Tag: Japanese

Sincerity (まごころ, Mikio Naruse, 1939)

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When the daughter of a poor family leapfrogs that of a rich one to be named top of the class, it exposes a series of hypocrisies and contradictions within the militarist order in Mikio Naruse’s 1939 drama, Sincerity (まごころ, Magokoro). The film opens, however, with a parade led by the Patriotic Women’s Association seeing young men off war. The group is led by Mrs Asada (Sachiko Murase), the mother of the rich girl, Nobuko (Etchan), who is busy giving orders to the other women regarding the air defence watch and sweet potato market which seems very forward thinking for the time period.

But in other ways it’s Mrs Asada who comes in for the greatest criticism as her bossiness and involvement with patriotic activity is depicted as a kind of displacement activity to mitigate her sense of uselessness and unhappiness in her marriage to arch militarist Kei (Minoru Takada) whom she fears is still hung up on his old girlfriend, Tsuta (Takako Irie), who is also the mother of Tomiko (Teruko Kato), the poor girl and apparent model student who has just displaced Nobuko as the cleverest girl in the class. Through Mrs Asada is rightly concerned that Nobuko has dropped a whole 10 places, Kei is not bothered by it at all because she is physically robust and healthy, which are the two most important qualities from a militarist perspective, leaving aside the fact that many wouldn’t regard a woman’s academic success as particularly important. Indeed, Kei is dismissive of his wife. Mrs Asada suggests that he finds her “stupid” and that their daughter is “stupid” by extension while Tsuta’s is clever and earnest because Tsuta is the same. He tells her that a child’s education is the mother’s responsibility and it’s probably her fault for busying herself outside of the home with her wartime activities with the implication that she’s been neglecting her child and that’s why her grades have fallen.

This point seems contradictory seeing that even at this stage, the nation expects women to serve their country in ways other than dedicating themselves to their families which is a responsibility secondary to that they owe to the emperor. Nevertheless, the implication remains that she’s doing it for the wrong reasons because what she enjoys is the status it gives her and the power of being in charge. Unlike Tsuta who has no husband, Mrs Asada’s family is wealthy with servants to take care of the domestic work so has nothing to do all day, while it’s also clear that the marriage is more or less dead and Kei does not particularly care for her, which he later admits, though partly because he has already rededicated himself to the nation in eagerly anticipating his call-up letter. When he’s first introduced, Kei is admiring a sword he’s having made ready for when he gets his papers to enlist as an officer. 

It’s a remark about Kei’s call-up that first sets alarm bells off in Tomiko in noticing the sadness it provokes in her mother, itself a little transgressive from a propaganda perspective. The grades situation doesn’t affect the girls’ friendship in the slightest, though this sudden reckoning with the past does begin to place a wedge between them not only in a growing awareness of their class differences but an awkwardness about the complicated situation between their parents which they are not well equipped to fully understand. Tsuta first tries to tell Nobuko the truth, but it upsets her so much that she lies instead and says that it’s true she knew Kei in the past but only as an acquaintance not a romantic partner. Nevertheless, the fact that she called him “Kei” rather than “Keikichi” or whatever his surname was before he married into Mrs Asada’s family suggests a great degree of intimacy which is something Tomiko seems to pick up on. 

There’s a persistent implication that Kei may be the father of both girls, which further reinforces the idea that their contrasting characters are a product of the way their mothers have raised them. Nobuko is described as self-involved and lazy, characteristics which reflect her privileged upbringing and sense of entitlement. Mrs Asada tries to talk to her new teacher, Mr Iwata, but his opinion is that Nobuko was most likely coasting and is struggling now because the work is more difficult and she hasn’t learned how to study or developed a consciousness that results are born of what you put into them. She, and her mother, simply expect to come top because it’s what a girl of her status deserves. Her displacement is a discomforting inversion of the social order. In this, the film both undercuts and reinforces militarist ideology in stressing the importance of hard work for all while doing so at the expense of a reverence for feudalistic ideas of class hierarchy. 

It’s this class divide that is transgressed when Kei sends the present of an expensive French doll to Tomiko after she and her mother come to Nobuko’s rescue when she cuts her foot on some sharp rocks while the girls’ are playing together at the river. The gift seems rather extravagant for the relatively minor act of kindness Tomiko and her mother performed which accidentally reunited Tsuta and Kei though neither of them say very much and while Tsuta seems to look at him longingly, Kei appears indifferent. Nevertheless, the grandmother suggests the doll reflects Kei’s sincere heart with the implication that it reflects his continuing attachment to Tsuta. Tsuta wants to refuse it, but realises she can’t because Mrs Asada likely doesn’t know and her finding out would just cause more trouble, though it’s a painful reminder of her romantic disappointment. 

Tomiko ends up sending it back herself with a note for Nobuko explaining everything. Nobuko then limps off with her injured foot to return the doll to Tomiko and tell her none of that matters, she wants her to have the doll anyway. The doll then becomes a symbol of the sisterhood between the girls and the erasure of the class boundary between them. Tomiko can be seen holding the doll when they join the parade to send Kei off to war, while Tsuta and Mrs Asada also smooth out the misunderstandings between them to celebrate Kei’s mobilisation together. The message here is more that old differences must now be put aside so that everyone can serve the nation together rather than selfishly fixating on personal drama such as wounded pride or romantic heartbreak. Even so, Naruse slightly undercuts the patriotic conclusion with the hint of sadness on Tsuta’s face before she recomposes herself to smile at Mrs Asada and reinforce the sense of solidarity between them, while what we’re left with is the memories of the idyllic countryside setting and sense of pastoral serenity along with the sincerity of the relationship of the two girls which is rooted not in patriotism but genuine friendship that cares nothing for the divisions of social class or the rigidities of the adult world.

