Tag: Daisuke Kato

The Greatest Challenge of All (喜劇 一発勝負, Yoji Yamada, 1967)

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A prodigal son rocks the social order in Yoji Yamada’s anarchic nonsense comedy, The Greatest Challenge of All (喜劇 一発勝負, Kigeki: Ippatsu Shobu). The greatest challenge may be trying to manage Kokichi (Hajime Hana), a roguish Del Boy-like figure with an impossible dream of striking it rich. While in some senses he anticipates the equally  anarchic yet basically goodhearted Tora-san, he also represents a modernising and aspirant Japan determined to leave behind dusty old tradition for a new “deluxe” future.

Having taken to the road after being disowned by his conservative father (Daisuke Kato), Kokichi returns 15 years  later a middle-aged man with seemingly nothing to show for his many years of wandering. He has no idea that he has a daughter, Mariko, by a local woman that his parents took in and raised as if she were theirs which was not an especially uncommon solution to the problem of illegitimate birth in the post-war era. Nor did he know his mother had passed away before walking in on her annual memorial service. This sense of parental disconnection one level reflects a lack of filiality that marks him out as a “modern” man uninterested in these familial obligations or a sense of duty towards his family, but it’s also true that it’s to family that he’s returned having mellowed in middle-aged and in a way looking to settle down.

In any case, his life seems to have been a series of crazy episodes from briefly becoming a sumo wrestler to meeting a mysterious woman on a bridge who gets him a job as a snake charmer. When two yakuza types kick up a fuss about not being able to have their usual room at the inn during his mother’s memorial service, Kokichi manages to frighten them off just with bluster, hinting at the way he may have lived for the last 15 years. He also has two friends who turn up to see him, one of whom is a former yakuza who refers to Kokichi as if were his boss and they were a little trio of crime-adjacent buddies.

But it does appear that Kokichi has come with a business plan in mind, convinced that he can find the source of a hot spring in the town and build a resort hotel on top of it. To do this, he tries to convince his father to sell him his land and the inn the family run so he can knock it down and build a “deluxe” modern, Western-style hotel in its place. Kokichi’s father obviously isn’t keen. This inn has been in the family for generations, he really wouldn’t want to ruin that and especially not for one of Kokichi’s harebrained schemes. Yet again this brings us back to the battle between the conservatism of Koikichi’s father, and Kokichi’s own consumerist modernism that is more individualistic and no longer sees beauty in the past, only backwardness and stagnation. When he finally does find his hot spring, he builds a vast modernist complex with a botanical water park housed in a giant Hawaiian-themed conservatory complete with dancing hula girls. 

His corrupting presence is most discernible in the changing role of Fumi (Tanie Kitabayashi), the family’s housekeeper who generally dressed in kimono but on moving to Kokichi’s mansion she begins wearing Western dress. Fumi had at one time left the family because Kokichi had unwittingly forced her to betray it in helping him get his hands on a precious family heirloom to pawn as capital for his new business venture. Having done so brings her to a confrontation with the contradictions of her role within the family, both a surrogate mother to Kokichi and also a servant who is expected to abide by a certain code with not stealing from your employers a key tenet. She feels she can no longer look Kokichi’s father in the eye and must now return to her home in the country even though she has likely not seen it since she was a young woman. Having undergone this change, she can no longer return to the inn but is brought back to Kokichi’s modernist home once he strikes it rich. 

But Kokichi too is later confronted by hypocrisies of his own position as a free-spirited man and finally a father on learning the truth about Mariko. Hanging out at the hot spring, the 16-year-old Mariko has attracted the attentions of a couple of fashionable young men and wants to leave with them to visit Tokyo. Despite the intrusion of the modern in the hot springs resort, Mariko doesn’t want to stay in this “deadbeat” town and longs for the bright lights of the big city. Kokichi’s father understandably says no, but Kokichi is originally all for it, perhaps seeing his own desire to be free of his father’s oppressive authority. However, he soon changes his tune on assuming his paternity. He too tells Mariko she can’t go and strikes her for talking back. But just as he had, she leaves anyway. His modernity is no longer modern enough, and the young will always walk towards the future.

One exception might be Kokichi’s painter sister Nobuko (Chieko Baisho) who appears to be happy enough living at the inn and with seemingly no intention of marrying which might be her own kind of rebellion against traditional mores. While other similarly themed films may have emphasised the importance of hard work and the reality of the salaryman dream, this one suggests that it really is possible to bumble along and then strike it lucky but also that you never really travel as far from home as you might think. The desire for patriarchal control rises in Kokichi, but is now ineffectual. Though he didn’t raise her, Mariko is a child of the world he’s created and simply chooses to leave with a final sock in the eye to traditional filiality. 

Trailer (no subtitles)

Flowing (流れる, Mikio Naruse, 1956)

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The denizens of a moribund geisha house contemplate visions of independence in post-war Japan Mikio Naruse’s thriving ensemble drama, Flowing (流れる, Nagareru). There is indeed a flowing through the geisha house, a tumble of comings and goings though mostly connected to money which is itself constantly flowing though the for geisha mainly in the wrong direction. Released in the year of Prostitution Prevention Law, the film casts a shadow over the lives of these women who are unwittingly living in their industry’s twilight but asks if it’s really possible for a woman to survive without a man while each of them is in one way or another badly let down by an inconstant lover. 

We’re constantly told that Tsutanoya is the most respectable geisha house in town yet despite its well appointed interiors, it’s clear that business is not good. As the film opens, a young geisha, Namie, is accusing the owner’s daughter Katsuyo (Hideko Takamine) of diddling her on her pay. Katsuyo acts indignant and tries to shift the blame back onto Namie but later admits that the house has indeed been skimming a little more off their wages than was agreed claiming all the geisha houses do it which is probably true but doesn’t make it right. In any case Namie will eventually quit and end up working at “some third rate place” while her uncle (Seiji Miyaguchi) causes problems for proprietress Tsuta (Isuzu Yamada) complaining that Namie was exploited and wanting both the backpay he feels she’s owed and compensation though it seems unlikely any of that money is finding its way back to Namie. Meanwhile the house is a geisha down with only former office worker Nanako (Mariko Okada) and 50-year-old veteran Someka (Haruko Sugimura) on the books.

