Tag: Japan

Devotion to Railway (大いなる驀進, Hideo Sekigawa, 1960)

Posted on by

In the early 1960s, Japan’s rail network might have felt a little uneasy with the Shinkansen already on the horizon. Hideo Sekigawa’s Devotion to Railway (大いなる驀進, Oinaru Bakushin) is in part a celebration of this essential service, the conductor and steward ever fond of reminding us that most passengers probably don’t realise that the Sakura sleeper service on which they are travelling from Tokyo all the way to Nagasaki is operated by only seven or eight people (though they don’t seem to be counting the staff from the dining car which hints at a minor source of division among the crew). While the Japanese title which means something more like “the great dash” might hint at a little more excitement, the film is less thriller than gentle ensemble drama in which the passengers and crew must come together to solve the improbable number of crises arising on this otherwise ordinary journey. 

Even so considering the film is directed by the left-leaning Sekigawa best known for his anti-war films such as Hiroshima and Listen to the Voices of the Sea, not to mention scripted by Kaneto Shindo, it is a little ironic that the central thrust of the drama revolves around junior steward Yajima’s (Katsuo Nakamura) rediscovery of his own devotion to the railway after at the beginning of the film declaring this will be his final journey. Mimicking the dilemma at the centre of Yoshitaro Nomura’s Stakeout, Yajima’s problem is that he has been engaged for two years and is sick of waiting to get married but his girlfriend Kimie (Yoshiko Sakuma) is the main breadwinner in her family and though his salary could support them as a couple it won’t stretch much further. Kimie, however, is dead against him taking the counter-productive decision to quit the railways even with the suggestion of going into business with a friend who owns a cafe, partly because it’s better to stick with a steady job than take a chance on something less certain, and partly because she knows he likes his work and all his experience will be wasted if he suddenly opts to switch careers. 

Despite its positive warmhearted message of people pulling together to overcome crisis, the film does skew a little conservative in essentially turning Kimie into a minor villain as if she were in a sense responsible for making Yajima doubt his devotion to the railway. After jumping aboard to make sure he doesn’t suddenly quit before the end of the line, she eventually has a heart to heart with the sympathetic conductor Matsuzaki (Rentaro Mikuni) that forces to her to admit that perhaps she’s just nervous about the nature of married life and has been making trouble where there needn’t be any, now certain that it’s better to just get married as soon as possible and let the rest figure itself out. 

Meanwhile, there’s additional tension seeing as a waitress from the diner car has an obvious crush on Yajima and is quite resentful on being presented with his fiancée, but even this is eventually solved with the two women becoming accidental friends during the climatic crisis, a landslide caused by a typhoon, that grants each of the passengers an epiphany about what it is they really want out of life. While waiting for the maintenance crew from the next station to arrive, Yajima, still in a bad mood, stands around doing not much of anything until coaxed into action by Kimie and Matsuzaki, Kimie too eventually jumping off the train to solve this literal roadblock in their relationship followed by the dining car girls and a young woman only on the train to transport blood to a hospital needed urgently by 2pm the next day. This sense of collective endeavour opening the way gives everyone on board a new sense of positivity, allowing Kimie and Yajima to repair their relationship and a man who tried to take his own life in the night to gain a new sense of hope for future. 

Several times Yajima is reminded that he has the lives of the passengers in his hands which is undoubtedly true given that there is always the chance of disaster yet also perhaps going a little far seeing as most of his job is checking tickets and providing travel information. Nevertheless, there is a lot going on on this train from eloping couples to yakuza assassins, not to mention the twin sights of a newly wed couple and a pompous politician momentarily disembarking at each stop to be feted either by workers at their factory or the local members of their political party. The snooty politician even gets a minor comeuppance from a famous pickpocket who steals his watch as a joke and then gives it back only to dismissively ignore his thank you message while eating a giant apple. 

Surprisingly handsome for a Toei programmer, Sekigawa’s deft direction lends a claustrophobic sense of dread to the interior of the train stalked by a vengeful assassin, while simultaneously making it an essentially safe space guarded by the ever solicitous crew keen to help an anxious young woman with a long journey ahead of her arrive on time to get home to her chronically ill mother. An effective piece of advertising for the Sakura sleeper service (which ran until 2005 albeit in slightly different forms), Devotion to Railway may surprise in its insistence that the hero rededicate himself to his employer but is nevertheless a charming ensemble drama which finds a new sense of positivity in the solidarity between friends and strangers coming together to overcome crisis through common endeavour. 

Original trailer (no subtitles)

0&1 (Kei Nakata, 2001)

Posted on by

Filled with a sense of post-millennial ennui, Kei Nakata’s 2001 noir drama 0&1 is a familiar tale of fatalism and existential crisis but also a zeitgeisty capture of turn of the century Tokyo in which its heroes appear lost and in continual fear of displacement. Now digitally remastered, the meta quality of the film’s use of early DV ironically adds to the characters’ quest for proof of life through video while bearing out the mutability of physical recording which in itself can become inaccessible with terrifying speed. 

A young hitwoman ironically codenamed “0” is beginning to question her repetitive life of ceaseless killing, feeling in a sense as if she does not quite exist. In a quest to document her existence, she buys a handheld DV camera and begins recording herself and her thoughts as a kind of proof of life verifying that she does in fact live. “My memory will disappear someday. Will I disappear too?” she asks herself, stopping to capture cherry trees in bloom but disappointed to discover something at the harbour already gone. 

