Tag: Juzo Itami

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)

A Quiet Life (静かな生活, Juzo Itami, 1995)

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“One person is not a tool for another” the heroine of Juzo Itami’s 1995 melodrama A Quiet Life (静かな生活, Shizukana Seikatsu) eventually writes in her diary quoting her novelist father but also reflecting on herself and her life in which some have indeed attempted to use others for their own ends. Outside of international mega hit Tampopo, Itami is best known for a series of anarchic comedies each starring his wife Nobuko Miyamoto as forthright woman tackling the ills of contemporary Japan from tax evasion and increasingly amoral capitalism to the yakuza and shady cults. Based on a novel by his brother-in-law Kenzaburo Oe, A Quiet Life is therefore something of an outlier yet once again addresses a number of social issues from treatment of disability in the contemporary society to the relationships between parents and children and the dangers of a rapidly modernising society. 

Middle daughter Ma (Hinako Saeki) lives in a large Western-style in the country with her father, internationally renowned author K (Tsutomu Yamazaki), mother and two brothers the oldest of which, Eeyore, has some learning difficulties but is largely independent. Nevertheless, when K, who is experiencing a moment of crisis that leads him to consider suicide when he is unable to fix a problem with the drains and has to resort to a plumber, is offered a job at a university in Australia Ma is left in charge at home and therefore responsible for her brother. Though the family fully accepts Eeyore, it’s clear the world around them is not always so kind. As they approach a centre for the disabled on a walk, others around them openly express disgust, suggesting they are a “bad influence” and wanting to leave the area entirely. 

Meanwhile as the film opens two children are locked together in a game of magnets, a collection of adults attempting to pull them apart by force. The shot is later repeated as Eeyore holds his sister in the rain following a traumatic and unexpected incident and demonstrating the close and affectionate bond between the siblings. Yet there is an uncomfortable suggestion from some that Ma is being asked to sacrifice her life to look after her brother who after all is unlikely to marry and will require additional care as long he lives, while she is perhaps slightly overprotective and wilfully self-sacrificing. “Don’t expect another human to sacrifice their life for you” goes another of her father’s lines, “to expect such a thing is the worst kind of depravity”, the family otherwise committed to the insistence that Eeyore has his own life and interiority which must neither be sacrificed, nor sacrificed for, for to do so would be to deny his personhood. Eeyore is not a tool for Ma’s charity nor is she a tool for the family’s duty towards him. 

Nevertheless even she is not immune to negative stereotyping becoming increasingly concerned that her now adult brother may pose a threat to the local community in his lack of understanding and inability to control his impulses. When a child molester is on the loose in the village, she is terrified Eeyore may be involved having read a newspaper report about a similar crime committed by someone with learning difficulties uncomfortably echoing the prejudice of the walkers by the disabled centre not to mention to middle-aged women who openly gossip about it in front of their house. Meanwhile, her own naivety becomes a threat when she allows a smarmy young man, Arai, to give her brother swimming lessons later learning that he has a grudge against her father who he feels “used” him to facilitate his art having bought and drawn inspiration from his experiences of being accused of a crime but leaving readers with the impression that he was a sex offender. 

Arai may indeed be trying to use her for revenge and at any rate is not all he seems even if the implication of her father’s story is that he wanted to sacrifice himself to save the young man. While K works through his artistic block offscreen aided by his wife (whom he soon forgets once he’s well), Ma has a series of epiphanies of her own over an eventful summer you couldn’t really call “quiet” even if there’s a strange tranquility in its anarchy. Going to some dark and unexpected places, Itami’s gentle dramedy veers away from the zany comedies of his earlier career but discovers a kind of serenity in the quiet of life of the siblings getting on with business of living in the sometimes hostile Japanese countryside. 

Original trailer (no subtitles)

The Last Dance (大病人, Juzo Itami, 1993)

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A self-involved film director gets a lesson in what it is to live when he discovers that he has terminal cancer in a lighthearted melodrama from Juzo Itami, The Last Dance (大病人, Daibyonin). Itami was apparently inspired by his own stay in hospital after being attacked by yakuza offended by his previous film Minbo and like his debut The Funeral the film has a few questions to ask about the nature of death along with the functioning of the medical system. 

That’s partly because film director Buhei Mukai (Rentaro Mikuni) is not initially told of his diagnosis. His well-meaning doctor, Ogata (Masahiko Tsugawa) a old university friend of his wife, elects to tell him only that he has a stomach ulcer in keeping with an old-fashioned policy that worries patients may lose hope and give up too easily on discovering the extent of their illness. Buhei meanwhile continues to obsess about his condition, convinced it must be cancer and that his wife, Mariko (Nobuko Miyamoto), and the medical staff are lying to him, at one point pretending to be his own uncle in order to tease the truth out of Ogata over the phone and attempting suicide when he accidentally implies that Buhei may not have long left. 