Sincerity screens at Japan Society New York May 10 as part of Mikio Naruse: The World Betrays Us – Part I.

Images: Collection of National Film Archive of Japan

My Sunshine (ぼくのお日さま, Hiroshi Okuyama, 2024)

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A golden light seems to pour into the life of Takuya (Keitatsu Koshiyama), a nervous young man with a stammer, as he stands transfixed by the elegant movements of a figure skater. As the world around him literally brightens, he begins to discover another side of himself, though it’s never quite clear if it’s Sakura (Kiara Takanashi), a moody teenage girl whose attitude to figure skating seems ambivalent at best, with whom he’s fallen in love or the simple act of figure skating itself. 

Drawing on autobiographical experience, Okuyama studied figure skating himself while his older sister trained to be a champion, My Sunshine (ぼくのお日さま, Boku no Ohisama) otherwise roots itself in the small-town Japan of the late ‘90s and 2000s in which being different was not exactly welcomed. But in fact, most people seem accepting of Takuya, if in a sometimes patronising way, viewing him as a boy with his head in the clouds and cutting him off when he attempts to speak rather than give him the time to finish. When the teacher is going around the class asking the children to read out a stanza of a poem each, he picks on Takuya and tells him to take his time, though the boy’s anxiety is palpable. The teacher may be caught between two options and struggling to decide which is better, not asking him to read at all to spare him from his classmates’ mocking which would also be to exclude him and reinforce a sense of inferiority in his otherness, or to ask him deliberately and try to encourage patience to teach him and the other children that there’s nothing wrong with the way he speaks. 

But in any case, Takuya is already something of an outsider in that he has no aptitude for sports and it’s never clear if he actually enjoys them or just participates because it’s what you do in this town to be man. When a recent arrival to the town and former international pro-figure skater Hiroshi (Sosuke Ikematsu) catches sight of him clumsily trying to teach himself how to dance like Sakura, it enlivens something in him that reminds him of the passion he once felt for skating. He finds himself wanting to help the boy, gifting him his old figure skating skates and teaching him for free before hitting on the idea of training him alongside Sakura as a pair.

Sakura isn’t all that keen to begin with, though at times, it seems as though she may not even like figure skating and is only doing it because her mother makes her. She tells Hiroshi that she isn’t aiming to become the best ice dancer and is a little resentful of being forced to go back to basics to meet Takuya’s skill level but goes along with it because the coach says so. What she thinks of Takuya isn’t exactly clear, though she seems to look down on him a little like the other kids who also mock him giving up ice hockey to do a “girl’s” sport. For her part she seems to have a crush on the handsome and mysterious Hiroshi that, like Takuya, she is unable to articulate. For this reason, along with an insecurity in her talent, she resents the special attention Takuya seems to be getting when it’s her mother who’s paying for the lessons and comes to the conclusion that he’s just more interested in him than her.

She may not altogether be incorrect. In his early coaching sessions with Sakura, Hiroshi doesn’t seem all that invested and is distracted by Takuya in the same way Takuya is distracted by the sunlight or the snow. In trying to help Takuya, he’s trying to help himself and for a time succeeds as the three of them generate a joyful familial relationship, culminating in a day skating on a frozen lake. But he too is unable to be honest about the fact that he came to this rural town to be with his partner who decided to take over the family business when his father passed away. Kai (Ryuya Wakaba) laughs off questions about whether he’s married yet, and the two men seem to live together quietly otherwise isolated from the community around them. When Sakura catches sight of them together, she realises something she may not really be equipped to fully understand, only further deepening her sense of resentment in an unreasonable feeling of betrayal. It isn’t really homophobia that motivates her as much jealousy when she suddenly brands Hiroshi as “‘disgusting” and accuses him of getting a kick out of making a boy do a girl’s sport, excusing her conviction that he prefers Takuya over her and potentially giving herself an out to quit skating (though it seems her mother’s not taking the hint).

But like Sakura, Hiroshi is also uncertain if this is the right place for him or if he and his partner can really live together in this small town permanently. Though he answers “of course” when Kai asks if he’s glad he came, Hiroshi pointedly gives no answer when he’s asked if he really wants to be here. Kai says that he hasn’t talked about skating like this for ages nor seemed so happy, suggesting that there may have been something missing in his life that the relationship didn’t compensate for and may not survive without. How his professional career ended is never explained, though his telling Sakura that he only got to compete internationally because of the lack of male dancers speaks to a degree of insecurity that contributes to a lack of ambition in his personal and professional lives. All three of them are, for varying reasons, unable to say what they really want or how they really feel. Though they find temporary solace in their fragile bond, it is only, as Takuya’s brother cruelly puts it, meant to last until the snow melts. Nevertheless, now dressed in a new school uniform clearly far too big for him that suggests he has some more growing to do, Takuya may have found a means of self-expression in dance that might give him the courage to speak his mind.

My Sunshine screened as part of this year’s Queer East.

