Tag: Japan

Until the Lights Come Back (大停電の夜に, Takashi Minamoto, 2005)

December 23, 2018by Hayley ScanlonLeave a comment

Christmas is, among other things, conveniently held on the same day every year. As such, it can’t help but become a moment of minor introspection inviting a thorough investigation of a life’s trajectory. In Japan, Christmas is also about romance which means it can also be an intense or melancholy occasion in which relationships past and present come up for reappraisal. Takashi Minamoto’s ensemble drama Until the Lights Come Back (大停電の夜に, Daiteiden no Yoru ni) spins a tale of city life as it catches hold of a number of accidentally connected souls and puts them through the emotional ringer thanks to an artificial psychological pause engineered by a power cut on Christmas Eve,

A melancholy barman sets a record going. A boy tracking satellites sees a girl hovering dangerously close to edge of the roof opposite. A conflicted salaryman finds out a dark family secret. A mistress is dumped while a wife wonders how much longer she should wait. A pregnant woman is chased by a yakuza, and an old lady gets an unexpected phone call.

Somehow, all of these events are connected though it takes a moment to figure out how. Christmas is a time for romance, but for the dejected salaryman, Ryotaro (Tomorowo Taguchi), it’s about to become a very difficult day indeed. When his terminally ill father decides to tell him the secrets of his birth, it prompts him into a mild bout of introspection concerning his own familial relationships. Ten years with the patient Shizue (Tomoyo Harada) haven’t cured his philandering and the marriage is strained to breaking point. Still, he thinks nothing of cancelling their special Christmas Eve dinner together to go meet his mistress even if his true purpose is to end things before they get any more complicated.

Missed connections and frustrated love stories continue to dominate. The mistress, Misuzo (Haruka Igawa), gets into a lift with Chinese bellboy Dongdong (Tsuyoshi Abe) who was supposed to be going back to Shanghai to visit his long-distance girlfriend who he worries is losing interest. Meanwhile, the melancholy barman, Mr. Kido (Etsushi Toyokawa), is pining for a failed love of his own – a woman he foolishly abandoned and then tried to pick back up again only to learn she had married someone else and that the marriage was unhappy. Mr. Kido gave up his musical dreams to open a jazz bar in the hope his love would someday return to him, only to be visited by “hope” in a different form – that of the strange young woman, Nozomi (Tomoko Tabata), from the across the way who’s about to have a very big business night in her off the beaten track artisanal candle shop.

Meanwhile, the recently released ex-yakuza, Gin (Koji Kikkawa), pines for his lost love in the form of the heavily pregnant Reiko (Shinobu Terajima) who swore to wait for him but eventually drifted away and married someone else though she seems to be happy enough which, strangely, he seems to find a comfort. When the lights go out there’s nothing much else to do but talk and think and so each of our wounded protagonists is forced to put their pain into focus, considering the wider context of an emotional landscape and attempting to find accommodation within it. Mr. Kido can’t quite let go of his failed love, however much he might want to, but Gin can perhaps learn to be thankful that the woman he loved found someone nice who looked after her when he couldn’t.

While the older generation swap stories of the eerie wartime blackouts and those of the comparatively less worrying power outages born of an inability to keep up with a rapidly recovering economy, the young make the best of it – swapping the twinkling lights of Christmas displays for the wonder of the stars. Candlelight and unexpected friendships give birth to new ways of thinking and create their very own Christmas miracles which seem set to pave a way towards a happier future for all in which forgiveness and understanding rule. Strangely warm yet never sentimental, Until the Lights Come Back captures a brief moment of stillness in a lonely city as its disconnected heroes find themselves pulled into a series of concentric epiphanies, putting the past to rest while learning to embrace an as yet unseen future.

Original trailer (no subtitles)

Growing Up (たけくらべ, Heinosuke Gosho, 1955)

December 21, 2018by Hayley ScanlonLeave a comment

Caught in a moment of transition, it’s no great mystery that post-war Japanese cinema began to look back at the Meiji past. Progress had indeed been rapid but ended in national tragedy and collective madness. The post-war humanists were eager for a different outcome, to avoid the mistakes of the last fifty years and build a society that was kinder and freer than that which had come before. Though on the surface it might seem as if much had changed since the dawn of a new century, the problems were still the same and a failure to address them only likely to add new tragedies in place of the better future many hoped for. Among the foremost proponents of post-war humanism, Heinosuke Gosho made a rare trip back into the Meiji past in 1955’s Growing Up (たけくらべ, Takekurabe), an adaptation of the well known short story by Ichiyo Higuchi, finding that nothing much had really changed when it came to the fates of women and the poor in an often wilfully indifferent society.

The action opens on the outskirts of the Yoshiwara in 1894. Our heroes are a collection of children who find themselves dealing with typically adolescent problems but also, by modern standards, expected to grow up all too fast. Chief among them is 13-year-old Midori (Hibari Misora) whose sister, Omaki (Keiko Kishi), is the most famous courtesan of the red light district. Although she knows on some level that her parents have already sold her to the brothel owner in whose house they live as servants, Midori has not yet quite processed the full implications of her destiny or that her world of childhood innocence is rapidly drawing to a close. She is in love with a local boy, Shinnyo (Takashi Kitahara), who seems to return her feelings but is as awkward and confused by them as any teenage boy and treats her by turns with coldness and contempt mixed with grudging affection.