His distress is compounded by the irony that in the film he was working on when he became ill he was starring as a composer with advanced cancer whose wife has also been diagnosed with a more aggressive form of the disease. Whatever we might think about Buhei, it’s fair to say that the film’s sexual politics have not aged well. Not only was he having an affair with the actress playing his wife, but continues to flirt inappropriately with the medical staff and at one point even tries to force himself on his wife who was in the process of leaving him when he was first diagnosed. His lechery seems primed to appeal to men of a similar age while hinting at his virility and desire for life, but is nevertheless crass and often uncomfortable. Nevertheless, as Mariko says he’s like a child inside cheekily joking with the doctors about his drinking and smoking habits while running away from anything unpleasant and trying to get out of having to undergo treatment. 

Itami had often remarked on the weaknesses of Japanese men who “can’t stand loneliness, can’t make decisions alone, can’t face anyone who disagrees with them and can’t accept responsibility for their mistakes,” Buhei seemingly possessing all four. In part regretting her decision to keep the seriousness of his illness from him, Mariko reflects that in the end all they did was leave Buhei alone in his fear and anxiety as the only one who didn’t know the truth, engineering a kind of conspiracy as they cheerfully told him to “soldier on” knowing there was no hope. Yet during his time in the hospital, Buhei is also confronted by the ethical dilemmas of medical treatment on witnessing doctors desperately try to resuscitate a man who was miserable, in pain, bedridden, and unable to communicate, just waiting for the end. As even his grieving wife calls out to the doctors to let him go, Buhei wonders if it’s right to preserve life at all costs especially when the patient has not been given a choice in his treatment and may not have been informed that they have no possibility of recovery. 

Coming to a new realisation he challenges Ogata’s conviction that death is his enemy, telling him that he should see it less as defeat than acceptance reflecting on the irony that he never felt so alive as when dying. Whimsical if occasionally maudlin, Itami throws in a surrealist dream sequence in which Buhei approaches the other side and comes to realise that death might not be so frightening after all even as he watches himself from above in an out of body experience witnessing the accidental violence inflicted on his body by those trying to save it. In some senses, Buhei is fairly unredeemed, winking at his indifferent mistress even on his death bed, but is in others humbled as he looks back on his life with its regrets and unfulfilled promises, repairing his relationship with his long suffering wife while admitting that under different circumstances he and Ogata might have become good friends. Offering a sometimes critical view of medical practice and ethics, Itami’s poetic meditation on what it is to die loses none of his ironic humour even in its unfolding tragedy. 

Sweet Home (スウィートホーム, Kiyoshi Kurosawa, 1989)

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A documentary film crew hoping to discover long-hidden frescos by an artist with a tragic history find themselves on a quest to resurrect the traditional family in unlikely horror comedy Sweet Home (スウィートホーム). Written and directed by Kiyoshi Kurosawa, the film shares many of the hallmarks of his later career in his preoccupation with what lurks in the shadows, yet produced by Juzo Itami who also stars and apparently reshot some scenes himself it also mines a deep seam of ironic humour harking back to classic serials and contemporary kids adventures in the same way as Hiruko the Goblin among others would do just a few years later. 

This strain of irony is perceptible in the opening scenes in which producer Akiko (Nobuko Miyamoto) appears in an elegant ’40s-style outfit more in keeping with an archeological dig than a haunted house adventure, her later attire strongly recalling that seen in Indiana Jones. The gang are waiting by their military-style jeep seemingly in the middle of a sandstorm while chief producer Kazuo (Shingo Yamashiro) is busy at the municipal office trying to get permission to enter the Mamiya Mansion which has been shut up for the last 30 years since the death of legendary artist Ichiro Mamiya who is the subject of their documentary. A diffident man as his daughter jokes, Kazuo finds it difficult to make headway until a slightly more cynical employee takes over the negotiations and hands over the key with the rationale that they’ll either find out the house isn’t haunted after all in which case they can turn it into a museum, or that they’ll get some tidy publicity out of the horrifying deaths of all concerned. 

A western-style gothic mansion, the house is itself as imposing as it is ominous even without swirling mists or hovering gloom. Once inside the crew find what they’re looking for, a beautiful fresco with the title “home sweet home” painted in a corner. All we’re told about Ichiro is that he died in the house, but when all is said and done he, like Kazuo, is not terribly important and it is not his death which has cursed the mansion but that of his wife. The sweet home the couple had dreamed of was coming to fruition with the long-awaited birth of a child whose life was to inspire frescos on the remaining walls only tragedy struck. As a toddler the child somehow climbed into the furnace and was burnt alive when his unknowing mother ignited it. She then went mad, kidnapping other children and apparently burning them so her child would not be lonely before eventually throwing herself in too.

Perhaps uncomfortably, Sweet Home leans in to the kind of maternal questioning common to the genre as it considers the formation of a new family in the awkward romance between the shy widower Kazuo who has brought his teenage daughter Emi (Nokko) along on the job, and capable producer Akiko who is repeatedly questioned about marriage, children, and the reasons she currently has neither of them. Keying in to the terror of the house, Emi reveals that as she grows older the memories of her birth mother begin to fade to the extent that she can barely make out her outline, envisioning her merely as an indistinct light. She is prepared to accept Akiko as second mother, offering her the dress which her own mother used to wear only for Akiko to diffidently refuse on the grounds that the dress should be worn by Emi as her mother would have wanted perhaps hinting at the way Emi often treats her father as a clueless child in need of mothering himself. 

