Tag: Koichi Sato

The Vancouver Asahi (バンクーバーの朝日, Yuya Ishii, 2014)

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Second generation Japanese-Canadians stake their hopes on baseball in Yuya Ishii’s historical drama The Vancouver Asahi (バンクーバーの朝日, Vancouver no Asahi), inspired by the story of the Vancouver Asahi baseball team which was belatedly granted a place in the Canadian Baseball Hall of Fame in 2003. In many ways a conventional sporting movie in which the underdogs eventually triumph, Ishii does not shy away from the dark shadows of the 1930s even while framing the Asahi’s path to glory as a symbolic punch back against discrimination and oppression. 

As the hero, Reggie (Satoshi Tsumabuki), relates, many like his parents came to Canada at the beginning of the 20th century planning to work for three years and then return to a more comfortable life in Japan only to find themselves trapped in low-paid and exploitative work. Reggie’s main concern is that his drunken and dejected father Seiji (Koichi Sato) still sends the majority of his pay back relatives in Japan meaning their family live like paupers while as he never meant to stay he hasn’t bothered to learn the language or attempt to integrate into the local community. In fact, Reggie is their major breadwinner with his job at the sawmill but the only thing that makes his life worth living is playing baseball with the Vancouver Asahi baseball team even though they are regarded as something of a joke, always at the bottom of the league tables and never actually winning a game. 

The plight of Asahi is closely aligned with that of the immigrant community, divided as it is in its approach to integration with some feeling they should abandon their Japaneseness in order to better get along with Canadians and others fiercely determined to hang on to their traditions. When Reggie admits that they can’t win against the power of the Canadians it feels as if he’s talking about more than just baseball though his solutions are perhaps apt for both in realising that to beat strength you need to be smart. What he comes up with is essentially a bunt and run strategy that plays to their advantages of speed and lightness but also at times feels to him like a trick or a gimmick, an admission that they can’t compete in the normal way. “Why are you always apologising?” Reggie is repeatedly asked, his shyness and mumbling speech always seeking to keep the peace while his desire to offer justification is less as one Japanese old lady puts it “a bad habit of their culture” but a defence mechanism in an environment of potentially violent oppression. 

As Japanese migrants the family faces constant xenophobic micro aggressions, a woman at the hotel refusing to let Reggie’s bellboy friend Frank (Sosuke Ikematsu) carry her bags while they are also suspected as thieves or harassed by the local Canadians. Reggie’s hothead friend Kei (Ryo Katsuji) finds it increasingly difficult to keep his cool, not least as it turns out because his father was killed fighting for the Canadians in the last war and yet he is still treated as a dangerous outsider. Meanwhile, they are paid only half the wages of the Canadian workers, expected to work unreasonable hours, and can be fired without warning. Now an ageing man, Seiji is still a casual labourer fighting for a place on a truck to work at a quarry or construction site often in other towns away from his family in order to get more money. The team is constantly losing players because men lose their jobs and focus on finding new ones or moving away. As one old man laments, there’s no job security and even if you go to a Canadian university it won’t make any difference to your job prospects. Reggie’s sister Emi (Mitsuki Takahata) was on track for a scholarship only to have it pulled at the last minute when parents of the other kids complained it wasn’t right it was going to a Japanese girl. 

After the hotel fires all of its Japanese staff, Frank decides to go “back” to Japan where relatives will help him find work but pointing out to Reggie that he’ll still be seen as an outsider even there and there’s no guarantee anything will be any better in Japan. Poignantly the guys later catch sight of him in a newsreel as a soldier having been sent to the Machurian front. Once war breaks out they are discriminated against again, forced out of their homes and interned leaving all their property behind and destroying their small community, the Asahi included. The team’s unexpected success had forged a bridge between the Japanese and Canadian communities but it was not strong enough to survive the war. Stepping away from the sports movie, Ishii concentrates more on the ways they were betrayed, the team’s success later buried and forgotten while they find the advances they’d made washed away on the shore as if to suggest their strike back against an oppressive society could never be more than superficial while their position remains so precarious. 

Trailer (no subtitles)

Sin and Evil (罪と悪, Yuki Saito, 2024)

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A man not quite a yakuza and perhaps even what might be termed an ethical gangster tells one of his underlings that it isn’t a sin unless you believe it it is, which might in a sense be true in same way as Socrates says that no one does wrong willingly. Yet the heroes of Sin and Evil (罪と悪, Tsumi to Aku), Yuki Saito’s small-town crime drama, are marked by their guilt while trying to come to terms with traumatic events of 20 years earlier and their mutual decision to cover them up.

Echoing similarly themed films such as Stand By Me, Saito opens with idyllic scenes of the boys riding their bikes with the only hint of darkness offered by a disturbing conversation about an elderly man who is rumoured to be abusing children. However, it seems that Haru is living in a difficult domestic situation following the death of his sister with an abusive father and apparently neglectful mother. His best friend, Akira, is the son of a local policeman while the boys are also friends with a pair of twins, Saku and Naoya, whose family operate a tomato farm. Rounding up the group is Masaki who also seems to be living in difficult circumstances though his backstory is never fully fleshed out as he’s eventually found dead in a local river. Saku jumps to the conclusion that the old man must have abused Masaki, who was known to be friendly with him, and then killed him to keep him quiet. He drags Haru and Akira to the old man’s shack where he attacks and eventually kills him with a shovel. Haru decides to take the blame and torches the place, telling the other two boys to flee the scene.

