A dejected young man finds himself pondering lost wonder amid the vicissitudes of life in Takuro Ijichi’s poetic debut feature. Drawing inspiration from Terence Malik, the film finds a sense of awe and serenity in the natural landscape that contrasts with the demands of a modern, more urban way of life with its resulting pressures that leave the hero, Gaku, floundering without direction in the wake of the implosion of his baseball playing dreams.
Indeed, baseball becomes a kind of metaphor as Gaku finds himself running in an endless loop. This first chapter titled competition itself at first seems to be a lost paradise from which Gaku is unexpectedly expelled. After showing some potential as a high school baseball player, Gaku’s determination to turn pro is ridiculed by teachers as childish and unrealistic. While he devotes himself to perfecting his craft at the expense of human relationships such as his connection with female classmate Saki, his less than friendly rivalry with another boy spills over into spite and resentment. When he is deliberately injured, Gaku at first tries to hide it, but then faces both disappointment and humiliation in being kicked off the team ending his baseball playing dreams for good.
It’s at this point that Gaku begins to idealise his rural childhood and friendship with another local boy, Ryu. Largely left to their own devices the pair play in the fields and forests and bask in a sense of wonder for the natural world. At first they float paper boats, then take to a real one to ride the waves of a local lake. Conversations with his elderly grandmother about the war lend the place a sense of history and continuity as Gaku finally turns back to nature to ask himself where it is that he belongs. He tries to find his way back and reclaim something that he’s lost while battling uncertainty. Yet this bygone world seems slightly outside of his reach, lent an elegiac quality by Ijichi’s wistful cinematography and melancholic score.
The early death of a fellow baseball team player in an accident similarly reinforces the themes of transience and impermanence, reminding Gaku that his life is short and fleeting. Yet his constant circling of the baseball field is not a futile effort so much as a training ground for life in which he figures out what it is he’s running towards and eventually discovers the courage to chase it. He reflects that the people around him and the town may have changed, yet his homeland remains the same lending him the sense of certainty he’d been missing in a solid foundation to his life.
These realisations are echoed in the film’s non-linear structure in which Gaku is thrown back to his childhood memories while contemplating his current sense of confusion and emptiness in the present. He asks himself if having all the answers is really necessary in life while actively looking for them inside his past. The conclusion he may come to is that it isn’t, really. Life is an ongoing process or a kind of evolution that doesn’t so much lead towards a kind of solution as being one in and of itself. What becomes important is accepting its vicissitudes and learning to savour each moment while reassessing what’s important, such as human relationships and the sense of joy and wonder to be found in the natural world.
Playing out more as a tone poem, Ijichi is content to let the narrative drift on the waves of time, as he puts it, focusing more on images of transience such as flowing water, rolling waves, and floating clouds that reflect a sense of perpetual loss echoing Gaku’s inner turmoil. Nevertheless, it’s within the natural environment that Gaku begins to find the answers he’s looking for that give him a sense of direction in his life and the courage to embrace it in all of its tragedy, absurdity, joy and sorrow.
A world-famous, record-breaking mountain climber faces the final ascent in Junji Sakamoto’s fictionalised biopic of Junko Tabei, the first Japanese woman to reach the summit of Everest. Here named Tabe, the highest mountain Junko (Sayuri Yoshinaga / Non) has to climb seems to be the patriarchal nature of Japanese society in the 1970s. The film does, however, mistakenly imply that sexism is an issue that has now been solved in the film’s contemporary setting of 2010-16 in which women hold positions of authority and are free to fulfil themselves outside the home on an equal footing with men.
Of course, this is not really the reality even if, in some ways, the situation may be much better than during the high prosperity era during which Junko was a trailblazer in more ways than one. When she decides to mount an all-female expedition team to conquer Everest, she’s mainly met with derision and scorn. While she and female reporter Etsuko (Yuki Amami / Mizuki Kayashima) do the rounds of various companies looking for sponsorship, the elderly male CEOs are incredibly confused and accuse them of being traitors to their sex. They questions whether it’s safe for women to do something like this without any men around (though in the interests of clarity, all the Sherpas appear to me male), and also what wonder what their husbands are supposed to do for the six months they’ll be away shirking their domestic responsibilities. Even when they encounter a man who is closer to their own generation and sounds supportive, stating that the era of gender equality has arrived, it turns out to be all talk. He does not take their proposal seriously and even asks which part of it he should read as if it wasn’t really important. In the end, his “support” doesn’t transfer into any investment.
