Tag: Daiei

Shinobi no mono 8: The Three Enemies (新書・忍びの者, Kazuo Ikehiro, 1966)

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The abiding constant of the Shinobi Mono series had been its continual forward motion, at least up until instalment seven which had backtracked to the death of Ieyasu. This eighth and final film (save for a further sequel released in 1970 starring Hiroki Matsukata replacing Raizo Ichikawa who had sadly passed away a couple of years earlier at the young age of 37) however reaches even further back into the mists of time setting itself a few years before the original trilogy had begun.

This time around, we follow young Kojiro (Raizo Ichikawa) on what is a more stereotypical tale of personal revenge albeit that one that eventually becomes embroiled in politics as he joins a ninja band that’s working for Takeda Shingen (Kenjiro Ishiyama). In slightly surprising turn of events, Ieyasu (Taketoshi Naito) turns out to be what passes for a good guy at least in contrast to Shingen’s duplicity though Ieyasu himself is still young and at the very beginning of his military career which is why unlike his older self he’s a little more proactive and willing to start a fight as well as finish one. In any case, Shingen thinks he’s an easy target largely because he simply hasn’t been in post long enough to have begun making connections with local lords, bribing them with gifts to secure their loyalty. 

In any case, Kojiro’s journey begins as something more like a martial arts film as he surpasses his current teacher and is told to find a man called Sadayu (Yunosuke Ito) in the mountains if wants to be up to gaining his revenge against the three men who killed his father while trying to steal his gunpowder. Perhaps there’s something a little ironic in the fact that Kojiro’s father was killed in a fight over what amounts to the substance of the future engineering a wholesale change in samurai warfare and edging towards the oppressive peace of the Tokugawa shogunate. But to get she revenge, Kojiro commits himself to learning true ninjutsu as the film demonstrates in a lengthy training montage. Unlike previous instalments, however, there is left emphasis place on the prohibition of emotion with the reason Kojiro cannot romance Sandayu’s adopted daughter down to her father’s whim forbidding her from marrying a ninja.

Apparently not the Sandayu of the earlier films despite the similarity of the name, this one has decided to side with Shingen because he’s mistakenly concluded that he is a “fair person who understands us ninja” when in reality he just using them and is no better than Nobunaga or Ieyasu. Shingen hires them to tunnel into a castle through the well, but is entirely indifferent to their complaints about safety leaving a Sandayu voiwing vengeance. The ninja, he says, generally serve themselves and are bound to no master but he seems to have thought Shingen was different only to be proved wrong once again.

Of course, Kojiro continues looking for the men who killed his father though they obviously guide him back towards conflict anyway. When he tracks some of them down, one remarks that all he did was finish him off which was an act of kindness to end his suffering not that he necessary approved of what his fallow gang members had done. Kojiro finds a surrogate father in Sadayu much as Goemon had though this time a slightly better one even if Sandayu is also a man with a lot on his conscience. Even more so than the other films, this one takes place in a largely lawless land too consumed with perpetual warfare to notice the starving and the desperate let alone the inherent corruption of the feudal era. The bad of ninjas has a rather scrappy quality, not quite as sleek as the Iga of previous films while also a little naive. Shooting more like a standard jidaigeki, Ikehiro uses relatively few ninja tricks generally sticking to smoke and blow tarts with a few shrunken battles. Nevertheless, the violence itself is surprisingly visceral beginning with unexpected severing of an arm and leading to a man getting stabbed in both eyes. Then again, the film ends in the characteristically upbeat way which has become somewhat familiar only this time Kojiro runs back towards romantic destiny now freed of his mission of vengeance and the oppressive ninja code. 

Shinobi No Mono 5: Return of Mist Saizo (忍びの者 続・霧隠才蔵, Kazuo Ikehiro, 1964)

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At the end of the previous instalment, Saizo (Raizo Ichikawa) had escaped from the fall of Osaka Castle spiriting away Sanada Yukimura (Tomisaburo Wakayama) who, in contrast to what the history books say, did not die. The pair make their way towards Shimazu, where they are also not well disposed to Ieyasu (Eitaro Ozawa), but as Saizo is informed the Tokugawa clan will never die. Knocking off Nobunaga put an end to the Oda clan, getting rid of Hideyori took the Toyotomi out of the running, but killing Ieyasu will make little difference because another retainer will swiftly take his place.

As a reminder, that’s bad for Saizo because what he wanted was the chaos of the Warring States era back to restore the ninja to their previous status. Nevertheless, at the end of the previous film he claimed to have rediscovered a human heart in his devotion to Yukimura though it may of course be simply another ruse to meet an end. In any case, Ieyasu seems to be putting his ninjas to good use and is once again waiting it out apparently aware that Yukimura is alive and well in Shimazu.

