Tag: Japan

Bleach (BLEACH ブリーチ, Shinsuke Sato, 2018)

September 16, 2018by Hayley Scanlon3 Comments

Tite Kubo’s Bleach (BLEACH ブリーチ) had the distinction of being one of three phenomenally popular long running manga series (alongside Eiichiro Oda’s One Piece and Masashi Kishimoto’s Naruto) which dominated the industry from the early 2000s until its completion in August 2016. The series spans 74 collected volumes and was also adapted into a successful television anime which itself ran for several seasons and spawned a number of animated movies. It might seem like a no brainer to bring the series to the big screen with a live action adaptation but Bleach is no ordinary manga and the demands of recreating its fearsome world of cruel death gods and huge soul sucking monsters are a daunting prospect. Perfectly placed to tackle such a challenge, director Shinsuke Sato (I am a Hero, Inuyashiki) spent more than a year in post-production working on the CGI and has brought his characteristic finesse to the finely crafted world of Kubo’s Karakura.

Our hero, Ichigo Kurosaki (Sota Fukushi), is a regular fifteen-year-old high school student, save for his fiery orange hair and the ability to see ghosts. He lives with his relentlessly cheerful father (Yosuke Eguchi) and two cute little sisters but is also nursing guilt and regret over the death of his mother (Masami Nagasawa) who died protecting him from a monster when he was just a child. Feeling disconnected from his family, Ichigo likes to put on a front of bravado – taking on petty punks to teach them a lesson though, in a motif which will be repeated, he only escapes an early encounter unharmed thanks to the intervention of his unusually strong friend, Chad (Yu Koyanagi). Ichigo’s life is changed forever when he finds a strange girl, Rukia (Hana Sugisaki), in his room where she despatches a lingering spirit back its rightful destination of Soul Society. That was not, however, her primary mission and a giant “Hollow” suddenly punches a fist through Ichigo’s living room and scoops up his littlest sister. Rukia does her best to defeat the beast but is seriously wounded. Sensing Ichigo’s high psychic ability, she breaks the rules of her own society and transfers her powers to him but later discovers she gave him too much and is unable to return to Soul Society unless Ichigo ups his Soul Reaper rep to the point he is strong enough to survive giving her powers back.

Loosely speaking Sato adapts the “Soul Reaper Agent” (which is eventually attached to the title during the credits sequence) arc, otherwise known as “Substitute Shinigami”, in which Ichigo gets used to his new life as a Soul Reaper. Condensing Kubo’s considerably lengthy manga to a mere 108 minutes is obviously a difficult exercise necessitating a slight refocussing of Ichigo’s essential character arc as well as that of the feisty Rukia. Sato’s streamlined narrative emphasises Ichigo’s ongoing psychodrama as an adolescent young man attempting to deal with the repressed trauma of his mother’s death and his own feelings of guilt and regret in having unwittingly dragged her into a dangerous situation from which he was unable to protect her. Being “the protector” remains a primary concern of the young Ichigo who withdraws from his family but is determined to protect them from harm. His odd friendship with the similarly conflicted Rukia whose upbringing in the austere surroundings of Soul Society has left her also feeling isolated and friendless (but believing these are both “good” things to be) paradoxically returns him to the real world just he’s turned into an all-powerful monster fighting hero.

Yet the important lesson Ichigo learns is through repeated failures. His mother died saving him, his first fight is ended by a friend, and he is finally redeemed once again by an act of selfless female sacrifice. What Ichigo is supposed to learn, is that he doesn’t always need to be the protector and that being protected is sometimes alright because what’s important is the mutuality of protection, emotional, spiritual, and physical. Meanwhile Rukia, having lost her powers, is perhaps sidelined, rendered both vulnerable and empowered as she becomes Ichigo’s mentor in all things Soul Reaper. This quality of restraint is also how she chooses to make use of her power – something beautifully brought out in Sugisaki’s wonderfully nuanced performance as Rukia’s icy Soul Reaper exterior begins to thaw thanks to her unexpected connection with Ichigo.

Rather than get bogged down in exposition, Sato is content to let the world simply exist with occasional explanations offered in the form of Rukia’s improbably cute rabbit drawings in a motif borrowed from the manga. Sato makes sure to include a number of background players including the strong armed Chad and the lovelorn Orihime (Erina Mano) as well the omniscient shop owner Urahara (Seiichi Tanabe) though their role is strictly to add background colour rather than actively participate in the plot. Despite occasional narrative fudging, Bleach succeeds as a high-octane action blockbuster, by turns slick, ironic, and affecting but always grounded in the real even in excess.

Bleach is currently available to stream worldwide via Netflix.