20 years later, it’s clear that each of them are still marked by what happened that day though Haru (Kengo Kora) appears to have built a good life for himself after serving time in juvenile detention even if the construction company he runs is friendly with local yakuza and gets its contracts through small-town corruption. He also operates a cafe where he employs delinquent boys while secretly using them as thieves but also in a more genuine sense looking after them and concerned for their welfare. His machinations are seen to be key in keeping order, working in tandem with police Inspector Sato (Kippei Shiina) who explains to a more idealistic Akira (Shunsuke Daito) how things are done around here which is essentially keeping ordinary people safe by managing crime rather than punishing or preventing it. The balance is only disrupted by some of Haru’s boys who stupidly steal far too much money from the local yakuza. Haru attempts to protect the young man concerned, but his body soon ends up in the river in exactly the same place as Masaki raising a series of questions about the nature of the earlier crime. 

What the film is trying to do is paint the world in shades of grey while looking for the parts where it’s darkest. It seems it’s not in doubt that the old man abused local children, though Haru and Akira now doubt he killed Masaki raising further questions about their killing of him. As the yakuza underling had said, it’s not a sin unless you think it is and Haru feels that he deserved to die for what he did to other kids so doesn’t feel any remorse for his actions even if he didn’t kill Masaki. But for Akira, the trauma lingers in other ways and he’s disturbed on learning his father may have been involved in covering up their crime and at least complicit in police corruption essentially teaching Sato how things are done in small-town policing. The conclusion Haru comes to is that they are all victims of the town itself, unable to break free of its provincial mores and petty prejudices.

Those would largely be a lingering homophobia and deep shame stemming from suffering sexual abuse as a child. As usual with these kinds of mysteries, the solution lies in the desire to prevent the truth being exposed though in this case the resolution is not entirely convincing when using one killing to cover up another couldn’t help but expose the truth anyway even when attempting to pin it on someone else who can no longer defend themselves. It also sidesteps the themes of small-town corruption and the dark heart of suburbia even as Haru points out that someone should have stepped in to support both himself and Masaki when they could see their families were struggling rather than just closing their curtains and pretending not to notice. The disruption of the friendship, which ought to be the heart of the drama, therefore lacks poignancy muddied by the various overlapping plot lines from the present day yakuza drama to the lost paradise that Haru longs to reclaim despite the otherwise apparently happy life he seems to be living now. Sin, the film seems to say, is in the eye of the beholder along with justice and retribution, and evil maybe just the same or merely invisible to those who choose not to see it.

Sin and Evil screened as part of this year’s Camera Japan.


International trailer (English subtitles)

The Box Man (箱男, Gakuryu Ishii, 2024)

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Those who obsess over the Box Man, become the Box Man, in Gakuryu Ishii’s adaptation of the Kobo Abe novel. Yet the unnamed hero’s problem is that he feels himself unable to become “the real thing” and is thereafter trapped inside a labyrinth while forever seeking an exit. It’s never clear to him, or to us, if the cardboard box he wears is really just that or something imbued with a supernatural power that actively masks his identity even from himself.

Tellingly, the only named character is a woman, Yoko (Ayana Shiramoto), who seems to exist outside of the box. She appears to be free, confident, aware of all she is and apparently certain of her identity. The Box Man, or perhaps “a” Box Man, meanwhile, is known only as “myself,” a former photographer (Masatoshi Nagase) who almost pities those who target him in memory of the Box Man who once infected and cursed him to the same fate. Watching the city through the tiny letterbox slit, he remains a step away from our world and later refers to the box as the entrance to some other place suggesting that it’s really we who are trapped on the other side of the cardboard.

He advances something similar when he in effect turns the box inside out, walling himself inside a single room by covering the windows and doors to box out the world but not really finding escape. Still, others seem to covet the title of Box Man, those also without concrete identities but going by names such as Fake Doctor (Tadanobu Asano) and the General (Koichi Sato), both of whom are apparently interested in the Box Man and tracking his every move. It seems they believe there can only be one real, authentic Box Man allowed, but become increasingly uncertain which of them is “real”. The notes the Box Man is keeping become key to his identity, but like a metaphor for the unseen hand of fate, one points out that perhaps someone else has written them out for them, Myself lamenting that the author has written a better version of himself than he ever could. 

There is something undeniably absurd about the way the Box Men scuttle around, occasionally sticking their ams out of the box’ flaps while arguing over the true identify of the Box Man despite having described the mystery as boring. The Fake Doctor seems to want to destroy the box, as if he wanted to obliterate it perhaps in an attempt to destroy the image of a mask to avoid the suggestion that he has one himself, while it remains unclear if this would free the other Box Man or trap him further while Fake Doctor would take his place. When Myself killed the Box Man before him, a mask may have been what he wanted. A photographer sick of seeing the world and longing to be free of it, to shed himself of an identity he no longer wanted only to search for it once again even as others try to crush it from without. 

