Beginning to piece something together, the dogged reporter at the centre of Kei Kumai’s Willful Murder (日本の熱い日々 謀殺・下山事件, Nihon no Atsui Hibi Bosatsu: Shimoyama Jiken) looks out at an industrial complex and reflects that when he visited it eight years previously it was a “piddling little factory” and has since become a “major company”. His comments might equally stand for Japan itself as Kumai charts the course of the nation’s post-war economic miracle viewing it as a kind of Faustian bargain with the Americans largely conducted by former militarists driven by personal gain and ideological fury.
Based on the book by Kimio Yada, The Killing: The Shimoyama Incident, the film turns on the mystery surrounding the still unexplained death of Japan National Railways CEO Sadanori Shimoyama whose dismembered body was discovered by the railway tracks in July 1949 suggesting he had been hit by a train. Given the investigative techniques available at the time, Shimoyama’s demise has never been conclusively ruled either a murder or a suicide with experts from rival universities coming to opposing opinions and the police later closing the case in somewhat suspicious circumstances.
Kumai’s film leans towards the murder angle though like the real life investigators cannot definitively rule out that Shimoyama may have taken his own life presumably due to the pressure he felt himself under after being ordered by the occupation authorities to dismiss 30,000 railway workers from their jobs as part of the so called “Dodge Line” economic plan intended to halt runaway inflation. As the film’s opening voice over also reveals, the Japan Railways Union was at the centre of the labour movement at the moment in which occupational approach was shifting from its original purpose of demilitarisation and democratisation, towards remilitarisation and capitalisation as the Americans sought to make Japan a foreign policy ally in their opposition towards communism in Asia.
The film’s thesis is that US forces were already planning for the Korean War and urgently needed to crush the labour movement. Shortly after Shimoyama’s death, two other railway incidents occurred firstly with the runaway train in Mitaka which crashed into the station killing six and injuring 20, and then the Matsukawa derailment for which 17 men were falsely convicted (four sentenced to death) all of whom were members of the railway workers’ union. The conclusion that dogged reporter Yashiro (Tatsuya Nakadai) slowly comes to, is that Shimoyama was murdered and the train incidents staged to discredit the labour movement on the orders of the occupation forces while former militarist collaborators continued on the same path in a newly “democratic” Japan.
Japan certainly did very well out of the Korean War the economic stimulus of which allowed that “piddling little factory” to become a “major company” in under a decade much as the nation rocketed towards the economic prosperity which culminated in the 1964 Olympics against which the film’s finale is played. The portrait the Kumai paints is of a nation which has lost its soul, mired in hypocrisy which makes a mockery of “pacifism” and “democracy”. There are in fact at least three unexplained deaths presented in the film, the second of the being that of Michiko Kanba who was killed during the protests against the Anpo security treaty which was later forced through parliament despite clear public opposition. The same possibly corrupt pathologist is assigned to the autopsy and argues that the young woman died as the result of a crowd crush despite the attending physician’s report that the cause of death was strangulation.
The true villain is however the American occupation and Japan’s continuing complicity even after it ended. Kumai includes several scenes of mass protest against the presence of the American military in Japan, and often places American soldiers ominously hovering in the corners of the frame such as those standing directly outside the police station. Yashiro attempts to interview a Korean man who tried to blow a whistle on the Shimoyama murder only to be arrested by US Counter Intelligence and later physically dragged out of the visiting room by a lurking MP. It all sounds like a conspiracy theory and one Yashiro doesn’t know if he should believe but then has to ask himself why all these people are seemingly being silenced if there is nothing to hide. He maintains his conviction that Shimoyama was murdered, but cannot necessarily say whether it was by a communist foreign nation as the Korean whistleblower had suggested or by the Americans trying to frustrate the “democracy” they’d previously been so keen on lest it disrupt their capitalist agenda.
In the closing scenes, Yashiro is confronted by yet another death which cannot be ruled suicide or murder along with the realisation that he will never learn the truth. The grills from a grate on the platform of a train station above cast shadowy bars that imprison him in the shady cynicism of the Cold War society. Kumai films in boxy 4:3 academy ratio and in the black and white of golden age cinema, lending a degree of cinematic realism to his devastating tale of post-war moral decline which contains a note of inescapable dread in the faces of two men caught in the intermittent flashes of a train going by obscuring a truth that can never be revealed.
For one reason or another, the 1970s gave rise to a wave of disaster movies as Earthquakes devastated cities, high rise buildings caught fire, and ocean liners capsized. Japan wanted in on the action and so set about constructing its own culturally specific crisis movie. The central idea behind The Bullet Train (新幹線大爆破, Shinkansen Daibakuha) may well sound familiar as it was reappropriated for the 1994 smash hit and ongoing pop culture phenomenon Speed, but even if de Bont’s finely tuned rollercoaster was not exactly devoid of subversive political commentary The Bullet Train takes things one step further.
Masahiro Shinoda, a consumate stylist, allies himself to Japan’s premier literary impressionist Yasunari Kawabata in an adaptation that the author felt among the best of his works. With Beauty and Sorrow (美しさと哀しみと, Utsukushisa to Kanashimi to), as its title perhaps implies, examines painful stories of love as they become ever more complicated and intertwined throughout the course of a life. The sins of the father are eventually visited on his son, but the interest here is less the fatalism of retribution as the author protagonist might frame it than the power of jealousy and its fiery determination to destroy all in a quest for self possession.
When AnimEigo decided to release Hideo Gosha’s Taisho/Showa era yakuza epic Onimasa (鬼龍院花子の生涯, Kiryuin Hanako no Shogai), they opted to give it a marketable but ill advised tagline – A Japanese Godfather. Misleading and problematic as this is, the Japanese title Kiryuin Hanako no Shogai also has its own mysterious quality in that it means “The Life of Hanako Kiryuin” even though this, admittedly hugely important, character barely appears in the film. We follow instead her adopted older sister, Matsue (Masako Natsume), and her complicated relationship with our title character, Onimasa, a gang boss who doesn’t see himself as a yakuza but as a chivalrous man whose heart and duty often become incompatible. Reteaming with frequent star Tatsuya Nakadai, director Hideo Gosha gives up the fight a little, showing us how sad the “manly way” can be on one who finds himself outplayed by his times. Here, anticipating Gosha’s subsequent direction, it’s the women who survive – in large part because they have to, by virtue of being the only ones to see where they’re headed and act accordingly.
Throughout Masaki Kobayashi’s relatively short career, his overriding concern was the place of the conscientious individual within a corrupt society. Perhaps most clearly seen in his magnum opus, 
“Sometimes it feels good to risk your life for something other people think is stupid”, says one of the leading players of Masaki Kobayashi’s strangely retitled Inn of Evil (いのちぼうにふろう, Inochi Bonifuro), neatly summing up the director’s key philosophy in a few simple words. The original Japanese title “Inochi Bonifuro” means something more like “To Throw One’s Life Away”, which more directly signals the tragic character drama that’s about to unfold. Though it most obviously relates to the decision that this gang of hardened criminals is about to make, the criticism is a wider one as the film stops to ask why it is this group of unusual characters have found themselves living under the roof of the Easy Tavern engaged in benign acts of smuggling during Japan’s isolationist period.
Windows on Worlds 