In the present day, Etsuko remarks that there were a lot of useless men around back then, as if men are universally different now. She herself has become a senior reporter and is in a position of authority over younger male reporters in the newsroom. Likewise, Junko’s main physician in the later stages of her treatment following a cancer diagnosis is also female and makes a point of listening to her patient’s wishes and concerns. It does not appear that Etsuko ever married or had children, but no one of is critical of them for “abandoning” their domestic responsibilities to pursue a career in the way they were of Junko when she left her daughter behind to climb Everest. To that extent the film paints a rosier picture of the contemporary society than might actually be the case given the still persistent levels of sexism and gender bias that still present barriers to woman’s ability to find fulfilment whether within the domestic environment or outside of it.
Nevertheless, Junko’s husband Masaaki (Kôichi Sato) is depicted as a shining example of confident masculinity in his support for his wife’s endeavours. A sister-in-law looks after daughter Noriko during the day with Masaaki on parental duties outside of his shifts as a mechanic. Even so, Junko’s success is seen to have a negative effect on her children who do feel a degree of resentment towards her. Noriko has largely taken it in her stride, but also feels a sense of regret that Junko is not just her mother but someone she has to share with the world. When this spurs her on to deepen their relationship in adulthood, younger son Shintaro (Ryuya Wakaba) who was born after Everest is hugely resentful and struggles to emerge from his mother’s shadow or the pressure of being the child of a famous person. He doesn’t like it that people have expectations of him because of who his mother is and feels as if he is held to a different standard because of it, causing him to become rebellious at school. The situation becomes so bad that he eventually moves in with relatives and transfers to the relatively more anonymous Fukushima where his teacher gives him some harsh lessons in humility, reminding him that he is not “Junko’s Tabe’s son”, but that Junko Tabe just happens to be his mother.
Shintaro’s views also seem to be more patriarchal than those of his father whom he verbally attacks insisting that he must also be resentful of Junko and that if it were not for losing his big toes to frostbite it would have been him conquering Everest, not her. While Shintaro appears to feel emasculated by his mother and looks down on his father for what he sees as weakness, Shintaro is able to put his personal frustrations aside and devote himself wholeheartedly to supporting Junko. It’s not until Junko’s illness becomes serious that Shintaro is able to reconcile with her and find a more stable path in life through helping with her programme to bring high school students displaced by the 2011 earthquake to climb Mount Fuji.
Mountains take on an almost sacred presence for Junko with Mount Fuji in particular becoming a constant motif. The film depicts her final battle with cancer as being yet another mountain to climb, though knowing your limitations is also part of the art of climbing and so when she comes to the realisation that she can no longer reach the summit, she decides to plan her descent. The poignant closing moments have her looking at a photo of the women’s team and insisting they will all go together, expressing a degree of sadness that the group fell apart after Everest with some resentful that Junko had progressed to the summit alone rather than postpone to regroup to call off the ascent to try again another time. All of the press attention fell on her alone forgetting the efforts of those who’d stayed at base camp and without whom Junko’s success would not have been possible. Female solidarity is also vulnerable to these kinds of pressures, the film implies, though Junko’s friendship with Etsuko endures right to the end. Though the conclusion is bittersweet, the closing moments at least focus more on a life well lived amid the majesty of the mountains rather than dwelling on its inevitable tragedy.
Amid increasing gentrification of urban centres, where are the kids supposed to go? Ren Akiba’s Tokyo Strayers (東京逃避行, Tokyo Tohiko) seems to suggest efforts to clean up Kabukicho haven’t actually been all that successful, while young and impressionable people for whom home is not or safe place or who feel themselves to be out of place in their hometown continue to flock to the city in search of a kind of grimy glamour that promises freedom in a conformist society.
At least, that’s why Asuka ends up in Shinjuku while in flight from a policeman father she resents for leaving their family for a younger woman. In truth, Asuka’s problems are more of the normal teenage variety and otherwise she appears to come from a more stable, financially comfortable home with parents that are invested in her welfare even if she finds them to be overbearing. The same is not true for many of the other runaways including Hiyori left home away after experiencing physical and sexual abuse at the hands of her father. It’s Hiyori who is currently writing the Tokyo Strayers blog that’s attracted Asuka and countless other young women to this hip and happening place, though it soon becomes clear that the diary is an idealised vision of Shinjuku life that doesn’t really exist.
The film seems to present two young men, Edo and Merio, as the angel and demon of Shinjuku. Edo runs a kind of shelter for runaway teens that provides a safe space for them where they can find food and start to rebuild their lives. Merio, meanwhile, gets young women hooked on drugs in order to sexually exploit them. The distinction between them would seem to be black and white, but in reality the two were once a team and Merio apparently only started working with a local drug dealer in order to get money to fund Edo’s sanctuary, which Edo eventually accepted, if unwillingly. In any case, Edo started the sanctuary with money he made as a host working in Kabukicho which means that it still arises from the sleazy underbelly of the red light district which is built upon the exploitation of women.