The Box Man comes to the conclusion that it’s the world that should be boxed away, but of course it’s all the same. When he remarks that Yoko, after leaving their sanctuary, did not really escape but has simply gone to a deeper level, it’s reflective if his own desire to find meaning in a meaningless world. He claims that he dreams of a world yet to begin but is finally confronted perhaps by anonymity in witnessing a row full of Box Men apparently all also devoid of personality which might in an ironic sense tell him who is if only in reflection. 

Strange and surreal, Ishii lends an edge of absurdity to the strange existence of the Box Man while perhaps aligning the letterbox frame of his open window to that of the cinema screen and the artificial reality that surrounds us. In any case, it seems the other world the Box Man longed to enter was that of the self, his interior life expanding inside the box as a small galaxy he has somehow become lost inside, no longer able to see beyond himself but trapped inside an “exitless black hole” looking for a path to authenticity away from this “fantasy” in which everything is “fake” save the potential salvation of a distant guiding light.

The Box Man screens in New York July 13 as part of this year’s JAPAN CUTS.

Original trailer (English subtitles)

Tokarev (トカレフ, Junji Sakamoto, 1994)

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The discovery of a pistol concealed under a vending machine provokes a prolonged crisis of power and masculinity in Junji Sakamoto’s tense psychological drama, Tokarev (トカレフ). So named for the guns at its centre, the film roots itself in post-Bubble anxiety in the push and pull between two very different men mediated through the kidnapping of an innocent child who in the end pays a very heavy price for the anxieties and resentments that drive his parents’ generation.

That said, the kidnappers are actually very nice to little Takashi who looks strangely happy in the videotaped ransom note as the friendly voice of a youngish man encourages him to look towards the camera. They take him to an amusement park, buy him new shoes and ice cream, and even let him wave the gun around during the money drop but are it seems otherwise callously indifferent to his fate.

The boy’s father, Nishiumi (Takeshi Yamato), has just moved onto a danchi housing estate with his wife Ayako (Yumi Nishiyama). They seem very excited to start their new life, yet the danchi itself speaks of a post-war aspiration which now seems dated and largely absent in the contemporary society. Nishiumi drives the bus to the local kindergarten picking up the surprisingly large number of children from their block each morning. Meanwhile, their neighbour, Matsumura (Koichi Sato) seems irritated by their presence perhaps jealous of their happy family life as he returns home alone and angrily flips the cover over his motorbike before opening the door. 

On the morning in question, Matsumura has trouble kickstarting his bike yet Ayako seems strangely drawn to him perhaps attracted by a different and older kind of masculinity. Unlike her husband, Matsumura wears a suit to work everyday and carries a little salaryman-style purse yet he works a job that could be considered manual in a printing press where they produce newspapers. He later excitedly tells Ayako that he gets to read the news before anyone else, though his hands glide over notices of violent crimes including a shooting which may seem additionally exciting to him given that he is the man who discovered a gun under a vending machine in Christmas-set opening sequence. His cluttered home otherwise at odds with the sense of order he projects is full of old newspapers while he seems to listen to the same weather broadcast every day. 

The gun is later used by another man who fires it at Nishiumi before abducting Takashi from the kindergarten bus. It takes Nishiumi a few seconds to realise it’s Takashi who’s been taken, suddenly taking off at speed after him endangering the lives of the other kids. The sense of guilt and inadequacy slowly consumes him. “Takashi must be so disappointed,” he later laments to Ayako over the phone in his failure to live up to the socially defined codes of masculinity. His son was taken from him in front of his eyes yet he couldn’t do anything to save him. Matsumura meanwhile turns up near the crime scene having been shot in the shoulder claiming the kidnapper stole his bike. 

Perhaps it’s this uncanny proximity along with his odd expression and obvious effect on Ayako that leads Nishiumi to believe that Matsumura was somehow involved in the crime. In another instance of mid-90s technophobia, the clue is once again discovered via videotape as a guiltridden Nishiumi spots Matsumura in the crowd at his son’s sports day which is odd considering he has no children of his own and no reason to be there. The kidnapper also films the random drop on camcorder, black and white images capturing a crowded Shibuya presumably as some kind of insurance plan.

After being attacked and seriously injured, Nishiumi ends up in hospital where he ironically discovers a gun of his own stashed in the restroom by a visiting yakuza. As it had Matsumura, the gun gives him a new sense of power but also drives him into a frenzied obsession, dressing like a yakuza himself in a suit and dark glasses having alienated Ayako who eventually leaves him for Matsumura who has by this point usurped him as a man and patriarch, taking everything he ever had. No longer wishing to live, he embarks on a suicide mission to get his revenge on Matsumura. The pair of them essentially trade places, Matsumura now in check shirt and jeans while Nishiumi approaches in a suit each of them corrupted by the illusionary power of the gun. 

