Tag: Hisashi Hidaka

Wild Ducks and Green Onions (カモとねぎ, Senkichi Taniguchi, 1968)

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Outside of Japan, Senkichi Taniguchi is most likely best known as the director of Toshiro Mifune’s debut film Snow Trail, or else as the screenwriter of one of Akira Kurosawa’s lesser known works The Silent Duel. Yet throughout the 1960s, he also made a series of silly comedies including Wild Ducks and Green Onions (カモとねぎ, Kamo to Negi), an absurd crime caper revolving around a gentleman thief’s attempts to plot the perfect crime while assisted by two bumbling henchmen and a young woman with a hidden agenda.

The film’s Japanese title is likely inspired by a proverb, “a duck comes carrying an onion” which means something close to “there’s a sucker born every minute” though it might be up for debate who exactly is the sucker here. In any case, dapper mastermind Nobukichi (Masayuki Mori) has plotted the perfect heist which involves rigging a speedboat race by nobbling the propellers on two of the four boats and then betting accordingly. So far so good, but the enigmatic Mami (Mako Midori) has been watching their every move and is able to swipe the bag containing the money before henchmen Yosuke (Hideo Sunazuka) and Kyuhei (Tadao Takashima) can return it to their boss who for once has agreed to an equal split. The guys eventually track her down, but she tells them she spent the money on bail for her husband but it turns out he left the police station with two other women and hasn’t been seen since. The gang then determine to track him down to get the money back, but become involved in several other scams along the way. 

Despite having been able to rob them blind, all the men seem to be under the impression that Mami is a brainless airhead though she later reveals herself to speak fluent English and in fact comes up with a few scams of her own that are better than Nobukichi’s whom the guys refer to as “Cap’n”. Nevertheless, the guys only tolerate her because they need to find her husband though all’s not quite as it seems. Kyuhei in particular seems to have a rather misogynistic streak and is somewhat jealous that Nobukichi gets to have Mami to himself though he remains a perfect gentleman, sleeping on the sofa and giving her the bed. But it’s Kyuhei’s lascivious nature that eventually gets them into trouble when he tries to drag a reluctant Yosuke into a cinema screening pink films only to be pulled aside by some kind of anti-delinquency brigade who read off some unconvincing statistics stating that 80% of young male sex offenders are fans of pink films. 

This annoys them so much they decide to scam the organiser, Tomiko (Hisano Yamaoka), by appealing to her vanity and tricking her association, which is dedicated to conservative family values, into watching (and apparently enjoying) a porn film on school premises believing it to be an “educational movie”. Tomiko in some senses represents the forces of order against which the gang are rebelling, though she’ll get her revenge in time. In any case, they find a more worthy target after travelling to a seaside town and encountering the daughter of a man who has been poisoned by industrial pollution while the local factory insists everything is within “safe limits” and they aren’t the cause of the sickness spreading across the area. 

Conducting another expert heist to steal the secret documents to prove otherwise, Nobukichi could make a lot of money blackmailing the factory owner but instead gives the report to the man’s daughter so she can pursue justice and compensation for her father much to the chagrin of Mami and proving that it isn’t all about the money after all. Then again, he has another document that, once translated by Mami, reveals the factory has actually been producing Napalm for the Americans which is a bit of a grey area as far as the constitution is concerned. This time, they play a nasty trick on the heartless factory owner (Eijiro Tono) though he is hardly remorseful and in fact was too greedy to pay their blackmail money despite the vast sums it would cost him if the news ever got out. 

Despite its silliness and absurdity, the film takes an ironic swipe at serious issues of the day such as scandals like the Minamata disease and Mary Whitehouse-esque social campaigners ranting about a decline in morals while simultaneously enjoying the platform that protesting them grants them. In some ways, the gang themselves exist as a kind of rebellion against the salaryman society with their various scams presented as silly games targeting faceless or ridiculous figures who can either afford to lose the money or were ripe for a comeuppance though in the end, crime doesn’t really pay either and the gang find themselves hoist by their own petards, robbed of enjoying their ill-gotten gains by unexpected twists of fate. Very much of its time the film has a kind of charm in its whimsical score and pastel colours but has lingering darkness in its threats of unexploded bombs and hidden Okinawan torture facilities in a society increasingly ruled by amoral capitalists.

The Sea of Genkai (任侠外伝 玄海灘, Juro Kara, 1976)

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Juro Kara was an avant-garde playwright and theatre practitioner whose work was a part of the Little Theatre Movement which rejected conventional naturalism and prioritised the physicality of the actor over text and dialogue. Though he performed as an actor in films by other avant-garde filmmakers such as Shuji Terayama and Nagisa Oshima, he directed only one film. By these standards, the The Sea of Genkai (任侠外伝 玄海灘, Ninkyo Gaiden: Genkai Nada), a co-production with the Art Theatre Guild, may seem surprisingly conventional, but is also highly unusual not only in ATG’s filmography but also in its subversions of the yakuza film. 

