Tag: Hiroshi Kato

Girl with the Fire Banner (唄祭りかんざし纏, Kinnosuke Fukada, 1958)

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Hibari Misora puts out the fires of the Bakumatsu in another musical jidaigeki adventure, Girl with the Fire Banner (唄祭りかんざし纏, Utamatsuri Kanzashi Matoi). Once again co-starring with Chiyonosuke Azuma, Misora plays another feisty young woman taking over the family business from a sickly father only this time the business is the fire brigade and while she calmly points out to those of a differing opinion that firefighting is an equal opportunities, apolitical occupation, she also finds herself at the centre of a coming revolution caught between corrupt Shogunate loyalists and the imperialist advance. 

Set in Edo in the climactic year of 1868 in which the Shogunate ultimately falls, the action opens with a fire at a townhouse owned by a member of the Satsuma clan, the leaders of the imperialists aiming to topple the Tokugawa and restore power to the emperor. While Haru (Hibari Misora) and her top team of firefighters rush to the scene, others actively refuse to fight the fire even going so far as to try to stop her. While she reminds them that it doesn’t matter who the house belongs to they have a duty to fight fire if only to prevent it engulfing the rest of the town, a dashing young samurai turns up and fights off the loyalists before daringly retrieving their firefighter’s banner from a burning roof asking only five ryo in return. The mysterious man soon disappears only to turn up a few days later having attempted to charge them for a new kimono and a shave in order to ask for a job as a fireman. Haru tries to dissuade him, not least because of his samurai arrogance as he explains he’s not come to join at the bottom and serve out the three year probationary period but to lead, but eventually relents only to find him continuing to behave like an entitled twit flouting all of their rules. 

Nevertheless, as someone later puts it, Japan will shortly be a “classless society” or at least samurai privilege is about to dissolve. This appears to be the central preoccupation of the villainous lords who describe themselves as Shogunate loyalists but in reality care only for their own cause. Not content with running an obvious protection racket with local vendors, threatening to burn down their stores if they don’t agree to contribute to their fund for restoring the Shogunate, they’ve also been buying up rifles to sell at inflated prices to “young hotheads” eager to die for the Shogun, and stockpiling rice hoping to profit when the city burns as they assume it will when imperialist troops arrive. Realising that their gambles may not pay off as the Shogunate may be planning to cut a deal and surrender in order to protect the people of Edo, the lords, who are technically in charge of the fire brigades, consider burning the city to the ground themselves under the cover of avenging the Shogunate’s honour. 

Of course, Haru, a firefighter through and through, could never support such duplicity though it’s clear many of the others would have gone along with it if no one had resisted. In contrast to some of Misora’s other Bakumatsu-era movies, the Shogunate and more particularly the loyalists are definitely the bad guys though in a rather strange turn of events we also see real life sumo wrestlers Asashio Taro III and Wakamaeda Eiichiro arrive to stand up for justice by knocking some of the loyalists heads together, returning later armed with giant poles and dressed only in their mawashi loincloths while throwing hay bales followed by the actual cart (!) at the arsonist loyalists before physically holding them back with the firefighters’ ladders. 

Misora, meanwhile, remains largely on the sidelines uncharacteristically elbowed out of the fight by the guys while lowkey falling for Shintaro despite his samurai arrogance. Musical numbers are fewer than might be expected, the title Edo Firefighter song reprised at the end while Misora gets a second love song wistfully sewing a kimono for Shintaro in the company of a cat wearing a fancy ruff. Shintaro gets his own number before handing back to Misora for another reprise of the title song. Nevertheless, the pair manage to salvage Edo from the flames of the revolution purifying the corruption while furthering progress towards a more equal society even if the closing scenes leave us clearly still on the march. 

Tengu Priest (お坊主天狗, Yasushi Sasaki, 1962)

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Disparate denizens of Edo are united in one thing in Yasushi Sasaki’s light hearted jidaigeki, Tengu Priest (お坊主天狗, Obozu tengu), revenge. Like many jidaigeki, what they really want is revenge against the evils of feudalism to which they have each fallen victim, but also acknowledge that they have found something better in being outside it in the solidarity that exists between them as outsiders free from the obligations of samurai society if also with loose ends waiting to be tied.

