Tag: 1972

The Target of Roses (薔薇の標的, Kiyoshi Nishimura, 1972)

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One of a series of internationalist conspiracy thrillers arriving in the early 1970s, Kiyoshi Nishimura’s Target of Roses (薔薇の標的, Bara no Hyoteki, AKA Red Target) finds itself at a particular moment of paranoid anxiety. In the immediate wake of Asama-Sanso, its villains are a band of revolutionaries hiding out in the mountains behind the shield of “New Religion” as they plot the over throw of the state. Yet these villains are not left-wing former student protestors but Nazi holdovers branding themselves as the “Fourth Reich” while insisting that they are not “fascists” but merely trying to create a new world order free of “corrupt governments”. 

The hero, Akira, in keeping with similar roles Yuzo Kayama played in this period, is a former Olympic sharpshooter who fled to America after being implicated in the death of a teammate. You can tell that things haven’t been going well for him by the terrible mutton chops haircut he is forced to wear throughout the film, but his problem seems to be that he has lost all interest in living. That’s one reason he’s recruited by the Fourth Reich’s local leader Tachibana who theorises that Akira is a man who lives for the gun and is good as dead without one. He and his one-eyed associate Nomura (Toby Kadoguchi), a former sharpshooter himself, begin training him with various strange exercises never revealing their true purpose until asking him to shoot a prisoner they’ve tricked into trying to escape from their secret base. Realising the target is human Akira refuses but then changes his mind shooting the man at much closer range as he runs through a forest. 

Meanwhile, foreign photographer Robert (Ralph Jesser) and his assistant Ling Ling (Taiwanese actress Chen Chen) accidentally end up finding the secret camp after becoming lost in the forest, Robert returning later to investigate and take more photos. Akira is then sent to Hong Kong where the pair have travelled to visit the grave of Ling Ling’s brother, a war photographer killed by a landmine in Laos, in order to take out Robert before he exposes their operation in the newspapers. Never asking any questions of his new job, Akira is unexpectedly moved on seeing Ling Ling’s distress over Robert’s body, later striking up a relationship with her when she too becomes a target for the Fourth Reich. 

In a surprising contrast to similar contemporary crime thrillers, Hong Konger Ling Ling represents a kind of innocent beauty as symbolised in her interest in photographing flowers rather than the war zones covered by her brother. At one point she and Akira are even seen tiptoeing on the railway tracks just like innocent lovers only for Akira to then reflect on the sight of an obsolete steam train likening it to himself, abandoned and destined to be torn to pieces. His love for Ling Ling gives him new reason to live, breaking the nihilistic spell which he claims had led him to want to destroy everything. To that extent Tachibana is correct when he says that Akira has no interest in the future of mankind, but he has become determined to preserve the world of two which exists between himself and Ling Ling which leads him to oppose The Fourth Reich, of whose activities he had been previously ignorant. 

It has to be said that Nishimura’s repurposing of Holocaust imagery, the failed “trainees” of the Fourth Reich’s re-education programme driven to vacant madness and piled up on wooden bunk beds later to be gassed and burned on mass funeral pyres, may be a little inappropriate in its accidental flippancy. Nomura’s claim that the Fourth Reich is not a resurrection of fascism is somewhat disingenuous even if they seem to have no other ideology than their weird super soldier brainwashing programme designed to create some kind of new society, later suggesting that the conspiracy already has assets within the Japanese government. Yet Akira is indifferent to fascism, as Tachibana had framed him a man of the gun born only to pull a trigger a function he later uses in order to convince him to destroy himself. Often marred by overly theatrical dialogue rendered in sometimes awkward English which plays much less well than it might in Japanese, Target of Roses remains a little on the pretentious side despite Nishimura’s characteristic artistry but nevertheless embraces its nihilistic philosophy in the vast emptiness of its internecine conclusion. 

The Pledge (博奕打ち外伝, Kosaku Yamashita, 1972)

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The gangster code slowly consumes series of men each trying to do the right thing but hamstrung by the actions of others in Kosaku Yamashita’s yakuza tragedy, The Pledge (博奕打ち外伝, Bakuchiuchi Gaiden). It is indeed a promise between brothers which damns them all, but the roots of it lie in repressed emotion and a desire to protect other people’s feelings by keeping a destructive secret while trying to satisfy oneself that one has behaved properly even if no one else understands. 

The battleground is Wakamatsu, Kyushu, where outsider Egawa (Koji Tsuruta) has united the local boatmen and is undercutting the prices of a rival gang led by Omuro (Tomisaburo Wakayama). While Omuro is out of town, his right-hand man Taki (Hiroki Matsukata) has decided to take advantage of a minor squabble between some of his guys and Egawa’s to initiate a small scale turf war hoping to take the river back under their control. He does this by kidnapping Egawa’s younger brother Masakazu (Goro Ibuki) to lure him to their headquarters alone, something of which Omuro does not approve on his return but decides to go with as an excuse to bring his rivalry with Egawa to a head. Just as the pair are squaring off, a mutual friend, Hanai (Ken Takakura), arrives and intervenes convincing the two men to lay down their arms for the moment at least.

It could be argued that it is this interrupted fight that is resolved in the film’s conclusion if only by inexorable fate. In a repeated motif, Omuro keeps to the code and is exasperated and disapproving of Taki’s underhanded tactics but accepts the responsibility for them himself knowing that Taki acted only on his behalf and his recklessness is only an expression of his love for him. There is indeed something homoerotic in the relationship between the two men as Omuro cradles a wounded Taki and attempts to comfort him that the fault is all his own, while resolving to accept Taki’s actions and build on them rather than try to deescalate or try to apologise. 

