Tag: Eiken Shoji

That Guy and I (あいつと私, Ko Nakahira, 1961)

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Likely intended as a slightly silly student rom-com, Ko Nakahira’s That Guy and I (あいつと私, Aitsu to Watashi) captures a sense of the changing gender roles and sexual mores of the early 1960s, if through a very male and at times even middle-aged lens. Adapted from a serialised novel by Yojiro Ishizaka and set amid the ANPO protests of 1960, the film is narrated by its heroine, a very ordinary young woman from a typical, moderately wealthy middle-class family, as she struggles with her attraction to a fabulously wealthy young man who pretends to be a boor but is actually a nice guy and unexpected feminist.

One of a new generation of women attending university with a prospect of independence, Keiko’s (Izumi Ashikawa) horizons seem to be broadening. She’s not exactly conservative and openly jokes about sex and dating with her friends, but is quite settled with her life, not particularly wanting anything more than she already has. Her psychology tutor highlights the problem of social inequality in their school that she had already raised in her opening voiceover in remarking that the rich kids all have cars and can drive themselves to school, while others are having to work to support themselves while they study. When he asks how much pocket money they all get, some are outraged and keen to stress they don’t get any help at all, but Keiko reveals that her parents actually give her a healthy allowance. It’s just that she has no real urge to spend it, so it’s been mounting up quietly in a desk drawer in her childhood bedroom while she still lives at home close to the university.

Saburo (Yujiro Ishihara), by contrast, boasts that he gets more than some people’s monthly wage as an allowance from his mother and blows it on drink, gambling, strip clubs and sex workers. It’s this last point that scandalises the female students who are all shocked and disapproving, even going so far as to ask the teacher to throw Saburo out because they don’t feel comfortable sharing a space with a man like that. The teacher also says he’s disappointed and wishes Saburo hadn’t added the last bit, only for Saburo to call him a hypocrite because sex work was legal in his day and he simply doesn’t believe that he’s never paid for sex. Most of the other boys join in on Saburo’s side, insisting that no man sees any problem with visiting sex workers which they regard as a natural right because the male sex drive is driven by “uncontrollable forces”.

But then there’s something unexpected that occurs among the female students in that some of them are obviously attracted by this very rough form of masculinity. “I’d rather have a wild beast than a meek sheep,” one intones, but nevertheless goes to join the group of girls confronting Saburo at the pool in the hope of gaining an apology for the offence he caused them. They’ve since found out that he probably made it up anyway, which is ironic because he claimed he’d only spoken the truth when they asked him to leave, but that’s somehow even worse because it means he said it deliberately to upset them. The upshot of it all is that Saburo ends up in the pool and is then forced to borrow some of the girls’ clothes while his dry off, signalling his awkward positioning between traditional masculinity and femininity in that he’s otherwise surprisingly sympathetic of women and makes sure to look out for them but in a way that encourages their independence and is never patronising. 

That might, in one way, be because of his unusual upbringing which is far more modern and bohemian than Keiko’s and in the beginning, at least, quite confusing for her. Saburo’s mother Motoko (Yukiko Todoroki) is a famous entrepreneur with a beauty shop empire. She writes her name in Western order and uses katakana for her first name which makes look foreign and therefore exciting and sophisticated even though it obviously isn’t. It was Saburo’s mild-mannered father who gave up his career in insurance to raise him, while his mother apparently blows off steam through numerous affairs. His father occasionally gets upset about this and the pair go through a charade of him leaving her while she professes her love for him, which seems to have a sexual dimension in itself. Perhaps this has given Saburo an alternative view of romantic relationships, though we also later discover that he was subject to what we’d now see as a form of sexual abuse as a teenager when his mother got a young but still adult woman, Michiko (Misako Watanabe), to essentially give him practical lessons in sex and satisfy his teenage urges, only he thought it was an organic romantic relationship and feels more than anything else emotionally betrayed. 

