Tag: Hideo Shimada

Killer’s Mission (賞金稼ぎ, Shigehiro Ozawa, 1969)

Posted on by

According to the title card at the beginning of Shigehiro Ozawa’s Killer’s Mission (賞金稼ぎ, Shokin Kasegi), none of the events it depicts have been recorded in history because the shogunate decided to erase them all in fear of the effect they may have on the nation’s geopolitical stability. Nevertheless, it gives some very concrete dates for its historical action, even if they may not make complete sense while foreshadowing the political turbulence of the following century. 

What it essentially attempts to do is tell a James Bond-style tale of political intrigue in a feudal Japan in which perpetual peace has begun to create its own problems. Here played in a cameo appearance from Koji Tsuruta, the Shogun Ieshige was weak in part because he was in poor health and had a speech impediment which led him to be rejected by his retainers. The problem here, however, is with Satsuma which has been on bad terms with the Tokugawa shogunate since the Battle of Sekigahara after which they took power. Satsuma will in fact be at the centre of the conspiracy to overthrow the government in the following century, but for the purposes of the film have fallen foul of a rumour that the plan to do an arms deal with some Dutch sailors who sailed South to Kyushu after being rebuffed in Edo. 

A civil war is feared and in the interests of maintaining peace, Ieshige sends his trusted spy Ichibei (Tomisaburo Wakayama) to protect Satsuma official Ijuin Ukiyo (Chiezo Kataoka) in the hope that he will be able to talk his young and naive lord out of doing the deal. Ostensibly a doctor by trade, Ichibei has a series of spy gadgets such as hidden blades and collapsible guns stored in a secret room at his surgery which he then carries in a black leather utility belt. He keeps the nature of his mission close to his chest, but often double bluffs by simply telling people he is a shogunate spy or otherwise adopting a disguise as he does in a moment of meta comedy impersonating the signature role of his brother Shintaro Katsu by posing as a Zatoichi-style blind masseur. 

As if to signal the cruelty of the feudal world, Ichibei comes across the corpses of suspected spies abandoned outside Satsuma territory while his enemies meditate on their ancient slight and consider taking the deal in the hope of avenging their defeat and overthrowing the Tokugawa. They are warned that creating unrest and sowing division may be exactly what foreign powers like the Dutch crave, but aren’t particularly bothered, preferring to take their chances with them rather than curry favour with the Shogun and possibly destabilising the entire society along with it. 

Of course, much of this is anachronistic with the Dutch sailors appearing in a distinctly 19th century fashion carrying weapons which are also too advanced for the era as are Ichibei’s folding pistols. Through his travels, he runs into a female Iga spy who too can do some nifty ninja tricks and has a gadget of her own in a comb which can shoot poison darts, though luckily it’s one of the poisons Ichibei has already developed an immunity to. Ichibei is fond of crying that you kill him he’ll simply come back to life, barrelling through the air with feats of improbable human agility and generally behaving like some kind of supernatural entity with a secondary talent for violent seduction. 

Though ironic and often darkly comic, there is an unavoidable poignancy in the inner conflict of Ijuin who knows his clan is about to do something very foolish but is torn between his duty to obey them and that to act in their best interests, eventually backed into a corner and left with no real way out of his predicament. As Ichibei points out, it’s difficult to keep the peace, especially when restless young samurai spot opportunities to cause chaos and the outside world knocks on the door of a closed community. Even so, Ozawa ends on a romantic image of a beach at sunset somehow undercutting the violence and tragedy with the restoration of an order that might itself be imperfect in its peacefulness.

Eleven Samurai (十一人の侍, Eiichi Kudo, 1967)

Posted on by

“If no one denounces the absurdity of this world, then our descendants will keep suffering,” a soon-to-be ronin insists in Eiichi Kudo’s revengers tragedy, Eleven Samurai (十一人の侍, Juichinin no Samurai). It seems clear from the outset that their actions will have little effect no matter whether they succeed or fail because the enemy is feudalism which may be approaching the end of its life but is definitely not dead yet. They can at least attempt to avenge their clan even if they can’t save it while refusing to let an entitled, selfish lord get away doing whatever he likes just because he happens to be the son of the former shogun and brother of the current one.

The opening scenes see Nariatsu (Kantaro Suga) chasing a deer having declared himself a “real hunter”. He ignores the cries of his men to watch where he’s going and sails over the border into the territory of Oshi which amounts to an invasion seeing as he is armed and has no permission to be there. The deer gets away, but Nariatsu shoots an old woodcutter whom he felt to be in his way with his bow and arrow. The Lord of the Abe clan that rules Oshi immediately takes him to task and tells Noriatsu that his behaviour is unbecoming for the son of the former shogun. He’s committed a murder in their territory, but they’re prepared to let it go as long as he leaves as soon as possible. But Nariatsu doesn’t like being told what to do and simply shoots the lord in the eye, potentially sparking a diplomatic incident. 

The Abe clan try to lodge a complaint in Edo, but are shut down by courtier Mizuno (Kei Sato) who fears that to acknowledge an event such as this would damage the moral authority of the Tokugawa regime. He decides to cover the whole thing up by claiming it was the Abe clan who insulted Noriatsu. The Abe clan will then be dissolved, and Oshi essentially gets nationalised. All of which suits Nariatsu just fine because he wants to take control of Oshi and expand his territory anyway. Part of his petulance seems to stem from the fact that he feels hard done by with such a small inheritance when his brother became the Shogun and received multiple fiefdoms. The previous Shogun, Tokugawa Ieyoshi, had produced an unusual number of children which became quite a problem in that he had to find lands for them all and eventually hastened the demise of the shogunate because of the additional strain. 

