Tag: Haruo Tanaka

Dancing Girl (踊子, Hiroshi Shimizu, 1957)

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The sudden arrival of a younger sister throws the despair and disappointment of an ageing chorus dancer into stark relief in Hiroshi Shimizu’s Dancing Girl (踊子, Odoriko). Chiyo (Machiko Kyo) is indeed a dancing girl, waltzing her way through post-war Japan with seemingly little thought for others or the consequences of her actions aware only of her ability to dazzle and what it might win her if used in the right way while her sister quietly yearns for a more comfortable, conventional kind of life.

Hanae (Chikage Awashima) apologises for Chiyo’s childishness when she suddenly gets up to marvel at the snow during in an important meeting with choreographer Tamura (Haruo Tanaka) who has offered to take her on as a trainee dancer but he simply replies that it’s what makes her special in the way Hanae herself perhaps is not. In that sense there’s something a little uncomfortable in Tamura’s first word on meeting Chiyo being simply “sexy” uttered as if he were already salivating over her when the key to her appeal seems to lie in the awkward juxtaposition of her naivety and curvaceous figure. In many ways, it’s childishness that is Chiyo’s defining characteristic. She follows her impulses and is incapable of thinking beyond them. In a repeated motif we see her eat heartily as if she had not for eaten days or else to be snacking on something or other at a time when food is scarce. We later discover that she’s some kind of kleptomaniac, stealing at every opportunity even when she has no need to, simply taking something she wants without considering why it might not be right to do so as if all the world belonged to her. Meanwhile she embraces her sexuality without shame, sleeping with whomever she chooses but also doing so in a calculated effort to advance her own cause. 

The irony is that her rise coincides with her sister’s fall. Hanae has passed the age at which she might have become a star and is beginning to age out of her career as a chorus dancer. She tells her husband, Yamano (Eiji Funakoshi), that what she wants is a comfortable life and to become a mother though the couple have been married for five years and not yet conceived a child leading her wonder if there’s medical issue in play though Yamano confesses in what turns out to be an ironic comment that he doesn’t really want children anyway. In any case, they are each becoming tired of life in Asakusa and their mutually unsatisfying careers. Crushingly they each fear they have disappointed the other, Hanae sorry that she never made it as a dancer and wondering if Yamano would have been better off marrying someone from a less stigmatised profession, while he feels guilty that he could not give her a better standard of life and has failed to progress in his own career as a violinist. Chiyo’s arrival reinvigates them both in different ways. Hanae shifts into a maternal mode otherwise denied her in looking after Chiyo as she begins her career as a dancer, while Yamano begins with her a sexual affair that rekindles his masculine drive. 

But Chiyo also remains flighty and elusive. Essentially lazy, she soon tires of dancing and decides to become a geisha because it requires less rehearsal, then to give that up too to become someone’s second mistress. She rejects the conventional, settled life Hanae has come to long for and describes that in the countryside as “boring” when she suggests moving there having selflessly offered to adopt the baby Chiyo has also rejected which maybe Yamano’s or perhaps Tamura’s or someone else’s entirely not that it necessarily matters. The closing moments of the film perhaps imply a moralising rebuke of the new post-war vision of liberated sexuality, a despondent Chiyo once again making a surprise appearance and wanting to see her child but being afraid to do so unable to match up to the unsullied maternity of Hanae. Shimizu lends her passage a kind of transient quality in his restless camera which is in constant motion sliding laterally from one scene to another often coming to rest on emptiness even amid the bustling streets of a neon-lit Asakusa and the false promises of its illusionary glow.

Dancing Girl screens at Japan Society New York on May 18 as part of Hiroshi Shimizu Part 2: The Postwar and Independent Years.

365 Nights (三百六十五夜, Kon Ichikawa, 1948)

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For his second film at Shintoho, Kon Ichikawa had wanted to adapt a story by Ryunosuke Akutagawa that later inspired Rashomon, but was handed a standard melodrama to direct first. Ichikawa apparently did not think much of the novel the film was to be based on nor the script by Kennosuke Tateoka which he subsequently brushed up with the help of his new wife Natto Wada, and it’s not difficult to see why he might have felt he had an uphill battle. Melodrama is after all a genre that is founded on coincidence, though 365 Nights (三百六十五夜, Sambyaku-rokujugo ya) quickly strains credulity with the sheer number of unlikely events and surprise reappearances along with its rather strange take on the contemporary post-war society which is undoubtedly influenced by the demands of the Occupation censorship regime. 

Indeed, the setting itself seems reminiscent of 1930s cinema following the dashing hero Koroku, played by the equally dashing Ken Uehara, an architect who has walked away from his privileged upbringing as the son of a successful construction magnate. His problem is that he’s being aggressively courted by the haughty Ranko (Hideko Takamine), also the daughter of a successful but shady businessman, who to modern eyes is basically stalking him. Grinning with an evil glint in her eye, she tells her minion Tsugawa (Yuji Hori) that she’ll have seduced Koroku within 365 days which by melodrama standards seems to give her quite a lot of leeway.