Nevertheless, Edo is committed to keeping runaway kids safe, which is why he tells Hiyori to make sure Asuka gets home safely knowing that she likely means to sell her to Merio in exchange for drugs. Hiyori is only really doing this because she feels she has no other means of survival and the implication is that she began doing sex work as a kind of self-harm intended to wipe out the abuse she received at the hands of her father. Edo warns his runaways to avoid going out because of the increased police presence given that they will just send anyone they catch back home without considering whether that might be a safe environment for them. A policewoman later confesses her regrets about sending a girl back to her family thinking it was for the best and they’d patch things up over time only for the girl to take her own life shortly afterward. The film is then implicitly critical of an unthinking adult world that is failing to protect these children. Even if they try to report what’s happening to them, they are not believed or no action is taken because of a reluctance to interfere in domestic matters and an unshakeable belief in the sanctity of family.
But this environment is obviously no good for them either, leaving them open to exploitation or falling into criminal activity as a means of supporting themselves. Edo’s initiative is one way of fighting back through youth solidarity, but it’s also rooted in the dark side of Kabukicho given the impossibility of running such an establishment without any kind of funding. Akiba seems to want to show the two sides of Kabuki, one seemingly glamorous and alluring, and the other seedy and depressing, while suggesting that the only real source of solidarity exists among the young people themselves if only they can find the strength to look after each other while simultaneously striving to escape the traumatic circumstances that have forced them onto the streets.
“Why do people write love letters?” is the question posed by the Japanese title of Yuya Ishii’s latest film, which turns out to be less about romance than the regret that stems from things left unsaid. Love letters, it seems to say, are written more for the writer than the recipient, but can, at the same time, bring about a sense of closure or peace of mind in having communicated something that would otherwise have lingered as an unresolved mystery.
The film is inspired by a real-life incident in which a bereaved family received a letter over 20 years after their teenage son’s death in a train accident from a middle-aged woman who’d had a crush on him at the time but never got a chance to say anything. It is, of course, also drawing inspiration from Shunji Iwai’s seminal 90s romantic melodrama Love Letter in which a young woman sends a letter to her late fiancé she doesn’t expect to be delivered only to get an unexpected reply. After receiving some upsetting news about a medical condition and being reminded of her own first love by her teenage daughter Mai’s (Airi Nishikawa) eerily similar experience, Nazuna (Haruka Ayase) is prompted to write a letter to Shinsuke (Kanata Hosoda), a boy she liked on the train, but eventually decides against sending it, only for it to end up being delivered anyway.
Her medical prognosis is, in some ways, the reason that Nazuna writes the letter, knowing that Shinsuke is already dead, and that writing it will allow her to sort out her own feelings. She says in the letter that there is no one else that she can talk to, though she has a husband and daughter she otherwise struggles to communicate with. She too afraid to tell her daughter that her medical condition has declined and is living in a kind of limbo state with something left permanently unsaid. To begin with, there are hints that Nazuna’s marriage is unhappy with her husband Ryoichi (Satoshi Tsumabuki) a perpetually gloomy presence who stays out late drinking alone after work presumably to avoid coming home. Likewise, his gruff instructions to Nazuna that she should give up her vegetable garden and cafe business come off as patriarchal and controlling, though his irritation later seems to be an expression of the pressure lack of communication is placing on the family unit. He wanted Nazuna to give up her vegetable garden out of consideration for her physical condition, but phrased it badly, and later changes tack to help out as he and Mai harvest the vegetables together.
In that sense it’s a little ironic that it’s Mai who is the open communicator and directly asks her mother for romantic advice having also fallen for a boy on the train, though one in her class at school. Nazuna’s letter brings comfort to Shinsuke’s parents precisely because he had been an uncommunicative son and parts of his life remained a mystery to them. Shortly before his death, he had begun to open up, but they are still left with regret that they did not have the opportunity to talk more and left many things unsaid. It’s this realisation that prompts Nazuna to have a serious discussion with her daughter about her health and implications for the future, reducing the sense of distance and anxiety caused by a lack of communication and allowing them to come together as a family.
In the end, the daughter’s first love turns not to be such a big deal and is quickly forgotten in favour of the central messages of making sure you say everything that needs to be said while you can still say it rather than being left with lingering regrets. Mai comes to see her mother less as the “random weed” of her name, and more as a hardy plant that can grow anywhere meaning that Nazuna is still somewhere close by watching over her, so she feels secure in her maternal legacy and family history as she begins to embark on her own story. In its own way, the film itself is a kind of love letter from a daughter to a mother that brings its own kind of healing in bringing the past full circle.