It later transpires that the kidnapper was also facing a crisis of masculinity in that his business was about to go bust, though Nishiumi was not a wealthy man or particularly good candidate for a ransom. The police, who are in fact completely useless, bungling their only opportunity to retrieve Takashi because they were caught off guard by the kidnapper giving him the gun, keep asking him if there’s anyone who might have held a grudge but as he points out there must have been thousands of incidents of petty annoyance that may have pushed someone over the edge dating all the way back to his childhood. The battle he finds himself in is one of vengeance to reclaim his wounded sense of masculinity while Matsumura in turn is determined to defend the new life he’s bought for himself or perhaps stolen from Nishiumi as a happy family man. Sakamoto keeps the tension high through the near wordless closing sequence in which the two men square off against each other with the intention of meeting their endgame each victims of the pervading sense of futility of the post-Bubble era.

Wait and See (あ、春, Shinji Somai, 1998)

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In the opening sequence of Shinji Somai’s Wait and See (あ、春,  Ah haru), a large grey cat growls as it creeps through a suburban home and out into the garden where it sits outside a henhouse and loudly miaows at the birds trapped inside. In many ways, this is exactly what’s about to happen to the Nirasakis when a prodigal father suddenly returns to disrupt the life of his incredibly dull and emotionally distant son. 

Hiroshi (Koichi Sato) is the epitome of the ideal salaryman and seems to be living a charmed life having married into his wife’s wealthy family but under the surface nothing is quite as it seems to be. His wife Mizuho (Yuki Saito) seems to be suffering with some kind of mental distress and Hiroshi often appears indifferent or even cold towards to her. At the memorial service for his late father-in-law, Mizuho’s mother (Shiho Fujimura) and aunt (Chisako Hara) reflect on the late patriarch in less than favourable terms remarking that “everything was half measures” with him. He didn’t commit himself fully to either his family or his career and consequently achieved success with neither. 

The implication is that Hiroshi is much the same, simply going through the motions whether at work or at home and largely closed off to his wife at one point even drawing a curtain and leaving her in the dark to escape a conversation. “He never tells you anything” Mizuho’s mother points out after reading in the paper that the company where Hiroshi works may be in financial trouble, while Mizuho too complains that he never discusses anything with her only announcing the results when it’s already finished. 

Hiroshi had always believed his own father to have died when he was five years old, so it’s quite a surprise when the gnomish Sasaichi (Tsutomu Yamazaki) accosts him in the street and claims to be his long lost dad. Like the cat outside the henhouse, he’s set to create a disturbance but not quite the one everyone assumes it will be. Hiroshi’s mother Kimiyo (Sumiko Fuji) warns him that his crass working class dad will only cause embarrassment in the refined elegance of the upper-middle-class family he has married into. Yet Mizuho and her mother actually find Sasaichi quite amusing for the first couple of days, the mother very impressed by Sasaichi’s unreconstructed manliness which she finds so in contrast to the comparatively meek Hiroshi. Sasaichi fixes the leaky bath and sticking door that Hiroshi never got round to symbolising his lack of regard and inability to care for his home, which is in a sense ironic because Sasaichi was never really able to take care of anything. 

Sasaichi later explains that he left because his business failed and he ended up with debts to loansharks so he divorced Kimiyo and moved away to prevent them coming after her money. A fatherless son, Hiroshi struggles to construct the image of himself as a father and cannot create intimate relationships with people, but has settled for fulfilling the role of a successful member of society who can support a family financially even though the sense of himself as a provider is an illusion as his wife’s generational wealth already guarantees them a comfortable existence. Even so, this being the difficult post-bubble economy Hiroshi lives with a sense of economic anxiety but buries his head in the sand refusing to listen to a more savvy friend who can see the writing on the wall and tries to convince him to take a job at another company where he’s just secured a position for himself. But Hiroshi is afraid of change and ironically clings fast to his corporate family even while fearing it will leave him. 

He desperately doesn’t want to think that he is like Sasaichi, that he may fail his family by failing in his career or that he too is an uncouth, unrefined country bumpkin incapable of taking care of himself let alone anyone else. The again perhaps they’re more alike that he’d like to think. Hiroshi and Mizuho object when they realise Sasaichi’s been teaching their son Mitsuru (Keita Okada) how to play craps, but as his friend points out stockbroking is also really just legitimised high stakes gambling. He too wanders around until late at night because he doesn’t want to go home and makes his wife worry so she has to take sleeping pills .

Yet there’s also a side of him that is still the gentle boy from the country as he painstakingly raises chicks in the back garden. In the end, it’s Sasaichi who shows them the maternal warmth they need to grow, gestating the eggs in a pouch inside his haramaki only for them to hatch at the most ironic moment. Hiroshi gives his son a brief life lesson in explaining that the chicks that hatch from these eggs will go on to lay their own in a circular process of renewal just as he is passing on knowledge from his childhood to the next generation. The film begins and ends with a ritual of mourning, though Somai takes us through the passing season moving from Setsubun to Hinamatsuri as Sasaichi continues to outstay his welcome while attempting to repair his corrupted paternity. “Don’t worry, life will go on,” Mizuho reassures a more open Hiroshi finally coming to terms with his anxieties and willing to share them with his family in full knowledge of who he is as a man and a father in a world that’s anything but certain.