Clueing us up to her villainy, Ranko is always seen wearing incredibly stylish Western outfits but otherwise behaves in a transgressively masculine fashion ordering her male employees about while set on the sexual conquest of Koroku who despises her for everything she is. It’s difficult not to see an inherent criticism of the new post-war woman and an anxiety regarding the power that comes with wealth being wielded by someone who is not a man. The contrast between Ranko and traditional femininity is rammed home by the fact that Teruko (Hisako Yamane), the daughter of the landlady in the house where Koroku finds new lodging after moving home to escape Ranko, is always dressed in kimono and otherwise naive and innocent. 

This positions Ranko, and her minion Tsugawa who is also in love with her, as the villains who are rebelling against the kind of earnestness expressed by Koroku and Teruko. From more humble origins, Tsugawa is deeply resentful of Kokoku’s class privilege and feels that he looks down on him which is one reason he seeks revenge by destroying his life along with his sexual jealously that Ranko pays him no attention yet is fixated on Kokoku perhaps precisely because he is entirely uninterested in her though it remains mystery why you’d want to be married to someone who strongly dislikes you. 

Yet for all his own earnestness, Koroku is almost betrayed by the capitalist father of whom he also seems to disapprove when he asks him to consent to an arranged marriage with Ranko to save his business. Meanwhile, it also transpires that Teruko’s father has been absent from her life because he two has a criminal past further tainting the legacy each of them bear. Ichikawa stages each evolution of their relationship at the same, noirish street corner that seems to exist as a kind of border between the illicit underworld that seeps out from Tsugawa’s bar into the post-war society, and the geniality represented by Teruko’s otherwise nice, middle-class home. 

It’s the this transgressive quality, of being caught between these two worlds, that starts to eat away at Koroku leaving him a broken and shabby man little better than a tramp. In a break with melodrama norms, though he is aware that he has led Teruko into Tsugawa’s trap he comes to believe that she has betrayed him while she clings fiercely to her love and in the end attempts to sacrifice it basically giving Koroku to Ranko whom she believes can better care for him in his now corrupted state. Though events become grim with a wedding that is staged like a funeral and takes place at a death bed, there is also the sense that something must come right that seems a little incongruous and perhaps a concession to the censors board as may be the coda implying that Ranko, despite having undergone a kind of redemption, will also have to pay for all her dodgy dealings. Though clearly hampered by the material, Ichikawa crafts some stunning images such as the final scene at Tsugawa’s bar along with a surprisingly energetic action sequence during which Koroku fights off burglars at Teruko’s home and wins her heart with his manliness. In any case despite the hints at redemption the implication remains that this is a world dark at its core in which not even the earnest can escape its creeping corruption. 

Three Women of the North (北の三人, Kiyoshi Saeki, 1945)

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Film was the primary medium for propaganda and Japan had been pumping out increasingly patriotic fare under the National Policy programme since the late 1930s but what’s interesting about those which appeared towards the war’s end is that they do not try to sugarcoat the situation or pretend that the conflict is going well, rather they use the encroaching sense of desperation as an additional motivator to get all hands on deck. Released on Aug. 5, 1945, Three Women of the North (北の三人, Kita no Sannin) was the last propaganda film to be produced and the only film currently screening when the war ended on Aug. 15. Of course, after that it was swiftly withdrawn by the Occupation forces never to be seen again except perhaps as a historical document. 

Like The Most Beautiful, the film skews accidentally feminist in its focus on three female radio operators who seem to be regarded as something of pioneers in the field. After encountering technical issues, a plane with a top secret mission is guided into an airfield in Aomori by nothing more than the voice of radio operator Sumiko (Setsuko Hara) yet on landing the pilot expresses surprise apparently stunned that a young woman would be able to perform such a stellar job. The sexist attitudes seem almost set up so they can be shot down, the pilot is quickly corrected by the ground control chief (Takashi Shimura) who explains “nowadays women can become excellent radio operators.”

Of course, this is born of necessity seeing as at this late stage there is a huge untapped resource of young and widowed middle-aged women previously discouraged from getting directly involved with the war effort. In earlier propaganda films, the most important thing a woman could do was get married and particularly to a young man who was going to the war, but this time a conflict develops between two of the women, Yoshie (Hideko Takamine) and Sumiko, because Sumiko declined to marry Yoshie’s brother Kazuo before he left because she too wanted to do her bit for the war effort and would not have been able to do so as a married woman. On learning from Yoshie that Kazuo has been killed after volunteering to lead a suicide mission, she breaks down in tears and cries that she should have married him but Yoshie, who has forgiven her on learning of her patriotic reasoning, tells her that she has done the right thing and her brother would be proud of her for serving her country. 