The life of a samurai is to some extent dependent on ritual. It’s as much a performance as anything else, yet, unlike a play, these actions often have very real and destructive consequences that result in bloodshed or exile. Though absurd and arbitrary, it’s adhering to this code of ethics that makes one a samurai, and once set in motion the consequences of a particular action proceed with inevitability. One cannot, in the end, escape one’s duty or destiny even by resigning samurai status.
This is really the idea at the centre of Takashi Minamoto’s Samurai Vengeance (木挽町のあだ討ち, Kobikicho no Adauchi) in which a playwright conspires to take the blood out of revenge and finds largely that the conditions are met for the samurai world to continue on without incident. The fact that the act of vengeance is essentially theatre is clear from the opening sequence in which fallen samurai theatre director Kinji (Ken Watanabe) orders the spotlight-like lanterns to be turned on the scene of a young man who has raised his sword against an older one he holds responsible for the death of his father. The action takes place adjacent to a theatre where a performance of the 47 Ronin, one of the most famous tales of vengeance in Japanese history, has just concluded, and this is, in a way, a continuation of that. Attracted by the commotion, a crowd has started to gather around the two men that becomes both audience and witness to this act of performative justice.
But then the film wrong-foots us slightly, and we realise the central mystery is not to do with the staged performance itself, but the true identity of the man who has come around asking questions about it. Kase (Tasuku Emoto) too is playing a role, in this appearing as a bumbling, Kindaichi-like presence claiming to be a friend of the dead man, Sakubei (Kazuki Kitamura), who to some extent did not really exist having been giving an entirely new persona to suit the narrative of the staged revenge plot. Though Kase claims to have been kicked out of his clan and become a ronin himself, which explains why he has no money and is always hungry, he is later revealed to be a clan investigator who has fallen foul of the authorities after attempting to expose the corruption of a senior retainer.
Though the rules of samurai society may be strict, they can be gamed by those ruthless enough to subvert them for their own ends. This seems to be something that Lady Tae, the mother of the revenge-seeking Kikunosuke (Kento Nagao), knew all too well and understanding the performative nature of samurai justice, turned to her old friend Kinji to save her son from falling victim to the cruelty of their class. At only 17, Kikunosuke is a slender and effete young man of delicate features and sensibility. He does not appear to be suited to the harshness of samurai mores and being forced to take the head of a man who not only saved his life but is someone he’s been close to since the day he was born would likely destroy him.
His fragility is signalled in the fact he first appears dressed as a woman in a beautiful red kimono passed down from a retired onnagata to the current holder of his name. As they say, the world of the theatre is like another country and a place where those who do not otherwise fit into Edo society can be accepted. Kikuosuke’s vulnerability and the unfairness of his plight endear him to the members of the theatre company who all feel an instinctive need to protect him. Indeed, Kikuosuke himself says that he is sorry to have to leave the theatre behind and will never forget the six months that he has spent there. It may be that he is much more suited to living in this environment which is the antithesis of samurai rigidity. In the end, the symbolic need for “vengeance” is satisfied without actual bloodshed. Though those in power know this to be so, they accept it and decline to ask further questions, but still the samurai world continues as it is and others will not be so lucky as to avoid paying with their lives for offending its exceedingly arbitrary values.
Samurai Vengeance screens as part of this year’s Toronto Japanese Film Festival.
Sometimes people come into your life for a short time and then move on. Perhaps you won’t see them again, though the effect they have on you remains profound. Takaki is still hung up on a girl he met during his childhood and subsequently lost touch with to the extent that he has become isolated and emotionally distant. In remaking Makoto Shinkai’s anime 5 Centimeters per Second ( 秒速5センチメートル), Yoshiyuki Okuyama homes in on a sense of urban alienation and a longing for something greater that transcends ordinary life before arriving at an acceptance that sometimes there is no greater meaning beyond a pleasant memory.
Takaki (Yuzu Aoki) feels as if he’s looking for the feeling he’s lost while living in a soulless urban environment and doing a job that, as someone later says, isn’t all that much fun but not particularly taxing either. It’s clear that he wants something more out of life, but at the same time has become afraid to connect with people. As a child, he moved around a lot and so developed a habit of avoiding getting into relationships in order to avoid the pain of separation. As an adult, he never stays in one place for too long and is always moving on, quitting one job after another and moving to new parts of the city. He has a kind of girlfriend, but keeps her at arms’ length emotionally and is not seriously invested in the relationship.