Her opposing force, a male hitman codenamed “1” is in the midst of a similar existential crisis feeling himself lost in a crowd as if it would make no difference to anything if he were to disappear. Unknowingly crossing paths with 0 in the chaos of the Shibuya scramble, he idly picks up a DV tape left behind in a cafe and, buying a DV camera for himself, is struck by 0’s existential musings. Taking up the camera he too begins to film himself because in this moment he wanted to exist even if describing his existence as “waiting to disappear slowly”. “We don’t know where to go” he laments, talking not just for himself and his opposing number but for the present generation trapped by post-Bubble malaise and millennial anxiety. Nakata frames his tale in terms of Y2K paranoia mired in the distrust of new technologies, but these two binary individuals look for salvation in the video screen for proof that they exist and that their reality has veracity.

Nevertheless, as the opening text informed us, 0 and 1 are numbers not meant to touch and their accidental meeting may spark its own kind of revolution in this case in the minds of two killers for hire otherwise trained neither to think or feel. Through their interactions, each begins to rediscover their sense of humanity while burdened by existential questioning but their newfound desire for emotional connectivity and individual identity is necessarily dangerous to their handlers who abruptly decide their broken robots must be destroyed before the contamination spreads. 

Yet the veteran they set on their tails, a refugee from old noir in crumpled trench coat, is facing much the same dilemma realising his end is near and in what form that end may likely come. Visiting an old school smokey jazz bar apparently after some time, he remarks on how nothing has changed inside but it too may soon disappear along with his own place to belong. Like the youngsters, he has grown tired of an existence of cynical repetition but given a new job he doesn’t quite like complains that in the old days things were fairer and had a kind or nobility rather than this rather sordid piece of housekeeping he’s just been asked to perform which could, he assumes, also be the end for him. His opposing number, however, is a pure survivalist living squarely in the moment who resents being saddled with a partner and insists on doing things her own way. 

Melancholy in its sense of fatalism, 0&1 ironically captures an early 20th century Tokyo which like its heroes has long since disappeared. The early DV aesthetic, while never quite beautiful, is the perfect evocation of the early 2000s while the medium itself has become largely obsolete, a digital halfway house now viewable only to those with the correct technology to unlock its secrets. Yet Nakata’s nihilistic prognosis is bleaker than it first seems, the heroine’s hopes of putting the camera down to make her own memories seemingly a forlorn hope while no refuge is available from the all pervasive sense of post-millennial emptiness, not even in dreams. 

 0&1 streamed as part of Yubari International Fantastic Film Festival 2021.

Original trailer (no subtitles)

Air Doll (空気人形, Hirokazu Koreeda, 2009)

Posted on by

“Was everything you saw in this world sad? Was there something, anything, what was beautiful?” the heroine of Hirokazu Koreeda’s exploration of urban loneliness Air Doll (空気人形, Kuki Ningyo) is asked by her creator though he can offer her few answers for the strange mystery of her life. Like a child, she takes beauty where she finds it yet much of what she sees is indeed sad as she reflects on the disconnected lives around her, the emptiness and futility of life in the contemporary society where everything is just a substitute for something else which cannot be obtained. 

As for herself, she is quite literally empty inside, an inflatable sex doll owned by middle-aged family restaurant waiter Hideo (Itsuji Itao) who has given her the name of his ex, Nozomi (Bae Doona), which ironically means hope, wish, or desire though not generally of the sexual kind. Yet one day she suddenly wakes up and begins to explore the world rejoicing in its new sensations feeling the rain on her hands and the wind that sounds the chimes as she watches her neighbours go about their daily routine. Dressed in the French maid’s outfit picked out for her by Hideo she gets a job at a local video store and begins living a more independent life while learning how to operate in human society. She feels herself out of place but is repeatedly told that there are others like her, mistaking her literal emptiness for their spiritual despair. 

Yet that sense of emptiness and futility is evident from Nozomi’s first forays into the human world in that the first act of mundanity she witnesses is the bin men sorting rubbish for disposal. “Unfortunately they’re non-burnable” Nozomi’s creator explains when she visits him in search of answers revealing he throws out the broken dolls that are returned to him once a year, “after all, once we die we’re burnable garbage. It’s not such a big difference” he adds, though as it turns out it is quite a big difference to Nozomi in ramming home to her that she can never become human and will always be something else, an inorganic “substitute” for something perceived as the “real”. 

“Your only flaw is that your body’s so cold” Hideo ironically laments as he warms her up in the bath, something she is told repeatedly to remind her that though she has discovered a heart it does not beat and she is not “alive”. Yet an old man (Masaya Takahashi) seeking a different kind of comfort later remarks that those with cold hands often have warm hearts as he reflects on his own life as a “substitute” teacher while she looks over the pictures of the many dogs he’s had through the course of his life as substitutes for the traditional family that have only left him feeling lonelier through their inevitable absences. There is perhaps in this a slightly conservative and uncomfortable implication that the loneliness we see in everybody that we meet is partly caused by the decline of the traditional family itself partly a consequence of the shifting gender roles of the later 20th century society. When they first meet, Nozomi has been rejected by a group of local mothers for inappropriately cooing over a baby in a pushchair the old man comforting her with a tale of the mayfly which is itself empty inside existing only to give birth and then die its own life defined by futility. Nozomi can never truly be human, but more than that she can never truly be a woman because she cannot reproduce as signalled in her final exchange with a little girl in her neighbourhood who swaps her beaten up and broken doll, a substitute for her absent mother now symbolic daughter to Nozomi, in exchange for her ring, a symbol of adulthood. 