Despite their financial situation, Tsuta hires a new maid, Rika (Kinuyo Tanaka) who is immediately renamed “Oharu” on her arrival. Oharu is a salt of the Earth type, infinitely capable, maternal, kind and loyal bringing a much needed sense of stability to the ever flowing geisha house while also fascinated by this exotic and arcane world. But then as Tsuta cautions her geisha houses may look glamorous from the outside but the life inside them isn’t always fun. Oharu runs into trouble on her first trip to the grocers when they inform her Tsuta hasn’t paid her tab and they can’t let her add to it until she does. A 45-year-old widow whose only child died a year previously, Oharu is also trying to live an independent life, a conflicted Tsuta struck with wonder at her ability to survive without a man, but may also have struggled, grateful to have been offered the job which others might have declined because of the stigma towards the sex trade as finding employment as a middle-aged woman is near impossible. 

At the film’s conclusion even she may imply it isn’t really possible to live as a woman without some kind of support or losing one’s humanity suggesting that she may return to her husband’s hometown and the family she claims not have gotten along with after learning of Tsuta’s betrayal at the hands of an old friend and former geisha, Ohama (Sumiko Kurishima), who at any rate seems to be living quite well as the proprietress of a restaurant. Traditionally, the profession of geisha was seen as a kind of independence in itself but it’s also one that by its nature is reliant on men. Tsuta is often described as someone who is not able to do anything else yet is highly skilled at music and dance having spent a lifetime in training. Without a patron she is stuck and as we learn she threw hers over to pursue a man she loved but he left her in the lurch having mortgaged the geisha house to invest in his business by taking a loan from her older sister who seems to have a nice sideline as a polite loan shark also having loaned money to Someka. 

The most outwardly cheerful, Someka is in other ways a dark vision of a geisha’s future surviving on nothing but nihilistic hedonism while apparently living with a much younger man who eventually leaves her to marry into another woman’s family. Katsuyo has rejected the geisha life explaining that she is unable to, as Nanaka puts it, say silly things to men in order to earn her keep and is essentially incapable of ingratiating herself with men she doesn’t like. She claims she has no desire to marry, unconvinced that any man would be interested in a geisha’s daughter while certain that for a man marrying into a woman’s family is humiliating while suggesting the same would be true for her. Putting her faith in industry, she buys a sewing machine and sets about figuring out how to use it less because she envisages being able to support herself and her mother through taking in needlework than she just wants to feel as if she’s doing something. 

Meanwhile, Tsuta’s niece Fujiko observes all the comings and goings of the geisha house learning the traditional arts in preparation for a future which will soon be obsolete. In a typically Narusean touch, Tsuta comes to a resolution about her future and envisages a new beginning for herself but is unaware the rug is soon to be pulled from under her by the underhanded capitalist Ohama who plans to turf her out to turn the geisha house into another restaurant. “My days of seeking favours from men are over,” Tsuta admits, not of her own volition but simply understanding that she no longer has access to that kind of independence though in essence surrendering her autonomy in leaving herself to the mercy of Ohama in order to escape her older sister’s control. Someka had laughed raucously at Katsuyo’s insistence that she need not be dependent on a man (and after everything she’s seen why would she want to be?) but the younger woman is undeterred even as we see her struggling, doubting that her efforts will in the end be enough to win her her freedom. Ever the optimist, Tsuta is perhaps doing something similar but even Oharu is considering giving up and going home, too good to survive in the dog eat dog world of the contemporary capital where the flow of currency is the lifeblood of the city implying that perhaps the answer to her question is no, a woman can’t survive alone, nor can she rely on female solidarity, but she’ll have to try anyway because there is no other choice. 

Vendetta of a Samurai (荒木又右衛門 決闘鍵屋の辻, Kazuo Mori, 1952)

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During the American Occupation, period dramas were frowned upon, the occupation forces apparently fearing that they might encourage the latent feudalism in Japanese society. Released immediately before the Occupation’s end, Kazuo Mori’s Vendetta of a Samurai (荒木又右衛門 決闘鍵屋の辻, Araki Mataemon: Ketto Kagiya no Tsuji), not to be confused with the director’s similarly titled Samurai Vendetta from a few years later, is a suitably revisionist piece interrogating the legacy not only of the samurai but the samurai movie in demonstrating, quite poignantly for the contemporary audience, that the rigid and austere codes of a warrior class did nothing but create sadness which forced good men to sacrifice true friendship in service not even of an ideal but simply an agreement. 

To signal his intent, Mori opens with a bombastic sequence shot in the fashion of pre-war jidaigeki, all booming speeches and clashing swords before a voiceover cuts in to tell us everything we know of the events in play is wrong. The legends surrounding the battle at Kagiya Corner tell us that Jinza (Takashi Shimura) was a bad man, and that Mataemon (Toshiro Mifune) killed 36 that day, but in reality Jinza was kind and noble and in fact the two men were good friends while Mataemon in reality struck down only two enemies which is in any case much more plausible if perhaps less exciting. As the classic chanbara scene fades, we return to the modern city of Ueno in Iga which in some respects remains unchanged further emphasising the “reality” of the brief 17th century conflict. As we learn, a man called Matagoro (Minoru Chiaki) has poked a hole through the samurai order in killing the brother of a young man called Kazuma (Akihiko Katayama), and so a lot of people have to die to eradicate the corruption of his transgression.

Boasting a script by Akira Kurosawa, the action flips between Mataemon, brother-in-law of Kazuma, and his men waiting for the arrival of Jinza and Matagoro inside a small inn, and the circumstances which brought them to this point. Mataemon is duty bound to support Kazuma who is really just a boy forced to seek revenge because they are family though there does not seem to be much heat in his desire for justice against Matagoro. Jinza, by contrast, is positioned on the opposite side solely because he is affiliated with a high ranking Hatamoto who is protecting Matagoro. Yet the two men are good friends each resigned to their fates and in full knowledge of how the samurai world works. The have no quarrel with each other, but are forced into mortal combat because of a complex network of loyalties and obligations that can only be satisfied with blood. 