The irony is that he and Akari (Mitsuki Takahata) bonded over the experience of being transfer students, but where Takaki has become a kind of nomad, Akari has begun to settle down with a regular job in a book shop. Though the film is told mostly from Takaki’s perspective, it seems that she has decided their youthful connection is something that belongs in the past as a comforting memory rather than a promise that will one day be fulfilled. She may think of Takaki from time to time, but also hopes that he has moved on and is living in the present rather than being hung up on the romantic ideal of their childhood connection.
TV news broadcasts discussing space probes that are destined to continue travelling in different directions echo the course of their relationship. Takaki assumes it’s an orbit and that their paths are destined to cross again eventually, when really their childhood friendship was a kind of launch point after which the distance between them would only grow. Their paths do indeed cross at times with several near misses at reconnection, but they remain liminal presences in each other’s lives.
The implication is that Takaki has retreated into a fantasy of idealised romance to avoid dealing the emotional difficulties of adult life, while for Akari the memory of her childhood friendship with Takaki has allowed her to move on into a more settled adulthood in which she is willing to accept the possibility of painful separations while putting down roots and forging relationships with those around her. Living through the illusionary “end of the world” affords Takaki a kind of rebirth in which he can learn to let go of the past and begin to move on by opening himself up to those around him.
Okuyama captures Takaki’s sense of alienation while finding beauty in the world that surrounds him, from the spaces of urban loneliness to the crisp white snow and cherry blossom tree that Takaki believes is his salvation. The environment both reflects his anxieties and feelings of isolation, and is at times a barrier to his reconnection with Akari, but is also a source of hope for the future that the impending end of the world will not in fact come to be. Takaki’s 30th birthday is rather a kind of coming full circle and the launch point for adulthood in which he can finally move on from idealised first love and begin to open himself up to all the joy and pain that life has to offer.
5 Centimeters per Second screened as part of this year’s Nippon Connection
Kanna (Takako Matsu) married Kakeru (Hokuto Matsumura) after a whirlwind romance and to begin with they were blissfully happy, but the pressures of modern life soon placed a strain on their relationship and 15 years later they had just signed divorce papers when Kakeru was killed in a tragic train station accident. Left behind alone, Kanna can’t help reassessing their marriage and wondering what went wrong. When she drives through a tunnel undergoing structural repairs and emerges on the day she and Kakeru first met, it seems like a golden opportunity to rewrite the past and possibly save both Kakeru and her miserable marriage.
A quirky time loop romance, First Kiss (ファーストキス 1ST KISS) is essentially a portrait of grief as Kanna constantly returns to the past in an attempt to understand the present. The Kanna of the present day is a stand-offish middle-aged woman who hates people and animals. Though she still lives in the apartment she shared with Kakeru, it’s a cold cluttered space that seems to echo her internal depression. Her marriage began to fall apart when Kakeru gave up his dreams of studying dinosaurs to get a real grown-up job as a married man, having been told by his professor that a real man must provide for his family. His corporate persona slowly made him miserable to the extent that he bought a bed for the spare room and began sleeping in there. By the end, the pair were living parallel lives, eating breakfast separately and barely exchanging a word.
Given this opportunity to reconnect with the Kakeru she fell in love with, Kanna becomes determined to save him by tweaking the timeline so he never goes to the station on that day, but each time she returns home to his photo on the altar. After an incredibly insensitive visit from Ritsu (Riho Yoshioka), a woman Kakeru was being lined up to marry, who basically blames her for making Kakeru miserable and failing to look after him, Kanna wonders if the best solution isn’t that he never meets her at all but drifts into a marriage with Ritsu, remaining at the university working with her father. That way, he’d still be alive, as if Kakeru choosing her were a deviation from the original turn of events and she were merely restoring it at the cost of her own romantic fulfilment.
But at the same time, she’s falling in love with Kakeru all over again with the unexpected bonus that he too is drawn to her 45-year-old self despite being unaware of their romantic history. Her inability to change the past in any significant way seems to suggest that there are some things that are fixed and can never be altered, but within that you are free to decide how you live now and what you do with your life. It’s not so much about when you die or how long you live so much as making the best of the time that is given to you rather than spending it mired in resentment and misery. Aside from the status of her mission, returning to the past begins to brighten Kanna’s life, allowing her to enjoy interacting with people and be a part of the world again.
These are all also ways of allowing her to deal with her grief while reclaiming her marriage and saving Kakeru in a different way by preventing him from losing sight of himself and giving in to misery. Falling in love is about finding things you like about each other, Kanna tells the youthful Kakeru, but marriage is about discovering all the ways you drive each other crazy. Kakeru’s tendency to pick at her about leaving lights on hints at the way financial concerns eroded their relationship along with the outdated social pressure placed on Kakeru to be a “real man” by supporting his family financially though a “proper” salaryman job. Kanna filing his death certificate next to an excited couple registering their marriage seems to ram the message home that, as Kakeru says, life is short and the most important thing is to use the time well. Whatever else happens, you do have a choice how you live today, and even if you suffer later, the pain will be easier to bear with fewer regrets.