But Nariatsu is also an overgrown child who has no idea how to do anything for himself and no concern for the feelings or fortunes of others. When instructed to do something he doesn’t want to, Nariatsu petulantly stamps his feet and complains, and when his actions are challenged he simply replies that he’ll be telling his father. In fact, he is so infuriating that it’s likely most of his men secretly want him dead too, including his chief adviser Gyobu (Ryutaro Otomo) who was once the General Inspector but is now expected to babysit this absolute buffoon. Even though Nariatsu knows the Abe clan will be trying to kill him, he still sneaks out to the red light district and gets blind drunk with geisha which in itself is conduct unbecoming for a high ranking samurai such as himself. 

As such, he represents almost everything that’s wrong with the feudal order while Mizuno represents the rest. It’s Mizuno that secretly plots against the plotters, manipulating them into giving up their assassination mission by claiming to have switched sides only to backtrack and reveal he’s actually still working for Nariatsu fearing a reputational loss for the Tokugawa. Chief revenger Hayato (Isao Natsuyagi) is also banking on this fear of reputational damage, certain that the Shogunate won’t be able to bear the humiliation of Nariastsu being killed by a ronin so will instead claim that he died from an illness. Vowing to avenge the clan, Hayato righteously gives up his position to become one so that the Abes won’t be linked to the crime and is joined by 10 more similarly annoyed samurai. Six of them are already “dead” having been asked to commit seppuku for recklessly attacking Nariatsu on their own and blowing the whole operation. 

Hayato at least believes this to be a suicide mission. He leaves his loving wife and home and allows people to think he’s run off with Nui (Eiko Okawa), the younger sister of one of their number who died before he could join them. They do this because they think it must be done, and also because if no one stands up to samurai oppression it will never end. Wandering peasant Daijuro (Ko Nishimura) agrees with them. He wants revenge on the samurai for raping his sister after which his father and brother took their own lives. Nariatsu is as good as anyone else and he does very much need to die. 

But despite Daijuro’s homemade cannons, nothing quite goes to plan. Kudo sets his final battle in an atmospheric, misty valley that is an obvious stand in for the underworld. Hayato may succeed in killing Nariatsu but it’s a pyrrhic victory. Though he vowed “to put an end to this ridiculous world,” a samurai cannot really win this battle. It’s Daijuro who eventually walks off with Nariatsu’s head, symbolically decapitating the shogunate which the closing titles confirm was mortally wounded by this incident. With his striking black and white cinematography, Kudo does indeed paint this samurai world as a hellish place ruled over by an infinitely corrupt and self-interested authority. The nihilistic futility of it all is emphasised by the figure of a grown man sitting like a small child and splashing his sword in a puddle while surrounded by dead bodies. There might be a way out of this, but not for the samurai, only for those who will come after and perhaps finally be free of this world’s absurdity.

The Geisha (陽暉楼, Hideo Gosha, 1983)

Posted on by

The coming of the railroad spells doom for one of the most prestigious geisha houses in Japan in Hideo Gosha’s adaptation of the Tomiko Miyao novel, The Geisha (陽暉楼, Yokiro). Miyao’s novels had often provided the inspiration for Gosha’s films and she had herself been the daughter of a “flesh broker” in pre-war Kochi though later escaping to another town to be a substitute teacher. Though the English title may focus more on plight of the the individual geisha at its centre, the Japanese hints more at the destructive cycle of the Yokiro itself in the persistent legacy of exploitation.

Then again as he later points out, if you’re looking for a villain in this story then the responsibility lies largely with Daikatsu (Ken Ogata) himself. In a prologue set in 1913, Daikatsu has eloped with geisha Otsuru but the pair are discovered by gangsters sent after them by the Yokiro. Daikatsu kills all of their assailants and assures Otsuru that they are finally “free” but it appears to be too late. Holding their baby daughter in one arm, Otsuru collapses into his other and presumably dies either then or shortly after while Daikatsu is later sent to prison for 10 years. 20 years later in 1933, the daughter, Fusako (Kimiko Ikegami), has become the number one geisha at the Yokiro under the name Momowaka though her career flounders because she is regarded as too emotionally distant to keep a patron. 

Daikatsu is also himself in Kochi at this point and working as a procurer brokering the sale of young women to the Yokiro and other geisha houses and brothels. When a school teacher comes to him to sell his wife, he taps her teeth to check for malnutrition much as one would examine a horse before running a hand underneath her kimono to check everything is at is should be before offering a valuation. Her husband only looks at him anxiously enquiring if a body such as hers which has as he later reveals born three children will fetch a good price. Daikatsu lets them go so the woman, Masae, can spend a final night with her family explaining that he cannot force someone to work if they do not want to do so and is well aware they will likely take his money and never be seen again which is what almost what happens. As it turns out the husband is killed in a fight and the woman ends up becoming a geisha anyway, only in the pay of prominent Osaka yakuza led by Inaso. 