Meanwhile, at another airfield even deeper into the frozen north their friend Akiko (Hisako Yamane) has a developed a fondness for a research scientist but their romance is of course frustrated by the war. In a moment of fraught emotion, he tells her that he will be returning after delivering his findings and she should wait for him there which is almost to say that they will be granted their romantic resolution once the war is over. The curious thing is that Hara (Shin Saburi) is a weather scientist whose cloud forecasts have apparently been very useful to the pilots. A slightly strange diversion sees the film try to argue that at this point the greatest threat to the Japanese war effort is the weather, which aside from sounding like a very British excuse makes very little sense even if it is obviously a factor in mission success. 

The radio operators obviously can’t do much about the weather, but they can pull together with plucky spirit dedicating themselves to the national good and giving all to the war effort. While Sumiko and Yoshie are having their emotional confrontation they’re interrupted by a trio of young women who were supposed to be getting a radio demonstration from Sumiko but they’ve come to say they can’t make it because one of the other girl’s mothers has been taken ill so they’re walking up the snowy mountain to the observatory in the middle of the night to send her back and take over her shift. When the radio operator on the special flight is taken down by pneumonia (the weather, again), Yoshie volunteers insisting that she’s prepared if the worst should happen but on landing remarks that she couldn’t have got through it without Sumiko and Akiko on the other end of the line resting their success on female solidarity. Though it’s clear the film was made on a shoe string it does feature special effects by none other than Eiji Tsuburaya along with some well conceived action sequences that lend an uncomfortably thrilling note to this extremely late entry into the realms of propaganda filmmaking. 

Ghost Man (幽霊男, Motoyoshi Oda, 1954)

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Employees at a small nude modelling agency find themselves in the firing line when a “bloodsucking painter” escapes from a psychiatric institution in Motoyoshi Oda’s adaptation of Seishi Yokomizo’s Ghost Man (幽霊男, Yurei Otoko). Though produced by Toho and helmed by the director of The Invisible Man, the film does not particularly make use of special effects and as it turns out, Ghost Man is just a creepy name for a weird villain rather than an accurate description of a supernatural threat. 

Even so, you’d expect someone who runs a modelling agency to be on high alert after hearing that a crazed painter who is a danger to women is on the loose, but the manager of the Mutual Art Club simply assumes it must be an eccentric artist thing when he’s presented with a business card from “Ghost Man” Sugawa. Ghost Man is dressed in an unsettling outfit and is immediately rough with the model he picks out, Keiko, all of which you would think would have the manager thinking twice about allowing her to go with him. Some of the other girls urge her to turn the job down, but Keiko is the breadwinner for her family and work has been thin on the ground so she agrees to take it only to realise Ghost Man does indeed intend to kill her on arrival at an abandoned house way out in the country. 

“What a single woman has to do to earn a living, it’s both thrilling…and terrifying,” one of the other women, Ayuko, tells her boyfriend Ken (Yu Fujiki) after she quits the agency to become a stripper and decides to take to the stage despite knowing that Ghost Man may try to kill her during the show. Her words hint at a transgressive frisson of danger which she at least has chosen to embrace, an icy glint in her eye as she encourages Ken to pay close attention to her performance which she claims will be “wonderful”. Nevertheless, it also makes clear that the work the women do at the agency is necessarily unsafe given that it involves travelling to the home of a man they don’t know where they will be expected to undress. 

For reasons the film doesn’t quite explain, the models are also members of the “Bizarro Enthusiast Club” led by Dr. Kano (Joji Oka) who is the head doctor at the psychiatric hospital from which the bloodsucking painter, Tsumura (Ren Yamamoto), escaped. Meanwhile, Dr. Kano also seems to have a sideline in taking the girls to remote locations for nude photoshoot parties. In all honesty, he’s quite suspicious especially seeing as he seems to instinctively know how to open the tricky door at the abandoned house where Keiko’s body is found. Then again, we’re also told that Tsumura was once a member of the club with at least some suggesting that he ended up getting too into the bizarre and going out of his mind to the extent that he began committing weird acts of crime of his own. 

The lesson might be that getting overly obsessed with the occult and esoteric is unhealthy, only it turns there’s something else going on entirely that isn’t really about anything “weird” but caused by completely banal negative human emotions resulting from spurned romantic interest and the fear of parental disappointment. This being a Kindaichi mystery, the famous detective soon makes his appearance (played by a hardboiled Seizaburo Kawazu) only in a less eccentric guise and accompanied by a more efficient Todoroki who assists him as he begins to put the pieces together to solve the mystery. 

