Tag: Kin Ishii

The Greatest Challenge of All (喜劇 一発勝負, Yoji Yamada, 1967)

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A prodigal son rocks the social order in Yoji Yamada’s anarchic nonsense comedy, The Greatest Challenge of All (喜劇 一発勝負, Kigeki: Ippatsu Shobu). The greatest challenge may be trying to manage Kokichi (Hajime Hana), a roguish Del Boy-like figure with an impossible dream of striking it rich. While in some senses he anticipates the equally  anarchic yet basically goodhearted Tora-san, he also represents a modernising and aspirant Japan determined to leave behind dusty old tradition for a new “deluxe” future.

Having taken to the road after being disowned by his conservative father (Daisuke Kato), Kokichi returns 15 years  later a middle-aged man with seemingly nothing to show for his many years of wandering. He has no idea that he has a daughter, Mariko, by a local woman that his parents took in and raised as if she were theirs which was not an especially uncommon solution to the problem of illegitimate birth in the post-war era. Nor did he know his mother had passed away before walking in on her annual memorial service. This sense of parental disconnection one level reflects a lack of filiality that marks him out as a “modern” man uninterested in these familial obligations or a sense of duty towards his family, but it’s also true that it’s to family that he’s returned having mellowed in middle-aged and in a way looking to settle down.

In any case, his life seems to have been a series of crazy episodes from briefly becoming a sumo wrestler to meeting a mysterious woman on a bridge who gets him a job as a snake charmer. When two yakuza types kick up a fuss about not being able to have their usual room at the inn during his mother’s memorial service, Kokichi manages to frighten them off just with bluster, hinting at the way he may have lived for the last 15 years. He also has two friends who turn up to see him, one of whom is a former yakuza who refers to Kokichi as if were his boss and they were a little trio of crime-adjacent buddies.

But it does appear that Kokichi has come with a business plan in mind, convinced that he can find the source of a hot spring in the town and build a resort hotel on top of it. To do this, he tries to convince his father to sell him his land and the inn the family run so he can knock it down and build a “deluxe” modern, Western-style hotel in its place. Kokichi’s father obviously isn’t keen. This inn has been in the family for generations, he really wouldn’t want to ruin that and especially not for one of Kokichi’s harebrained schemes. Yet again this brings us back to the battle between the conservatism of Koikichi’s father, and Kokichi’s own consumerist modernism that is more individualistic and no longer sees beauty in the past, only backwardness and stagnation. When he finally does find his hot spring, he builds a vast modernist complex with a botanical water park housed in a giant Hawaiian-themed conservatory complete with dancing hula girls. 

His corrupting presence is most discernible in the changing role of Fumi (Tanie Kitabayashi), the family’s housekeeper who generally dressed in kimono but on moving to Kokichi’s mansion she begins wearing Western dress. Fumi had at one time left the family because Kokichi had unwittingly forced her to betray it in helping him get his hands on a precious family heirloom to pawn as capital for his new business venture. Having done so brings her to a confrontation with the contradictions of her role within the family, both a surrogate mother to Kokichi and also a servant who is expected to abide by a certain code with not stealing from your employers a key tenet. She feels she can no longer look Kokichi’s father in the eye and must now return to her home in the country even though she has likely not seen it since she was a young woman. Having undergone this change, she can no longer return to the inn but is brought back to Kokichi’s modernist home once he strikes it rich. 

But Kokichi too is later confronted by hypocrisies of his own position as a free-spirited man and finally a father on learning the truth about Mariko. Hanging out at the hot spring, the 16-year-old Mariko has attracted the attentions of a couple of fashionable young men and wants to leave with them to visit Tokyo. Despite the intrusion of the modern in the hot springs resort, Mariko doesn’t want to stay in this “deadbeat” town and longs for the bright lights of the big city. Kokichi’s father understandably says no, but Kokichi is originally all for it, perhaps seeing his own desire to be free of his father’s oppressive authority. However, he soon changes his tune on assuming his paternity. He too tells Mariko she can’t go and strikes her for talking back. But just as he had, she leaves anyway. His modernity is no longer modern enough, and the young will always walk towards the future.

One exception might be Kokichi’s painter sister Nobuko (Chieko Baisho) who appears to be happy enough living at the inn and with seemingly no intention of marrying which might be her own kind of rebellion against traditional mores. While other similarly themed films may have emphasised the importance of hard work and the reality of the salaryman dream, this one suggests that it really is possible to bumble along and then strike it lucky but also that you never really travel as far from home as you might think. The desire for patriarchal control rises in Kokichi, but is now ineffectual. Though he didn’t raise her, Mariko is a child of the world he’s created and simply chooses to leave with a final sock in the eye to traditional filiality. 