“What is the meaning of this violence?” an imperious official asks, receiving no answer only a mild plea for a little more time. “Being a samurai, what a funny thing,” Mataemon laments to himself reflecting on the fact he must now kill or be killed by his friend for no real reason but simply because things are the way they are. Jinza meanwhile agrees, “Being warriors, what a misfortune,” as the pair calmly discuss the inherent hypocrisies which define their lives wherein all that really matters is one’s proximity to the shogun. That’s one reason the nervous Mago (Daisuke Kato) has joined the mission for revenge, his loyalist father a former tutor to the lord and keen to show their fealty but also hoping to advance their fortunes through a successful vendetta. 

Mago isn’t the only one who’s scared. The inn keeper is visibly shaking. He didn’t really want to be ground zero for a samurai duel today and is presumably worried not just for his safety but for the repercussions of offending his guests and damage to his property. A crowd gathering around the fighting, which includes the wealthy merchant brother-in-law of Matagoro who declared himself unafraid of a few rural bumpkin samurai, remarks on the smell of blood in the air seemingly both horrified and excited by the spectacle though even that is thin on the ground. No grand duel, Mataemon merely strikes his friend down before the battle begins, thereafter coaching the young Kazuma to overcome his fear and claim his revenge despite the bloody ugliness of the task. Yet in the end all there is is fear and futility, along with still more duty and the promise of more blood to come.  

A Wanderer’s Notebook (放浪記, Mikio Naruse, 1962)

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Many of Mikio Naruse’s most famous films are adapted from the work of Fumiko Hayashi, a pioneering female author who chronicled the life of a working class woman with startling frankness. Yet his dramatisation of her life, A Wanderer’s Notebook (放浪記, Horo-ki), is both a little more reactionary than one might have expected and surprisingly unflattering even in the heroine’s eventual triumph in escaping her poverty through artistry. Even so if perhaps sentimentalising the economically difficult society of the 1920s in emphasising the suffering which gave rise to Hayashi’s art, the film does lay bare the divisions of class and gender that she did to some extent transgress in pursuit of her literary destiny. 

Naruse and his screenwriters Toshiro Ide and Sumie Tanaka bookend the the film with a literal “lonely lane” which the young Fumiko walks with her itinerant salespeople parents. As a small child, she sees her father arrested for a snake oil scam peddling some kind of wondrous lotion, setting up both her disdain for men in general and her determination not to be deceived by them at least unwittingly. She has no formal education but is a voracious reader well versed in the literary culture of the time and intensely resentful of if resigned to her poverty. In the frequent sections of text which litter the screen taken directly from her novels, she details her purchases, wages, and longing for the small luxuries she can in no way afford. 

As an uneducated woman in the 1920s her working opportunities are few. She exasperatedly relates standing in a queue with hundreds of other women waiting for an interview for a company job only to be told they’ll let her know, while her other opportunity involves meeting a theatre director at a station who later takes her to his hotel/office and makes it plain he’s not really interested in her CV. She gets a job at the office of a stockbroker, but lies about being able to do accounts and is flummoxed by double entry bookkeeping getting herself fired on day one. After a brief stint in factory painting toys, she leaves with a friend to become a hostess but is also fired on her first day for getting drunk and being unwilling to ingratiate herself with the boorish men who frequent such establishments. 

Despite her animosity, she is drawn towards men who are callous and self-involved, firstly taking up with a poet and actor who praises her work but turns out to have several “wives” on the go, and then begins living with a broody writer, Fukuchi, who is insecure and violent, resentful at her success in wake of his failure. Perhaps because of her experiences, she seems to resent any hint of kindness though sometimes kind herself, lending money to her friend whose mother is in need and often ready to stand up for others whom she feels are being mistreated. A kindly widower in the boarding house where she lives with her mother, Yasuoka, falls in love with her but she repeatedly rejects him partly as someone suggests because he is not handsome, but mainly because of his goodness and kindness towards her. Nevertheless, he continues to support always ready in her time of need though having accepted that she will never return his feelings or accept his proposal. 

Perhaps her might have liked to have been kinder, but was too wounded by her experiences to permit herself. In any case at the film’s conclusion in which she has achieved success and in fact become wealthy it appears to have made her cold and judgemental. She instructs her maid to send a man away believing he is from a charity set up to help the poor, insisting that the poor must work for industry is the only path out of poverty implying that as she managed it herself those who cannot are simply not applying themselves when she of all people should know how fallacious the sentiment is. As if to bear out the chip on her shoulder, she forces her mother to wear a ridiculous kimono from a bygone era that is heavy for an old woman and makes her feel foolish because of her own mental image of the finery she dreamed of providing her on escaping the persistent hardship of their lives. 

As she says, she’s no interest in the socialist politics espoused by the literary circles in which she later comes to move, pointing out that the poor have no time for waving flags. One of her greatest supporters is himself from a noble family despite his progressive politics and in truth can never really understand the lives of women like Fumiko. He describes her work as like upending a rubbish bin and poking through it with a stick, at once fascinated and repulsed by a frankness he may see as vulgar. At one point he accuses her of writing poverty porn, playing on her humble origins for copy and becoming something of a one note writer. 

In truth, the film is not really based on the novel from which it takes its title but on the play that was adapted from it, while the novel itself was apparently reworked and republished several times in response to reader taste giving rise to a series of questions both about its essential authenticity and what it was that it was attempting to convey. In the film at least, moments after her literary success, Fumiko is challenged by a fellow female writer, Kyoko, who was once her love rival, that she cheated in a contest by failing to submit Kyoko’s entry until after the deadline had passed, though as it seems she would have won anyway. She is occasionally underhanded, perhaps because she feels she has no other choice, but then as we can see there is no particular solidarity between women save the kindly landladies who often let her delay her rent payments. Fumiko feels herself to be alone and her quest is not really for literary success but simply for her next meal, though she feels the slights of the bitchy women and arrogant men who mock her commonness while simultaneously exploiting it as entertainment. 

On the one hand, her success seems to signal a triumph of independence having freed herself from the need to depend on terrible men though she also she seems to have met and married a warmhearted painter who cares for her and supports her work while she has also been able to give her mother the level of comfort they both once dreamed of. Even so, the unavoidable fact that she dies at such a young age implies she’s worked herself into an early grave in a sense punishing her for her rejection of contemporary social norms undercutting her achievements with some regressive moralising while the one thing she still desires, rest, is given to her only in death. In Takamine’s highly stylised performance, as some have implied perhaps intended to mimic the silent screen, Fumiko is at once a carefree young woman who dances and sings and a melancholy fatalist with a self-destructive talent for choosing insecure and self-involved men, but above all else a woman walking a lonely road towards her own fulfilment while searching for a way out of poverty that need not transgress her particular sense of righteousness. 

