Tag: Eizaburo Sakauchi

Sanshiro Sugata (姿三四郎, Akira Kurosawa, 1943)

November 30, 2025by Hayley Scanlon

It might seem curious in some ways to make a film about the importance of humanity in martial arts during a time of war, but Akira Kurosawa’s debut feature Sanshiro Sugata (姿三四郎, Sugata Sanshiro) does just this in depicting the hero’s coming of age as a gradual progress towards awakening as he learns to attain control over body and mind through the modern discipline of judo. Based on a novel by Tsuneo Tomita, the film is in many ways a typical martial arts drama in which a young hopeful seeks a master and must eventually face a rival, but lends a note of poetry to the tale which is in other ways perhaps out of keeping with its times.

The times of the film, however, are late Meiji as demonstrated in the lively opening sequence which ventures into a town in transition where policemen in Western-style uniforms walk the streets alongside townspeople dressed largely in kimono as is the hero, Sanshiro Sugata (Susumu Fujita), who’s come looking for a famous jiujitsu master. Taken on as a pupil, he overhears the master, Momma (Yoshio Kosugi), disparaging a rival, Yano (Denjiro Okochi), who has come up with a new martial art he calls judo which is fast gaining both respect and popularity. Momma thinks it’s all just a branding exercise and Yano’s “judo” is just repackaged jiujitsu, irritated that he seems primed to take a prestigious position as a trainer to the police force which runs its own martial arts contest. Sanshiro goes with them when they attempt to ambush Yano and teach him a lesson only to be easily defeated and humiliatingly thrown in the local river. Sanshiro immediately switches his allegiance, discarding his geta to give Yano a ride home in his rickshaw.

As Yano repeatedly tries to teach Sanshiro, judo is more than a martial arts discipline and places humanity at the centre of everything. This is a difficult lesson for the hot-headed Sanshiro to learn, quickly falling foul of his new master after brawling in the red light district and dramatically throwing himself into the pond. Clinging to a pole, he refuses to get out until Yano forgives him, but in true master fashion Yano merely says that getting out of the pond or not is entirely up to him. It’s while he’s in there, and after a few words from a Buddhist monk, that he witnesses a lotus flower slowing unfolding and achieves a kind of enlightenment that allows him to realise he’s been childish and petulant, finally getting out of the water to submit himself to the rigorous discipline of the martial arts life.

The flower motif recurs several times, not least being its subversion when antagonist Higaki (Ryunosuke Tsukigata) sprinkles the ash of his cigarette over it. Making his first appearance in dandyish Western dress, Higaki is described as a snake-like villain, his evilness emphasised by his non-Japanese attire in contrast to pretty much everyone else who continues to dress in kimono. Higaki vows that his fight with Sanshiro must be to the death, in part a fight between the nascent art of judo originating in the post-feudal society and the traditional art of jiujitsu, but echoing Sanshiro’s first fight with former master Momma which resulted in his death and plunged the hero into spiritual conflict. He then experiences something similar when realising that he has inadvertently fallen in love with Sayo (Yukiko Todoroki) the pure-hearted daughter of another rival, Murai (Takashi Shimura), who also desires to fight him but as it turns out only in his desire to face a worthy opponent. Sanshiro wants to back away, afraid that he may humiliate or even kill the father of the woman he loves but is brought back to himself by more words from the monk who tells him that he must be as innocent as she is and engage in the fight in a sportsmanlike fashion as a spiritual as well as physical contest.

This is also to some degree true of his final confrontation with Higaki which too is a confrontation with the evils of the age if less comfortably also satisfying the censors by allowing Higaki to stand in for foreignness in general. Higaki is indeed often accompanied by the sound of the wind which echoes his modernity, the fight taking place in a large windswept field below roiling clouds as the two men grapple despite the advice of their intermediary to call it off before one of them really dies. Higaki does in a sense die a sort of death in that we’re told after the fight he reformed and also managed to find a similar kind of enlightenment to Sanshiro who is then bashful and romantic while heading off on another journey from which he assures Sayo he will soon return. It’s true enough that there doesn’t seem to be much that would appeal to the censors of 1943 save the implied defeat of Western powers and celebration of Japanese martial arts given that humanity is repeatedly emphasised as the core component of judo and that Sanshiro achieves an individual enlightenment rather than finding peace as a member of a team or community, but they did otherwise decide to cut a substantial amount of the film said to contain a love scene and references to alcoholism that they deemed improper. Nevertheless, there are shades of Kurosawa’s later greatness even here in his dramatic composition and expressionistic use of nature to detail one boy’s journey into manhood through the spiritual rather than physical gymnastics of the philosophy of judo.