Meanwhile, times are changing. Yukimura is convinced the future of warfare lies in firearms and whoever controls Tanegashima where the weapons are made will prove victorious. They think they can gain it by figuring out how they get access to high-quality iron when trading with anyone outside of Portugal is illegal and the Portuguese don’t have any. It’s access to foreign trade which is becoming a crunch issue as Ieyasu tries to solidify his power, later giving a deathbed order to ban Christianity to stop European merchants taking over the country. Saizo travels to Tanegashima to investigate and figures out that the secret is they’re trading with China, which is pretty good blackmail material, but also encounters two sisters who turn out to be the orphaned daughters of a Tokugawa ninja with vengeance on their mind.

In a surprising turn of events, it turns out that his main adversary is Hanzo Hattori (Saburo Date) but the fact he keeps outsmarting him eventually convinces Ieyasu that the ninja have outlived their usefulness. Hanzo becomes determined to kill Saizo to restore his honour, filling the palace with various ninja traps though unlike Goemon Saizo seems to be one step ahead of them. This lengthy final sequence is played in near total silence, and ironically finds Goemon just waiting, after dispatching several of Hanzo’s men, to see if his poison dart has taken effect and Ieyasu is on his way out. Only in the end Ieyasu just laughs at him. He’s 75. Saizo’s gone to too much effort when he could have just waited it out. Ieyasu has already achieved everything he wanted to. His control over Japan is secured given he’s just been appointed chancellor. He can quite literally die happy because nothing matters to him anymore. A title card informs us that when Ieyasu did in fact die, no one really cared. The Tokugawa peace continued. 

Here, once again, the Ninja too are powerless victims of fate despite their constant machinations. Yukimura tells Saizo to live and be human, advice he gives to the sisters in Tanegashima but does not take for himself staking everything on his revenge against Ieyasu which is, as he points out, pointless for Ieyasu was at death’s door anyway and his demise changed nothing. In his first of two entries in the series, Kazuo Ikehiro crafts some impressive set pieces beginning with a mist-bound underwater battle as Saizo and Yukimura make their escape by water to an epic flaming shuriken battle, though this time around the deaths are noticeably visceral. Men are drowned, stabbed, or caught on wooden spikes. Those who do not obey the ninja code are stabbed and pushed off cliffs while once again emotion is a weakness that brings about nothing more than death. Ikehiro’s frequent use of slow dissolves adds to the dreamlike feel of Saizo’s shadow existence even as the ninja themselves seem to be on the point of eclipse for what lies ahead for them in a world of peace in which there is no longer any need for stealth?

Shinobi no Mono 4: Siege (忍びの者 霧隠才蔵, Tokuzo Tanaka, 1964)

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When he began what would become the Shinobi no Mono series, Satsuo Yamamoto had wanted to put a more realistic spin on the ninja movie, shifting from the fantasy-esque wuxia with which the genre had been associated since the silent days to something that was largely devoid of romanticism. In the films he directed, the ninja are powerless manipulators doomed to live unhappy lives defined by a cruel and heartless code. Though still based on the same novel, the third film began to compromise that vision in the hero’s miraculous escape from certain death, ending on a note of ambivalent positivity in which Goemon declines the offer to join Ieyasu and instead walks out into independent freedom. 

The first three films had covered all of the action in Tomoyoshi Murayama’s serialised novel, and so the following four are based on original ideas by screenwriter Hajime Takaiwa save for episode six which is scripted by Kei Hattori and Kinya Naoi. Many of the same actors appear but in different roles while the action has moved on 15 years, skipping ahead from the unseen battle of Sekigahara to the siege of Osaka and the end of the Toyotomi. Raizo Ichikawa stars as another displaced Iga ninja nominally in the service of the Toyotomi but secretly longing to bump off Ieyasu not for reasons of revenge but because there is no place for ninja in his new and peaceful society. If they’re able to unseat him, they assume the situation will revert to the civil war society with the effete Hideyori (Junichiro Narita) too ineffective to assume control over the nascent nation. 

It has to be said, this version of events has rather misogynistic overtones with frequent speeches from Sanada Yukimura (Tomisaburo Wakayama) avowing that it’s all Lady’s Yodo’s (Otome Tsukimiya) fault for giving her son bad advice that he is too naive to know not to follow. In negotiating to end the siege at Osaka castle, Yukimura had advised it was better to strike back against Ieyasu and kill him as soon as possible, but Lady Yodo vetoed it and insisted she and her son remain locked up in relative safety. His conviction is somewhat born out seeing as Ieyasu had deliberately targeted the area of the castle where they assumed she was staying in order to further frighten her.

Nevertheless, he’s astute in realising it was all essentially a ruse and part of Ieyasu’s plan to force the Toyotomi into submission. The attack on the castle was only ever intended to engineer a peace treaty which Ieasyu himself presented and forced Hideyori to sign. Then again, there’s some strange symmetry in play. When Saizo enters the castle in an attempt to assassinate Ieyasu he mangles to trick him into killing his double instead, then when Ieyasu’s ninja try to assassinate Yukimura after following Saizo having known he would pretend to be dead and dig himself out of his own grave they also kill his double much to Ieyasu’s consternation. 

