Tag: Kinzo Shin

The Man Without a Map (燃えつきた地図, Hiroshi Teshigahara, 1968)

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Hired to find a missing person no one really wants found, a detective begins to chase his own tail amid the impersonal vistas of the contemporary city in Hiroshi Teshigahara’s The Man Without a Map (燃えつきた地図, Moetsukita chizu). The fourth and final in his series of Kobo Abe adaptations and the only one in colour, the film’s Japanese title “burned-up map” may also, in its way, refer to the city of Tokyo which appears blurred out and indistinct in the sepia-tinted opening and is thereafter frequently shot from above as a depersonalised space where anonymous cars shuttle along highways like so many ants moving in rhythm with the momentum of the metropolis.

We follow a nameless detective (Shintaro Katsu) as he’s charged with investigating the disappearance of a 43-year-old salaryman, Hiroshi Nemuro, who turns out to have myriad other personalities and hasn’t been seen for six months. The man’s wife, Mrs Nemuro (Etsuko Ichihara), is not terribly helpful and the detective comes to wonder if the investigation itself is intended to further disguise the man’s whereabouts and prove that he really is a “missing person”. Yet this Tokyo is full of “missing people” including the detective who, we later learn, is a kind of fugitive himself. He apparently walked out on his wife (Tamao Nakamura), the owner of a successful boutique, because he couldn’t find his place there any more. He was once a salaryman too, and became a detective because it was the furthest thing he could think of from a regular job. 

It confuses him that no one really seems to be interested in where Nemuro is or if he’s alright, only in the reason behind his disappearance. The more he chases him, the more he begins to take on Nemuro’s characteristics as if he were intended to slide into the space Nemuro has vacated. Toru Takemitsu’s eerie harpsichord score only seems to add to the hauntingly gothic quality of this quest. The question is whether such a thing as identity even exists any more. The detective puts on Nemuro’’s jacket, though it’s too small, and is mistaken for him, while a colleague of Nemuro’s insists that he’s seen him in the street and is sure it was Nemuro simply because of the unusual colour of his suit without ever seeing his face. Tashiro (Kiyoshi Atsumi) tells the detective that Nemuro had a secret hobby taking nude photos at a specialist club that caters to such things. The two of them are confident they’ve identified the woman in the picture based on her haircut, but the girl they speaks laughs and takes off her wig explaining that she was merely asked to wear it, so the woman in the photo could be anyone, including Nemuro’s own wife.

Nemuro apparently had a series of hobbies for which he’d obtained certificates because he said that having them helped him to feel anchored in his life, though he’s apparently unmoored now. Like the detective, he may have been trying on different personalities from car mechanic to school teacher looking for the right fit and a place he felt he belonged in rebellion against the depersonalisation of the salaryman society in which one man in a suit is as good as another. The detective finds an opposite number in the missing man’s brother-in-law (Osamu Okawa), a very modern, apparently gay gangster connected with a network of male sex workers sold on to influential elites, and a commune of similarly displaced people working as casual labourers that is overcome with corporate thugs and eventually trashed.

The trashing of the commune may have something to do with a man named Maeda who is a councillor in a town no one’s heard of, but was possibly involved in some shady business over which Nemuro may have been intending to blackmail him or blow a whistle with the assistance of his brother-in-law who helped him land a big contract at work. The more the detective investigates, the more confused he becomes. It’s impossible to follow the case as we might expect in a conventional noir thriller, but we’re not supposed to be looking at Nemuro’s disappearance so much as the detective’s gradually fracturing sense of self as he becomes lost in the anonymous city. He sees himself bury Mrs Nemuro in leaves only for her body somehow reduce itself to its component parts and sink into the street. Later her face is superimposed on the buildings as if she were looking down on him while he is lost and alone. Nemuro’s face also appears on buildings, though more as a metaphor as if the salaryman and the office building were one and the same and the reason the detective can’t find him is because he doesn’t really exist as a concrete identity. The detective spots a dead cat in the road and laments that he never thought to ask its name, but will try to think up a good one later. He might as well be talking about himself, now displaced, unmoored, and pursued among the city streets, a man without a map lost amid the simulacrum of an imaginary city.