The villain may be taking advantage of a historical moment in allowing others to think his face is bandaged to disguise a disfigurement like those of many men wounded in the war, as was the case in another Kindaichi case The Inugami Family, but is also harking back to the Invisible Man while his accomplice adopts a much more “monstrous” appearance with buck teeth and the two missing fingers on his hand along with the insectile movements that play into the spider-themed finale. Oda has a lot of fun with the villain’s Phantom of the Opera-esque antics which include recording a tape to taunt the police along with a public announcement of “Act 3” of his ongoing drama to be staged at the “Reijin Theatre” which literally means “the beautiful lady show” but is also a minor pun that makes it sound a little “Ghost Man Theatre” in true B-movie villain fashion. Even so, there’s an underlying darkness in the serial killer drama most particularly in the scrapbook the villain makes with photos of the dead women posed and titled as works of art as if they were never any more alive than the mannequins he often substitutes for them. Striking in its set pieces and unsettling design, Oda’s strange drama is surprisingly nasty and actually quite cynical even as it unmasks its villain as little more than a ghost of man who hid behind the spectre of unease to mask his cowardice and insecurity.

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)

The Lower Depths (どん底, Akira Kurosawa, 1957)

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“How can you go to hell if you’re already there?” quips a stoical gangster, perhaps the only denizen of a rundown tenement block no longer looking for escape in Akira Kurosawa’s adaptation of the Gorky play The Lower Depths (どん底, Donzoko). In general, much of Kurosawa’s post-war work decries deliberate falsehood but paradoxically suggests that some degree of self-delusion is essential for surviving an otherwise hopeless world. The wandering pilgrim who arrives like some kind of emissary from the land above says as much as he offers what may turn out to be false promises of a better world to come, but as one of his charges points out he does so “out of pity for those beyond hope.”

Then again, perhaps spirituality won’t save you either. As the film opens, it’s two monks who are seen throwing leaves over a cliff describing the settlement below as “just an old rubbish dump”, which in a sense it is if that were not such a cruel thing to say. In any case, the people who live here are all those who have already fallen into desperation, exiled from mainstream society and caught between a fierce desire to claw their way back up and the despair of knowing that in all likelihood they never will. A man who claims to be a former samurai waxes on his illustrious past, while a melancholy sex worker meditates on the lost love that reduced her to current position, and a stage actor laments his failing memory his mind now fogged by years of alcohol abuse that he says have already poisoned his “bitol organs”. A tinker secretly thinks he’s better than those around him. He’s only been here six months and insists that he’s a skilled craftsman who can continue working, but blames his desperate circumstances on the sickly wife whose death he quietly awaits assuming it will free him of this burden and thereafter this place.

It doesn’t, of course. He sells his tools to pay for her funeral, and otherwise appears lost no longer a husband to a dying wife. In essence the film revolves around a confrontation between the pilgrim who offers what may well be an illusion of salvation and the thief Sutekichi (Toshiro Mifune) who challenges him but begins to believe that it really may be possible for him to leave this place and take the woman he loves, Okayo (Kyoko Kagawa), with him or else fall further and remain trapped in this mortal hellscape. The problem there is that Sutekichi had previously been having an affair with the landlord’s wife Osugi (Isuzu Yamada) who is Okayo’s sister. Though Osugi, whose hope of escape through romance is dashed, first takes against her sister, she later offers to surrender her to Sutekichi if only he will assist her by killing her greedy husband Rokubei (Ganjiro Nakamura). 

In this cold and austere place which is in effect a living hell, there is a sense that many of the residents are already dead. Rokubei’s face is the palest of them all, suggesting that he is already too far gone ever to be saved and most likely doesn’t want to be anyway for in this terrible place he is in effect the king. Osugi is the queen, but often framed behind bars now a prisoner already too corrupt to leave the tenement behind. Her uncle, Deputy Shimazo (Kichijiro Ueda), has a largely illusionary sense of power in his position in a policeman which he prosecutes selectively and mostly at the service of the landlord. In the climactic closing scenes, his policeman’s baton is stolen by the drunkard Unokichi (Yu Fujiki) who dances through the streets with it demonstrating just how little authority he actually wields finally losing his position when the landlord is deposed and his familial connections become irrelevant. He inherits the landlord’s residence, but is reduced to the husband of the sweet seller Otaki (Nijiko Kiyokawa) whose status as a working woman is perhaps higher than his. 

Yet the pilgrim seems to think there is still time to save Sutekichi who at heart wants to go straight but is also resentful admitting that in a world where swindlers prosper perhaps it is foolish not to be a swindler. The pilgrim promises all of them a “better place”. “As long as you believe you’ll find it, you surely will”, he explains telling the actor about a temple that can help him cure his alcoholism while simultaneously urging the tinker’s suffering wife to give in to her fate and go to Buddha’s embrace as soon as possible. Perhaps he sincerely believes these things to be true, but also seems to have a sense that even if they weren’t these hopeless people could not go on if they knew there was no way out. They all say they’ll leave, but discover there are only two means of escape, to die or fall still further in banishment from this already banished place. Only Okayo whose final whereabouts remain unknown may finally have been able to free herself. Staying almost exclusively with the claustrophobic confines of the drafty tenement as wind the whistles through it, Kurosawa frames the space of one of existential purgatory but perhaps suggests that in the absence of salvation a comforting falsehood is the only means of survival.