Original trailer (no subtitles)

A Wife’s Heart (妻の心, Mikio Naruse, 1956)

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“We’re too late for everything these days,” mutters an overly cheerful geisha whose behaviour is becoming ever more erratic. A sense of fatalism, that everything has already been decided and there is no real escape from the misery of life, hangs over much of Naruse’s filmmaking even if his heroines often do their best to rail against it and on occasion succeed. Kiyoko (Hideko Takamine), the heroine of A Wife’s Heart (妻の心, Tsuma no Kokoro), finds herself faced with just this dilemma while considering which side of a generational divide she might be on and whether she has the power to escape from her disappointing life to chase emotional fulfilment. 

We can see the literal distance between herself and her husband Shinji (Keiju Kobayashi) in the opening sequence as he stands in a vacant lot at the back of their property and she firmly within the domestic space hanging washing. Yet for all that she seems excited, perhaps even a little giddy as they plot their escape together through planning to turn that vacant space into a cafe in an attempt to fend off the economic changes ravaging their town and wider society of Japan in the mid-1950s. Out and about on his bike, Shinji looks anxiously at the construction of a new pharmacy much larger than his own and with flashy modern signage. Their business is failing and they don’t know how to save it so the cafe is their way out and also a break with the depressing past represented by Shinji’s grumpy mother, Ko (Eiko Miyoshi), who is predictably dead against the cafe idea. 

The new business, in its way, is also a stand-in for the child they don’t have and a means for Kiyoko to find domestic fulfilment in a society ruled by motherhood. This one reason that the sudden arrival of her sister-in-law Kaoru (Chieko Nakakita) with her small daughter Rumiko causes so much disruption. Kaoru has fulfilled the social obligations which Kiyoko has not and quickly insinuates herself within the house, taking over the domestic space as symbolised by her otherwise trivial action of putting back a pair of nail clippers in the place she sees fit rather than their usual home. Yet she does this in part because her husband, Zenichi (Minoru Chiaki) who left the family to become a salaryman in Tokyo, is so obviously unreliable and appears to have not for the first time lost his job while employed at a company possibly involved in something untoward. On getting wind of Shinji’s plans to open a cafe, Zenichi announces he’s thinking of opening one himself and gets his mother to put pressure on the couple to give him the money they borrowed for their dream project.

It’s the loan that in part allowed Kiyoko to consider life beyond her marriage in reuniting with the still unmarried brother of her best friend Yumiko (Yoko Sugi). Kenkichi (Toshiro Mifune) is everything Shinji is not, handsome, well dressed, and with a good, middle-class job working at a bank. On a visit to her relatives, Kiyoko’s aunt remarks that everyone wanted to marry her provoking a slight twinge of pain in Kiyoko’s face. Mother-in-law Ko arranges marriages and it’s likely she arranged the one between Kiyoko and her son and that Kiyoko likely agreed out to of social obligation under the rationale that Shinji was a good catch as the proprietor of a successful business. The implication is that if, like Yumiko, she had held out a little longer she probably would have fallen in love and married Kenkichi. As the atmosphere in the family home grows ever more toxic, she grows closer to him yet at least in part as a symbol of the path not taken, what her life may have been like if only she had resisted and claimed a little more freedom for herself. 

Ko has also arranged a marriage for youngest daughter Sumiko (Akemi Negishi) who asks her if all of her matches were happy. An indignant Ko replies that only one or two have split up, but as Sumiko points out just because a couple stays together does not mean they are happy. “Women don’t have the courage, they just give up,” she remarks implying that she, as a representative of the younger generation, might be less minded to simply accept a disappointing situation in the same way as someone of Kiyoko’s age may feel she had to. For these reasons Kiyoko is torn. Yumiko remarks that she and Shinji didn’t even particularly like each other when they married and perhaps remain indifferent to each other now. The cafe may have brought them closer as a couple, but now it’s causing a rift in the wider family while also offering Kiyoko the faintest glimmer of an escape route. When she returns to the cafe where she was learning the ropes as a part-time employee, much to Ko’s chagrin at losing a domestic helper, it’s clear that she’s doing so in part to have a means of supporting herself as she leans closer to the idea of leaving Shinji. 

But for all that it seems unlikely that she has the courage, as Sumiko put it, to break with the traditional social codes of feminity by leaving a husband who was not really bad but that she did not love and made her unhappy. In rebellion, Shinji has an indiscretion with a local geisha who goes missing on the way home from a hot springs and is later found dead having taken her own life because she was trapped in a bad relationship with her husband. The implication is that this is the only way many women find to escape from their dismal circumstances and may soon present itself to Kiyoko if she cannot find a way to reconcile herself to her life with Shinji or find the confidence to leave it. The enemy is the increasingly outdated institution of arranged marriages as advocated by the austere Ko who refuses to hire maids while believing herself entitled to the free labour of her daughters-in-law, and the patriarchal social codes of a modernising nation in which Shinji can have his dalliance with a geisha and his wife is expected to put up with it, but merely being seen walking with a man not one’s husband provokes gossip and jealousy. 

When Shinji implies he suspects her of having an affair with Kenkichi, he tells her that she’s free to follow her heart and he understands if she chooses to leave him but of course by telling her this he seals her fate by making it almost impossible for her to do so. The couple repairs itself, but the resolution is far from comfortable as it becomes clear that each is essentially resigning themselves to misery because of social convention vowing that they’ll build their cafe in the next season though it seems like a dream destined to go unfulfilled while the institution of Rumiko left behind in the family superficially fills the void it was designed to fill. The fades to black between scenes seem to echo an exhalation of bleakness as the interrupted thought of Kenkichi’s dangerous “Kiyoko…” as an admission that the prospect of escape is only ever a torturous fantasy and a heart is something that must be sacrificed in the name of conventional success. 

Twilight Saloon (たそがれ酒場, Tomu Uchida, 1955)

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A generational divide echoes around a beer hall filled with a defeated sense of bonhomie until finally finding a point of rest in Tomu Uchida’s elliptical single set drama, Twilight Saloon (たそがれ酒場, Tasogare Sakaba). The melancholy title captures the feeling of finality which seems to overhang the bar but equally the shift that is taking place as the old must decide whether they will allow the young to be free or forever trap them with the legacy of their own mistakes. 