The real crisis occurs when the boss, approaching 60 which represents the full circle of a life, decides to name Omuro as a successor rather than the anticipated Hanai. Hanai stoically accepts though intending to leave the gang and travel to another part of Japan but other members of the clan are perplexed, little understanding the boss’ decision in feeling that Omuro is not of good character whereas Hanai is easily the better choice. As it transpires, the boss has made his decision deliberately in order to mitigate the fact that Hanai is secretly his illegitimate son whose origins he has kept secret in deference to his legal wife. He chooses not to name him as a successor in order to avoid causing him problems in his later life while justifying himself that he has not made the decision for dynastic reasons or out of simple favouritism. Yet the relationship between the two men, father and son, is raw and painful if founded on a deep understanding that leaves them unable to meet each other directly with emotional honesty. 

Because of his father’s decision, Hanai forces Egawa to promise that he will not antagonise Omuro which leads to problems in his own gang with his men angry and confused, unable to understand why Egawa is letting Omuro walk all over him. Compounding the problem, Egawa’s errant brother Tetsu (Bunta Sugawara) returns unexpectedly and as Egawa cannot tell him about the pledge without disclosing Hanai’s secret, thinks his brother is being messed around and raids Omuro’s offices to reclaim money he had extorted from Egawa. He learns the truth from devoted geisha Hideko (Yuko Hama) who is deeply in love with Egawa yet largely unable to act on it again because of the gangster code while pledging that she’d sooner die and prove her devotion to him than summit herself to Taki, who is also in love with her, even when he threatens her with a knife. 

The yakuza code dictates that Omuro must die though he is little more than a passive antagonist all too willing to accept the evil deeds that Taki did on his behalf because of the code of loyalty though he would not have dared to do them himself. Secrecy and repressed emotion drag all into a dark web of self-destructive violence until reaching their inevitable conclusion and perhaps bringing one cycle to a close if only in the birth of another. 

Original trailer (no subtitles)

Dear Summer Sister (夏の妹, Nagisa Oshima, 1972)

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The complicated relationship between mainland Japan and the Okinawan islands is played out in the youthful identity crises of two adolescents struggling to understand the world their parents have left to them in an uncharacteristically breezy effort from Nagisa Oshima, Dear Summer Sister (Dear Summer Sister (夏の妹, Natsu no Imoto). Part Rohmerian travelogue, Oshima takes a tour around the island in the immediate aftermath of its reversion to Japan but rather than the busy tourist spots explores a legacy of colonialism and exploitation in the islands’ war memorials and red light districts. 

The irony is that Sunaoko (Hiromi Kurita) finds the person she’s looking for immediately after disembarking from the boat she’s taken from the mainland only she never realises it. Having received a letter from a boy, Tsuruo (Shoji Ishibashi), claiming that he may be her half-brother but isn’t entirely sure, Sunaoko has accepted his offer to come to Okinawa where he will show her his “brotherly affection”. Unbeknownst to her, however, he mistook the figure of her father’s much younger fiancée Momoko (Lily) for that of the teenage Sunaoko with the older woman half-heartedly trying to head off a potential crisis while understandably curious and seeking to know the truth behind her future husband’s hidden past. 

The figure of Tsuruo’s mother, Tsuru (Akiko Koyama), comes to stand in for that of Okinawa yet the central problem as we discover is that she was raped firstly by Sunaoko’s father Kikuchi (Hosei Komatsu) and subsequently by local Okinawan policeman Kuniyoshi (Kei Sato) who had previously passed her off as his younger sister. Even so the trio seem to interact with each other as if nothing had happened and they were simply old university friends reuniting after years of separation. Despite his present occupation in law enforcement, Kuniyoshi had been in prison at the time having been arrested as a student protestor and on his release raped Tsuru after she told him she had been raped by Kuniyoshi in an attempt to reclaim her body and send his sperm as a kind of advance division to prevent Kikuchi’s successfully colonising her womb with the consequence that Tsuru cannot of course be sure whose child Tsuruo is settling finally for “mine” in an answer which at least earns her Sunaoko’s respect. 

Obviously still somewhat naive and additionally provoked on discovering the attraction between Momoko and Tsuruo, Sunaoko had been unfairly judgmental in preemptively accusing Tsuru implying that she been immoral in maintaining relationships with two men at the same time. What occurs is a gradual sense of disillusionment in her father the judge when confronted, it has to be said with confusing frankness, with his own immorality in his misuse of Tsuru which is also of course a metaphor for Japan’s misuse of Okinawa, a thread picked up more directly by the old soldier Sakurada (Taiji Tonoyama) who has apparently come to Okinawa looking for a local willing to kill him in atonement for atrocities he half-heartedly claims not to have committed himself but feels responsible for simply as a Japanese person. Ironically enough he finds such a person in Rintoku (Rokko Toura), a teacher of traditional Okinawan folk music who is looking for “a Japanese who deserves my killing him”.

Nevertheless the relationship between the old men turns into one of playful animosity which does not seem to hint towards violence, a playful fight breaking out between the pair on a boat in the middle of the sea in the film’s concluding scenes in which Sunaoko offers an ironic commentary to the effect that the “killer” and his “victim” are still “singing and drinking” despite the earlier claim that there were only two kinds of people, Okinawans and Japanese, in counter to the claim that the only two kinds of people were men and women. Meanwhile, Kikuchi attempts to process the implications of his friendship and actions explaining that Kuniyoshi’s Okinawan roots were not an obstacle between them while admitting that he never thought about the position of Okinawa during their youth and wonders what he thought back then as to Okinawa’s future, whether it should revert to Japan or become independent. Kuniyoshi claims not to remember, while Tsuru explains how difficult it was to travel to the mainland under the occupation and implies that it’s better now that “we can go where we please”. 