Shinnyo, meanwhile, is the son of a greedy and heartless monk (Takamaru Sasaki) who has decided to sell his older sister as a concubine to a wealthy man who already has a wife. As he loves his sister dearly and has a naive, childish sense of absolute morality, this is a sin Shinnyo cannot forgive. He argues with his father but has no real power to change the situation and then decides on rebelling against his father’s wishes that he not become a monk by leaving for the main temple in Kyoto to take holy orders. Of course, this also means he must sacrifice any youthful idea he might have had of pursuing his love for Midori.

The title, in a sense, could refer not only to the increasingly melancholy youngsters coming of age in an oppressive society, but also to Japan itself as it emerged into modernity in an effort to prove itself the equal of any other major power in the late 19th century. It is, however, an ironic a title as any could be. To “grow up” here is to abandon one’s humanity and conform to the kind of “real world” thinking that codifies cruelty and makes a virtue of heartlessness. Still an innocent child, Midori bounces her ball and basks in her somewhat elevated position as a wealthy young girl and sister of a “notorious” woman without fully understanding all that entails. When her sister tells her about a dream she had of climbing trees and picking persimmons, she is incapable of understanding her warning about the loss of innocence she’s about to experience, but her world is brought crashing down when a gang of rival boys rudely attack her and point out that all her finery was bought through “whoring” and that she is nothing more than a “whore” in waiting.

Another of the boys, Sangoro (Masanori Nakamura), whose family is poor, says he can’t wait to be “grown up”, reacting with less than sensitivity to Midori’s pained pleas that she wishes everything could stay as it was and they could be children forever. Sangoro sees adulthood as freedom. He’ll be free to earn his own living and maybe he won’t have to be like his father, too afraid to stand up to people with money because when you don’t have any you’re always reliant on their kindness. Sangoro may be poor, but he’s a man (or will be) and can’t process the total lack of agency that comes with being an adult female whose future is decided entirely by her closest male relative. Midori, like Shinnyo’s sister, has been sold by her father and there’s nothing she or anyone else can do about it now.

Nevertheless, confronted by her fate, Midori decides to own it. She encourages her parents to think of her as dead, cooly hitting back at their callousness but acknowledging an obligation as she goes. The final scenes preceding her passage across the small bridge which will forever sever her from her childhood are filled with dread and anger as if crying out for someone to stop the inevitable from happening, but of course, no one can. An old woman and former courtesan, Okichi (Isuzu Yamada), who owns a shop where Midori used to spend time and is indirectly responsible for Midori’s acceptance of her fate in some cruel, drunken words she threw at her, puts it best when she briefly feels as if she could have done something in affirming that it isn’t her fault, and it isn’t Midori’s, it’s simply “the world”.

Midori meets her fate not with resignation but rage and defiance. Shinnyo, who runs away from his inability to help his sister by becoming a monk, is forever incapable of declaring his real feelings in words but leaves a flower in front of her window in echo of another he gave her long ago. At first Midori picks it up and cherishes it for the innocent symbol of love that it is, but by the time she has travelled half way along the bridge which will take her to the Yoshiwara, she has realised this kind of innocence does not belong inside. She throws the flower to the mud and leaves her youthful dreams of love and happiness behind as she prepares to step through the doorway into a future which is not of her making and over which she has no say. To “grow up”, in this world, is a kind of spiritual death in which there exists nothing other than emptiness and indifference.

Tokyo Profile (都会の横顔, Hiroshi Shimizu, 1953)

December 20, 2018December 20, 2018by Hayley Scanlon2 Comments

Judging by the vision presented in the cinema of the time, the Japan of 1953 was one still fighting to emerge from post-war disillusionment and destruction. Set in the glittering Ginza, Hiroshi Shimizu’s Tokyo Profile (都会の横顔,Tokai no Yokogao) is, like much of the director’s work, a more cheerful affair. This world is a very different one from the dingy attics and rundown tenements of the average social drama in which the struggling urban poor battle economic impossibilities while earnestly investing in their future, a somewhat barbed aspirational comedy which lays bare the increasing gap between rich and poor but in a humorous, perhaps resigned fashion save for its strangely cutting finale.

Shooting once again almost entirely on location, Shimizu opens with a lengthy shot captured from the back of a tram traveling through contemporary Ginza – then and now an elegant and refined part of town home to numerous upscale department stores from all around the world. It’s an ordinary Saturday afternoon and the streets are only middling busy. A crowd has gathered around something mysterious, gradually attracting more people and becoming a spectacle in its own right. Thankfully there hasn’t been an accident. A shoeshine girl (Ineko Arima) is trying to comfort a crying child, Michiko (Sachiko Atami), who has become separated from her mother. Michiko is five years old and knows her parents’ names by rote, but all she can tell the concerned people trying to help about her home is the general vicinity it might be located in and that it’s next to Yoshiko’s house, which is not very helpful. Luckily a young man, nicknamed “Mr. Sandwich” (Ryo Ikebe) because he’s one of Ginza’s many sign carriers, offers to take her to the police station while looking around and attracting attention with his sign (and patented silly walk) in case they spot her mum in the street.

Meanwhile, Michiko’s mother Asako (Michiyo Kogure) is wandering around frantically terrified she might never see her daughter again. Unfortunately she is accosted by a pushy neighbour who promises to help her look for Michiko but keeps pulling her into other business before finally landing her with the bill for two cream sodas which, needless to say, she cannot afford (and didn’t even want).