The tensions are obvious as a once feared military colonel nicknamed “Demon” Onitsuka (Eijiro Tono) strides into the bar cutting a slim, anxious figure evidently a shadow of his former self. Puffing out his chest, he lives on memories of past glory claiming that though he may now be a lowly estate agent, he will rise again should the occasion call and will never lose his soldier’s spirit. Kibe (Daisuke Kato), a regular at the bar, is excited to run into him, his former commanding officer, and evidently still holds Onitsuka in some esteem but the pair of them seem ridiculous, even a little pitiable, as relics of the wartime generation unable to move into the post-war era. Onitsuka has a minor apoplexy when the table of students across from them begin singing a communist song explaining it as evidence of the absence of morality in the contemporary society. Somewhat embarrassingly, he and Kibe begin singing along to what they thought was a classic military ballad sung by someone outside only to abruptly realise that it is the communists once again. Strapped for cash, Onitsuka makes an abrupt exit leaving a confused Kibe to chase after him yelling “put it on my tab.” 

“Put it on my tab” might as well be the life philosophy of regular patron Umeda (Isamu Kosugi) who unlike Onitsuka and Kibe is wracked with guilt over his wartime experiences and has dedicated the remainder of his life to making amends by paying it forward. Once a famous painter, he feels he sullied his art by wilfully depicting warfare in a manner that sought to glorify it and may have led others astray ultimately costing them their lives. Umeda feels he no longer has a right to practice his art and has made a sacrifice of it in atonement, his earnestness leant a poignant quality by the fact that he is played by Isamu Kosugi who had himself starred in a propaganda film co-produced by Nazi Germany. 

Yet he’s far from the only one who’s abandoned or compromised his art because of what he sees as a moral failing. All knowing, Umeda recounts the history of accompanist Eto (Hiroshi Ono) who he claims once lives under a different name and returned from abroad to found a revolutionary opera company only to be betrayed by his protégé who left to set up his own revolutionary company taking Eto’s wife with him. Eto later stabbed her in jealously and like Umeda has lived the rest of his life in quiet contemplation slumming it in this backstreet bar while training up a new protégé, Kenichi (Takuya Miyahara), said to be the son of a former bandmate. Eto is a vision of defeat, Umeda remarking that his time has most likely come, walking around in a Russian tunic unable to let go of the past. Emi (Keiko Tsushima) is much the same. Once a promising ballet dancer she feels she’s lost the right to dance after becoming a stripper apparently because of a bad man who later breaks into the bar and slashes her arm with a knife echoing Eto’s dark crime of passion. 

This might in part be why she is so keen to ensure that Eto will not prevent Ken from taking advantage of a valuable opportunity because of his own jealousy and resentment. The offer comes from Nakaoji, the leader of a national opera group and the man who once betrayed Eto though as the snippy “intellectuals” at another table point out he may once have been a “revolutionary” but is now an old man and has in effect become the establishment. The dilemma brings things full circle, the generational divide which once existed between master and pupil has now been eclipsed by a turn of the wheel. Eto cannot help but recognise Nakaoji, the cause of all his suffering, but Nakaoji does not acknowledge him and after all he has another name. 

Umeda pleads with him to allow Kenichi to go, not to ruin his life in the same way his was ruined by holding on to his pettiness and resentment as the man who took all from him returns to take his surrogate son too. His call is to those of his generation who bear the responsibility for wartime folly that they should accept that the world now belongs to the young and it is their duty to nurture them while setting them free to pursue their own destiny. The young customers in the bar are universally cheerful, still drunk on the exuberance of youth while those a little older are mostly defeated and melancholy, meditating on their own failed revolutions unable to move forward or let go of the past. 

Yet the youngsters who work there aren’t quite so happy, barmaid Yuki (Hitomi Nozoe) caught between the posturing of current and former gangster boyfriends while simultaneously discovering that her mother has been taken ill. She lost her father in the war and her home to the bombing and claims she has nothing other than the love of Masumi (Ken Utsui), a young tough who wants her to abandon her mother and schoolgirl sister to go with him to Osaka. Umeda adds 3000 yen to his tab, Yuki’s monthly salary, when the manager vacillates over granting her request for an advance to pay for her mother’s medical care seeing as they no longer even have rice at home. Later he runs into an old journalist friend who simply gives him the same amount of money from his wallet as if it were mere pocket change. The fact that Yuki doesn’t go with Masumi is not because she is afraid to or constrained by the burden of her family but an active choice to embrace her responsibility to others over her personal desire much as Umeda has already been doing. 

This maybe a twilight place, peopled by the hopeless and downtrodden, but there’s life here in all of its confusing randomness. A young man at one point runs in and jumps over the balcony to the stairs eventually chased by an older one, an incident otherwise unexplained just like the minor argument between a woman clutching a cat and the man who may be a patron of sorts who also brush through the bar. Uchida gives the snobbish left-wing intellectuals quite a kicking in their pithy discussions about existentialism and mocking of the students for trying to actually do something rather than just talk about it even if it’s singing in the street. Shot as if the action were unfolding in real time, the camera floats around the saloon as if it were itself a ghost lighting on the small moments of action that contribute to the incongruously warm atmosphere before ending up more or less where it started with a man singing on stage to an empty room. Even so, it does it with equal measures of hope and melancholy as age quite literally retreats and surrenders the space those who may still fill it.

Original trailer (no subtitles)

Late Chrysanthemums (晩菊, Mikio Naruse, 1954)

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The post-war economy was difficult for most, though by the mid-1950s the situation was perhaps improving. The four former geishas at the centre of Naruse’s Late Chrysanthemums (晩菊, Bangiku) , adapted once again from a series of stories by Fumiko Hayashi, are all in their way attempting to find a way through to the modern society but are nevertheless stuck in the past, unable to move forward as women more or less left behind by a changing idea of “modernity” which no longer has a place for them. 

