Tag: Kimiko Ikegami

The Geisha (陽暉楼, Hideo Gosha, 1983)

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The coming of the railroad spells doom for one of the most prestigious geisha houses in Japan in Hideo Gosha’s adaptation of the Tomiko Miyao novel, The Geisha (陽暉楼, Yokiro). Miyao’s novels had often provided the inspiration for Gosha’s films and she had herself been the daughter of a “flesh broker” in pre-war Kochi though later escaping to another town to be a substitute teacher. Though the English title may more centre plight of the the individual geisha at its centre, the Japanese hints more at the destructive cycle of the Yokiro itself in the persistent legacy of exploitation.

Then again as he later points out, if you’re looking for a villain in this story then the responsibility lies largely with Daikatsu (Ken Ogata) himself. In a prologue set in 1913, Daikatsu has eloped with geisha Otsuru but the pair are discovered by gangsters sent after them by the Yokiro. Daikatsu kills all of their assailants and assures Otsuru that they are finally “free” but it appears to be too late. Holding their baby daughter in one arm, Otsuru collapses into his other and presumably dies either then or shortly after while Daikatsu is later sent to prison for 10 years. 20 years later in 1933, the daughter, Fusako (Kimiko Ikegami), has become the number one geisha at the Yokiro under the name Momowaka though her career flounders because she is regarded as too emotionally distant to keep a patron. 

Daikatsu is also himself in Kochi at this point and working as a procurer brokering the sale of young women to the Yokiro and other geisha houses and brothels. When a school teacher comes to him to sell his wife, he taps her teeth to check for malnutrition much as one would examine a horse before running a hand underneath her kimono to check everything is at is should be before offering a valuation. Her husband only looks at him anxiously enquiring if a body such as hers which has as he later reveals born three children will fetch a good price. Daikatsu lets them go so the woman, Masae, can spend a final night with her family explaining that he cannot force someone to work if they do not want to do so and is well aware they will likely take his money and never be seen again which is what almost what happens. As it turns out the husband is killed in a fight and the woman ends up becoming a geisha anyway, only in the pay of prominent Osaka yakuza led by Inaso. 

Inaso (Mikio Narita) and buddies want in on the construction of the railroad that will shortly be coming to Kochi, but need to take over the town first which means getting around the mistress of the Yokiro, Osode (Mitsuko Baisho), who is apparently running every game town. The entire local economy is underpinned by female exploitation and facilitated by a woman, a former geisha, seizing the only power that is available to her. Isano later uses Masae as a kind of spy, getting her to initiate a relationship with Osode’s weak willed husband in an attempt to humiliate her which largely backfires as Osode boldly reclaims her man through a violent brawl in a hot spring though it does not appear that she is especially fond of him so much as he serves a particular purpose.

The brawl emphases the way in which women are pitted against each other by the nature of a patriarchal society along with the ways in which they are forced to mediate their power through men. Fusako also gets into an intense physical fight with Tamako (Atsuko Asano), a surrogate daughter of Daikatsu’s and emblem of a coming modernity, who insists on becoming a sex worker at the area’s most prominent brothel. In a strange moment of confrontation, both the geishas of the Yokiro dressed in their traditional regalia, and the sex workers of Tamamizu, arrive at a modern club where the heir to a banking empire courted by the Yokiro, Saganoi, dances the Charleston he learned while studying abroad in America. The geisha who dances with him struggles to pick up the moves, Saganoi lamenting that the dance is just not suited to a woman wearing a heavy kimono, elaborate wig, and clumsy geta. Tamako immediately gets up from her table and kicks off her shoes, gathering the hem of her own kimono to free her legs for the high level kicks of the modern dance. 

Fusako reclaims her authority by interrupting the dance immediately before its conclusion and insisting on retrieving their guest. Tamako appears to resent Fusako, perhaps frustrated in her relationship with Daisuke who does not appear to have had much contact with the daughter he sold at 12 years old. They too end up in an elaborate brawl in which Tamako rips off Fusako’s wig and splits her lip, symbolically freeing her to transcend the constraints of her “geisha” persona. Meeting Saganoi at Western-style bar, she boldly dances on the counter and sleeps with him of her own volition. But in doing so she conceives a child and leaves herself in a difficult position. She has betrayed her patron, and though she could simply have kept the fact from him and allowed him to think the baby was his, Fusako does not want to bring her child up in lies while simultaneously hanging on to a naive dream that Saganoi will one day return to her despite being made aware he has left for Europe. 