In this way Nozomi becomes herself a symbol of something that is broken, an active barrier to societal happiness in providing a way for men like Hideo to escape the responsibility of the traditional family by satisfying his sexual desire through a fantasy of intimacy with an inanimate substitute. When Nozomi throws her pump away, Hideo buys a new model and when she confronts him he asks her to go back to being a passive doll because he finds all the human stuff “annoying” and only wants a woman who can be a selfless embodiment of his desires, will never talk back, challenge him, or hurt his feelings. Meanwhile, when her boss at the store (Ryo Iwamatsu) who seems have experienced a recent familial breakdown of his own blackmails her into having sex with him in the bathroom he is conversely annoyed by her passivity while tearfully calling out his wife’s name. Even her innocent love for coworker Junichi (Arata Iura) has its darkness, not only does she suspect she’s merely a substitute for his ex, his fetishisation of her revolves around his ability to take control over life by letting out her air and then permitting her to live by blowing his own back into her. 

“I am an air doll. A substitute for sexual desire” is how she introduces herself, preoccupied with her literal emptiness yet along with a heart discovering a sense of self as she interacts with others, beginning to wear her own clothes rather than those purchased for her by Hideo. At a moment of crisis she is surrounded by all the treasures she’s collected which ironically include a number of ornaments intended for a doll’s house including a tiny simulacrum of a cake which reappears in her imaginary birthday party suggesting that the only true happiness is to be found in wishful fantasy while the “real” will only ever disappoint. Nevertheless, she uses her last breath to bring happiness to all she can, uniting the old man with a lonely old woman (Sumiko Fuji) who confesses to random crimes just to have someone to talk to. Shot with unusual fluidity by Mark Lee Ping-Bing, Koreeda captures a society in flux in which the easy convenience of disposable consumerism has begun to replace human relationships and left us all empty inside. 

Air Doll in in US cinemas and on VOD Feb. 4 courtesy of Dekanalog

Trailer (English subtitles)

Flesh Pier (女体桟橋, Teruo Ishii, 1958)

Posted on by

Teruo Ishii may be most closely associated with his exploitation work for Toei in the late ‘60s and ‘70s but in actuality he began his career at Toho, later joining Shintoho where he served as an AD to among others Mikio Naruse whom he regarded as a lifelong mentor. After making his debut with boxing movie King of the Ring: The World of Glory in 1957, he worked mainly in children’s sci-fi tokusatsu serials before sliding into B-movie noir of which 1958’s Flesh Pier (女体桟橋, Nyotai sanbashi) is an early example. 

Set firmly in the contemporary era, Ishii opens with a documentary-style voiceover exoticising the seedy underbelly of the city’s entertainment district hidden away in otherwise sparkling Ginza. Shooting in a bold reportage style, he captures a sense of natural spontaneity reminiscent of early American independent cinema transitioning directly into nightclub Arizona where a woman is furiously dancing. Arizona is as we’ll see the nexus of the recent proliferation of “call girl” businesses which have arisen since sex work was criminalised and in this case at least dependent on an international sex trafficking network backed by an American gangster, Thompson (Harold Conway). Salaryman Keizo (Ken Utsui) is a new customer, double checking that the business is “safe” before being reassured that they don’t deal with anyone they don’t know and have already vetted his identity, but when he reaches the hotel room he’s been handed the key for, he discovers the body of a woman lying in the bathtub and is forced on the run. The twist is that Keizo isn’t a bored executive after all but an undercover policeman working on breaking the trafficking ring. 

Co-scripted by Akira Sagawa, Flesh Pier seems to draw frequent inspiration from Casablanca only with the roles slightly reversed as replacement hostess Rumi (Yoko Mihara) finds herself wondering why of all the gin joints in Ginza Keizo had to walk into hers while the bar’s musician, Teruo (Teruo Hata), quite clearly in love with her himself, completes the triangular relationship. The couple even enter a Moroccan-style room while echoing Rick and Ilsa’s painful rehash of their Paris break up as Rumi tries and fails to explain why she left him on some previous occasion, Keizo remembering that she wore a white sweater and a blue coat to mimic Rick’s “the Germans wore grey, you wore blue” while the film’s ending is also hugely reminiscent of Casablanca’s “beginning of a wonderful friendship” only with additional romance. 

Nevertheless, the crime here is bigger and darker than most contemporary noir with awkward echoes of Japan’s prewar sex trafficking industry embodied by the karayuki as it becomes clear the gang’s business model relies on finding young women and luring them abroad with promises of good jobs only to force them into them sex work. Meanwhile one of the regular policemen, Hayami (Hiroshi Asami), gets a shock when he sets up a meeting with one of the call girls and is met by his own fiancée who, unbeknownst to him, has resorted to sex work in order to fund her brother’s tuition. “What else could I do?” she tearfully asks him making plain that in the difficult if improving economic environment of late 50s Japan sex work is still the only viable option for many women needing to support their families in the absence of men given persistent societal sexism which often locks them out of other kinds of well-paying jobs. Hayami perhaps understands this, drowning his sorrows with his veteran partner insisting that he’s sick of being a policeman and plans to quit only for the older man to sympathetically tell him not to give up so easily. 