The most successful of the women, Kin (Haruko Sugimura), has become a ruthless moneylender engaging in real estate speculation. As the film opens she’s waiting for the arrival of a business associate for a meeting about a house she’s trying to flip, clear that they’ll need to kick out the desperate widow who is currently living there. Kin has lent money to her old “friends” with whom she spent her youth as a geisha before the war. Otamae (Chikako Hosokawa) and Otomi (Yuko Mochizuki) are widows with unfilial children, Otamae now working as a maid in a love hotel while her son Kiyoshi (Hiroshi Koizumi) struggles to find a job, and Otomi a washerwoman selling blackmarket cigarettes as a sideline while her daughter Sachiko (Ineko Arima) is a forthright modern woman who refuses to enable her mother’s irresponsible vices. Nobu (Sadako Sawamura), meanwhile, married late to a man from outside of Japan and has opened a small bar where she hopes to start a family, brushing off Kin’s insensitive insistence that she is already too old to bear a child. 

Kin has prospered and become wealthy, but she’s done so largely at the sacrifice of maternity. She disparages the other women, telling them she’s grateful not to have had children because not even they can be depended upon, but is also embittered that she’s missed out on life and love, substituting material wealth for emotional fulfilment. Otomi and Otamae have problems with their children and regrets about their lives, but they both resent Kin for her heartless rationality. Kin is in a sense supporting them with her money, even if she wants it back with interest, and continues to see herself as doing a favour for women she considers friends, hurt that they often run or hide when they see her coming but insisting that she is only trying to survive while implying that the other women have failed to achieve the self-sufficiency she has achieved because they’ve lived irresponsibly by placing their trust in men and frittering their money away on the temporary pleasures of drink and gambling. 

Otomi’s thoroughly modern daughter Sachiko thinks something much the same. When Otomi approaches her for a loan, she says no, fearing that her mother has another lover she will end up subsidising or that she will spend it all on drink and pachinko. Sachiko does, however, offer to buy her mother dinner which at least ensures she will get a good meal. Sachiko’s shock news is that she plans to marry an older man, though he seems not to be particularly wealthy seeing as she later sarcastically asks Kin to buy her a house because they’ll be living with other tenants in a small flat. Otomi objects, not only because Sachiko hasn’t mentioned any of this to her before, but because she thinks Sachiko is being overly practical and gives her some surprisingly transgressive advice to the effect that she should have her fun with various men while she’s young so she’ll be able to figure out which is the best to spend a life with. Sachiko quite reasonably asks how that worked out for her, to which Otomi obviously has no answer and leaves the restaurant feeling dejected enough to ask Kin for the money she was after instead. 

Otamae’s problem is of the opposite order. Her son Kiyoshi cheerfully rolls home in the morning after staying out all night and tells her he’s become a kind of gigalo, dating a slightly older woman who is technically the kept mistress of another man. The situation is ironic in the extreme, but despite her own past as a geisha, Otamae doesn’t like it that her son is engaging in a compensated relationship, while he suggests that perhaps she messed him up by making him refer to her as his sister in public. Eventually Kiyoshi is offered a job in a mine in Hokkaido, salmoning the post-war migratory movement and leaving his mother (as well as the mistress) behind to fuel the economic recovery from the provinces. 

Otomi and Otamae have only each other to rely on, men and children have all proved undependable. Kin, the most fiercely independent, is literally haunted by the spectre of failed romance. Nobu, snaps that Kin made her money by swindling her clients, which might be why she takes the side of Seki (Bontaro Miake), a man who tried to commit double suicide with Kin but survived and was ruined. Kin sees it differently. Seki tried to kill her when she refused to die with him, so understandably she is not keen to reconnect. Nobu advises him to visit her and ask for money as “compensation”, which whichever way you look at it is crass and troubling, that Kin is expected to compensate a man for his ruined prospects caused by his obsessive romantic violence towards her which she claims has put her off men for life. Nevertheless, she continues to meditate on the memory of Tabe (Ken Uehara) whom she loved when he was a student, even visiting him in his Hiroshima barracks after he was drafted. She is thrilled to receive a letter from her first love, but declares herself disappointed minutes after he arrives for a visit. Tabe is just another failed salaryman who thinks women like her have it easy and harps on about how looking at his “old” wife makes him nostalgic for the women he loved in his youth. Like everyone else, he’s after her money. Kin burns the photo of him in uniform and gives up any lingering dream she might have had of romantic fulfilment. 

The women find themselves trapped by conflicting visions of “modernity” which are wildly different from those of their youth. They miss their “carefree” lives as geishas, now perhaps somewhat romanticised, along with the misplaced idealism of their time of Manchuria, while lamenting that as single older women they cannot be anything other than dependent. Only Kin is able to achieve self-sufficiency, but does so effectively as the film suggests at the cost of her “femininity”, becoming hard and cold, ruthlessly practical but not perhaps uncaring even as she continues to subsidise the only “friends” she has perhaps in the knowledge that they fiercely resent her. Yet their lives continue. Nobu runs her bar, Otomi and Otamae send their children off with grudging respect while vowing to follow their examples, and Kin, after a moment of crisis, ventures off towards new prospects. For good or ill they shift towards the modern world, more understanding of its rhythms and their place within it than before, but perhaps no more secure.

Yojimbo (用心棒, Akira Kurosawa, 1961)

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“You’re not a bad guy after all” a previously hostile inn owner later concedes, finally seeing the method in the madness of a cynical wanderer who appears to take no side but his own but may in his own way be quietly fighting for justice in a lawless place. A samurai western set in an eerie ghost town beset by feuding gangsters whose presence has destroyed the local economy and lives of the frightened townspeople, Yojimbo (用心棒) subversively suggests that the world’s absurdity is best met with nihilistic amusement and healthy dose of irony. 

When the confused hero who later gives his name as Sanjuro (Toshiro Mifune) wanders into town, he is surprised to see a stray dog running past him with a human hand in its mouth. This is indeed a dog-eat-dog society in which a petty dispute between gang members has forced the townspeople to hide behind closed doors. The streets are empty and silent until the town’s only policeman darts out and requests a “commission” for recommending Sanjuro offer his services as a bodyguard to either of the two factions suggesting that brothel owner Seibei (Seizaburo Kawazu) is on the way out and upstart Ushitora (Kyu Sazanka) is the best bet. But Sanjuro does not particularly like the look of Ushitora’s gang which as is later revealed is largely staffed by desperate disreputables, convicts, and murderers. 