The Japanese title is prefaced by “ninkyo gaiden” which makes it sound like a spin-off to a ninkyo eiga or chivalrous gangster movie, which turns out to be incredibly ironic because there is no chivalry or honour here only cruelty and exploitation. Set in the port of Shimonoseki where boats leave for Korea, the film follows dejected petty yakuza Kondo (Noboru Ando) as fate finally catches up with him. He and his boss Sawaki (Jo Shishido) were once students together and took a job in Busan dealing with the corpses of American soldiers killed in the Korean War. Sent to deliver dog tags to widows, Sawaki spits in a distraught woman’s face and then attempts to rape her, only there is another couple in her home and the man soon wakes to challenge him. Kondo and Sawaki are then drawn into a brutal and ugly fight during which Kondo knocks out the man while Sawaki rapes the widow. The other woman then threatens them with a knife, taking back the dog tag only for Sawaki to pounce and strangle her. Sawaki then flees the scene confused by what he’s done, but Kondo stays behind and rapes the second woman’s corpse before leaving her for dead. 

Kondo later relates that he’s been unable to sleep with women ever since his experience of necrophilia in Korea in 1951. Kura often cuts back to the bundle of dog tags Kondo has been keeping all this time which hang by his window like a wind chime. He watches them sway and hears them jingle with the violent motion of Sawaki’s raping the woman, hanging that of, presumably, a random man around the second woman’s neck as he in turn rapes her body. He later finds a woman who reminds him of the one he raped while dead among a cohort of those he’s in the process of sex trafficking who has unwittingly put on one of the dog tags like an ironic necklace while taking a bath in his apartment on the invitation of his more sensitive associate Taguchi (Jinpachi Nezu). On catching sight of Kojun (Reisen Ri), he’s struck by a literal flashback that is a clear homage to Henri-Georges Clouzot’s Les Diaboliques as he watches a “dead” woman rise from a bath. Later he rapes her too, presumably the first (though not the last) “living” woman he’s had sexual contact with in 25 years. 

The dog tags take on a still more ironic relevance in the Korean song which plays over the opening titles and is sung frequently by the trafficked women. The song is sweet and innocent, narrated by a woman who is preparing a “flower garland” for someone that she loves, but its imagery is subverted in Kondo’s grim necklace of dog tags taken from fallen men. Even Sawaki describes him as someone who has been dead for 20 years while preparing to sacrifice him to curry favour with their creepy Tokyo boss Tahara (Taka Ohkubo) who permanently wears black gloves on both hands even while shirtless, while Kondo later sings a song characterising himself as a “black dog” who never stood a chance in this broken world of ruined dreams. Penned by Kura himself and performed by Ando, this song more clearly reflects his absurdist dialogue style in its deeply melancholy imagery as Kondo fully succumbs to his image of death. 

Kondo’s actions come to emblematise the continued violence inflicted on the bodies of Korean women by Japanese men from the colonial era onwards. The woman from the bath, Kojun, suffers continually throughout the film and is later forced to perform in strip shows by the Sawaki gang. She is clever, and fierce, but the world is all against her and the only answers that she ever gets as to why her “uncle” forced her to stowaway on a smuggling boat to Japan only further deepen the wounds inflicted by a deeply corrupted, imperialistic patriarchy. Kojun develops a fondess for Taguchi because he is the only man who doesn’t try to rape her and in fact saves her from being raped though later said to be impotent and rejected by the other gang members for his refusal to participate in their despoiling of the Korean women. Bloodstained underwear becomes a symbol of sexualised violence countered only by the plain white pairs Kojun later buys for Taguchi after replacing her own ruined clothing.  

She and Taguchi attempt to protect themselves by bringing the receipts, threatening to release the smuggling account books and expose a host of dodgy dealings if the Sawaki gang come for them, but in the end there is no escape. Taguchi finds himself wading through oil-soaked waters with his dreams in ruins before finally breaking the chain though it’s unclear if it will really free him. Bleak beyond measure in its deeply tragic denouement, Kara’s intense drama offers no respite from its nihilistic world of violence and exploitation and leaves us quite literally floundering in a dark sea of inevitable corruption. 

Trailer (no subtitles)

꽃목걸이 – 이영숙 (1972)

(꽃목걸이 = “flower necklace”. There doesn’t seem to be an official romanisation of singer 이영숙 (李英淑)’s name, but it does appear in a few places as “‘Iyeongsuk”, or “Lee Young Sook”. A contemporary romanisation would render it as “Lee Yeong-suk”)