Morning’s Tree-Lined Street (朝の並木路, Mikio Naruse, 1936)

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A country girl comes to the city in search of a more glamorous life but largely finds only disillusionment and disappointment in Naruse’s 1936 drama Morning’s Tree-lined Street (朝の並木路, Ashita no Namikimichi). Naruse depicts Chiyo’s (Sachiko Chiba) spiritual journey literally as she takes the bus from her rural hometown all wide-eyed wonder and then arrives in the city to be bothered by a homeless man and then walk into a less salubrious area of the city with only her friend’s address to go on. 

In her hometown, everyone thinks Hisako (Ranko Akagi) works in a big office in Marunouchi, but in reality she’s now working in a hostess bar under the name “Shigeko.” Nevertheless, despite a degree of shame in her circumstances, Hisako doesn’t reject Chiyo and isn’t angry that she’s come and found out her secret. She talks her landlady, Okada, into letting her stay but discourages her from working in the bar. The current economic depression is evident in the fact that the bar isn’t doing so well and never has many customers, yet the “help wanted’ sign keeps going up and down outside. There’s even a running gag that the cook makes a permanent version so they won’t waste so much paper, only he spells “hostess” wrong, so they have to take it down anyway. 

The help wanted sign is a harbinger of doom for Chiyo who, it seems, is being drawn towards this kind of life. As Hisako had told her, it’s impossible for a country girl to find a job when there are already so many “desperate” people in Tokyo, and at the grand old age of 22 Chiyo is worried that she’s simply too old to find employment. By the standards of the time, she may be considered on the older side not to be married, and indeed Hisako tells her she’d be better off to go home and find a husband, but Chiyo wants both more and to find a grand romance. She romanticises an idea of poverty believing that she could be happy with a man she truly loved even if they had no money. Hisako doesn’t disillusion her, but may be inwardly rolling her eyes at her naivety. She has a boyfriend already, but he’s no good. He keeps turning up and pestering her for money which might be one reason Hisako can’t escape the life of a bar girl.

It is indeed money that gets in the way everyone’s relationships. Hisako reads in the paper about a salaryman who embezzled money to spend at a hostess bar and then died in a double suicide with one of the women who worked there. The dark fantasy the bar represents echoes the wider despair in the society coloured by economic depression and broken dreams in which the fantasy version of Ogawa admits that his life was without hope or joy. Chiyo gets close to a nice young man who comes into the bar who tries but fails to find her a legit job in an office in attempt to save her from becoming a bar girl. In the end, she gives in and becomes one. Ogawa says he thinks no less of her, but begins coming to the bar more often and appears to be spending beyond his means even while Chiyo warns him not to waste his money. 

What happens next turns out to be a cinematic fantasy informed by Chiyo’s naive desires in which Ogawa agrees to marry her but has already ruined himself by embezzling public funds and later asks her to die with him while she pleads that as long as they have love poverty is nothing to fear. In many ways, the dream shatters her illusions and confronts her with the stark reality of her life in playing out a best/worst scenario in which Ogawa is so deeply in love with her that willingly walks to his destruction, which is at least preferable to the truth, which is as Hisako says that a man may seem honest and sincere but will turn out to be a coward or else he’ll cheat on you.

Unable to find employment nor rely on men, the women have only each other and the solidarity of those like Mrs Okada her running a small bar in this rundown corner of the city where dreams go to die. Chiyo takes to her new life a little more than to her liking. She turns to Hisako and asks if she looks like a bad girl, fearful that it’s already changed her and it’s no longer possible to go back to being the innocent country girl who wanted a bigger life in the city. Her conviction might be brought home to her by the fact that Ogawa is promoted and sent out of Tokyo but doesn’t ask her to come with him, only leave his address in case she ever feels like writing. But at the same time it spurs her into a flurry of false positivity, committing herself to the job search despite knowing that it’s almost certainly futile. Throwing his note into the river and letting it flow away, she both sees through the naivety of her dream of escape through romance and also resigns herself to the life of a bar girl, like Hisako with nowhere else to go and no possibility of return only the vague and far off hope of salvation through employment.

Morning’s Tree-Lined Street screens 21st June at New York’s Metrograph as part of Mikio Naruse: The World Betrays Us – Part II.

Images: Collection of National Film Archive of Japan.

Hiroshima (ひろしま, Hideo Sekigawa, 1953)

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During the post-war occupation of Japan which lasted until 1952, the censorship regulations which replaced those of the militarist era perhaps ironically made it more or less impossible to criticise the US presence or depict the extent of wartime devastation lest it raise hostility towards American forces or reinforce a feeling of victimisation. For this reason, images of the atomic bombings were tightly controlled and the events rarely referenced in mainstream media, Hiroshi Shimizu’s Children of the Beehive being a notable if brief exception. Once the occupation was over, however, many assumed it would become easier to broach such taboo subjects. 

