Tag: 1970s

Festival Champ (お祭り野郎 魚河岸の兄弟分, Norifumi Suzuki, 1976)

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Who doesn’t love a festival? The hero of Norifumi Suzuki’s Festival Champ (お祭り野郎 魚河岸の兄弟分, Omatsuri yaro: Uogashi no Kyodai-bun) loves them so much that he travels all over Japan to help out in places where young men have become thin on the ground thanks to increasing urbanisation and rural depopulation. Following the success of Suzuki’s entries in the Truck Yaro series in 1975 and 1976, the film was part of a new line of comedies and sports movies launched by Toei as well as a vehicle for Hiroki Matsukata who was trying to move on from yakuza movies.

Katsuo (Hiroki Matsukata) is however something of a goodhearted bruiser who is always getting into manly scraps and especially at the festivals he travels to which is a pretty good hook for an ongoing series. But it’s not all that great for his employer who runs a family fishmonger’s at the Uogashi fish market and complains that Katsuo’s always running off and causing trouble. The fish market itself takes on an exoticised quality in the opening sequence which features a voice over from karate queen Etsuko Shihomi, here in a purely dramatic role, who is the daughter of a well-to-do traditional Japanese restaurant and travels there daily by speedboat to pick up the best fresh fish available. Suzuki throws in some documentary-style stock footage and statistics about the market that lend a strangely corporate feel, but then homes in on its capacity as a community hub. Kiyoko says it’s her favourite place precisely because there’s nothing formal about it. Deals are done through body language and you don’t need any kind of resume to work there, everyone’s welcome. 

That may be the implied contrast between Kiyoko’s father, who owns an upscale place and cultivates genuine relationships with local fishermen and brokers, and local boy made good Kurosaki who has supposedly become the CEO of a restaurant chain, itself a symbol of the soulless corporation of ‘70s Japan. Kurosaki rocks up dressed like a yakuza, but everyone treats him as a successful businessman and in part thanks to Katsuo’s boss Zenjiro’s recommendation is eager to make deals with him but predictably he’s running a huge scam that could destroy the local economy. Zenjiro is later faced with the difficult decision of selling his family business to repay all the other fishermen and brokers that have fallen foul of him. 

It’s this societal sense of unfairness that stripper Kumi (Terumi Azuma) hints at when she says she feels “frustrated” and that her long-lost brother Eiji (Toru Emori) probably feels even more frustrated than she does after he slaps her having found out that she’s become a burlesque dancer. As she points out to him, he ran away from home and left her behind with the aunt that was cruel to them so what exactly he expected her to do is a mystery. In the end, it’s his own fault for abandoning her, so he has no leg to stand on in criticising her for the way she’s lived her life. Kumi is well accepted in the local community and walks around in very elegant attire which gives her the air of an “ojosan” or upperclass lady to much greater extent that Kiyoko has in her love of the earthy world of the fish market. The fact that she turns out to be suffering from a tragic terminal illness perhaps only reinforces this sense of unfairness, that the modern world has essentially poisoned her and she can no longer survive in it.

The only things that give her solace are Katsuo and the idea of joining in carrying a shrine festival which would seem to be ways of reconnecting with a more essential Japaneseness. Despite his rowdiness, Katsuo is as she describes him the kindest person she’s ever met and a more positive vision of a still traditional masculinity that looks to protect the community and those around him. He gets into a fight with Eiji, but after exchanging a few blows the men become firm friends, while it’s trying to hook his wimpy friend Kinichi up with a date that brings him to Kumi in the first place. Meanwhile, it seems like Ayuko (Junko Natsu) has a crush on him and despite Zenjiro’s exasperation with Katsuo, everyone expects that he will eventually marry her and take over the family business. 

And so, it’s only a violent, but also quite funny, intervention from Katsuo that can eventually overcome the disruption Kurosaki threatens. Suzuki throws in a lot of his trademark weirdness including all of Zenjiro’s other daughters having fishy names, and a local sex worker who is insatiably aroused by octopuses followed by a gag in which Katsuo is trolled with a suggestive-looking shellfish, but mostly rests on a sense of qualified wholesomeness and community all carried on Katsuo’s broad shoulders as the lone guardian of a more essential Japaneseness otherwise uncorrupted by venal post-war capitalism.

*Norifumi Suzuki’s name is actually “Noribumi” but he has become known as “Norifumi” to English-speaking audiences.

Jeans Blues: No Future (ジーンズブルース　明日なき無頼派, Sadao Nakajima, 1974)

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Nihilistic lovers on the run make a break for the sea only to find their pathway blocked in Sadao Nakajima’s anarchic love tragedy, Jeans Blues: No Future (ジーンズブルース　明日なき無頼派, Jeans Blues: Asu naki Buraiha). As the title suggests, the heroes find themselves devoid of hope, pressing the accelerator as far it’ll go with no clear destination in sight and nothing really left to lose while discovering a twisted kind of salvation in their unlikely connection.