Nevertheless, it’s the dress of maternity that Akiko must finally put on in order to claim the maternal space in venturing back into the haunted house in order to save Emi from becoming another playmate for Mrs Mamiya’s child. Rather than Kazuo, who proves rather ineffectual, she is guided by a weird old man, Yamamura (Juzo Itami), from the petrol station who apparently knows all about fighting ghosts but bluntly tells her she has no chance of success because she is not a mother herself and cannot understand the pain of a mother who has lost a child nor the magnetic pull between a childless mother and motherless child. In order to defeat the vengeful spirit, Akiko must fully embrace the role of the mother, easing the spirit’s pain with maternal compassion in returning to her what was lost. Her child restored to her, the spirit takes on the appearance of the Holy Mother ascending to Heaven bathed in golden light lifting the shadowy gloom that cursed the house. 

Even so there is something insidious in the fact that as Yamamura says if you attempt to fight shadow with light all you get is more of the same, the crew trapped in the house with no means of defence against the encroaching darkness. This unknown, shadowy sense of threat, of being swallowed by darkness, is a key harbinger of a Kurosawa’s signature style as well as a clear evocation of the gothic dread focused on the house with the ironic failure of the “sweet home” dream which is in essence what Akiko, Kazuo, and an Emi are chasing as they try to escape the haunted mansion. Ironically enough, Sweet Home has become best remembered for fathering a video game which eventually led to the Resident Evil series while Kurosawa himself has all but rejected the film claiming Itami’s later interventions undercut his directorial vision. Featuring effects work by Dick Smith, the horror is visceral and disturbing at one point a man’s face melting, his skin slipping from his bones, while the score is cheerfully whimsical in keeping with the absurd lightness of tone that recalls classic teen adventures before heading into the fable-like conclusion in which Akiko must wrest her surrogate child from a vengeful spirit through maternal exchange. Having served its purpose the mansion implodes, freeing not only the spirits trapped inside but the new family now freed of the weight of traditional mores to embrace their new connection founded on love and empathy rather than duty or convention.

Original trailer (no subtitles)

Choji Snack Bar (居酒屋兆治, Yasuo Furuhata, 1983)

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Beginning his career at Toei, Yasuo Furuhata is most closely associated with tough guy action films forging a strong and enduring relationship with the genre’s key star Ken Takakura through their work on the New Abashiri Prison series. From the late ‘70s however he began to transition further towards the realms of manly melodrama with a series of films which often starred Takakura as a man struggling to adapt to life in modern Japan such as the guilt-ridden policeman of Station or the conflicted former yakuza of Yasha. Arriving between the two and adapted from a novel by Hitomi Yamaguchi, Choji Snack Bar (居酒屋兆治, Izakaya Choji) is in someways much the same casting a typically stoic Takakura as an intensely noble man whose values are increasingly at odds with the world in which he lives while shifting away from the realms of manly action towards a more somber contemplation of the broken dreams of post-war youth. 

Eiji (Ken Takakura), known to all as “Choji”, is a happily married father of two who gave up his job in shipping to open a bar selling small eats in a Hakodate. He and his wife Shigeko (Tokiko Kato) have been planning to expand the business by opening a larger location near the docks but Eiji is dragging his feet largely it seems because the place found for him by childhood friend Kawahara (Juzo Itami) is too close to another bar run by an old man who helped him when he first started out so he’s loathe to risk infringing on his livelihood. Meanwhile, the central drama in town in the mysterious disappearance of Choji’s childhood sweetheart, Sayo (Reiko Ohara), who married a wealthy ranch owner but has long been trapped in an unhappy marriage she has several times failed to escape. Sayo’s disappearance coincided with a fire at the ranch which is suspected to have been started deliberately the assumption being that Sayo is responsible. 

The ironic disappearance of Sayo forces Choji into a reconsideration of his life choices, something his middle-aged friends also find themselves experiencing if for various different reasons. Choji was once a high school baseball star dreaming of turning pro but his hopes were dashed after an injury forced him to leave the sport thereafter working in an office at the docks but later resigning rather than accept a promotion that would mean he’d suddenly be the boss to his former friends. The bar is his way of being his own man, no one’s boss but his own, though his decision was not universally respected among his friends and in fact came as something of a shock to Shigeko who consented to an arranged marriage partly in search of the typical salaryman life. Most of the other men in town, however, struggle to keep their youthful dreams alive or to find accommodation with the way their lives are now. Inoue (Eiji Misato), for example, is obsessed with cabaret singing, spending all his time in karaoke bars often wearing elaborate costumes and makeup. Childhood friend Iwashita (Kunie Tanaka) even wonders if he’s gone “mad” after taking him to task for neglecting his family on discovering that he’s converted a docked boat into a tiny private cabaret space complete with a sound system and lighting as well as a small seating area for spectators who presumably have not yet materialised. 