Trailer (English subtitles)

Strangers (Kenta Ikeda, 2024)

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Naoko, the heroine of Kenta Ikeda’s Strangers, says she’s been pretending all her life. She’s been pretending to be what everyone wanted her to without really knowing or thinking about what it was she wanted to be or who she really is. On a baseline level, Ikeda suggests that we are and remain strangers to ourselves while equally confused about those around us, seeing what we want or expect to see rather than who they really are.

In part that may explain why Naoko has stayed with her unfaithful fiancé Takeo who got a colleague pregnant and then seemingly abandoned her. Shimizu then began harassing Naoko, stalking her and making silent calls. To make matters worse, Takeo is often away on “business trips”. He’s not currently responding to her phone calls or messages and has just embarrassed her by not turning up to a family event. Naoko’s sister thinks she should leave him and doesn’t understand why she hasn’t already. But Naoko just sighs that she’s decided not to expect too much from life and seems prepared to put up with this degradation because she doesn’t think she deserves anything better. 

That might be why she’s so drawn to her enigmatic colleague Yamaguchi who waltzes in past noon wearing a distinctive blue dress that floats in the air behind her. The other ladies at work gossip that their bullying boss Satome, who is married with two children, got her the job after picking her up on a dating app and the reason why she can get away with such unprofessional behaviour is because she’s sleeping with him. But Naoko later discovers that Yamaguchi’s dating app activities are a kind of side hustle in which she participates in idealised dating scenarios pretending to be the lover of lonely men who pay her handsomely for a few hours of fantasy romance.

Or as Yamaguchi describes it, the opportunity to experience only the good parts of love before you get sick of each other and run out of things to say. It sounds more than a little like the logic of someone who’s decided not to expect too much from life, and while it seems Yamaguchi may be trying to avoid her own grief and loneliness, it’s true that she otherwise remains a cypher. After losing contact with Yamaguchi and being left with her smartphone, Naoko receives a call from her handler who tells her that it doesn’t matter who she is or why she has “Yamaguchi’s” phone, all that matters is turning up at the appointment and never letting it slip that it’s all just role-play.

On her dating app profile, Yamaguchi’s face is blurred so that you only really see the image of her in her distinctive blue dress which Naoko too later starts wearing. The people around Naoko are often shot in soft focus so that we can’t really be sure of their identity beyond using their clothing to infer who they are. Men in particular are often shot from behind or with their faces out of frame as if they were all just a much of a muchness. We never even meet Takeo, who apparently does not return from his “business trip”. In any case, in agreeing to the fantasy date, Naoko is gradually taken over by the Yamaguchi persona. The spread of the graze she sustained at the beginning of the film seems to indicate the gradual erasure of her identity, yet in another sense becoming Yamaguchi also gives Naoko an excuse to stop pretending and accept herself or at least to start expecting more from life. She becomes more assertive, flirtatious, and confident in confronting Shimizu only to realise that she may not have been the mysterious force she felt watching her after all. 

In her Yamaguchi persona, Shimizu describes Naoko as a like a colourless and doorless detergent, but she replies she’s been hiding all her life. She ran ran away from her problems, refused confronting Takeo or Shimizu, avoided being honest with her family and simply played up to the image they had of her of a shy and obedient woman. There might be something in the fact that Yamaguchi kisses her suggesting that Naoko may have been running away from her sexuality, but equally it could just be that this is how the Yamaguchi curse is passed from woman to woman. Having once assumed it, Naoko now must try to shake it off but that too might not be as easy as she might assume. Meanwhile, those around her also have their own secret lives and faces they keep hidden from others. Ikeda creates a atmosphere of eeriness and hovering violence amid the faceless city where it doesn’t matter who you are so long as you show up and everyone is to some extent participating in a temporary fantasy in order to overcome the disappointment of life in which as Naoko had told herself it seems better not to expect too much.

The Killing Machine (少林寺拳法, Norifumi Suzuki, 1975)

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“As long as somebody like you is around, there’s hope for Japan,” an oddly sympathetic prison warden says to the last patriot standing in post-war Osaka. The title of Norifumi Suzuki’s Sonny Chiba vehicle The Killing Machine (少林寺拳法, Shorinji Kempo) maybe somewhat inappropriate or at least potentially misleading as the film is deliberately constructed as a martial arts parable emphasising the spiritual philosophy of self-improvement and compassion that is inextricable from its practice.

To that extent, the hero, Soh Doushin (Shinichi Chiba), is trying to fight his way out of the miasmas of the immediate post-war era. As may be apparent, Soh has taken a Chinese name, though Soh was apparently his along and belonged to a former samurai family whose nobility has been crushed by militarism. As the film opens, however, he’s a Japanese secret service operative in Manchuria blindsided by the news of Japan’s surrender. Soh is it seems a nationalist and a patriot, but a fairly revisionist one who stands up to the abuses of the Japanese army. He later says that he protested the way that the local Chinese population were often treated and he does indeed raise a fist toward an officer who wants to sell a young Japanese woman to a Chinese soldier in return for a guarantee of their safe passage to a boat heading out of the country. The young woman’s mother protests that she is an innocent virgin, a fact that has some later relevance. Soh refuses to let the officers take her, though evidently separated from her later.

When he meets the young woman again in the bomb-damaged backstreets of Occupation Osaka, she is dressed in Western clothing as opposed to the smart kimono she wore in Manchuria and is about to become a “pan pan” or streetwalking sex worker catering to American servicemen. Of course, Soh can’t let this happen either, but as she later tells him, she was raped by Russian soldiers during the retreat and now feels herself to be despoiled. She never wears kimono again and becomes a kind of symbol for a despoiled nation that Soh is reluctantly forced to accept he cannot save in part because his philosophy, which is still uncomfortably rooted in the philosophy of militarism, only valued strength when it should have valued love. The kind of love that Kiku (Yutaka Nakajima) had for her brother that made her willing to sacrifice herself for his wellbeing. 