It’s this similarity that Saizo hints at when he pities a retainer of Ieyasu’s explaining that Nobunaga and Hideyoshi had tried to eliminate them but they survived while Ieyasu now wants to use them for his own ends but will likely do the same when they are no longer necessary to him. Thus what they want is a kind of chaos, desperate to assassinate Ieyasu to return to the world in which the ninja are able to influence events from the shadows. Even so his conviction is apparently shaken. As in the previous series, Saizo gains a love interest, Lady Akane (Midori Isomura), who has become a sex worker as an apparent act of self-harm after being raped by Tokugawa soldiers during the fall of Osaka castle. But as we’ve been repeatedly told, a ninja’s heart lies under the blade. Born in darkness, they shall die in darkness and are not permitted to fall in love. Thus Saizo rejects her affections, but eventually declares himself corrupted by wanting to die alongside Yukimura as a loyal soldier. The in-film lore would have us believe that Yukimura did not in fact die during the final assault but was spirited away by Saizo to plot Ieyasu’s downfall in the shadows. 

Directed by Tokuzo Tanaka in his only instalment in the series, the film is shot more like a conventional jidaigeki but returns something of the fantasy aesthetic to the ninja as they somersault through the forest. Saizo’s surname effectively means “hidden in the mist”, which is partly ironic seeing as Akane also describes her rape as being overcome by a thick fog, but is also symbolic of his frequent use of smoke bombs as a disappearing trick which again undermines the sense of realism with which the series began. Yukimura is fond of declaring that the clock cannot be turned back, a sentiment echoed by Akane and emphasising the sense of melancholy fatalism that cannot be avoided in a historical drama in which the outcome is already very well known, imbuing Tanaka’s take with the sense of elegy and legend Yamamoto had so deliberately rejected. 

A Bullet Hole Underground (地下街の弾痕, Kazuo Mori, 1949)

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Produced by Daiei Kyoto under the guidance of the Osaka Police, Bullet Hole Underground (地下街の弾痕, Chikagai no Dankon) is keen on selling a vision of order in a new Japan in which the police force employs all the latest technology to solve crimes calmly and methodically. We see them approach the crime scene forensically and conduct a series of scientific tests with microscopes and gadgets such as lie detector machines and code breaking equipment as they proceed towards the truth while earnest policeman Minagawa (Hiroshi Nihonyanagi) battles the ghosts of his past on realising that the dead man’s wife is his own lost love.

In any case, the film opens with a noirish scene at Umeda Station, Osaka, which then turns strangely comic. A man stumbles toward the exit and we assume that he is probably drunk but another man soon comes up behind him and pushes a pistol into his back. The second man pulls the trigger, then again to make sure, before calmly walking up the steps and leaving the station. A little while later, another drunk man arrives and has a little banter with the body before covering it with a signboard which is one reason it isn’t spotted until the shoeshine boys turn up in the morning. 

This sudden influx of children at rush hour is another symbol of the destabilisation of the post-war society in which the war orphans try to support themselves amid the still difficult economic environment. The lack of economic opportunities is also posited as a reason that the deceased, later identified as Kaneko, may have turned to crime by getting involved with a criminal gang smuggling drugs and money to destabilise the society even further. Yet the rot may have set in a little earlier than that. Before the war, Minagawa had wanted to marry Michiko (Machiko Kyo), the sister of his friend Sekiguchi (Toshiaki Konoe), but she later threw him over to marry the wealthy son of a family running a pharmacy. She admits she married him for the money, but after the war he lost everything. Unable to find work, Kaneko became a wastrel while Michiko gained employment at a cabaret bar as a dancer. He told her that he’d found a job at a company, but this turned out to be a lie and chief investigator Fujimoto (Takashi Shimura) assumes he must have been working for the gang. 

Still, to begin with it seems like it may have been a case of mistaken identity. Kaneko’s clothes turned out to belong to other people, a fact easily explained by Michiko that they were second hand, but also suggesting that someone may have set him up to take their fall. The gang needed the skills he learned in the navy but maybe they didn’t need him anymore. The root of the evil is located, ironically enough, in a jewellery store presenting a front of affluence and elegance but in reality founded on crime and misery when so many are still struggling to rebuild their lives. Michiko too seems to have turned cynical. She snarls and pushes Minagawa away, but privately cries and appears to regret her youthful decision to reject love for material comfort.