Hiroshima native Kaneto Shindo’s comparatively better known Children of Hiroshima, inspired by the book Children of the A Bomb: Testament of the Boys and Girls of Hiroshima, was released in 1952 shortly after the censorship regulations were lifted and stars his later wife Nobuko Otowa as a teacher who returns to Hiroshima to visit the graves of her parents killed in the atomic bombing and thereafter several of the children from a nursery school she once taught at who have survived but continue to suffer in various ways due to their experiences. Despite Shindo’s well known leftist credentials, many including the Japan Teachers’ Union who apparently owned the rights to the book though there is some dispute as to their involvement in the production, were disappointed with the film which they felt to be an overly sentimental studio melodrama that was ultimately unhelpful in supporting the anti-war political movement or accurately representing the hibakusha community. 

In response, the JTU commissioned a second version in order to better reflect their aims and ideals. Long unseen in either Japan or internationally prior to its recent restoration, Hideo Sekigawa’s Hiroshima (ひろしま) adopts a much more strident docudrama approach while, like Children of Hiroshima, maintaining a focus on the plight of children during the bombing and beyond though it seems somehow unlikely that teachers and parents would be wholeheartedly enthusiastic about showing such a deliberately harrowing piece to a sensitive younger audience. One criticism of Shindo’s film had been that he’d dodged dealing with the bombing itself by concerning himself only with the present-day aftermath. Sekigawa meanwhile focuses directly on the traumatic instant of the attack, utilising expressionistic techniques to recreate the living hell to which the city was reduced literally in flash. 

It’s clear however that the normal of that day was already far from normal. Rather than go about their studies, school children are working hard for the war effort helping to clear extensive bomb damage. A teacher and a class of school girls salvaging roof tiles from a ruined building pause to look at the sky. They can hear bombers but no sirens and it’s in that moment of stillness that everything changes. The world as it was implodes and is left in total collapse. Survivors search desperately for loved ones while stumbling through an unfamiliar landscape filled with crying children, charred bodies, rubble and fire. “This is hell” an injured man groans after managing to make his way to the field hospital, “hell”. 

Sekigawa bookends his tale with a contemporary framing sequence in which an idealistic teacher tries to instil compassionate values in his students some of whom are survivors of the bomb and still living with its effects including one suffering with radiation-related leukaemia who becomes very upset on listening to a radio lesson recounting the morning of the bombing from the point of view of the pilot flying the plane. Another of the students later comes to her defence, taking some of the others to task and lamenting that the suffering of those affected by the A Bomb is not taken seriously while victims still undergo a degree of social stigma even if they have no visible wounds. He is also very worried about his friend, Endo (Yoshi Kato), who later appears in the flashback to the aftermath of the bombing and has apparently gone off the rails, working in a cabaret bar and addicted to pachinko after losing his entire family. 

It’s through Endo that Sekigawa dramatises many of the secondary effects of the bombing in that he was not physically injured but is consumed by a sense of hopeless anxiety, intensely concerned about the prospect of another war and unable to envisage a successful future for himself in a world in which such horror can occur seemingly at random. It’s he who first introduces us to the parasitical disaster tourism that generates a grim trade in A-Bomb “souvenirs” as he passes a stall selling fake skulls as a child and then later attempts to sell actual human remains with inspirational stickers plastered on the top. The “better” future they have imagined for him is however in itself problematic, harking back to the traditional post-war solution of a factory job which directs aligns him with the nation’s push towards a capitalistic society, but is then undercut when he quits not because he is bored or lazy but because he discovered the factory was being used to produce artillery shells and he felt he could have nothing to do with it. 