Original trailer (no subtitles)

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

September 15, 2018by Hayley Scanlon2 Comments

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Downtown Heroes (ダウンタウンヒーローズ, AKA Hope and Pain, Yoji Yamada, 1988)

September 14, 2018by Hayley ScanlonLeave a comment

Unlike many of his contemporaries, Yoji Yamada was an infrequent visitor to the youth movie. Best remembered for his long running Tora-san series, Yamada’s later output is marked by an alternation of laughter and tears, running between raucous family comedies and poignant examinations of wartime loss. Set in the immediate postwar period, 1988’s Downtown Heroes (ダウンタウンヒーローズ, AKA Hope and Pain) adapts the autobiographical novel by Akira Hayasaka for a twin tale of endings and beginnings as a group of boys prepare to leave the Japan of their childhood behind and set out into the brand-new post-war future.

Our narrator for the tale is Hayasaka’s stand-in, Kosuke (Hashinosuke Nakamura), a sensitive young man from the mountains studying at the prestigious boys’ boarding school in town. The Matsuyama high school is one of the last to still be operating in Japan’s pre-war educational model. In fact, when the boys graduate the school will shut down in favour of the American 6-3-3 standard model of organising the educational system. Nevertheless, Kosuke and his friends enjoy what seems like a fantastically broad curriculum to modern eyes, much of which consists of classic German literature. Rather than their family names, the boys refer to each other with a series of nicknames inspired by their studies and have been heavily influenced by European left-wing political ideology. Accordingly, they are less than happy about the imposed American “reforms” and, paradoxically, the restrictions placed on their individual “freedom” by the “imperialist” occupation.

The central drama revolves around two episodes occurring one after another during the final year of high school. The first involves Kosuke’s friend Arles (Toshinori Omi) and a prostitute he helps to rescue from the red light district – Sakiko (Eri Ishida) was supposed to elope with a student from the school, but he didn’t show up and if the people from the brothel she was sold to find her she’ll be in big trouble. Her suitor turns out to be a fraud, but the boys are committed to saving her and hide Sakiko in their dorm, sharing their meagre rations with her before helping her escape to her home town. Meanwhile, the boys are also preparing for the very last culture festival the school will ever see at which they will present their adaptation of a classic German play. The snag is, the play needs a girl. Eventually the gang enlist the help of Fusako (Hiroko Yakushimaru) – a student at the girls’ school recently repatriated from Manchuria who also happens to be the young lady Kosuke had a meet cute with on the road and has been in love with ever since. Trouble brews when Gan (Tetta Sugimoto), the play’s director, falls in love with her too.

Told from the POV both of the old and the young Kosuke, the atmosphere is one of intense melancholy and inescapable nostalgia. Though these were times of hardship – rationing is fierce and intense, so much so that the school no longer serves meals at all on Sundays and the boys largely subsist on rice gruel, they were also times of joy and possibility. These are however youngsters in the best tradition of the sensitive young men of Japanese literature. They feel everything deeply, fully aware that they are living on the cusp of something new, which necessarily also means to be standing atop a grave. Their world is collapsing and the values they’ve been given (progressive though they seem to be) are about to be thrown out of the window. They have been taught that nothing is more important than their personal autonomy and that personal freedom is attained only through overcoming hardship, but their lives will increasingly be dictated by occupying forces and they feel themselves robbed of something without the right to reply.

Nevertheless their problems are also ordinary teenage ones of romantic crises and friendship dilemmas. Kosuke struggles with his love at first sight crush on Fusako but remains too diffident to say anything until it’s almost too late, while he also struggles to figure out what the most proper thing to do is when Gan reveals he is also in love with her. Gan, a sensitive writer, apparently burns with longing – so much so that he’s written a book long confession of love in apology for being unable to declare himself in person. Kosuke, a good friend, agrees to deliver the letter but both of them have neglected to consider Fusakao’s feelings so bound up are they in their own solipsistic dramas. Fusako was also struck by the love bug on her first meeting with Kosuke and has been patiently waiting for him to say something (as is the custom of the time). She is therefore doubly hurt and offended when he delivers a mini-tome on the theme of love from someone else before attempting to leave abruptly in a huff. Truth be told, there are few women who would enjoy being handed a thesis as a confession, but Fusako is really not in the mood to read one now.

Ending on a melancholy epilogue in which the old Kosuke looks on at field of young men playing American football before some others in running shorts brush past him and a young couple enjoy an evening walk, Yamada embraces the mild sense of deflation that has been building since the beginning. Young love faded and the dreams of youth were destined to come to nothing – not quite a tragedy, or perhaps only one of the ordinary kind, but food for the regrets of age all the same. The times were hard, and then they got better but somehow they were never so happy again. A youth drama indeed.

Original trailer (no subtitles)

Theme song “Jidai” performed by Hiroko Yakushimaru

Sennan Asbestos Disaster (ニッポン国VS泉南石綿村, Kazuo Hara, 2017)

September 10, 2018July 21, 2019by Hayley Scanlon1 Comment

In these troubled times, many may find themselves wondering what the purpose of government really is. Is the primary duty of the state to look after its citizens or to maintain “order” and what exactly is the limit of the state’s responsibility towards those most in need of its care? Director Kazuo Hara had made a career of examining the lives of those who dared to defy the system, but his latest film Sennan Asbestos Disaster (ニッポン国VS泉南石綿村, Nipponkoku vs Sennan Ishiwata Mura) focusses not on an individual but on a group of ordinary people attempting to stand up to governmental bureaucracy after having been betrayed by successive administrations who put economic prosperity ahead of citizens’ welfare.