Perhaps because of its genesis as a film designed to promote the local police force, it has a much more upbeat conclusion and particularly for Michiko who is, unusually, allowed to redeem herself and gain a second chance to make a better decision by reuniting with Minagawa who does not and never has held her past against her. The pair of them look out over the fracturing city and remark at how it just carries on as if nothing had happened which feels like advice intended for the post-war society that it should do the same and try to leave the past behind to start a new life in this new era. Meanwhile, huge numbers of policemen swarm the harbour to crack down on the smuggling gang sending the not altogether comforting message that this city is well protected against all kinds of crime and the police force is a well-trained, modern institution that has the latest technology at its disposal along with astute and compassionate officers. There may be sleazy clubs, duplicitous men and heartless gangsters, black markets and smuggled dangers, but there are, the closing scenes with their wide-open vistas in which scorched trees stand behind the burgeoning city imply, better days to come.

The Pit of Death (怪談おとし穴, Koji Shima, 1968)

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The building at the centre of Koji Shima’s dread-fuelled horror noir Pit of Death (怪談おとし穴, Kaidan Otoshi Ana) is said to be haunted by the spirits of the many people who died during its construction. In his opening voiceover, anti-hero Kuramoto (Mikio Narita) likens the city to a hornet’s nest, the salaryman drones mindlessly buzzing around the business district as if driven by some supernatural force. In that sense, the office building itself becomes an eerie place, the nexus of the salaryman dream which in the end drags all to hell. 

Largely a retelling of Yotsuya Kaidan for the mid-20th century with a little A Place in the Sun thrown in, the film finds Kuramoto an ambitious man deluded by consumerism and resentful of the classism and snobbishness which limit his prospects as a man who has otherwise been able to pull himself out of poverty. His boss pointedly speaks of his talents which include the ability to speak several languages despite only having attended night school rather than university while it’s unusual for a man of his background to hold this kind of position even if he’s only a secretary and not yet an executive. Nevertheless, his boss clearly sees him as a potential successor and plans to marry him to his daughter (Mako Sanjo) who has in some ways inexplicably developed a crush on him.

But Kuramoto is already in a relationship with typist Etsuko (Mayumi Nagisa). In fact, the reason the boss is so pleased with him is largely down to her in that he asked Etsuko to sleep with their foreign client, Mr Hancock, to seal the deal which she duly did. Kuramoto plans to throw her over in order to pursue his dream of taking over the company so he can look down on those who once looked down on him. He tells Etsuko that the marriage will be in name only, that he isn’t attracted to the boss’ daughter Midori, and their relationship will continue as before only to be confused when Etsuko is not totally on board with the plan. She tells him she’s pregnant with his child though he callously points out it could be Hancock’s and insists on an abortion thereafter determining he must kill her so that he can fulfil his destiny by joining the executive class. 

His desires are obvious when he steps into Midori’s home and gazes at a painting crassly asking how much it’s worth, admitting that he’s the kind of poor person who has a fascination with luxury. His forward propulsion is driven by a fear of poverty, the trauma of the hard life he’s had and the futility he felt in his inability to escape it. Yet it’s also a kind of class rebellion motivated by resentment for the prejudice held against him as a man without means in a highly stratified society. Paradoxically, he will do anything and everything to be accepted as a member of the elite class including murdering Etsuko, the symbol of the working class past he fears will drag him down.

Etsuko does indeed drag him down eventually in her own revenge against his callousness and the double standards of a patriarchal society. Her relationship with Kuramoto seems to be a secret in the office while he uses and discards her when no longer useful to him. She too is trapped within this building of a newly corporatised society but can rise no further alone and is in a fairly bleak position without Kuramoto for she has already thrown away her only bargaining chip by entering a sexual relationship with him. Should she attempt to raise his child alone as a never married single mother, her life would be very difficult indeed if not actually impossible. Nevertheless, she does have real power over Kuramoto in her ability to expose the affair and ruin his chances of career advancement through dynastic marriage destroying any possibility of his future success. 

In Kuramoto’s mind, Etsuko cackles like a witch or evil spirit. Her hair billows out into the wind like a vengeful ghost, though the first few times Kuramoto only imagines her death. He sees himself push her off a roof, only to be surprised to see her still standing over him. Etsuko haunts Kuramoto while alive as an image of his destruction all while he silently plots hers. He plans to use the building against her, hiding her body inside it where he assumes no one will see. In the end, it’s as if this building, an edifice of soulless corporatising capitalism, consumes them both, drawing them in with their unfulfilled desires until they fall into the bottomless pit of post-war ambition. Shima makes frequent use of solarisation and film noir lighting to destabilise Kuramoto’s world as his mental state starts to fracture along with innovative use of split screens to lend the space a sense of eerie continuity but ultimately posits the salaryman society as a kind of death trap beckoning greedy souls towards their demise with an inexorable fatalism.

Hoodlum Soldier (兵隊やくざ, Yasuzo Masumura, 1965)

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The opening voiceover of Yasuzo Masumura’s Hoodlum Soldier (兵隊やくざ, Heitai Yakuza) explains to us that the settlement we’re looking at is effectively a huge prison in the desert inhabited only the Japanese military from which there is no escape. To ram the point home, the camera lingers on the decomposed skeleton of Japanese infantrymen half-buried in the mud only a short distance from the fort’s borders. This is the fate of the soldier, it seems to tell us with nihilistic futility as if in effect all of these men are already dead while imprisoned inside the death cult that is militarism. 