Endo is also among a group of post-war street kids who learn to say the word “hungry” without knowing what it means to get bread and chocolate from passing Americans. A later more direct speech has them make a formal accusation that the Americans are responsible for the deaths of their parents and therefore bear a responsibility towards them which they should immediately repay with food. Some, including Shochiku who were originally set to distribute but later declined, described the film as overly anti-American, but Hiroshima largely refrains from mentioning the Americans other than a suggestion that the dropping of the bomb was itself a racist act in which they used the Japanese people as guinea pigs to test their new weapon, and focuses on the failure of the militarist authorities to respond in an appropriate fashion. We see a soldier read out a proclamation telling a ragged queue of survivors queuing up for food that the situation is “not unusual” in time of war and they should all return to their jobs despite the fact that there are no longer any buildings in which to work. Meanwhile, militarists talk of using the disaster to foment the war effort by marshalling hate and resentment towards the enemy while commanders refuse to take scientific advice that tells them Hiroshima may be uninhabitable for the next 70 years, obsessed only with continuing the war at all costs ironically insisting that their “fervent will” which “burns as brightly as a million stars” will bring them an assured victory.  

In the face of a second bombing, however, they are forced to accept that the war cannot continue, many of the victims left perplexed and defeated that despite their suffering the government has unconditionally surrendered and seemingly abandoned them. An abnegation of responsibility is also suggested by the presence of the street kids abandoned by their society and left to fend for themselves though Endo is eventually taken into a progressive care home from which he and other boys make numerous attempts to escape, in his case in the hope that he can find the sister from whom he became separated. Sekigawa does not make suggestions for the future, merely depict the difficult post-war reality while arguing for greater compassion in the contemporary era, one bomb survivor describing her despair in the knowledge that her disability is a barrier to marriage while finding work that can be done with her physical limitations is also difficult as is accessing government support. Sekigawa too may give in to a particular kind of sentimentality in the closing moments but it is indeed undoubtedly effective as a reminder of the human cost of war and our collective responsibility to ensure that it never happens again.

The Sands of Kurobe (黒部の太陽, Kei Kumai, 1968)

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Kei Kumai’s three-hour epic of human engineering The Sands of Kurobe (黒部の太陽, Kurobe no Taiyo) opens with a titlecard to the effect that the film testifies to the courage of the Japanese people who brought the nation back to life after the war. Partly produced by Kansai Electric Power along with the production agencies of stars Toshiro Mifune and Yujiro Ishihara, the film is therefore somewhat conflicted, part bombastic celebration of Japanese engineering skill and ambivalent critique of the wilful decision to place success above all else including the welfare and safety of ordinary workers.

This critique is most evident to the flashbacks to the construction of Kuro 3 in 1938 which as many point out was conducted by the military under brutal and primitive conditions. The construction of the new Kurobe hydroelectric dam, by contrast, is a much more modern, enlightened affair in which workers have proper equipment and are not simply hacking at rocks with pickaxes wearing only a vest. But then as the conflicted Takeshi (Yujiro Ishihara) points out, it’s all effectively the same. Just because no one is pointing a gun at their heads, it doesn’t mean the men actually building the dam aren’t being exploited rather simply pressured by a vague notion of national good that they should be ready to lay down their lives. Could it be that “prosperity” is worse thing to die for than “patriotism”, especially when it appears as if your employer cares little for your physical wealth and economic wellbeing simply pledging that they will support the families of men killed during the dam’s construction. 

That there will be deaths seems inevitable. The man placed in charge of building a tunnel through the mountain, Kitagawa (Toshiro Mifune), is haunted by the vision of a man falling from a cliff that he witnessed when they first hiked to the dam site. He originally described the project as “crazy” and wanted to resign but was convinced to stay on. Kitagawa is himself fond of insisting on safety first where others are minded to cut corners, but also troubled by domestic issues in the film’s sometimes insensitive use of his daughter’s terminal leukaemia as a mirror for the dam project in considering what is and isn’t possible through human endeavour. The suggestion is that Kitagawa wants to believe the miracle of the dam is possible because needs to keep believing in a scientific miracle that can save his daughter, though obviously even if it is ultimately possible to build this dam that’s designed to fuel the post-war rocket to economic prosperity there are limits and unfortunately decades later we have still not found a cure for cancer though treatment may be more effective. 

Takeshi meanwhile has a similar battle with his hard-nosed father whose devotion to the dam project he describes almost like an addiction, suggesting that he values nothing outside of tunnelling and is willing to sacrifice everything in its name including the lives of himself and others. A flashback to to 1938 reveals that he asked his own teenage son to place dynamite and inadvertently caused his death though lax safety procedures which is the understandable reason why his wife eventually left him taking Takeshi with her. But the strange thing is for all his original opposition, Takeshi too is later captivated by the immensity of the challenge if also wary that the workers are falling victim to the same sickness as his father and are still being exploited by those like him who expect them to offer up their lives while paying them a pittance and complaining when the project does not proceed along their schedule. 