Michiko and her family are from Meguro which is quite a way out from the centre of the city and one gets the impression this is quite a rare day out for them. Michiko is very excited when she tells the shoeshine girl that they came to buy her a hat and a pair of red shoes, but as we later hear from Asako, Michiko’s presents are tiny splash of luxury in an otherwise economically anxious home. Shinji, Michiko’s father, was a Lieutenant-Commander during in the war but like many of his generation found himself unwanted after its end and struggled to find proper employment. Much to the family’s relief, he’s recently got a steady job as an accountant, but it still doesn’t pay enough to live on. Wanting to buy summer clothes for the children, Shinji worked overtime and walked to work rather than taking the train but little Yoshiko’s parents have bought her little red shoes and now Michiko wants a pair too. Doting parents, Asako and Shinji feel dreadful that they aren’t able to buy their daughter the things that other children have, but today she’s come to Ginza to see what she can do with what she has (which isn’t much either way).

Shimizu follows Michiko as she travels round the city with various adults looking for her mum but also having a grand adventure. Though she was originally quite distressed, Michiko is a clever little girl and quickly decides to start having fun instead of being sad. The sandwich man takes her all around Ginza, bumping into various people that he knows including a philandering boyfriend and the girl waiting for him, the girl he was with who has several boyfriends but has the most fun when standing them up, a shady gangster type not normally around during the day (he’s on his way to Osaka), and a geisha girl who’s taking classes in English for the “service” industry from an extremely camp instructor.

The irony is that Michiko and her family aside, the sandwich man, shoeshine girl, and everyone else they meet are people with no money who earn their living on the streets where rich people come to play. The gangster offers sandwich man a cigarette and he takes it, only to consider throwing it away when he sniffs it and realises it’s a cheap and nasty variety. Meanwhile, Asako’s horrible neighbour convinces her to ask a streetside psychic to help finding Michiko but he keeps interrupting their consultation to chase after discarded cigarette butts which he puts in a big pot and later smokes with the help of his pipe-like cigarette holder. The people who come to Ginza to play don’t care about smoking their cigarettes down to the last because they know they can buy more. Streetside psychics can’t even afford to buy any.

Nevertheless, no one seems to be unhappy with their life in Ginza. Sandwich man is nursing a crush on shoeshine girl which she might or might not return. So obviously good with children he longs for many, which is a problem because the one thing shoeshine girl dislikes about the city is that there are too many people – she only wants two. His desire for a big family means he doesn’t envisage spending the rest of his life as a sandwich man, but then it seems to be alright for the time being while he waits for something better to come along (which he seems to think it will). Shimizu takes us on a jaunty journey through the glitzy Ginza, taking in the musical halls and cafes while now famous tunes celebrating the area play unironically in the background, but as much as he celebrates the aspirational swankiness of the recovering city he’s always keen to remind us that not everyone who lives here lives in the same world and little girls like Michiko risk getting left behind for good if no one stops to think about that.

Home from the Sea (故郷, Yoji Yamada, 1972)

December 18, 2018by Hayley Scanlon1 Comment

By the early 1970s, Japan was well on its way to an economic recovery with memories of post-war privation fading and modern consumerism rapidly taking hold in the national mindset. Contemporary cinema understandably saw this as a good thing, that brighter times were coming and soon enough everyone would be enjoying a comfortable, prosperous life. The future, however, was not always evenly distributed and modernisation brought with it problems as well as solutions. Yoji Yamada’s Home from the Sea (故郷, Kokyo/Furusato*) paints a melancholy picture of a changing Japan as an earnest young couple are forced to consider leaving their beloved hometown to seek their fortunes elsewhere.

Seiichi Ishizaki (Hisashi Igawa) owns a small transport boat he uses to ferry rocks between construction sites. He is sometimes joined by his wife, Tamiko (Chieko Baisho), who serves as the boat’s engineer. The couple live with Seiichi’s elderly father (Chishu Ryu) and their two daughters on a small island in the Inland Sea. Times are hard. Fuel costs are increasing making Seiichi’s business much less profitable while his boat is old and slow. The maintenance costs alone are difficult to contemplate and the family cannot afford to invest in one of the new steel boats which are currently sucking up most of the available work. Seiichi’s younger brother who used to work on the boat with him has already given up and moved on, taking his wife and children to another town where he works in a factory. Many people seem to think Seiichi would do well to do the same, but he is stubborn. He refuses to be pushed out of his ancestral home and occupation simply because of the unfairness of his times.

A little way into the film, a friendly fishmonger, Matsushita (Kiyoshi Atsumi), who often stops by to have dinner with the family expounds on the beauty of the town. He can’t understand why anyone would want to leave somewhere as lovely as this. Unlike the Ishizakis, Matsushita wasn’t born on the island but in Korea – his parents died during the repatriation after the war and he’s been getting by on his own ever since. He’s done many different jobs and lived in many different places but has chosen to make his home here. A fishmonger’s job is probably always safe (to an extent, at least) in a small harbour town, but Seiichi’s isn’t and he needs money to feed his family. There is no other work on the island, and so there is no way to stay without making the boat pay.

The boat, however, is already 19 years old. Transport ships are only intended to last 10. The engine is faulty and the hull is in desperate need of repair but a visit to the original shipwright reveals that to do so would not be cost effective. The best thing to do would be to buy one of the shiny new steel vessels like their neighbour’s, but that’s far out of Seiichi’s reach. All along the shoreline, you can see the charred remains of boats belonging to those like Seiichi who’ve finally come to the conclusion that their era has passed.