But then again, the film has a very of its time and defiantly male view of rape which is dealt with in a fairly flippant manner. Keiko rings her mother to tell her she’s realised that the reason she didn’t like the idea of her being at the ANPO protests was because she feared she’d be raped, which is at any rate an odd conversation to be having. Her mother asks her what her virginity has to do with ANPO, which is a fair question, but also implies that it’s not so much the physical and psychological harm of sexual assault that bothers her mother but the shame of premarital sex. One of the girls who goes to the protest, Ayako (Shigako Shimegi), is actually raped by the two boys she went with who deliberately plied her with alcohol and took her to a hotel knowing that she trusted them, but her roommate, who had a crush on one of the boys, immediately turns against her. Sadako (Kazuko Yoshiyuki), the most political of the students, calls her a slut who parades herself in front of men and says Ayako must have led them on. Only Keiko takes her side, walking her to the bath and waiting outside for her while admitting that she has conflicted thoughts about Saburo. She throws things at him to shoo him away, feeling that his presence as a man is inappropriate and not wanting him to see Ayako in this moment of vulnerability, but also she admits to herself because she’d be jealous and doesn’t want him to see a naked woman that isn’t her.

Something similar happens when she finds out about Saburo’s past and is jealous and resentful of Michiko, irrationally angry with Saburo, and on another level protective of him knowing that happened when he was a teenager was wrong. After she runs out into the rain and the pair argue about it, Saburo forces a kiss on her which, again, Keiko seems like in a show of robust manliness. Saburo is though also protective and sympathetic towards Ayako, insisting that that the way for her to move past her rape is to ensure she becomes financially independent and successful so that she can see it as just something unpleasant that happened to her rather than something that ruined her life or makes her unworthy of another man’s love. He even helps her to do that by getting her a job at his mother’s company. 

Saburo’s mother Motoko, meanwhile, gives Keiko some frank advice in disclosing the secrets of her life and Saburo’s birth. Even when Saburo suddenly announces their engagement without actually asking her, Keiko does not merely swoon but reflects that she’s got to have a proper think before actually agreeing which she is still free to do or not. Nevertheless, the film seems to have hit on a contradiction in redefining masculinity as both tough and soft. Keiko is despite herself attracted to Saburo’s forcefulness, but also his chivalrous nature and awkward kindness, his fair-mindedness and care, and recognition of women as actual human beings with interior lives and a right to independence. Nakahira may be a little less surreal than usual, but leans heavily into absurdity, on the one hand acknowledging the somewhat superficial quality of these privileged students’ lives in having them confront a band of angry rural workers and half-heartedly take part in the ANPO demonstrations without much thought to what they’re for or what they mean, but, in the end, characterises them as merely ordinary, slightly lost amid the rapid changes of the post-war society but otherwise cheerful and looking ahead to a bright future stretching out in front of them.

Trailer (no subtitles)

Whirlpool of Flesh (おんなの渦と淵と流れ, Ko Nakahira, 1964)

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A intellectual professor and his wounded wife find themselves trapped in a toxic marriage after returning from Manchuria in Ko Nakahira’s fatalistic drama, Whirlpool of Flesh (おんなの渦と淵と流れ, Onna no Uzu to Fuchi to Nagare). Set in the late ‘40s, the film does indeed position Manchuria as a point of corruption while otherwise suggesting that Japan itself has been emasculated by the Occupation, but otherwise demonstrates how the couple drag each other into a cycling whirlpool of jealousy and obsession that it seems neither of them are really equipped to understand let alone escape.

Claiming to have been struck by her bright and smiling face in her omiai photo, Keikichi (Noboru Nakaya) married Sugako (Kazuko Ineno) in Manchuria without actually meeting her before the wedding. Apparently uninterested in sex, Keikichi was a virgin on their wedding night but harbours doubts Sugako may not have been. In any case, he seems put out that Sugako is not in his opinion his intellectual equal. He chances on her diary in which she details how bored she is by his constant lectures about English literature and that she feels him to be more schoolteacher than husband, but he merely scoffs that it’s not particularly well written. He begins to suspect that she’s sleeping with customers who come into the speakeasy she opens in their home during the days between the Russian invasion and repatriation and succumbs to a generalised sense of impotence hiding out in his room upstairs reading while she takes care of business below. 

In the present day, convinced that she’s having an ongoing affair with a merchant, Otani (Kazuo Kitamura), Keikichi pretends to go to a hot springs resort and then sneaks back to spy on her from an adjacent room. Though he feels no desire for her as his wife, through the eyes of these other men he rediscovers a sense of Sugako as the woman from the photograph for whom he does feel some attraction and satisfies his latent sexual desires through watching her sleep with Otani. As an escape from the war, he’d been working on a translation of Shakespeare’s Troilus and Cressida the heroine of which he seems to superimpose on Sugako in wondering if she is a faithless woman or true, angel or devil. 