The almost nationalistic, bombastic quality of the film seems at odds with some of Kumai’s previous work save the discussion of the building of the 1938 tunnel though this largely serves as a contrast to imply that this time is different because they’re doing it for love of country rather the forced patriotism of the militarist past. Kitagawa justifies himself that if they don’t build the dam, economic prosperity will stall, companies will go bust, and people will lose their jobs but it seems somewhat hollow in the knowledge many men are certain to die while building this dam. Kumai undercuts the bombast with a series of scenes shot like a disaster movie in which supports collapse and the tunnel floods, or men are hit by falling rocks, eventually closing on an ironic Soviet-style statue dedicated to the labour of the workers that seems to question the immense loss of life along with the destruction of the natural beauty of Mount Kurobe but cannot in the end fully reconcile himself, torn between a celebration of human endeavour and its equally human costs. 

Original trailer (no subtitles)

The Wolves (狼, Kaneto Shindo, 1955)

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Post-war desperation drives a collection of otherwise honest men and women towards a criminal act that for all its politeness they are ill-equipped to live with in Kaneto Shindo’s biting social drama The Wolves (狼, Okami). “Wolves” is what the criminals are branded, but the title hints more at the wolfish society which threatens to swallow them whole. After all, it’s eat or be eaten in this dog eat dog world, at least according to a cynical insurance salesman hellbent on exploiting those without means. 

Each of the five “criminals” is an employee at Toyo Insurance where they’re immediately pitted against each other, reminded that in order to qualify for a full-time position they need to meet their quotas for six months. The orientation meeting is cultilke in its intensity, the boss insisting that only in insurance can you become a self-made man while recounting his own epiphany as to the worthiness of his profession. They are told that the only two things they need are “faith and honesty”, and then “faith and pursuasion”, while encouraged to think of their work as an act of “worship”, “for the salvation of everyone”. 

Yet they’re also told to exploit their friends and family by pressuring them into taking out life insurance policies in order to help them meet their quotas. As one man points out, friends and relatives of the poor are likely to be poor themselves, but these are exactly the kind of people they’re expected to target. They’re told there’s no point going after the weathly because they’re already insured, but there’s something doubly insidious in trying to coax desperate people who can’t quite afford to feed themselves into paying out money they don’t have on the promise of protecting their families from ruin. One man even asks if the policy covers suicide and is told it does if you pay in for a year, sighing that he doesn’t want to wait that long.

“Suicide or robbery, choose one,” one of the salespeople reflects after failing to make their quota once again. They each have reasons to be desperate, all of them already excluded from the mainstream society and uncertain how they will find work if the job falls through. Akiko (Nobuko Otowa) is a war widow with a young son who is being bullied at school because of his cleft palate for which he needs an expensive operation. She’s already tried working as a bar hostess but is quiet by nature and found little success with it. Fujibayashi (Sanae Takasugi) is widowed too with two children and five months behind rent for a dingy flat in a bomb damaged slum where the landlord is about to turn off her electric. Harajima (Jun Hamamura) used to work in a bank but was fired for joining a union and is trapped in a toxic marriage to woman looking for material comfort he can’t offer. Mikawa (Taiji Tonoyama) too is resented by his wife, a former dancer, having lost his factory job to a workplace injury while the ageing Yoshikawa (Ichiro Sugai) was once a famous screenwriter but as he explains people in the film industry turn cold when you’re not hot stuff any more. 

Their unlikely descent into crime has its own kind of inevitability in the crushing impossibility of their lives. They may rationalise that what they’re doing is no different from the insurance company that exploits the vulnerable for its own gain, thinking that if they can just get a little ahead they’d be alright while feeling as if robbery and suicide are the only choices left to them and at the end of the day they want to survive. Perhaps you could call them “wolves” for that, but they’re the kind of wolves that give the guards from the cash van they robbed their train fare home after bowing profusely in apology. The real wolves are those like Toyo who think nothing of devouring the weakness of others, promising the poor the future they can’t afford while draining what little they have left out of them. As the film opens, Akiko looks down at a bug writhing in the dirt attacked by ants from all sides and perhaps recognises herself in that image as the sun beats down oppressively on both of them. Breaking into expressionistic storms and unsubtly driving past a US airbase to make clear the source of the decline, Shindo paints a bleak picture of the post-war world as a land of venal wolves which makes criminals of us all. 