Asbestos was hailed as something of a wonder for its highly useful properties including sound insulation, fire proofing, strength and durability. Increasing in use throughout the industrial revolution, the harmful affects of asbestos were first discovered in the early 20th century but its use across most of the world was not banned until the turn of the millennium following long campaigns by those whose health had been adversely affected by breathing in its fibres leading to long term respiratory issues and even a risk of cancer.

In Sennan, in the South West of Japan, asbestos production was the dominant economy stretching back into the Meiji era. Concerns had been raised about the possible harmful effects of asbestos before the war and then again afterwards, but successive governments chose to do nothing while workers remained unaware of the risks even while noticing that many of their friends and family members were dying young often of respiratory conditions. Most only became aware that asbestos was dangerous in 2005 following a national scandal known as the “Kubota Shock” in which a well respected manufacturer of machinery was forced to admit that as much as 10% of its workforce had died of asbestos-related conditions.

Hara follows a collective of Sennan residents who have come together to file a class action law suit against the government for failing to ensure safety standards in asbestos production. Led by Kazuyoshi Yuoka whose grandfather owned an asbestos factory before the war, the group members are mainly older men and women who worked in the factories during the economically straitened days of the immediate post-war period. Though many point to the otherwise progressive nature of the factories which were desperate to attract workers and keen to foster a community spirit as well as offering other benefits including access to education, it is true that many of the employees were among those already facing other kinds of oppression aside from the economic – the uneducated rural poor, women, and a large number of minorities including zainichi Koreans. This information is important because it exposes the truth that the state decided these people were expendable and could be sacrificed in the name of the economic prosperity that was deemed necessary in order to rebuild the nation after its crushing wartime defeat.

Unlike the protagonists of Hara’s previous films, the Sennan campaigners are ordinary people – those assumed to have very little social power pressuring their government to take responsibility for having wilfully abandoned them. Unsurprisingly, the government is not very keen to do so. The legal case drags on eight years during which many of the sufferers die while their children or spouses continue the quest for justice. The case itself is wider than it first seems, extending not just to factory workers but to those exposed by general proximity such as famers owning land near asbestos plants and in one poignant case a woman whose parents took her to the factory while they worked when she was a child.

Forming a tightly knit community, the campaigners present a united front but come up against the wall of bureaucracy. As time wears on it’s difficult not to feel a small amount of sympathy for the junior civil servants the government trots out to deal with angry protestors, forced to repeat the same tired phrases without explanation while the group insist on seeing someone with a bit more clout, but even when the case is finally proved, progress is slow and the ritual apology as hollow as it always is. Yet even if some are angered by the perfunctory nature of professional atonement, others actively embrace it and appear grateful even for this small shred of attention from the authority. It’s here that Hara wavers in his sympathy, admiring the kindhearted solidarity of the protestors but lamenting their tendency towards feudal deference when they should be raging against a society which is often content to exploit and discard them, remaining accidentally complicit in enabling a gradual decline of democratic freedoms.

Nevertheless, Sennan Asbestos Disaster is the chronicle of a (partially) successful campaign in which a group of concerned citizens working within the law eventually force the government to concede an error, even if that concession may turn out to have no wider application. The victory, however, can’t bring back lost time nor ease past suffering and only serves to draw a line under one chapter of a struggle which is sadly far from over.

Sennan Asbestos Disaster was screened as part of a Kazuo Hara focus at Open City Documentary Festival 2018.

Original trailer (English subtitles)

The Emperor’s Naked Army Marches On (ゆきゆきて、神軍, Kazuo Hara, 1987)

September 9, 2018November 11, 2019by Hayley ScanlonLeave a comment

The relationship between a director and a subject can often be a complex one. Who is really leading who and towards what end is a difficult enough question at the best of times, but when your subject is an unhinged crackpot with a definite agenda, a natural love of the camera, and an unpredictable violent streak, it’s an inescapable conundrum. Kenzo Okuzaki, a Pacific War veteran with a deeply seated grudge against the emperor for his refusal to acknowledge his war guilt, first came to the attention of director Shohei Imamura but a second stretch in prison for firing pachinko balls at the object of his wrath put paid to his directorial hopes. 10 years later Imamura passes his subject on to Kazuo Hara who finds himself increasingly at the mercy of his mercurial campaign for truth and reconciliation.

The main thrust of Okuzaki’s current activities lies in uncovering the facts behind the deaths of two enlisted men who were executed in New Guinea three weeks after the war was over. Okuzaki believes the men were murdered and lays the blame at the feet firstly of the officers on the ground and ultimately at those of the emperor who created the circumstances in which all of this horror was allowed to bloom. To assist him in his investigations, Okuzaki ropes in the families of the victims – one a Shinto priestess who is convinced she sees her brother in her dreams and on her altar, and the other a conflicted brother who just wants to know the truth. The truth, however, may be hard to hear, as one of the men Okuzaki corners tries to tell them. Like most of the others questioned about the events of almost forty years before, he advises the family that it’s better not to know while emphasising that their relatives died through no fault of their own.