Sanjuro’s response is to laugh. He makes his money by killing and there are lots of people in this town the world would be better off without. He plays each side off against the other, knowing that they each need a man of his skill to break the stalemate but is rightfully mistrustful of both. First approaching Seibei, he overhears his cynical wife Orin (Isuzu Yamada) suggesting that they agree to his high fee but kill him afterwards so his services will effectively be free. Sanjuro’s plan is to antagonise both sides so they wipe each other out, freeing the town of their destructive influence. With violence so present on the streets, the townspeople are afraid to leave their homes and the only guy making any money is the undertaker. 

The trouble also means they can’t host the local silk fair which usually stimulates the town’s economy demonstrating the counter-productivity of the gangsters’ dispute in that no silk fair means no delegates and empty gambling rooms meaning the gangsters aren’t making any money either. Yet it’s also clear that it’s gambling that has corrupted the town and is disrupting the social order. A symptom of an economical shift, gambling offers a new path to social mobility amid the fiercely hierarchal feudal society in which the possibility of distinguishing oneself in warfare has also disappeared. Thus the young man Sanjuro encounters on the way into town argues with his father, rejecting the “long life of eating gruel” of a peasant farmer claiming he wants nice clothes and good food and has chosen to burn out brightly. Kohei (Yoshio Tsuchiya), a young father has also succumbed to the false hope offered by the gambling halls and lost everything, including his wife, to a greedy sake brewer turned silk merchant and local mayor thanks to his enthusiastic backing of Ushitora. 

“I hate guys like that” Sanjuro snarls, but it seems he also hates petty gangsters and everything they represent. “This town will be quiet now” he remarks before leaving, as if stating that his work here is done and the real purpose of it was clearing out the source of the corruption rather than taking advantage of the town’s plight for his own material gain. Yojimbo quite literally means bodyguard and is the service Sanjuro offers to each side interchangeably, but Sanjuro isn’t above betraying his clients or playing one off against the other. His final foe, Ushitora’s brooding brother Unosuke (Tatsuya Nakadai), wanders around with a pistol in his kimono as if to say the age of wandering swordsmen has come to an end but in the end is exposed as complacent in his superior technology, easily neutered by Sanjuro who even gives the gun back to him as if no longer caring whether he lives or dies merely amused to find out the answer much as he had been standing on a bell tower watching the factions pointlessly tussling below. Masaru Sato’s surprisingly cheerful score seems to echo his state of mind, seeing only humour in the absurdities of the feudal order and the futility of violence while Kurosawa’s camera roves around this windswept wasteland as Sajuro kicks the gates of hell shut and prepares to move on to the next crisis in a seemingly lawless society.

Yojimbo screens at the BFI Southbank, London on 18th & 23rd February 2023 as part of the Kurosawa season.

Original trailer (English subtitles)

Ikiru (生きる, Akira Kurosawa, 1952)

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The Japanese economy may have embarked on a path towards recovery thanks to the stimulus of the Korean War, but in the early 1950s many might have thought it too soon to ask if survival in itself was enough yet this is exactly what disillusioned civil servant Kenji Watanabe finds himself asking after receiving the devastating news that he has advanced stomach cancer and year at most to live. “To live” is apt translation of Akira Kurosawa’s intensely moving existential melodrama, Ikiru (生きる), which tackles the compromises of the salaryman dream head on along with those of the contradictions of the sometimes dehumanising post-war society. 

As the opening voice over reveals to to us, Watanabe (Takashi Shimura) is man who died long ago or perhaps has never truly been alive. In some senses, he is nothing more than an embodiment of the seal he uses to stamp documents day in day out, a mere piston in an ever turning machine of relentless bureaucracy. A young woman, Miss Odagiri (Miki Odagiri), working in the Public Affairs department loudly reads out a joke someone has written about their boss, Watanabe, who has taken not a single day’s holiday in 30 years suggesting that it’s less that he fears city hall will grind to a halt without him than they’ll suddenly figure out city hall has no need of him at all. The irony is city hall does indeed grind to a halt in Watanabe’s absence as he, unthinkably, fails to turn up for work for days on end as the papers pile ever higher on his desk. “Nothing moves here without his seal” one of the workers admits, bewildered by this sudden break with protocol while salivating over its implications in the possibility that Watanabe’s chair may soon be empty. 

Yet Watanabe’s crisis is that he’s realised he’s wasted his life on a pointless bureaucratic career that’s done little more than keep a roof over his head. Even the roof is a fairly modest one and it’s clear that his grown up son Mitsuo (Nobuo Kaneko) considers him to be a stingy old miser, unable to understand why he’s never spent so much as a penny on himself and lives in a kind of self-imposed austerity. Perhaps to Watanabe this is what constitutes properness. He’s done everything he was supposed to do, got a steady job at city hall and eventually became the head of department, but now he feels foolish and lonely. Mitsuo and his wife seem to resent him and talk openly about their plans to use their inheritance, along with Watanabe’s retirement bonus, for a downpayment on a “modern” home the polar opposite of the pre-war townhouse where the family continue to live. 

Mitsuo and Kazue (Kyoko Seki) are perhaps emblems of the increasingly empty consumerism of the post-war era, emotionally disconnected from Watanabe and seeking only the flashy and new. Miss Odagiri, the young woman from work, immediately says that she’d love to live in a home like Watanabe’s rather than the crowded multiple occupancy flat she currently inhabits with her family. Cheerful and outgoing, Odagiri is on the other hand a symbol of a new generation that wants something more out of life than simple material comfort and might even be willing to trade it for a small amount of happiness. Having worked at city hall for all of 18 months, she decides that she just can’t take it anymore and is quitting to get a job in a factory making toy rabbits that she says allow her to feel as if she’s making friends with all the babies in Japan. 

To that extent, Watanabe is himself also a baby craving Odagiri’s company admitting that he envies her youth and vitality in realising he squandered his own and will never get it back. How uncomfortable it must be for her, their final meeting in a restaurant sandwiched between a loving couple and teenage girl’s birthday party as Watanabe, gaunt and shrunken, claws at the air and begs her to help him live. Yet even within the grotesquery the tone is ironic, the strains of “Happy Birthday” accompanying Watanabe down the stairs as a the high school climbs up to meet her friends signalling his (re)birth as a man with purpose and determination. Just as Odagiri had found meaning in the rabbit, Watanabe finds it deciding to get a playground built over a post-war swamp in the slums filled with raw sewage and mosquitos that left the local children ill. 