Then again, Keizo’s secondary love interest Haruko (Akemi Tsukushi) is an intrepid undercover reporter posing as a model in order to bait the trafficking ring. Even so the primary drama revolves around Keizo and Rumi’s unfinished business along with her musician’s jealousy, the implication being more that her feelings for Keizo have clouded her judgement rather than reawakened a sense of moral goodness. Like many femme-fatales in post-war B-movie noir she is made to pay the ultimate price for her transgressive femininity in having firstly climbed the in-gang ladder and then damned herself in her conflicted love for the earnest Keizo even while suspecting he may be an undercover cop despite his acting like an underworld thug. These are indeed a new breed gangster much more like those seen in European and American noir rather than traditional yakuza while the environment of the Arizona is also something of a liminal space as the opening voiceover puts it in but not of Japan. 

While nowhere near as lurid as some of Ishii’s later work, Flesh Pier is certainly daring for the time period in the griminess with which it depicts the successor to the red light districts along with its air of forbidden allure even while its club scenes are in keeping with those found in other contemporary gangster tales if lent a little more realism in the immediacy with which Ishii shoots them making full use of documentary-style handheld. Expressing a degree of anxiety as regards Japan’s increasingly global outlook along with that of increasing social change, Flesh Pier is formally daring from the young Ishii artfully playing with classic noir while fully embracing the transgressive thrills of B-movie crime. 

The Golden Bat (黄金バット, Hajime Sato, 1966)

Posted on by

Named after Japan’s oldest brand of cigarettes, Golden Bat is regarded by some as the nation’s first superhero created as a character for Kamishibai in 1931 by Takeo Nagamatsu and Suzuki Ichiro. Drawing inspiration from mythological illustrations, Nagamatsu and Ichiro had however intended Golden Bat to be rooted in science rather than legend which might seem ironic on viewing Hajime Sato’s 1966 piece of Toei tokusatsu titled simply The Golden Bat (黄金バット, Ogon Bat). 

Though Toho might be more closely associated with big screen tokusatsu adventures, Toei also had a small sideline in special effects movies as well as a series of hugely popular television franchises. Back in the 1960s, however, Golden Bat was something of an outlier in that it shifts away from the predominant messages that underlined many post-war tokusatsu in the importance of responsible science favouring instead a kind of throwback to the 1930s serial origins of the title character. As the film opens a factory worker with an obsessive though amateur interest in astronomy, Kazahaya (Wataru Yamakawa), tries to convince a professor that the planet Icarus has left its regular orbit and is on an imminent collision course with the Earth. The professor, however dismisses him, stating that his story might appeal to the tabloids but “it is essential that scientists examine any situation carefully” (which he doesn’t seem interested in doing). An assistant then arrives to back him up, adding that as they live in a world in which mankind has been to the moon “the universe no longer poses any terror for us” which sounds like quite an irresponsible statement for a scientist to make. 

In any case, according to Kazahaya Icarus is going to collide with the Earth in under 10 days so there isn’t much time for careful investigation anyway. On his way out of the building he’s accosted by two scary looking guys, but contrary to expectation they aren’t from some shady government organisation carting him off because he knows too much but from the super secretive Pearl Research Institute which has apparently been following him closely and wants to offer him a job because he’s right about Icarus. In another break with the usual tokusatsu anti-nuclear messages, Pearl has developed the “Hyper Annihilator Beam Cannon” which, using a special lens they haven’t developed yet, can turn a ray of atomic light into a heat beam with the power of a thousand H-bombs. They plan use this to blow up Icarus before it hits the Earth (no mention is ever made about whether or not Icarus is also inhabited). It’s about this time that their expeditionary force begins sending distress signals and then drops out of contact, the gang then discovering Icarus is part of a master plan operated by the evil inter galactic villain Nazo who thinks that only he deserves to exist so wants the Earth destroyed. 

Nazo is Golden Bat’s arch enemy, here a man in a rat costume with four eyes and a large metal wrench for a hand. Travelling to find their fallen comrades, the gang discover Golden Bat in his sarcophagus hidden in what looks like an ancient temple with instructions to wake him up with a single drop of water should humanity be in crisis which he predicts will happen 10,000 years after he went into storage in Atlantis. Professor Pearl’s adorable 12-year-old granddaughter Emily (Emily Hatoyama) does just this and then becomes his point of contact, but in true tokusatsu fashion after simply gifting them the special lens and fighting off Nazo’s goons Golden Bat flies off into the sunset with important superhero business to attend to. Meanwhile, Captain Yamatone (Sonny Chiba) and the others attempt to save the Earth while battling Nazo’s three most dangerous henchmen: wolfman Jackal (Keiichi Kitagawa), fish woman Piranha (Keiko Kuni), and Keloid (Yoichi Numata) who has a large skin lesion on his face which honestly seems in poor taste. 

As in his other films, Sato appears to have his tongue very much in his cheek given that the performances of his cast are decidedly broad with a tendency towards evil glares and reaction shots, his camera often zooming in directly on villainy. Golden Bat meanwhile is often seen striking theatrical poses while uttering phrases such as “for justice alone do I fight!” and hitting people with his baton to make them behave. You might think children would find a skeleton man with an eyeless gold skull a little frightening, but Golden Bat seems to make it work while offering his own non-evil laugh as he cheerfully returns to save the day until finally forced to tap the sign he’s helpfully put up reading “those who attempt to subjugate the world through force by their own force shall perish”. Nazo meanwhile has a definite nautical theme, travelling by shark submarine/aeroplane and giant squid-shaped earth borer with laser eyes but is finally undone in surprisingly violent fashion by Golden Bat’s Baton of Justice. Defiantly irreverent and flying in the face of tokusatsu’s general responsible science stance, Golden Bat is exceptionally silly and makes little literal sense but is undeniably fantastic fun as the skeletal superhero does his best to ward off galactic imperialism. 