Even so, Soh is doing his best to issue a course correction by caring for a small group of war orphans and helping them support themselves by running a rice soup stall so they won’t end up becoming dependent on the yakuza or the black market. It’s the yakuza and their increasingly corporatising nature that become Soh’s chief enemies, though standing right behind them are the Occupation Forces. They are, of course, just the biggest gang, as we can see when one of the kids steals a few tins from the gangster’s crate which is marked with text making it clear it came from the mess hall at the American base. The backstreets are full of sleazy soldiers and pan pans or otherwise the starving and dejected, sometimes violent demobbed soldiers filled with despair. It’s these men that Soh wants to buck up, telling them to rediscover their fighting spirit and giving them the opportunity to do so through learning Shaolin martial arts.

Of course there are those who don’t want to learn Chinese kung fu in the midst of their defeat, but what Soh is advocating is something that has a greater spiritual application even than karate can also have. It’s a kind of humanitarian riposte to the futility of the post-war society that might sometimes fail to recognise the depths of the impossibility faced by many in insisting they can be faced by discipline and moral fortitude but at the same time is not really judgemental except toward those who have deliberately abandoned their humanity, such as the trio of goons who rape a school for amusement (the girl is later seen among the students at Soh’s school along with the children from Osaka). The girl’s father reports it to the police, but the police and the gangsters are in cahoots, so nothing gets done. Soh cuts the guy’s bits off so he won’t be doing that again. Strength without justice is violence, he realises. But justice without strength is inability. Strength and love like body and mind should never be separated. The closing shots show an entire mountain covered in white-clad figures practising Shaolin kung fu and joining the humanitarian revolution rather than the cruel and selfish one represented by the gangsters with their red-light districts and black markets. It may be a simplistic solution, but it is in its way satisfying and at least a rejection both of the militarist past and the capitalistic future.

*Norifumi Suzuki’s name is actually “Noribumi” but he has become known as “Norifumi” to English-speaking audiences.

Minbo, or the Gentle Art of Japanese Extortion (ミンボーの女, Juzo Itami, 1992)

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“Yakuza are vain, treat them politely,” the heroine of Juzo Itami’s 1992 comedy Minbo, or The Gentle Art of Japanese Extortion (ミンボーの女, Minbo no Onna) instructs a hapless pair of hotel employees trying to solve the organised crime problem at their hotel, but it’s a lesson Itami would go on to learn himself after he was attacked by gangsters who slashed his face and neck with knives. Itami in fact died in fairly suspicious circumstances in 1997 having fallen from the roof of a high-rise building leaving a note behind him explaining his “suicide” was intended to prove his innocence in regards to an upcoming newspaper story alleging an affair with a young actress. Given Itami’s films had often made a point of skewering Japanese traditions and that taking one’s own life is not the way most would choose to clear their name, it has long been suggested that his death was staged by yakuza who’d continued to harass him ever since the film’s release. 

It’s true enough that Minbo may have touched a nerve in undercutting the yakuza’s preferred image of themselves as the inheritors of samurai valour standing up for the oppressed masses against a cruel authority. Of course, that isn’t really how it works and getting the yakuza on your side in a civil dispute may be a case of out of the frying pan into the fire. It’s the yakuza themselves who are the oppressive authority ruling by fear and intimidation. Even so, the yakuza as an institution were in a moment of flux in the early ‘90s following the collapse of the bubble economy during which they’d shifted further away from the street thuggery of the post-war era into a newly corporatised if no more respectable occupation. This change is perhaps exemplified by “minbo”, a kind of fraud in which gangsters get involved in civil disputes underpinned with the thinly veiled threat of violence. 

The yakuza who plague the Hotel Europa, for example, pull petty tricks such as “discovering” a cooked cockroach in the middle of a lasagne, or claiming to have left a bag of cash behind which is later handed back to the “wrong” person by the front desk who probably should have asked for ID. Itami frames the presence of the yakuza as a kind of infestation, suggesting that if you do not tackle it right away it soon takes over and cannot be removed. Dealing with the problem directly may cause it to get worse in the short term, but only by doing so can you ever be rid of them once and for all. At least that’s the advice given by forthright attorney Mahiru (Nobuko Miyamoto) who demonstrated that the only way to deal with yakuza is to show them that you aren’t afraid because at the end of the day the law is on your side. 

Part of the “woman” cycle in which Itami’s wife Nobuko Miyamoto stars as a sometimes eccentric yet infinitely capable woman solving the problems of contemporary Japan through old-fashioned earnestness and everyday decency, Minbo finds its fearless heroine explaining that the yakuza themselves are a kind of con. In general they won’t hurt civilians because then they’re much more likely to be arrested. Going to prison is incredibly expensive and therefore not likely to prove cost effective. She knows that if she can catch them admitting they’ve committed a “crime” then they can’t touch her, and they won’t. They do however go after the rather more naive hotel boss Kobayashi (Akira Takarada) whom they try to frame for the rape of a bar hostess, drugging him after he unwisely agreed to meet them alone to hand over blackmail money. Then again, the hotel isn’t entirely whiter than white either. Kobayashi admits they can’t pull strings with the health ministry over the cockroach incident because they previously used them to cover up a previous instance of food poisoning. 