“Can’t beat the Big” is a local mantra. In early ‘70s Japan, counterintuitively enough, size is everything. Not just the boats themselves, but the fleets and the architecture of life. You can’t survive as your own boss anymore because the little guy alone has no power when corporations and conglomerates are extending their reach even into tiny islands. Seiichi goes to have a look at the factory in Onomichi to which he’s been recommended by a friend. It’s not as bad as he thought, but it’s huge and filled with hundreds of identically dressed faceless men. The food is awful, and they’d have no friends. Nevertheless, needs must. If you can’t fight the Big you’ll have to become a part of it or it’ll swallow you whole.

Still the sadness of leaving one’s hometown behind against one’s will with one eye always looking back towards the shoreline is difficult to bear. Seiichi’s father, who had been looking after the children and was therefore extremely close to them, will be staying behind with no one left to look after him save the community itself. Progress might be a good thing, but there are costs too and small town Japan is one of them. It’s sad, but there’s nothing you can do about it. The post-war world might not require so much “gaman” anymore, but bearing the demands of modernity just might.

*According to Shochiku’s website and the narrator in the trailer, the official title is “Kokyo” which is the Sino-Japanese reading of the kanji (故郷) but it’s also often listed under the title “Furusato” – the slightly more emotive native Japanese reading.

Original trailer (no subtitles)

After the Rain (恋は雨上がりのように, Akira Nagai, 2018)

December 17, 2018by Hayley Scanlon3 Comments

Adolescence is a difficult time for all, a period of waiting, in a sense, for the rain to end and everything to make the kind of sense you’ve been led to believe life is supposed to make only to finally see that the thing about life is there is no sense to be made of it. After the Rain (恋は雨上がりのように, Koi wa Ameagari no yo ni), adapted from the popular manga by Jun Mayuzuki, is touted as an admittedly creepy age gap romance between a confused teen and a melancholy middle-aged man but thankfully arrives at something more thoughtful and less problematic in its philosophical look at self-imposed inertia seen through the lenses of age and youth.

High school girl Akira (Nana Komatsu) loves nothing more than running but her record-breaking track career was brought to an abrupt halt by a ruptured achilles tendon. Having given up on her athletic dreams, she now spends her “free” time on a part-time job in a diner-style “family restaurant”. Unbeknownst to all, the reason Akira took the job was that the restaurant’s manager, 45-year-old divorced father Kondo (Yo Oizumi), was once nice to her after her accident and now she’s developed an almighty crush on his mild-mannered charms.

While Akira is processing the loss of her future as a top runner, Kondo is trying to get over not only the failure of his marriage but of his own dreams of literary success. Jealous of a college friend with a bestseller, Kondo has barely written anything in years and has all but resigned himself to a lifetime of managing a low-level chain restaurant in suburbia.

Kondo, for all his faults, is essentially a good guy whose major problem in life is being too nice. Needless to say, he’s not enthused by Akira’s surprise declaration of love and understands that it could cause him a lot of trouble but even so he wants to help her get over whatever it is that makes her think an affair with an older guy might be a good idea. Realising that her misplaced crush is most likely a displacement activity born of her grief for her racing career, Kondo sets about trying to coax Akira back towards something more positive than unwise romance through genial paternal attention even if she finds his attempts to make clear that he is only prepared to offer friendly support somewhat frustrating.

Akira’s problems are perhaps greater than they first seem. A strange girl with underdeveloped social skills and a relatively low need for interpersonal interaction, Akira has few friends and a habit of accidentally glaring at everyone she meets (which is not an ideal quality for a diner waitress). She is however very beautiful which also earns her a heap of unwanted attention precisely because of her angry aloofness. Neither of the boys her own age who declare an interest are very promising – both of them are unwilling to take a flat no for an answer and continue to chase Akira even though she consistently ignores them, though sous-chef Kase (Hayato Isomura) is at least a little more perceptive than he originally seems and finally able to offer some impartial advice to the confused young woman once he’s realised that his attentions really are unwanted.

Unwilling to engage with anything that reminds her of what she’s lost, Akira has been avoiding all her old friends. Haruka (Nana Seino), who has been chasing along behind desperate to catch up ever since they were kids, is as broken-hearted about their ruptured friendship as Akira is about running and longs to repair what was broken if only to prove that there’s more between them than just sports. Originally worried about Akira’s interest in Kondo she relaxes when she realises that he, like her, just wants to help Akira escape her moment of wounded inertia.

As Kondo puts, it’s boring waiting for the rain to stop. Like the heroes of Rashomon which becomes a repeated motif, Akira and Kondo are essentially just marking time waiting to be released from a self-imposed sense of frustrated impossibility. Kondo needed a dose of self-confidence which the decision to help a depressed high school girl who seems to be the only person who doesn’t find him pathetic just might offer, while Akira needs to realise that her life isn’t over and that she may have been too hasty in abandoning her dreams over what could be nothing more than a minor setback. Through their awkward non-romance the pair each rediscover something about themselves that they’d forgotten along with the courage to face their painful failures head on rather than attempting hide and living on in melancholy resentment.

Thankfully not the creepy age gap romance the synopsis teases, Nagai’s adaptation perhaps fails to mine the unexpectedly rich philosophical seam of Mayuzuki’s manga to its fullest extent in its powerful confrontation of age and youth sheltering from the storm of disappointment, but nevertheless presents an oddly warm tale of serendipitous friendships and mutual support as two frustrated people at different points of life each find the courage to move forward through helping someone else do the same.

