Tag: Kon Ichikawa

Goodbye, Hello (あなたと私の合言葉 さようなら、今日は, Kon Ichikawa, 1959)

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A pair of young women reassess their views on marriage when one breaks off a long-term engagement and the other unexpectedly falls for her spurned fiancé in Kon Ichikawa’s witty comedy, Goodbye, Hello (あなたと私の合言葉 さようなら、今日は, Anata to Watashi no Aikotoba: Sayonara, Konnichiwa). Exploring a change of social mores in the late 1950s as the economy improved and it became easier for women to lead more independent lives, the film ends with a sense of liberation as the heroine’s desire to reject marriage in favour of self-fulfilment is validated by her departure for America to study abroad at her company’s expense.

On the other hand, it’s a lack of direct communication that causes most of the issues as everyone seems to want someone else to explain their feelings to a third person rather than frankly stating their desires. Kazuko (Ayako Wakao), a woman with an engineering degree working for Nissan Motors, is subject to an arranged marriage set up by her father and his friend that she will marry his son, Hanjiro, who has since moved to Osaka. She wants to break it off, she says because her father can’t look after himself, and asks her old university friend Umeko (Machiko Kyo), who also lives in Osaka, to explain it to him plainly because she is someone who is good at that sort of thing.

Umeko shares Kazuko’s rather low opinion of marriage. She thinks that all men are idiots and marriage is only for dim women who can’t by on their own. For some reason, however, she is quite smitten with Hanjiro and immediately changes her mind. However, her adoptive brother who was brought in to inherit her family’s sushi business, has always assumed she’d eventually marry him, which is why she’s consistently turned down even promising proposals from various suitors despite growing close to aging out of the marriage market. Meanwhile, Kazuko’s air stewardess Michiko has a crush on their over helpful neighbour, Tecchan, though he is actually interested in Kazuko and just assumes she will also be interested in him if he can finally find a steady job after graduating from university.

The men are both more conservative and more romantic. They make a lot of assumptions about women’s feelings and intentions, the chief among being that will ultimately want to become wives and mothers, but they also reject arranged marriages and say they want to marry for love. Of course, they may also be a way of resisting commitment and rebelling against their parents’ control, but they also seem to be interested in romantic fulfilment in a way that is unimportant to some of the women. At its most cynical, the film seems to say that in the end, anyone will do and marriage isn’t much different from a job application in which both parties weigh up the advantages and disadvantages of each candidate and make a rational decision of which offers the best terms. Some fear that Kazuko is held back because her widowed father is incapable of looking after himself in a society which inadvertently infantilises men, but their solution is not that he should learn how to cook and do laundry, rather that he should simply marry again. Hanjiro similarly remarks that he could overcome the barriers to Kazuko’s marriage if he had money by hiring a housekeeper for her father while he still lives with his widowed mother who presumably takes care of him.

But in the end, Kazuko is just using her father as an excuse because what she really wants is to continue with her career. The company have offered her the opportunity of studying abroad in America, but she is afraid to accept it because of the social expectations placed on her. A repeated motif sees Umeko tell her to take off her glasses so that she sees the world less clearly and is almost seduced by conventionality. Her father pressures her to marry, but at the same time does not actually want her to, because he does need someone to take of him and is emotionally unready to let go of his children.

But Kazuko also feels as if she needs her father’s blessing to go abroad and just as she was unable to break off her engagement in person or through a letter, is unable to ask for it until her father volunteers it for himself having realised he may be holding her back in another way. Nevertheless, his solution is that Michiko and Tecchan should move into the attic, even if it’s Tecchan who will presumably be handling the domestic chores such as cooking and laundry. Umeko too seems to have found a third way, marrying a salaryman to become a salaryman’s wife, but still planning to open a branch of her family’s restaurant in a Tokyo department store. Each of the women gets what they want and the men are sort of forced to go along with it, but somehow everyone seems to have ended up in the right place with Kazuko’s decision to reject marriage entirely validated as she seeks new horizons in the wider world.