Once a hatamoto with a 1000 Koku stipend, Obo Kichiza (Chiezo Kataoka) is now a much feared figure keeping order in Edo. When some yakuza toughs are hassling the geisha Kozome (Hibari Misora) at the theatre, insisting that she serve them sake even as she reminds them she’s off the clock, one look from him stops them dead though Kichizo is also impressed with Kozome’s nerve. Like him, Kozome is also in Edo for revenge. Formerly a samurai’s daughter, she became a geisha to look for the man who killed her father in a stupid quarrel over a fencing duel. Kichiza, meanwhile, seeks revenge against the local lord, Honda Etsu (Masao Mishima), who killed his father in a fit of temper when he ordered him to commit seppuku for causing his son-in-law to fall off his horse but he refused. 

Loyal retainer Kinpei (Ryutaro Otomo) had begged for his forgiveness and insisted that he could get Etsu to reform but three years have passed and not only has he bribed his way to head office but his behaviour has declined still further. We see him cruelly cut down a maid seemingly for no reason, simply ordering his men to get rid of the body. Etsu has a reputation for random violence while drunk, but as he is the lord, there are no real consequences for him. His retainers cover up his crimes, and Kinpei’s sole attempt to talk some sense into him goes nowhere, meanwhile his chief adviser Shichinosuke (Sentaro Fushimi) is basically running the show telling others the lord is not in his right mind and cannot make decisions so he must make them for him.

They are all, including Etsu himself, victims of the feudal order in which the systems of power are necessarily corrupt. In his yakuza persona, Kichiza has struck up a friendship with another geisha, Kozuru (Naoko Kubo), who was actually a lady in waiting working as a maid at his estate. She has long been in love with him, but the class difference would have made any union impossible. Ironically, she remarks to Kozome that even in their present state they are still a Hatamoto and a lady in waiting so she dare not express her love for him. Only once his revenge is concluded and he’s fully abandoned his samurai status can Kichiza truly be free to embrace a relationship with Kozuru while conversely Kozome regains her life as a samurai’s daughter by avenging the death of her father.

Kozome asks for Kichiza’s help to track down the target of her revenge, but he also respects her wishes and understands that it’s something she must do herself as does eccentric sword sharpener Shinzaburo (Hashizo Okawa ) who actively stands back so she, another wronged woman, can stick the knife in. Hibari Misora’s role in the film is smaller than one might expect as her revenge subplot is secondary to Kichiza’s and she has relatively little screen time with only a brief musical sequence during a naginata dance though she does participate in the high octane final showdown in which all grievances are exorcised and a kind of order returned to the samurai realm even if it must be destroyed to so as Kinpei resolves to protect both the lives and livelihoods of their many retainers and the integrity of Kichiza, going so far as to congratulate Kozome on the successful completion of her revenge. 

Yet what made the whole thing possible was Kichiza’s own band of outlaw drifters whom he allowed to live in his home he later says just so that they would have a place to come and be together so that they might more easily reintegrate into mainstream society. He might have lost his domain and samurai status but has discovered something better in this accidental community. They may be in a sense almost like retainers to him, but if so they stay by choice rather than obligation and help out of a genuine sense of loyalty and affection. In essence, in taking his revenge, he frees himself from the oppressive nature of the samurai code and is able to live like an ordinary man lamenting that if only he and Kinpei had both been ronin they could have enjoyed their time together for longer. Lighthearted and cheerful despite its dark themes, the film is nevertheless a condemnation of the hypocrisies and abuses of a feudal society in which freedom is to be found only among those who live outside it.

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

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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.

Road Warriors (あやめ笠 喧嘩街道, Tai Kato, 1960)

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A penniless wanderer finds himself mixed up in chaos and conspiracy after deciding to help a lady travelling alone for the purposes of revenge in Tai Kato’s Toei chanbara, Road Warriors (あやめ笠 喧嘩街道, Ayame Kasa: Kenka Kaido). Truth be told, the hero isn’t much of a warrior at all and wisely prefers to avoid a fight if possible but is prepared to put his sword where his mouth is when the occasion calls. Still the conspiracy in this instance is small scale and incredibly petty as a trio of ambitious retainers attempt to frame their one time bodyguard for the murder of a lord.