Original trailer (no subtitles)

My World (Murantin, 2021)

Posted on by

Perhaps we’ve all had that lonely feeling recently, walking around eerily empty streets as if somehow the world had ended while we were asleep and now we’re all alone, but the hero of theatre actor Murantin’s feature debut My World is about to discover that he really is (almost) the last of his kind as he struggles to reconstruct his history, identity, and sense of self while encountering only two other women one young and one more his own age but each with strange and unclear motives. 

A man wakes up naked in a park, almost rebirthed in a sense, and rises in confusion. Finding a grey tracksuit abandoned a little way away he wanders through a town he doesn’t recognise where all the stores are closed and there are no people nor any traffic on the streets. With no sign of life to be found he’s drawn towards a library but finds little in terms of illumination before leaving and noticing a second Earth hanging in the sky where the moon ought to be. Returning to the park he sleeps, but is woken in the morning by an apparently concerned high school girl who later offers him a place in her home where she is currently living alone as her siblings are away and her parents abroad. A kind gesture, but perhaps not very sensible given her circumstances. In any case, she tells the man not to go out, buying him some nicer clothes and cooking dinner every night.

With no memories of his own, the man remains confused. The high school girl appears to be living normally. She leaves every day to attend class which suggests there are other people around though he never sees any and the strangely old-fashioned TV in the living room only displays static. One day she informs him her boyfriend wants to come over so he’ll have to make himself scarce, later escorting him to the basement where she handcuffs him to a water pipe. Why would a regular high school girl own a pair of sparkly handcuffs with fairytale-esque little blue keys? Why is he not supposed to look into any of the other bedrooms? What secrets is this world hiding from him? The plot begins to thicken when he decides to break the rule and follow the high school girl to see where she goes, only to find himself at the library again where he encounters a middle-aged woman in what appears to be her negligee. 

The man is in a sense imprisoned within the house, the handcuffs a literal extension of his mental constraint in a world which may be of his own making in wilful self-exile from a traumatic past. His strange dreams hint at another life, possibly on the other Earth, in which there are flashes of potential violence. Before long he begins encountering other versions of himself, fracturing under the weight of his internal confusion when directly confronted. The high school girl tells him he’s creating too much “disorder” and the only way to repair it is to go back to his own world, but the man doesn’t want to. Describing it as painful, he insists there’s no need to return if he can stay with the high school girl but in the end he will have to face himself and the traumatic past from which he seems to be in mental flight. 

Dreamlike in its uncanniness, Murantin’s camera chases a man on the run from himself as he walks through a world already dead, a still place with no past or future. He does not know himself, and no one else does either or at least that’s what they claim. The world is quite literally his, a place which he has unwittingly created in refuge from his trauma but he is no god only a man imprisoning himself, a wilful exile from a world he couldn’t accept. A tale of guilt and loneliness, My World offers its hero a chance at redemption through facing his past, accepting his responsibility, and learning the truth about himself but nevertheless concludes that there may be only one path to freedom while atoning for his transgressions in a world suddenly more alive and once more in motion. 

My World streamed as part of Yubari International Fantastic Film Festival 2021.

Trailer (English subtitles)

Apart from Life (地の群れ, Kei Kumai, 1970)

Posted on by

By 1970, Japan had more or less cemented its economic miracle and in terms of cinema at least memories of the war were beginning to recede with the young keen to address other concerns such as dissatisfaction with increasing consumerism or resistance towards American foreign policy in Asia. Unjustly neglected by international scholars, Kei Kumai by contrast refused to turn away from issues others might have found taboo or at least unpleasant enough to avoid mentioning. Like A Chain of Islands, Apart of From Life (地の群れ, Chi no Mure) has an overt anti-American sentiment but in essence criticises a society in which people are dying of guilt and shame though essentially blameless while those marginalised continue to oppress each other and fight amongst themselves rather than unite to resist their marginalisation. 

Based on a novel by Mitsuharu Inoue, the film opens with a brief prologue set in 1941 before jumping forward to the mid-1960s in the naval port town of Sasebo, the naval facilities now operated by American forces. An ensemble drama, the tale revolves around a drunken doctor, Unan (Mizuho Suzuki), though this one is far from an angel merely another wounded and compromised soul of the post-war era wracked by guilt over his various moral failures which began with the incident in the prologue in which he attempted to weasel out of his responsibility after getting an ethnically Korean girl pregnant as a young teenager working in a coal mine. He is the first of many to insist “I know nothing” that he’s “responsible for nothing” firstly denying the child is his then trying to smooth it over with money before coldly telling the woman’s sister to take her to a hospital in nearby Sasebo where no one will know them in order to get an abortion and avoid the social stigma of unwed pregnancy. The sister can only look at him with contempt. Later he discovers that the young woman lost her life while trying to provoke a miscarriage. 

Hako died, in a sense, out of shame. Many of Unan’s patients face the possibility of something similar. One woman comes to him about her teenage daughter, Yoshiko, who is bleeding continuously as if constantly menstruating. Unan asks the mother if she was in Nagasaki at the time of the atomic bombing as the symptoms are similar to the effects of the radiation poisoning he observed while working as a doctor in the city. She continues to deny it, but flashbacks to conversations with her now absent husband and daughter suggest she may not be telling the truth at least in its entirety even though her daughter’s life is at stake. She doesn’t want to be associated with “those Kaito Shinden people”, referring to the industrial slumland where many refugees from Nagasaki have settled which is treated as a kind of plague town by the rest of the local area. If her daughter survives but is unmasked as a second generation A-bomb victim her mother fears she will never be able to marry and that she will have “no future”. 