Bridge of Japan (日本橋, Kon Ichikawa, 1956)

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Punishment Room, released in 1956 as Daiei’s attempt to get in on the Sun Tribe phenomenon, had provoked a moral panic that brought the whole short-lived movement to a close. In considering his next film, Ichikawa consulted with Daiei executive Matsutaro Kawaguchi, who is also the father of Punishment Room’s star Hiroshi Kawaguchi, and was offered the chance to direct one of two relatively safe and subdued literary adaptations, either Izumi Kyoka’s Nihonbashi, or Kafu Nagai’s Okamezasa. Ichikawa chose Nihonbashi (日本橋), though his wife and screenwriter Natto Wada feared adapting it maybe beyond her capabilities.

The film is generally known under the The Bridge of Japan in English-speaking territories. This is either an attempt to suggest a wider thematic importance that extends across the nation, or an overly literal translation of a place name. In any case, the significance of Nihonbashi is that, during the time the film is set, it was known as an area where there were many high-class geisha houses. On the other hand, Izumi was well known for incorporating supernatural themes in his work, which  is why the film opens like a ghost story with the curtain rising on a dark and gloomy alleyway through which a geisha walks until she finally dissolves leaving only a creepy song and the sound of her geta rattling along on the cobbles. 

The messages seems to be that this is a place that consumes women. The ghost is said to be that of Owaka who, according to rumour, cheated on her husband who left her after which she died of tuberculosis. Ambitious geisha Okoh (Chikage Awashima) has just moved into Owaka’s former giesha house, apparently unperturbed by its grim history or the the possibility that it is effectively cursed. Geisha come to a miserable end if they act selfishly, according to one of Okoh’s clients who will essentially prove correct further sealing Okoh’s unhappy fate. As is common in these tales she has an entirely one-sided rivalry with local favourite Kiyoha (Fujiko Yamamoto) who her is total opposite in terms of personality. Kiyoha is kind, gentle, and dislikes her life as a geisha, not because she disapproves of it, but because of the moral compromises it requires her to make and the happiness that it denies her.

She has taking a liking to a regular customer, university professor Shin, but when he asks her to marry him, she has no choice but to refuse. Then again, Shin’s proposal is seemingly driven by his incestuous desire for his older sister, who, perhaps having realised this, has disappeared from his life apparently in shame in having become the mistress of a married man to provide for his education. Shin then bears out a sense of hypocrisy in the relationship between men and geisha in that he insists he has never seen has as one but only as his sister who was of course another woman sexually exploited for material gain. As Kiyoha is unable to marry him because she must also financially support her mother and an illegitimate daughter, as well as being indebted to her primary patron, they will not meet again as a geisha and a client.

Okoh, meanwhile, has a tendency to pick up things Kiyoha as dropped as a way of getting back her meaning she is now determined to become Shin’s lover, though he is not interested in her. After she helps in him out with a predicament with a local policeman in which she claims to be his wife, she really considerers herself to be so, though again one-sidedly. She then faces the same thing with a clingy client, Daikichi, she nicknames “Red Bear,” who has convinced himself, one-sidedly, that she is his wife despite also having a legal wife and child.

Red Bear is presented somewhat grotesquely and really takes on the position of a monster within the story. He was once a wealthy seafood wholesaler from Hokkaido who set up shop in Tokyo before an economic downturn which has also impacted the geisha world. This, along with his foolish infatuation with Okoh has ruined him financially and may also have contributed to the later death of his wife which leads him to abandon his infant son ironically dropping him off at Kiyoha’s knowing she will care for him though she rejected Red Bear on the grounds of his ugliness. Driven into a kind of madness, he now subsists on grubs and maggots that live on his distinctive but poorly made bearskin coat.

Okoh is also driven into madness when Shin decides to become a wandering pilgrim and search for his sister in order to ease the tension between Okoh, Red Bear, and Kiyoha. For her, Shin may represent a way out of this geisha world as a respectable man’s wife, something which is otherwise unobtainable to her. While in some senses, a geisha could claim greater independence as a single woman through running her own house rather than being dependent on a patron, she may also be denied the possibility of a settled domestic life or romantic fulfilment. Even if Kiyoha cannot escape her life as a geisha, she does at least have her daughter and comes to dote on Red Bear’s son, though without knowing who his parents were. 