The Lower Depths screens at the BFI Southbank, London on 19th & 30th January 2023 as part of the Kurosawa season.

No Regrets for Our Youth (わが青春に悔なし, Akira Kurosawa, 1946)

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“Freedom is something you have to fight for” a young woman is ironically reminded by her progressively-minded father as she finds herself torn between the conservatism of her upbringing as an upper middle class daughter of an academic family and a bid for independence in the freedoms of the post-war society. In part a lament for a lost generation whose resistance towards rising militarism had been all but forgotten, No Regrets for Our Youth (わが青春に悔なし, Waga Seishun ni Kuinashi), is also the story of a post-war woman seeking new directions which in this case eventually send her back to the land.

Then again, there’s no denying that Yukie’s (Setsuko Hara) dilemma is framed as romantic, torn between a dynamic communist and a spineless conservative while otherwise in her youth fairly vacuous. As the film opens, she frolics with some of her father’s students at a local mountain that overlooks Kyoto University. Caught on a stepping stone she awaits help from either the charismatic Noge (Susumu Fujita) or the diffident Itokawa (Akitake Kono) before Noge boldly dashes forward and carries her to the bank. Seeing Itokawa looking sheepish and embarrassed, she tugs on his student cap as if she hasn’t quite yet made up her mind which path she will take. “If I married you, my life would be calm and peaceful,” Yukie later reveals to Itokawa, “but it would also be a bit boring”, whereas if she married Noge “my life would burn so brightly that I might be blinded.” 

Even so, her outlook as the professor’s daughter leans towards the conservative. During the picnic on the mountain, the students suddenly hear the sound of cadets training with firearms Yukie exclaiming that it makes her heart race before ominously discovering the body of a wounded solider in the overgrowth. She declares that she hates “leftists” and that her father is a “liberal” not a “red” but will any case eventually be vindicated. Though attracted to Noge’s passionate nature, she seems to find him dull company, “boring” in his constant conversation about the rise of fascism while visibly bristling when he all but calls her a vacuous socialite and says she needs a “slap in the face to grow up” which is in a sense what he’s just given her. Her life had been that of a privileged upperclass girl cosseted from the world, engaging with refined pursuits such as playing the piano and learning traditional flower arrangement. Her epiphany seems to come when she realises she’s been doing as she’s told, reminded that flower arrangement is a means of self-expression suddenly tearing the heads off chrysanthemums and crafting something truly avant-garde that is in its own way quietly shocking. Notably her flower arrangements while living with Noge are much more harmonious. 

Still she wavers, wondering if she should give in to the quiet life she’d have with a man like Itokawa, a man with no ideology who sides with the militarists and becomes a prosecutor because it is expedient to do so, or continue to wait for Noge who by this point has been in prison and ostensibly renounced his socialist beliefs to join the army. What she chooses independence, breaking with the conventional life her mother wanted for her to support herself with a job at a trading company in Tokyo. Running into Itokawa in the city, he strongly hints to her that Noge is, from his point of view, up to no good running a kind of think tank as an expert on China. 

When Yukie chooses Noge she implies it’s because she wants “something I can throw myself into body and soul”, hoping to join him in his new cause prepared as her father had warned her to make sacrifices in the struggle for freedom. In the one sense, it’s Yukie making up her own mind to abandon her privileged background to live her life with no regrets, but it’s also impossible to ignore that the cause she dedicates herself to is that of her husband. Committed to making Noge’s parents, both peasant farmers, understand that he was not an “ungrateful” son but a man who did his best to oppose the war and fight for peace and prosperity in Japan, she commits herself to the land and wins them over with the strength of her resolve. The hands that once played piano are now rough with work and it is in this she has found her purpose. Yet it’s difficult to say if the austerity of her new life represents ultimate freedom or only further constraint in the imperative of her continued suffering. Perhaps it doesn’t really matter, if as she says she has no regrets for her youth as she joins hands with the peasant farmers leaving her privileged upbringing behind her even as her mother remarks that with her father reinstated at the university it’s as if nothing had changed. There is then something quite poignant as she sits by the stream and sees the students file past her singing their song of protest that in the end went unheeded while she prepares to reject modernity in its entirety and return to the simplicity of the land.

No Regrets for Our Youth screens at the BFI Southbank, London on 2nd & 10th January 2023 as part of the Kurosawa season.

Untamed (あらくれ, Mikio Naruse, 1957)

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“Don’t let guys control you. You have to make them men” the heroine of Mikio Naruse’s Taisho-era drama Untamed (あらくれ, Arakure, AKA Untamed Woman) advises a former rival, yet largely fails to do so herself in the fiercely patriarchal post-Meiji society. Based on a serialised novel by Shusei Tokuda published in 1915 but set in late Meiji rather than early Taisho, Naruse’s adaptation essentially drops a contemporary post-war woman into a by then almost unrecognisable Japan but finds her hamstrung firstly by feckless and entitled men and then by complicit women who themselves cannot accept her transgressive femininity. 