Sensing danger in the air, grave-digging drifter Jiro (Tsunehiko Watase) decides to run off with all the money after his gangster friends off a moneylender on the orders of a businessman. Meanwhile, across town, bar lady Hijiriko (Meiko Kaji) decides to walk out on her unsatisfying life taking some money from the till and her boyfriend’s car for good measure. The pair quite literally collide, but realise that they are much the same in their growing sense of emptiness and impossibility. Nothing really really interests Hijiriko anymore, and watching the car burn after Jiro tossed a cigarette is the only thing that’s made her feel alive in eons. Running through his many and various jobs, Jiro reflects that work is “no fun” either and that the reason he wanted the money was for his sister who he says has run up huge debts paying for medical treatment for a close friend and is now facing the threat of being forced into sex work. 

His sense of impotence is palpable in his desperation and the knowledge that there is no good way to come by large amounts of money especially for a young man from the country with limited prospects. At one point he is beaten by a man with a golf club, a symbol of the class privilege and middle class success that will always elude him. The money, much more than he needs for his sister, gives him a new sense of confidence and possibility even if he remains somewhat frugal, picking up an old banger from a second hand car salesman that immediately blows a tire and apparently belonged to “Koji the murderer” which explains the huge dent in the bonnet. Yet he does at least pay his way, even leaving a collection of notes next to the body of a man he ran over intended to pay for medical treatment which casts him as something of a naive innocent cast adrift in a corrupt society and driven into criminality by desperation.

Trapped inside a shipping container and fearing he may be about to die, Jiro comes to see his fate as karmic retribution for having taken the money that was earned by killing others. Inside the container, the pair are in a sense already dead but also undergo a kind of rebirth if only one fuelled by desperation and the connection that has arisen between them. Hijiriko appears to be suffering from some kind of trauma, experiencing a flashback to the orgy going on at the bar which she had been invited to join but declined much to her customer’s disappointment. He remarks that she always did before, a comment which seems to annoy her though perhaps not as much as the arrival of an older woman a male voice tells her on the phone is a actually quite wealthy and doesn’t need the money but does sex work as a kind of hobby. 

It’s Hijiriko who begins to fight back against the world, dressed in the stylish black leather suit Jiro buys her while he struts around in a cap and three-piece tartan suit. Jiro does not actually kill anyone, but Hijiriko does without a second thought perhaps because she herself is already dead. Using her sexuality as a weapon, she asks a hunter if she can hold his gun and trying his luck he lets her only to end up getting shot when he tries to fight back. The pair rob a petrol station for money but come up with only a few notes and coins while the attendant reveals they’ve already made their daily deposit at the bank signalling just how out of luck these lovers really are. They’re bound for the sea, but travel to the mountains and find there only danger and disappointment. Nakajima lends their flight from a dissatisfying existence a kind of desperation in its breakneck pace and frenetic camera work but equally injects a sense of cosmic irony in the many coincidences and reversals that frustrate the lovers’ escape and in the end leave them only one way out from the society which constrains them.

Original trailer (no subtitles)

The Twilight Years (恍惚の人, Shiro Toyoda, 1973)

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In the early 1970s Japanese society was not as concerned with population slowdown as it would come to be, but Shiro Toyoda’s sympathetic ageing drama The Twilight Years (恍惚の人, Kokotsu no Hito) is evidence of a growing consciousness that traditional ideas about how one cares for the elderly may now be becoming incompatible with the functioning of modern society. Based on a best-selling novel by Sawako Ariyoshi, the film has profound empathy both for the ageing patriarch once apparently a tyrant but now a meek and frightened child, and the daughter-in-law to whom his care largely falls.

In fact, it’s caring for Shigezo (Hisaya Morishige) that some believed shortened the lifespan of his late wife who passes away in the film’s opening scenes. Already somewhat detached from reality, Shigezo simply reports that his wife won’t wake up no matter how much he tries to wake her, much like a child who’s discovered someone no longer living. While his daughter-in-law Akiko (Hideko Takamine) rushes to her room with a sense of foreboding, Shigezo merely stays in the kitchen eating boiled potatoes straight out of the pan. It’s the odd behaviour that seems to irk his son Nobuyoshi (Takahiro Tamura) but it’s only now that the couple seem to be realising that there’s something wrong especially as Shigezo does not appear to understand that his wife has died. Pitiably, he chides her for lounging around so late in the day when she’s already been laid out for her funeral.

When his daughter, Kyoko (Nobuko Otowa), arrives having actually missed the funeral itself due to transport issues and a conflicting responsibility to act as a matchmaker at a wedding, Shigezo doesn’t recognise her. He continues to ask for Akiko and gradually forgets most of the other people in his life, screaming when encountering Nobuyoshi and instructing Akiko to call the police to report a burglar in their home. According to both women, Shigeyoshi had treated Akiko poorly ever since she joined their family, which makes caring for him so much harder. The reason he becomes so attached to Akiko is likely simply that she is the person who is always around him so he has less time to forget her. He may realise on some level that she may not wish to care for him given his previous behaviour which may be why he becomes preoccupied with the idea she may “disappear” and cries out in the night when he can no longer see her.