Her parting with Shin (Ryûji Shinagawa), who does not belong in this world and has undergone a religious conversion in deciding to become a monk permanently having given up on looking for his sister and symbolically accepting Okoh as his wife, is then bittersweet but not as much of a tragedy as the fate of Okoh. The geisha house appears to have been purified, released from its cursed legacy under the ownership of Kiyoha even if geisha gossiping about the constant flow of people in this ever changing area. The alleyway which was once dark and gloomy, is now brightly lit and has lost its sense of ominousness, if otherwise seeming rather ordinary.

This was Ichikawa’s first colour film, though in order to recreate Izumi’s world he decided on a broadly grey colour palate for the props and sets, recreating all of the Meiji-era setting only to burn it down for real during the fiery climax. At that time, filming in colour also required additional lighting which meant that it was stiflingly hot on set. They eventually had to purchase industrial size air coolers of the kind that were only used in cafes, pushing up the production budget which was already high considering the painstaking attention to detail in the historical sets which included laying actual tracks to recreate the Meiji-era street car. Nevertheless, it all pays off in the exquisite visuals that bring that bring this world to life in all of its defeated hopes and melancholy. 

The Crowded Train (満員電車, Kon Ichikawa, 1957)

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The Japan of 1957 moves like clockwork in Kon Ichikawa’s absurdist satire, The Crowded Train (満員電車, Manin densha). You can’t expect a seat to be there just because you want to sit down, according to go-getter Tamio, you have to fight for your place on the crowded train that is the post-war economy. His horologist father raised him to prize things like order, precision, and self-reliance, yet the irony is that in a nation like this, if everyone else’s clocks are wrong and only yours are correct, you may be better off resetting them.

Nevertheless, Tamio (Hiroshi Kawaguchi) comes to think of himself as part of the machine and does his best to slot himself into the rhythms of contemporary urban life. People move around in the same way as the bottles manufactured at the brewery where Tamio gets a job after graduating from a top university. But he soon learns fitting into the system requires a degree of compromise. On his first day at the office, he’s told off by his new boss for being overly efficient. He finished all his work before 10:30, but his daily quota is fixed and his productivity only makes things difficult for others. The head of brewery anticipates that increasing automation will allow them to increase efficiency through shedding personnel, only the unions and cultural practice won’t let them. Tamio is one of only three people was recruited for his skills. The other seven joining with him are nepotism hires that will likely drain resources due to their lack of ability, but will be promoted anyway because of their connections. 

In any case, he might have hoped for a better job after graduating from such a good university. A rational man like his father, Tamio meticulously works out how much he can expect to earn over a lifetime subtracting things likes taxes, insurance, and the costs of raising a family. It turns out, the salaryman life is rather disappointing and there’s relatively little reward at the end of it. His constant toothaches and mounting health problems are manifestations of his anxiety and buried desperation. He lives in a company dorm with no furniture surrounded by long corridors of identical rooms. Everyone leaves at the same time every morning to take their place on the train. His colleague Sarai (Eiji Funakoshi) tries to make friends with him, but also explains how most of the other men in the building have been ruined in one way or another by the salaryman life. One has returned to the dorm after his wife left him. Another has a heart condition, but has run through his sick leave and has no choice but to return to work. Tamio only got his position because the previous occupant of his room jumped from the window. 

Sarai says that he held off on making friends with Tamio because he was afraid of him. Graduates overthink things, he says, and are ill suited to the regimented life of a salaryman. The film opens with another kind of conveyor belt visualising the expansion of the educational sector beginning with a handful of graduates in the Meiji era to the present day in which there are so many the ceremony has to take place outdoors in the rain. Tamio loses his job after falling into a coma for month without giving prior notice and is told by a friend he asks for help that they just don’t need graduates from top universities. He’s eventually only able to get a job as a school caretaker by leaving his degree off resume, but is then abruptly fired when they find out. Despite the system apparently overproducing graduates it has no need for, all the teachers want their kids to university and are open to Tamio’s plan to set up school to teach people how to get in.