Yet, our heroes will eventually escape. At least that’s how it seems at the end of the film though there are a further eight instalments in this series. A mismatched pair who develop something akin to a sadomasochistic relationship, they each resist this system in opposing ways. “College boy” Arita (Takahiro Tamura) is just waiting out the end of his contract, continually refusing promotions so that he will be discharged at the end of his three-year term and allowed to return to Tokyo a free man. Omiya (Shintaro Katsu), by contrast, is a man who has no real concept of hierarchy or authority. As he later says, he doesn’t do anything he doesn’t want to do and it’s not so much that he resists authority but is simply indifferent to it.

As Arita explains, the the army is a hierarchy that’s founded on violence. The mildest infraction is dealt with through a process of slapping in which those of higher status assert their authority by inflicting violence on those below. We’re told that laws have recently been put in place to regulate the violence implemented as disciple with excessive force now apparently frowned upon leaving this culture of slapping as the only accepted form of judging an action right or wrong though it’s also clear that these rules are not always respected even by those who made them. The very system is then itself corrupt and unfair, which Arita knows and therefore contrives to live outside of it in so much as he does not participate in this chain of violence.

Neither does Omiya but in an opposing way. On joining the unit, he simply does not react to being slapped by his superior officer and in that way makes it clear that he cannot be controlled by violence. He does not fight back, but only uses to violence to oppose what he sees as injustice and it’s this refusal to just accept the unfairness of army life that makes him a thorn in the side to army command. They assign a reluctant Arita as his mentor, much to his chagrin because he fears that Omiya will get him into trouble and damage his chances of making it to his discharge without incident. But the funny thing is that Omiya does submit himself to Arita’s authority precisely because he does not brutalise him and never uses violence as a means of control. Omiya respects Arita, and therefore listens to him when he explains why a particular course of action is disadvantageous to himself and will only result in further violence. 

To Arita, Omiya at times seems like a bullheaded brawler who thinks a fight is over when someone is knocked out or surrenders and is unable to see the potential for reprisals, but he’s smarter than he gives him credit for and the bond between them is quite genuine even at times homoerotic as they each declare they don’t want to be parted from each other seemingly the only two sane men marooned amid the folly of war in Manchuria. Omiya respects Arita because he does not use violence against him, but in other senses perhaps craves it and is willing to inflict violence on himself in order to save Arita from being forced to do so by the system under which they live which would obviously cause him mental anguish. The power dynamics between them shift as the fortunes of the war decline with Arita eventually declaring that Omiya is now his superior and may issue him orders which he will then obey.

The statement may however be ironic in that they are in the process of escaping the hierarchal society by hijacking its most potent symbol, a train. Omiya declares themselves free of it in pointing out that China stretches to the borders of Russia and Europe as if the whole world were now open to them that they are no longer bound by the walls of the literal prison that is the army camp and the symbolic ones of the militarist society ruled by violence. As Arita had pointed out, the camp ran itself like a prison and was akin to a yakuza society with the different factions often at war with each other. Goverened by macho posturing, every transgression must be solved through violence to approve each man’s status with Omiya’s perpetually high in part because he doesn’t really care very much for the hierarchy only for what he sees as righteousness. 

The two men bond with a Japanese sex worker who they realise is just as trapped as they are by the force that underpins militarism, violent patriarchy. She also feels her situation to be futile, that even if she should return to Japan there will no future for her because of her past in sex work while she currently has no more control than they do and is simply pulled around by her employers to wherever the army goes now that the frontlines are in constant flux and the retreat south has begun. Arita and Omiya free themselves by decoupling from the train leaving the sleeping soldiers yet to awake from the cruel spell of militarism inside while they seek freer futures. Our heroes are men who in effect simply choose to remove themselves from an absurd and destructive social order which speaks just as well to the contemporary society of docile salarymen living in a different kind of prison but perhaps no more free than previous generations while tied to a feudalistic, patriarchal social hierarchy. 

Hoodlum Soldier screened as part of this year’s Camera Japan.

Original trailer (no subtitles)

The Blind Menace (不知火検校, Kazuo Mori, 1960)

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Two years before finding fame as Zatoichi, Shintaro Katsu starred as his mirror image in a tale of pure villainy, The Blind Menace (不知火検校, Shiranui Kengyo). As the title suggests, the film follows the upward trajectory and eventual downfall of an unsighted man who gleefully rapes and pillages his way to becoming the leader of his community aided and abetted by the ills of the feudal era which allow him to profit from his crimes until the past finally catches up with him.