What is probably obvious to Okuzaki but not to the relatively less cynical family members is that an issue is being skirted. The soldier makes out that he doesn’t want to go into the deaths because the men were executed for desertion – something which is absurd in itself when the war was already over, and that he did not want the family to experience the shame and social stigma of being related to “cowards” who failed in their “duty”. Such notions are already out of date by the late ‘80s, but evidently still weigh heavily on the minds of veterans. Wanting to spare others the pain and shame of discovering the truth about what happened in New Guinea is a frequent excuse offered by those questioned, but perhaps a way of deflecting their own reluctance to speak of such deeply traumatic, extremely difficult events.

Getting them to open up is not Okuzaki’s first thought. Okuzaki himself is a strange man with a disturbing aura and a tendency to self-aggrandisement. When we first meet him he’s acting as a go-between at a wedding of a man he met through his “activism” which is to say a fellow combatant in Okuzaki’s campaign against “The Establishment”. A wedding speech might not be the most appropriate moment to embark on a personal history that involves going to prison for murdering someone you “did not want” to murder as well as a litany of anti-establishment acts including the pachinko ball incident and distributing “pornographic” pictures of the emperor to shoppers at a Tokyo department store. Nevertheless, Okuzaki is extremely proud of these “achievements” which exemplify how he alone has continued to fight the good fight in the post-war world. He sees his original conviction as karma not for his actions in the Pacific but the wastefulness of his life afterwards. He now believes he was saved from New Guinea in order to educate the young about the horrors of war and ensure none of this ever happens again.

Problematically, his main weapon in this fight is violence. Okuzaki’s manner is one of extreme politeness, bordering on obsequiousness, but he is also direct and aggressive, becoming violent when his subjects decline to answer his questions. The relatives are there to shame the officers into speaking the truth through being directly confronted by the human costs of their actions, but Okuzaki’s personal bluster hasn’t thought through the various ways in which his tactics might make it more difficult for them to speak. After all, Okuzaki is a veteran of New Guinea himself, if these men could feel comfortable talking to anyone about their experiences, you’d think they could turn to someone like Okuzaki if only he were not so frightening a presence. Uncomfortably enough, the violence does seem to work and Okuzaki gets his answers through intimidation which leaves his quarry broken and compliant. Despite claiming to work for world peace, Okuzaki believes that his violence is justified by the worthiness of his aims, which you have to admit is an oddly familiar mantra.

His subject’s propensity for violence places Hara in a difficult position, as do his frequent attempts at engineering the situation including roping in his wife and a couple of male friends to pose as relatives of the deceased when the original couple tire of Okuzaki’s exploitative antics. Okuzaki quite obviously has a very clear aim for what he perhaps sees as a propaganda exercise for his ongoing cause which might stand in deep contrast to that of his director who is, after all, a bystander reconstructing narrative after the fact. Okuzaki emerges as a symbol of a nation’s repressed trauma, skittering between officious politeness and belligerent violence while offering a bizarre, quasi-religious philosophy about god’s plan for us all. Hara remains caught between conflicting impulses, unwittingly complicit in Okuzaki’s personal war against war while trying to maintain control in the face of his constant manipulations. As a portrait of a madman The Emperor’s Naked Army Marches On excels, painting Okuzaki as a product of his own mad times while refusing to back away from the bitter truths his madness is so keen to expose.

The Emperor’s Naked Army Marches On (ゆきゆきて、神軍, Yuki Yukite, Shingun) was screened as part of a Kazuo Hara focus at Open City Documentary Festival 2018.

Short clip from the film (English subtitles)

Extreme Private Eros: Love Song 1974 (極私的エロス恋歌1974, Kazuo Hara, 1974)

September 7, 2018July 21, 2019by Hayley ScanlonLeave a comment

If you’re going to use your camera to interrogate the world, perhaps it’s only fair to let the world interrogate you by means of your own camera. Kazuo Hara’s second documentary is about as personal as its possible to get – a detached, rational examination of the interplay between the director and his subject who happens to be his former lover and the mother of his child. A thinly veiled excuse to maintain contact with a woman who had abandoned him and taken his child with her, Extreme Private Eros: Love Song 1974 (極私的エロス恋歌1974, Gokushiteki Eros: Renka 1974) is both a tiny snapshot of a nation in flux, and a timeless exploration of the end of love.

Hara and his former lover Miyuki Takeda had lived together for three years and even had a child when she abruptly announced that she no longer wanted to live under the authority of a man or as a member of a “traditional” family and intended to leave in order to live a life of complete independence. Although the relationship was officially over, Miyuki maintained contact with Hara and visited him more or less weekly so it was an additional shock when she suddenly announced she was moving to Okinawa. However, Miyuki made a strange request of her former lover – that he film her attempt to give birth without assistance. Hoping to remain close to her or perhaps to attempt to understand better the reasoning behind her erratic behaviour, Hara agrees.