Meanwhile, Tamio’s father has since entered a mental institution and is apparently very happy there. Everyone else is mad except for me, he claims, but also appreciates the sense of order and precision he couldn’t find in the outside world. The doctors find it impossible tell patients apart from visitors suggesting lack of division between sanity and madness, while Tamio’s father had originally accused his mother of insanity simply for being cheerful. Cheerfulness or insanity seem to be the only ways out of this impossible situation as Tamio desperately tries to hold the roof on his shack during a storm while his mother is just happy to be able to live with her son and hopeful that her husband will get “better” so they can all live together again. “There is always another school year ahead of you,” the head teacher of the primary school tells his new charges somewhat omniously, suggesting that they too are destined to spend their lives fighting for a seat on a packed-out train with no clear destination.

Mr. Pu (プーサン, Kon Ichikawa, 1953)

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Perhaps ironically, film censorship under the American Occupation was just as heavy as it had been under the wartime authorities if tilting in a different direction. Depicting the feudal past and straitened present were equally discouraged, as was anything that showed the Occupation forces in a less than ideal light. These restrictions were, however, lifted when the Occupation came to an end in 1952 and Kon Ichikawa’s adaptation of the comic strip by Taizo Yokoyama, Pu-san (プーサン), is a relatively early attempt to address this second round of post-war chaos characterised by high unemployment and defeated hopes for the future.

Yokoyama apparently settled on the nickname “Pu-san” just because it sounded funny, though the strip later moved away from the title character to focus more on an ensemble. That may be why the name is never mentioned during the film which also incorporates elements from another Yokoyama strip, Miss Ganko. The film then focuses on mild-mannered maths teacher Noro (Yunosuke Ito), a widower and war veteran living in a boarding house where he has developed a crush on the landlady’s daughter, Kanko (Fubuki Koshiji). Noro is the sort of person destined to suffer in life as evidenced by the opening sequence in which he is almost run over by a truck, but actually ends up injuring himself by becoming entangled with a fire hydrant in his botched attempt to move out of the way.

Nevertheless, he is really at the centre of a collection of people who are struggling amid the difficult economic environment of the early 1950s in which the nation still has not fully emerged from post-war privation. His boss at the school where he works (Daisuke Kato) is clearly exploiting his nature as someone unlikely to complain about ill-treatment by asking him to work both the day and night shift for no additional pay while forgoing a pay rise he suggests he may later to give to the other teachers. Noro goes along with it because he thinks it’s better to have a job than not and others are hard to come by. His students, meanwhile, are ideologically volatile, flirting with communism or trying to defend the nascent capitalism of the democratic society. It’s one of his students that invites him to the May Day march which leads to him being caught up in the “Bloody May Day Incident” of 1952 in which the police fired on protesters opposing the Anpo security treaty killing two and injuring 2,300 people.

Because Noro is an unlucky person, a photograph of him at the event is published in the newspaper which leads to him being fired from his job. He’s then thrown into a world of job hunters jostling for work outside the employment office with seemingly hundreds of applicants for every position. Many assume him to be further up the queue because he is a university graduate, but it’s clear that things like that no longer really matter in the post-war society and may even hinder his prospects. The job he eventually finds, thanks to his landlady’s recommendation which she only gets for him with the expectation of being able to raise his rent, is working as a deliveryman for a sewing machine company. 

After the war, Singer Sewing Machines gave the patent for the Singer 15 to Japanese factories so that those which once manufactured munitions could transition to making sewing machines. However, most in the film seem to be aware that these factories are actually still making bullets for machine guns, which turns out to be the case at the factory where Noro gets a job. Japan’s post-war recovery will largely be powered by manufacturing munitions and military equipment to be used in the Korean War. This leaves Noro understandably conflicted and leads to an ongoing sense of confusion about the nature of this new “pacifist” and “democratic society”, though he justifies himself that his is only a light crime as his complicity extends only to the delivery and not to the manufacture of these deadly weapons. The ranks of the protestors at the May Day march are contrasted with those of soldiers once again marching through the streets. Harried doctor Tezuka (Isao Kimura), sick of having to rush through patients, has apparently joined the Self Defence Forces instead. 