The implication is, perhaps, that Tsuruo is his mother’s child but also a kind of orphan creating a new identity in a new Okinawa having symbolically rejected both of his potential fathers if seeking a brotherhood with his half-sister though even in this the waters are muddied with the undercurrents of incestuous desire which seem to run both ways. Even so Oshima hints at the secondary colonisation of America in conducting what doesn’t seem to be an entirely appropriate series of conversations with the young Sunaoko concerning the history of sex work on the island and the number of bars geared towards American servicemen returning from Vietnam with the suggestion that the islands remain economically dependent on the US despite the reversion while Sukurada makes similarly crass comments about his relationships with Okinawan sex workers during the war. They cast themselves as Urashima Taro travelling to the magical underwater palace of the Dragon King but wary of opening the box of truth they’ve been given lest their world crumble beneath their feet. Picturesque and strangely cheerful, Oshima’s Okinawan odyssey shot with breezy immediacy offers a characteristically thorny take on relations between the two island nations but reaches an unexpectedly hopeful conclusion in the young people’s rejection of their parents’ legacy and intention to move forward in mutual solidarity. 

Dear Summer Sister screens at Japan Society New York May 14 at 7pm as part of Visions of Okinawa: Cinematic Reflections. 

Images: © 1971 Oshima Productions

Execution in Autumn (秋決, Li Hsing, 1972)

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“We all have to die, but we must die in peace and honour” the hero of Li Hsing’s tale of spiritual redemption Execution in Autumn (秋決, Qiū Jué) finally realises, resigning himself to the cruelty of his fate. Partly an advocation for “responsible” childrearing, Li’s philosophical tale is also one of growing enlightenment as the boorish, entitled hero is cajoled towards a sense of social responsibility through the ministrations firstly of his cellmates and then of a good woman who finally learns to see the good in him if through a gentle process of emotional excavation. 

As the opening voiceover explains, at this time it was thought somehow offensive to conduct an execution during the seasons of life and rebirth and so they were relegated to the autumn amid its ominous mists. As we first meet Pei Gang (Ou Wei), however, he’s on the run, trying to make a break for it in refusing to accept the judgement which has been passed on him. The sole heir of a wealthy family, he has been convicted and sentenced to death for the murder of two men and a woman who claimed he was the father of her child (as for what became of the baby, no further mention is made). His grandmother (Fuh Bih-Huei) vows to get him out of jail, pulling every trick in the book and bribing a local official to engineer a good outcome at the upcoming retrial. But in an ironic indication of his buried goodness, Pei Gang refuses to lie to the court and freely admits his crime claiming he was “overcome with rage” believing the woman and her cousins intended to blackmail him but was otherwise in sound mind when he murdered her because he was “sick of being duped” and wanted to vindicate his family honour by taking vengeance on those who’d wronged him. 

Unable to save her grandson, Gang’s grandmother blames herself realising that her failure to discipline him in childhood has led to his immense sense of entitlement and conviction that the rules do not apply to him. Grandma promised that whatever sort of trouble he got into, she would get him out which is obviously a promise she wouldn’t be able to keep but also somewhat irresponsible. For these reasons, Gang regards his treatment as extremely unfair, unable to understand why any of this is happening to him or to accept that this is one fix grandma won’t be able to smooth over even with her money and the power of her name.  

The lesson would seem to be that you have to be cruel to be kind, a message later confirmed by Gang’s conflicted jailor (Ko Hsiang-Ting) who we learn had a son of his own he wrongly indulged which led to him becoming a wayward lad like Gang drowning in a river in the middle of a fist fight. Learning that his grandmother has passed away, Gang once again rails against his fate offering proclamations of hate which are really of love while blaming his grandmother for never having beaten him when he was a child recognising her problematic love for him, mixed as it was with his importance to her as the heir, but also his own abuse of her indulgence. Bad parenting may be the cause of Gang’s amorality, but he is not and never was blameless. He had a free choice to become a better person but did not take it, engaging in persistent boundary pushing even as an adult culminating in the murder of three people mostly out of spite. 

At first Gang can’t bear the mention of the word death, caught between the earthy philosophies of the street thief in the cell to him and the Confucianist scholar opposite serving a one year term as a proxy for his elderly, debt-laden father. Slowly he begins to come around the scholar’s way of thinking, coming to accept death as an inevitability of life as certain as the seasons. His second lessons begin on realising he cannot escape his sentence, his grandmother has given up on him and enacted her back up plan to ensure the family line continues by marrying him to his adopted “sister” Lian (Tang Pao-Yun). Other signs of his buried goodness manifest themselves in his initial reluctance to go along with the plan, not only resenting being used as a stud but unwilling to make Lian an instant widow. “I don’t want you to hate me the rest of your life” he adds in a moment of vulnerability, trying to convince his new bride to find someone more able to give her a happy life stretching further than the next autumn. 

Gang’s tragedy is, in a sense, that as he approaches his execution he experiences true happiness and is genuinely reformed but only by accepting the necessity of his death can he fully redeem himself. Though he tried to escape, he refuses to leave even when the jailor offers to let him go fearing both for the jailor’s fate and for that of his wife and child if he were to become a fugitive. Nevertheless he cannot prevent their victimhood, knowing that just as grandma and Lian had done he must sacrifice himself in order to protect his family accepting not just his moral and social responsibility but the filial. Taking place mostly within the claustrophobic confines of the prison, Li’s melancholy existential drama uses the rhythm of the seasons as a metaphor for life but also as a kind of ticking clock accelerating Gang’s remaining time as he lives out his glory days and twilight years in the span of months awaiting his execution as the first leaves fall. It might be tempting to draw the conclusion that they are each victims of a cruel and oppressive social system taken to authoritarian extremes though Li may have intended the opposite in reminding parents, literal and figural, that the moral education of their children through physical discipline is their primary duty. Nevertheless, Gang’s spiritual awakening and subsequent redemption prove profoundly moving even in their concurrent tragedy. 