Before all that, however, Gantaro (Ryuji Shinagawa) is as he’s fond of introducing himself a penniless traveller who makes his ends meet through gambling. In debt to local boss Hidegoro (Ushio Akashi) he agrees to act as an intermediary in a dispute with the greedy Onizo (Eijiro Yanagi) who has usurped some of their territory. Gantaro suggests they settle the matter through gambling but is then challenged to combat by the gang’s bodyguard, Akiyama (Shin Tokudaiji). The young man looks noticeably afraid, sweating at the temples and gripping his sword at an unusual angle, but holds his own in the fight until Onizo tries to cheat by sending in one of his minions to finish him off. Noticing what’s happening, Akiyama proves his nobility by ending the fight and accepting defeat. Onizo appears cheerful and even asks Gantaro to join his gang, but seconds after the young man leaves he sends his guys out after him and evidently has no intention of enforcing a truce with Hidegoro.

Meanwhile, Gantaro runs into a melancholy samurai woman, Miyuki (Kyoko Aoyama), chasing after a thief who has stolen something from her far more precious than money. Discovering the thief has robbed him too, Gantaro springs into action and soon discovers that Miyuki is on a quest for revenge against the man who killed her father but that she’s been betrayed by her three retainers and has managed to ditch them to proceed alone. Unsprisingly, the prime suspect appears to be Akiyama but as stabbing a man in the back and running away don’t seem to fit with the noble character he displayed in the fight, Gantaro has an idea that something’s not quite right. 

Of course, he also begins to fall for Miyuki despite the obvious affection held for him by Hidegoro’s daughter Omitsu (Hiromi Hanazono) which he otherwise seems keen to escape. It’s reasonable to assume that loveable rogue Gantaro is the love them and leave them type, though his love for a samurai’s daughter is always going to be an impossibility no matter how much she may come to admire him. Even so, the conspiracy angle along with Onizo’s smug and overbearing duplicity do begin to awaken his sense of justice especially while travelling with an incredibly cynical thief who will sell anything or anyone in search of a quick buck. Even he however eventually comes around to the idea of helping Miyuki get away from her retainers and enact her revenge especially after overhearing the truth while cowering behind some barrels. 

It may be an overly familiar chanbara tale if one enlivened by Gantaro’s wisecracking antics, but Kato brings to it his characteristic sense of uncertainty in the potent mists that seem to surround Gantaro and Miyuki as they travel the mountain paths in search their enemy. Then again, there are shades of unexpected darkness not least in the implication that Gantaro was about to rape Miyuki before she fainted and brought him back to his senses. Nevertheless, her retainers may tell her that she has “no choice” but to obey them, but Gantaro seems to feel differently if abruptly giving up his intention of protecting her on learning that she has someone else in her heart. This is indeed a harsh world for women samurai and otherwise, a mother and daughter are saved by Akiyama after being harassed by Onizo when he annexes the local market while both Miyuki and Omitsu are left to finish their father’s unfinished business in the wake of their untimely deaths. Notably, it is indeed they who finally strike the final blow to eliminate the corruption which surrounds them. Penniless wanderer Gantaro doesn’t have it that easy either, gambling his life away and ending up with debts both financial and moral that may have dangerous consequences while often beset by cynicism even if latterly deciding to help those in need for no reward. In any case, like any good wanderer all he can do is smile and wave as he departs for the next adventure on the violent streets of the Edo-era society.

Underworld Beauty (暗黒街の美女, Seijun Suzuki, 1958)

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“No one can be happy without money” the villain of Seijun Suzuki’s Underworld Beauty (暗黒街の美女, Ankokugai no Bijo) claims, vainly trying to justify his actions. He may indeed have a point, but you can’t buy happiness through selfish immorality. A noirish tale of changing times, Underworld Beauty pits a noble hearted gangster on the road towards reform against his amoral bosses as he tries to ensure a better future for the sister of a friend whose life was irreparably changed through proximity to crime. 

Miyamoto (Michitaro Mizushima) has just been released from three years in prison. His first stop is the sewers where he locates a loose brick he’d been using as a dead drop and retrieves a handgun and a small bag containing three diamonds stolen in the heist which got him sent away. Paying a visit to his old gang, Miyamoto makes it plain that he intends to keep the diamonds for himself so that he can sell them and give the money to Mihara (Toru Abe), the man who was crippled during the job and now lives an “honest” life running a small oden stall. To Miyamoto’s surprise, his boss, Oyane (Shinsuke Ashida), says OK and offers to set him up with a foreigner in Yokohama who is interested in buying blackmarket jewels. Unfortunately, the whole thing goes south in predictable fashion when a gang of masked heavies turns up to disrupt the deal. Mihara, who had come along with Miyamoto, swallows the diamonds and promptly falls off a nearby wall. He survives just long enough to tell the police that he “slipped” thanks to his unsteady legs, which makes his death “accidental” meaning he won’t have to undergo an autopsy. That’s both good and bad for the crooks. The cops won’t find the diamonds, but getting them back before the body is burned is going to be difficult. 