Inaso (Mikio Narita) and buddies want in on the construction of the railroad that will shortly be coming to Kochi, but need to take over the town first which means getting around the mistress of the Yokiro, Osode (Mitsuko Baisho), who is apparently running every game town. The entire local economy is underpinned by female exploitation and facilitated by a woman, a former geisha, seizing the only power that is available to her. Isano later uses Masae as a kind of spy, getting her to initiate a relationship with Osode’s weak willed husband in an attempt to humiliate her which largely backfires as Osode boldly reclaims her man through a violent brawl in a hot spring though it does not appear that she is especially fond of him so much as he serves a particular purpose.

The brawl emphases the way in which women are pitted against each other by the nature of a patriarchal society along with the ways in which they are forced to mediate their power through men. Fusako also gets into an intense physical fight with Tamako (Atsuko Asano), a surrogate daughter of Daikatsu’s and emblem of a coming modernity, who insists on becoming a sex worker at the area’s most prominent brothel. In a strange moment of confrontation, both the geishas of the Yokiro dressed in their traditional regalia, and the sex workers of Tamamizu, arrive at a modern club where the heir to a banking empire courted by the Yokiro, Saganoi, dances the Charleston he learned while studying abroad in America. The geisha who dances with him struggles to pick up the moves, Saganoi lamenting that the dance is just not suited to a woman wearing a heavy kimono, elaborate wig, and clumsy geta. Tamako immediately gets up from her table and kicks off her shoes, gathering the hem of her own kimono to free her legs for the high level kicks of the modern dance. 

Fusako reclaims her authority by interrupting the dance immediately before its conclusion and insisting on retrieving their guest. Tamako appears to resent Fusako, perhaps frustrated in her relationship with Daisuke who does not appear to have had much contact with the daughter he sold at 12 years old. They too end up in an elaborate brawl in which Tamako rips off Fusako’s wig and splits her lip, symbolically freeing her to transcend the constraints of her “geisha” persona. Meeting Saganoi at Western-style bar, she boldly dances on the counter and sleeps with him of her own volition. But in doing so she conceives a child and leaves herself in a difficult position. She has betrayed her patron, and though she could simply have kept the fact from him and allowed him to think the baby was his, Fusako does not want to bring her child up in lies while simultaneously hanging on to a naive dream that Saganoi will one day return to her despite being made aware he has left for Europe. 

“All men are enemies of women,” she writhes in childbirth while swearing that no one will take her child from her, but she is still an indentured woman and her daughter is by rights the property of Osode. Her illness, presumably consumption, began long before her pregnancy and seems to an echo of the suffering she has been forced to endure as a geisha. As her health weakens, so the Yokiro declines. First it is ravaged by a literal storm, but also under threat from the Osaka gangsters desperate to take over Kochi to gain access to the lucrative construction contracts extending in its direction. Even so, as Daikatsu admits much of the fault lies with him. He chose to elope with Otsuru and was unable to protect either her or their daughter whom he allowed meet the same fate by entering the geisha world. He continued to earn his money by selling women into what is essentially slavery, and cannot escape his part in their continued exploitation while his entanglement with gangsters later disrupts the more settled life Tamako has begun to build for herself. 

“Wait all you want, the train’s not coming,” Tamako is later told, as if signalling that there really is no way out of this destructive and disappointing existence. Truly epic in scope, Gosha’s pre-war drama draws together patriarchal exploitation and societal corruption to critique a burgeoning modernity, but ends exactly as it started among the vibrant cherry blossoms only this time undercutting the melancholy of the oft repeated song with a more cheerful scene hinting at least symbolically at a long-awaited reunion. 

Original trailer (English subtitles)

Eighteen Years in Prison (懲役十八年, Tai Kato, 1967)

Posted on by

Genre star Noburu Ando had a certain cachet in that he had been a yakuza prior to becoming an actor. He had in fact been the head of his own gang which at its high point had over 300 members and controlled much of the lucrative Shibuya nightlife scene. His first onscreen appearance was in a gangster movie in which he played himself. Rather than the jitsuroku epics he would later become associated with, Tai Kato’s Eighteen Years in Prison (懲役十八年, Choueki Juhachi Nen) essentially casts him in a ninkyo role as a noble if compromised former captain of the kamikaze squad who finds himself caught between the contradictions of post-war Japan and the American occupation. 

Indeed, in this as in many other yakuza movies set during the immediate post-war era, the Americans are really just the biggest gang. Suffering with survivor’s guilt, Captain Kawada (Noboru Ando) has set up an association together with former comrade Tsukada (Asao Koike) to look after he dependent relatives of men who fell in war. To do this, he has to resort to criminality raiding American boats for supplies such as sugar and rice which he redistributes to war widows and their families. His ultimate goal is amassing enough money to buy a patch of land in the town centre and do away with the black market which exploits the vulnerable replacing it with a legitimate market so the surviving family members can set up businesses to support themselves. 

Around this time, the association manages to track down the younger sister of one of their men who died as a kamikaze, Hisako (Hiroko Sakuramachi ), and discovers she is living in desperation having lost the family home to aerial bombing. As her mother is seriously ill and she needs money for food and medical treatment, Hisako contemplates turning to sex work and is almost assaulted by a gang of drunk and abusive American servicemen from whom she is rescued by a passing Kawada. This incident makes plain his resentment towards the occupation and sense that it is the American influence that is wilfully suppressing the efforts of the Japanese people to rebuild their society. It’s this resentment that lends a note of justification to Kawada’s decision to rob a nearby factory of valuable copper wire to get the money to save Hisako’s mother thereby saving her from falling into sex work and thereafter helping to achieve their ultimate goal of building the market. The raid, however, goes wrong. Kawada sends an injured Tsukada back to the association and is arrested.