Execution in Autumn screened as part of this year’s San Diego Asian Film Festival

Trailer (English subtitles)

The Long Darkness (忍ぶ川, Kei Kumai, 1972)

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Golden age Japanese cinema is generally resistant to the idea of romance as salvation. There may be a romantic happy ending, lovers uniting despite the mounting odds, but their happiness is often overshadowed by the anxieties of the world in which they live. Adapted from the novel by Tetsuo Miura, Kei Kumai’s post-war romance The Long Darkness (忍ぶ川, Shinobugawa) meanwhile insists that it’s love that will save you in the end as its dejected, insecure heroes find the courage to go on living precisely because of the strength and validation they discover in loving and being loved.

The hero, Tetsuro (Go Kato), feels himself to be cursed, overcome with a sense of shame and anxiety because of the dark shadow that hangs over his once prosperous family. His oldest sister committed suicide for love on his sixth birthday, while another sister then took her own life some time later out of guilt for having contributed to her death. His oldest brother whom he describes as sensitive and eccentric disappeared in grief, while the next oldest took a job at a Tokyo lumber yard and supported him as a student but later disgraced the family by running off with money he’d fraudulently accumulated in the name of opening his own company. Tetsuro is convinced that there is something genetically wrong with the family line and is intensely anxious that it will one day consume him too. 

That might be why he’s unexpectedly bashful for a man of 27 in courting the pretty waitress of a local bar, Shino (Komaki Kurihara), whom he first met while celebrating the graduation of some other students after making a belated return to university. Shino too is carrying her own burdens which lead her to feel unworthy of happiness in that she was raised in the red light district and her family, evacuated to rural Tochigi during the war, is now impoverished and living in a shrine. The proprietress at her restaurant has pressured her into an engagement with a prosperous car salesman whom she doesn’t like but feels unable to refuse on the grounds that he will take care of her sick father. The car salesman tries to rape her so she’ll have to marry him which, as her father points out, does not speak well for his character or the prospect of a happy marriage. Her father is clear, he wants his daughter to be happy and in this age a woman’s happiness does largely depend on the man she marries. He tells her to find a man she loves more than life itself and marry him without a moment’s thought. 

The forces which divide them aren’t so much to do with class, politics, money, or custom but with internalised shame and the deeply held belief that they are “bad” people who do not deserve to be happy. “Can I go on living?” Tetsuro’s only remaining sister tearfully asks him, burdened both by her traumatic family history and by a visual impairment that further convinces her she cannot expect to be a part of regular society and has no prospect of a happy future. He almost turns away after noticing her crying but realises that’s what his absent siblings might have done and resolves to behave differently, reforging his his familial bonds with love and compassion in place of the gloominess and futility that had long overshadowed his family home. Just as Shino’s father had anointed Tetsuro a “good person” he could entrust his daughter to, Tetsuro’s sister and mother affirm that Shino too is “good” and her presence brings light and laughter back into their lives after years of lonely suffering. 

“We’ve spent our whole lives worrying about appearances” Tetsuro declares, “it’s time we stop”. Affirming that her new in-laws are also “all good people”, Shino too admits that she realises the “uselessness” of her old life “never saying what I want or don’t want, going along with everything”, liberated by the transcendent power of love that allows her to overcome her fear and insecurity to claim her own agency, the jingling bells of a farmer’s horse cart echoing from below as if in celebration. Shooting in a classic 4:3 monochrome with occasional intertitles and voiceover, Kumai emphasises the literary quality of the tale spanning the rundown lumberyards of post-war Tokyo to the frozen north of Tetsuro’s frosty home but finally argues for the freedom and possibility to be found in the contemporary era by making an active choice for happiness rather than submitting oneself to a fated misery out of misguided obedience to austere and oppressive social codes. “Everyone’s jealous of you” an old woman cackles catching sight of the newly-wed couple on the train to their new life, and you can well understand why. 

Original trailer (no subtitles)

Poem (哥, Akio Jissoji, 1972)

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Poem dvd coverThere might be a temptation to view Akio Jissoji’s “Buddhist Trilogy” as an intensely Japanese affair given its obvious preoccupation with Eastern religious thought and background dialogue with the political confusion of the day, but like fellow New Wave outsider Kiju Yoshida, Jissoji had studied French literature and there is something classically European about his nihilistic ennui in the midst of a decaying social order. Poem (哥, Uta), the trilogy’s final instalment, bears this out most of all as the servant boy of a noble house, secretly its spiritual heir, alone attempts to resist the march of time to save the natural essence of a culture about to eclipse itself in consumerist emptiness.

Jun (Saburo Shinoda), a strange young man, is a servant/legal clerk to a lawyer, Yasushi (Shin Kishida), who is the oldest son of the Moriyama family. Though he has inherited stewardship of the house and mountains, Yasushi and his wife Natsuko (Eiko Yanami) long to break free of its traditionalist constraints by ripping it apart and replacing tatami mat comfort with Western modernity. They can’t do that, however, because old Moriyama (Kanjuro Arashi), Yasushi’s father, is still alive and Yasushi doesn’t particularly want to have to talk to him. Meanwhile, the spacious mansion is also shared by a legal student, Wada (Ryo Tamura), who is kind of interning with Yasushi while repeatedly failing the bar exam, and the family’s maid Fujino (Hiroko Sakurai).   

Unlike Yasushi, Jun sees his life’s purpose as serving the Moriyama family. Intensely worried that a fire may engulf this fine house built with only the best Japanese cedar, Jun gets up every night at midnight and patrols with an electric torch, looking for loose sparks. One night he finds some, though not the kind he was expecting, on accidentally witnessing Wada make love to Fujino. Apparently uninterested, Jun looks it over and moves on while the lady of the house, Natsuko, starved of affection by her impotent husband, finds herself stirred by such unexpected eroticism.