Original trailer (no subtitles)

Heaven’s Story (ヘヴンズ ストーリー, Takahisa Zeze, 2010)

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“When your family’s murdered, aren’t you entitled to happiness?” remarks a bereaved husband trying to move on from tragedy to a similarly bereaved little girl who is determined not to. “I don’t think so”, she coldly replies, dragging him back into a dark world of hate and vengeance. At that time perhaps best known for his career in pink film, Takahisa Zeze’s 4.5-hour epic Heaven’s Story (ヘヴンズ ストーリー) weaves a tale of interconnected hurts born of violence and its legacy, parental betrayals, and irreconcilable loss. The only victory is survival, but it’s a prize none of us will win. The best we can hope for is continuity, and perhaps leaving something more behind us than fear or rage. 

Our heroine, Sato (Moeki Tsuruoka), is orphaned when her parents and older sister are brutally murdered by a disgruntled employee exacting some kind of petty revenge on her father. The killer is later found dead in a hotel room, presumed to have taken his own life. The tragedy is however just one of many. Passing by a TV screen, Sato catches a report detailing the death of her family members and their murderer which is immediately followed by a press conference with a very angry young man whose wife and infant daughter were killed in random attack by a passing drifter who has been given an indeterminate sentence on account of the fact that he was underage and suffered greatly during his childhood. Tomoki (Tomoharu Hasegawa), the bereaved husband and father, vows revenge angrily insisting he won’t ask for the death penalty because he wants the killer, Mitsuo Aikawa (Shugo Oshinari), released as soon as possible so he can kill him with his own hands. Only eight years old, Sato identifies with his rage. The man she wants to kill is already dead and she’s been robbed of the chance of closure through vengeance so vicariously latches on to Tomoki’s quest for retribution, making him something of a personal hero. 

Tomoki’s words were offered in the raw pain of his loss. His reaction is understandable, but as he later says, people started to lose sympathy for him once he called for the killer’s death. As time moves on, he perhaps starts heal, marrying again and having another little girl, starting a new life in a new place which of course does not overwrite his past loss but is a new start. That’s something Sato can’t allow or understand. She feels irrationally betrayed by Tomoki’s decision to leave his loss in the past and move on to a new life. Rocking up at his tranquil island home, she accuses him of forgetting the dead, guilting him into thinking he’s betrayed the memories of his wife and child by not knowing that Mitsuo has been released from prison let alone not having taken his revenge. 

Mitsuo, however, has also attempted to move on. It can’t be denied that he committed a heinous, unforgivable crime, but he is also, in a sense, a victim himself. His mother took her own life when he was 13 because his father was abusive and he carries that abuse with him, which of course does not excuse his crime but might help to explain it. Kyoko (’70s folk singer Hako Yamasaki), a lonely doll maker, is taken by his enigmatic statement that he wants to be remembered by the unborn and begins writing to him in prison, eventually agreeing to adopt him as her son though she is already suffering with the early stages Alzheimer’s. Later in a tense conversation with Tomoki, Mitsuo describes Kyoko as a woman of great warmth and if it were not for her he might perhaps have killed again. Her positive maternal presence gives Mitsuo the sense of anchoring through parental love that he had never had, restoring him towards a more normal kind of existence as he diligently cares for her while her condition continues to deteriorate. 

Time swindles them all. Kyoko desperately tries to remember something she’s forgotten, while Sato is locked into a pleasant childhood memory of walking with her parents to see a newly completed housing estate which seems to be the very embodiment of a post-war utopia, a large green space surrounded by neatly arranged, identical blocks with well appointed family homes piled one on top of the other. The conclusion takes us somewhere similar, only inverted, in the empty shell of a disused danchi, once a home to a bustling mining community now abandoned by the modern era. In the monologue which opens the film, Sato recounts a folktale about a monster who lived in the hills and attacked people, but did so only accidentally in his loneliness and longing to be a part of the world around him, but the people were afraid and so they rejected him and his monstrousness intensified. Tomoki destroys his second family in an internecine need to avenge the first driven by Sato’s demonic need for vicarious retribution, while Mitsuo’s attempt to move into the light is frustrated by an inability to escape his past. All the fear, and hate, and suffering, breeds only more of the same. “Heaven’s Story” may be in many ways the story of violence, but violence is not its resolution. Sato makes a kind of peace with the past, but will also carry that legacy of pain back into the complicated urban world as far from the heavenly vistas of tranquility which exist now only in her memory as it’s possible to be. 

Original trailer (no subtitles)

Okiku and the World (せかいのおきく, Junji Sakamoto, 2023)

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“Where does Edo’s poop go?” it’s a question a child might ask but the rest of us somehow gloss over. In the modern world, if we were suddenly confronted with a lot of problematic poop, we’d have to pay someone to come and take it away and that person might then get paid twice for selling it on. In old Edo, however, manure merchants had to buy their raw materials (well, aside from those they could produce themselves) in the hope of selling them on to peasant farmers desperate for fertiliser. Junji Sakamoto’s Okiku and the World (せかいのおきく, Sekai no Okiku) takes a wry look at this circular economy in the dying days of the feudal era and in the end asks us if a samurai’s shit is really any better than anyone else’s.