Yet from Sugako’s point of view, she begs him for physical intimacy which he refuses to grant despite his jealousy over her relations with other men. Traumatised by her sexual abuse at the hands of her uncle, Sugako believes that she has a body designed to satisfy men’s desires and is drawn into meaningless, and often transactional, sexual relationships. When Keikichi later questions her, it seems she doesn’t remember any of them in detail for to her they were simply “men” and nothing more. The situation is somewhat complicated by the fact that her uncle was a scholar of Chinese literature, which in part aligns him with Keikichi, but also points back to Manchuria as a source of corruption though coming uncomfortably from the opposite direction. 

Sugako equates this corrupted sexuality with the great emptiness inside her that frequently leads to thoughts of suicide. Nakahira constantly shows us shots of Keikichi’s knife as if implying some kind of violence is inevitably going to take place, though in the end it signals nothing so much as Keikichi’s impotence. Then again, the emptiness is also linked to a sense of despair in Japan’s defeat that is manifested most obviously in the house next-door where the widowed mother may have been having an affair with Sugako’s uncle and unsubtly tries to blackmail her by threatening to expose the secret of her sexual abuse about which she had tried to tell Keikichi but he had refused to listen. The daughter has become a sex worker catering to American servicemen to support the family while her brother, Kenichi (Tamio Kawachi), allows her to sacrifice herself for him justifying himself that it’s for the greater good as he’ll eventually become a doctor and save countless other lives. He’s also masquerading as a Christian to get a scholarship to an American university through the church which is all very contradictory not to mention selfish and cynical. The sister, meanwhile, appears to have lost her mind and frequently rants and raves, blaming her mother by claiming that walking in on her with Sugako’s uncle permanently corrupted her sense of self and sexuality. Like Sugako, she exorcises her trauma through abusing her body, in her case through sex work with “nasty GIs who don’t always pay.”

Keikichi refers to this as “post-war nihilism” like the frequent strikes and workers parades that take place around him, but partially repairs his sense of masculinity after moving to Tokyo and getting a job. At work he meets another young woman who is a mirror of the young lady from next-door in that she was also repatriated from Manchuria where her father was a member of the government. With her mother dead and father unable to work, Shimura (Kaori Taniguchi) also supports her family with her secretarial job and often goes without lunch herself to make ends meet. Keikichi notices this and offers her his bento claiming to be feeling unwell, but fails to notice how his pity wounds her dignity even if he meant in kindness while acknowledging that he’s never known hunger. Unlike the mismatched Sugako, Keikichi and Shimura are an ideal match. She also wanted to study English literature and can meet him on his level discussing politics and culture though he does not seem to be aware that he is attracted to her and acts almost paternally in offering to pay her university fees to help her escape her life of poverty, echoing Sugako’s claims that he had become her “little boy” rather than her husband. 

The irony is that Sugako insists Keikichi, who does little but look down on her and alternately complain that she’s either impure or unattractive, is the only man she’s ever loved and blames his lack of sexual interest in her on the unresolved trauma of her childhood abuse. Having asked Kenichi to help her get her hands on some cyanide, she is shocked and disgusted when despite his need he rejects her money and asks for her body instead. He insists that it’s “only the friction of mucus membranes” and that she might as well sleep with him first if she’s going to die, though her refusal is in part a desire to die “pure” and finally overcome the emptiness and despair inside her. This inability to reconcile herself is also aligned with Keikichi’s vision of “post-war nihilism” and suggests that in the end this trauma can’t be healed and must necessarily lead to destruction. Meanwhile, Keikichi seems to have discovered a path towards his rebirth in his friendship with Shimura only to potentially have the rug pulled from under him. His new future too, may end up poisoned by Sugako’s unilateral decision to facilitate it. Dark and twisted in true Nakahira fashion, the film paints the post-war society itself as a deepening whirlpool from which there is no escape or at least not for those like Keikichi and Sugako forever locked in a deathly embrace and drawn ever deeper into the waves.

The Wolves (狼, Kaneto Shindo, 1955)

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Post-war desperation drives a collection of otherwise honest men and women towards a criminal act that for all its politeness they are ill-equipped to live with in Kaneto Shindo’s biting social drama The Wolves (狼, Okami). “Wolves” is what the criminals are branded, but the title hints more at the wolfish society which threatens to swallow them whole. After all, it’s eat or be eaten in this dog eat dog world, at least according to a cynical insurance salesman hellbent on exploiting those without means. 