Yet they are not the only ones facing marginalisation. A young woman, Tokuko, comes to Unan’s office wanting a certificate that proves she has been raped, but Unan doesn’t help her firstly for the understandable reason that she is, understandably, unable to explain the exact circumstances to him, and secondly because he just isn’t very invested in her wellbeing bizarrely suggesting she come back with a relative or the person responsible. As she later explains, the rapist threatened to expose the fact that her family are burakumin in order to keep her quiet while she clearly remembers that he wore a glove on his left hand which she believes probably hides a distinctive keloid skin lesion marking him as an A-bomb victim and probable resident of Kaito Shinden. Tokuko’s father had also been a victim of workplace discrimination presumably because of his burakumin heritage, his wife told that he had stabbed himself while confronting the workers who were harassing him advised to keep quiet rather than attract the attention of the authorities. Tokuko is originally shamed into silence not by her violation but by her marginalisation, later deciding to track down her assailant by herself after someone else reports the crime to the police who arrest a local Kaito Shinden troublemaker and attempt to frame him for the crime. 

The confrontation however leads to a small war between the Kaito Shinden A-bomb survivors and the burakumin community which results in the death of a burakimin woman after they tactlessly insist that Kaito Shinden is a buraku below the buraku and that their blood is “rotten” and will be for generations. Discussing the case, some had even suggested that the rape was itself a result of prejudice towards the A-bomb survivors seeing as they are unable to find wives. Yet Tokuko’s mother had asked if being burakumin means it’s OK to rape her daughter, in much the same way Hako’s sister might have asked if being ethnically Korean made it OK for Unan to so casually discard her. Explaining that the locals regard Kaito Shinden as a “sick village” Yoshiko’s mother says she doesn’t think the people there are any different from anyone else despite her determination not to be associated with the A-bomb “disease”. “If Kaito Shinden is sick, the whole of Japan is sick!” Unan fires back revealing that he himself was also in Nagasaki shortly after the bomb dropped, apparently objecting to these baseless prejudices but seemingly unwilling to cure them even while his patients quite literally die of shame. 

In his own case, however, it’s not prejudice or wartime trauma that have led to Unan’s alcoholism but his many moral failures and their resulting guilt. His wife (Noriko Matsumoto) wants to divorce him, partly because of the drinking, but also because of his longstanding guilt over the death of a friend who retreated to the mountains with the communists during the Red Purge of the early 1950s of whom he is also jealous in that he was previously his wife’s lover and he can’t get over wondering if he’d lived his wife would have chosen him. Guilt over Hako, perhaps mixed with the fears of his radiation exposure, have also led him to emotionally blackmail his wife into several abortions as if he thinks it improper to father a child. 

Meanwhile, we seem to see pregnant women everywhere. Nobuo (Mugihito), orphaned by the A-bomb, sees a pair of them walking ahead of a gaggle of nuns which he later decides to freak out by creepily staring at them before lunging wildly like a dog among geese. The film’s conclusion finds him on the run from a gang of burakumin boys looking for revenge, running far out of the slums into the suburbs and through one of those nice new danchi housing complexes where a row of pregnant housewives sits silently knitting, something almost creepy in the vacant way they smile at him as he runs past before tripping over a child’s toy car. Boys like Nobuo are it seems cast out from the newly consumerist society of the economic miracle while just about everyone is in some way marginalised and in some cases several times over: rape victim, burakumin, A-bomb survivor, troublemaker, orphan, divorcee, communist, Christian. Nobuo wonders why God chose Nagasaki for an A-bomb when it’s where all the Christians live while the head of a Virgin Mary statue is repeatedly smashed as if to imply there’s no more mercy to be found here. 

Kumai regularly cuts back to a disturbing visual motif of a cage filled with rats who kill a live chicken and fight over the scraps of rotting meat until ignited by a gust of fire, the survivors scrabbling over each other blindly looking for an exit. Meanwhile, US jet planes fly constantly overhead and all Unan can think to do is throw a rock at a flag flying on the base. “She was killed by everybody” Tokuko exclaims of the burakumin woman, suddenly seeing the webs of prejudice, oppression, and selfishness which created the circumstances which led to her death by stoning. Shot in a crisp black and white and academy ratio, Kumai’s steely drama lets no one off the hook implying that all of Japan is indeed “sick” wilfully leaving these marginalised people to fight amongst themselves for the scraps of a newly prosperous society. 

DVD release trailer (no subtitles)

Kyoshin (共振, Keiichi Higuchi, 2021)

Posted on by

In modern society we often criticise others, but not always ourselves, for a perceived lack of empathy but what would it be like to truly empathise with everyone, all of the time, with no control over our own feelings? The hero of Keiichi Higuchi’s psychological drama Kyoshin (共振) finds himself with just this problem after a traumatic incident leaves him with both intense PTSD and the unwelcome side effect of being forced to feel the pain of others as his own. 