In a sense it might be, given that historically samurai are better fed but even they are beginning to feel the pinch these days. Sakamoto opens in 1858 which is the year the Treaty of Amity and Commerce between Japan and the United States was signed opening the door to trade with other nations after two centuries of isolation. It is also 10 years before the Meiji Restoration and the eventual abolition of the samurai. Okiku (Haru Kuroki) is just one woman struggling with this moment of social change. Her samurai father Genbei (Koichi Sato) has been kicked out of his clan for challenging corrupt authority, so now she supports him teaching calligraphy at a local temple while the pair live in a rundown tenement in a forgotten corner of the city. 

Fittingly enough, Okiku’s name and the film’s title with it is written in hiragana, but the character usually used to write it is that for chrysanthemum which is also of course a stand in for Japan itself. Genbei muses on what the world is, defining it as an expanse of skies and lamenting that those who have only just realised that the world is vast are ironically unable to look past their small corner of it amid the chaos of the bakumatsu era and what he describes as continual “unrest”. But then politics have little relevance to those living in this particular corner of the world or for those who quite literally shovel the shit day in day out just to be able to shit themselves. 

Chuji (Kanichiro) and Yusuke (Sosuke Ikematsu) are manure men who purchase excrement from local communities and fine samurai houses to sell on to provincial farmers, transporting it by boat to a silo out in the country they occasionally bulk out with mud seeing as they’re paid by weight. Yusuke rails against his subjugation, revealing that at one particularly low point he was asked to wipe a samurai’s bum while otherwise constantly humiliated by their doorman who really does seem to think his shit’s better than anyone else’s. But as Yusuke points out, samurai or common man everyone eats and shits even if he describes himself as a literal bottom feeder who is nevertheless essential to the Edo-era economy. Without men like him, the samurai wouldn’t eat either because they’d have no crops to buy. Chuji may berate him for being all mouth and no trousers, but times are changing. Even he later mounts resistance by flinging his produce at a now powerless samurai. 

Okiku meanwhile has been rendered mute, her voice silenced by the cruelties of the feudal order leaving her struggling to rediscover her place. She has fallen in love with Chuji, but they think they come from worlds even as they witness them merging and realise there is only one vast expanse under an unending sky. In a decade’s time, it won’t mean anything that Okiku is a samurai’s daughter and Chuji an illiterate peasant but for the moment every step towards each other is transgressive and requires courage in breaking an unthinkable taboo. Sakamoto homes in on the muddiness of this “hopeless shitty world”, the unending drudgery and nihilistic futility of feudalistic life but finally offers his shit-shovelling heroes a new sense of possibility amid the ever expanding vistas of a new society. Presented as a series of black and white vignettes each except the last ending in a moment of vibrant colour, the film finally discovers a sense of serenity as Okiku prepares to reenter the world having finally come to understand her place within it.

Okiku and the World screened as part of this year’s Nippon Connection.

International trailer (English subtitles)

Kill! (斬る, Kihachi Okamoto, 1968)

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“Samurai aren’t as great as you might think” according to a jaded retainer in Kihachi Okamoto’s Kill! (斬る, Kiru) but it’s a message that the ambitious farmer at the film’s centre struggles to take in. Having been a victim of samurai violence he resolves to become a samurai while a former samurai turned yakuza drifter attempts to show him the hypocritical realities of the samurai life as they find themselves swept into local intrigue when a band of young revolutionaries arrive to cut down a corrupt and oppressive lord. 

Corrupt and oppressive is perhaps the defining image of the samurai in post-war cinema, but like the film’s title that cuts both ways. Farmer Tabata (Etsushi Takahashi) sold his lands to buy a sword after witnessing peasants cut down during an uprising but he’s decided the best way out of oppression is to become an oppressor and is dead set on achieving samurai glory through the time-honoured method of distinguishing himself in battle. That may prove a little difficult given that his new boss, Ayuzawa (Shigeru Koyama), immediately mocks him for swinging his sword as if it were a scythe. Then again as former samurai Genta (Tatsuya Nakadai) explains to him, if you don’t know what you’re doing you can always just stab people which at the end of the day does rather undermine the idea of samurai elegance in the art of killing. 

Genta keeps trying to tell Tabata that “samurai are no good” but Tabata still wants to be one anyway even after learning that Ayuzawa means to double cross them, hiring ronin to take out the young samurai whose sense of honour he manipulated to eliminate the admittedly corrupt (but aren’t they all?) lord for his own political gain while planning to send in his retainers to finish off the job to ensure there are no witnesses. Genta gave up his samurai status because he was “disgusted” by just this sort of duplicity along with the meaningless codes of loyalty that govern samurai society and caused him to betray a friend who was acting only in the interests of justice. Leader of the ronin Jurota (Shin Kishida) did something similar though in his case for love when his fiancée’s father was condemned on false charges and she and her mother exiled. He wants not land or status but only money in order to redeem the woman he loves from a geisha house and like Genta is under no illusions about the nature of samurai life having figured out most of what’s going on but hoping to emerge with the means to liberate both himself and his wife from samurai oppression. 