Snow Trail (銀嶺の果て, Senkichi Taniguchi, 1947)

April 25, 2020by Hayley Scanlon

The cinema of the immediate post-war era might in a sense be aspirational, but it rarely shies away from hardship or from the sometimes difficult choices which had to be made both in terms of individual survival and the future direction of a society. Remembered chiefly for featuring the debut of screen legend Toshiro Mifune, Senkichi Taniguchi’s Snow Trail (銀嶺の果て, Ginrei no Hate) is less a crime doesn’t pay story than it is an affirmation that it’s never too late to turn back and that people who do “bad” things aren’t always “bad”, only troubled and desperate, but can be guided back towards the right path by the power of simple human goodness.

As the film opens, a trio of thieves commits a daring bank robbery and then heads off on the run intending to hideout in the mountains posing as tourists on a skiing trip. To facilitate their ruse, they’ve cut off communication by fiddling with radios and disabling telephones but two young men with too much time on their hands have already heard about the robbery and figured out the three suspicious gentlemen might be the fugitive criminals. In another picture, the two young guys would be the bumbling heroes, mistaken in their assumption that their world has been invaded by crime and probably finding romantic disappointment before heading home. This time however their guess is correct and their investigation has placed them in danger. The leader, Nojiri (Takashi Shimura), whips out a gun on a collection of drunken labourers and forces them out of their clothes and into the hot spring so the gang can make their escape further up the mountain, eventually taking refuge in a tiny lodge run by a philosophical grandpa (Kokuten Kōdo) and his cheerful teenage granddaughter (Setsuko Wakayama).

The police are in hot pursuit, but it is by nature which we will be judged. After leaving the hotel, the trio stop briefly in a ranger’s hut where hotheaded youngster Eijima (Toshiro Mifune) suggests splitting up. Nojiri divides the loot, giving each their promised share, but the other guy, Takasugi (Yoshio Kosugi), objects. He doesn’t want to go it alone and resents being forced to make his own way, even wondering out loud how long they’d get if they gave themselves up now. After a fight knocks Takasugi out, Eijima is keen to leave him behind, but he ends up spelling his own doom when he fires his gun at the police and provokes an avalanche.

Later the patient grandfather tells us that the “mighty mountain punishes the bad”, and Takasugi is presumably its first victim, paying the price for panic and cowardice. Meanwhile, Nojiri and Eijima find themselves playing tourists once again in the mountain lodge where Nojiri is touched by the simple innocence of the young girl and her grandfather and Eijima paces around impatiently like a caged animal, cruelly killing the little girl’s prized carrier pigeon in case it takes it upon itself to signal the authorities. Threatening the girl’s life, Eijima convinces another guest, Honda (Akitake Kono), to guide them safely over the mountains to escape, but becomes increasingly paranoid that he will be betrayed, knowing he does not have the skills to survive alone in this environment.

Nojiri meanwhile is drawn back towards humanity. Already softened by Harue, the cheerful young woman at the lodge who innocently offers him honey tea and reminds him of his own daughter who passed away at a similar age, he remains conflicted in their coercion of Honda and even more chastened after Honda saves both of their lives when Nojiri slips breaking own his arm in the process. Later, Nojiri asks him why he helped them rather than just cutting the rope and escaping. He replies that all he did was respect the code of the mountains. “The rope that ties one life to another must never be touched” he tells him.

In an unexpected twist, Nojiri’s humanity is reawakened by a song filled with nostalgia but it isn’t Furusato or Akatombo, it’s “My Old Kentucky Home” played in an instrumental version on Harue’s portable record player, previously used by Honda who performed a silly dance to tune of Oh Suzannah. The choice of music perhaps echoes the movie’s Hollywood inspiration, but otherwise follows the pattern of other similarly themed contemporary crime movies in which the hero is eventually redeemed by connecting with his own childhood innocence through the “furusato” spirit. Still able to find this essential goodness within himself, the mountain has judged Nojiri favourably, proving that as grandpa says he isn’t a “bad” person even if he’s made “bad” choices. Filled with a new respect for the ropes that bind one human to another, he is allowed to return to the world presumably to live a more connected existence cheerfully helping others rather than remaining selfishly alone.

Girls of the Night (女ばかりの夜, Kinuyo Tanaka, 1961)

March 15, 2019January 9, 2022by Hayley ScanlonLeave a comment

Working from a Keisuke Kinoshita script, Kinuyo Tanaka’s first film as a director, Love Letter, made a point of exploring the often hypocritical and contradictory attitudes towards women who had engaged in sex work or become the mistresses of American servicemen in the immediate aftermath of the defeat. For her fifth film, Tanaka returns to the same subject but this time adapting a novel by Masako Yana scripted by Sumie Tanaka (no relation) with whom she’d previously collaborated on The Eternal Breasts. Somewhat suggestively retitled Girls of the Night (女ばかりの夜, Onna Bakari no Yoru), Tanaka’s adaptation tones down the novel’s sensuality but dares to ask a series of subversive questions regarding female agency and sexuality in the rapidly changing post-war society.