As the film opens, a teenage Shima (Hideko Takamine) has just married wealthy grocery store owner Tsuru (Ken Uehara) but the marriage is already a failure. Though Shima is compared favourably with Tsuru’s previous wife who was apparently in poor health, presumably suffering with TB which required a sojourn by the sea, it soon becomes clear that Tsuru is as trapped by the archaic patriarchal social system as she is. He was apparently in love with a woman from a higher social class he was too afraid to pursue and despite still seeing her also has a mistress near their factory in Hokkaido whom he often visits under the guise of a business trip. Yet when Shima tells him she thinks she may be pregnant, he is unimpressed immediately questioning the paternity of the child while harping on about her having been married before which it seems is not quite true. Perhaps the reason that she has ended up a second wife despite her youth and beauty, Shima ran out on a marriage to a childhood friend arranged for her by her adoptive parents the night before the wedding not realising they had already registered the union without her knowledge or consent. 

This transgressive act at once signals Shima’s total disregard for conventionality and insistence on her own autonomy, yet it is also indicative of the fact she married Tsuru in search of a better life, knowing that to marry her adoptive parents’ choice meant only a life of servitude on the family farm. She is not always a terribly likeable figure, coldly explaining that she didn’t mind being fostered out because the adoptive family were wealthier and could give her a better life than she had with her birth parents yet it’s this sense of familial dislocation and the liminal status it gives her that allow her to take agency over her life in the way other women might not unwilling to lose the familial security Shima may not feel she ever had. Tsuru is also an adopted son, but the price for disobedience for him may be even higher and indeed as we later hear his inability to sort out his love life eventually sees him out on his ear. His pettiness in refusing to accept the child is his leads to an argument which causes Shima to slip on the stairs and miscarry the implication being that she may not be able to bear more children leaving her unlikely to remarry and thereby spurring her desire for a tempered independence. 

The fall is the last straw, Tsuru divorces her citing her inability to play the role of the proper wife while her birth family, from whom she is emotionally estranged, refuse to take her back as do the adoptive parents because of the embarrassment she caused them with the marriage stunt. She is often described as “like a man”, unable to win as Tsuru at once insists she wear the frumpy kimonos left behind by his previous wife who was a decade older, complains she wears too much makeup, and tells her to loosen her kimono belt to de-emphasises her figure, while criticising her for being unfeminine in her refusal to simply put up with his bad behaviour as is expected for a wife in this era. Shima fulfils all her wifely duties and as we see is in fact running his business as the women of the family are often seen to do while their husbands spend the money they earn for them on other women whether drinking with geishas or supporting mistresses in second homes. When her husband hits her, she fights back rather than shrinking away chastened as intended. 

Yet she cannot overcome the sense that a man is necessary for her success which cannot be accomplished alone. Cast out from her family, her brother installs her in the mountains to work in a geisha house if only as kitchen staff but soon does a flit to reunite with his married lover who has left her husband for him. While there she falls for the quiet and sensitive inn owner Hamaya (Masayuki Mori), also an adopted heir, whose wife is again ill with TB. Hamaya may be treating his wife a little better than Tsuru did his, but quite clearly assumes she’ll die in starting an affair with Shima who is then sent away to an even more remote inn to avoid a potential scandal. As Tsuru did with the woman he apparently loved, Shima continues to see Hamaya until he too succumbs to TB as an ideal of an impossible love while simultaneously accepting that he failed her in being too weak and cowardly to fight for their romance outright refusing to become his mistress. 

This may be one reason she is determined never again to be an employee but to own her own store which is why she ends up marrying tailor Onoda (Daisuke Kato) who introduces her to textiles and seamstressing at which she quickly proves adept having mastered the modern sewing machine. She marries Onoda in believing him “reliable”, but soon comes to regard him as lazy and feckless. The first shop fails because he can’t keep up with her. The male employees are always taking breaks to drink tea and play shogi, Onoda complaining that he’s tired while she does all his work for him and the housework too. Yet he also criticises her for a lack of femininity, snapping back that it must be her time of the month when she berates him in front of their employees while later after they’ve become successful complaining it’s “embarrassing” that his workhorse wife doesn’t know the things a sophisticated society woman would such as ikebana while flirting with the teacher he’s hired ostensibility to teach her. He even forces her to wear a frumpy and already somewhat dated classically Edwardian dress with a fancy bonnet which more resembles something a country girl might wear to church than the latest in Western fashions in an attempt to advertise their tailoring which seems primed to backfire. 