“Miss Stubborn” Kanko, by contrast, has a good job in a bank and though she goes on a kind of date with Noro, has fallen in love with a colleague she wishes to marry. Her mother objects to the match because her boyfriend is only a middle-school graduate, but as Kanko points out he’s had a steady job and worked his way up since he was 16. A university degree might not mean very much at the present time and those who entered employment earlier might actually have a head start. In a rather cruel moment, Noro overhears Kanko tell her mother that university graduates like him are “boring” while simultaneously suggesting they take part back of the area he’s currently renting to rent out separately without reducing his rent so they can make more money. Her father, an accountant who’s ironically never made enough to pay tax, has made himself ill through overwork leaving them largely dependent on rental income. Kanko intends to continue to working after marriage, though expects that her husband will eventually be promoted to a position offering a salary that will support a family.

This is not a realistic prospect for Noro, who has now essentially been cast aside by the post-war society. His hopes of romantic fulfilment with Kanko have been dashed, exposing his vision for a rosy future as nothing more than a delusional fantasy. Caught between idealistic students who have been, like him, displaced in the new democratic era, and amoral capitalists like his former boss and landlady, he has little other choice but to retreat into the mist of an uncertain future. Unexplored subplots including a sleazy right-wing politician’s collusion with the bank manager, hint at a still murkier world of backroom deals ruled by self-interest that betrays the “democratic” ideals of the new society along with those of a man mild-mannered man like Noro who can only survive by embracing his troubles with good humour.

Fusa (その木戸を通って, Kon Ichikawa, 1993)

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Kon Ichikawa’s Fusa (その木戸を通って, Sono Kido wo Totte) opens on a note of artifice. Misty rain and the verdant green of the forest give way to total darkness in which leaves appear, followed by the hero, Seishiro (Kiichi Nakai) tending a bonsai tree. As light brightens the scene, we see that he is seated beyond the veranda of his home which has taken on the appearance of a proscenium arch framed by the open shoji. It’s almost as if this space, in which Seishiro will enter his own reverie, is one of unreality as distinct from the interior which is busy with the preparations for the marriage of Seishiro’s only daughter, Yuka.

17 years previously, however, it was his own marriage he was preoccupied with when a mysterious woman arrived at his home claiming to have lost her memory and knowing only his name while he was away doing the annual audit. This is a little ironic, because “Seishiro Hiramatsu” hadn’t  been his name for very long and, in fact, he struggled to remember it or answer when called. The second son of an Edo lord, Seishiro had been adopted into the Hiramatsu clan and has made an advantageous match with the daughter of a lord, Tomoe. The presence of the mysterious woman threatens Seishiro’s position and path to advancement when Tomoe happens to catch sight of her, assuming she’s an old flame from Edo trying to rekindle things with Seishiro.

He, meanwhile, assumes the woman’s arrival is part of a plot to discredit him and ruin his engagement, presumably perpetrated by a jealous rival. For those reasons, he instructs his retainer Yoshizuka to have the girl sent away, but he and his wife (Kyoko Kishida) feel sorry for her and wish to take her into the household. Seishiro comes up with the ingenious plan of throwing her out and following her to see if she meets up with whoever sent her, but becomes protective when she is nearly assaulted by a pair of local louts. Despite himself, he becomes absorbed in the mystery, but at the same time both he and the woman, whom they name “Fusa” (Yuko Asano), become worried that if she did in fact regain her memory, she would have to leave.

Fusa sometimes enters a kind of trance state, staring at the mystical forest behind the house in way that gives her a supernatural air. That she arrives so suddenly aligns her with a tradition of ghost story and folklore, suggesting that she may be some kind of forest spirit that like the Snow Woman would have to leave once the spell was broken. She describes herself as feeling as if he had been possessed or were trapped within a dream. As Seishiro learns later, she may not have known his name at all, but only taken it from one of his servants, while her past remains opaque. Nevertheless, they are blissfully happy and conceive a daughter together before Fusa suddenly disappears with the same suddenness as she arrived. She had often had visions of a bamboo path and a wooden door beyond which seem to lurk the secrets of her past, but it may not be possible to return after passing through.