Yasushi’s physical impotence is perhaps merely a manifestation emasculated powerlessness as the oldest son of a noble house who, nevertheless, wields no real power and is entirely unable to make decisions for himself. Yet his big case at work is thrown into confusion when his social climbing client suddenly tries to have his partner, Arita (Haruhiko Okamura), removed days before the court hearing because it might look nicer to have someone of Moriyama’s standing representing him. Even so, Yasushi is so clueless with the modern world that he needs Jun, a calligraphy enthusiast and advocate for the old, to operate the photocopier because he doesn’t know how (and neither does Wada). Only Jun, in another contradiction, insists on working to rule and leaving at 5pm because his “main job” is protecting the house and serving the Moriyama family, not Yasushi. Jun allows himself to be seduced by Natusko on the grounds that if she does not receive sexual satisfaction inside the house she will need to look for it outside which could bring shame on the Moriyama name. Finding out his wife is sleeping with another man, the weird servant boy no less, Yasushi doesn’t even care (besides being mildly turned on), as long as she doesn’t do anything which might arouse “rumours”.

The dirty secret that neither Yasushi or his debauched brother Toru (Eishin Tono) know is that Jun, whose name means “pure”, is their illegitimate half-brother that their father had with a maid. As we later discover, old Moriyama plans to divide his estate not in two but three, believing that it hardly matters anyway because division, in a break with the system of traditional succession by the oldest son, will be the end of the Moriyama family. He may well have a point as neither Yasushi, who eventually abandons the house to Toru and escapes to Kyoto, or his brother are interested in legacy. Once Moriyama passes, they plan to sell the entire plot, mountains and trees and all, to developers. In fact, the house already technically belongs to someone else because as soon as he moved in Toru started taking out exorbitant loans to fund his wastrel playboy lifestyle and has already figured out the jig is up and they’re all broke. Only Jun, who hears the voice of the mountains as if it were the voice of existence itself, is desperate to save the family name though he is at this point almost beyond saving himself.

Looking for the “absolute” in tombstones, Jun is told that only darkness exists inside. Yet he is certain that as long as form survives, content can return. He sees the Moriyamas’ forests as the essence of an older Japan and their untouched natural beauty the rock on which their souls are anchored. Yet his half-brothers oppose him. For them, Japan, even the world, is already ruined and nothing worth protecting remains. Existence itself is nothing more than a dream, and suicide no different. They no longer feel they can live “in such an age”.

Yet Jun, his father’s spiritual heir even if he doesn’t know it, keeps reaching, perhaps not quite hoping but demanding even in his powerlessness which may, in a sense result in a kind of transcendence in its purity. Unlike the ambiguously hopeful ending of This Transient Life, or the urgent ominousness of that of Mandala, Poem ends in defeat and futility, suggesting that time cannot be stopped or progress arrested even by those who seek the eternity of enlightenment. And so Jissoji brings us full circle by showing us a world in entropy unsalvageable in the cruelty of its contradictions.

Poem is the third of four films included in Arrow’s Akio Jissoji: The Buddhist Trilogy box set which also features an introduction and selected scene commentaries by scholar of the Japanese New Wave David Desser plus a 60-page booklet with new writing by Tom Mes and Anton Bitel.

Original trailer (English subtitles)

The Midnight Sun (0시(영시) / 0時, Lee Man-hee, 1972)

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midnight sun posterIn Korean cinema, the police are a problematic presence. Often corrupt, violent, self-interested, and incompetent, even when the cops are the good guys it’s generally because they’re badder than the bad. 1972’s The Midnight Sun (0시(영시) / 0時, 0 Shi), however contains a rare example of a virtuous policeman whose fierce commitment to ethical values perhaps runs too far in endangering his role as a husband and father.

Police captain Jang Jung-han (Heo Jang-gang) has been charged with tracking down a couple of delinquents who’ve been going round committing robberies on a motorcycle they stole from the son of a high ranking police officer. Meanwhile, his son, Kyuseok, has made friends with a boy from the country, Dol Lim, who’s looking for his sister. Feeling sorry for the boy who’s all on his own, Jang takes him in until Kyuseok manages to get him a job as a greeter outside a local restaurant. Complications arise when Lee Min-soo (Mun Oh-jang), a felon previously arrested by Jang, is released and signals his intention to get revenge on Jang whom he blames for the death of his son while he was inside.

Jang is in all ways a model police officer who is good at his job and pursues all of his investigations with the utmost professionalism. His work is, however, not always compatible with being a regular family man. An early scene sees him greeted by his young son, up early on a part-time job delivering newspapers on his flashy pushbike, who reminds him he’s not been home in a couple of days. Kyuseok has been given a message from both his aunt and his mum to make sure his dad remembers to come home early – Jang has completely forgotten that it’s his wife’s birthday (and not for the first time).

Though she has long made her peace with being a policeman’s wife, Mrs. Jang (Yoon Jeong-hee) has her share of troubles with a husband whose safety is not assured while he is often absent from home for extended periods of time. Jang’s salary is also comparatively low and the family have a very modest quality of life with little chance of any kind of advancement. For all of these reasons, she counsels her sister, Hye-rung (Kim Chang-sook), not to get into a relationship with Jang’s junior officer, Park (Shin Seong-il). Hye-ryung, unmarried, lives with the Jangs and works as a tour guide on a tourist bus. Rather than advocating marriage, Mrs. Jang thinks her sister should look into becoming an air hostess, hinting at new possibilities outside of the home for the next generation of Korean women. Despite her sister’s advice, however, Hye-ryung purses a tentative, spiky romance with Park even if somewhat irritated that he only takes her out for noodles rather than something fancier. A policeman’s salary only stretches so far, after all.