Consumed by rural ennui, three teenage girls set on a dramatic plan for escape in Takashi Koyama’s darkly comic youth drama, All Greens (万事快調〈オール・グリーンズ). The title turns out to be apt, not only in ironically referencing the drugs at the film’s centre, but also that the girls are all still fairly naive and just trying to figure out their place in the world. Whatever that may turn out to be, it’s clear that each of them is constrained by their circumstances from abusive fathers to absent parents and outdated patriarchal ideals.
The reduced horizons of their lives are evident in Hidemi’s (Sara Minami) description of the school as a place where everyone’s either given up on exams or is too poor to access better education. She and Mako (Mizuki Yoshida) seem to resent popular girl Milk (Natsuki Deguchi) and her seemingly perfect life, but are unaware that circumstances are similar to theirs or that she too is longing to escape this dead-end town. Hidemi is sick of her abusive father and submissive mother and finds release through rap music. Mako wants to be a manga artist, but is under pressure from her family who expect her to marry a man to take over their farm. And Milk has become a mother to her mother who appears to have had a mental breakdown following the death of her husband, a nuclear plant worker caught up in a radioactive incident.
The attitude of Mako’s family may seem excessively old-fashioned, but seems to reflect the traditional culture of the village. When the teacher warns their class about a flasher, he tells the girls to travel in groups and avoid going home alone while ensuring their skirts are not too short as if that had anything to do with the likelihood of being flashed. The three girls are briefly united when they witness a woman and her small child being dumped in the middle of an intersection by an abusive spouse. They hear later that the woman snapped, killed her abusive husband and burnt his house down before drowning herself and her daughter in the river. Each of them fear ending up like this woman, as if the village itself were an abusive spouse from whom they can’t escape. Hidemi’s dreams of rap stardom are even disrupted when she’s offered a promising opportunity with a “beat master” who first tells her he’s quitting the business because he’s getting married and needs a more stable line of work, and then matter-of-factly says that the job is conditional on sleeping with him. He even tried to drug her drink, but Hidemi has a healthy level of suspicion regarding men who offer help, so she switched their drinks which is how she finds out he has a safe full of marijuana seeds.
The drugs offer a more literal kind of escape in the prospect of a small business the three girls could operate illicitly together without really thinking about the consequences beyond the hope of making enough money to leave town. Later they bring in two fellow students who need money because they are gay and want to move in together to escape their oppressive families, though Hidemi’s assertion that karma isn’t real may seem hubristic while playing into her sense of the world as a lawless place in which there are no real consequences for anything because she’s used to seeing bad guys get away with their crimes. In trying their luck in the big city, however, the girls find themselves out of their depth as their small-town gangster dreams implode in the face of the realities of urban crime.
In the end, the only real answer may be to burn it all down, but the sense of solidarity between the girls has at least given them the courage to chase their dreams even if they may still prove elusive. As the fumes make their way through the school, it provokes a sense of liberation as the old codes of conformity begin to dissolve and people say what they really feel. It may be only temporary and perhaps lead nowhere at all, but for the moment at least the road ahead is wide open.
Not all memories are nice, according to the heroine of the latest film by Yoji Yamada, Tokyo Taxi (TOKYOタクシー). A remake of the film Driving Madeleine, the action follows a glamorous older woman (Chieko Baisho) as she enlists a middle-aged taxi driver (Takuya Kimura) to drive her around Tokyo with the final destination being a care home that she has reluctantly decided to move in to. As such, it’s really journey through the stations of her life, but also about Japan as it was 60 years ago and the Japan of today.
After all, it wasn’t all plain sailing, Sumire insists as taxi driver Koji escorts her to a series of Tokyo landmarks each with a link to her past. It’s clear that one some level the care home has come to symbolise death for Sumire who has made the decision to go there, but still drags her feet. On their eventual arrival, she begs Koji to take her to a hotel instead while he ties to coax her like a child, certain that there’s no real point trying to postpone the inevitable.
There is, however, something quite touching about this path towards the acceptance of mortality given that this is director Yoji Yamada’s 91st film, made when he was already 94. Star Chieko Baisho is similarly 84. The pair have worked together for over 60 years and it was apparently the desire to make one more film with Baisho that pushed Yamada to keep going despite no longer quite having the stamina to direct a major motion picture. The film also marks the 130th anniversary of Yamada’s home studio, Shochiku, bringing things neatly full circle.