26-year-old Takehiko (Akihiro Yamamoto) thought of himself as perhaps a little over sensitive, feeling obvious discomfort sat opposite two salarymen arguing loudly in a crowded restaurant while also somewhat disconnected from his partner in a moment of supposed intimacy. It’s one evening on the beach, however, when everything goes into overdrive. Spotting two guys manhandling a screaming woman into a van he and his friend Gin (Keisuke Sohma) intervene but aren’t much of a match for two the young thugs and find themselves tied up and stunned in the back while the woman is forced to provide oral sex to the driver. Taking advantage of a momentary lapse from the other man who was busy interrogating Gin and Takehiko, the woman takes drastic action of her own in a bid to escape. Gin tries to help her, but seeing what’s befallen the driver Takehiko is plunged into fugue state able to do nothing other than scream in pain as if it were he that had suffered the catastrophic injury. 

A year on, Takehiko is a broken shell of a man unable to venture outside owing to the intense assault of other people’s pain. Ignoring calls from Gin, he’s cared for by his older brother Yuya (Daichi Yamaguchi) who ferries him to various doctor’s appointments, jeopardising his own employment in the process. Sick of medical professionals unwilling to admit they don’t know how to help him and obsessed with the curse of 27, Takehiko decides he’ll take his own life if there’s no improvement in his condition by his next birthday but then discovers potential salvation in an experimental programme run by a lesbian couple in which he will receive treatment from a woman who once experienced something very similar to himself but claims to have learned to live with it. 

The irony is that Takehiko’s condition is caused by extreme empathy in that he cannot avoid feeling other people’s physical pain as his own, yet he continues to treat those around him badly blind to the emotional toll caring for him is taking on them. His brother, feeling a parental responsibility as their parents passed away young, drops everything to help him but his boorish boss, ironically, has a fundamental lack of empathy. Annoyed that Yuya takes so much time off, he openly mocks him making the rather irrelevant point that Takehiko is 26 not six and therefore shouldn’t need so much care virtually accusing him of mollycoddling as if the problem were Yuya’s anxiety rather than his brother’s precarious mental health. 

Yet the experimental programme Takehiko finds himself involved with raises its own collection of ethical questions as the psychiatrist pushes him into a series of erotic situations arguing that if he learns to empathise across the emotional spectrum to experience other people’s pleasure as well as their pain he’ll be able to turn it off much more easily or at least flatten it out. She implies that similar therapies are what has enabled her to live a relatively normal life, but fails to disclose that she is also carrying a similar trauma which the treatment ironically recalls while largely failing to deal with the obvious possibility of transference in the potentially inappropriate lack of boundaries between patient and doctor. 

It might not be appropriate to ask how much empathy is too much empathy, but Takehiko’s path to recovery ironically enough lies only in secondary shock and a brush with death that allows him to reconnect with his friend Gin, suffering alone in their shared trauma, while empathising emotionally with his brother’s obvious care for him. It isn’t so much that Takehiko needs to disengage with those around him, but learn how to process effectively so that he can better help and understand rather solipsistically internalising external suffering. Shot with a sense of uneasy eeriness and a sci-fi twist in the manifestation of Takehiko’s descent into an oppressive empathy bubble, Higuchi’s provocative drama advocates for caring a little more about the pain of others but not so much that it stops you seeing where it hurts. 

Kyoshin streamed as part of Yubari International Fantastic Film Festival 2021.

Original trailer (no subtitles)

The Ceiling at Utsunomiya (怪異宇都宮釣天井, Nobuo Nakagawa, 1956)

Posted on by

Crime does not pay for a series of conspirators at the centre of Nobuo Nakagawa’s supernaturally-inflected historical tale, The Ceiling at Utsunomiya (怪異宇都宮釣天井, Kaii Utsunomiya Tsuritenjo). As the title implies, Nakagawa’s ominous jidaigeki is inspired by a historical legend in which a retainer supposedly attempted to assassinate the shogun through the rather elaborate device of a mechanical ceiling designed to crush him as he slept. In actuality no such thing took place, the shogun changed his route and subsequent investigations of Utsunomiya Castle found no sign of a false ceiling, yet the story took on a life of its own as local folklore. 

In this version of the tale, conspirators Councillor Kawamura (Ureo Egawa) and local yakuza Kagiya (Masao Mishima) are conspiring to depose Tokugawa Iemitsu (Yoichi Numata) in favour of his brother, manipulating Lord Honda (Shuntaro Emi) of Utsunomiya Castle by convincing him that his clan will prosper when the other retainers fall in behind the new shogun. The pair have arranged for nine talented craftsmen to be shut up in the castle to install “the mechanism” in time for the arrival of the shogun who is due to stay at the castle on his way to Nikko. Meanwhile, Kawamura is also intent on sleeping with the daughter of head carpenter Toemon (Yoji Misaki), Ofuji (Konomi Fuji), whom chief minion Tenzen (Tetsuro Tamba) is supposed to kidnap once the workmen have gone into isolation in the castle. Righteous samurai Ryutaro (Hiroshi Ogasawara) however, an undercover shogunate bodyguard, begins to disrupt their plan saving Ofuji while bonding with a friendly bar hostess, Onobu (Sachiko Toyama), and secret princess forest woman Oshino (Akemi Tsukushi). 