Jang’s loyalties are strained when his cases begin to overlap. Lee Min-soo has returned from his prison sentence to find his wife has left him for another man and his son has died. Lee only turned to crime because his son was ill and he needed money for medical treatment, but Jang wouldn’t listen to his mitigating circumstances and arrested him anyway. While he was inside his boy died and Lee holds Jang responsible. In revenge, he kidnaps Kyuseok but rather than drop everything to look for his son, Jang continues to work on the delinquent case and reminds his colleagues to split their workloads. He regards his son’s predicament as “personal” and refuses to dedicate extra resources or take men and time away from other matters for his own benefit. Jang’s coolness further strains his relationship with his wife who can’t understand why he isn’t trying harder to find their son. Yet in Jang’s officious mind, to do so would be wrong and a betrayal of his duty as a police officer.

Lee eventually decides to give up on his revenge and let Kyuseok go after bonding with the boy and being swayed by his cheerful innocence. Kyuseok forgives his kidnapper and wants his dad to do the same. Jang too is a compassionate soul – he is eventually able to help Dol Lim find his sister though, unfortunately, also has to arrest her. Like Lee, Dol’s sister is also forced into a reconsideration of her life of crime after seeing her brother. Arrested by Jang, she resolves to atone, swaps her bright red mini skirt for modest attire, and ties her hair up in a more innocent style. She even manages to convert her boyfriend to the same cause and the pair decide to get married once they’ve paid their debts to society. Wanting to help Dol, Jang does his best to get the pair as a light a sentence as possible while ensuring justice is served both on a legal and on a human level.

Mixing the crime genre with family drama, Lee Man-hee continues his tendency towards experimentation but with a more hopeful outlook, allowing for a happier ending in which family bonds are restored and crimes forgiven rather than punished. Rather than the frustration and inertia which often traps Lee’s conflicted heroes, Jang and his family are able to free themselves from their various prisons through nothing more than compassion and goodness. Sponsored by the Seoul Metropolitan Police Agency, Midnight Sun is an oddly cheerful piece of pro-police propaganda in which the stigmatised face of authoritarian rule is given a humanising makeover even while remaining steadfast and selfless in the pursuit of justice.

Available to stream online via the Korean Film Archive’s YouTube Channel.

Home from the Sea (故郷, Yoji Yamada, 1972)

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Home from the sea still 1By the early 1970s, Japan was well on its way to an economic recovery with memories of post-war privation fading and modern consumerism rapidly taking hold in the national mindset. Contemporary cinema understandably saw this as a good thing, that brighter times were coming and soon enough everyone would be enjoying a comfortable, prosperous life. The future, however, was not always evenly distributed and modernisation brought with it problems as well as solutions. Yoji Yamada’s Home from the Sea (故郷, Kokyo/Furusato*) paints a melancholy picture of a changing Japan as an earnest young couple are forced to consider leaving their beloved hometown to seek their fortunes elsewhere.

Seiichi Ishizaki (Hisashi Igawa) owns a small transport boat he uses to ferry rocks between construction sites. He is sometimes joined by his wife, Tamiko (Chieko Baisho), who serves as the boat’s engineer. The couple live with Seiichi’s elderly father (Chishu Ryu) and their two daughters on a small island in the Inland Sea. Times are hard. Fuel costs are increasing making Seiichi’s business much less profitable while his boat is old and slow. The maintenance costs alone are difficult to contemplate and the family cannot afford to invest in one of the new steel boats which are currently sucking up most of the available work. Seiichi’s younger brother who used to work on the boat with him has already given up and moved on, taking his wife and children to another town where he works in a factory. Many people seem to think Seiichi would do well to do the same, but he is stubborn. He refuses to be pushed out of his ancestral home and occupation simply because of the unfairness of his times.

A little way into the film, a friendly fishmonger, Matsushita (Kiyoshi Atsumi), who often stops by to have dinner with the family expounds on the beauty of the town. He can’t understand why anyone would want to leave somewhere as lovely as this. Unlike the Ishizakis, Matsushita wasn’t born on the island but in Korea – his parents died during the repatriation after the war and he’s been getting by on his own ever since. He’s done many different jobs and lived in many different places but has chosen to make his home here. A fishmonger’s job is probably always safe (to an extent, at least) in a small harbour town, but Seiichi’s isn’t and he needs money to feed his family. There is no other work on the island, and so there is no way to stay without making the boat pay.

The boat, however, is already 19 years old. Transport ships are only intended to last 10. The engine is faulty and the hull is in desperate need of repair but a visit to the original shipwright reveals that to do so would not be cost effective. The best thing to do would be to buy one of the shiny new steel vessels like their neighbour’s, but that’s far out of Seiichi’s reach. All along the shoreline, you can see the charred remains of boats belonging to those like Seiichi who’ve finally come to the conclusion that their era has passed.

“Can’t beat the Big” is a local mantra. In early ‘70s Japan, counterintuitively enough, size is everything. Not just the boats themselves, but the fleets and the architecture of life. You can’t survive as your own boss anymore because the little guy alone has no power when corporations and conglomerates are extending their reach even into tiny islands. Seiichi goes to have a look at the factory in Onomichi to which he’s been recommended by a friend. It’s not as bad as he thought, but it’s huge and filled with hundreds of identically dressed faceless men. The food is awful, and they’d have no friends. Nevertheless, needs must. If you can’t fight the Big you’ll have to become a part of it or it’ll swallow you whole.

Still the sadness of leaving one’s hometown behind against one’s will with one eye always looking back towards the shoreline is difficult to bear. Seiichi’s father, who had been looking after the children and was therefore extremely close to them, will be staying behind with no one left to look after him save the community itself. Progress might be a good thing, but there are costs too and small town Japan is one of them. It’s sad, but there’s nothing you can do about it. The post-war world might not require so much “gaman” anymore, but bearing the demands of modernity just might.