After all as he later says, “as long you as you keep rising in the world, past misdeeds don’t matter.” In any case, even as a child the man who would later be known as Suginoichi (Shintaro Katsu) is incredibly unpleasant. In the opening festival sequence he picks his nose and flicks it in a barrel of sake so that the men drinking will abandon it. The only sign of possible goodness in him is that he takes the sake home for his mother to enjoy, though he seems to relish the idea of her unwittingly drinking his snot so perhaps that was the real purpose. Other hobbies of his include conning wealthy passersby out of a ryo with a well worn scam in which he asks them to read a letter from his uncle which mentions that it should include one ryo only what’s in there is a stone. When the reader explains the situation, he accuses them of trying to take advantage of his blindness and makes a fuss about it until they’re embarrassed into coughing up a ryo of their own (not a small sum for the time period). 

In some ways his poverty and disability might explain his behaviour. His family set up is subverted with his mother much like him money hungry and willing to do anything to get it while his saintly, henpecked father is gentle and honest. This might have taught him the wrong lessons about masculinity that lead him to see his father as weak in allowing the world to trample him while taking his mother’s advice to heart that if they only had a 1000 ryo they could get him trained up properly so that he might one day become a Kengyo which is a little bit like a community leader for the blind with social status and political influence. 

It’s this kind of social affirmation he seems to crave, but is essentially a narcissistic sociopath who takes advantage a stereotype that in some ways infantilises the blind and those with other disabilities who are believed to be pure-hearted and incapable of intrigue or evil. He seems to come to the rescue of a noblewoman who asked his boss, the Kengyo, to lend her money secretly because her brother has been caught embezzling but then rapes her, asks for the money back, and blackmails her into further acts of sexual exploitation offering her only 5 ryo a time knowing she needs 50. He thinks nothing of using his acupuncture skills to kill a man who was carrying 200 ryo to buy a “boneless girl” for a freak show and then framing a man who saw him do it but agreed to say nothing for a 50% cut for the crime. Suginoichi later teams up with “Severed Head” Kurakichi (Fujio Suga) to commit a series of burglaries including that of the Kengyo master who he also has killed to usurp his postion. 

But as he said, once his recognition is in sight with an invitation from the shogun everything begins to fall apart as all his wrongdoing starts to catch up with him. The feudal world had allowed him to prosper partly because of other people’s greed but also the social codes that favour shame and secrecy along with people’s unwillingness to accept that a blind man can also be selfish and evil despite a lot of evidence to the contrary. Elegantly lensed by Kazuo Mori who brings a sense of realism to the hardbitten backstreets of the feudal poor, the film may suggest that the wealthy only get that way by trickery and exploitation and the only way to rise to the loftiest place is to be like Suginoichi and not care what you do to get there but is clear that once you arrive you won’t stay very long because one day the past will really will come back to bite you. 

4K restoration trailer (no subtitles)

The Whale God (鯨神, Tokuzo Tanaka, 1962)

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Original trailer (no subtitles)

Two Wives (妻二人, Yasuzo Masumura, 1967)

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Everything is facade in Yasuzo Masumura’s ironic exploration of the corruptions of the post-war society, Two Wives (妻二人, Tsuma Futari). Based on the novel by Patrick Quentin and scripted by Kaneto Shindo, Masumura’s dark mystery drama is a characteristically circular affair revolving around the hero’s moral confusion but positioning its two women as mirrors of each other, one a conservative upperclass daughter of a magazine editor whose intense properness has alienated all around her, and the other a perpetual mistress hung up on no-good starving artists.

Kenzo (Koji Takahashi), the hero, is married to the upperclass Michiko (Ayako Wakao) but is accidentally reunited with former uni girlfriend Junko (Mariko Okada) through an act of extreme coincidence. Junko is sporting a bandage around her neck to hide bruises caused by her violent drunk of a boyfriend Kobayashi (Takao Ito), a failed writer. This is in a sense ironic, as Kenzo had himself been an aspiring author during their uni days and it was Junko’s introduction to an old family friend, Nagai (Masao Mishima), which resulted in him getting a regular salaryman job before dumping her to marry the boss’ daughter. Despite himself, Kenzo ends up doing the same thing for Kobayashi but the young man’s motives are less than pure and he’s not so much tempted by consumerist comforts as coldly avaricious quickly setting his sights on Michiko’s wayward younger sister Rie (Kyoko Enami) who is just young and reckless enough to rebel against her sister’s puritanism through an affair with an unsuitable man. 

The magazine, Housewife’s World, seems to have been Michiko’s brainchild and runs under the slogan “clean, bright, beautiful”. Its target demographic is conservative wives and mothers with a particular interest in wholesome family values. These are all things Michiko practices in her personal life though as it becomes clear her excessive properness often annoys those around her who claim her moral authoritarianism pushes them towards transgressive rebellion. As the film opens, Nagai holds a meeting in which he announces that he’s fired two employees for being cautioned by the police when caught in an after-hours nightclub fearing that if such an event were to make to the papers it would tarnish their brand. However, pretty much no one other than Michiko is very dedicated to wholesomeness, her father having married off his mistress to a penniless aristocrat for the prestige of his name while employing the couple to manage a fund Michiko had set up for disabled children only for them to siphon all the money off for themselves. 