But Akiko also has other responsibilities including a job outside the home and a teenage son studying for his exams. Nobuyoshi expresses regret that he hasn’t been more help and voluntarily tries to pitch in, but lets himself off the hook given that his father doesn’t recognise him and becomes anxious in his presence. Satoshi (Izumi Ichikawa) meanwhile does try to do his bit but is young and a little resentful of the responsibility. As his dementia becomes more severe, Shigezo begins calling Satoshi “Dad” as if he were a child again. Which is all to say, Shigezo becomes Akiko’s responsibility and the strain of caring for him begins to affect her own mental and physical health leading her to fear that she too may die younger than she otherwise might have. 

Yet in exploring her options, Akiko finds little by way of support. Most nursing homes won’t accept patients with complex needs like Shigezo and conditions such dementia are often regarded as mental illnesses meaning her only option might be to put him in an asylum. Shigezo was attending an old person’s daycare centre, but later says he doesn’t want to go anymore because it’s full of old people and therefore no fun. While the film is sympathetic towards Akiko and the difficulties she is facing in caring for her father-in-law it also has profound empathy for Shigezo for though he has so many people who are doing their best to look after him, his increasing mental confusion quite obviously leaves him isolated and he must be incredibly lonely while trapped within his own reality. He develops a habit of saying “hello, hello,” as if he were answering the telephone which may be his attempt to communicate while he is also fascinated with a caged bird which may reflect his own sense of being constrained by his condition.

Later, the bird seems to symbolise Akiko too, trapped as she is within the domestic environment where all responsibility seemingly falls to her. Even so a young student couple she rents the annex to for a lower price in exchange for keeping an eye on Shigezo during the day remark that he may be in the ideal state for a human being having returned to early childhood in which there are no concerns or responsibilities and he is therefore unburdened by the weight of what is to live. Toyoda often uses handheld camera to symbolise the desperation and destabilisation of Shigezo’s existence in which Akiko has become his only fixed point. One of Nobuyoshi’s friends remarks that perhaps it was better when the average life expectancy was 50 and Nobuyoshi’s mother might have been lucky passing away peacefully while otherwise in good health. Still, as Nobuyoshi says, it comes for us all in the end and we should all try to be kinder to each other while we’re here.

Golden Partners (黄金のパートナー, Kiyoshi Nishimura, 1979)

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Kiyoshi Nishimura began his career in the action genre with a series of paranoid thrillers so it feels particularly odd to see him tackle similar themes in such a breezy, lighthearted way as 1979’s Golden Partners (黄金のパートナー, Ogon no Partner). Though based on a novel by Kyotaro Nishimura, the film seems to have been envisioned as an homage to Robert Enrico’s Les Aventuriers in following two men and a young woman on a quest to track down a missing person and also find a large amount of gold supposedly contained in a downed submarine. 

Kosuke (Tomokazu Miura) is a rather aimless young man who lives on a fishing boat and has a career as a freelance photographer taking photos of things people would rather weren’t photographed, while his best friend Shusaku (Tatsuya Fuji) is a motorcycle-riding policeman who has a strong sense of civic duty yet mostly spends his time giving out tickets to locals traveling slightly over the speed limit. They’re both good friends with the landlord at the Polestar bar whom they affectionately refer to as Pops (Taiji Tonoyama). Pops has let them run up a significant tab even though he doesn’t appear to have any other customers. In any case, their aimless days are interrupted when Kosuke begins hearing a strange SOS message but can’t seem to identify where it’s coming from to be able to help. Meanwhile, a young woman arrives looking for Pops and explains that her father, an old friend of his, has gone missing which may be connected to the mysterious stash of gold bars Pops is fond of talking about every time he has too much to drink. 

Figuring out that the SOS message is using a code employed by the Imperial Navy during the war, the trio embark on trying to solve the mystery partly to help the young woman, Yukibe (Misako Konno), and partly because they want to find the gold. Basically a buddy movie, the film has a childlike quality as it mainly follows the trio hanging out on the beach in Saipan solving puzzles and getting into minor arguments. Things take a slightly darker turn when Shusaku decides to stay on even after his paid leave from the police force ends despite realising it’s unlikely they’re going to find the gold bars or even figure out what’s happened to Yukibe’s father. Having realised that Yukibe likes Kosuke and despite his own feelings for her, he’s beginning to feel like a third wheel but in the end cannot bring himself to leave this unending holiday adventure.

But after making a shocking discovery, what they stumble on is a wartime conspiracy in which a corrupt spy killed the other men assigned to transport the gold and took it for himself. He then used it to become a rich and powerful man in post-war Japan, apparently suffering no consequences for his actions hinting at the essential corruption of the post-war society. Realising he likely can’t be prosecuted nor would justice really be served if he went to prison for a few years, they decide on blackmail as their way of recovering the gold little realising how far someone who has killed before will go to protect their secrets. Nevertheless, despite the conspiratorial overtones the atmosphere remains largely cartoonish rather than dark or threatening right up until another tragedy occurs and brings the whole thing to an end.