Each of the five “criminals” is an employee at Toyo Insurance where they’re immediately pitted against each other, reminded that in order to qualify for a full-time position they need to meet their quotas for six months. The orientation meeting is cultilke in its intensity, the boss insisting that only in insurance can you become a self-made man while recounting his own epiphany as to the worthiness of his profession. They are told that the only two things they need are “faith and honesty”, and then “faith and pursuasion”, while encouraged to think of their work as an act of “worship”, “for the salvation of everyone”. 

Yet they’re also told to exploit their friends and family by pressuring them into taking out life insurance policies in order to help them meet their quotas. As one man points out, friends and relatives of the poor are likely to be poor themselves, but these are exactly the kind of people they’re expected to target. They’re told there’s no point going after the weathly because they’re already insured, but there’s something doubly insidious in trying to coax desperate people who can’t quite afford to feed themselves into paying out money they don’t have on the promise of protecting their families from ruin. One man even asks if the policy covers suicide and is told it does if you pay in for a year, sighing that he doesn’t want to wait that long.

“Suicide or robbery, choose one,” one of the salespeople reflects after failing to make their quota once again. They each have reasons to be desperate, all of them already excluded from the mainstream society and uncertain how they will find work if the job falls through. Akiko (Nobuko Otowa) is a war widow with a young son who is being bullied at school because of his cleft palate for which he needs an expensive operation. She’s already tried working as a bar hostess but is quiet by nature and found little success with it. Fujibayashi (Sanae Takasugi) is widowed too with two children and five months behind rent for a dingy flat in a bomb damaged slum where the landlord is about to turn off her electric. Harajima (Jun Hamamura) used to work in a bank but was fired for joining a union and is trapped in a toxic marriage to woman looking for material comfort he can’t offer. Mikawa (Taiji Tonoyama) too is resented by his wife, a former dancer, having lost his factory job to a workplace injury while the ageing Yoshikawa (Ichiro Sugai) was once a famous screenwriter but as he explains people in the film industry turn cold when you’re not hot stuff any more. 

Their unlikely descent into crime has its own kind of inevitability in the crushing impossibility of their lives. They may rationalise that what they’re doing is no different from the insurance company that exploits the vulnerable for its own gain, thinking that if they can just get a little ahead they’d be alright while feeling as if robbery and suicide are the only choices left to them and at the end of the day they want to survive. Perhaps you could call them “wolves” for that, but they’re the kind of wolves that give the guards from the cash van they robbed their train fare home after bowing profusely in apology. The real wolves are those like Toyo who think nothing of devouring the weakness of others, promising the poor the future they can’t afford while draining what little they have left out of them. As the film opens, Akiko looks down at a bug writhing in the dirt attacked by ants from all sides and perhaps recognises herself in that image as the sun beats down oppressively on both of them. Breaking into expressionistic storms and unsubtly driving past a US airbase to make clear the source of the decline, Shindo paints a bleak picture of the post-war world as a land of venal wolves which makes criminals of us all. 

The Hunter’s Diary (猟人日記, Ko Nakahira, 1964)

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Ko Nakahira is most closely associated with the seminal Nikkatsu Sun Tribe film Crazed Fruit which sent Yujiro Ishihara to stardom though he began his career at Shochiku in 1948 alongside Seijun Suzuki who like Nakahira would transfer to the newly re-established Nikkatsu when it resumed production in 1954. Suzuki was rather famously let go in 1968 due to creative differences with Nakahira also leaving the studio that year in similar circumstances having decamped to Shaw Brothers in Hong Kong in 1967 where he remade some of his previous hits including 1964’s Hunter’s Diary (猟人日記, Ryojin Nikki). 

Based on a mystery novel by Masako Togawa who in fact stars in her only film role as the hero’s little seen wife, Hunter’s Diary is one of a string of films in the mid-1960s critical of the functioning of the legal system in the post-war society. Nakahira opens with a lengthy sequence introducing new forensic technologies which anticipate the use of DNA as an investigative tool in the use of blood type analysis to place a suspect at a crime scene. This science will however be undercut by the sympathetic lawyer Hatanaka (Kazuo Kitamura) who reminds us that the presence of such evidence is not proof in and of itself in much the same way that DNA has since become the new smoking gun and is as susceptible to misuse as any other kind of forensic technique. 