That she learns to ride a bicycle in this rather ridiculous outfit is again a symbol of her desire to seize and manipulate modernity even giving rise to a piece of innuendo from her much younger assistant Kimura (Tatsuya Nakadai) as to the pounding she’s been getting from the saddle. Kimura seems to think the problem with the business is that Onoda’s patterns are outdated, offering her a new modernity while she prepares to cut Onoda out on catching him with his mistress taking their best employee with her to ruin his business and start another of her own. Though once again she cannot leave alone only with a man the ending is perhaps more hopeful than might be expected from a Naruse film allowing Shima to commit herself fully to the sense of industry she embodies always ready to start again, work harder, and achieve her desires unwilling to be bound by conventional ideas of femininity or to simply put up with useless men who refuse to accept her for all she is. Yet she largely fails to make men of them, each of her various suitors failing to live up to her, ruined by an oppressive social system that encourages them to exploit female labour while taking it for granted in their intense sense of patriarchal entitlement. 

Ghost Cat of Nabeshima (鍋島怪猫伝, Kunio Watanabe, 1949)

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When is a ghost cat not a ghost cat? Drawing inspiration from classic folklore and kabuki theatre, the ghost cat movie had been a popular genre of pre-war cinema yet thereafter fell out of favour before a brief resurgence in the 50s and 60s. Inspired by the classic vampire cat legend, 1949’s Ghost Cat of Nabeshima (鍋島怪猫伝, Nabeshima Kaibyo-den) was part of a wave of post-war kaibyo yet in a slightly meta touch features no actual “ghost cat” leveraging instead the superstitious fear of their existence along with a mild prejudice towards otherwise supernaturally cute kitties. 

Set in the feudal era, the central drama revolves around a weakened lord, a supposedly cursed Go board, and local hysteria about a dangerous ghost cat lurking round the palace that has the townspeople nervous enough to have organised a patrol on the look out for suspicious-looking felines. A store owner has recently taken in an ornate Go board which has sent his wife into a minor frenzy because it looks just like the one from the local temple which she knows to be haunted by the vengeful spirit of a man who was killed during a dispute over a particularly heated game. As such, she pushes him to sell it as quickly as possible which he does to a lower level samurai whose gaming companion is so weirded out by the bad vibes emanating from the board that he gives it away to villainous retainer Tanuma (Ureo Egawa). Tanuma then gifts it to the rather effete lord ignoring the advice of his noble rival Komori (Denjiro Okochi) that Go is bad for the lord’s health both mental and physical. 

Komori may in a sense be proved right when, lacking a companion, the lord decides to summon Matashichiro (Haruo Tanaka) who is reputed to be a good player. Matashichiro is something of a Go obsessive and had been planning to leave for Edo in order to train with a true master partly it seems because he is carrying a chip on his shoulder as his family has been reduced in circumstances leaving him with few opportunities. On seeing the board, however, he appears to have something of an episode repeating the earlier tragedy in insisting the lord is playing “unfairly” before starting a fight during which the lord accidentally kills him, Matashichiro’s adorable black kitten Kuro leaving tiny bloody footprints as he scuttles away to relative safety glaring at the lord as he goes.

The lord thereafter develops an intense fear of cats, half-believing Kuro has become a bakeneko out to get him. All of this plays directly into the hands of Tanuma who is secretly plotting against the lord and hopes to capitalise on the ghost cat rumours while simultaneously making the lord seem mad in order to usurp and manipulate him. Tanuma had rejected concern over the cursed nature of the board insisting that “supernatural things don’t exist” while suggesting “weak government” is the reason such rumours were allowed to arise in the first place though it later becomes clear he too is manipulating them later sending out one of his minions in a ghost cat outfit with the instruction to cause trouble to keep the townspeople afraid. Komori, meanwhile, the good samurai later reminds the lord that he brought some of this on himself in his selfishness, failing to properly care for his subjects such as the rebellious Sanpei (Yataro Kurokawa) who openly disparages him while encouraging a peasant revolt in the face of samurai indifference. 

In this, there is perhaps a message for the immediate post-war world in the peasants’ frequent mistaken assertion that greed is good and a necessary tool for survival, Sanpei and the others half-heartedly taking part in a cat cull ordered by the increasingly paranoid lord which creates further animosity towards the samurai authorities from local people who love their cats and won’t stand for their beloved pets being sold off and killed because of a bizarre rumour about a vengeful feline spirit. One of the reasons cited for the decline in popularity of the ghost cat film is that post-war audiences simply no longer took such things seriously and some of that flippancy is indeed seen in the attitudes of some of the townspeople who are quick to dismiss such ridiculous superstition. Yet there are ghostly apparitions only they’re very much human if perhaps mildly linked to feline activity, a dishevelled Matashichiro appearing in front of the lord to remind him of his crime while Tanuma does his best to cover it up. Here more than most, there’s a heavy implication that the spirits of the deceased are mere hallucinations of a guilty mind, but could the Go board really be responsible, it did provoke a violent rage in the otherwise dejected Matashichiro after all?