This is perhaps in a way a symbol in itself of Japan’s new economic prosperity, later thrown into stark contrast by Choji’s explanation that he and Sayo broke up because of their mutual poverty he nobly pushing her to marry a wealthy man so at least one of them could be happy. Happy is however something Sayo has never been, later paying a short visit to Choji during which she blames him for his “cowardice” suggesting that he is largely responsible for the misery of her life in failing to fight for their love, giving up too easily on a distant happiness which is something he later cautions a young baseball player not to do. The police meanwhile accuse him of complicity, implying the pair knew Sayo’s husband had TB and thought he’d die soon enough after which they’d inherit his money and stay together, consequently assuming the “arson” was an attempted murder. 

The irony is that Choji is far too noble to have ever considered such a thing, something demonstrated by his continuing righteousness in refusing to take up Kawahara’s offer of cheap and lucrative new premises because it would mean betraying his former mentor, refusing to condemn his former teacher’s shock marriage to a woman 30 years his junior, and eventually taking Kawahara to task for his callous comments over the death of friend’s wife. Rival cabbie Akimoto (Masao Komatsu) was forever joking that his wife would die before him and sleazily flirting with young women, but went into debt in order to buy her an elaborate funeral altar and is completely devastated by her loss while living with his three children in a noticeably rundown apartment. As Choji puts it, Kawahara’s broken dream is in no longer being the big boss among the boys as he was in their high school days, fuelling his sense of middle-aged male frustration into embittered drunken violence. Yet everyone is always telling Choji he is being unnecessarily “good”, that he should stop thinking about doing the right thing and put himself first by accepting the offer to relocate the bar because business is business. 

Sayo too is trapped in the past unable to accommodate herself with the way her life turned out, an ironic casualty of Choji’s goodness clinging to her broken dream of youth. These now middle-aged teens of the post-war era are in a sense victims of their age, denied the sense of possibility the youth of today might enjoy but equally unable to step fully into the contemporary era of economic prosperity which some feel has become increasingly amoral and unkind. Nevertheless, as Shigeko puts it “no one can take away what a person carries in their heart”, Choji manfully retaining his nobility while literally burning the image of the past but perhaps carrying it with him as the other men carry the shards of their broken dreams some with more nobility than others.  

Original trailer (no subtitles)

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Q03kIaHHZJg

Supermarket Woman (スーパーの女, Juzo Itami, 1996)

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By 1996 Japan had entered an extended period of economic stagnation which signalled the end of post-war aspiration but for many at least the false promises of the Bubble era proved hard to dispel. In what would be his penultimate film, Supermarket Woman (スーパーの女, Supa no Onna), Juzo Itami turns his attentions to the insular world of the nation’s family-held, independent supermarkets to ask a few questions about integrity in business which cut straight to the heart of what kind of society post-Bubble Japan intended to be given yet another opportunity to make itself anew. 

As the opening text crawl explains, this is a story not about giant supermarket chains but your friendly indie local. “Honest Mart” is a family-owned, mid-range supermarket in a declining industrial area nominally run by absentee CEO Goro (Masahiko Tsugawa) who was bequeathed the place by his father but is a melancholy drunkard delegating responsibility to his manager. The store has a huge problem in that a rival has recently re-opened under the new name “Discount Demon” and seems primed to steal all their business. On a stakeout of the new place, Goro runs into a childhood friend, Hanako (Nobuko Miyamoto), who is now a widow returning to the area. With her lifelong experience as a veteran housewife, Hanako knows a few things about supermarkets and she’s not very impressed with Discount Demon, doing a few quick calculations to realise the supposed discounts aren’t as enticing as they seem while common gimmicks like the all pervasive red glow that makes their meat look fresher than it really is only irritate her. Goro asks her for a “professional” opinion on Honest Mart without telling her who he is, only to discover she’s even less impressed with them, certain that his place is on the way out thanks to its dated decor, uninviting atmosphere, and low quality produce. 

The irony is Honest Mart is not much better than Discount Demon, both stores are subject to the same industry standards in which a certain degree of obfuscation is permissible. “In business honesty doesn’t pay” Hanako is told by the onsite butcher after she questions his tendency to mix meats to pass them off as more expensive cuts, while she later discovers that the store engages in the practice of repackaging unsold meat and fish with new expiration dates and is not very particular about its suppliers when it comes to buying in ready-made products. Brought on board to save the store, Hanako breezes in with a new mission to win the hearts and minds of her customers, and she can’t do that if she can’t have confidence in her stock. In any case, her the customer is always right policy quickly brings her into conflict with the store manager, an older more conservative man who actively resists innovation and resents having his authority undercut by an interloping woman. 

Meanwhile, we can also see that customer attitudes have changed. There’s a problem with availability of trolleys because, perhaps unusually for Japan, customers are just abandoning them willy-nilly in the carpark instead of retuning them to the trolley point like responsible shoppers. One man is even for some reason intent on stealing a large number of shopping baskets, caught by Hanako loading them into his car. Everybody wants cheap, which is understandable especially given the economic situation, and they might even be a little underhanded when it comes to getting it, but they also expect a reasonable level of quality and to be able to trust that the food they’re buying is safe to feed their families. Hanako is most alarmed that the ladies who work in the kitchen area, who are obviously wives and mothers themselves, do not shop at Honest Mart because they know what goes on at the store and they don’t trust it. 