Trailer (no subtitles)

I, the Executioner (みな殺しの霊歌, Tai Kato, 1968)

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Nephew of Sadao Yamanaka, Tai Kato joined Toho as an apprentice in 1937, returning after the war training under Daisuke Ito and Akira Kurosawa, but later moved to Toei where he became closely associated with ninkyo eiga yakuza movies and jidaigeki. From the mid-1960s, however, he made several movies at Shochiku which had, it has to be said, a house style that was almost the polar opposite with a clear focus on polite, family-friendly melodrama. 1968’s I, the Executioner (みな殺しの霊歌, Minagoroshi no Reika) meanwhile is a surprisingly dark affair even among the grittier examples of Shochiku’s similarly themed B-movie thrillers, an avant-garde noir and proto-giallo in which the fugitive, serial killer antihero sees himself as an agent of divine justice in a hellish and immoral post-war landscape. 

Kato opens with a shocking scene of sexualised violence in which a woman is knocked unconscious, stripped, bound with telephone cord, and finally revived, forced to write down the names of four other women before being brutally raped and murdered by a killer whose voice we have not yet heard nor face seen. The police are mystified, attributing the woman’s death to the fact that she had worked as a bar hostess and maybe things like this are an occupational hazard for women who are surrounded by too many men. Her landlord, however, laments that hers is the second death to occur recently after a laundry boy threw himself off the roof. All things considered, he wishes the boy had picked somewhere else. 

The police have no reason to connect the two unfortunate events and so remain largely clueless, but we gradually become aware that the killer, Kawashima (Makoto Sato), is targeting the women because he holds them directly responsible for the boy’s death. He is the inspector that calls, avenging the death of this young man who, he has learned, like him hailed from Hokkaido and had come to the city at only 16 years old to earn money to support his family, saving almost all of his wages in the hope of opening a shop. Kato shows us scenes of a city under construction, a land of girders casting shadows on the ground like prison bars trapping men like these who are building the new Japan but will be discarded as soon the job is done and their labour no longer so much in demand. Kawashima has another reason for living like this, but he perhaps admires something pure and innocent in the desire of a young man leaving home to seek his fortune so that he might take care of those he loves and that this world betrayed that desire is something he finds impossible to forgive.

The five women have apparently done quite well for themselves, despite the fact that more than one of them has worked on the fringes of the sex trade. Their treatment of the boy is attributed to their boredom in the relative ease of their lives as monied women with little to occupy their time other than getting their kicks abusing the less powerful. It’s an uncomfortable role reversal that places women in a position of power and then sees them abuse it in the exact same way that men do, slinging back the same pithy justifications that men offer for sexual violence while the police meditate on the relative connotations of rape when the word is applied to a man at the hands of women rather than the other way around. If it were their sister, they could understand the desire to kill the men who had done it but a part of them struggles to see that a teenage boy may still find unwanted sexual contact a traumatic enough experience to push him towards suicide. 

Yet Kawshima appears to have no real connection to the boy, and his “revenge” is also a product of his misogyny in that as we later learn he also has reason to feel betrayed by womanhood and is already on the run from previous crime. Nevertheless, he is drawn to the innocent Haruko (Chieko Baisho), a girl-next-door type who works in his favourite ramen restaurant, only to discover that she too has a dark and violent past which may be why she seems to be drawn to him. He struggles with himself, but believes that he is taking revenge on a brutalising society defined by violence and abuse while sublimating his sense of emasculation in the face of women’s growing social and sexual freedoms in the post-war era. It is perhaps the post-war era which is cast as the major villain, one of the women later escaping her protective custody to dance furiously a hip nightclub only to return to the scene of her crime while refusing to see that she has done anything so “wrong” as to merit this kind of persecution. 

“The cycle of divine punishment must be fulfilled” Kawashima finally laments, acknowledging his grim place within this series of post-war tragedies. Surprisingly avant-garde, Kato experiments with blown out negatives, extreme close up, and deep focus mixed with his characteristic low angle composition to add to the sense of noirish dread which paints the modern city as an inescapable hellscape while even the romantic place of refuge shared by Kawashima and Haruko is a gothic moorland lit by moonlight and filled with eerie mist. Lurid and sweaty, the film has a grim sense of humour even in its oppressive atmosphere with a running gag devoted to the lead investigator’s painful case of piles, but its overriding fatalism nevertheless offers the hero a sense of redemption if only in acceptance of his narrative destiny.