In prison he discovers only more corrupt authority in which guards beat and torture prisoners, just another bigger gang. He finds out that block warden Hanya (Tomisaburo Wakayama) is actively accepting bribes and in cahoots with some of the inmates that attempt to terrorise newbies to the point that one attempts suicide by swallowing glass though Hanya refuses to call for help forcing Kawada and some of the other men to pull the alarm themselves. The sources of moral authority lie in the new college-educated deputy warden recently returned from five years as a POW in Manila, and a veteran yakuza with a grudge against Hanya who apparently had his girlfriend raped leading to her suicide. 

Though the film is titled eighteen years in prison, Kawada becomes eligible for parole in 1952 which is of course the year the occupation ends. By this point he discovers that Tsukada has abandoned their idealistic mission and turned full yakuza, building an immense red-light district on the land they bought for the market and making himself rich through the violent trafficking and exploitation of women. Eventually confronted, he tries to convince Kawada that the world has changed, that the post-war years of privation are over and that he sees only “the ghost of a nation that lost the war” rather than burgeoning new economy stimulated by the Korean War and an ironically a repositioned America now no longer occupiers but still somehow influential if leaving a vacuum a man like Tsukada may step into. It’s no coincidence that he threatens Hisako with deportation to a brothel in Okinawa he’s set up to service American servicemen in a place where the conditions of occupation are still largely in place. 

Tsukada clearly feels that he need have no more responsibility for his wartime conduct, roundly telling Kawada that the families of the fallen are not his responsibility and should “stop leeching off other people and start working for a living”. Hisako’s long lost younger brother Kenichi (Masaomi Kondo) who ended up alone on the streets after being conscripted as a student factory worker and returning to find his home in ashes, turns the blame back on the authorities reminding them that it’s their fault, they started the war the cost him his home and family and turned him into the half-crazed man of violence who immediately introduces himself as “King” on moving up from a juvie prison. Much of Kawada’s prison life is then given over to saving Kenichi, a representative of the next generation, from becoming mired in a life of nihilistic crime. 

In many ways, he remains a squad leader trying to atone for having sent so many young men to die by accepting the responsibility for their families while trying to protect those left behind from the vagaries of the post-war era including the amoral capitalism represented by the infinitely corrupt Tsukada. Dressed in a military uniform ironically pinched from an American soldier he goes on the rampage knowing that he has to deal with Tsukada himself in order to defend the post-war future from those like him who’ve apparently learned nothing much at all even from such recent history. Shooting from his characteristically low angles, Kato explores the seedy underbelly of the beginnings of the economic miracle while his noble hero does his best to offer a course correction to those who have already forgotten their responsibility not just to others but to those they left behind.

Yakuza Graveyard (やくざの墓場　くちなしの花, Kinji Fukasaku, 1976)

Posted on by

“We don’t resort to violence. We observe the law.’ The hero of Kinji Fukasaku’s Yakuza Graveyard (やくざの墓場　くちなしの花, Yakuza no Hakaba: Kuchinashi no Hana) is berated by a superior officer for excessive use of force, but his criticism is in some senses ironic because it is the police force itself which becomes a symbol of the societal violence visited on those who can find no place to belong in the contemporary society. By this time the yakuza was already in decline and in the process of transforming itself into a corporatised entity while as a police chief explains increasing desperation has led to escalating gang tensions. 

Recently transferred maverick cop Kuroiwa (Tetsuya Watari) finds himself caught between two worlds in attempting to enforce the law through methods more familiar to yakuza. Soon after he’s had his gun taken away for exercising excessive force on a suspect he’d been independently tailing in the street on whom he’d found bullets designed to be used with a remodelled toy gun, Kuroiwa is pulled aside by another senior officer, Akama (Nobuo Kaneko) who takes him to a meeting with local yakuza boss Sugi (Takuya Fujioka). It seems obvious that Akama has cultivated a relationship with the Nishida gang which may not be strictly ethical for a law enforcement officer and hopes to bring Kuroiwa on board as a potential asset. They attempt to bribe him in return for information on the Yamashiro clan, the dominant organised crime association in the area, which has been hassling Nishida in an attempt to take over their territory. But Kuroiwa ironically tells them that they should “act like yakuza” and sort out their own problems rather than relying on the police before dramatically walking out much to to the consternation of everyone else present. 

Nevertheless, he eventually comes to sympathise with them as a symbol of the little guy increasingly crushed by corporate and authoritarian forces outside of their control. He finds out from a briefing that the police’s goal is the disbandment of the Nishida gang but when he asks why they aren’t going after the Yamashiro too he’s told to mind his own business and begins to realise that the police are in cahoots with organised crime. Whether they justify themselves that managing the Yamashiro to prevent a turf war is the best way to protect the public or are simply corrupt and in the pocket of big business, Kuroiwa can’t help but balk at the blatant hypocrisy of the law enforcement authorities. 

Later Kuroiwa reveals that he became a police officer after being bullied as a child in order to exert power over his life, or perhaps becoming an oppressor in order to avoid being oppressed. He was bullied because he had been born in Manchuria and even years later remains a displaced person at least on a psychological level. It’s this sense of displacement which allows him to bond with the Nishida gang’s accountant, Keiko (Meiko Kaji), whose father was Korean. Kuroiwa agrees to accompany Keiko to visit her husband (Kenji Imai) who is serving a lengthy prison term in order to tell him that the gang want to promote someone else to a position he viewed as his by right. The husband explodes in rage and uses a word some would regard as a slur to reference Keiko’s Korean heritage while she later attempts to walk into the sea feeling that there really is no place for her in the contemporary society. 