Willful Murder (日本の熱い日々 謀殺・下山事件, Kei Kumai, 1981)

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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.

Tokyo Twilight (東京暮色, Yasujiro Ozu, 1957)

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Closely associated with the family drama, Yasujiro Ozu is perhaps the most socially conservative of golden age directors. Unlike Naruse or Mizoguchi, he cheerfully reinforces patriarchal social norms and foregrounds the paternal experience while upholding the primacy of the traditional family in a rapidly modernising society. In his later career he’d come to sympathise more strongly with the young, but 1957’s Tokyo Twilight (東京暮色, Tokyo Boshoku), perhaps his bleakest take on familial failure, is essentially a treatise on the legacy of corrupted motherhood and rebuke to growing post-war freedom in which a young woman is made to feel that her future is impossible because of maternal betrayal while her sister is forced back into an unhappy marriage to an abusive husband in order to avoid the same fate befalling her own daughter. 

Unlike most Ozu families, the Sugiyamas do not seem to be particularly happy in each other’s company, living in superficial politeness rather than true intimacy. This may partly be because the sisters had a brother who passed away young in a mountain climbing accident, but it also seems that Mr. Sugiyama (Chishu Ryu), though kind and polite, is a typically authoritarian, distant father. Oldest daughter Takako (Setsuko Hara) has returned home declaring herself unable to go on living with her professor husband Numata (Kinzo Shin) who, she says, has become increasingly erratic, taking out his petty professional disappointment on their small daughter Michiko whom he seems to resent. Younger sister Akiko (Ineko Arima) meanwhile is sullen and introverted. Unmarried, she lives at home and is studying to become a stenographer. 

As we later discover, the girls’ mother Kikuko (Isuzu Yamada) left the family during the war after falling in love with the junior officer Mr. Sugiyama enlisted to look in on the family while he was away in Seoul. Akiko was only three when their mother left and barely remembers her. Takako attributes her wayward behaviour to “loneliness”, that she has been forever corrupted through never knowing a mother’s love. Mr. Sugiyama admits he tried his best, but both agree that children need two parents and no matter how much he wants to a father cannot make up a mother’s share. 

This atmosphere of alienation is perhaps why Akiko feels as if she has no one to turn to in her own moment of maternal crisis. She has become pregnant by her college student boyfriend who has been avoiding her and even has the audacity to ask if the baby’s his when Akiko finally manages to pin him down. Trying to borrow money for an abortion, Akiko visits her aunt who declines to give it to her without knowing why, eventually turning to a family friend who apparently provides no questions asked. The woman at the clinic assumes she is a bar girl, as does a policeman who eventually “arrests” her for loitering in a sleazy cafe where her boyfriend has obviously stood her up which is quite openly being used as a place for men to pick up call girls. All of this contributes to Akiko’s increasing sense of shame and worthlessness. She sees herself as a fallen woman, convinced that she is all her mother’s child contaminated by her “bad blood” which makes a conventionally successful life as an ordinary wife and mother an impossibility. 

Akiko’s aunt wants to set her up with arranged marriage matches, but Akiko declares she has no intention of marrying or having children. Without knowing anything of Akiko’s circumstances, Takako assumes this is because of her obviously unhappy marriage, trying to convince her sister that there are plenty of happy couples she is merely unlucky. Mr. Sugiyama attempts to talk to his son-in-law but finds him strange and indifferent, offering treatises on familial love while implying that he has little of it. He regrets pressuring Takako to marry him when he knew that she preferred someone else while Takako is once again haunted by the spectre of corrupted maternity in her mother’s decision to leave the family for emotional fulfilment and is fearful of making the same mistake creating another troubled daughter just like Akiko in denying her a father’s love (which seems a moot point given that Numata does not care for the child). 

Neither woman is able to escape paying for their mother’s transgression. Akiko is punished firstly for embracing her sexuality and secondly for the rejection of motherhood in choosing to have an abortion. Alone and humiliated by her unreliable boyfriend, she is denied the opportunity to start over, while Takako meditates on female failure and believes that her only option is to live in misery with a cruel and narcissistic husband because that is the “proper” thing to do and the only way to bring her daughter up “right”. The absent mother, meanwhile, is denied reconciliation and left only with the painful separation from her daughter who finally rejects her in order to reclaim the image of the good wife and mother by returning to her unhappy home. Bleak as it is, all of this is presented as a kind of happy ending in that it restores the idea of the traditional family, increasingly threatened by post-war modernity, to its original primacy. We leave with Mr. Sugiyama rehiring his maid and heading cheerfully back to the male world of work, making the fresh start that his daughters have been so cruelly denied.  