Still, there’s a fair amount of sadness in Sumire’s passage from her father’s death in the fire bombing of Tokyo to losing her first love and experiencing domestic violence. Speaking of her youth, Sumire remarks that not everything was bad in those days, but a lot of things certainly were and some of them have not changed so much as one might hope all this time later. Back then, violence was something a wife was expected to endure and in itself not considered grounds for ending a marriage. Sumire’s husband picked her precisely because her circumstances made her an easy target for his bullying leaving her with few options for escaping her abusive relationship.
For his part, Koji too is somewhat lost as he meanders on the way to the care home. His daughter Nana (Runa Nakashima) may have the opportunity to attend a prestigious music college, but it won’t come cheap. He agreed before really thinking it through, and now can’t face the possibility of standing in the way of Nana’s dreams. But when he reaches out to his sister for help, she tells him that music school is just for rich people’s children with the implication that he’s getting above himself and should just accept that things like that aren’t meant for people like them. Reflecting a contemporary class divide, Koji’s quest nevertheless bears out a father’s love for his daughter as he racks his brains trying to think of ways to come up with the money so that she can chase her dreams in the way that he never could.
It’s this simple desire that allows him to bond with Sumire who, as it turns out, was never someone who felt compelled to accept the status quo and was prepared to take drastic action to challenge circumstances that actively impeded her happiness. As they weave through a Tokyo that often seems entirely foreign and unrecognisable, simple human kindness and the connections between people have remained constant. Koji does his best to get Sumire safely to her destination while patiently listening to her story and gradually opening up with his own. Beginning in the stomping grounds of Tora-san and ending up in an idyllic setting by the sea, the film, in a way, elegises the careers of both director and star with the acceptance of an ending still to come, though perhaps not quite yet. “The sun is setting,” Sumire remarks with accidental profundity, but there’s beauty still to be found even this twilight in simple acts of human kindness and compassion that will never themselves fade away.
Black River is a good place to start this retrospective as, though it’s not his first film, it is the first time Nakadai played a prominent role on screen. His cinema career, however, began a little ignominiously with a small gig as an extra on Seven Samurai having been sent there by the acting school he was training at at the time. He had obviously never been involved with a period film before and Akira Kurosawa actually yelled at him that he “walked funny” and didn’t know how to move like a samurai. He was only in one scene all he needed to do was walk across the set, but Kurosawa kept making him redo it from 9am to 3pm before finally giving up.
Nakadai seems to have taken this quite badly and made a vow that he was going to become a great actor so he could turn down all of Kurosawa’s films, so he was quite reluctant to work with him again. He rebuffed all of Kurosawa’s attempts to do so and only accepted the role in Yojimbo when Kurosawa reached out to him personally, having apparently remembered him from Seven Samurai. Presumably, he’d either learned to walk like a samurai by that point, though he’d mainly done films set in the present day, or Kurosawa didn’t mind because his character in Yojimbo after all represents a kind of modernity.
In any case, Nakadai got his start in films proper after he was spotted playing Oswald in Ibsen’s Ghosts by actress Umeji Tsukioka who recommended him to her husband, the director Umetsugu Inoue, and he made his film debut in Pheonix in 1956 in which Tsukioka starred. He then played several small parts in other films before playing what’s really his first prominent role Masaki Kobayashi’s Black River, which is the film you’re about to see, after being recommended to the director by a friend of his who was an executive at Haiyuza theatre company where Nakadai had trained and continued to work.
Throughout his career, Nakadai was primarily a theatre actor. Though he was highly sought by each of the big five studios during Japan’s golden age, Shochiku, Toho, Nikkatsu, Toei, and Daei, he never signed an exclusive contract and preferred to remain freelance meaning that he was in the enviable position of having a lot of control over which projects he participated in. While the studio system was in place, the Big Five’s business model was largely based around a roster of exclusive stars that they slotted into whichever project they thought would suit them. If a director wanted to use an actor from another studio, they’d have to come to some sort of agreement which could be quite difficult to work out. But as Nakadai was freelance, he could work with any of the studios he wanted and was able to play a wide variety of roles rather than by literally type cast as a leading man or character actor or limited one particular genre.
That’s why you’ll see the Shochiku logo before Black River which was the home studio of director Masaki Kobayashi, while The Age of Assassins was made for Toho which was the home studio of Kihachi Okamoto. During the days of studio system, the Big Five would also train their own directors in house and there was no real other way to become a mainstream film director without joining a studio and working your way up from assistant director. That said, the interesting thing about Masaki Kobayashi is that he was a relative of the great star Kinuyo Tanaka who had also spent most of her career at Shochiku before breaking her exclusive contract following the backlash on her return from an American tour in 1949. She also went freelance in order to work with a wider variety of directors and later pursue a career as one herself.