It’s a problem for the hero, Honda (Noboru Nakaya), because his blood type is incredibly rare. In fact he was once in the paper for saving a baby by coming to the rescue with a donation just in time which as we later discover is ironic because much of his behaviour is shaped by the loss of his own child who was born with osteogenesis imperfecta and did not survive. The traumatic circumstances of the birth left his wife, Taneko, with a fear of pregnancy that eventually destroyed their marriage. The couple now live largely apart, she in her family’s country mansion painting disturbing pictures and he in the city “hunting” women for one night stands adopting the persona of a man who is foreign or part-Japanese. There is something of the fear of foreignness seen in other similarly themed films of the era in the fact that Honda’s child is born in Mexico while the couple had met and married in the US, Taneko convinced that had they returned to Japan earlier her baby may have survived while Honda claims that “intellectual” women are drawn to foreign men as he assumes his rather creepy “Monsieur Soubra” alter-ego complete with a funny accent and slightly broken Japanese. 

He positions his “hunting” as a way of dealing with the collapse of his marriage and his guilt over the death of his child overcoming his sense of impotence through transgressive sexuality though many of the women Hatanaka later interviews describe him as disappointingly vanilla and as we discover his games might have begun long before. Meanwhile the women are themselves judged for their sexuality, the discovery of a male muscle magazine in the home of a mousy spinster somewhat amusing to Honda while the unintended darkness of his sport is brought home by the film’s opening sequence in which a 19-year-old woman who became pregnant after he seduced and abandoned her takes her own life in shame and desperation only to be branded an “idiot” by her grieving sister for having slept with a man she had only just met. When a previous conquest of his is murdered in her apartment, Honda is momentarily worried but assumes it’s a grim coincidence. When her death is followed by that of a woman who could have provided him with an alibi he comes to the conclusion that someone is trying to frame him. 

Hatanaka’s conviction is that “the law is everything in court” and that Honda should not be judged on his moral character for his sleazy philandering only on the basis of the evidence presented which he believes may have been deliberately planted to incriminate him. His investigations take him to unlikely places discovering the potentially unethical practices of blood donation programs along with the illegal sale of blood and other bodily fluids such as semen while seeing the tables turned on visiting a gay bar where a male sex worker reports a weird encounter with a suspicious client, and salesman continues to frequent a Turkish bath hoping to run into a woman who seduced him but may only have been interested in his blood type. Honda soon forgets the name of the woman who took her own life, but is haunted by the visions of the women he has harmed while simultaneously rejecting the labels placed on him as a pervert or a predator and believing that his child’s death is punishment for his “abnormal sexuality” as some may brand it. 

This sense of guilt is also reflected in his worry that he is a “spreader of death”, as if though he did not kill them directly he were the carrier of a disease or else some kind of grim reaper beckoning these women towards their demise though he evidently thinks little of them outside of their status as trophies and does not stop to consider the consequences of his actions on others. Above his bed in his city hideout (officially he lives in a hotel) there is a picture of a fox hunt making plain that his satisfaction lies in the chase rather than its conclusion yet otherwise his motives are rather banal. He cannot leave his wife because he married into her prominent family and his social standing depends on his connection to them, likewise he decides against alerting the police or the building’s caretaker on discovering one of the women’s bodies because his reputation would be ruined if were to become involved in a murder and his secret life exposed. Ironically his salvation comes precisely because of this social standing when his wealthy father-in-law hires Hatanaka to handle his appeal and save him from the death penalty. 

Hatanaka had resigned from a previous position in opposition to the system, disappointed on meeting the lawyer who defended Honda at trial and realising they did not attempt to mount a defence nor investigate his case simply try to mitigate it in the hope of working it down to a custodial sentence. He instructs his naive young assistant who wonders if Honda is the sort of man they should be saving that she should approach every case on its merits as if the defendant is innocent without bringing in external moral judgements on his character. As he tells him, Honda may be legally vindicated but his moral judgement would depend on how he lives his life from then on later offering him a kind of absolution in telling him that one of his conquests, who does not want to be identified, gave birth to a son who is healthy and happy signalling that his is not an original sin and he does not bear that kind of responsibility for the death of his child. Veering towards the avant-garde Nakahira makes frequent use of superimposition and dissolves to reflect Honda’s fracturing mental state along with the persistence of his guilt while shifting into the purely documentarian in his lengthy explanation of forensic techniques and the science behind blood types but always returns to the Hitchcockian interplay of sex, death, and remorse which is true source of Honda’s trial. 