Currently streaming in the UK via BFI Player as part of Japan 2020. Also available to stream in the US via Criterion Channel.

The Long Darkness (忍ぶ川, Kei Kumai, 1972)

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Golden age Japanese cinema is generally resistant to the idea of romance as salvation. There may be a romantic happy ending, lovers uniting despite the mounting odds, but their happiness is often overshadowed by the anxieties of the world in which they live. Adapted from the novel by Tetsuo Miura, Kei Kumai’s post-war romance The Long Darkness (忍ぶ川, Shinobugawa) meanwhile insists that it’s love that will save you in the end as its dejected, insecure heroes find the courage to go on living precisely because of the strength and validation they discover in loving and being loved.

The hero, Tetsuro (Go Kato), feels himself to be cursed, overcome with a sense of shame and anxiety because of the dark shadow that hangs over his once prosperous family. His oldest sister committed suicide for love on his sixth birthday, while another sister then took her own life some time later out of guilt for having contributed to her death. His oldest brother whom he describes as sensitive and eccentric disappeared in grief, while the next oldest took a job at a Tokyo lumber yard and supported him as a student but later disgraced the family by running off with money he’d fraudulently accumulated in the name of opening his own company. Tetsuro is convinced that there is something genetically wrong with the family line and is intensely anxious that it will one day consume him too. 

That might be why he’s unexpectedly bashful for a man of 27 in courting the pretty waitress of a local bar, Shino (Komaki Kurihara), whom he first met while celebrating the graduation of some other students after making a belated return to university. Shino too is carrying her own burdens which lead her to feel unworthy of happiness in that she was raised in the red light district and her family, evacuated to rural Tochigi during the war, is now impoverished and living in a shrine. The proprietress at her restaurant has pressured her into an engagement with a prosperous car salesman whom she doesn’t like but feels unable to refuse on the grounds that he will take care of her sick father. The car salesman tries to rape her so she’ll have to marry him which, as her father points out, does not speak well for his character or the prospect of a happy marriage. Her father is clear, he wants his daughter to be happy and in this age a woman’s happiness does largely depend on the man she marries. He tells her to find a man she loves more than life itself and marry him without a moment’s thought. 

The forces which divide them aren’t so much to do with class, politics, money, or custom but with internalised shame and the deeply held belief that they are “bad” people who do not deserve to be happy. “Can I go on living?” Tetsuro’s only remaining sister tearfully asks him, burdened both by her traumatic family history and by a visual impairment that further convinces her she cannot expect to be a part of regular society and has no prospect of a happy future. He almost turns away after noticing her crying but realises that’s what his absent siblings might have done and resolves to behave differently, reforging his his familial bonds with love and compassion in place of the gloominess and futility that had long overshadowed his family home. Just as Shino’s father had anointed Tetsuro a “good person” he could entrust his daughter to, Tetsuro’s sister and mother affirm that Shino too is “good” and her presence brings light and laughter back into their lives after years of lonely suffering. 

“We’ve spent our whole lives worrying about appearances” Tetsuro declares, “it’s time we stop”. Affirming that her new in-laws are also “all good people”, Shino too admits that she realises the “uselessness” of her old life “never saying what I want or don’t want, going along with everything”, liberated by the transcendent power of love that allows her to overcome her fear and insecurity to claim her own agency, the jingling bells of a farmer’s horse cart echoing from below as if in celebration. Shooting in a classic 4:3 monochrome with occasional intertitles and voiceover, Kumai emphasises the literary quality of the tale spanning the rundown lumberyards of post-war Tokyo to the frozen north of Tetsuro’s frosty home but finally argues for the freedom and possibility to be found in the contemporary era by making an active choice for happiness rather than submitting oneself to a fated misery out of misguided obedience to austere and oppressive social codes. “Everyone’s jealous of you” an old woman cackles catching sight of the newly-wed couple on the train to their new life, and you can well understand why. 