Arita (Hiroshi Kondo), a sculptor of mannequins, finds himself perfectly primed to find a solution because he’s been dating Mihara’s little sister, Akiko (Mari Shiraki), who’d been working as a nude model. Mihara had talked to Miyamoto about his sister and his fears for her in the big city. Feeling his debt even more since his friend’s death, Miyamoto decides to save Akiko from the evils of city life, but finds himself fighting an uphill battle. Meanwhile, Akiko is smitten with the intellectual yet cold Arita, who may perhaps be more interested in her for access to her brother’s body than to her own. 

The diamonds themselves become a kind of MacGuffin and symbol of amoral post-war greed. Having been away for three years, Miyamoto is the classically conflicted film noir hero, a noble yet compromised figure forced to operate in a murky moral universe that is at odds with his own sense of justice. That is perhaps why he tries so hard to “save” Akiko even if she resents his sometimes patronising paternalism that, well-meaning as it is, denies her the agency that is a mark of the age. Mihara warned his sister about hanging out with Arita, suspecting he was a no good guy likely to drag her further into the underworld which he had now escaped, but she sees him as “different” from the men around her, mistaking his coolness for sophistication rather than a possibly sociopathic superiority complex. 

Yet it’s perhaps a sense of inferiority which sends him so crazy about the diamonds. A tortured artist slumming it in a mannequin factory, he resents the way he’s chosen to “sell” his art while superficially laughing at those who buy it. There is something quite perverse in the various ways he is “using” Akiko, literally commodifying her body and turning it into a lifeless object, a simulacrum of “real” womanhood sans voice or agency, all the while planning to use her in order to get his hands on the diamonds. Figuring out Arita may have mutilated her brother’s body in order to dig them out, she wonders if he ever really loved her at all. His sudden declarations of affection and an impromptu proposal only further convince her that what he wants is money. She hides the diamonds inside the breast of a half-baked mannequin, just about where the heart ought to be. Later we spot the poor thing dismembered and abandoned, a gaping hole in its chest as it floats ominously in the sewer, discarded in just the way a woman like Akiko might be if she’d let a man like Arita get his hands on the loot. 

Kidnapped as leverage to force Miyamoto to hand the diamonds over, Akiko loses her fascination with underworld darkness in learning what the “yakuza code” really means. “What do you mean, the yakuza way?” She barks at Oyane, “it’s wrong to kill, you idiot!”. Literally steamed clean and making an ironic escape up a coal shoot, she edges towards a new dawn. “What a beautiful day!” She exclaims, declaring herself not bored in the least, freed from the false promises of the underworld and released from the diamonds’ corruption into the bright sunshine of a wide open future.

Law in Ghost Island (幽霊島の掟, Yasushi Sasaki, 1961)

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The post-war world was one of increasing globalisation which brought with it anxiety as well as hope as Japan readied itself to step back onto the world stage. The populist cinema of the early ‘60s is marked by ambivalent attitudes to international influences, not just towards creeping Americanisation and its perceived costs but perhaps somewhat uncomfortably towards the wider world and Asia in particular with the same old prejudices which had marked the previous 20 years rearing their heads once again. Voice of the post-war era, the films of Hibari Misora are, by contrast, about as forward looking and progressive as it was possible to be but Law in Ghost Island (幽霊島の掟, Yurei-jima no Okite) in which she plays a noticeably smaller part, is a bizarre exception in which a “lawless” melting pot outpost must be “civilised” by Japanese influences else the creeping rule of thuggish Asian gangs finally reach Japan “proper”.