DVD remaster trailer (no subtitles)

A Chain of Islands (日本列島, Kei Kumai, 1965)

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nihon retto posterKei Kumai made just 19 films films in his 40 year career, but even since his earliest days he ranked among the most fearless of directors, ready to confront the most unpleasant or taboo aspects of contemporary Japan. His first film, The Long Death, interrogated wartime guilt through drawing inspiration from a real life 1948 mass poisoning case in which materials manufactured in a Manchurian lab may have led to the deaths of post-war civilians. Having begun in this possibly controversial vein, Kumai pressed on with 1965’s A Chain of Islands (日本列島, Nihon Retto, AKA The Japanese Archipelago) which he set in 1959 as Japanese youth protested the renewal of the ANPO treaty which placed Japan under the military protection of the American Armed forces in return for allowing the presence of those forces on Japanese soil.

Despite the contemporary setting Kumai opens with a explanatory voice over detailing the depth of the American military presence and the function of the CID which exists solely to investigate crimes committed by American servicemen. The CID is staffed by both Americans and Japanese nationals who, the voiceover explains, often feel conflicted in stepping onto American soil each morning as prolonged exposure gradually erodes their sense of difference and finally of “Japaneseness”. Akiyama (Jukichi Uno) is a translator/investigator at CID and he’s about to be handed an unusual request from his boss – reopen a cold case from the previous summer in which an American Sergeant was found floating in Tokyo bay. Akiyama’s new boss was a friend of the late soldier and would like to know what happened.

Akiyama’s investigations lead him down a dark path of corruption, murder, conspiracy, and governmental complicity. Beginning to investigate the case, Akiyama discovers that nothing is quite as it seems. A couple of policeman from the original investigation arrive to help him and echo their frustrations with the way the case was handled. Despite the police investigation, the American authorities did their best to interfere – commandeering the body and claiming jurisdiction in contravention of Japan’s standing as a sovereign nation. The Americans are no longer occupying forces but honoured guests who should obey international protocol in cases like these, but they rarely do. Despite the existence of the CID, crimes by American servicemen are generally covered up as the military insists the matter will be dealt with internally only for suspects to be suddenly “transferred” overseas.

Sgt. Limit was, however, one of the good ones and Akiyama’s investigation seems to point towards a murder and cover up instigated because Limit had got too close to the truth in investigating a sudden flood of counterfeit cash. The Americans, to the surprise of all, are only the middle man in the grand conspiracy which leads right back to the dark heart of Japan and the vast spy networks operated during the militarist era. As might be expected, these valuable networks are left wide open with the collapse of Japanese fascism but are perfectly primed to facilitate widespread crime spanning the Asian world and all with the tacit approval of the American and Japanese states.

Kumai also implicates the spy ring in a series of “mysterious” rail incidents, but makes sure to reserve some of his ire more the more usual injustices. Akiyama is caring for his young nephew whose father was killed in mining explosion which has claimed the lives of nearly every young man in the village leaving his sister unable to cope with her children alone. He is also battling a personal tragedy which is intensely connected to his decision to join CID which is currently inundated with cases of rape and murder in which American servicemen are implicated. The “foreign” becomes suspect but mostly for its hypocrisy as in the Catholic priest who becomes a major suspect in subverting the legitimate devotion of a Godly woman who only sought to live under the Christian teachings of love and kindness, while the American forces claim to stand for honour and justice but actively facilitate organised crime at an interstate level to further the progress of Capitalism whilst also facilitating civil unrest in volatile nations for financial and political gains.

That all of this happens immediately before the renewal of the ANPO treaty is no coincidence and Kumai even includes aerial footage of the mass protests filling the streets around the Diet building as the youth of Japan question why their nation has seen fit to make itself so complicit in the questionable foreign policy of another country. The outcome looks bleak for our protagonists who discover themselves to be mere pawns at the mercy of greater forces which cannot be circumvented or denied, but just as it all looks hopeless a new hope arises. Pledging to fight harder and continue the work which has been started, those left behind dedicate themselves to equipping the young with the tools to build a happier, fairer world in contrast to the one they seem primed to inherit from those who should know better. The final sequence shows us a young woman walking gloomily past the Diet building which seems to be looming over her as a veritable symbol of oppression but then her face brightens, her step quickens and she leaves the Diet far behind to walk forward towards the work which awaits her. 

A comprehensive overview of the 1960 ANPO protests.