironic nod to the film’s strange fascination with the new craze in cow’s milk to which Taro’s father Goro (Eiji Funakoshi) attributes Westerners’ ability to grow up big and strong. Taro does seem to get sick a lot, the doctor more or less implying that his sickliness is in part transferred anxiety from an overabundance of parental love. Visited by her older sister who lives on a farm in the country and has eight children, Chiyo becomes broody for a second baby (though not another six!) but Goro isn’t so sure, not just because of the additional expense or the fact that their danchi apartment is already cramped with the two of them and a toddler, but reflecting that he already lives in a world of constant fear why would you want to double it worrying about two kids instead of one?

Nevertheless, Goro is certainly a very “modern” man. He helps out with the housework and is an active father, taking on his share of the childcare responsibilities and very invested in his son. He accepts that his wife also “works” even if he also insists it’s not the same because she doesn’t have to bow to Taro and is not subject to the petty humiliations of the salaryman life. Tellingly, this changes slightly when the couple end up leaving the danchi for a traditional Japanese home to move in with Goro’s mother after his brother gets a job transfer. Grandma (Kumeko Urabe) is actively opposed to him helping out around the house, viewing it as distasteful and unmanly not to say a black mark against Chiyo for supposedly not proving up to her wifely duties. Living with Grandma also introduces a maternal power struggle under the older woman’s my house my rules policy which extends to criticising Chiyo’s parenting philosophy not to mention refusing to trust “modern technology” by insisting on rewashing everything that’s been through the washing machine by hand.

Yet when Taro becomes sick again it’s perhaps Grandma who has a surprisingly consumerist view of medical care. Exasperated by the couple’s failure to get Taro to take his medicine she offends the doctor by insisting on him having an injection as if you haven’t really been treated without one. Eventually she takes him to another clinic where they get on a conveyor belt of doctoring, rushed through from a disinterested receptionist to a physician who yells “bronchitis” to a nurse who violently sticks the baby in the arm. After that Taro vows never to trust grown-ups, though Grandma only gives in when she realises injections are not an instacure and didn’t do any good. 

For all that however there’s a poignancy in Taro’s reflecting on his birthday cake with its two candles that Grandma’s must have many more and in fact be brighter than the moon with which he has a strange fascination. He’s just turning two. He used to be a baby but now he’s a big boy and soon he’ll be a man. Goro reflects on time passing, for the moment he’s a father but might be a grandad soon enough. The wheel keeps turning which perhaps puts the hire purchase fees on the TV he bought to keep Grandma occupied and out of the way into perspective. From the experimental opening to the occasional flashes of animation and that banana moon, Ichikawa paints a whimsical picture of the post-war world as seen through the eyes of a wise child but ironically finds a wealth of warmth and comfort even in an age of anxiety.