Even the elderly chamberlain later rescued by Genta tries to warn Tabata that the samurai life isn’t all it’s cracked up to be, hinting at the ways they are also oppressed by their own code while clearly gleeful to have had the opportunity of stepping into a teahouse for the first time responding to Genta’s request to stay put that if he could he’d like to stay put for the rest of his days. Both former samurai, neither Genta nor Jurota are minded to draw their swords knowing that whatever the outcome it would be unhappy while the young who thought it was their duty to change the world by removing one who brought shame on their names are faced with the realisation that they have been used and their resistance will count for nothing. Even their bond as brothers banding together to achieve a common goal is eventually disrupted by alcohol and petty jealousy.

Genta acts as a kind of chorus, touched by the naivety of the seven samurai holed up in a mountain lodge because they believed in justice, while knowing that the society itself is innately unjust and already beyond redemption. Tabata eventually comes to a similar conclusion having gained samurai status but found it quite literally uncomfortable deciding to shake off his newfound nobility and rejoin Genta as a cynical yet pure hearted wanderer because the only way to escape samurai oppression is to actively live outside it. The final irony is that it’s the elderly chamberlain who eventually sets him, and all they women trapped in indentured servitude at the geisha house, free using samurai gold to enable them to escape a system he himself cannot escape but does not exactly support while Genta enlists the help of local peasants to hold a festival of rebellion to cover the final assault. Marked by Okamoto’s characteristically absurd humour and cartoonish composition along with the eerily gothic emptiness of the deserted ghost town where not even yakuza can survive the film takes on a quasi-spiritual dimension in which Genta and the gang eventually walk out of hell if only into a purgatorial freedom. 

Kill! screens at Japan Society New York on Sept. 2 as part of the Monthly Classics series.

Original trailer (no subtitles)

The Floating Castle (のぼうの城, Isshin Inudo & Shinji Higuchi, 2012)

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What happens if you call the bluff of those who thought they could take your complicity for granted? As it turns out, at least in the case of a small provincial outpost in Isshin Inudo & Shinji Higuchi’s lighthearted historical drama The Floating Castle (のぼうの城, Nobo no Shiro), something and nothing. Inspired by a real life incident which took place in 1590, 10 years prior to the era defining battle of Sekigahara, the film asks how far standing up to corrupt authority will get you but as history tells us this this is the twilight of the Sengoku warring states period and in the end any victory can at best be only partial and temporary. 

With Hideyoshi Toyotomi (Masachika Ichimura) poised to unify all of Japan under his rule he turns his gaze towards Hojo, the last remaining hold out in the East of Japan. The small castle of Oshi is asked to commit its forces to protecting the main castle at Odawara where lord Ujinaga (Masahiko Nishimura) is to meet with the head of the clan which has decided to resist the Toyotomi invasion. Ujinaga meanwhile is privately doubtful. He knows they do not have the manpower to protect themselves and the only viable course of action is immediate surrender though he cannot of course say this openly even if buffoonish lord in waiting Nagachika (Mansai Nomura) is brave enough to raise the idea of neutrality in front of the messengers. Preparing to head to Odawara, Ujinaga tells his closest retainers to strengthen defences but to open the castle should the enemy approach while revealing that he plans to write to Hideyoshi, whom he apparently knows personally, and privately pledge allegiance in order to avoid destruction. 

Nagachika, however, eventually makes the decision to resist following the arrogant entreaty from Natsuka (Takehiro Hira), the right-hand man of the Toyotomi retainer leading the assault, Mitsunari Ishida (Yusuke Kamiji). He does this largely because Natsuka makes the unreasonable demand that they surrender their princess, Kai (Nana Eikura), herself a fearsome warrior though somewhat sidelined here relegated to the role of contested love interest, to be sent to Hideyoshi as a concubine but also correctly reads that Natsuka and Ishida are overreaching and actually have little more than their bluster to leverage other than the 20,000 men standing behind them which they may not know how to use. Nagachika may play the clown, but he’s not stupid and knows that the 20,000 men are there for the purposes of intimidation and are not expecting a force of a mere 500 to tell them where to go so it stands to reason to think they are not entirely prepared for battle. 

In this he’s mostly correct. Hideyoshi has essentially given Ishida, previously in finance, an easy ride to improve his reputation among the other lords instructing the more experienced Yoshitsugu Otani (Takayuki Yamada) to ensure he comes back painted in glory. Otani had said that others admired Ishida for his “childlike sense of fair play”, but his sense of fair play is often childish as in his gradual realisation that everyone is surrendering to him because of the 20,000 men rather than his prowess as a general annoyed with his enemies for backing down from a challenge which is why he sends Natsuka to alienate Nagachika hoping to provoke a battle which no rational person could ever describe as “fair”. Having assumed that Nagachika would back down or that the castle would be easy to take with only 500 country bumpkin soldiers defending it, the Toyotomi are in for a rude awakening discovering the extent of the counterstrategies in place to protect the small provincial outpost, forced into a humiliating defeat licking their wounds from a nearby hill. 