Set in the contemporary era, the film opens with reportage-style voiceover and newspaper clippings highlighting the enforcement of the anti-prostitution laws of 1958. According to the voiceover, the red light districts of Japan may have all but disappeared but streetwalking and other forms of casual sex work are still very much a part of the post-war economy. In an attempt to bridge the gap between the old ways and new, those arrested by the police are divided into two camps – those deemed beyond “redemption” sent to prison, and the rest to reform centres such as the Shiragiku Protective Facility for Women which is where we find our heroines.

The reform centre itself is a fairly progressive place and much more forward looking that seen in the earlier Women of the Night though perhaps sometimes patronising even as it makes a strenuous attempt not look down on the women who enter its care. Our first entry into the facility is in the company of a similarly well meaning women’s association whose misplaced pity only reinforces their innately privileged position. They are as far from many of these women as it is possible to be and struggle to understand how it is possible that they found themselves engaging in a practice they find both shameful and degrading. Having got to know many of the women through trying to help them, the school’s headmistress Nogami (Chikage Awashima) and her assistant are better placed to understand even if they also apologise that many of the women in their care are of “low IQ” and fail to convey the kinds of pressures that many have been subject to from desperate poverty to bad family situations and abusive relationships.

Abuse and the trauma of abuse remains one of the barriers to the women moving on, as in the reason many of them found themselves in sex work was because of their relationship with an exploitative partner who either forced them to sell their bodies or left them with no other choice in order to support themselves through being unable or unwilling to work. Nogami, a compassionate and understanding woman, is at pains to insist that the reason many of these women see nothing wrong in sex work is that they have an insufficient level of self respect and value their bodily autonomy too cheaply in allowing others to buy and sell access to it without full consideration of everything that implies.

Then again, asked by one of her most promising cases, Kuniko (Hisako Hara), what is actually so “bad” about sex work, Nogami is forced to admit that she doesn’t know – only that it is now illegal and her job is to help these women live “honest” lives within law. It is difficult to evade the hypocrisy that Nogami is telling these women that they should exercise full agency over their bodies while simultaneously telling them what they shouldn’t be doing with them, but then for all the centre’s talk about “purity” Nogami herself is refreshingly frank and practical in her approach to helping these women towards reintegration into mainstream society in the assumption that that is something they would want rather than out of any quasi-religious ideas of moral goodness.

Shame and social stigma, however, become another barrier as Kuniko finds to her cost in her attempts to move on from the centre. At her first placement as a live-in assistant at a grocer’s, she is quickly outed by a nosy deliveryman already acquainted with the true nature of the Shiragiku centre. The exposure of Kuniko’s past provokes not only mild disgust and suspicion among “respectable” people but also unwanted male attention from those who assume her former life as a sex worker means that they are already entitled to her sexuality with or without her consent.

Thinking the direct approach might be better, Kuniko decides to share her past with the ladies in the dorm at her next job in a factory but they are not quite as supportive as she might have hoped. Despite the fact that many of these young women are sexually active and in fact involved in what might be thought of as acts of casual sex work, they collectively look down on Kuniko while also seeking to exploit her both for the practical knowledge they assume she must have and by attempting to pimp her out to other men they know. When the attempt fails (Kuniko humiliates the three men who try to pressure her into sex by frightening them off with nothing more than confidence and self-possession), the women turn on her and enact an extremely violent and sadistic revenge.

Despite what she observed at the centre, Kuniko learns to her cost that she cannot necessarily rely on female solidarity as a bulwark against male exploitation. Nevertheless, it is to female communities and friendships that she ultimately returns. The leader of the women’s group from the beginning turns out to be less of a dilettante than she first seems and eventually takes Kuniko in with a promising job in a rose a garden which seems to suit her perfectly. Roses, however, have thorns – this one’s being her tentative relationship with gardener Hayakawa (Yosuke Natsuki) who is aware of her past but falls in love with her anyway only for her romance to hit the barrier of entrenched social mores when she discovers that Hayakawa is in fact a member of a noble family. In another instance of women not helping women, Hayakawa’s mother puts the kibosh on her daughter-in-law being a former sex worker which both reinforces Kuniko’s sense of being irreparably damaged and makes her feel as if she has become a problem for a man with whom she has fallen in love. Vowing to live up to Hayakawa’s vision of her as a “pure” woman, Kuniko retreats once again to a supportive community of women – this time of pearl divers in what seems to be an act of spiritual cleansing.

In Kuniko’s final identification of the “disgracefulness” of her past and declaration that she does not hate the world but only herself, Girls of the Night shifts into a more conventional register than the broadly empathetic, subversively positive attitude it had hitherto adopted towards the idea of sex work and the women who engage in it, opting to blame the woman rather than engage with the various forces of social oppression which attempt to micromanage female sexuality. Nevertheless, Tanaka’s deft touch remains as sympathetic as it’s possible to be in affirming that there is a path forward for those who might feel trapped by past transgression even if it simultaneously insists that its heroine save herself only by rejecting her happy ending in atonement for her past “sins”.