The post-war world was one rife with trouble. By 1958, however, the horizon was perhaps beginning to brighten which means it was no longer too soon have a good laugh about how awful life could be. Nothing particularly awful happens in Shiro Toyoda’s cheerful comedy The Hotelman’s Holiday (駅前旅館, Ekimae Ryokan), the first in a series of “Ekimae” or “station front” movies produced by Toho, but it does amusingly rip a leaf out of Toei’s book in having its community of feckless hoteliers band together to stand up to greedy yakuza stand-in barkers who are actively destabilising the local economy with their underhanded ways.
Our hero, “born in a maid’s room” Jihei (Hisaya Morishige), is the manager of the Kukimoto inn near Tokyo’s Ueno station. Kukimoto seems to get most of its business from large tour groups, particularly school children on trips to the city and religious organisations, seemingly unperturbed by the area’s then scrappy working class earthiness. The problem is that there are rather a lot of inns in this small area (it is after all near a major rail station) and they’re all competing for the same walk-in guests which means they’re increasingly at the mercy of the local “barkers” who target travellers at points of transit and take them to certain inns in return for commissions. Even so, Jihei himself can often be found outside enticing passersby into the hotel to prove his managerial prowess.
The barkers know their worth and are beginning to get too big for their boots in shifting into the human trafficking business. Not to go into the finer details, the inns have a lot of ladies living on their premises on whom some of their trade relies. The barkers have been tempting the girls from the inns away from their homes and into potentially more lucrative though almost certainly less friendly occupations.
The central drama kicks off when the barkers try to abduct Kukimoto’s maid Okyo (Mina Mitsui) who is saved at the last minute by intellectual student Mannen (Frankie Sakai). Mannen is studying law and working illicitly for several tourist information companies in order to pay his way through college. As such he’s just another of the scrappy young guys trying to forge ahead in the precarious post-war environment. Jihei is, in a sense, pretty much the same. Born in a maid’s room, as he says, he’s very much part of the inn business and is proud to be a manager but also resents his subordinate position to the owner and the way they often treat him like a servant rather than the dependable employee he really is. His position leaves him feeling as if he’s already reached his peak and there is no real future for him other than the status quo. That feeling of futility might be why he, Mannen, and some of the other hotel managers eventually decide that they need to “cleanse” the Ueno Station area of the barker threat.
Their resistance has a pleasantly pithy quality in that it relies on a perfectly peaceful method of putting up banners to encourage customers not to trust the barkers and to approach inns directly. As might be assumed, the barkers aren’t very happy about their business being undermined and immediately begin threatening the Kukimoto inn, whom they assume to be the instigators, with destruction if they do not immediately cease and desist. Jihei thinks he has a solid plan and it does indeed defuse the situation but cannot ultimately rectify it. What it does do is give the inn’s owners the excuse they’ve been looking for to part with him, and Jihei the impetus he perhaps needed to rethink his life.
As Mannen puts it, “our reality is preposterous and absurd”, but we have to go on resisting because “happiness exists even in this world”. The inn managers stand up against the barker oppression in the same way communities stand up against yakuza in Toei’s modern gangster dramas, but like many of anti-gangster narratives, the corruption is so deeply ingrained that it cannot be entirely eliminated, only managed. Thus Jihei, also involved in a series of romantic subplots involving an intense former geisha (Keiko Awaji) and a diffident bar owner (Chikage Awashima), eventually realises that if he cannot change his environment he might be better to leave it, escaping to the sort of place where they still grow barley and travel by cart. Mannen too, their revolution failed, eventually takes off with Okyo to go into business in Osaka, giving up on his imagined future for a more solid present. Meanwhile, chaos rules in Ueno as crowds of travellers pour out of the station towards an uncertain future with only the barkers to guide them.
Original trailer (no subtitles)
Where there’s danger, there’s money! Or, maybe just danger, who knows but whatever it is, it certainly doesn’t lack for excitement. Ko Nakahira is best known for his first feature, Crazed Fruit, the youthful romantic drama ending in speed boat murder which ushered in the Sun Tribe era. Though he later tried to make a return to more artistic efforts, it’s Nakahira’s freewheeling Nikkatsu crime movies that have continued to capture the hearts of audience members. Danger Pays (AKA Danger Paws, 危いことなら銭になる, Yabai Koto Nara Zeni ni Naru) is among the best of them with its cartoon-like, absurd crime caper world filled with bumbling crooks and ridiculous setups.
The bright and shining post-war world – it’s a grand place to be young and fancy free! Or so movies like Tokyo Mighty Guy (東京の暴れん坊, Tokyo no Abarembo) would have you believe. Casting one of Nikkatsu’s tentpole stars, Akira Kobayshi, in the lead, Buichi Saito’s Tokyo Mighty Guy is, like previous Kobayashi/Saito collaboration 
Windows on Worlds 