Just as she claims that she is neither Korean nor Japanese or much of anything at all, Kuroiwa is neither cop nor thug and similarly excluded from society at large. He ends up bonding with old school Nishida footsoldier Iwata (Tatsuo Umemiya), who is also ethnically Korean, for many of the same reasons and attempts to mount a doomed rebellion against their mutual oppression, but is hamstrung by his otherness which is only deepened when he’s taken prisoner by loan shark Teramitsu (Kei Sato) and given a mysterious truth drug developed by the nazis later becoming a user of heroin. Already marginalised, forced into crime by economic necessity and social prejudice, Iwata and Keiko like Kuroiwa himself struggle to escape their displacement while pushed still further out by systemic corruption and the amoral capitalism of an era of high prosperity. Shot with jitsuroku-esque realism and characteristically canted angles, Fukasaku injects a note of futility even within the hero’s tragic victory as he quite literally sticks two fingers up to the corrupted “brotherhood” that has already betrayed him.

Yakuza Graveyard is released on blu-ray on 16th May courtesy of Radiance Films. On disc extras include an in-depth appreciation of the film and the work of screenwriter Kazuo Kasahara from Blood of Wolves director Kazuya Shiraishi, and an informative video essay from Tom Mes on the collaborations of Meiko Kaji and Kinji Fukasaku. The limited edition also comes with a 32-page booklet featuring new writing by Miko Ko plus translations of a contemporary review and writing by Kasahara.

Original trailer (no subtitles)

Cantankerous Edo (大江戸喧嘩纏, Kiyoshi Saeki, 1957)

Posted on by

A noble-hearted samurai on the run falls for a fireman’s sister in Kiyoshi Saeki’s hugely enjoyable jidaigeki musical adventure Cantankerous Edo (大江戸喧嘩纏, Oedo Kenka Matoi). Another vehicle for Hibari Misora and samurai movie star Hashizo Okawa, Saeki’s wholesome drama finds its heroes not only standing up to the oppressions of a rigid class system but also taking on a bunch of entitled sumo wrestlers intent on throwing their weight around having apparently lost sight of the tenets of traditional sumo wrestling such as fighting for justice and having a kind heart. 

To begin at the beginning, however, young samurai Shinzaburo (Hashizo Okawa) is on the run believing that he has accidentally killed another man who attacked him in order to clear the path towards his fiancée, Otae (Hiroko Sakuramachi), whom he wasn’t going to marry anyway because he realised she was in love with someone else and wanted to help marry him instead. Having escaped to Edo, he takes refuge inside a parade of firemen lead by Tatsugoro (Ryutaro Otomo) and his feisty sister Oyuki (Hibari Misora) who decide to take him in after hearing his story. Adopting the simpler, common name of “Shinza” he begins life as a fireman and gradually falls for Oyuki but remains a wanted man constantly dodging the attentions of his uncle, the local inquisitor, and the magistrates. 

More a vehicle for Okawa than Misora who plays a relatively subdued role save for boldly stealing the standard and climbing a roof herself when the others are delayed, Cantankerous Edo takes aim not particularly at a corrupt social order but of the oppressive nature of class divisions as Shinza discovers a sense of freedom and possibility he was previously denied as a samurai while living as a common man. It’s this desire for personal autonomy and the freedom to follow one’s heart that led to his exile from his clan, unwilling to marry a woman he knew not only did not love him but in fact loved someone else and would have been forever miserable if forced to marry him out of duty alone. “The life of a samurai who has to be somebody or not to suit another’s convenience is utterly stupid” he bluntly tells his uncle and Otae’s father, “how you cling onto family status, heritage, and honour. All that fuss, I hate it.” he adds before turning to Otae and encouraging her too to stand up to her father and insist on marrying the man she loves rather than be traded to another. 

Meanwhile, the two women exchange some contradictory messages about the nature of class and womanhood, the samurai lady Otae confessing that she isn’t sure she’s strong enough to fight for love in the face of tradition and filial duty in contrast to Oyuki’s spirited defence of Shinza the fireman insisting that firemen don’t think about such trivial things as name or family status before throwing themselves into harm’s way for the public good. “All women are weak” Otae sighs, Oyuki replying that they need to be strong for the men they love, “that’s what it means to be a woman”. Love may be in this sense a force of liberation, destabilising the social order but also a means of improving it, yet it still reduces women to a supporting role ironically as perhaps the film does to Misora who in contrast to some of her feistier performances takes something of a back seat. 

Romance aside, the main drama revolves around a conflict between the local sumo wrestlers who have turned into thuggish louts under their boorish leader Yotsuguruma (Nakajiro Tomita), taking against the fireman and forever spoiling for a fight. The samurai proving unexpectedly understanding, the sumo wrestlers become the main source of oppression in usurping a class status they don’t really have. The noble Tatusgoro tries to stave off the fight insisting that they aren’t brawling yakuza but responsible firemen here to serve the public good and should save their energy for fighting fires rather than their obnoxious neighbours. Nevertheless the fight cannot be held off forever. Tatsugoro is forced to redefine the nature of “fire” after hearing a warning bell informing him one of his men is in grave danger unable to manage their anger anymore.  