“All men are enemies of women,” she writhes in childbirth while swearing that no one will take her child from her, but she is still an indentured woman and her daughter is by rights the property of Osode. Her illness, presumably consumption, began long before her pregnancy and seems to an echo of the suffering she has been forced to endure as a geisha. As her health weakens, so the Yokiro declines. First it is ravaged by a literal storm, but also under threat from the Osaka gangsters desperate to take over Kochi to gain access to the lucrative construction contracts extending in its direction. Even so, as Daikatsu admits much of the fault lies with him. He chose to elope with Otsuru and was unable to protect either her or their daughter whom he allowed meet the same fate by entering the geisha world. He continued to earn his money by selling women into what is essentially slavery, and cannot escape his part in their continued exploitation while his entanglement with gangsters later disrupts the more settled life Tamako has begun to build for herself. 

“Wait all you want, the train’s not coming,” Tamako is later told, as if signalling that there really is no way out of this destructive and disappointing existence. Truly epic in scope, Gosha’s pre-war drama draws together patriarchal exploitation and societal corruption to critique a burgeoning modernity, but ends exactly as it started among the vibrant cherry blossoms only this time undercutting the melancholy of the oft repeated song with a more cheerful scene hinting at least symbolically at a long-awaited reunion. 

Original trailer (English subtitles)

A Chaos of Flowers (華の乱, Kinji Fukasaku, 1988)

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Kinji Fukasaku is best remembered for his work in the yakuza genre and most particularly the Battles Without Honour cycles which chronicled the darkness beneath Japan’s progress towards the economic miracle of the post-war era. He was, however, much more varied in output than it might at first seem. Set before the war, A Chaos of Flowers (華の乱, Hana no Ran) positions the great Kanto Earthquake of 1923 as the day innocence died, Taisho-era liberalism crushed in a fundamental collapse of the old world which led only to the intensification of militaristic ideology and the subsequent corruption of Japanese imperialism. 

Our guide is legendary poet Akiko Yosano (Sayuri Yoshinaga) who tells the story of pre-war 20th century Japan by recounting her own which begins in 1901 when she fell in love with fellow poet and later husband, Tekkan (Hiroshi) Yosano (Ken Ogata). The situation is complicated firstly because Hiroshi is already married with an infant daughter, and secondly because Akiko’s friend Tomiko (Yoshiko Nakada), another poet who had worked with her on a feminist journal, was also in love with Hiroshi and perhaps her rival. Akiko tricks Hiroshi into seeing him alone on the pretext that Tomiko is coming too, confessing her feelings and discovering that he plans to divorce his wife because she is unsupportive of his work. Full in the knowledge that he is choosing poetry over his daughter, Hiroshi decides to enter a relationship with Akiko because she, as a fellow poet, is more appreciative though it proves harder than expected to separate from his first wife. In any case, Akiko is left with a sense of guilt which continues throughout her married life that she cheated Tomiko to claim Hiroshi. 

During this time, Akiko Yosano becomes one of the most celebrated yet controversial young poets in Japan well known for her explicit, erotic love poetry much of which was inspired by her husband. She has eclipsed him as an artist and is supporting the family while he has fallen into a deep depression. A mother of 13 children, Akiko has begun to feel lonely in her marriage and wonders if someone who has only known one man has the authority to continue writing tracts about love and sex. Meanwhile, thanks to the admiration her poetry has received among the young radicals, she has become an accidental figurehead for the Taisho radicals and finds herself swept up by the movement through her associations with such avant-garde figures as Sakae Osugi (Morio Kazama) and his wife Noe Ito (Eri Ishida), the actress Sumako Matsui (Keiko Matsuzaka) held responsible for a revolution in Japanese theatre, and finally tragic author Takeo Arishima (Yusaku Matsuda) who was also the father of golden age actor Masayuki Mori. 

Arishima is first struck by Akiko when knocks her out of a rickshaw during an anarchist publicity stunt driving a motorcycle and sidecar around outside the theatre where Sumako Matsui is performing one of her most famous roles in a play inspired by Tolstoy’s Resurrection. It turns out that Akiko bears a striking resemblance to his late wife, which is one reason he sends her an extravagant gift of a beautiful Western-style outfit which she first tries to return partly because she only wears kimono and partly because it’s an inappropriately expensive gesture. Arishima is from a wealthy, landed family and like many of his generation uncomfortable with his privilege but struggling to convince himself to abandon it. Drawn to him in the same way she was drawn to Hiroshi, Akiko accepts the dress and later wears it on a picnic she organises where her children and Arisihma’s two sons can play together. The Western clothing becomes a kind of signifier of Akiko’s drive towards the future and away from her husband as she too despite her feminist perspective struggles to free herself of the image of the good wife while inwardly burning with a desire for love and passion which her husband can no longer satisfy. 