The working relationship between Nakadai and Kobayashi was the most important in terms of their cinema work to the point that Nakadai really became a stand-in for Kobayashi on many of his films and especially his magnum opus The Human Condition. They were, however, from quite different generations. Kobayashi joined Shochiku as an assistant director after graduating from Waseda University in 1941 but was drafted not long after and left for the war though he regarded himself as a pacifist and resisted by refusing all promotions above the rank of private despite being considered a capable soldier. He spent about a year in a prisoner of war camp after the war ended and only returned to Japan 1946 to discover his father and older brother had died, while he was professionally disadvantaged as other directors who were exempt from the draft and had continued working throughout the war had leapfrogged ahead of him. He ended up serving as an assistant to Keisuke Kinoshita who was only a couple of years older than he was, though they got on really well and Kobayashi had a lot of admiration fro Kinoshita’s work who had, after all, been quite a close collaborator with Kinuyo Tanaka.
That might explain why his first couple of films were more regular Shochiku fare. The studio specialised in “shomingeki” or films that revolved around the lives of ordinary, lower-middle-class urbanites. It wasn’t until his third film, Thick-Walled Room that he began to address the themes that were more personal to him such as Japan’s wartime legacy and the struggle of the individual against a corrupt system. But The Thick-Walled Room which dealt with the still sensitive topic of wartime atrocities proved too controversial for Shochiku, which is not a studio that generally tolerates controversy. Consequently The Thick-Walled Room was shelved for a few years for fear of offending the Americans though the Occupation was already over and Kobayashi had to go back to making films that were much more typical of the studio’s style.
After testing the waters with cynical baseball drama I Will Buy You, Black River may be Kobayashi’s second attempt to work on material that directly interested him. Scripted by Zenzo Matsuyama, the film explores on the radiating corruption of US military bases in the post-Occupation society through the lives of those drawn into its nexus of violence and immortality. It opens with an American plane noisily zooming overhead above sleazy clubs with Western names catering American servicemen. Sex workers line the streets and it’s clear that the entire area is economically dependent on the base for its survival. Caught between those living in a rundown slum area and red-light district are recently arrived student Nishida and pure-hearted waitress Shizuko neither of whom feel they belong in this environment. Nishida is a student who’s chosen to live out here to save a few pennies, but at heart thinks he’s much better than the other residents at the tenement. Shizuko is attracted to him because he seems different and represents a link back to a more middle-class, respectable vision of Japan, but ends up being raped by local gangster Killer Joe who represents post-war moral decline in his wilful collaboration with the Americans. She’ll spend the rest of the film trying to retrieve the parasol that Joe took from her that represents innocence, while struggling with herself, unable to understand her attraction to the man who raped her despite her fear of him and his violence towards her.
Ineko Arima who plays Shizuko is another interesting case in that she actively fought for more control over the kind of roles she played even within the studio system. She started out playing male roles at Takarazuka Review and made her film debut in a Takarazuka Review film for Toho. Before moving to Shochiku she co-founded the independent production company Ninjin Club with fellow actresses Keiko Kishi and Yoshiko Kuga that aimed to circumvent the studio system and provide more creative freedom for actresses in particular. Ninjin Club is also one of the production companies listed for this film alongside Shochiku.
You actually might not recognise her to begin with because she’s wearing this amazing set of false teeth that give her a rather grotesque appearance, but the slum landlady is played by Isuzu Yamada, a star of the 1930s who mainly worked at Toho and often worked with Mizoguchi and Naruse. She had also gone freelance at this point having left Toho during the labour dispute that erupted in the mid-40s, so you could say that these are all very appropriate stars for a Masaki Kobayashi film in each having in some way rebelled against the corrupt studio system, even if Kobayashi himself was more or less complicit with it.
The landlady’s grotesquery provides an interesting counter to the amorality of Joe and his backer who are in cahoots with the Americans and want to knock the tenement down to build a love hotel. She is merely someone whose worst instincts have been indulged by the post-war moral decline as she gleefully teams up with Joe in the hope of many a bit more money from selling her apartment block, little caring that most of the residents have nowhere else to go and are only living here because they can’t afford anything better. The resistance, led by Korean communist Mr Kim, in the end proves ineffective and it seems there really is no solution other than violence to deal with a man like Joe, though in taking him out one would only damn oneself. Nevertheless, the film does not particularly blame the Americans so much as the Japanese for allowing themselves to be corrupted in this way and permitting this state of lawlessness to exist in which a man like Joe is free to behave as he does with no real consequences. I do hope you’ll enjoy it.
Windows on Worlds 