In Okinawa, Miyuki has moved in with another woman, Sugako, but the relationship between them appears strained and ill defined. Hara’s arrival, he eventually realises, is yet another disruptive influence in this already fraught environment but it’s unclear whether his camera is a deliberate or accidental witness to a series of extremely difficult, not to mention private, conversations taking place in front of a third party in which Miyuki berates her silent roommate for rejecting her desire for a full and exclusive relationship in favour of continuing to sleep with her friend Tommy.

When the relationship with Sugako breaks down, Miyuki takes up with a black GI, Paul, who later becomes the father of the child she intends to birth alone. Though interviewing Miyuki alongside Paul (who speaks no Japanese) is a mild and dispassionate affair, interviewing Miyuki alone about her new lover and the basis of their relationship sends Hara into a spiral of jealousy and despair in which he eventually cedes control of his camera to an assistant and appears on screen breaking down in tears. Wondering if Miyuki is as accidentally jealous of him as he is of Miyuki, Hara muddies the waters by inviting his own new lover, Sachiko – who is also pregnant with his child, to assist him in the making of the documentary. Hara gets his wish. Miyuki is indeed jealous, angrily barking at Sachiko while running down her former lover in every conceivable way, and yet the two women eventually end up bonding, once again excluding Hara from his own attempt at narrative.

The perspective is indeed Hara’s – his weary voiceover and occasionally passive aggressive, exasperated intertitles making plain his own confusion and continued searching for the central question of what exactly he’s trying to achieve, but Miyuki wrestles with him for overall control and to assert her right of ownership over her own story (or at least the presentation of it). Miyuki’s quest seems to be one of total independence – she rejects the world of the patriarchal family, later rejecting love entirely and resolving to live without a man or woman, but remains firmly within its standard ideological parameters in recasting herself as the embodiment of selfless motherhood. She rejects the ideas of traditional Japanese femininity, insisting that her children are raised to be aggressive rather than meek or gentle or kind and going so far as to reject these supposedly feminised qualities as she sees them in her own son as reflections of those same qualities she eventually found unappealing in Hara. She becomes obsessed with the idea of mixed-race children, perhaps as an extension of her desire for a non-Japanese idea of individualism, but later tells her new born daughter that Japan is good and America bad, and pens a damning letter of advice to the women of Okinawa warning them off deceitful GIs.

Miyuki is a woman with scant respect for boundaries and so Hara is granted near unrestricted access to the entirety of her existence as she pursues her various desires and contradictory convictions. Hara’s camera is both unobtrusive and powerfully present, privy to extremely private thoughts and conversations and only occasionally inserting itself into the narrative but unafraid to embrace taboos while perhaps also conflicted in its own defiant pursuit of emotional honesty at all costs. In attempting to capture his subject Hara illuminates both himself and his society, exposing painful truths and unwelcome prejudices but perhaps allowing them to fester unresolved in a future which is both open yet also uncertain.

Extreme Private Eros: Love Song 1974 was screened as part of a Kazuo Hara focus at Open City Documentary Festival 2018.

Trailer (English subtitles)

The Portrait (肖像, Keisuke Kinoshita, 1948)

September 6, 2018by Hayley ScanlonLeave a comment

The immediate post-war period was one of fear and hardship. You might survive, but you might not like the person you’ll have to become in order to do so. The (unexpected) heroine of Keisuke Kinoshita’s The Portrait (肖像, Shozo) thought she’d made her peace with her choices, only to be confronted by a vision of her essential self as seen through the eyes of a cheerfully innocent artist. Despite the harshness of the times, there are those who’ve learned to be happy in their lot, but is their talent for happiness inspiration or irritation for those who’ve chosen a different path?

Kinoshita opens with a comic scene in which two shady real estate brokers take a look at a local property. Deciding it’s overpriced and impractical, the pair nevertheless decide to buy it together with the intention of flipping it once they convert the downstairs workspace into more practical living accommodation. There is, however, a slight hitch in that there are sitting tenants – a painter and his family who live in the room upstairs and use the rooms below as a studio. Thinking it will be easy enough to evict them, the men aren’t bothered but the the family are all so relentlessly nice that no one has yet been able to tell them to go. As a last resort, one of the men, Kaneko (Eitaro Ozawa), decides to move into the upstairs with his mistress, Midori (Kuniko Igawa), in the hope that the family will feel so awkward and in the way they will decide to vacate. Innocent and unworldly, the Nomuras all assume Midori is her lover’s daughter rather than his mistress, and start treating her like a well to do young lady. Such sudden and unexpected respect starts to weigh on Midori’s mind as she finds herself playing along, pretending to be “nice” and “respectable” while knowing that the life she’s living is anything but.

The problem is that the Nomuras are so essentially kind and welcoming that they really don’t mind sharing the house. Mr. Nomura (Ichiro Sugai), the middle-aged painter, feels guilty that he doesn’t earn more money and is too poor to move, but he’s also the sort to get over excited about having grown a giant pumpkin that he can’t resist showing to absolutely everyone. As it turns out the Nomuras are also living with a private tragedy – their eldest son Ichiro (Toru Abe) whose wife Kumiko (Kuniko Miyake) and son Koichi also live with the family has not yet returned home from the war and his whereabouts are unknown. Still, they don’t mind talking about it and are as happy as they can be, dancing away under the light of the moon – an unexpected upside to constant power outages. Meanwhile, Kaneko complains loudly as he attempts to finish his accounts in the evening gloom.