*According to Shochiku’s website and the narrator in the trailer, the official title is “Kokyo” which is the Sino-Japanese reading of the kanji (故郷) but it’s also often listed under the title “Furusato” – the slightly more emotive native Japanese reading.

Original trailer (no subtitles)

The Rendezvous (約束, Koichi Saito, 1972)

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The Rendezvous poster“If human’s don’t trust each other, it’ll be the end of the world” – so says the cheerful hero at the heart of Koichi Saito’s The Rendezvous (約束, Yakusoku). Saito’s film is, somewhat unusually, a rare example of a Korean film remade in Japan. Inspired by Lee Man-hee’s Late Autumn (now sadly thought lost), The Rendezvous has been remade three times in Korea by such esteemed directors as Kim Ki-young (1975), Kim Soo-yong (1982) and most recently Kim Tae-young in 2010. There is indeed something particularly timeless in its tale of fate frustrating a fated love as each of our protagonists struggles to find the energy to rebel against their own sense of impossibility.

A brief framing sequence begins with a nervous, melancholy woman, Keiko (Keiko Kishi), sitting alone on a park bench, surrounded by the cheerful activity of athletes training, women pushing prams, and families enjoying the crisp sunshine. As she thinks back to what brought her here we travel back with her to a fateful train journey some years previously.

Keiko sits sadly by the window, impassively watching the sea stretch out as the train whizzes by. An older woman (Yoshie Minami) is sitting next to her, though they appear at least not to be on particularly friendly terms. At the first stop a younger man, Akira (Kenichi Hagiwara), gets on and sits down opposite Keiko, throwing a newspaper over his face, presumably to help him get some sleep (or, as we later wonder, perhaps just to better disappear). Intrigued, Keiko nevertheless shivers on catching sight of the paper’s headline – “Drunken Husband Stabbed to Death”. Knocking the paper off his head as she gets up to go to the bathroom, Keiko clips it back on for him with her hairpin – something that later gives him an excuse to talk to her when he eventually wakes up.

Akira, it turns out, is the chatty sort of person who enjoys making conversation with strangers. He makes a nuisance of himself trying to chat to Keiko and the old woman who ignore him, whilst accidentally frightening the bored little girl opposite by trying to entertain her. The ice finally thaws when Akira decides to buy everyone lunch – Keiko accepts and speaks to him if only to insist on paying him back (which the old lady then also feels compelled to do). Though very little actual conversation takes place on this first train journey, Akira is also travelling to the same small town as Keiko and continues to make a nuisance of himself by following her around. Nevertheless a connection begins to form between the pair, such perfect opposites in every way but one, though the time is always ticking and the encounter is one coloured by its impending end.

Keiko’s mysterious behaviour is later revealed to be more than just shyness or existential angst. Akira repeatedly asks for her trust, but she claims herself incapable of trusting anyone because in a sense she is already dead. Indeed, her entire aura is one of deliberate stillness, rarely speaking, and often leaning sadly against a more solid structure as if lacking the energy to fully support herself. Ironically enough, Keiko’s name is written with the character for “firefly” – a creature that burns out bright and then fades away. Keiko not only believes that her light has gone out, but that there are no more fireflies left. Akira, whose name is written not with the character for “bright” but with one for “cheerful”, begins to show her that there could be fireflies still, jokingly pointing to the lights from a nearby boat bobbing on the water.

We’re later told that the root of all Keiko’s suffering is “an absence of love”, that as passion cooled there was only emptiness in its place. “Emptiness” seems to be the force which defines Keiko’s existence, the reason her fire is out and her life apparently over. Though she feels a passionate attraction to Akira, she cannot bring herself to submit to it, both distrusting herself and afraid to face the possibility that it too will end. Both Keiko and Akira are fugitives from themselves, literally railroaded towards an inevitable conclusion they lack the courage to oppose. Akira wants to run, but Keiko knows she belongs on the train, incapable of escaping her self-imposed imprisonment and unwilling to step away from her unchanging destiny.

Fate follows them everywhere – violent headlines, prisoners being escorted, flashes of handcuffs, all reminding them that they are trapped, powerless in the face of an oncoming reckoning. Akira repeatedly asks Keiko to trust him, insisting that as long as she believes in him everything will be alright. Yet Akira is a flustered young man always in a hurry, running as if already late for the future. He makes Keiko a promise of a meeting and even gives her his watch to help her keep it, yet fails to appear. Akira’s heart may be trustworthy, but his body less so and even if he really wanted to come fate may have other plans. Love, it seems, is not enough. Saito returns to Keiko, sitting alone on the bench, waiting as the park empties and all the kids go home for tea. There’s no way to know if Akira can keep his promise even if he meant to, but perhaps there is something even so in the continued faith that he might simply bound in, hours late but as earnest as ever.

The central narrative seems to retain the Korean of sensibility of Lee’s original in its sense of dread and inevitability, and of passion repressed. Saito’s approach leans more towards misty European arthouse than your average Shochiku romance, making the most of its mystery as the time continues to run down for Keiko and Akira before they must prepare to meet their respective fates. Fate, at least, will wait for you and will always be there in the end. Impossibility defines the world of the defeated Keiko and the childlike Akira, but perhaps the most painful thing is hope itself, and the lingering faith that a promise will be kept despite the overwhelming odds.