This laidback sensibility is aided by the soundtrack provided by Takao Kisugi who briefly appears at the end of the film as his city pop folk songs run constantly throughout. Nishimura’s use of a ghostly zero fighter as the gang investigate the former airbase on Saipan proves slightly uncomfortable though ties in with some ghostly imagery as an evocation of a past that’s apparently still very present and largely unresolved. In any case, like a classic children’s adventure story the film does not particularly engage with its larger themes but concentrates on the trio’s attempts to solve the mystery along with their zany plans and crazy stunts culminating in the guys parachuting out of a private plane after aiming it right at that of the bad guys in a moment of extreme irony. A little bit sad and more tragic than it perhaps ought to be, the film is nevertheless a warmhearted tale of male friendship, the childish glee of solving a mystery, and the satisfaction of getting one over on the bad guys even if it comes at a very high price.

Trailer (no subtitles)

King Boxer (天下第一拳, Jeong Chang-hwa, 1972)

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Legend has it that Shaw Brothers’ main motivation in making King Boxer (天下第一拳) was retaliation against Golden Harvest who’d managed to sign Bruce Lee after he turned them down because they offered him the standard studio contract which was at the very least unattractive. Until that point, the studio had mainly been making wuxia pictures and musicals, but had begun to shift towards unarmed combat with the success of The Chinese Boxer in 1970. 

Released internationally under the title Five Fingers of Death, the film kickstarted the 1970s kung fu craze with its vast success in America and helped to solidify a new genre that was then only just being formed through the use of the trampoline technique pioneered by wuxia master King Hu along with his fast cuts and a surprisingly gory take on violence even having the floor shift and give off puffs of dust for added realism. Otherwise it weaves a fairly standard tale of warring schools each vying to win a top contest which confers on the winner the right to control five territories in the north, though this is not of course the goal of the righteous contenders who desire neither fame nor fortune only to improve their skills. The earnest Zhihao (Lo Lieh) just wants to stay with his master and adopted father, Song (Ku Wen-Chung), with whose daughter Ying-ying (Wang Ping) he has also fallen in love, but when and former pupil Daming (Jin Bong-Jin) returns after training with Master Sun and Song is attacked by bandits which leaves him feeling past his best, he decides Zhihao should be sent away too until he wins the contest and returns to take over the school. 

Meanwhile, the evil Meng (Tien Feng) is scheming to have his son Tianxiong (Tung Lam), who lacks martial arts talent, win the contest so that they can control the territory and oppress everybody in its domain. Meng is fond of talking about honour and the martial arts spirit, but actually plans to win the competition by cheating which is why he had his goons attack Master Song. He plans to take out his rivals ahead of time so Tianxiong will have a clear path to victory. 

Zhihao, however, is floundering, forced to toil in Sun’s kitchen’s for a year training through practical means before even being accepted as pupil. Sun’s top student, Han Long (Nam Seok-hoon), appears to take an instant dislike of him that may just be down to his insecurity and fear of competition but eventually becomes a source of weakness in the Sun school. It’s clear that Han resents Zhihao for stealing the place he feels to have been his by right, especially on learning that Sun has given him the manual for the Iron Palm technique, and is even more annoyed when he runs into singer Yan who asks him about Zhihao though he is obviously interested in her himself. This romantic rivalry seems to further undermine his sense of masculinity and causes him to betray everything he stands for as a martial artist by cutting a deal with Meng in the hope he’ll get rid of Zhihao so he can take his place in the contest even if doing so likely means he’ll have to lose to Tianxiong. 

The romantic subplot has a gentle poignancy as we obviously know that Yan will never end up with Zhihao because he is in love with Ying-ying while Yan also tries to convince him to leave the martial arts world which is something that just isn’t going to happen. In any case, Zhihao remains committed to opposing injustice, facing off against Meng and battling the three karate masters he’s imported from Japan to do his dirty his work as well as the ace up his sleeve, wandering fighter Chen Lang (Kim Ki-Joo) who eventually begins to realise he’s chosen the wrong side on witnessing Meng’s ruthlessness which breaks every rule in the martial arts book. 

Korean director Jeong Chang-hwa, however, slightly wrong foots us denying Zhihao his vengeance against Meng while Han takes him on instead as an act of redemption though he too is eventually denied. This not quite final fight is among the most impressive in the film, fought in near darkness as Han has by this point lost his sight. Zhihao meanwhile takes on Okada (Chao Hsiung), the karate master, demonstrating his “Iron Palm” technique which Jeong lends an eerie supernatural quality through the use of red lighting and the sting of synths. Though the plot plays out like a western, Jeong’s aesthetics otherwise strongly recall the colour of Nikkatsu youth drama of the earlier 1960s most especially in his colour palette and lighting. Unfortunately this would be the last film he made for Shaw Brothers after apparently becoming fed up with Mona Fong’s cost cutting and jumping ship to Golden Harvest where he stayed for the rest of his career, but he did help to create a genre of kung fu cinema and popularise it all over the world.