Midori half envies, half resents her new neighbours. The longer she lives with the Nomuras the guiltier she starts to feel in deceiving them. Matters begin to come to a head when Mr. Nomura asks permission to paint her portrait. He thinks Midori has a very “interesting” face, in part because he can see a sadness in her eyes that is totally absent in those of his daughter, Yoko (Yoko Katsuragi). Midori agrees and swaps her usual Western attire for the kimono her mother once gave her, but the picture Mr. Nomura paints begins to bother her. The portrait is of a pure young woman, innocent and honest, which is about as far from the way she sees herself as it’s possible to be.

As a friend of Midori’s puts it, you have to survive somehow and Midori thought she’d made her peace with the way she has decided to live but the portrait reminds her that she wasn’t always like this and now she’s not sure which version of herself she ought to despise. She wishes she could paint herself over, but feels her fate is sealed and there’s no way back. Kumiko, a little more worldly wise than her in-laws, is perfectly aware of what’s been going on upstairs but isn’t at all bothered by it. She doesn’t blame Midori for the choices that she’s made and thinks the picture is accurate in capturing her true soul, advising her that it is possible to be that woman again if that’s what she really wants.

The Portrait was scripted by none other than Akira Kurosawa whose belief in the essential goodness of humanity was perhaps not quite as strong as Kinoshita’s but the Nomuras are nevertheless typical Kinoshita heroes and it’s their unguarded warmth and kindness which begins to change the world for those around them. Even the cynical Kaneko is eventually moved by their cheerful selflessness, forced to accept their accidental moral victory rather than continue with his nefarious plan. Midori, forced into a reconsideration of herself, stands in for a generation attempting to make peace with the compromises of the past, learning that they don’t need to define the future and that it isn’t too late to strive for a more authentic life of simple happiness even if you feel you may have already sunk too far.

The Nomuras dancing in the moonlight

Puppets Under Starry Skies (星空のマリオネット, Hojin Hashiura, 1978)

September 4, 2018July 21, 2019by Hayley ScanlonLeave a comment

The youth movie had been the populist rebellion against the stately Japanese cinema of the golden age, but many of its representative directors had quickly tired of the restrictive studio system. Some had decamped into the “independent” arena which offered relative artistic freedom if without the resources and financial rewards of the commercial sector. The Art Theatre Guild had provided a valuable outlet for experimental film since it began to shift from distribution of foreign films into production of Japanese language art movies, but paradoxically the early 1970s saw it shift again as the studio’s “arthouse” aims fell by the wayside and more conventional youth films made a gradual return. Puppets Under Starry Skies (星空のマリオネット, Hoshizora no Marionette), the first of three films directed by Hojin Hashiura for ATG (aside from an earlier 16mm independent effort, the only films Hashiura would ever make), is very much a youth movie in the new ATG mould which is to say its tone is one of sadness rather than anger as its protagonists find themselves adrift in the changing 1970s society, unable to find their place in the world their parents have been building for them.

Hideo (Yoichi Miura), leader of small biker gang, is best friends with Hiroshi (Kazuhito Takei) – an effeminate young man from a wealthy family who likes to wear makeup and dress in (slightly) flamboyant outfits. The trouble starts when Hideo picks a fight with a rival gang boss and then charges in for a rematch to avenge his honour only to be set on by thugs, stabbed, and beaten so badly he winds up in hospital for over a week. Humiliated, Hideo loses all his gang member friends with only Hiroshi sticking by him. Later he takes up with a local bar girl, Akemi (Ako), who has a promiscuous past and is already pregnant with another man’s child. Together the three attempt to find a way forward into a more conventional adulthood but struggle to find a place for themselves within a rigidly conformist society which has already rejected them.

Parental disconnection seems to be a recurrent theme in the lives of each of the troubled youngsters. Hideo lost his mother young, not long after they’d moved into the town from the mountains. Never having been able to come to terms with his mother’s death he has a difficult relationship with his father and takes out his frustrations through meaningless violence and male posturing. Akemi too has a difficult family background but this time with a single mother who is a former sex worker turned publican. Working in a local bar (not her mother’s) Akemi is harassed by the customers but is well known for being open to casual sex, suffering a degree of social stigma both because of her liberated attitude and because of her mother’s former profession.

Hiroshi’s problems are perhaps of a different order. From an “elite” family, he feels himself entirely disconnected from normal family life and has been raised in an atmosphere of cold austerity rather than parental love. Hiroshi believes this is partly because he has “bad blood” and is cursed beyond redemption. He is not his father’s biological son but the child of a sperm donor enlisted to ensure an heir for his father’s bloodline. Hiroshi, however, is gay and will not be able fulfil the purpose he was born for, at least not in the way that was expected of him. He is also effeminate, something of which his family do not approve, and feels himself excluded from mainstream society because of his sexual orientation. To combat his feelings of intense alienation, Hiroshi has become a drug user, sniffing glue in order to send himself on psychedelic trips to outer space in which he merges with the deep blue vacuum free of all worldly concerns.