Original trailer (no subtitles)

Eternal Cause (海軍特別年少兵, Tadashi Imai, 1972)

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Marines cadets posterOften regarded as a “left-wing” filmmaker, even later pledging allegiance to the Communist Party of Japan, Tadashi Imai began his career making propaganda films under the militarist regime. Describing this unfortunate period as the biggest mistake of his life, Imai’s later career was dedicated to socially conscious filmmaking often focusing on those oppressed by Japan’s conservative social structure including the disenfranchised poor and the continued unfairness that often marks the life of women. 1972’s Eternal Cause (海軍特別年少兵, Kaigun Tokubetsu Nensho-hei, AKA Marines Cadets/ Special Boy Soldiers of the Navy) sends him back to those early propaganda days but with the opposite spin. Painting Japan’s tendency towards authoritarianism and its headlong descent into the folly of warfare as a direct result of social inequalities and the hierarchical society, Imai tells the dark story of the “special cadets”, children from military academies who eventually found themselves on the battlefield as members of the last, desperate defence of an already lost empire.

Imai opens at the grim conclusion – February 1945, Iwo Jima. A squad of young men catch sight of their “Instructor” just as he falls and are shortly all killed themselves by approaching American forces. The Americans, sympathetically portrayed, wander the corpse laden battlefield and lift the arm of one particular body lamenting that the fallen soldier is “just a boy”, and that Japan must be in a very bad state indeed if it has come to this. One of the soldiers, not quite dead as it turns out, manages to get to his feet. The Americans are wary but give him time in case he wants to surrender but the boy tries to charge them, crying out that he is a “Marine Cadet”. They have no choice but to shoot him dead.

Moving back around 18 months to June 1943, the “Marine Cadets” are new students at a military academy. On arrival they are instructed that everything they brought with them, including the clothes they are wearing, must be sent home. They are now at war and must forget civilian life. This dividing line neatly marks out the central contradiction in the Marine Cadets’ existence – they are children, but also marines.

Enrolment in the school is voluntary rather than conscription based and the young men have many reasons for having decided to enter the military, most of them having little to do with dying bravely for the Emperor. There is, however, a persistent strain of patriotism which brought them to this point as they find the sacrifice they offer to make all too readily accepted by their nation. The education on offer is wide-ranging and of high quality – the boys will learn English as well as geography, history, science and maths, all of which will hopefully turn them into well educated, efficient military officers, but there is profound disagreement between the teaching staff and “instructors” as to how that education should be delivered.

Sympathethetic teacher Yoshinaga (Katsuhiko Sasaki) believes in education and wants to contribute to raising these children in love seeing as he is in loco parentis. Kudo (Takeo Chii) the military instructor, however, disagrees. He believes in harsh discipline in which progress is encouraged through physical punishment and a strong shame culture. Yoshinaga reminds Kudo that the boys are just children and that such punishment based motivational techniques place the boys at each other’s throats and will undermine the spirit of comradeship and togetherness which is essential for the well functioning of any military unit. Kudo counters that the boys became men when they enlisted, that he was raised this way himself, and that a culture of violence binds the men together into a kind of hive mind which moves and thinks as one. Kudo does not waver in this belief even after his tactics have tragic consequences, but does come to love the children in his care, entrusting them to Yoshinaga as he prepares to face the battlefield himself.

As Kudo leaves, he stops to admit that the boys are children but also wants Yoshinaga to understand something he thinks may not have occurred to him. The boys are mostly poor children, who, he says, have only themselves to rely on unlike the officers who are by and large from middle-class families with extended safety nets of privilege. Kudo’s doctrine of progress through strength is born of being born at the bottom of the heap and needing to struggle to survive. They have made themselves strong in order to resist the consistent oppression of their economic circumstances which often prize nothing other than their physical capabilities.

Poverty is indeed a major motivator. The most sympathetic of the boys, Hayashi (Michiko Araki), has enlisted alongside another boy from his village, Enami (Taketoshi Naito), whose teacher father has fallen headlong for the militarist folly and is even allowing military representatives into his classroom to offer recruitment talks to the boys. He recommends Hayashi join the Marine Cadets as a matter of practically – Hayashi’s family is dirt poor and his father is a drunkard. Joining the academy means reducing the burden on the family who have many other children and also that he will eventually be able to send money home as well as being well provided for himself. Despite a lack of aptitude for soldiering, Hayashi is eventually grateful – in the academy he gets a taste of comfort he never knew at home as well as a sense of comradeship and brotherhood away from the hostile home environment dominated by the violence of a drunken father. Another boy makes a similar decision to escape his indifferent foster family after being orphaned. Despite the fact that his sister has embarked on a life of prostitution to support him, his relatives offer him only scant comfort and keep most of her money for themselves.

Yoshinaga’s complaints about the nature of the education the boys receive is quite naturally countered with a question as to why he is at the school at all given that these boys are destined only to become cannon fodder in a war which clearly all but over. His pleas for kindness and compassion largely fall on deaf ears. The boys are still children – our narrator is 14 when he enlists at the academy, but they have been encouraged to think of themselves as men. Their halfling status embarrasses them and they’re keen to prove themselves as brave soldiers of Japan. Yoshinaga, true to his word, tries to save the boys – ordering them to hide during final attack sure that the Americans will take pity on these child soldiers and prevent their lives from becoming meaningless sacrifices laid on the altar of an uncaring nation. He is unsuccessful because the boys’ heads are already filled with the idea of glorious sacrifice. Ashamed to be thought of anything other than Marine Cadets, they launch their own attack and sacrifice their lives willingly.

Imai is at great pains to remind us that this society cares nothing for the boys, 5,020 of whom fall on the battlefield, or for the poor in general who bear the brunt of a war that is waged against their interests. The approach is distinctly old fashioned for 1972 and the message at times unsubtle, but given that the film appears less than thirty years later than the events it depicts when those who survived would themselves still be young, perhaps fathers of teenage sons themselves, it serves as a timely reminder of past madness and a pointed warning for the consumerist future.