“A housewife knows” Hanako is fond is saying. Her revolution is in essence a vindication of “the housewife”, perhaps the most maligned and dismissed figure of the mid-90s society, putting to good use all of her veteran experience both of running a home and of working a series of part-time jobs including those in supermarkets which she claims to love. Approaching the problem from the point of view of a consumer, she attempts to help Goro achieve his dream of making Honest Mart number one in Japan not through making it the most financially successful but the most loved by listening to women like her in the form of a focus group of local aunties some of whom had previously been serial complainers. 

Then again, some of her decisions are in a sense contradictory as she attempts to streamline the business along classically capitalistic lines in suggesting that the store doesn’t really need its overqualified butcher and fishmonger because the part-timers could be trained to do a “good enough” job. “Good enough” is in a sense her business philosophy, only not in the sense that somewhere like Discount Demon which falsely advertises regular steak as discount Wagyu means it, rather that her customers are after an everyday level of produce and so it’s not surprising that premium meats don’t sell. She wants to get rid of the butcher, who turns out to be on the fiddle, and the melancholy fishmonger disappointed no one wants his top quality seafood, because their “artistic temperament” is disruptive to the flow of the store and their presence is perhaps emblematic of the bloated, pretentious management style which is holding it back. 

Positioning the “housewife’s choice” as the ultimate seal of approval, Supermarket Woman advocates for a return to wholesome, small-town values, prioritising a sense of integrity as Honest Mart projects itself as a corporate force their customers can trust, perhaps anticipating a trend in dedicating itself to providing good quality fresh produce at fair prices in direct opposition to Discount Demon and its underhanded trickery. “Honest Mart keeps its word” Goro assures, pledging to honour a mistaken ad which promised eggs at prices so good it caused minor riot. In the end, it’s all about trust and integrity. If you don’t have that, you don’t have anything and the housewives of post-Bubble Japan will it seems vote with their feet. 

Currently available to stream in the US via Criterion Channel.

Original trailer (no subtitles)

Flame of Devotion (執炎, Koreyoshi Kurahara, 1964)

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Koreyoshi Kurahara, like Seijun Suzuki, began his career at Nikkatsu mostly working on its youth-orientated commercial cinema only to end up being fired for producing films deemed too “arty” for the studio’s target audience such as his 1967 Mishima adaptation, Thirst for Love. Released the same year as Black Sun, 1964’s Flame of Devotion (執炎, Shuen) is in someways a much more subdued affair, a fairly atypical melodrama critiquing not only the destructive legacy of war but also a cultural insistence on stoical endurance in the face of emotional difficulty which is itself the mark and enabler of militarism. 

Beginning at the end, Kurahara opens with a small collection of men and women in mourning clothes walking towards a memorial service, later followed by an elegant young woman in western dress who has just arrived by train. Today marks the seventh anniversary of the death of a young woman, Kiyono (Ruriko Asaoka), who drowned herself after learning that her husband would not return from the war. The action then jumps back 20 years to a much more peaceful time in which the 10-year-old Kiyono first encountered the 12-year-old Takuji, before shifting to the more recent past in which the youngsters fell in love, overcame many hardships, and married only to be torn apart by war. 

The love story is complicated by the fact that Kiyono is a resident of a small and secretive village who claim to be descendants of the legendary Heike. Kiyono is a mountain woman, and Takuji (Juzo Itami) is a man of the sea, the son of a fishing village expected to take over the family business. When he first re-encounters Kiyono in his late teens, Takuji is in the process of finding wood to carve his own boat with dreams of sailing it all around the world. A mountain man advises him of a shortcut home, which brings him to Kiyono’s village where he serendipitously stops to ask for water and is invited inside. Kiyono insists on walking him back to the beach where she makes plain that she remembers him as the boy from all those years ago though he is now a man. She declares that she loves the sea, because it is big, manly, and also kind, abruptly stripping off and jumping in much to Takuji’s surprise. He waits for her on the beach every day after that, and the couple fall in love but the spectre of war is already upon them. Takuji has to leave for his mandatory military service and they are parted for the first time. 

Unable to see him off on the train because she would be ashamed to become emotional in front of so many people, Kiyono for the first time laments that she is not a strong woman. She sees this quality in herself as a failing and is constantly upbraided for it by the women around her who are quick to point out that the ability to bear all is a woman’s sorry duty. They see her as being too soft for the world, or perhaps merely too uninhibited, her mother lamenting that she always preferred the sea to the mountains which is perhaps why they finally agreed to allow her to leave the village and marry Takuji though no woman had ever married an outsider before. 

Yet Kiyono is a strong woman just in a different way. We were torn apart by a single order, Kiyoko laments, but when Takuji is injured she travels to the navy hospital to visit him and fiercely resists the doctor when he advises amputating Takuji’s leg. Though she is warned that the wound may become infected and Takuji may not survive, she is adamant that she will nurse him back to health herself and in fact does just that. To keep him safe from the war, Kiyono convinces Takuji move into an isolated cottage in the mountains where they can live together without being bothered by anyone else. She helps him learn to walk again, ignoring the advice of Takuji’s cousin Yasuko (Izumi Ashikawa) as a medical doctor that she is being reckless with Takuji’s health in boldly stating that she only wants the Takuji from before, not one damaged by war. But her devotion is a double edged sword, once he is healed, Takuji can be drafted again. She starts to regret her decision to oppose amputation.