That same dilemma is one which plagues her rival, journalist Akiko Hatano (Kimiko Ikegami) who is already involved with Arishima but married to a patriarchal man who sees her as nothing more than a “doll”, something which is supposed to look pretty and live in its box until he chooses to take it out. Akiko Hatano warns Akiko Yosano that Arishima is a man drawn to death and is merely looking for someone to die with in a lovers’ suicide, something of a fad at the time. In meeting Akiko Yosano, however, his desire for life seems to have been reinvigorated. He makes peace with himself by dissolving his estate in Hokkaido and surrendering control of it to a peasants’ committee, but is thrown again into suicidal despair when the secret police turn up to harass the peasants for undermining the social order. 

As Akiko Hatano puts it, Arishima is a man vacillating between life and death, claiming to be in love with Akiko Yosano soon after meeting her and actively rejecting Akiko Hatano as symbolic of his newfound desire to live. Arishima committed a love suicide with Akiko Hatano on 9th June, 1923 which is only a few months before the Great Kanto Earthquake which devastated the city of Tokyo and enabled a roundup of subversive forces such as socialists and anarchists along with Koreans many of whom were massacred by state sanctioned forces after a false rumour circulated that they had been poisoning the wells and preparing an insurrection for Korean independence (Sakae Osugi and Noe Ito along with their 6-year-old nephew were also victims of this pogrom). 

In her voice over, Akiko describes the earthquake as the death of Taisho which in real terms lasted a few more years until 1926, but was perhaps over as far as its liberalising ideals are concerned, the crisis giving the militarists further excuses to increase their powers. Yet like Arishima the Taisho intellectuals had also been obsessed with death and futility of which the love suicides were a part. Arishima, shortly before witnessing Sumako’s very public breakdown over the death of her lover Hogetsu Shimamura (Keizo Kanie) from Spanish Flu, describes her nothing more than a ham actress but also believes that the theatrical revolution of the Taisho era would not have been possible without her. Sumako also committed suicide for love a few months after Hogetsu’s death, unable to go on without him. Tomiko, Akiko’s old friend, contracted TB and painfully faded away with Hiroshi unexpectedly by her side. Catching sight of a couple of Osugi’s comrades being dragged away after the earthquake Akiko chases after them with rice balls, telling them they must survive. She’s watched many of her friends and the finest minds of her generation die, mostly through choice, and is making an active choice to live. 

In essence this choice may not be as positive as it first sounds. One of Japan’s first avowed pacifists, Akiko Yosano turned increasingly towards the right in the years following the earthquake, eventually becoming an enthusiastic supporter of the war in China and actively subverting the words of her previous poems in insisting it was glorious to die for the emperor after all. Her friends died out of a sense of futility, that the social changes they envisaged were not possible or that they were unable to continue living with themselves in such a society. Society changed, and Akiko changed with it, such was the path she found to continue living. Nevertheless, something did die with the earthquake and it was perhaps those youthful dreams of overwhelming romance crushed like Akiko’s hat in the rubble of a world which was already collapsing. 

Original trailer (no subtitles)

The Man Who Stole the Sun (太陽を盗んだ男, Kazuhiko Hasegawa, 1979)

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(C) Toho 1979

man who stole the sun posterIn the post-Asama-Sanso world, Japanese society had shifted into period of intense calm in which improving economic prosperity was in the process of delivering comfort rather than the creeping acquisitive anxiousness that began to overshadow the bubble era. Nevertheless, in cinematic terms at least anxiety was everywhere and not least among the young who, swept along by this irresistible economic current, were quietly doubtful about their place in a changing society. Co-scripted by an American screenwriter, Leonard Schrader (brother of Taxi Driver’s Paul), The Man Who Stole the Sun (太陽を盗んだ男, Taiyo wo Nusunda Otoko) provides a satirical snapshot of this confusing moment as an oppressed, belittled high school science teacher builds an atomic bomb in his apartment just to show he can but then realises he has absolutely no idea what to do with it.

Technically speaking, the science teacher’s name is Makoto Kido (Kenji Sawada) but no one really calls him that. The kids at school refer to him as “Bubble-gum” because he always seems to be chewing on the rather childish confectionary. Not the most conscientious of teachers, he tailors the curriculum to his own interests, teaching the kids all about atomic energy and the bomb, but the kids aren’t interested. They only want to know what’s going to be on the test. To them Kido’s information is irrelevant and so they ignore him, talking amongst themselves while he carries on, preaching to a seemingly empty room.