We’re deep in the Bakumatsu. The Black Ships have already arrived and there is considerable political trouble brewing back in Japan. That’s not our immediate concern however because we’re on a creepy boat with slovenly ronin Yagi Hanzo (Hashizo Okawa) and a mysterious woman wearing a cheongsam (Hibari Misora). Fellow petty gangster and slave trafficker Bunji (Chiyonosuke Azuma) is suspicious of Hanzo, but decides he’s probably just an unlucky retainer on the run from something or other and might prove useful. Therefore, on arrival at Dragon Island, Bunji starts on trying to recruit Hanzo for his boss Chou Yang Po (Isao Yamagata), but Hanzo’s his own man and he hasn’t come here looking for a job. Fearing Hanzo is a government official here to bring the law down on all their heads, Chou tries to force him to harm a man they have in custody and believe to be working for the state. Hanzo gets round this by breaking a chair over the man’s back but leaving him otherwise unharmed, keeping his cover (if that’s what it is) firmly intact.

During his stay on Dragon Island, Hanzo will meet several other shady characters, many of them dressed in outfits more usually associated with the Chinese, Indians, nondescript “islanders”, and strange movie pirates, but what must be assumed is that though Japan “owns” this distant island it is unable to police it and as such it has become a den of scum and villainy in which various tribal gangs vie for hegemony and control over the lucrative smuggling hub which has unwittingly formed in direct response to Japan’s unwise policy of internal isolation which is itself at breaking point thanks to Perry’s Black Ships which we later hear are also on their way to Dragon Island.

Our key into this conflict is the crazed child of the leading gangster, Isakichi (Hiroki Matsukata), who dresses like a cowboy and likes to showoff his hard-won saloon credentials as sharpshooting libertine and all round party animal. Hanzo is not as impressed by this as Isakichi was hoping though an awkward sort of camaraderie eventually arises between them. Meanwhile, Isakichi has fallen in innocent love with the sister of his childhood best friend who is deep into a putative resistance movement hoping to end the stranglehold the smugglers have placed over the previously peaceful island.

Misora’s Madame Song, for some reason posing as a Chinese sex worker, hints at the various ways nothing is quite as it seems in her astute observations of the world around her, sensing that Hanzo is hiding something but also assuming that he is on the “right” side. There is conspiracy everywhere – the putative revolution at home is sending its shockwaves all the way out here as our unscrupulous gangsters try to procure guns to send to various sides on the mainland, while Madame Song ironically laments that what Dragon Island needs is to be more like Japan which is to say ruled less by law itself than an internalised acceptance of the proper order of things. Uncomfortably, it also probably means sending the people who aren’t wearing kimono somewhere else and trying to stop them tricking nice women from Kyushu into coming to tropical islands where they discover they’ve been trafficked into sex work and are unable to leave.

Among Toei’s lower budgeted efforts, Law in Ghost Island bills itself as a supernatural tale and does indeed open with a creepy scene of a misty boat but Hanzo doesn’t end up anywhere like the isle of the dead only a fantasy tropical “paradise” filled with zany movie pirates. Somewhere between pirate fantasy and western, Law in Ghost Island is closer to the kind of spy spoofs Toho would start producing in a few years’ time and even ends with a strangely comic scene in which just about everyone reveals themselves as spy for the same side during the climactic final shootout having been too busy playing spy games to figure any of it out before.

The final messages too are uncomfortable and ambivalent as Hanzo affirms that if there were more “good samurai” Japan would not become lawless like it is here while also claiming Dragon Island for the mainland in fear external forces may use it as a base to attack Japan. The smugglers pay heavily for their “treachery” in contributing to internal mainland chaos while the revolutionary islanders declare their intentions to make the island a better place, which mainly seems to mean making it more “Japanese” which is a fairly ambivalent message whichever way you look at it. Misora only sings two songs and is relegated to a minor mystery in the strange goings on of Ghost Island which features absolutely no ghosts or supernatural intrigue. It does however perhaps shine a light on a strange moment of cultural flux however how unflattering that mirror may turn out to be.

Brief clip of some of Hibari’s songs (no subtitles)

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ryNk8dAVVnI

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

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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.

Ghost in the Well (怪談番町皿屋敷, Toshikazu Kono, 1957)

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Ghost in the Well poster 2Love across the class divide threatens to overthrow the social order. Inspired by the classic folktale Bancho Sarayashiki, Ghost in the Well (怪談番町皿屋敷, Kaidan Bancho Sarayashiki) is indeed the story of a haunting though perhaps not altogether of the kind you might be expecting. This is a tale of romance, but also one of impossible love in which the only possible union is in death. The pure love of a servant girl is deemed incompatible with the oppressive world of samurai honour, and so she must die, but her lord cannot survive it. He cannot reconcile himself to having chosen to preserve his honour, his status, his lineage at the cost of her life and his love.