Saeki’s jidaigeki musical has surprisingly good production values for a Toei programmer, making space for a few songs along the way celebrating the valour of the firemen while Oyuki meditates on her potentially impossible romance and the perils of love across the class divide. While the conclusion may end up ironically reinforcing the hierarchical society, it does however make the case for the right to romantic freedom along with the necessity of human compassion in the face of inconsiderate arrogance and intimidation.

Note: This film is sometimes titled “Fight Festival in Edo” but according to Eirin’s database, the official English-language title is “Cantankerous Edo”. Rather confusingly, a very similar film with a very similar title (大江戸喧嘩まつり) was produced in colour at Toei in 1961 and is known as “Fight Festival in Edo” in English. Meanwhile, Hibari Misora also starred in another colour film with a very similar storyline in 1958 (唄祭りかんざし纏) which is known as “Girl with the Fire Banner” in English but listed as “Festival of Song” on Eirin’s database.

The Pledge (博奕打ち外伝, Kosaku Yamashita, 1972)

Posted on by

The gangster code slowly consumes series of men each trying to do the right thing but hamstrung by the actions of others in Kosaku Yamashita’s yakuza tragedy, The Pledge (博奕打ち外伝, Bakuchiuchi Gaiden). It is indeed a promise between brothers which damns them all, but the roots of it lie in repressed emotion and a desire to protect other people’s feelings by keeping a destructive secret while trying to satisfy oneself that one has behaved properly even if no one else understands. 

The battleground is Wakamatsu, Kyushu, where outsider Egawa (Koji Tsuruta) has united the local boatmen and is undercutting the prices of a rival gang led by Omuro (Tomisaburo Wakayama). While Omuro is out of town, his right-hand man Taki (Hiroki Matsukata) has decided to take advantage of a minor squabble between some of his guys and Egawa’s to initiate a small scale turf war hoping to take the river back under their control. He does this by kidnapping Egawa’s younger brother Masakazu (Goro Ibuki) to lure him to their headquarters alone, something of which Omuro does not approve on his return but decides to go with as an excuse to bring his rivalry with Egawa to a head. Just as the pair are squaring off, a mutual friend, Hanai (Ken Takakura), arrives and intervenes convincing the two men to lay down their arms for the moment at least.

It could be argued that it is this interrupted fight that is resolved in the film’s conclusion if only by inexorable fate. In a repeated motif, Omuro keeps to the code and is exasperated and disapproving of Taki’s underhanded tactics but accepts the responsibility for them himself knowing that Taki acted only on his behalf and his recklessness is only an expression of his love for him. There is indeed something homoerotic in the relationship between the two men as Omuro cradles a wounded Taki and attempts to comfort him that the fault is all his own, while resolving to accept Taki’s actions and build on them rather than try to deescalate or try to apologise. 

The real crisis occurs when the boss, approaching 60 which represents the full circle of a life, decides to name Omuro as a successor rather than the anticipated Hanai. Hanai stoically accepts though intending to leave the gang and travel to another part of Japan but other members of the clan are perplexed, little understanding the boss’ decision in feeling that Omuro is not of good character whereas Hanai is easily the better choice. As it transpires, the boss has made his decision deliberately in order to mitigate the fact that Hanai is secretly his illegitimate son whose origins he has kept secret in deference to his legal wife. He chooses not to name him as a successor in order to avoid causing him problems in his later life while justifying himself that he has not made the decision for dynastic reasons or out of simple favouritism. Yet the relationship between the two men, father and son, is raw and painful if founded on a deep understanding that leaves them unable to meet each other directly with emotional honesty. 

Because of his father’s decision, Hanai forces Egawa to promise that he will not antagonise Omuro which leads to problems in his own gang with his men angry and confused, unable to understand why Egawa is letting Omuro walk all over him. Compounding the problem, Egawa’s errant brother Tetsu (Bunta Sugawara) returns unexpectedly and as Egawa cannot tell him about the pledge without disclosing Hanai’s secret, thinks his brother is being messed around and raids Omuro’s offices to reclaim money he had extorted from Egawa. He learns the truth from devoted geisha Hideko (Yuko Hama) who is deeply in love with Egawa yet largely unable to act on it again because of the gangster code while pledging that she’d sooner die and prove her devotion to him than summit herself to Taki, who is also in love with her, even when he threatens her with a knife. 

The yakuza code dictates that Omuro must die though he is little more than a passive antagonist all too willing to accept the evil deeds that Taki did on his behalf because of the code of loyalty though he would not have dared to do them himself. Secrecy and repressed emotion drag all into a dark web of self-destructive violence until reaching their inevitable conclusion and perhaps bringing one cycle to a close if only in the birth of another. 

Original trailer (no subtitles)

Killing in Yoshiwara (妖刀物語花の吉原百人斬り, Tomu Uchida, 1960)

Posted on by Leave a comment

Killing Yoshiwara posterHaving led a somewhat floating life, Tomu Uchida returned to Japan in only in 1953 after a sustained period with the Manchurian Film Cooperative followed by a brief flirtation with Maoism. Before the war Uchida had been closely identified with the Keiko Eiga movement of broadly left-wing filmmaking but later fell hard for the inherent romanticism of militarist ideology during his time in Manchuria. Nevertheless it was apparently the Maoist doctrines of progress through contradiction that influenced his later dramatic philosophy in which he came to think of narrative as a series of conflicts which culminate in an explosive act designed to resolve them (or not, as we will see). 1960’s Killing in Yoshiwara (妖刀物語花の吉原百人斬り, Yoto Monogatari: Hana no Yoshiwara Hyakunin-giri, AKA Hero of the Red Light District) is perhaps a prime example as it takes a seemingly generic story inspired by a kabuki play and uses it to tell a melancholy tale of parallel yet mutually thwarted desires for vengeance against a cruel and oppressive society.