Hideo too gets in on the glue sniffing act but feels himself becoming one with the river of life and death, feeling it flow through him as he flows with it. The river itself, and the idea of passive resignation that comes of simply allowing oneself to float, becomes a grim symbol of the futility that faces Hideo as he struggles to reassemble an identity in a world which consistently denies him one. The future looks bleak for each of our protagonists, the only one with any sense of hope once again investing it in the system which has already betrayed her – the family. Youth looks for new models, new standards by which to live, but does not find them. Puppets of fate, the trio dance under starry skies until the sun comes up and they realise that the day holds nothing for them except the nihilistic desire for its end.

Golden Orchestra! (オケ老人!, Toru Hosokawa, 2016)

September 1, 2018by Hayley ScanlonLeave a comment

It might never be too late to follow your dreams, but if following your dreams makes you very unhappy perhaps you need to spend some more time figuring out what they are. Golden Orchestra (オケ老人!, Oke Rojin!) is one in a long line of Japanese fish out of water / underdog comedies, but addresses some very contemporary concerns from the ageing society to a perceived loss of community in the face of soulless commercialism. Our stuck-up school teacher is about to learn a few lessons, chief among them being that it’s much better just having fun with nice people than being caught up in a vicious and unwinnable game of elitism with a bunch of permanently scowling snobs.

20-something school teacher Chizuru (Anne Watanabe) harbours a longstanding dream of playing in an orchestra but gave up the violin when she got a job. A visit to a classical music concert in provincial Umegaoka reignites her musical passion and she quickly becomes determined to dust off her instrument and ask for an audition. However, as she was so excited she can’t quite remember the orchestra’s name and, assuming there couldn’t be two in this tiny town, signs up for the wrong one. Only realising her mistake when a bunch of old people turn up instead of the well turned out collection of musicians she was expecting, Chizuru tries to back out but the old people are so happy to have her that she can’t quite work up the courage to tell them no.

As it happens there’s a People’s Front of Judea situation going on between Ume-sym and Ume-phil. The conductor of Ume-sym, Nonomura (Takashi Sasano), is also the owner of a family-run electronics shop – a relic of a bygone era made all the more lonely by the flashy electronics superstore that’s been set up right next door. The owner of the electronics superstore, Osawa (Ken Mitsuishi), used to be a member of Ume-sym but stormed out to form his own orchestra – Ume-phil, so he’s betrayed Nonomura twice over and there’s bad blood between them which isn’t helped by Osawa’s constant overtures to Nonomura’s son about buying up the shop in order to close it down.

Chizuru is, it has to be said, a somewhat clueless woman approaching middle age who is also a bit of a snob. She’s harboured musical dreams ever since she can remember, giving them up because, after all, that’s what you’re supposed to do in order to accept a conventional, ordered life. If playing music was all she wanted to do, there was nothing stopping her doing it at home in her free time, but Chizuru wants to be among the best. She looks down on the old people in the orchestra – firstly because they’re “old” and therefore “bothersome” (as she notes turning off a tap left running by an absent-minded older lady), and then because they’re just not any good, and finally because their aim isn’t really becoming a successful orchestra so much as it is participating in a community activity. The old ladies have brought snacks which must be indulged and appreciated, while the old men all enjoy the after practice drinking sessions perhaps more than they do the music.

Turning her back on this anarchic friendliness, Chizuru practices night and day to get into Ume-phil, but Ume-phil isn’t about love of music either, it’s just about being superior and giving yourself an excuse to look down on people. Chizuru finds out for herself how stressful and unpleasant it can be as a “member” of just such a community when they grudgingly grant her a spot. Ume-phil runs on a survival of the fittest policy – not everyone gets to play, only whoever is deemed most worthy. When push comes to shove, Osawa buys himself success by hiring a world-famous French conductor for the biggest concert of the year. Only the professional conductor is true music lover and quickly quits Osawa’s ersatz orchestra, charmed by the down-home wisdom of Mr. Nonomura who manages to fix his treasured cassette player when Osawa advised him to throw it out and buy something more up-to-date. Some people just can’t see what’s really important.

As expected, Chizuru finally realises that it’s just much nicer (not to mention less stressful) having fun making music with the old people rather than putting up with the soulless rigour of the Osawa brigade for whom nothing will ever be good enough. In the end Ume-sym decides to practice Dvorak’s Largo which is, as anyone who’s seen a Japanese film knows, an instantly warm and nostalgic tune familiar as the inspiration for (in some cities at least) Japan’s five ‘o clock chimes (British viewers may well experience the same surge of wistful melancholy thanks to the same tune’s iconic use in a series of Hovis adverts from the ‘70s and ‘80s). It’s an apt choice for a film which harks back to a simpler time when people took care of each other and rejoiced in ordinary pleasures like home-made pickles and fixing things that were broken rather than throwing them out to buy new ones. In true community spirit, it’s not so much that one side wins and another loses, so much as that the joy of sharing a dream with others becomes infectious, producing a rapprochement between the old and the new which allows a peaceful coexistence of the two. Cosy cinema at its finest, Golden Orchestra may not offer anything new to a well-worn formula but in many ways that is the point and its harmonious charms prove hard to resist.