The plot represents in itself a malfunctioning of the feudal order in the essential weakness of Lord Honda, the ambition of his underling Kawamura, and the cruel greed of Kagiya. As the two men conspire, Kagiya jokingly laments that he isn’t a samurai while Kawamura reminds him that if the plan comes off he’ll be fantastically rich. Kagiya, a yakuza who sends his thugs to extort protection money from the local market, is representation of the threat of the rising merchant class whose financial power presents a challenge to the authority of the samurai. Toemon, meanwhile, a master craftsman, is manipulated into participating in the plan because he is in debt to Kagiya, later promised that he too will be “promoted” in being given permission to carry a sword little knowing that Kawamura and Kagiya not only plan to kidnap and rape his daughter but never intend to allow any of the craftsmen to live because they simply know too much. 

The Ceiling at Utsunomiya is not a ghost story in the manner for which Nakagawa is best known but it certainly plays like one, Kagiya eventually haunted by the figure of a betrayed Toemon which in turn leads him to a self-destructive attack on Tenzen and his eventual demise collapsed over his ill-gotten gains, a koban falling from his hand. Greed and violence will only repay in the same, the weak-willed Lord getting his comeuppance from the ever confident shogun even if he himself coolly stands back while others risk their lives to protect him. Even so, the eventual operation of “the mechanism” is intensely startling, the ceiling abruptly collapsing with alarming ferocity though one wonders what the advantage is in such an expensive, elaborate contraption aside from its ironic symbolism when the point of a sword will do. 

Then again, the heroic Ryutaro is almost assassinated while crossing a river via zip wire later fished out of the river by sullen forest woman Oshino, first encountered hunting birds with darts but later revealed to be the illegitimate child of samurai parents who fell foul of political intrigue. In a sense this revelation emphasises the restoration of the political order, Ryutaro permitted to fall in love with Oshino because they are of the same social class, while the romance between Ofuji and craftsman Yoshichi (Kotaro Sugiyama) also comes to fruition eliding the minor class difference between them in allowing the boss’ protege to marry the now orphaned daughter. Onobu meanwhile pays heavy price for her misplaced love for Ryutaro, denied romantic fulfilment in her liminal existence as a bar hostess. In any case, the corruption is exorcised and the normal order resumes reinforcing the hierarchical shogunate society with each of the players back in their rightful positions and possessing new hope for the future as Ryutaro and the shogun continue their tour while their former comrades kneel at the roadside. 

Pickles and Komian Club (丸八やたら漬け, Koichi Sato, 2021)

Posted on by

For years the Komian Club had been a familial haunt for visitors to the Yamagata International Documentary Film Festival becoming almost an artificial hub where filmmakers and spectators could meet on equal terms. However, the 135-year-old family-run pickle store was left with little choice other than to close given the decline in demand for pickles among younger consumers and the additional strains placed on their business by the conoravirus pandemic. 

Pickles and Komian Club (丸八やたら漬け, Maruhachi yatarazuke Komian) is as much about the film festival and the wider Yamagata community as it about the building at its centre. The loss of the store leaves many feeling quite literally displaced, not only lacking a new place to gather and mourning the atmosphere of the traditional building, but reflecting on the absence of these kinds of structures in the urban environment which places value only in the land on which new structures more profitable to the modern economy may be built. We’re told that the pickle store had been approved as an intangible cultural asset because of its luxurious interior, but this does not apparently provide much protection under Japanese property laws. The store’s owner Yoshinori mentions the possibilities of someone buying his storehouse and moving it to a new location preserving all of its period features but is eventually forced to sell to developers who plan to knock it down to build build yet another generic apartment block. 

As he explains, in Japan property depreciates over time and the value that it has is essentially sentimental rather than financial. Few people are interested in preserving these traditional buildings along with their classical architectural styles because there is no real financial incentive to do so. The best that can be done is to salvage what one can that could be re-used or incorporated in another structure such as the heavy wooden beams and ornate friezes. Yoshinori sells one of his giant wooden pickling vats to an old friend who runs a traditional Japanese inn which is then repurposed as a bath. His friend worries what the decline of traditional culture might mean for his business, inns largely being the repository of the traditional in the modern society. But the repurposing of the vat which in essence turns something used for industry into something used for leisure is an example of one way to bring something of the past into the present finding new uses for old technology. 

While the pickle store could not be saved, other owners of similar properties have been able to breathe new life into old spaces, turning a small outside guesthouse into a cinema which the local community can enjoy or renting out part of the premises for local events taking full advantage of the calming atmosphere such traditional buildings can offer. Though as an architecture student later makes plain what’s needed is further action at the legislative level to ensure that older buildings are better protected and less likely to be torn down because of an economic imperative that has no interest in tangible history. Seeing the buildings stripped of their assets then roughly broken apart is a heartrending sight as is the giant empty space they leave behind robbing the area of its unique atmosphere in favour of the generically urban. 

One interviewee makes the point that in choosing to focus on documentary film the festival in a sense made an investment in its future by choosing the unique over the flashy, building a friendly atmosphere of openness and equality rather than the red carpets and VIP areas which can often define some other events. In a sense it’s this loss of traditional spaces which damages the fabric of the community in further distancing one person from another while robbing it of the architectural history that gives it its sense of place.  Even so the presence of the festival providing a place in which filmmakers and film lovers from all over the world can gather is a potent symbol of alternative community bolstering the local, while the young are also busying themselves finding new ways to incorporate the traditional into their modern lives or breathing life back into that which had been thought old-fashioned but might now be reappreciated for its quality of serenity in an ever changing society.

Pickles and Komian Club Storytellers streams worldwide (excl. Japan) via DAFilms until Feb. 6 as part of Made in Japan, Yamagata 1989 – 2021 (films stream free until Jan. 24)

Trailer (no subtitles)