Ostensibly, our “hero” is Jiro (Chiezo Kataoka) – a successful silk merchant. A good and kind man, Jiro is beloved of all his staff for his careful consideration of them as people as well as employees. This concern is, however, perhaps not as wholly “good” as it seems. Jiro’s major problem in life is that he is an adopted child, taken in by his parents who auspiciously discovered him abandoned on the anniversary of their own child’s death. Jiro, apparently of noble birth, was abandoned because he has a prominent grey birthmark “staining” his face. This is the reason he has so far been unable to find a wife despite his good character and relative wealth. Desperately grateful to the couple who took him in “despite” his “imperfection”, Jiro feels this failure heavily in his current inability to provide them with a male heir to take over the family business.

Being good and earnest, Jiro has never dared to fritter money away in the red light district but is tempted when invited by a valued client whom he would not want to offend by refusing. Nevertheless, his first visit to the Yoshiwara is not an altogether pleasant experience as even the seasoned courtesans find it difficult to bear the sight of his “monstrous” face. Embarrassed, the innkeepers finally decide to employ a lowly servant, Otsuru (Yoshie Mizutani), who is not a trained courtesan but a woman convicted for illegal prostitution, to minister solely to Jiro. Otsuru does her work and is relatively unbothered by Jiro’s facial abnormality – something which endears her to Jiro’s heart and has the desired effect of hooking him through his weakness.

Otsuru, later “Tamarazu” the courtesan, is in many ways our villainess but she is also Jiro’s mirror and merely another outsider trying to escape oppression through any means possible. Uchida is careful to frame Otsuru not as a cruel and amoral adventurer, but someone who has decided to survive and can at least be honest about her intentions. We see her caged, imprisoned inside the Yoshiwara to do inside it what was declared “illegal” outside and acknowledging that she may well die here to met by a lonely funeral and rest unnamed in a communal grave. Otsuru decides that if she has to stay in the Yoshiwara then she will be its queen and then use that success to catapult herself into a more comfortable life even if she knows that it will be little more than a nicer kind of cage.

Jiro and Otsuru are each victims of the oppressive society in which they live as symbolised by the cruelly hypocritical worldview of the brothel owners who set out to exploit them both. Otsuru, worldly wise, is fully aware of the ways in which she is and will continue to be exploited but has chosen to be complicit within them as a means of effecting her escape. Jiro, meanwhile, is obviously aware that the “stain” across his face is the reason for his unhappy destiny but has only ever sought to minimise the distress his appearance causes to others. Thus he overcompensates by being relentlessly nice and infinitely humble, grateful for each and every concession which is extended to him as a fully human being rather than the “monster” which he is later branded by the innkeepers in a rare moment of candour which exposes their venial desires. 

This extreme desire for acceptance is in itself a symptom of his self loathing and internalised shame regarding his appearance which is after all merely an accident of birth over which he had no control. Abandoned by his birthparents who left him with a “cursed” destiny in the form of an unlucky sword, Jiro has been working overtime to overcome social prejudice but finding his path continually blocked. He latches on to Otsuru simply because she was nice to him without understanding the peculiar rules of interactions within the Yoshiwara, or as she later puts it “no money, no love”. Jiro ruins himself out of frustrated loneliness and a forlorn hope of repaying the debt he owes the couple who took him in by being able to provide them with a male heir to inherit the family business.

It is these mutual conflicts which eventually lead to the explosive finale hinted at by the violence of the title. Otsuru’s star rises while Jiro’s falls – not only is he fleeced by the innkeepers and an unrepentant Otsuru, his business also fails thanks to an act of God while his reputation lies in tatters once his associates get to know of his “frivolous” behaviour in the Yoshiwara. This in itself is doubly hypocritical as it was this same major client who introduced Jiro to the “pleasure” quarters in the first place only to remind him that business is a matter of trust and that they no longer trust him because he has broken his promise of keeping away from the Yoshiwara.

Pushed to the brink by successive humiliations, Jiro’s rage erupts in a singular act of violence which takes the sword not only to the Yoshiwara but the entrenched systems of oppression and exploitation which it represents. Otsuru, now an oiran, is literally trapped by her ostentatious outfit (in reality the very purpose it is designed to serve) as she struggles to escape male violence, her hand on the gate of the Yoshiwara which refuses to release her. Their parallel quests for revenge eventually converge only to defeat each other in a staggering act of futility which remains unresolved as the curtain falls on a moment of unanswerable rage.

Bloody Spear at Mount Fuji (血槍富士, Tomu Uchida, 1955)

Posted on by 2 Comments

Bloody Spear Mount Fuji posterThere was a reason that the occupation authorities were suspicious of period films, but the jidaigeki of the post-war years are not generally interested in nationalistic pride so much as in interrogating the myths of the samurai legacy in order to pick apart the compromises of the modern era and the follies of the immediate past. Tomu Uchida had been among the most prominent directors of pre-war cinema but left to join the Manchurian Film Cooperative in 1942, remaining in China until 1953. Bloody Spear at Mount Fuji (血槍富士, Chiyari Fuji) was his “comeback” film, brought into existence through the good offices of fellow directors Yasujiro Ozu, Hiroshi Shimizu, and Daisuke Ito who had been the pioneer of samurai movies in the silent era. Like the later films of Masaki Kobayashi, Uchida takes aim at the hypocritical falsehoods of the samurai order and at a series of still prevalent social codes which oblige one human to oppress another in order to avoid acknowledging the fact that one is oneself oppressed.