Wicked Priest 5: Breaking The Commandments (極悪坊主 飲む打つ買う, Buichi Saito, 1971)

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The Wicked Priest returns for his final adventure and once again finds himself tackling the corruptions of the mid-Meiji society. Titled in English “Breaking the Commandments” (極悪坊主 飲む打つ買う, Gokuaku Bozu – Nomu Utsu Kau), the Japanese title refers to something Shinkai (Tomisaburo Wakayama) admits part way through, that his ironically non-buddhistic life revolves around drinking, gambling, and women all vices he seems unable to give up even as he continues to fight justice for the oppressed little guy amid the burgeoning capitalist society of the new Japan.

Indeed the film opens with him in a brothel where he’s exhausting one woman after another and demanding she be replaced with a fresh model while simultaneously covering for petty crook Hideji (Teruo Ishiyama) who is hiding his sex worker girlfriend in the cupboard to save her from a local gangster. In the first few instalment, Shinkai is a lecherous yet lovable rogue who in his own way respects women but in these last two instalments is certainly less kind, treating these sex workers more or less as disposable while later threatening to rape a lady gambler who tried to trick him. In any case, after realising that even Hideji who he went out of his way to help is trying to deceive him, Shinkai ends up getting involved with a local dispute over transportation licences and a nefarious land-sharking plan run by thuggish gangsters with the collusion of the police chief.

The land sharks want to take over the abandoned mansion where Hideji and his family of crooks are currently living in the company of a former samurai lord who seems to be suffering with some kind of delusion that it’s still the Sengoku era. The police chief isn’t up for the idea at first but the gangsters falsely imply that those living in this area of town are merely “jobless people and criminals” that they don’t need to worry about. But their plan depends on bringing on board Wajima who holds the license for running freight carts but Wajima is an honest man who isn’t interested in bribes and has no respect for those who exploit others. He refuses to participate in the project.

Shinkai too refuses to let the gangsters get away with mowing over Hideji and the others and is once again saved by Ryotatsu (Bunta Sugawara) who agrees to put off their final fight until Shinkai is finished cleaning up this dirty little town. He largely does this by donning an elaborate disguise and teaming up with lady gambler Gin to trick conspirator Kawashima into giving back Wajima’s (Takashi Shimura) license after setting him up so he’d lose it. Meanwhile he also tries to repair another broken father-son relationship between Wajima and his errant boy Ryutaro (Kyosuke Machida) whom he’d kicked out some years previously after he became a yakuza and got into trouble with the law. 

What seems clear is that the chaos of Meiji has allowed the greedy to profit over the changing orders of the hierarchical society, no longer bound by traditional notions of good conduct or basic humanity. The police chief first objects to the plan, stating that many people living in the area the gangsters have earmarked for their docks are honest and hardworking and shouldn’t be lumped in with “criminals”, but is soon won over by a bribe and is also supporting a mistress in a separate household. Yet even so, Shinkai turns this same weapon back on Kawashima (Fumio Watanabe) in pretending to be a general from Tokyo who will soon be his father-in-law, leveraging his social advancement to bring him back into line in appealing to his greed and ambition while hinting at a militarist future in reminding him that Wajima’s carts were essential during the Satsuma Rebellion and may be so again should the occasion call.

After seeing off a series of bounty hunters, one sent in via a honey trap that suggests the gangsters really know their enemy, Shinkai has no option but to clear out the corruption himself at the point of a sword culminating in another bloody showdown which is also in its own way a means of protecting Ryutaro from a pointless revenge. “If I die the devil in hell will be in for a big surprise!” Shinkai cooly remarks as he marches off to fight for justice, but then there’s another battle waiting for him in the postponed grudge match with Ryotatsu as the two men tussle atop a sand dune ironically trapped in a co-dependent cycle of vengeance and salvation while Shinkai’s wandering most likely will never end.

Wicked Priest 4: The Killer Priest Comes Back (極悪坊主 念仏三段斬り, Takashi Harada, 1970)

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At the heart of the Wicked Priest series is an idea of rootlessness, the wandering monk Shinkai (Tomisaburo Wakayama), an orphan, often finding himself dragged into familial disputes between fathers and sons for one reason or another often estranged from each other. The aptly named Wicked Priest 4: The Killer Priest Comes Back (極悪坊主 念仏三段斬り, Gokuaku Bozu: Nenbutsu Sandangiri) finds Shinkai returning to his hometown after reencountering a childhood friend who’s found himself on the wrong side of a historical divide.

When Shinkai and Takegoro (Ichiro Nakatani) left their childhood village, they swore to become the best priest and mountain owner in Japan respectively but that obviously hasn’t worked too well for either of them. Takegoro evidently joined the wrong side during Bakumatsu chaos, a fact rammed home when his attempt to use currency issued by a feudal lord is rebuffed in a gambling den whose owner reminds him that it is now worthless. Only official currency issued by the central government is considered legal tender. On top of all that, it seems Takegoro might also have been cheating which signals just how far he has fallen. Running into him by chance, Shinkai ends up saving the day while accidentally humiliating a chastened Takegoro who is given a further dressing down by the old school lady yakuza boss Kuroda (Chieko Naniwa), also known as “the Thunder Woman”, who appears to be in charge, shooting off his little finger as an attempt to save face. 