But then, as Ishida manically proclaims power comes from one thing, gold, using his vast resources to dam two nearby rivers and then burst them to drown the town as Hideyoshi had done once before. Designed by effects specialist Higuchi the flooding of the town is indeed terrifying, a spectacle which delayed the film’s release as the eerie similarities with the catastrophic tsunami of the year before may have been too traumatic for audiences, and speaks to nothing if not Ishida’s intense cruelty in which he is willing to go to any lengths in order to win even destroying the lives of innocent farmers far removed from these petty samurai games. As the film would have it, his arrogance and entitlement eventually come for him, his trap turned back on himself after an ill-advised potshot at Nagachika, a natural leader beloved by all because rather than in spite of his deceptive clownishness, causes disillusionment with his leadership. 

In any case, we already know how this story ends, Ishida is defeated at Sekigahara and beheaded in Kyoto. Nagachika’s victory can be only partial and in fact does not even win him the thing he went into battle for even if he strikes a blow at corrupt government in refusing to simply give in to intimidation, calling their bluff and showing them they cannot continue to push smaller clans around solely with the threat of extinction. In the end they are all at the mercy of their superiors, a truce imposed and imperfect to each side in an act of compromise which spells the end of an era many of those surviving the battles voluntarily renouncing samurai status as if realising their age is drawing to a close, Nagachika proved on the right of history in cultivating links with the Tokugawa soon to take the Toyotomi’s place as rulers of a unified Japan. His resistance was then not foolhardy but justified, necessary, and principled in standing up to injustice even if it could not in the end be fully stopped. 

The Floating Castle streamed as part of Japanese Film Festival Online 2022.

International trailer (English subtitles)

Pickles and Komian Club (丸八やたら漬け, Koichi Sato, 2021)

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For years the Komian Club had been a familial haunt for visitors to the Yamagata International Documentary Film Festival becoming almost an artificial hub where filmmakers and spectators could meet on equal terms. However, the 135-year-old family-run pickle store was left with little choice other than to close given the decline in demand for pickles among younger consumers and the additional strains placed on their business by the conoravirus pandemic. 

Pickles and Komian Club (丸八やたら漬け, Maruhachi yatarazuke Komian) is as much about the film festival and the wider Yamagata community as it about the building at its centre. The loss of the store leaves many feeling quite literally displaced, not only lacking a new place to gather and mourning the atmosphere of the traditional building, but reflecting on the absence of these kinds of structures in the urban environment which places value only in the land on which new structures more profitable to the modern economy may be built. We’re told that the pickle store had been approved as an intangible cultural asset because of its luxurious interior, but this does not apparently provide much protection under Japanese property laws. The store’s owner Yoshinori mentions the possibilities of someone buying his storehouse and moving it to a new location preserving all of its period features but is eventually forced to sell to developers who plan to knock it down to build build yet another generic apartment block. 

As he explains, in Japan property depreciates over time and the value that it has is essentially sentimental rather than financial. Few people are interested in preserving these traditional buildings along with their classical architectural styles because there is no real financial incentive to do so. The best that can be done is to salvage what one can that could be re-used or incorporated in another structure such as the heavy wooden beams and ornate friezes. Yoshinori sells one of his giant wooden pickling vats to an old friend who runs a traditional Japanese inn which is then repurposed as a bath. His friend worries what the decline of traditional culture might mean for his business, inns largely being the repository of the traditional in the modern society. But the repurposing of the vat which in essence turns something used for industry into something used for leisure is an example of one way to bring something of the past into the present finding new uses for old technology. 

While the pickle store could not be saved, other owners of similar properties have been able to breathe new life into old spaces, turning a small outside guesthouse into a cinema which the local community can enjoy or renting out part of the premises for local events taking full advantage of the calming atmosphere such traditional buildings can offer. Though as an architecture student later makes plain what’s needed is further action at the legislative level to ensure that older buildings are better protected and less likely to be torn down because of an economic imperative that has no interest in tangible history. Seeing the buildings stripped of their assets then roughly broken apart is a heartrending sight as is the giant empty space they leave behind robbing the area of its unique atmosphere in favour of the generically urban. 

One interviewee makes the point that in choosing to focus on documentary film the festival in a sense made an investment in its future by choosing the unique over the flashy, building a friendly atmosphere of openness and equality rather than the red carpets and VIP areas which can often define some other events. In a sense it’s this loss of traditional spaces which damages the fabric of the community in further distancing one person from another while robbing it of the architectural history that gives it its sense of place.  Even so the presence of the festival providing a place in which filmmakers and film lovers from all over the world can gather is a potent symbol of alternative community bolstering the local, while the young are also busying themselves finding new ways to incorporate the traditional into their modern lives or breathing life back into that which had been thought old-fashioned but might now be reappreciated for its quality of serenity in an ever changing society.

Pickles and Komian Club Storytellers streams worldwide (excl. Japan) via DAFilms until Feb. 6 as part of Made in Japan, Yamagata 1989 – 2021 (films stream free until Jan. 24)

Trailer (no subtitles)