Meanwhile, Kido is building the bomb at home, for real. As he tells the kids, anyone can build an atomic bomb – you only need the plutonium which is, admittedly, tightly controlled for just this reason. He acquires his through a daring heist on a nuclear plant. Kido never elaborates on what prompted him to begin his bizarre masterplan, but there is certainly a degree of pent up rage inside him born of resentment with his reduced circumstances. “Just” a high school science teacher, who would really think he’d have the capability to build an atomic bomb, alone, using only household equipment (plus the plutonium and a custom furnace purchased after nearly exploding his oven)?

Kido’s problems are the same as many middle-aged men in ‘70s Japan in that he feels intensely oppressed from above and below. What he’s trying to tell the kids is that they have access to this power already – anyone can build a bomb, if you bother to learn how. The only thing that’s being kept from him is the plutonium (and for good reason), which he manages to acquire anyway. A chance encounter with the madness of the age seems to kickstart his plan into gear when he meets his opposing number in police inspector Yamashita (Bunta Sugawara).

Kido, having halfheartedly escorted a group of students on a school trip, finds himself rendered powerless once again when the bus is hijacked by a distressed older gentleman (Yunosuke Ito) armed with a rifle and grenade and wearing a World War II soldier’s uniform. He demands to be driven to see the emperor from whom he intends to demand the return of his son, presumably killed in the war 30 years earlier. Yamashita, clean cut and authoritative, is the gung-ho cop who masterfully brings the hostage crisis to a close by lying to the man that the emperor has consented to see him. During the evacuation the old man is killed by police snipers (despite Yamashita’s too late cries of “don’t shoot” after having dispatched the grenade and disarmed the suspect).

Like Kido, the old man likely didn’t really know what he intended to do, only that he was lonely and desperate. The emperor couldn’t give him back his son (whose uniform he seems to be wearing) and his gesture is one of futile defiance coupled with a suicide bid that has no real goal save making an elaborate protest against the world in which he lives. Kido makes the bomb, lets the authorities know he has it, but then realises he has no demands. He asks them to fix something minor that annoys him, to stop the TV networks pulling the plug on late running baseball games to make way for the news, and finds himself rewarded. He has taken back the power, they believe he has the bomb and they fear him, but he has no further goals or notion of how his society should change. There is no idealised future he is fighting for, all there is is futility and indifference.

Meanwhile, ironically enough, Kido’s desperation provokes a mini revolution in others. A talkshow radio host (Kimiko Ikegami) named “Zero” (in contrast to Kido’s adoption of the codename “No. 9” as the 9th owner of a nuclear device and the only individual), broadcasts his on-air request for ideas, believing it to be a kind of thought experiment. The ideas she gets from the public are of the usual kind – lonely men who want to bathe with naked women, nationalists who want to start a war with America, dreamers who think it might be better not to want anything and just embrace the dream, while she muses that she wants the Rolling Stones concert that was cancelled a few years ago after a band member’s narcotics conviction to be reinstated. That being as good as anything is what Kido goes for in an overture that passes as an odd kind of romance and a suitably ironic kick back against strait-laced authority.

Kido’s war is, in a sense, a war with the fathers of the world as symbolised by men like Yamashita with their suits and neatly trimmed haircuts. Their button-down existence has never offered anything to men like Kido who feel trapped and angry within it. Yet Yamashita is also reacting against his own generation of fathers as symbolised by the old man on the bus, the last remnant of wartime resistance offering a defeated cry against a world which got away from them. Yamashita let the old man die when he prioritised his own sense of heroism, and that annoyed Kido. He can’t help sympathising with his plight which is in a way also his own in being relentlessly silenced and ignored by austere authority figures.

Turning down Yamashita’s clumsy attempt at a pickup, Zero affirms that Kido has given her a dream, which no small thing and she feels bound to him because of it. It’s an ironic statement because Kido has no dreams and not only that, he has no future either – he is slowly dying of radiation poisoning despite his precautions during the building of the bomb. In their final confrontation, Yamashita, adopting a paternal authority, neatly summarises Kido’s dilemma. The only life he has the right to take is his own, and his own death is the only thing he really wants, but he’s embarked on this elaborate plan to make his presence felt all the while aware that he will remain totally anonymous. No one will ever see him. He will die, like thousands of others, faceless. A lowly high school science teacher, no terrorist mastermind or bomb building genius. His revenge is as absurd as it is futile. Male inferiority complexes threaten to drown us all in a sea of violent resentment, and as the Earth dies screaming all we will have to reflect on is that we ourselves brought this world into being through our own incurable apathy.

Original trailer (no subtitles)