Having chosen consumerist fulfilment over the romantic, Kenzo has dedicated himself to his new role but is perhaps still conflicted in his decision especially after reuniting with Junko. His mirror Kobayashi, however, has no conflict at all and is willing to do anything and everything to achieve consumerist success. “You’ve no idea what a man without standing or money will do” he snarls, laying bare the effects of post-war inequality, pledging to use the Nagais like a springboard to jump as high as he can while threatening blackmail over having discovered all the sordid goings on at Housewife’s World. 

The soul of properness, Michiko is presented as the ultimate image of respectability while Junko is perceived as its inverse, a sexually active unmarried woman living in squalid backrooms and hanging out in bars. Yet Michiko’s austere exterior hides an inner ruthlessness in addition to an internal conflict over her own role in society. She publishes a magazine aimed at housewives though she is not a housewife herself but technically her husband’s boss. Eventually Nagai attempts to promote Kenzo above his wife claiming that the present situation does not fit with the traditional patriarchal outlook of magazine but he refuses, uncomfortable with this little piece of political manoeuvring in thinking that Michiko is better suited to the job and mildly insulted by the attempt at manipulation knowing that the reason for his promotion has nothing to do with his own ability. “I’m not interested in being a dog” he eventually barks back having come to the conclusion that this life of consumerist comfort is not worth the sacrifice of his autonomy or dignity. 

As for Junko, her love is indeed selfless continuing to support each of her starving artists even after they abandon her in favour of conventional success. Faced with Kobayashi’s rage, she cannot fire he effortlessly taking the gun from her which will eventually be retrieved by Michiko who does indeed use it to defend herself after Kobayashi attempts to rape her. “I want to be a woman who is loved like you” she exclaims on meeting Junko who has been accused of the murder she herself committed, jealous of her warmth and openness while Junko envies her for her refinement. Michiko claims that she hates lies, but discovers that everyone in her life has been lying to her while eventually forced to lie herself in covering up her crime. Yet it’s the weight of all the lies which eventually jolts Kenzo out of his complicity, resenting being made to lie to the police to cover up Rie’s potentially scandalous behaviour while unwilling to allow Junko to be convicted of a crime she did not commit. Nagai even convinces the family maid to lie for them in order to guarantee medical treatment for her sickly daughter. 

At his cruelest moment, Nagai goes so far as to undercut Michiko’s conflicted sense of self in telling her coldly that he only considered her a “token figure” he used for business who should have known her place and sat quietly in a corner ironically relegating her to the patriarchal space to which she on some level feels she ought to have confined herself while simultaneously wanting to take control as she had when she informed her father she would be marrying Kenzo rather than allowing him to find her a match. She too had worried about the direction of the current society and their magazine, wanting to move away from pure consumerism towards socially conscious content while her father clearly just wanted to make as much money as possible with no particular concern for morality only for optics. When she asks Kenzo if he loves her, he does not lie but replies only that he respects her which might in a way be an expression of love, later claiming that the properness which has alienated everyone else has in fact made him a better person who is determined to stand by her after she eventually commits to doing the right thing. 

In a final touch of irony, we see the “clean, bright” slogan echoed on a billboard outside the police station which is probably not an entirely transparent agency either though it appears as if in this case justice legal, moral, and emotional will be served striking back against amoral post-war consumerism and societal hypocrisy as the circle is brought to a close, both women landing on an equal footing and making their respective choices while Kenzo recommits himself to decency by pledging to start over together with Michiko. All in all, a more optimistic ending that might be assumed in a Masumura picture but then again no one can ever really escape the insidious hypocrisies of the contemporary society. 

Original trailer (no subtitles)

The Great White Tower (白い巨塔, Satsuo Yamamoto, 1966)

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“It’s about the right thing to do, it’s about conscience, and Prof. Zaizen lacks conscience” according to a star witness at the conclusion of a medical malpractice trial in Satsuo Yamamoto’s adaptation of the novel by Toyoko Yamasaki, The Great White Tower (白い巨塔, Shiroi Kyoto). One of a series of films heavily critical of the medical system in the midst of rising economic prosperity, Yamamoto’s tense political drama presents the succession intrigue at a university hospital as an allegory for the nation as a whole implying that lingering feudalistic and authoritarian thinking has poisoned the contemporary society. 

This is in part reflected in the way in which major hospitals are often run as large family businesses where succession is a dynastic matter. In this case, however, the scene is a prominent university hospital in Osaka at which the head of the surgical department, Azuma (Eijiro Tono), is about to retire. Generally, one of his assistant professors would simply move up after being approved by a board comprised of other department heads but the problem is no one, and especially not Azuma, is particularly happy with the most likely candidate, Zaizen (Jiro Tamiya). The issue between them seems to be one of ambition and authority. Zaizen is regarded by all as an excellent doctor with a stellar track record but he is also cold and arrogant with no regard for departmental protocol all of which of course offends Azuma as does his background and person. The son of a country teacher, Zaizen prospered through the dedicated labour of his widowed mother along with family connections before marrying into the extraordinarily wealthy and influential Zaizen family who run a large obstetrics clinic. Consequently, he is free to pursue his interests and lacks the economic anxiety that might make another employee wary of pushing his luck. 