The villagers, meanwhile, who had abandoned their initial scepticism to see Kiyono as a fine wife, now think her selfish and neurotic. They wonder why Takuji has not been to see his mother who is seriously ill, and for their own benefit want him to return so that he can communicate with the government who have requisitioned too many of their ships and left them unable to work. Kiyono has tried to create a space of her own into which the war may not enter, as if she were living in hiding. Nevertheless it is true that once Takuji makes the decision to leave the mountain the spell is broken, the war takes him, and there’s nothing Kiyono can do but “endure”. 

One of the ironic gifts brought to Kiyoko in the mountain is a Heike mask designed to contain all the pain and bitterness of a woman watching her husband march away to war. Yasuko, worried for her own husband, wonders if men and women are really so different. Kiyoko ironically replies that the men marching off to battle have an oddly beatific look, as if they too are in some way “enduring” in conforming to an idea of manliness though they too must be afraid, but if a woman looks that way it means she has gone mad. It’s the look that Kiyono herself eventually has, taking on the appearance of the mask, when her spirit is broken and she enters a kind of fugue state suspecting that Takuji will not return. 

Old women watching the few remaining men being recalled to the front remark on the cruelty, that they’re only going there to die because it’s quite obvious that the war is lost. It’s war which has divided the mountain and the sea, destroyed a fated a love, and created so much suffering. In an earlier time, Kiyono’s “devotion” might indeed have been seen as selfish, a desire to isolate herself and the man she loved and keep him from his duty because of her own pain. Now however, her tale is only tragedy. Not so much a woman driven mad by an excess of emotion, as a country by the lack of it.

Original trailer (no subtitles)

Bumpkin Soup (ドレミファ娘の血は騒ぐ, Kiyoshi Kurosawa, 1985)

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Bumpkin soup posterLike many directors of his generation, Kiyoshi Kurosawa began his career in “pink film” – mainstream softcore pornography produced to a strict formula. His debut had been made for Director’s Company, an independent production house which offered creative freedom to young and aspiring filmmakers. He then tried to move into the studio system by directing for Nikkatsu’s Roman Porno, but the film was rejected for not quite living up to the demands of the genre. Bumpkin Soup (ドレミファ娘の血は騒ぐ, Do-re-mi-fa-musume no Chi wa Sawagu, AKA The Excitement of the Do-Re-Mi-Fa Girl) was then purchased from Nikkatsu and released independently as his second film, earning Kurosawa something of a reputation as a contrarian. Though the film contains its fair share of nudity and strange sexual shenanigans, it is easy to see why it did not fit the Roman Porno remit thanks to its bizarrely absurdist tone and often nonsensical French New Wave-inspired post-modernism.

The film begins with the heroine, Akiko (Yoriko Doguchi), walking into a Tokyo university campus in search of her small-town boyfriend, Yoshioka (Kenso Kato). Yoshioka is not, however, where he said he would be – he rarely turns up to lessons and has been absent from the music club he said he had joined for some time. Determined and undaunted, Akiko continues to look for him, encountering various strange people and events including a psychology professor intent on exploring the depths of shame.

After meeting sexually obsessed female student Emi (Usagi Aso), Akiko remarks that the university campus is like a permanent festival, or perhaps an amusement park. It certainly seems to be some sort of continuous orgy as seen though the eyes of simple country girl Akiko who has, after all, only come here in search of lost love. Carrying around a walkman with a tape featuring Yoshioka’s music, she devotes herself to finding her beau but eventually sniffing him out, discovers that he’s not the man she thought he was. Truth be told, Yoshioka does not seem like much of a catch. A randy college student, he has more or less forgotten all about Akiko while he pursues just about everyone else on campus instead of going to lessons.

Latterly, Akiko comes to the realisation that she thought she was looking for an adventure leading to love, but perhaps what she really wanted was love leading to an adventure. She left the country behind, travelled to the city, transgressed borders and entered the university where she was sure she would find answers but has discovered only more questions. Akiko feels herself at odds with her new environment, unable to understand the strange grammar of the university world where people seem to talk mostly about themselves. She does, however, seem strangely taken with the befuddled professor Hirayama (Juzo Itami) whose attempts to explore the nature of shame are derailed by the “shamelessness” of the modern student.

Hirayama’s big idea is that shame is all a sham. That the custom of hiding the parts of the body we have been taught to be ashamed of is a kind of deception in itself. He hopes that in the future people will live “nakedly” without feeling the need to hide anything at all, or at least that it will be impossible to tell from the outside which parts of themselves someone might be ashamed of. In order to pursue his theories, the professor is currently engaged in experiments to provoke an “extreme shame mutation” – something which his students later undertake alone but are unable to fulfil because their subject, Emi, appears to get off on the very things they considered shameful and embarrassing which, in turn, turns them all on. So in one way a very successful experiment, but in another not. In any case, Hirayama comes to the conclusion that only Akiko, with her innocent country ways, will be capable of showing him true shame which is how she eventually becomes mixed up in his “research”.