Ironically enough we begin on the road to Edo as a goodhearted but compromised samurai, Sawaka (Teruo Shimada), makes the journey to the capital to make his name with a precious teacup in tow. He may be a samurai, but he’s making this lengthy journey on foot and accompanied by only two retainers – veteran spearman Genpachi (Chiezo Kataoka), and manservant Genta (Daisuke Kento). While on the road, the trio come across various other travellers including a shamisen player (Chizuru Kitagawa) and her daughter, a cheeky orphan who wants to be a samurai, and a melancholy father and daughter en route to visit a relative in the hope of financial assistance. There is also a notorious bandit on the loose going by the name of Rokuemon, which is one reason that the “recently wealthy” miner Tozaburo (Ryunosuke Tsukigata) is arousing suspicion with local law enforcement.

In contrast to many a jidaigeki epic, the travellers on the road to Edo are mostly good people if wise enough to be wary and on the look out for trouble. Genta and Genpachi have been given strict instructions that Sawaka is not to drink during the journey. Though he’s a nice enough soul when sober, Sawaka is a mean drunk with a tendency to start random fights and his mother doesn’t want him messing up his big chance by causing trouble on the road. This maternal solicitude can’t help but annoy Sawaka who overhears Genta complaining to a servant at the inn as he enjoys a quick glass of solo sake in the kitchen. There may be a sword on Sawaka’s belt, but he’s a middle ranker at best – something rammed home to him when the party is held up by a roadblock which turns out to be solely caused by three elite samurai having a picnic who wish to enjoy the view uninterrupted. Later he grips the handle on his sword in rage and desire to help a young woman in trouble before his hand begins to slip as he realises how little power he really has. The only thing to help her was money, and money is something Sawaka evidently does not have.

Sawaka’s “power” is entirely illusionary and dictated by the complex hierarchies of the samurai era. Breaking all the rules, he considers selling his “priceless ancestral spear” to get money to help the girl, but is told that the spear is a fake and hardly worth anything. With the help of the plucky little boy Jiro, Genpachi helps to apprehend a wanted criminal but it’s Sawaka who gets a commendation – something which causes him not a little consternation but his attempts to transfer the praise onto the rightful parties falls on deaf ears. In any case, the reward is just a piece of paper filled with more empty words and not much practical use to anyone. A fake spear begets a fake reward, he quips, becoming ever more disillusioned with the rights and responsibilities of the samurai order while somewhat romanticising the lives of the “ordinary” who might be more “free” in one sense but then Sawaka is never going to worry about being hungry or have to think about selling his daughter to avoid certain ruin even if he resents the ways in which is social class obliges him to affect coldheartedness.

Sawaka’s rejection of “samurai” values eventually leads to his downfall when an invitation to a servant to join him at his drinking table as an equal provokes outrage in a fellow nobleman who feels his own status threatened by this genial act of meaningless equality. Sawaka’s attempts to insist that he and his servant are both human beings only makes things worse and it doesn’t take long to figure out that he has picked the wrong battle if what he wanted was to strike a blow at samurai hypocrisy. Sawaka himself is no innocent in this game, terrorising a trio of peasants simply because one of them had an interesting nose and the drink was in him. Sawaka’s servant eventually pays the price for his mistake, bearing out his earlier frustrations with the chain of “shadows” that defines the samurai order and seemingly has no end.

Genpachi is the embodiment of the good retainer, but he’s also a kind and sympathetic man who takes an interest in the lonely orphan boy and, to a lesser extent, the shamisen player and her little daughter. The four of them form a kind of makeshift family, but the samurai order destroys even this small slice of happiness as the road prepares to force them apart. Having bloodied his spear but had his act of rage “approved” by the powers that be, Genpachi emerges broken and masterless, his fatherly attentions to Jiro relegated to a literal instruction not to follow in his footsteps and never to become a “spear carrier”, a mere tool at the mercy of a cruel and corrupt regime. Uchida begins in comedy complete with a whimsical contemporary score but makes clear that his ending is inevitable tragedy only made worse by the superficial rubber stamping that neatly sanctions the hero’s moment of madness as one perfectly in keeping with his moral universe.

Bloody Spear at Mount Fuji is available on blu-ray from Arrow Academy with a typically expansive feature commentary by film scholar Jasper Sharp including a minor digression into the career of director Hiroshi Shimizu – another sadly neglected figure of pre-war/golden age Japanese cinema. Other on-disc extras includes a series of interviews ported over from the French release – though it is nice to have them, it’s a shame that they are presented with the hardcoded French subtitles blurred out and English ones placed over the top which is less than ideal but perhaps cannot be helped. First pressing also includes a booklet featuring a lengthy essay by James Oliver which duplicates much of the information from the commentary while also situating the film within the context of Uchida’s career and the wider post-war world, as well as a complete filmography both for Uchida’s directing and acting work compiled by Sharp.

Short clip from an unrestored version of the film (no subtitles)