Rowdy samurai Harima (Chiyonosuke Azuma) loves making trouble in the streets. As the lord’s bannerman he knows he has a degree of status and likes to throw his weight around in the yoshiwara, much to the lord’s consternation. Harima has also taken a fancy to one of his maids, Okiku (Hibari Misora), who continues to reject his advances despite returning his affections because she knows the class difference makes a legitimate relationship between them impossible and a dalliance with her lord means losing the opportunity to marry anyone else. Harima tells her that there’s no such thing as status when it comes to love and that he doesn’t think of her as a passing infatuation. Eventually Okiku gives in and a kind of promise is made between them.

Nevertheless, it’s a promise which can’t be kept. The Aoyama family is in trouble and the obvious answer is to make a good match for Harima that will restore both status and wealth. When one of Harima’s friends is ordered to commit seppuku for the exact same petty punk antics Harima gets up to all the time matters come to a crunch. To keep him safe, Harima’s uncle arranges a marriage with an influential family. Harima tries to refuse but he too is more or less powerless even if he weren’t torn between the obligation to his samurai code and his illicit love for servant girl whom he would never be permitted to make his wife. To cement the match, Harima’s uncle has prepared 10 precious plates as a dowry, but Okiku, catching sight of Harima’s bride-to-be, drops one and breaks it in two. Her fate is sealed. Harima draws his sword on her and she backs away, eventually falling into the well and dying there.

The broken plate is, of course, a symbol of their broken covenant but also of Okiku’s shattered dreams as she watches a beautiful but haughty woman steal away her last hope of happiness solely through the accident of noble birth. As her friend tells her, a commoner cannot become the wife of a samurai and all Okiku can do is resign herself to her unhappy fate. Having broken the plate, however, all is lost. The men of the household admit their responsibility for entrusting the entirety of their future to a mere slip of a girl in the middle of intense heartbreak, but Okiku cannot go unpunished and Harima must claim his new life by destroying his past love.

Harima does what he’s supposed to do, if in passion and half by accident. Yet the marriage remains broken, the family in jeopardy, and Harima without hope of future. The ghost of Okiku, real or imagined, haunts him while he remains guilt ridden and filled with regrets. Despite his rowdiness and manly pride, he chose his samurai honour and condemned his one true love to a lonely death. Her love has, however, survived and resurrected her not as a demon of vengeance come to lead him to his doom but as a lovelorn woman keen to remind him of the promise he made and broke but which might be mended.

Harima pays for his transgressions, though more as a mischievous samurai who allowed his over inflated ego to convince him he had the right to oppress his fellow retainers than as a man who caused the death of an innocent woman, first by corrupting her and then by the same rigidity which has led to his present predicament. There can be no “love” in a such a society, let alone the love of a bannerman and a servant girl. Theirs is a blood wedding, uniting them in death, consumed by the impossibilities of the samurai era. At only 45 minutes, Ghost in the Well is perhaps a slight retelling of the tale and somewhat in imbalanced in its presentation of the fates of the two lovers but is nevertheless a refreshingly romantic take on an often dark story in which a scorned woman’s vengeance is reframed as a powerful condemnation of an oppressive society.

The Boy Who Came Back (踏みはずした春, Seijun Suzuki, 1958)

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the boy who came back posterSeijun Suzuki may have been fired for making films that made no sense and no money, but he had to start somewhere before getting the opportunity to push the boat out. Suzuki’s early career was much like that of any low ranking director at Nikkatsu in that he was handed a number of program pictures often intended to push a pop song or starring one of the up and coming stars in the studio’s expanding youth output. The Boy Who Came Back (踏みはずした春, Fumihazushita Haru, AKA The Spring that Never Came) is among these early efforts and marks an early leading role for later pinup star Akira Kobayashi paired with his soon to be frequent leading lady, Ruriko Asaoka. A reform school tale, the film is a restrained affair for Suzuki who keeps the rage quelled for the most part while his hero struggles ever onward in a world which just won’t let him be.