In any case, the yakuza end up looking very grubby indeed. It’s hard to call yourself a defender of the oppressed when you’re pulling petty stunts no better than a backstreet chancer. Yet like any kind of irritating insect, they too begin to evolve gradually developing a kind of immunity to Mahiru’s tactics in themselves manipulating law only they aren’t as good as she is and they are after all in the wrong. She’s a little a wrong too in that if pushed too far the yakuza will indeed stoop to physical violence against civilians, but she also knows that they thrive on fear and that to beat them she may have to put her safety on the line to prove they have no power over her. It seems Itami felt something similar issuing a statement shortly after his attack to the effect that “Yakuza must not be allowed to deprive us of our freedom through violence and intimidation, and this is the message of my movie”. As gently humorous as any of Itami’s movies and no less earnest, Minbo paints the yakuza as a plague on post-bubble Japan and suggests that it’s about time they were shown the door. 

Trailer (no subtitles)

Roaring Fire (吼えろ鉄拳, Norifumi Suzuki, 1981)

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If Chiba’s karate films and the Sister Streetfighter series had been influenced by Shaw Brother’s kung fu films, Roaring Fire (吼えろ鉄拳, Hoero Tekken) is an homage to contemporary action and in some senses anticipates Jackie Chan and heroic bloodshed though in other ways harking back to the classic serial with its diamond-themed MacGuffin. A vehicle for rising action star Hiroyuki Sanada, the film reflects a new internationalist Japan but also confronts the toxic legacy of the feudal past in the fall of a once noble house.

Joji (Hiroyuki Sanada) has spent his entire life on a ranch in Texas only to discover from a deathbed confession by the man that he thought was his father that he had been kidnapped as an infant and is actually the son of the wealthy Hinohara family. But on travelling there, he immediately finds himself in the middle of a conspiracy. His twin brother Toru has gone missing after going to London to study ophthalmology in order to cure his sister Chihiro’s (Etsuko Shihomi) eye condition. Though his uncle, Ikki (Mikio Narita), welcomes him with open arms, a weird ventriloquist act by a man called Mr. Magic (Shinichi Chiba) that he’s taken to see suggests that the plane crash his parents died in may not have been an accident and his uncle killed them to take over the family business. 

Ikki is mixed up in the drugs trade with Hong Kong Triads and in keeping with Suzuki’s other films, we once again have a new solution to smuggling in hiding drugs in underripe banana skins. Lured to Ikki’s underground lair which has a large photo of Hitler on the wall and other Nazi memorabilia scattered around, Joji is given the “join us or die” speech, but ultimately manages to escape with some help from Abdullah the Butcher who is working as some kind of bodyguard but apparently takes a liking to Joji and declares they will be the best of friends forever after their initial fight. In any case, we soon realise that Ikki’s purpose in life is feudal revenge in that his mother was a geisha who died young because of her poverty and the nature of her work while staring at the Hinohiras’ giant mansion though his father apparently took no responsibility for him until after his mother died. His only goal in life is to take over the estate and otherwise destroy the rest of the family that never fully accepted him. 

Of course, Joji is in his way, but Joji doesn’t really want this legacy either and only wants to save his sister who turns out to be a kung fu ace despite her blindness but is otherwise unable to escape. In his final confrontation with Ikki, he reclaims the name of the man who raised him, Hibiki, and rejects that of Hinohara as if symbolically refusing his feudal inheritance. Mr Magic, really an Interpol agent, makes an executive decision to let him go which is also a representative authority figure setting him, and the younger generation, free from the feudal legacy to live a more international life. 

Nevertheless, Suzuki fills the film with a series of high-impact action sequences and extreme stunt work such as a crazy bus chase through Hong Kong which predates that in Police Story by a few years. The shuttles back and forth between Hong Kong and Japan, but it’s clear here that Ikki and his weird Nazi cohorts are the villains rather than the Hong Kong gangsters who really just exist and otherwise only factor into the story because of their desire for Queen of Sheba diamond that Joji’s birth father hid before he died so Ikki wouldn’t get his hands on it. A possibly poor taste allusion to the holocaust aside, Suzuki sticks to the plucky teen adventure format in which Joji gets into fights with the local guys and is quickly befriended by Chihiro’s teenage friends who all hang out at the mansion, rather than opt for a gloomy sense of paranoia and conspiracy even as Joji finds himself at the centre of a Hamlet-esque plot in which his uncle has usurped the throne and he must return to set it right. Yet rather than restoring the existing order, Joji effectively resets it by ending the family’s influence and then moving on into a freer existence shorn of filial responsibilities. 

Trailer (no subtitles)

Cloud (Cloud クラウド, Kiyoshi Kurosawa, 2024)

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“We wanted to make easy money,” a down-on-his luck reseller admits, “is life easy now?” Factory worker Ryosuke (Masaki Suda) rebels against capitalism by subverting it through buying low and selling high while repeatedly refusing promotions at his job in a textiles factory. Though it might seem that reselling is just a way to earn an income that seems almost passive but is actually fairly labour-intensive, it’s clear that Ryosuke is a young man dissatisfied with capitalistic realities and lacking direction in his life. 