Original trailer (no subtitles)

Thus Another Day (今日もまたかくてありなん, Keisuke Kinoshita, 1959)

December 16, 2018by Hayley ScanlonLeave a comment

The cinema of the immediate post-war era, contrary to expectation, is generally hopeful and filled with the spirit of industry. Keisuke Kinoshita might be thought of as the primary proponent of post-war humanism in his fierce defence of the power of human goodness, but looking below the surface he’s also among the most critical of what the modern Japan was becoming, worried about a gradual loss of values in an increasingly consumerist society which refuses to deal with its wartime trauma in favour of burying itself in intense forward motion.

The housewife at the centre of Thus Another Day (今日もまたかくてありなん, Kyo mo mata Kakute ari nan), Yasuko (Yoshiko Kuga), is a perfect example of this internal conflict. She and her husband Shoichi (Teiji Takahashi) have built a modest house way out of the city in the still underdeveloped suburbs for which they are still burdened by an oppressive mortgage. Shoichi has a regular job as an entry level salaryman but his pay is extremely low and Yasuko is forced to scrimp and save just to get by. The central conflict occurs one summer when Shoichi’s boss declares he’s looking to rent a summer house in the quiet area where the family live. Shoichi thinks it would be a great idea to rent out their house to his boss earning both money and favour. Yasuko can go stay with her family who live in a pleasant resort town while he will stay with a friend in a city apartment. Yasuko does not really like the idea, but ends up going along with it.

Shoichi is trying to live the salaryman dream, but it isn’t really going anywhere. Yasuko is home alone all day with the couple’s small son, Kazuo, who is too young to understand why the family lives the way it does and continuously asks probing questions which upset and embarrass his mother. Watching her painstakingly washing clothes by hand, Kazuo wants to know why they don’t have an electric washing machine like some of his friends’ mothers do. Yasuko tells him they’re saving money to get one, at which point he pipes up that he personally would rather have a TV set. Like his father, he is rather self-centred but being only four can perhaps be forgiven. Nevertheless, Yasuko is constantly embarrassed by the family’s relative poverty. When another neighbour spots her out shopping and decides to accompany her, she is visibly distressed that the stall she takes her to is a little more expensive than the one she had in mind. Wanting to save face, she buys expensive fish but is mindful of there being less money for the rest of the week.

Meanwhile, Shoichi is obsessed with “getting ahead” by ingratiating himself with his bosses – hence why he decided to let out his own house over the summer. The house is, after all, Yasuko’s domain and she perhaps feels family atmosphere isn’t something you should be selling. She resents that the family will be split up over the summer even if it gives her an opportunity to visit her mother and sister out in the country. Even when Shochi arrives to visit, he makes them trot out to a neighbouring town to visit his boss’ wife also on holiday in the area, and stays there all day playing mahjong while Yasuko and Kazuo are bored out of their minds sitting idly by. The second time he doesn’t even bother to invite them.

The small resort town itself is something of a haven from the demands of the city but there is trouble and strife even here. Shortly after her arrival Yasuko meets a strange, rather sad middle-aged man who is a stay at home dad to his beloved little girl, Yoko. Takemura (Nakamura Kanzaburo XVIII) came of age in the militarist era, attending a military university to become one of the elite. The world changed on him and he remains unable to reconcile himself to the demands of the post-war society. Experiencing extreme survivor’s guilt, Takemura is filled with regret and resentment towards the ruined dreams of his misguided youth in which he abandoned a woman he loved to marry a wealthy man’s daughter who he has also let down by refusing his military pension, forcing her into the world of work and eventually onto the fringes of the sex trade as a hard drinking bar girl.

As if to underscore the looming danger, a thuggish gang of yakuza have also decided to spend the summer in the resort, holing up at the inn where Takemura’s wife is working. The young guys terrorise the youngsters of the town, disrupting the well established social hierarchy with acts of violence and intimidation. The punks cause particular consternation to Takemura who remembers all the men their age who went to war and never came back only for the successive generation to live like this. Having lost everything which made his life worth living, Takemura decides to take a stand against modern disorder, hoping to die in battle the way he feels he ought to have done all those years ago.

Thus Another Day is among the darkest of Kinoshita’s post-war dramas, suggesting that there really is no hope and that past innocence really has been lost for good. The values of Takemura’s youth, however, would not perhaps line up particularly well with those most often advanced in Kinoshita’s cinema, as kind and melancholy as he seems to be. Yasuko goes back to her crushing world of unfulfillable aspirations with her obsequious husband and demanding son with only gentle wind chimes to remind her of happier days while she tries to reaccommodate herself to the soullessness of post-war consumerism .

Original trailer (no subtitles)

Orgies of Edo (残酷異常虐待物語　元禄女系図, Teruo Ishii, 1969)

December 14, 2018by Hayley Scanlon1 Comment

“Pinky Violence” is a strangely contrary genre, often held up both as intensely misogynistic but also proto-feminist in its vast selection of vengeful heroines who seemed to embody the rage of several centuries of inescapable oppression. Teruo Ishii, at the very forefront of Toei’s attempts to graft pink film sensibilities onto its house style of manly yakuza drama, had a definite love for the perverse but, perhaps unusually, a consciousness of the implications of his world of surrealist violence. The Japanese title of Orgies of Edo (残酷異常虐待物語　元禄女系図, Zankoku Ijo Gyakutai Monogatari: Genroku Onna Keizu) translates as something like “a genealogy of the women of the Genroku Era” and concerns itself with three tales of misused women each of whom meets a grim end at the hands of faithless men who seem to embody the decadence of their prosperous times.