International trailer (English subtitles)

The original Hovis ad from 1973 (which was directed by Ridley Scott)

The Lights of Asakusa (浅草の灯, Yasujiro Shimazu, 1937)

August 30, 2018by Hayley ScanlonLeave a comment

The lights of Asakusa (浅草の灯, Asakusa no Hi) still shone bright before the war. In this tiny corner of Tokyo well known for “low” entertainment, actors mingle with gangsters, lonely owners of amusement stalls, starving artists, bar girls, and wealthy industrialists each just trying to survive in an increasingly jittery city. Yasujiro Shimazu had been a pioneer of the “shomingeki” – stories of ordinary lower middle class people, and brings his characteristic wit and humanity to a tale of backstreet life where danger and ruin lurk on every corner and the only way to ensure one’s safety is to ensure you have the right defenders.

The main stage, if you will, is that of the Nippon-za “opera” company. This is, however, no great opera house but a run down little theatre presenting classical European opera for vaudeville audiences. The currently running show is Carmen, which will turn out to be appropriate for the events at hand. The trouble starts (or perhaps merely intensifies) when a young chorus member, Reiko (Mieko Takamine), begins attracting a range of wanted and unwanted male attention. Reiko, an orphan, had been taken in by a local bar mistress who later pushed her into the opera company but still expects her to make good on her investment by becoming a casual prostitute and taking on “customers” who present themselves at the bar (Reiko is around 16 or so, and therefore has just reached the age her foster mother thinks appropriate to join the business). The complication is that the man who’s taken a fancy to Reiko, Handa (Shunro Takeda), is a steel magnate who also finances the opera troupe meaning it’s not just the bar owner who’s coming under pressure but the financial security of the troupe too.

Being so young, Reiko finds her foster mother’s demands hard to refuse but is rescued by Sasaki (Seiji Nishimura) – the leading actor, married to leading lady Marie (Haruko Sugimura). The situation with Reiko exposes cracks already present in the group when Handa sends his goons in to disrupt the show, irking Sasaki to the point he takes off in a fit of artistic temperament. Meanwhile, another actor Yamagami (Ken Uehara), gets together with the rest of the troupe to ensure Reiko’s safety by hiding her with a feeble minded fan, Pokacho (Daijiro Natsukawa), so that she won’t be forced into a potentially life ruining situation.

Reiko’s plight is perhaps all too common on the streets of Asakusa. Having been orphaned she feels herself indebted to the bar mistress who took her in even if the relationship between them is not especially warm. She also feels grateful to have found a third family in the opera troupe and is afraid to lose her place there. Nevertheless, she is under extreme pressure to submit herself to this system of reciprocal arrangements and sleep with Handa solely to save making trouble for everyone else. Meanwhile her (sometimes) sympathetic roommate Beniko (Kayako Fujiwara) knows exactly what’s at stake through having been in a similar situation herself. She’s long been in love with the pure hearted Yamagami and is harbouring a degree of jealously in believing that Yamagami has a soft spot for Reiko, but she also half wants things to work out between them seeing as she has lost the “right” to love a man like Yamagami because she is no longer a virgin.

Shimazu had often been of a progressive mind, but sadly Beniko falls by the wayside, merely a sacrificial lamb prepared to give up on her dreams on Reiko’s behalf, so we never find out the limits of Yamagami’s justice loving heart or if he would be as bothered about Beniko’s past as she seems to fear he might be. Yamagami, brooding but righteous, would become one of matinee idol Ken Uehara’s best known roles though he too is teetering on the brink in Asakusa. Committed to defending the innocent, he tries to save Reiko’s honour but fails to declare a personal interest, entrusting her to the rather odd painter Pokacho who claims that his love for Reiko is of a spiritual, rather than carnal kind. Yamagami may succeed in his primary goal but still ends up in defeat, running away from the most important fight by retreating from Tokyo completely with a rebound girlfriend in tow, hoping to find kinder light in Osaka than he had on the dog eat dog streets of Asakusa.

Based on a novel by Hiroshi Hamamoto, Shimazu’s portrait of backstreet life sparkles with authenticity but also with a kind of hopelessness as each of these down on their luck “opera” stars laments their sorry fates and longs for a better gig somewhere less down and dirty. Meanwhile, the spectre of war lingers – when Carmen comes off the next show is to be “Two Honourable Soldiers”, filled with maudlin anthems of war which push the messages of patriotism and the glorification of offering one’s life for one’s country. The slimy Handa may have been defeated for now, but his kind are in the ascendent and the streets of Asakusa are unlikely to improve with only war and depression on the horizon.