Most obviously inspired by mid-career Godard, Kurosawa adopts a post-modern, absurdist approach satirising left-wing student politics and youthful intensity while inserting random moments of song and dance along with explicit (and often odd) sexual  content that was likely still not quite enough to make it worthy of the Roman Porno name. A strange subplot pits the psychology student against a gang of mute performance artists led by a girl banging a bucket with a stick, which eventually leads to the act of nihilistic revolution which closes the film with a lullaby sung by a girl wielding a gun. What does it all mean? That shame is just a tool of social oppression, that one should make one’s own decisions without blindly following “thinkers”, that young people destroy themselves in pointless acts of revolution? Who can say, perhaps it isn’t very important but Kurosawa certainly has his fun while exploring the innocence/experience divide.

Woman in Witness Protection (マルタイの女, Juzo Itami, 1997)

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woman in witness protection posterJuzo Itami’s fearless taste for sending up the contradictions and hypocrisies of his home nation knew no bounds, eventually bringing him into conflict with the very forces he assumed so secure it was safe to mock – his 1992 film Minbo led to brutal attack by a gang of yakuza unhappy with how his film portrayed the world of organised crime. Woman in Witness Protection (マルタイの女, Marutai no Onna), continuing the “Woman” theme from previous hits A Taxing Woman and the more recent Supermarket Woman, would be Itami’s final feature as he died in mysterious circumstances not long after its completion and like Minbo it touched an open nerve. In 1997, crazy cult violence was perhaps no laughing matter nor as ridiculous as it might have seemed a few years earlier, yet Itami makes the actions of brainwashed conspirators the primary motivator of a self-centred actress’ gradual progress towards accepting the very thing his previous films might have satirised – her civic duty as a Japanese woman.

Itami breaks the film into a series of vignettes bookended by title cards beginning with the first which introduces us to our leading lady – Biwako Isono (Nobuko Miyamoto). Biwako is currently in rehearsals for an avant-garde play about giving birth (“a woman’s moment of glory”) during which she reduces her assistant to tears prompting her resignation, decrying Biwako’s self-centred bitchiness as she goes. Chastened, Biwako spends the evening doing vocal exercises outside her apartment which is how she comes to witness the botched murder of a lawyer by a crazed cultist (Kazuya Takahashi) during which she is almost murdered herself and only survives because the killer’s gun jams. As the only witness Biwako suddenly becomes important to the police which works well with her general need for attention but less so with her loathing for hassle. Seeing as Biwako is a famous actress, her involvement also precipitates increased press interest for the murder and accidentally threatens the ongoing police investigation not least because Biwako likes to play up for the camera and isn’t quite sure how best to deal with her divided responsibilities. With the killer still at large, the police decide to give Biwako protection in the form of two detectives – Chikamatsu (Yuji Murata), a cultured man who’s a big fan of Biwako’s stage career, and Tachibana (Masahiko Nishimura), a rather stiff gentleman who never watches films and rarely indulges in entertainment.

Bringing up cult violence in 1997 just two years after Japan’s only real terrorist incident perpetrated by a crazed cult, might be thought taboo but taboo was not something that Itami had ever run away from. Crazed cults had also popped up during A Taxing Woman’s Return though back then they mostly represented the hypocrisy of the new yakuza as a front for organised crime that thought nothing of bleeding vulnerable people dry while feeding them a lot of semi-religious claptrap to make them feel a part of something bigger while the bubble economy continued its puffed up attempts to make them feel inadequate. This time around our cultists are less well drawn but clearly a collection of unlucky people duped into believing the strange philosophies of the “Sheep of Truth” which teach that the world can only be saved by its followers dividing the world into white sheep and black sheep. Like the policeman and later Biwako, the killer believes he is only doing “that which must be done” in the best interests of the world. He is unaware of the cult’s shadiness and shocked when their lawyer threatens his family in an effort to convince him not to talk once the police have managed to break his programming, ironically through exactly the same methods – manipulating his feelings towards his wife and son.

The cult is however merely background to Biwako’s ongoing character drama. Despite experiencing emotional trauma from witnessing a murder and then being threatened herself, Biwako enjoys being the centre of the attention with the police as well as the warm glow she feels in being able to help them with their enquiries, but balks at the additional hassle of having to be involved in the trial (even if she would be given quite a sizeable platform as a witness in a high profile court case). She resents having the two policemen follow her around – especially as she has quite a busy schedule which includes an affair with her married manager. Nevertheless she gradually allows them into her life with Tachibana even making his stage debut as spear carrier in a production of Anthony and Cleopatra. Tachibana’s steadfast defence of her person even at the risk of his own life begins to teach Biwako a few things about civic responsibility and the importance of duty, even if her final moment of realisation is another of her staged set pieces in which she conjures a poignant monologue from the accidentally profound mutterings of Tachibana, a little of Cleopatra, and the earlier line from the maternity play repurposed as she affirms that testifying against the cultists will be her “moment of glory”.