In any case, the encounter has Shinkai feeling nostalgic and he decides to return to his hometown to hold a proper memorial service for his late mother. Only once there he ends up being drawn into another cycle of local corruption on discovering that the river workers are being exploited by rival yakuza groups who are working them to exhaustion and paying almost nothing. The leader of the Gondawara is quite obviously up to no good as he wears a western suit and has a handlebar moustache, quite clearly an amoral capitalist while his rival Ryuo (Eizo Kitamura) is a violent thug in ominous sunshades. In actuality, however, they are both branches of the yakuza syndicate led by Kuroda who is of the old school and doesn’t approve of their exploitative mindset. Just as she had Takegoro, she gives both men a good telling off reminding them that the river workers are essential for providing a steady supply of coal without which the new industrial economy will flounder. 

It’s also true that this same industry is fuelling militarisation and an eventual eye towards expanding imperialism, but Kuroda does seem to be mainly mindful of the workers welfare immediately insisting they should be paid a fair wage which is five times more than they’re currently getting. Ryuo and Godawara superficially agree but intend on simply exploiting their workers differently by demanding five times as much work for five times as much pay in a fifth of the time. Shinkai does his best to defend the rights of the local people, but is faced with a dilemma on realising that Takegoro is member of Godawara and hellbent on killing him having become cynical and desperate, willing to sell out a childhood friend for a few pennies. 

Part of Shinkai’s mission is winning Takegoro back over the side of right while reuniting him with his mother whom he’d been too ashamed to visit. On the other hand, this is perhaps the first time Shinkai shows a darker side to himself on threatening to rape a lascivious nun who tricked him into a martial arts contest while rebuffing his amorous intentions. He’s also still being pursued by Ryotatsu (Bunta Sugawara) and ironically ends up temporarily losing his sight himself but just as always Ryotatsu decides to come to his rescue mostly because it would be very annoying if someone else killed him first before he’s got his revenge. He also agrees to wait for Shinkai to finish his mother’s memorial service before scheduling their death match, the most patient revenger in jidaigeki history. In any case, it all ends with another massive showdown as a wounded Shinkai purifies the town of corrupt yakuza and liberates the river workers while finally getting to honour his late mother’s memory leaving Ryotatsu to make his exit deciding that vengeance can wait until the mourning’s over.

Haunted Samurai (土忍記 風の天狗, Keiichi Ozawa, 1970)

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An exiled spy is confronted by the cruel inequalities of the feudal era in Keiichi Ozawa’s possibly mistitled ninja drama Haunted Samurai (土忍記 風の天狗, Doninki Kaze no Tengu). There is a kind of fatalism that follows him, and he is in some senses haunted not only by men like himself charged with the neutralisation of a deserter but by the ills of a corrupt society, though the only ghost here may be himself. Based on a manga by Goseki Kojima who illustrated Lone Wolf and Cub, the film ultimately suggests that to be a good man necessarily means to walk alone as a melancholy exile from a society founded on greed and power.

Indeed, Rokuheita’s (Hideki Takahashi) sole desire is to live a “simple and decent” life as an ordinary farmer. The film opens with him squaring off against a childhood friend, who is also his sister’s love interest, having been ordered to execute him for deserting from their ninja clan. His friend no longer wants to live “like a beast”, and so there’s nothing more either of them can really do in this situation. Rokuheita carries out his duty, and his sister takes her own life in despair. When he’s given another similar mission, he questions it but again resolves that he has no real choice. Only he discovers that his target, Ushizo (Yuji Odaka), has chosen to desert after marrying and having a child. When his family suddenly show up just as he’s contemplating delivering the final blow, Rokuheita decides to let him go warning Ushizo that the Yagyu will never give up and he’ll be haunted all his life so he should try to live it well for as long as it lasts. 

But this also makes Rokuheita an exile too, himself now a target and on the run from the Yagyu and his clan. On his travels, he runs into a small family who’ve been attacked by bandits while returning from town to buy wheat seeds because their harvest has failed in the drought and they’re facing onerous taxes from an unforgiving lord. Rokuheita decides to stay in the village hoping to become an ordinary farmer but is regarded with suspicion by some because of his samurai status, while there is also another samurai exile in town, Tarao (Seiichiro Kameishi) who first worked hard to be a part of the community but has since become lazy and aloof.

Tarao is also suspicious of Rokuheita but mostly fearing that either he’s come to make trouble for him or is a fugitive who will lead trouble their way. Unlike Rokuheita, Tarao was kicked out of his clan for stealing and now lives a slightly disreputable life made all the more so by his attempts to pan gold from the local river. Rokuheita fears that if the villagers find out about Tarao and the gold it will only cause chaos and the obsession with easy riches will in the end be much worse for them than the famine. Even Tarao’s wife Oryo (Utako Shibusawa) insists they’ve already got plenty to live on and should simply go somewhere else to lead a quiet life but Tarao wants more, his hand reaching out for his purse even while attacked by corrupt retainers themselves intent on discovering the gold and keeping it a secret from their lecherous lord. 