Reselling has become a kind of game to him and like a gambler who plays to lose he’s hooked on the thrill of making a killing exploiting other people’s misery. He’s at once filled with pride and smugness over his apparent triumph over his society and consumed by self-loathing. His friend and fellow reseller Muraoka (Masataka Kubota) tells him that another acquaintance has been arrested for scalping concert tickets with both of them lamenting his foolishness in getting involved with something so risky. The implication is that their friend, Goto, must have been in real desperation to lower himself to such levels and they each fear they may someday end up in the same position. Muraoka laments that that kind of selling is a young man’s game and neither of them have the time or energy to spend all day queuing to buy stuff just to sell it on cheap. They are each, it seems, beginning to feel the increasing desperation of their age that they are running out of time and have little to show for their efforts nor any prospects for the future. 

But on the other hand, neither of them want to be locked into the grind or join the oppressive but secure world of the salaryman. In many ways, Ryosuke’s factory boss Takimoto (Yoshiyoshi Arakawa) represents the “correct” path of hard and honest work, though his own paternalistic conviction in meritocracy seems outdated in a man of his age whose formative years occurred during an era of economic stagnation. He talks to Ryosuke as if he’s a young man who wants to get on but lacks confidence, telling him that he has leadership potential and is wasted on the shop floor, but his language also has an edge of the uncanny as if he were trying to recruit Ryosuke into his own worker drone revolution. In any case, even if it might be true that Ryosuke lacks confidence and ambition, that isn’t the reason he refuses promotions, which seems to be another way of rebelling against capitalism. When he eventually quits, he suggests it’s because he’s sick of being told what to do and wants more autonomy over his life and finances.

He tells his girlfriend Akiko (Kotone Furukawa) that she should quit her job too, which she’s only too happy to do because, unlike him, she actively doesn’t want to work and only wants to spend money. When she said she was thinking of giving up her apartment, Ryosuke naturally asked her to officially move in but she refused because his place is too small and she has too much stuff. Akiko has already been corrupted by the same consumerist bug that’s driving Ryosuke’s reselling business, but neither of them can really afford this lifestyle in the city. Ryosuke’s bright idea is to move to the remote countryside where he’s able to rent a huge, though ominous-looking, property for a fraction of the price with the idea of also economically supporting Akiko who will revert to traditional gender roles as a housewife in charge of the domestic space and most especially the kitchen.

But freedom cannot be found simply by retreating from urbanity and the couple soon find themselves plagued by a pervasive sense of resentment. The locals are not particularly accepting of people from Tokyo and are also needled by their success which is something they feel they’ve been unfairly denied. When Ryosuke tries to report a smashed window, even the policeman hassles him and says he’s received a tip-off that Ryosuke is breaking trading standards regulations by selling counterfeit goods as the real thing. Reselling in itself is not illegal, if definitely dubious morally and incredibly cynical. Ryosuke doesn’t seem to like to think about that and tells his new assistant, Sano (Daiken Okudaira), that he tries to sell all the items as quickly as possible so he doesn’t have to worry too much about their authenticity. If they’re wanted they’ll sell, Ryosuke justifies but he might as well be talking about himself.

“Being real or fake doesn’t matter?” Sano asks him, just as Ryosuke’s online and offline personas start to blur. He’s unaware that there are people actively hunting him for selling them substandard goods and is later pursued by real life vigilantes acting like online trolls and planning to torture him to death during a livestream. Like many of Kurosawa’s heroes, Ryosuke is completely convinced that he’s the benchmark for normal and it’s everything around him that’s strange or unfair. As the internet once again invades the “real” world, or perhaps it’s more that Ryosuke’s living his online life offline, the increasing unreality of the situation makes us wonder if any of this is “really” happening or product of Ryosuke’s fractured identity as it finally collapses under the twin corruptions of capitalism and social media. “Please keep focusing only on making money,” his new guardian angel Sano tells him, “everything will be obtainable. Whatever you want. Even things that can end the world.” Flying through ironically heavenly clouds, Ryosuke reflects that the path to hell really is paved with gold and his Mephistophelian pact with hyper-capitalism may have damned him beyond all repair.  

Cloud is in cinemas from 25th April courtesy of Blue Finch Film Releasing 

UK trailer (English subtitles)

Big Time Gambling Boss (博奕打ち 総長賭博, Kosaku Yamashita, 1968)

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A Shakespearean tragedy of blood and honour, Kosaku Yamashita’s Big Time Gambling Boss (博奕打ち 総長賭博, Bakuchiuci: Socho Tobaku) discovers only fatalism and futility in the nobility of the yakuza code. The tragedy is that at any moment anyone could make a free choice to walk away, to abandon these arbitrary notions that convince them they must kill their friends and let their enemies go free, but they don’t because spiritually they cannot. Abandoning the yakuza code would in its own way a kind of death and mentally unsurvivable. 

There is however a greater tragedy in play. The film opens in the spring of 1934 with a villain remarking that it’s absurd to restrict oneself to one’s home terrified while a sword and the Japanese flag appear behind him. The catalyst for all this drama is Japan’s imperialist expansion. Yakuza fixer Senba (Nobuo Kaneko) and the shady Kawashima have hatched a plan to get all the yakuza clans to unite in a “patriotic” mission to traffic drugs to the frontlines looting as they go. Noble boss of the Tenryu Awakawa refuses, reminding them he’s just a simple gambling man and has no desire to get involved with politics before collapsing with a stroke. With Awakara alive but bedridden and no longer able to communicate effectively, the Tenryu decide to nominate a successor. The ideal candidate, Nakai (Koji Tsuruta), declines the offer on the grounds that he is a transplant from another gang in Osaka and thinks it would be inappropriate for an outsider to lead the clan. He proposes that his sworn brother, Matsuda (Tomisaburo Wakayama), should be appointed, though he is currently surviving a prison sentence so a caretaker should serve in his stead until his release. Most think this sensible though the proposed caretaker, Ishido (Hiroshi Nawa), also declines given the rules of seniority despite the fact that he is Awakawa’s son-in-law and so dynastic succession would also seem permissible. 