Original trailer (no subtitles)

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=R7K7ovi1vV4

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)

Sandakan No. 8 (サンダカン八番娼館 望郷, Kei Kumai, 1974)

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Sandakan 8 posterSome might argue that Japanese cinema has often been reluctant to examine the nation’s traumatic 20th century history with the proper rigour, but even if subtle and coming from unexpected angles there have been many and varied attempts to ask questions about the lingering consequences of feudalism. Sandakan No. 8 (サンダカン八番娼館 望郷, Sandakan Hachiban Shokan: Bokyo), inspired by a true life account of a woman unwittingly sold into sexual slavery as a child at the turn of the century, is not only a condemnation of socially approved people trafficking and its role in building the short-lived Japanese empire but a mild provocation of the contemporary society which refuses to engage with its traumatic past.

In the contemporary era, graduate student Keiko Mitani (Komaki Kurihara) is engaged in researching the “karayuki-san” – Japanese women who were sold into sexual slavery throughout Asia in the early 20th century. Almost forgotten, the karayuki-san are a taboo subject and even those still living in the areas from which women and girls were sent away are unwilling to speak of them. By chance, however, Keiko runs into an old woman in a cafe who speaks with a standard Tokyo accent and tells them that she spent most of her life “abroad”. Quickly realising she doesn’t mean she was a diplomat’s wife, Keiko wonders if the woman might be have been a karayuki-san and delays her return to Tokyo in order to find out.

There is something, it has to be said, ironically exploitative in Keiko’s determination to get the old woman, Osaki (Kinuyo Tanaka), to open up about a subject on which she so obviously does not want to be drawn. A visit to Osaki’s home reveals her to be living in a run-down hovel on the edge of town which is filled with stray cats whom Osaki feeds because “they’re all abandoned, but still they have to live”. Keiko gets herself brownie points by reacting politely to Osaki’s reduced living situation, eventually staying three weeks during which time she gradually teases out Osaki’s sad life story. Finally asking if there wasn’t anything Osaki might have liked to know about her, Keiko’s hypocrisy is fully brought home to her when Osaki admits that no one was more curious about Keiko than she was but that “people have reasons for not confiding in others” and if it’s something you need to ask about then it’s probably something that the other person may not want to share. In any case, Osaki seems to have known Keiko had an ulterior motive but does not regret sharing her story and has no worries about what Keiko might do with it as long as she makes sure to tell the truth.

The truth, in a sense, seems to be something the villagers feel themselves well acquainted with which is why Osaki lives in a shack on the edge of town. Tricked into sexual slavery as a child by an amoral people trafficker who lured her with promises of money to be made overseas, Osaki found herself in Borneo and a prisoner of “Sandakan No. 8” which was one of 10 numbered brothels on the island largely catering to Japanese travellers overseas, facilitating the expansion of the Japanese empire as accidental emissaries and ports of call. When Osaki was a child, Japan was a poor country and it was considered normal to sell one’s daughter in order to feed a family. Working overseas carried with it a kind of cache though no one, except perhaps her brother, seems to be fully aware of what Osaki is going to and she herself has not in any way chosen or consented to become a sex worker. When she eventually returns to Japan, she finds herself unwelcome in her brother’s house, which her money paid for, because of the shame associated with those who have “worked away”. Even 50 years later, she finds herself living alone, all but disowned by her only son, on the outskirts of her childhood village ostracised by the “respectable” townspeople who don’t for a second believe Osaki’s quick introduction of Keiko as her daughter-in-law.

The daughter-in-law deception is only one heartbreaking aspect of the complex relationship between the two women who are each, in a sense, hiding something from the other but end up forming a genuine connection anyway. Intensely lonely and having lived a life filled with suffering, Osaki is willing to pay for company with her story while Keiko is, not quite deliberately, using her loneliness against her in an attempt to earn her trust and get her to reveal her secrets. Nevertheless, Keiko is able to mine a rich and deep seem of 20th century trauma through the tragic story of just one woman which reaches out to hundreds like her some of whom rest in a graveyard in the forests of Borneo with their backs forever to Japan. The enemy is, once again, poverty more than it is patriarchy or even feudalism, a problem less of the essence in the rapidly improving post-war economy, but as Kumai is keen to point out, this system of state sanctioned people trafficking (finally outlawed only once Japan’s status on the world stage began to rise) had far wider implications than it might be thought which still echo into the present day and perhaps beyond if not for the efforts of women like Keiko who do not wish to forget.

Original trailer (no subtitles)