The retainers have been taking one life for every bale of “hidden” rice, carting off young women from the village to place into sexual slavery. Rokuheita tries to teach the villagers how to skirt the feudal order by secretly farming on rough terrain to evade taxes and ensure their own food supply, but this simply incurs harsher penalties even as one of the young men points out hungry farmers can produce nothing at all. Yet there’s nothing Rokuheita can really do for the villagers because it is the feudal order which is most at fault, an order which his ninja clan supports through their spy activities. The man who tracks him, Matahei (Isao Natsuyagi), says he does so as a means of appeasing the Yagyu and protecting his home territory from them but to do he must choose a lesser evil in killing those who have chosen to try to live “simple and decent” lives outside of this system.

Ozawa brings them together in a supernaturally charged conclusion which takes place during a solar eclipse marked by the eerie winds of the Japanese title but finds them both defeated, left with only the melancholy acceptance of their rootlessness as men who will always be pursued by the invisible hands of the feudal order. Utilising wuxia-esque jump cuts to recreate the ninja magic of Rokuheita’s spy craft along with a degree of surrealism in the underwater sequence in which he is attacked by a band of topless female ninjas the film seems to edge towards a more contemporary reading of jidaigeki and not least in the unexpected violence of its final scenes.

The Homeless (無宿 やどなし, Koichi Saito, 1974)

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Two men are released from prison on the same day. One, dressed in a 1920s-style white suit and straw hat, tries to befriend the other, in black kimono and geta, but he ignores him. Soon, they arrive at a fork in the road. The man in the kimono walks down a well worn grass path cut between the fields while the man in white, looking back and a little disappointed, continues along the modern roadway making his way towards civilisation.

In some ways, the heroes of Koichi Saito’s The Homeless (無宿 やどなし, Yadonashi) are embodiments of past and future. Jokichi (Ken Takakura), the kimonoed man in black, chooses the path of vengeance. On his release from prison, he learns that his gang leader older brother has been killed while his sister was sold to a brothel. He goes there to find her, but is told that she is already dead. The madam says she died of a chronic illness and that she did for her what she could but treating such a cruel disease is only throwing good money after bad. Sakie (Meiko Kaji), a sex worker who appears to have a childlike quality and possibly impaired mental state, tells a different story claiming the madam had Jokichi’s sister killed for reasons she doesn’t explain but may have more to do with the drama going on with Jokichi’s gang than a desire to cut costs and her losses. 

Gen (Shintaro Katsu), meanwhile, seemingly chooses the path of prosperity. He returns to his wife, Ume (Murasaki Fujima), who is a member of a moribund theatrical troupe, and asks her to return to him what he believes is a treasure map marking the location where his father saw a ship sink during the Russo-Japanese war that may be filled with gold. On finding out Jokichi used to be a diver, Gen becomes determined to bring him onto his mission but Jokichi is set on revenge firstly on a man called Senzo (Noboru Ando) he thinks killed his sister and then on whoever ordered the hit on his brother. This bad news for Gen who realises that if he achieves his vengeance, Jokichi won’t be available to help retrieve the gold because he’ll be in prison so he starts by warning Senzo that his past’s about to catch up with him. 

But it’s also Gen that helps Jokichi escape from the rival gang by suggesting he help rescue Sakie from her indentured servitude as sex worker. Childlike and ethereal, Sakie claims not to remember where she was from and has a simple desire to see the sea which represents to her a kind of freedom while for each of the men it may in fact form a kind of border they will eventually be backed up against and unable to escape. Though Sakie develops a fondness for Jokichi, and then begins to love Gen after he ends up taking care of her along the road, the three form a relationship that seems more fraternal or perhaps even forged on the homoerotic tension between the two men who light their cigarettes one from the other and finally find a home on an idyllic beach where they devote themselves to the search for buried treasure.

Sakie may say that the real treasure is her new life of freedom and warmth, but the hint of riches the two men find is itself rooted in warfare and imperialism which are the same forces by which they were each displaced amid the rising militarism of the 1930s. The three of them remain homeless in this environment, unable to fit into the changing society and by degrees exiled from it. An early title of the film was apparently Jingi no Okite (仁義の掟) which means “the law of honour and humanity” and that is in a way what Jokichi is bound by in his desire for vengeance, while Gen is clearly an anarchistic force unable to submit himself to authority and lusting after a more prosperous modernity. Sakie meanwhile is powerless as a woman with few rights, sold into sex work and technically a fugitive from the gang-backed brothel that owned her contract.