Then again, when the townspeople regain it, they realise the Go board is just a Go board experiencing very few supernatural incidents despite having it in their possession for over two months and as any cat owner knows, footprints on the tatami are hardly an unusual occurrence. “Did anyone actually see the ghost that everyone was fussing about?” a woman asks to confused silence before someone jokingly points at Matashichiro’s former girlfriend Otoyo (Michiyo Kogure) now guardian to the adorable Kuro looking like butter wound’t melt. Order has in any case been restored, the disruptive Tanuma’s schemes unmasked, the lord reminded of his proper responsibilities whether by supernatural intervention or not, and the townspeople laying aside their “greed” while rediscovering a sense of mutual solidarity not to mention affection for their feline companions. Playful to the last, Watanabe closes with a handheld zoom into the cute kitten sitting innocently atop the cursed board while the drunken townsmen snooze all around him in ominous tranquility. 

The Big Boss (暗黒街の顔役, Kihachi Okamoto, 1959)

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By 1959, Japan was well on the way towards economic recovery but this transitionary period brought with it its own dilemmas and particularly for those whose main line of business had in a sense depended on instability and desperation. The first of Kihachi Okamoto’s early crime capers, The Big Boss (暗黒街の顔役, Ankokugai no kaoyaku) finds the yakuza at just this moment of crisis, prescient in a sense in perhaps prematurely implying that post-war gangsterdom was already on its way out. 

The film opens, however, with a piece of yakuza thuggery as a mysterious man guns down an industrialist before barreling down the stairs and into a waiting car occupied by getaway driver Mineo (Akira Takarada) who is inconveniently spotted by a passerby, 16-year-old ramen restaurant waitress Kana (Rumiko Sasa). As we discover, Mineo is the younger brother of veteran gangster Ryuta (Koji Tsuruta), a middle-ranking member of the newly rebranded, rapidly corporatising yakuza outfit Yokomitsu Trading who seem to specialise in legal debt collection and running the entertainment district. Torn between their desire for a degree of legitimacy and their thuggish instincts, Yokomitsu have evidently knocked off a rival using an external hitman but now have a problem on their hands especially as Mineo has apparently embarked on a career as a singer in a teen jazz bar located in the same area as Kana’s restaurant which is at the very least unwise. 

Mineo is in many ways the “innocent” seen in many other similarly themed yakuza dramas, still too young to have been corrupted by the underworld and only an accomplice in the crime for which he is being asked to pay. He wants to get out of the yakuza life and sees singing as his escape route, adopting the persona of “Eddie Mineo” and styling himself as a teen idol in the vein of the rock ’n roll American pop culture which seems to be dominiating the late ‘50s youth scene. Yet Okamoto is also clearly evoking the world of Hollywood crime cinema, the environment open and dusty while everyone seems to drive massive Cadillacs and his gangsters behave much more like those in American movies than traditional yakuza even as the traditional yakuza is also changing. 

“I can’t stand it anymore” Ryuta finally exclaims, “There’s neither righteousness nor rules among mobsters”, tipped over the edge by the gang’s plan to kill the teenage witness. He wants out too, but considers himself already too far gone while pulled in two directions in his desire to save both his brother and his young son who has a lame leg and is being cared for in a hospital. Ryuta wears his wedding ring throughout though there’s no mention of what happened to his wife, while he’s also pulled between two potential love interests in the sympathetic doctor who cares for his son, Sumiko (Yumi Shirakawa), and the brassy cabaret girl, Rie (Mitsuko Kusabue), who does her best to save him, but in the end is never very much interested in either of them. He’s constantly haunted by his crimes, knowing what happens to yakuza who fall from grace in his murder of a man who limped and walked with a crutch just like his son. 

The clan are also planning to off a former foot soldier, Ishiyama, who in fact commits suicide immediately after his release from prison realising the futility of his position. Ishiyama’s suicide note directly references that of notorious post-war gangster Rikio Ishikawa whose life inspired Kinji Fukasaku’s Graveyard of Honor 15 years later “I took too big a gamble. lt’s a big laugh. It’s been a thirty year long spree.“ Ryuta realises there’s no way out of his life of crime, but finds himself conflicted even in his desire to ensure his brother and son remain free of it. His sense of futility is however wider, witnessing the death and decline of the traditional yakuza in itself the film climaxing in a moment of yakuza apocalypse as those apparently sick and tired of violence and intimidation finally fight back making it clear that organised crime is no longer welcome in the increasingly prosperous society. 

Skewing darker in tone than Okamoto’s subsequent entries into the “ankokugai” or “underworld” series, The Big Boss is lighter on his characteristically absurdist sense of humour but does feature a little of the exaggerated, cartoonish violence otherwise his hallmark while adding a note of irony as in his use of a sign outlining the numbers for police and ambulance or the sight of a bunch of children playing with guns while a hitman has a go on the swings. There is perhaps a sense of resistance to the conventionality of the material or that his relative inexperience, this being only his third film (the first two both romantic comedy vehicles for Izumi Yukimura) prevented him from fully embracing his anarchic spirit but The Big Boss nevertheless sows the seeds of his later career in its insistence on the absurdity of violence. 

Original trailer (English subtitles)