Ishii’s three tales of increasing madness and brutality travel from the streets to the palace in locating each scene of mounting debauchery within the shifting circles of prosperous Genroku era Edo. Our guide, positioned to the side of each of the tales, is a conservative doctor (Teruo Yoshida) who diagnoses his society as morally sick and hovering on the edge of a decadent abyss. Tellingly, each of episodes with which he becomes involved is presaged by his inability to access foreign knowledge in the wilfully isolated nation, slowly stagnating even in the midst of unprecedented prosperity.

His first patient is a young woman in the middle of a painful miscarriage caused by a beating intended to end her pregnancy. Abroad they know of an operation to avoid this sort of misery, the doctor muses, but he has no way of helping her. The young woman, Oito (Masumi Tachibana), like many in the tales of old Edo, got into debt and then was seduced by a handsome young man who posed as a saviour but only ever meant to misuse her. Hanji (Toyozo Yamamoto), a gangster, presses her into prostitution and eventually betrays her by taking up with another woman but neither of them are free of their respective captors be they the Yoshiwara or the gangster underworld.

The doctor’s second case is more extreme and calls upon him to make use of his knowledge of the Western notion of psychiatry in trying to cure a young noblewoman of her perverse fetish for the physically deformed. Ochise’s (Mitsuko Aoi) tastes stem back to a traumatic teenage incident during which she was abducted, held prisoner, and repeatedly raped by a man with a ruined face. Her loyal servant, Chokichi (Akira Ishihama), has long been in love with her but the pair remain locked in a one sided sadomasochistic relationship in which he knows that she can never return his love not because of their class difference, but because of his “perfection”. Pinching an ending from Tanizaki’s Shunkinsho, Ishii sends the frustrated lovers in a less positive direction in which a woman’s defiant insistence on pursuing her own desires is met only by the violence of a male need for possession which eventually leads to mutual destruction.

Mutual destruction is a final destination of sorts. The doctor’s third unrealisable request is for an untimely caesarian section – another piece of Western medical knowledge he has only vague awareness of. This unusual situation unfolds at the court of a lascivious lord whose perverse proclivities are quickly becoming the talk of the town. Drawn to a young woman, Omitsu (Miki Obana), who greets his attempt to fire his arrows at her while angry bulls with flaming horns charge at his other concubines with excitement, the lord is dismayed to hear of another of his ladies, Okon (Yukie Kagawa), enjoying the attentions of her pet dog and therefore somehow sullying his own bedroom reputation. The lord has Okon painted gold and thrown in a hall of mirrors for a slow and painful death of multiplied suffocations but she wins a temporary reprieve by promising to introduce him to untold pleasure if only he lets her live. This will all end in flames and ashes, but the lord hardly cares because it is only the natural end for his hedonistic endeavours.

The doctor performs his miracle and emerges with a child in whom lies the legacy of this immoral time. Yet the doctor wants to “save” it. Even if it’s a “beast” the child is innocent, he intones, insisting that he must live despite this burden in order to resist the madness. Like the strange butoh inspired performance art which opens the film, these are times of madness and confusion in which women, most of all, suffer at the hands of men who care only for their own pleasure. The doctor tries to cure the “sickness of the soul” that he sees before him, but knows that cannot be excised so much as tempered. Still he walks forward, away from the wreckage, with the future in his arms and resolves to live whatever the cost may be.

Orgies of Edo is available on blu-ray courtesy of Arrow Films.

Original trailer (no subtitles)

River Washes Away the Moon (残月大川流し, Yasushi Sasaki, 1963)

December 13, 2018by Hayley ScanlonLeave a comment

Times are changing fast in Edo. Hibari Misora reunites with director Yasushi Sasaki for another jidaigeki adventure only this time one with much less song and dance and fewer tomboy antics for the often spiky star. Set in 1868 in the immediate aftermath of the fall of the Tokugawa Shogunate, River Washes Away the Moon (残月大川流し, Zangetsu Okawa Nagashi) is, in its own way, a story of revolutions, personal and political, as sides are picked and alliances forged in midst of a city in flux.

Edo, 1868. The Tokugawa Shogunate has been drummed out of the capital by the collective forces of Satsuma, Choshu, and Tosa but a new regime has yet to solidify itself. While some remain loyal to the Tokugawa cause, others join the new imperial armies leaving Edo a fractured state in which loyalists are on the run and violence rules the streets. Meanwhile, ordinary Edoities are trying to go about their everyday business. Ogin (Hibari Misora), an orphan, is a member of a pickpocketing gang run by a cruel mistress who metes out extreme punishments to those deemed to have transgressed her stringent rules, most often by trying to keep some of the money for themselves rather than hand it to the bosses for “redistribution”. Ogin is good at pickpocketing, but she has a noble heart and feels sorry for the country bumpkins who often become her prey. The madame wants her to take over the gang, but she wants out of the criminal life as soon as possible.

With things the way they are, the the loyalists ask the pickpockets for a favour – steal the shoulder badges off the Imperialist mercenaries so they won’t be able to return to their camps. The madame declares herself apolitical and declines but Ogin, a true child of Edo, feels quite differently and is only too keen to support the loyalists in whichever way she can. She gets her opportunity when a wounded soldier, Shinzaburo (Yoshitomo Ogasawara), creeps into the house she hides out in to get away from the gang. Ogin bravely hides Shinzaburo from the Imperialist troops and then hides him again when he returns sometime later after another battle with a lost little girl in tow. The pair grow closer, but Shinzaburo is under the impression Ogin is a wealthy merchant’s daughter and has no idea she is a poor orphan forced to pick pockets on the streets in return for safe harbour.