It’s during all of this finagling that Senba begins manipulating events to his advantage, gently manoeuvring the other lieutenants towards accepting Ishido as the new boss while he has no idea he’s being used as a pawn in Senba’s nefarious nationalist plotting. When Matsuda is released early, the entire situation kicks into overdrive in his outrage that the codes of rank have not been respected and that a man who is his inferior now sits at the head of the clan in a place he think’s rightfully Nakai’s but in light of his honourable refusal no one’s but his own. Even Matsuda later recognises his hot-headed recklessness in directly challenging Ishido over his decision to accept, insisting that the proper thing to do in his position would have been to persuade Nakai to take the job. Meanwhile, his own righthand man who’d been slumming it as a mere labourer in his absence, is dragged into intrigue in foolishly defending his honour by recklessly attacking Ishido’s men incorrectly believing they had provoked another gang’s attack on Matsuda little knowing it was all part of Senba’s plot. 

Nationalist trappings aside, Senba’s villainy is obvious from the moment he tells Nakai he thinks Matsuda was foolish for going to prison on the clan’s behalf and that he should have just found a scapegoat and put the blame on them, signalling himself a member of the new amoral yakuza who does not believe in giri and has no ninjo. Nakai rather is the opposite, as his old boss confirms in praising him for his correct decision to turn down the succession as it would not be right for him to accept as one who did not originate in their gang. Matsuda meanwhile pays too much attention to the letter of the code and not its spirit, obsessed with Ishido’s transgression and unable to let the matter drop to live a quiet life even as Nakai tries to convince him that the decision has been ratified by the lieutenants and the boss and so he must obey it. In a poignant moment, Nakai brings out the cup they used to seal their friendship and tells him that he will choose the clan, breaking the cup if Matsuda does not agree to accept a minimal degree of humiliation in returning with the intention of lying low and subtly reminding him that if he does not Matsuda will be placing a heavy burden on him that he may be forced to inflict lethal violence on his best friend and in fact brother-in-law. Realising the gravity of the situation, Matsuda immediately backs down, but events are now in motion that neither of them are capable of stopping. 

Of course, they could walk away but they don’t. Nakai offers the opportunity to Matsuda’s remorseful foot soldier Oto, telling him to leave the clan and take the woman he loves far away to live a peaceful life but of course he can’t because of his debt of loyalty to Matsuda. They are all trapped by the code which they follow and the villains ignore, laughing at them all the way. Then again, that’s what men like Nakai are for, born to set things right even if it comes at great personal cost. Even he finally snarls that he’s merely a murderer, rejecting any sense of honour in his actions while throwing a sword at the symbol of the system which has defined his life and submitting himself to the automatic operation of law of the state as a kind of martyr for system in which he may no longer believe. 

Trailer (English subtitles)

Rainy Blue (レイニー ブルー, Asuna Yanagi, 2025)

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“You never know when it will end,” Aoi mutters to a concerned teacher. “The streaming period, and my life.” Asuna Yanagi’s Rainy Blue (レイニー ブルー) is a semi-autobiographical tale of a young woman figuring out how to live in the world while immersed in cinema. Her father may insist that she look at the reality, but Aoi’s world is already quite surreal even as she pours all her efforts into writing screenplays and watching films but otherwise floundering for direction.

To begin with, Aoi isn’t interested in cinema She just gets sent to see a film as punishment after getting caught setting off fireworks on the school roof because a local cinema has a special retrospective dedicated to actor Chishu Ryu who attended the same high school though probably 100 years previously. Despite scoffing at the idea and chuckling that everyone in the cinema is “old” while even the usher double checks to make sure she’s in the right place, Aoi is captivated by Ozu’s filmmaking and becomes a true convert to cinema to the extent that it completely takes over her life. She becomes the only member of the school’s film club, or as she’s find of reminding people “society”, and regularly turns up late after staying up all night watching movies. 

To that extent, Aoi’s film obsession may not quite be healthy in that it leads her to make some questionable decisions with unintended consequences, such as getting arrested for “stalking” people after following them around as research for her screenplays. She also finds out that one of her old friends, who is also her father’s favourite example of a “good” daughter, is into compensated dating and in reality perhaps just as lost as she is. Aoi’s father no longer understands her and has become authoritarian and unforgiving. He regularly berates and shouts at her while making no real attempt at communication. He simply asks why she can’t be “normal” and concentrate on going to uni like the other girls while complaining about how “embarrassed” he would be if she doesn’t go because it would reflect badly on him as a parent. 

Perhaps it’s not surprising that Aoi retreats into cinema to escape, but it’s also true that she finds a more supportive paternal presence in the guy at the cinema who turns out to have been a classmate of her mother’s. There’s a kind of poignancy in Aoi and her sister’s moment of confusion on realising that their mother was interested in films but they rarely watch them at home because her father doesn’t like them, while her mother rarely has time to go alone. Aoi’s love of cinemas as mediated by an old script she finds in the club room is also a way of connecting with her mother as a potentially more supportive parental figure in contrast to her father’s hardline authoritarianism.