As beautiful as the beach is, we have the feeling that in some senses the three of them are already dead and living in their temporary paradise. Indeed, the past eventually catches up with them as if these three homeless fugitives cannot be allowed to survive in resistance to an authoritarian culture. Their existence is elegised by the beautifully composed cinematography along with the childlike rapport between the two men and the sense of domesticity which arises between the trio before reality bites and even their beachside idyll is invaded by the forces of darkness.

Original trailer (no subtitles)

The Inferno (地獄, Tatsumi Kumashiro, 1979)

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No one can escape from their sins according to the ominous voiceover that opens Tatsumi Kumashiro’s loose reimagining of Nobuo Nakagawa’s Jigoku, The Inferno (地獄, Jigoku). Then again, some of these “sins” seem worse than others, so why is it that a woman must bear a heavy burden for adulterous transgression while the man who killed her seemingly suffers far less? Perhaps hell, in this case, is born of conservative social attitudes more than anything else besides the darker elements of the human heart such as jealousy and romantic humiliation. 

Those negative emotions are however as old as time as reflected in the folk song which opens the film about a young couple, though not the young couple currently onscreen, who are eloping because their incestuous desire is not accepted by the world around them. The connection between the couple onscreen might also be deemed semi-incestuous for Ryuzo (Ken Nishida) has run off with the wife of his brother, Miho (Mieko Harada), who is carrying (what she claims to be) Ryuzo’s child. Unpei (Kunie Tanaka), the brother, finally catches up with them and shoots Ryuzo with a shot gun. Miho tries to escape, but her foot is caught in a bear trap and Unpei decides to leave here there to die, while Ryuzo’s jealous wife Shima (Kyoko Kishida) later does the same. The body is found by local hunters, and in a strange miracle the baby is born from Miho’s dead body while Miho is dragged to hell for her “sins” where she learns that her baby has been born in hell but remains above. Not knowing what to do, the locals give the baby, Aki, to Shima but she obviously doesn’t want it and so swaps it with a foundling thanks to a weird old man, Yamachi, coming to love this other child, Kumi, as a daughter. 

This is quite literally a tale of the sins of the parents being visited on the child, the 20-year old Aki (Mieko Harada) later lamenting that she has no identity of her own and is solely a vehicle for her mother’s revenge. Though she apparently ends up in the same rural town “by chance” knowing nothing of her past, she resembles her mother physically and discovers she has some of her talents such as an innate ability to play the shamisen. What she also has is a trance-like lust that bewitches the men around her, though this is in a sense complicated by the fact it does not seem to be of her own volition so much so as a manifestation of her mother’s curse. Thus she ends up sleeping with the vulgar younger brother of the man she actually likes, Suchio, who in truly ironic fashion is actually her half-brother. She describes herself as having her mother’s “tainted blood”, while Shima later adds in a degree of class and social snobbery revealing that Miho had been a geisha Unpei unwisely fell for and was unworthy even of being a maid in their upper-middle class household let alone the wife of the second son. 

For all of her resentment, Shima is otherwise a loving mother to her sons and even to Kumi whom she is able to accept as a daughter in a way she would never have accepted Aki who was after all an embodiment of her husband’s betrayal. Colder and more austere than Aki or Miho would seem to be, she clings to the mummified body of her husband kept in a secret vault as a secret triumph over her humiliation laughingly remarking that now he’s hers forever and will never cheat on her again. Even if she left Miho to die, Shima does not particularly resist her fate well aware that her son has fallen for his half-sister (which probably wouldn’t have happened if she hadn’t swapped babies) and merely hoping Aki can be convinced to leave town alone rather than plotting any more drastic action. 

But the inferno of hell envelopes them all, crying out for retribution as the cycles of repressed or inappropriate attractions repeat themselves. Kumi realises that her love for her brother, Suchio, is actually not inappropriate because they are not related after all but is then consumed by her own hell in realising that he does in fact love his biological half-sister but is uncertain if he accept damnation in order to pursue it. What she, Miho, and Aki are punished for is female sexual desire aside the arguably taboo qualities of its direction though in hell it seems men are punished for this too, or more accurately for giving in to it, in a way they often aren’t in the mortal realm. “They cut their own flesh and blood for the vision of a woman in the future,” the guide explains as the brothers and Unpei literally climb over each other reaching for an illusionary representation of Aki/Miho at the top of the tree. In the mortal world they do something similar, grappling with each other, mired in competitions of masculinity as mediated through sexual dominance, conquest, or humiliation. 

Yet Aki’s path to hell is also a confrontation with her femininity and her search for an identity as a woman by reuniting with the birth mother who died before she was born. Kumashiro’s visions of hell are terrifying and outlandish, a giant land in which the dead are thrown into a huge meat grinder they then have to push themselves. For the sin of eating meat, others are condemned to spend eternity eating human flesh. Miho has lost all sense of reason and is incapable of recognising her daughter seeing her only as another source of food but there is a kind of rebirth that takes place even if it’s only once again to be born in the underworld. Surreal and harrowing, Kumashiro’s eerie land of giant demons and shuffling corpses does indeed suggest that as the opening titles put it we all live our lives alongside hell.

Original trailer (no subtitles)