Keiko (Sachiko Hidari) is a conductress on a tour bus, but she has aspirations towards doing good in the world and is also a member of the volunteer organisation, Big Brothers and Sisters. While the other girls are busy gossiping about one of their number who has just got engaged (but doesn’t look too happy about it), Keiko gets a message to call in to “BBS” and is excited to learn she’s earned her first assignment. Keiko will be mentoring Nobuo (Akira Kobayashi) – a young man getting out of reform school after his second offence (assault & battery + trying to throttle his father with a necktie, time added for plotting a mass escape). Nobuo, however, is an angry young man who’s done all this before, he’s not much interested in being reformed and just wants to be left alone to get back to being the cool as ice lone wolf that he’s convinced himself he really is.

Made to appeal to young men, The Boy Who Came Back has a strong social justice theme with Keiko’s well meaning desire to help held up as a public service even if her friends and family worry for her safety and think she’s wasting her time on a load of ne’er do wells. Apparently an extra-governmental organisation, BBS has no religious agenda but is committed to working with troubled young people to help them overcome their problems and reintegrate into society.

Reintegration is Nobuo’s biggest problem. He’s committed to going straight but he’s proud and unwilling to accept the help of others. He turns down Keiko’s offer to help him find work because he assumes it will be easy enough to find a job, but there are no jobs to be had in the economically straightened world of 1958 – one of the reasons Keiko’s mother thinks the BBS is pointless is because no matter how many you save there will always be more tempted by crime because of the “difficult times”. When he calms down and comes back, agreeing to an interview for work at his mother’s factory Nobuo leaves in a rage after an employee gives him a funny look. There are few jobs for young men, but there are none for “punks” who’ve been in juvie. Every time things are looking up for Nobuo, his delinquent past comes back to haunt him.

This is more literally true when an old enemy re-enters Nobuo’s life with the express intention of derailing it. His punk buddies don’t like it that he’s gone straight, and his arch rival is still after Nobuo’s girl, Kazue (Ruriko Asaoka). If Nobuo is going to get “reformed” he’ll have to solve the problem with Kajita (Jo Shishido) and his guys, but if he does it in the usual way, he’ll land up right in the slammer. Keiko’s dilemma is one of getting too involved or not involved enough – she needs to teach Nobuo to fix his self image issues (which are largely social issues too seeing as they relate to familial dysfunction – a violent father and emotionally distant mother creating an angry, fragile young man who thinks he’s worthless and no one will ever really love him) for himself, rather than try to fix them for him.

A typical program picture of the time, The Boy Who Came Back does not provide much scope for Suzuki’s rampant imagination, but it does feature his gift for unusual framing and editing techniques as well as his comparatively more liberal use of song and dance sequences in the (not quite so sleazy) bars and cabarets that Nobuo and his ilk frequent. Unlike many a Nikkatsu youth movie, The Boy Who Came Back has a happy ending as everyone, including the earnest Keiko, learns to sort out their various difficulties and walks cheerfully out into the suddenly brighter future with a much more certain footing.

The Boy Who Came Back is the first of five films included in Arrow’s Seijun Suzuki: The Early Years. Vol. 1 Seijun Rising: The Youth Movies box set.

Original trailer (English subtitles)

Bakumatsu Taiyoden (幕末太陽傳, Yuzo Kawashima, 1957)

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bakumatsu taiyoden posterMany things were changing in the Japan of 1957. In terms of cinema, a short lived series of films known as the “Sun Tribe” movement had provoked widespread social panic about rowdy Westernised youth. Inspired by the novels of Shintaro Ishihara (later a right-leaning mayor of Tokyo), the movement proved so provocative that it had to be halted after three films such was the public outcry at the outrageous depictions of privileged young people indulging in promiscuous sex, drugs, alcohol, and above all total apathy – frivolous lives frittered away on self destructive pleasures. The Sun Tribe movies had perhaps gone too far becoming an easy source of parody, though the studio that engineered them, Nikkatsu, largely continued in a similar vein making stories of youth gone wild their stock in trade.