But then, in her love of cinema Aoi is absolutely certain and she’s no reason why she should hide it from anyone else. Her best friend at school is rather bafflingly played by 43-year-old film director Hirobume Watanabe who dresses in a pre-war school uniform complete with student’s cap and little round glasses that make him look strangely like a Studio Ghibli character. Usami is an otaku with a love of anime he thinks he’s kept hidden despite having several anime badges on his backpack and is too afraid to be out and proud about it because he knows he’ll be bullied, which he eventually is when Aoi enters a deeper moment of crisis and more or less abandons him and the school. Watanabe also appears as a weirdly inspirational film director who has a go at an audience member at a q&a who asks him why his film is so nihilistic only for him to turn the question back on her and angrily insist that film can illuminate the way forward for those like Aoi who feel themselves to be lost. 

Thanks to all these strange adventures, her various friendships, and even her father’s animosity, Aoi eventually figures out what she wants to do with her life and gains the courage to go after it no matter what anyone else might say. Set in the picturesque environment of rural Kumamoto, the film’s gentle, laid-back aesthetic belies the storm at its centre and the rainy blue that surrounds the heroine until she too finally finds her way through the labyrinths of cinema.

Rainy Blue (レイニー ブルー, Asuna Yanagi, 2025) screened as part of this year’s Osaka Asian Film Festival.

Original trailer (no subtitles)

Brush of the God (カミノフデ ～怪獣たちのいる島～, Keizo Murase, 2024)

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High schooler Akari (Rio Suzuki) couldn’t care less about something as “uncool” as tokusatsu movies and the fact her recently deceased grandfather once made them makes it even worse. Though they had once been close, Akari harbours a degree of resentment towards her grandfather, Kenzo (Shiro Sano), whose behaviour even in earlier years could be somewhat intimidating. Holding Kenzo responsible for the scar on her mother’s arm, Akari wonders out loud why a public memorial event is even necessary when they’ve already had a funeral, and why her mother isn’t just throwing all this useless rubbish out rather than hold an exhibition honouring a man she believes harmed her.

“Useless rubbish” is largely what Akari thinks of Kenzo’s legacy, embarrassed by his connection to otaku culture which has a social stigma attached to it that a teenage girl in particular would find embarrassing. Sullen and grumpy, she looks on with sadness mixed with irritation when some of her classmates charge off without her to go look at make-up and is rude to a young man from her class who’s come to attend her grandfather’s memorial event because she wouldn’t be caught dead talking to a nerd. In a way, it’s some of these social attitudes that Keizo Murase’s Brush of the God (カミノフデ ～怪獣たちのいる島～, Kami no Fude ~Kaijutachi no iru Shima) wants to deconstruct, recovering a memory of the classics of the genre as a world of boundless creativity and goodness that was as much about overcoming obstacles as it was creating visions of marauding dragons wreaking havoc on the modern world. 

This is Murase’s first, and sadly only film as he passed away at the age of 89 in 2024 and was already in his late 80s when the film was made. Prior to that, he’d been a legendary figure in the tokusatsu industry working as a suit sculptor, prop maker, and stunt man. His self-cameo laying flowers at his own stand-in’s memorial service echoes the meta-quality of the film which he’d first come up with while working on Mighty Peking Man (in the movie Revenge of the Might Primate) in Hong Kong and subsequently reworked to take place in Japan just as Kenzo does in the film. At heart, it’s a tribute to classic kids special effects adventure movies in which Akari must reclaim the fond memories of her grandfather in order to save his interior universe and legacy which is now in danger of being forgotten while even she herself wanted to junk the whole thing. 

She does so in the company of Takuya (Takeru Narahara), the classmate she’d hardly even noticed because of his nerdiness but is also primed to be another kind of inheritor of Kenzo’s mantle as represented by the Brush of the God, a magical paintbrush that allows the wielder to create in reality anything that they can imagine much as Kenzo and Murase had done when they created their monsters and the means to beat them. Reminiscent of that of Nobuhiko Obayashi, Keizo’s world has a retro aesthetic that is at once both artificial and fantastical making it clear that the children have been sucked into a world of imagination on the invitation of the mysterious Mr Hozumi (Takumi Saito) who offers them a copy of Keizo’s unproduced script and asks them to save his universe from destruction at the jaws of a mystical dragon. 

There is real love and affection for this era which has now all but passed that valued practical effects and rejoiced in finding unexpected solutions to practical problems and creating a world which was often simpler than expected in which there were monsters who were bad but could be beaten or otherwise were good and could never be vanquished. Along with recovering more positive memories of her grandfather whom she realises to have misunderstood, a tortured artist who loved them in his own way, she regains a sense joy and creativity that had otherwise been lost to her with Takuya remarking that she seems much more lively in the midst of their adventure than she ever had at school. He meanwhile is very much in his element, but though he’d dreamed of becoming a tokusatu hero is effectively reduced to a damsel in distress whom Akari must then save by reawakening her imagination. Warmhearted and wholesome, the film is an advocation for this world of lost charm and childhood adventures powered by egg boxes, garden hoses, and the boundless potential of creativity. 

Brush of the God screens in Chicago 13th April as part of the 19th edition of Asian Pop-Up Cinema.

Trailer (English subtitles)