Yet children’s parks aren’t particularly profitable which is presumably why the petition to build one had been kicked all round city hall in the infernal wheel of bureaucracy in which Watanabe too is trapped. “You call this democracy?” one of the women bringing the petition asks, taking the clerk to task complaining that all they do is fob them off insisting it’s someone else’s responsibility to help while determined only to guard their own turf. “You’re not supposed to do anything at city hall” someone ironically adds, “the best way to protect your place in this world is to do nothing at all”. Watanabe did nothing at all for 30 years and it got him nowhere, his dedication to his job disrupting his relationship with his son though Watanabe is ironically one of the most emotional men and engaged fathers seen on screen in the post-war era. 

After his death, in the park he helped build for which the deputy mayor has taken credit, his colleagues put him on trial at the wake trying to work out why he did it and whether or not he even knew he was dying seeing as he told no one close him not even the son whom he felt he could no longer trust. They deny his role while both praising and condemning his passion as somehow improper, disrupting the dispassionate rhythms of the bureaucratic machine with human emotion. It was only coincidence, they say. The deputy mayor wanted an election and the yakuza wanted to turn the swamp into a red light district. “Did he think he could just build a park?” someone adds, bemused by his effrontery as a man from Public Affairs straying into the Parks Department’s territory. You have to protect your turf after all. Finally moved by Watanabe’s last ditch bid to make his life mean something, to feel alive and know he has lived, the the drunken salarymen, all but one who retreats to look at Watanabe’s photo above the altar, swear to follow his example. 

But of course the bureaucratic wheel keeps turning, another dangerous sewage problem diverted to another department continuing the literal pollution of the capitalistic post-war society. A kind of ghost story, Kurosawa lights Shimura from below, shadows cast across his gaunt face even by his “rakish” new hat while his huge eyes have a somehow haunted, grotesque quality filled with hungry desperation. Yet it’s to childhood that Watanabe eventually returns, “perfectly happy” sitting on a swing singing a song from his youth about the price age while surrounded by snow and at last painfully, absurdly alive. 

Ikiru screens at the BFI Southbank, London on 4th & 15th February 2023 as part of the Kurosawa season.

Original trailer (English subtitles)

Rashomon (羅生門, Akira Kurosawa, 1950)

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Is there such a thing as objective truth, or only an agreed upon “reality”? Like many of his early films, Akira Kurosawa’s adaptation of a pair of short stories by Ryunosuke Akutagawa is concerned with the idea of authenticity, or the difference between the truth and a lie, but is also acutely aware that the lines between the two aren’t as clear as we’d like them to be largely because we lie to ourselves and come to believe our own perceptions as “truth” assuming that it is others who are mistaken or duplicitous. 

After all, the film opens with the words “I don’t understand”, as the woodsman (Takashi Shimura), who later tells us unprompted that he does not lie, tries to reconcile the conflicting testimonies of a series of witnesses at the trial of the bandit Tajomaru (Toshiro Mifune) who is accused of raping a noble woman (Machiko Kyo) in the forest and killing her husband (Masayuki Mori). At the end of the film it becomes clear that most of his confusion is born of the fact that he witnessed more than he claimed, later presenting a more objective version of the events while justifying his decision not reveal it earlier by saying he didn’t want to get involved. Not wanting to get involved might be understandable, he has six children and presumably won’t be paid for his time nor will he want to risk being accused of something himself. Then again as the cynical peasant (Kichijiro Ueda) sheltering with him at the already ruined Rashomon Gate seems to have figured out, it might equally be that he took the precious dagger repeatedly mentioned in the trial before running off to find the police. He has six children to feed after all. 

The woodsman is simply confused if also guilty, but the Buddhist monk (Minoru Chiaki) who saw the couple on the road some days previously has been thrown into existential despair and is on the brink of losing his faith in humanity. He can’t bear to live in a world in which everyone is selfish and dishonest. Yet “dishonest” is not quite the right word to describe the testimony, for there’s reason to believe that the witnesses may believe what they say when saying it or have at least deluded themselves into believing a subjective version of the truth that shows them in a better light than the “objective” might have. At least, none of the suspects are lying in order to escape justice as each confesses to the crime though for varying reasons. 

The bandit flatters himself by assuming dominance over the situation, baldly stating that he killed the samurai to rape the wife only she took a liking to him and he killed the husband in a fair fight even remarking on his skill as a swordsman. As we later see Kurosawa frames these fights in a more naturalistic fashion than your average chambara. They are often clumsy and desperate, won more by chance than by skill. Tajomaru also describes the wife as “fierce” in an unwomanly fashion though she is meek and cheerful on the stand and later states that she fainted after her husband rejected her for her “faithlessness” and woke up to find her dagger in his chest, while his beyond the grave testimony delivered via spirit medium claims that he killed himself unable to bear the humiliation of his wife’s betrayal in agreeing to leave with Tajomaru. 

As the peasant points out, Tajomaru lies because he is insecure and so tells a story that makes him seem more “heroic” than he actually is, while the wife lies to overcome her shame, and the samurai to reclaim agency over his death and escape the twin humiliations of having been unable to protect his wife and being murdered by a petty bandit. As the three men sheltering under the Rashomon Gate concede, we don’t know our own souls and often resort to narrative to tell ourselves who we are. As usual, the truth is a little of everything, all the tales are partly true and less “lies” than wilful self-delusion to help the witness accept an unpalatable “reality”. Kurosawa perhaps hints at this in his use of extreme closeup while otherwise forcing the viewer into the roles alternately of witness and judge as if we were like the woodman watching from the bushes or hearing testimony from the dais while the action proceeds to the maddening rhythms of a bolero. Despite the hopeless of the situation, the reality that everyone lies and the world is a duplicitous place, the monk’s faith is eventually restored in the acknowledgment that there are truths other than the literal as he witnesses the woodsman’s compassion and humanity, the skies ahead of them beginning to clear as they leave the shelter of the ruined gate for a world which seems no less uncertain but perhaps not so cynical as it had before.

Rashomon is re-released in UK cinemas on 6th January courtesy of BFI.

Re-release trailer (English subtitles)