Unlike many of Misora’s jidaigeki heroines, Ogin is a much more “feminine” figure – she never gets to do any fighting of her own and the (extremely subdued) romance with Shinzaburo becomes the film’s main focus. She is however steadfast and bold. She stands up to her madame as much as feels she is able and is desperate to extract herself from the criminal world. As an orphan without any other means of support, however, her options are limited and even when she tries to do good it’s thrown back in her face.

Even Shinzaburo whose ideals one would hope to be more compassionate is after all a loyalist and not a revolutionary. His ideals are conservative if bending towards the moral good and therefore when he finds out what Ogin really is their connection is broken, he loses respect for her and though she never lied to him he blames her for the life she was forced to lead. A man like Shinzaburo might have lost his place, but he’s never known the kind of hardship a woman like Ogin has had to endure and the concepts are alien to him.

After getting her heart broken by Shinzaburo, Ogin finds the strength to break away from her criminal family by becoming an itinerant musician which gives Misora a chance to sing another song – her only other musical number is a full on set piece taking place during a community show held to raise money for orphans and possibly reunite dislocated people with their families in the process. Nevertheless Misora delivers an impressive performance as the continuously lovelorn Ogin, convinced that her world is limited by the circumstances of her birth and only latterly realising she has the power to change her fate (if for the slightly dubious reasons of proving herself worthy of Shinzaburo). Ogin opts for her personal revolution while Shinzaburo opts for a political one. By 1963 the winds of change were indeed blowing through Tokyo once again, though if there are any political messages to be found in River Washes Away the Moon they are fairly subtle and lean more towards compassionate living and finding the strength to live by your principles than advocating for direct agitation as the best path towards a fairer world.

Hibari’s musical numbers (no subtitles)

The Empty Table (食卓のない家, Masaki Kobayashi, 1985)

December 11, 2018December 11, 2018by Hayley ScanlonLeave a comment

Japanese cinema of the 1980s is marked by an increasing desire to interrogate the idea of “the family” in an atmosphere of individualist consumerism. Yoshimitsu’s Morita’s The Family Game had blown the traditional ideas of filial piety and the primacy of the patriarch wide open in exposing his ordinary middle-class family as little more than a simulacrum as its various members sleepwalked through life playing the roles expected of them free of the true feeling one would expect to define familial bonds. A year later, Sogo Ishii’s The Crazy Family took a different, perhaps more positive approach, in depicting a family descending into madness through the various social pressures of maintaining a conventional middle-class life in the cramped environment of frenetic Tokyo. Masaki Kobayashi, unlike many of his contemporaries, was not so much interested in families as in individuals whose struggles to assert themselves in a conformist society became his major focus. The Empty Table (食卓のない家, Shokutaku no nai Ie) is not perhaps “a family drama” but it is, if indirectly, a drama about family and the ways in which the wider familial context of society at large often seeks to misuse it.

Set in 1973, The Empty Table is also among the earliest films to tackle the aftermath of the 1972 Asama-Sanso Incident. For ten days in February, the nation watched live as the police found themselves in a stand off with five United Red Army former student radicals who had taken the wife of an innkeeper hostage and holed up in a mountain lodge, refusing to give themselves up to the police. The discoveries surrounding the conduct of the United Red Army which had descended into a cult-like madness involving several murders of its members (including one of a heavily pregnant woman) shocked the nation and finally ended the student movement in Japan.

Kidoji (Tatsuya Nakadai) is the father of one of the student radicals, Otohiko (Kiichi Nakai), who took part in the siege. In Japanese culture, it’s usual for the parents of a person involved in a scandal to come forward and offer an official apology to the nation on behalf of the their children. During the siege itself the family had also been weaponised as mothers, particularly, were enlisted to shout from outside the inn, offering poignant messages intended to get their sons to give themselves up and come home. Kidoji, unlike the other fathers (one of whom hanged himself in shame), refuses his social obligation on the grounds that the actions of his grownup son are no longer his responsibility.

As a scientist, Kidoji is used to thinking things through in rational terms and outside of Japan his logic may seem unassailable – after all, it is unreasonable to hold the conduct of a family member against an otherwise upright and obedient citizen. In Japan however his actions make him seem cold and unfeeling, as if he has disowned both his son and his position as the father of a family with whom rests ultimate responsibility for those listed on his family register. This way of thinking may be very feudal, but it is the way things work not just in the late 20th century, but even in the early 21st.

Kidoji’s refusal to do what is expected of him eventually leads to the crumbling of the family unit. Far from the cheerful scene we see of Kidoji, his wife, and their three children seated around a dinner table in celebration, the family now eat separately and Kidoji returns home to cold meals and an empty table. Kidoji’s wife, Yumiko (Mayumi Ogawa), has had a breakdown and had to be hospitalised, while his daughter Tamae (Kie Nakai) is forced to break off her engagement only to resort to underhanded methods to be allowed to marry the man she loves. While Otohiko languishes in prison, only his younger brother Osamu (Takayuki Takemoto) remains at home.