His humble background might have placed a chip on Zaizen’s shoulder but it’s also clear he’s part of a new generation that does things differently from the last, apparently keen to build a public media brand appearing in a glossy magazine which brands him “the magic scalpel” thanks to his success in treating pancreatic cancer. While they might not be able to argue with his track record, other doctors worry that Zaizen has developed a god complex and is slapdash with his practice often timing his operations and smugly pleased with himself when hitting a new record. Azuma first picks him up on this in the case of elderly patient, questioning his treatment decisions in accusing him of neglecting to fully consider the patient’s post-op wellbeing. This then becomes something of a recurring theme as good doctor Satomi (Takahiro Tamura) is minded to bring Zaizen in on the tricky case of a man, Sasaki (Nobuo Minamikata), he suspects may have pancreatic cancer but has been repeatedly diagnosed with chronic gastritis. 

Though it’s political intrigue that in some senses leads him to Zaizen, Satomi is otherwise depicted as the responsible physician who deeply cares for his patients’ wellbeing and not much at all for interoffice politics. Thus he continues to investigate Sasaki’s case even when other doctors tell him he’s wasting too much time on one patient and should just leave it at gastritis. Zaizen, meanwhile, is the exact opposite taking one look at the X-rays and deciding it is pancreatic cancer after all but thereafter ignoring Satomi’s advice after taking over the case refusing to run a CT scan to verify that the cancer hasn’t spread to the lungs as Satomi fears it might have. 

For Zaizen Sasaki ceases to matter, to him the human body is no different to a machine and he perhaps more engineer than doctor even as he proclaims medicine more art than science in insisting that he just knows the early signs of pancreatic cancer while others are unable to detect them. After the first operation we see him perform, a grateful wife stops to thank him profusely for saving her husband’s life though he treats her coldly and implies it’s all part of the job before going outside to celebrate his private glory in his record-breaking feat. It’s then a minor irony that he finds himself later slapped with a malpractice suit by Sasaki’s wife upset that he was unavailable as her husband was dying because he was preoccupied with the ongoing elections for Azuma’s successor.

The implication is that the dehumanisation of the health industry has reduced it to the status of any other company, the head doctors no better than ambitious salarymen whose lives are defined by their job titles. The various department heads eventually descend into factions with Azuma plumping for an external candidate, Kikukawa (Eiji Funakoshi), while others line up behind Zaizen or his internal rival Kasai (Koichi Ito). Influence is brokered largely by outright bribery or industry manipulation by external influential players including Zaizen’s wealthy father-in-law and a professor in Tokyo who can offer monetary perks, access to funding, and potential promotions to those willing to vote for their chosen candidate. The main argument against Zaizen is his bad character, yet the fact he has been carrying on an affair with a bar hostess is never used against him even as they prepare to smear a rival candidate with his mistress even suggesting they hire a hitman to take him out completely. Zaizen’s minions meanwhile make an ill-advised visit to Kikukawa to ask him to withdraw bizarrely stating the importance of maintaining “democracy” even as they themselves deliberately undermine it for their own gain.  

It’s this sense of feudalistic, fascistic authoritarian chumminess that Azuma’s daughter Saeko (Shiho Fujimura) later decries in asking her father why he did nothing to change such a destructive system while he himself had the power to do so the implication being that he saw no need because he continued benefit from it. Only she and Satomi present any kind of challenge to the hypocrisy that pervades the medical system but eventually discover that there is no place for integrity in the contemporary society. Zaizen miraculously falls upwards every time because his success is more expedient that his failure. Even the Tokyo professor brought in as an expert witness during the malpractice suit declares that Zaizen is unfit to be a physician because of his arrogance and total lack of human feeling but pulls back from testifying that he caused the death of his patient through negligence later explaining to a colleague that if a university professor were to be found guilty of malpractice it would undermine public faith in the medical system. 

If can’t they can’t have faith in the medical system, the very people who are supposed to care for them when they are most in need, how can they have faith in anything else? As the rather bleak conclusion makes clear, the entire system is rotten to the core and no longer has any place for idealists like Satomi who are continually pushed to the margins by those jockeying for power in this infinitely corrupt society defined by hierarchy and cronyism while ordinary people, like Sasaki, continue to pay the price. Just as in his opening sequence, Yamamoto takes a scalpel to the operations of the medical industry to expose the messy viscera below but ultimately can offer no real cure in the face of such an overwhelming systemic failure. 

Original trailer (no subtitles)