Rather than end on Biwako’s sudden moment of enlightenment, Itami cuts to an ironic epilogue in which a police detective watching the movie we have just seen complains about its authenticity while emphasising that no one in protective custody has ever been attacked. A little tongue in cheek humour from Itami that is followed by the more usual disclaimer before the credits resume, but perhaps anticipating another dose of controversy from both law enforcement and cult devotees. Lighter in tone and noticeably less surreal than some of Itami’s earlier work, Woman in Witness Protection is the story of a vacuous actress learning the purpose of her stage as her particular brand of artifice meets that of the less innocently self-centred cultists head on and eventually becomes the best weapon against it.

Original trailer (no subtitles)

A Taxing Woman’s Return (マルサの女2, Juzo Itami, 1988)

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Taxing Woman 2 posterA Taxing Woman introduced us to Ryoko Itakura (Nobuko Miyamoto) – an oddball detective working as an insurance inspector who met her Irene Adler in a tax dodging corporate gangster with a limp. A year later she’s back, still the only woman working with the tax inspectorate and apparently still a dogged pursuer of those who would seek to defraud the Japanese government of its rightful earnings. Ryoko may have been a stickler for the rules who applied the same dog with a bone approach to a mom and pop store chowing down on its own supplies as to a dodgy yakuza led conspiracy, but she also believed in justice – something which stands her in good stead when she rubs up against a dodgy cult which, again, is a yakuza front but adds insult to injury by deliberately manipulating the vulnerable.

The action opens with some kids poking at the dead body of a “landshark” floating in a pond before flashing to a meeting of officials sucking crab meat from the shell and wondering what they’re going to do about this land they need cleared now their heavy is out of the picture. The corrupt politician from the first film, Urushibara (Takeya Nakamura), is apparently still involved in semi-legal land deals but palms the assignment off on a colleague. The big wigs need to empty a dated housing complex on some valuable land so they can build a vanity skyscraper – office space apparently being scarce in mid bubble Tokyo.

To do this they enlist the services of dodgy cult leader Onizawa (Rentaro Mikuni) and his troop of yakuza goons. Most of the tenants have already signed but they have three key holdouts – a diner owner clinging on to the family legacy, a stubborn paparazzo, and an intellectual professor who heads up the housing association. Unlike the yakuza of Taxing Woman, these guys have not reformed – they are the new/old style of lawless thugs who are perfectly prepared to threaten women and children to get their own way. Making it impossible for the tenants to stay through intimidation and noise torture, they stoop to blackmail to seal the deal.

Despite arriving only a year after A Taxing Woman, Taxing Woman’s Return (マルサの女2, Marusa no Onna 2) takes place in a much darker, though more obviously comedic, world. Whereas the earlier film adopted a noticeably ambivalent attitude to the tax inspectors and the enterprising gangsters, the villains of A Taxing Woman’s Return are so heinous and morally bankrupt as to be entirely indefensible even if the inspectorate takes a turn for the bumbling to compensate. The “cult” is, of course, merely a convenient money laundering front and tax dodge for the yakuza – religious organisations are exempt from taxation in the vast majority of cases which may be why the local tax office records hundreds of registered “religious bodies” in its jurisdiction alone. That doesn’t mean it doesn’t have its loyal followers, often vulnerable people looking for spiritual fulfilment but being bled dry by the money hungry cultists while the leader’s wife swans around in sables costing more than the average annual salary. A desperate devotee in need of a loan puts his own teenage daughter up as collateral only to see her raped by Onizawa, eventually becoming pregnant by him at only 16 years of age and thereafter becoming his devoted concubine in a bizarre instance of Stockholm Syndrome.

Yet for all the background darkness of weird cultists and nasty yakuza backed up by corrupt and venial politicians, Itami ups the cartoonish sense of the absurd with our hero Ryoko clambering over rooftops to listen in to the bad guys while her boss throws himself down flights of stairs and has to battle piercing sirens to get into the villains’ secret vault. It is however a dark humour as the opening makes plain with its troupe of little children staring at the strange shape floating in the water – a motif later repeated when a yakuza is gunned down in the street only for another group of children to pour over him as he expires, a single tear rolling down his cheek. The original spongy white body gives way to the businessmen sucking spongy white crab out its shell while insensitively discussing the late land shark, and the yakuza are unafraid to deploy a maggot infested severed hand (thankfully a fake picked up from a friend who makes horror movies) to convince the tenants they mean business.

At the end of A Taxing Woman, the gangster and the inspector reached something of a truce but one which came down, broadly, on the side of right. This time things aren’t quite so simple. The conspiracy is bigger and deeper, stretching all the way into the Diet and about more than just office space in still developing Tokyo. Onizawa, regarding himself as public servant, tries to say he did it all for his country, that if someone didn’t get their hands dirty Tokyo would be eclipsed by Hong Kong or Seoul. A post-war justification for a bubble era problem, but one that takes us straight back to the first film in Onizawa’s second proposition that only through money does he truly feel “immortal”. He may be a liar and a cheat, but he’s only a symptom of rapidly spreading infection, one which Ryoko and her team are powerless to cure, trapped on the wrong side of the fence while the bad guys build monuments to economic hubris, indulging in vanity in an era of bad faith which is about to be brought to a rather abrupt close.

Currently available to stream in the US/UK via FilmStruck.

Original trailer (no subtitles)