Kobayashi’s central concern is the conflict in Kidoji’s heart as he faces a choice between maintaining his principles and saving his family pain. It’s not that Kidoji feels nothing – on the contrary, he is profoundly wounded by all that has happened to him, but ironically enough, puts on the face society expects but does not want in maintaining his composure in a situation of extreme difficulty. Kidoji’s deepest anxieties rest in the need to “take responsibility”, something he must do in acknowledging that it’s not his son’s disgrace which has destroyed his family but his own rigidity in refusing to bend his principles and obey social convention. What Kidoji wants is for his son to take responsibility for his own choices as an individual rather than expecting his family to carry his load for him. He must, however, also take responsibility for the effect his choices have had on others, including on his family, and accept his role both as an individual and as a member of a society with rights and obligations.

Kidoji’s refusal to apologise on behalf of his son looks to the rest of society like an abnegation of his paternal authority, and without paternal authority the family unit crumbles like a feudal household whose lord has been murdered. Yet Kidoji, like many of Kobayashi’s heroes, refuses to compromise his principals no matter how much personal pain they eventually cause him. Where the rules of society make no sense to him, he will ignore (if not quite oppose) them, remaining true to his own notions of moral righteousness.

In many ways, Kidoji is the archetypal Kobayashi hero – standing up to social oppression and refusing to simply give in even when he knows how beneficial that may be to all concerned. He is also, however, just as problematic in allowing his family to continue suffering in preservation of his personal beliefs. Kobayashi’s final feature film, The Empty Table is extremely dated in terms of shooting style with its overly theatrical dialogue and frequent use of voice over and monologue which were long out of fashion by the mid-1980s. Kobayashi does, however, return to the more expressionist style of his earlier career, moving towards an etherial sense of poetry as his hero contemplates his place in a society which often asks him to behave in ways which compromise his essential value system. The family, broken as it is, is also (partly) mended once again as Kidoji begins to reconcile his various “responsibilities” into a more comprehensive whole as he prepares to welcome a new generation seemingly as determined to live in as principled and unorthodox a way as he himself has.

The Lies She Loved (嘘を愛する女, Kazuhito Nakae, 2018)

December 10, 2018by Hayley ScanlonLeave a comment

How well do you really know the people with whom you share your life? Or, perhaps, how honest have you really been with those closest you? Inspired by a notorious newspaper article, The Lies She Loved (嘘を愛する女, Uso wo Aisuru Onna) has a few hard questions to ask about the nature of modern relationships and the secrets which often lie at their hearts. Yet the message is perhaps that there are different kinds of truths and the literal may be among the least important of them. The salient message is that consideration for the feelings of others and a willingness to share the burden of being alive are the only real paths towards a fulfilling existence.

30-something Yukari (Masami Nagasawa) is a workaholic career woman currently at the top of her corporate game. Unmarried, she’s been living with impoverished medical researcher Kippei (Issey Takahashi) for the last five years and is happy enough with him (save the occasional one night stand) but also feels as if there’s something missing. She’s angry when he doesn’t show up to a pre-arranged dinner where he’s supposed to meet her mum, leaving her to deal with her mother’s disapproving scorn all alone, but chastened when it’s revealed he was found collapsed in a local park and is currently in the hospital after suffering a brain haemorrhage. If that weren’t enough chaos for the hyper organised Yukari, the police tell her Kippei’s ID is fake. He doesn’t work where he said he said worked and no one seems to have heard of him. Remembering a conversation about cheating spouses, Yukari turns to the detective uncle (Daigo) of one of her work friends for help but starts to wonder what sort of answers it is that she’s really looking for.

An intriguing mystery, The Lies She Loved begins in worrying fashion as if it wants to punish Yukari for her obsessive workaholic lifestyle and avoidance of the traditionally feminine roles of wife and mother. The couple aren’t married, but Kippei is for all intents and purposes a kept man and house husband. He doesn’t earn enough to contribute to the household economy, but makes up for it by handling the domestic tasks usually the domain of a “wife”, i.e. cooking and cleaning. Meanwhile, Yukari works insane hours and often stays out drinking with colleagues, claiming this valuable out of hours time as part of the job but sometimes spending it with other men. We see her “lie” to Kippei, telling him a large bouquet of snacks won from an amusement stand was a gift from a female friend when it came from a “date”, while he reproves her with coldness for her excessive drinking and the tendency it provokes in her for unsolicited cruelty.

Yet moving on we see that a woman’s career, or man’s lack of one, is not the issue at all. The issue is neglect, a taking for granted of other people’s feelings and their willingness to provide support and affection while getting nothing in return. Rather than going to work, Kippei had been spending time in a coffeeshop writing something that’s somewhere between novel and therapy about a happy family living on an idyllic island. We discover that he too once took something for granted, became wrapped up in his career, and overburdened someone else by allowing them to take on the entirety of their mutual responsibility with tragic consequences. Filled with remorse, he ran away from his crime and tried to forget.

The crime is not a woman working, but people in general working too much and knowing each other too little. Humiliated, Yukari wants answers about her immediate past, wanting to know if she was tricked by a conman in order to avoid facing the fact that she never really bothered to ask many questions about the man she invited into her home. Indeed, her decision to “invite” him in the first place is not altogether altruistic and cannot help giving off the scent of mild desperation as she tries to make the arrangement seem convenient while ensuring she retains the upper-hand in the power dynamics without giving too much away. What she really wants to know, without really wanting to admit it, is if her lover really loved her despite his “lies”, but to know that she’ll have to deal with her own longstanding intimacy issues and accept that a loving home is a balanced one in which both partners are equal and agree to share their burdens with openness and generosity. A progressive, nuanced look at modern romance The Lies She Loved is a surprisingly effective defence of love and a mild rebuke of the society which does its best to undermine it.

Original trailer (no subtitles)