Yuzo Kawashima, a generation older than the Sun Tribe boys and girls, attempts to subvert the moral outrage by reframing the hysteria as a ribald rakugo story set in the last period of intense cultural crisis – the “Bakumatsu” era, which is to say the period between the great black ships which forcibly re-opened Japan to the outside world, and the fall of the Shogunate. The title, Bakumatsu Taiyoden (幕末太陽傳), literally means “legend of the sun (tribe) in the Bakumatsu era”, and, Kawashima seems to suggest, perhaps things now aren’t really so different from 100 years earlier. Kawashima deliberately casts Nikkatsu’s A-list matinee idols – in particular Yujiro Ishihara (the brother of Shintaro and the face of the movement), but also Akira Kobayashi and familiar supporting face Hideaki Nitani, all actors generally featured in contemporary dramas and rarely in kimono. Rather than the rather stately acting style of the period drama, Kawashima allows his youthful cast to act the way they usually would – post-war youth in the closing days of the shogunate.

They are, however, not quite the main draw. Well known comedian and rakugo performer Frankie Sakai anchors the tale as a genial chancer, a dishonest but kindly man whose roguish charm makes him an endearing (if sometimes infuriating) character. After a post-modern opening depicting contemporary Shinagawa – a faded red light district now on its way out following the introduction of anti-prostitution legislation enacted under the American occupation, Kawashima takes us back to the Shinagawa of 1862 when business was, if not exactly booming, at least ticking along.

Nicknamed “The Grifter”, Saiheiji (Frankie Sakai) has picked up a rare watch dropped by a samurai on his way to plot revolution and retired to a geisha house for a night of debauchery he has no intention of actually paying for. Though he keeps assuring the owners that he will pay “later” when other friends turn up with the money, he is eventually revealed to be a con-man and a charlatan but offers to work off his debt by doing odd jobs around the inn. Strangely enough Saiheiji is actually a cheerful little worker and busily gets on with the job, gradually endearing himself to all at the brothel with his ability for scheming which often gets them out of sticky situations ranging from fake ghosts to customers who won’t leave.

Saiheiji eventually gets himself involved with a shady group of samurai led by Shinshaku Takasugi (Yujiro Ishihara) – a real life figure of the Bakumatsu rebellion. Like their Sun Tribe equivalents these young men are angry about “the humiliating American treaty”, but their anger seems to be imbued with purpose albeit a destructive one as they commit to burning down the recently completed “Foreign Quarter” as an act of protest-cum-terrorism. The Bakumatsu rebels are torn over the best path for future – they’ve seen what happened in China, and they fear a weak Japan will soon be torn up and devoured by European empire builders. Some think rapid Westernisation is the answer – fight fire with fire, others think showing the foreigners who’s boss is a better option (or even just expelling them all so everything goes back to “normal”). America, just as in the contemporary world, is the existential threat to the Japanese notion of Japaneseness – these young samurai are opposed to cultural colonisation, but their great grandchildren have perhaps swung the other way, drunk on new freedoms and bopping away to rock n roll wearing denim and drinking Coca Cola. They too resent American imperialism (increasingly as history would prove), but their rebellions lack focus or intent, their anger without purpose or aim.

Kawashima’s opening crawl directly references the anti-prostitution law enacted by the American occupying forces – an imposition of Western notions of “morality” onto “traditional” Japanese culture. In a round about way, the film suggests that all of this youthful rebellion is perhaps provoked by the sexual frustration of young men now that the safe and legal sex trade is no longer available to them – echoing the often used defence of the sex trade that it keeps “decent” women, and society at large, safe. Then again, the sex trade of the Bakumatsu era is as unpleasant as it’s always been even if the familiar enough problems are played for laughs – the warring geisha, the prostitute driven in desperation to double suicide, the young woman about to be sold into prostitution against her will in payment of an irresponsible father’s debt, etc. One geisha has signed engagement promises with almost all her clients – it keeps the punters happy and most of them are meaningless anyway. As she says, deception is her business – whatever the men might say about it, it’s a game they are willingly playing, buying affection and then seeming hurt to realise that affection is necessarily false and conditional on payment of the bill.   

Playing it for laughs is, however, Kawashima’s main aim – asking small questions with a wry smile as Saiheiji goes about his shady schemes with a cleverness that’s more cheeky than malicious. He warns people they shouldn’t trust him, but in the end they always can because despite his shady surface his heart is in the right place. Warned he’ll go to hell if he keeps on lying his way though life, Saiheiji laughs, exclaims to hell with that – he’s his own life to live, and so he gleefully runs away from the Bakumatsu chaos into the unseen future.

Masters of Cinema release trailer (English subtitles)