Seishiro continues to believe she will one day remember them and return, but at the same time knows to treasure the small bubble of happiness they once had no matter how long it lasted. The truth is only that she was here and then gone, which isn’t so much of an unusual story and requires little explanation, though Seishiro never really solves the mystery as he had vowed to do. Perhaps like Fusa, he didn’t really want to risk breaking the spell. Based on a story by Shugoro Yamamoto, the film was produced by Fuji TV as a test feature for NHK’s “Hi-Vision” high-definition television channel with the consequence that it was shot on hi-def video tape and later transferred to 35mm for international festival screenings. For those reasons, it’s not a particularly handsome film and obviously low budget, but even so Ichikawa makes the most of the medium, leaning into its soft focus to create an ethereal and mysterious atmosphere. Playing with colour and light, he often frames Fusa as the only one in colour in an otherwise monochrome scene as if perhaps suggesting that it’s Seishiro’s world that lacks reality rather than hers. An ominous violet light seems to emanate from the misty forest, but in truth perhaps all here are ghosts looking for a way to go beyond the wooden door but, at the same time, hoping they won’t find it.

The Woman Who Touched Legs (足にさわった女, Yasuzo Masumura, 1960)

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Busho Sawada’s serialised novel had been adapted several times before with the first released shortly after its publication in 1926, but this “modernised” version directed by Yasuzo Masumura, The Woman Who Touched Legs (足にさわった女, Ashi ni Sawatta Onna), is tailor-made for the post-war era as the titular woman heads off in search of the old Japan only to learn that it no longer exists and what little of it remains is being sold off for golf courses and ever expanding American airbases whose noisy aircraft fly constantly overhead.

To that extent, Saya (Machiko Kyo) is an embodiment of aimless post-war youth. Her father was accused of being a spy and took his own life while her mother worked herself to death when she was just a child. Though she travels with a rather dim young man who refers to her as his older sister, they are not actually related by blood and seem to have belonged to the same community of street criminals in Osaka along with their “big sister” Haruko (Haruko Sugimura) who has since moved back to Atsugi which is Saya’s “hometown”. Since her parents’ deaths, she’s been obsessed with the idea of revenge and pickpocketing money to save for a giant memorial service to show the relatives who chased her family out of town how well she’s done for herself. But when she arrives, she can’t even find the place she’s looking for. A policeman flips through a series of ancient, handwritten ledgers looking for evidence of people with her surname and suggests they’ve all left town. Even the last one left is the wife of an adopted son who plans to move to Tokyo after their house is purchased by developers who want to build a golf course.

The golf course may be a symbol of Japan’s increasing prosperity, but the airbases seem to hint more at a sense of corruption and oppression. Saya’s “hometown” is a mythical concept that belongs to an idealised vision of a pastoral Japan before the war that she unconsciously wants to return to. Her mother spoke of a small settlement of perhaps 30 houses, a village society with a river running through it. The village has now, however, been swallowed by the airbase and, in fact, erased so that no one even quite remembers it. Saya is left feeling that she no longer has a hometown, and ironically asks policeman Kita to arrest her so she can go back to prison, which is, perhaps, where her heart truly lies. At least, it’s much quieter than here without any noisy aircraft flying overhead.

Nevertheless, Kita (Hajime Hana) is a fairly bumbling policeman and the film opens with what turns out to be part of a book set in a lawless Japan where people gamble, party, and openly sell guns on an ordinary train. Kita is currently on holiday, which he’s been forced to take even though he doesn’t really want to. He’s technically powerless for the moment, but continually complains that he’s not allowed to arrest Saya unless he catches her in the act of pickpocketing. It’s clear that the pair have feelings for each other it’s inconvenient to admit, and all this talk of “arrest” maybe more a kind of metaphor in which Saya secretly wants to be caught by Kita with the snapping of the handcuffs akin to the putting of a ring on a finger. The pair effectively lead each other on a merry dance with Saya ironically eventually chasing the policeman rather than the other way around.

The film does open rather salaciously with a closeup of a woman’s legs in fishnet tights followed by a kickline, and Machiko Kyo does indeed play up her sexy image to play the beautiful pickpocket who uses her body as a tool to mesmerise much to Haruko’s disapproval. Besides Kita, she’s followed by a rather louche writer (Eiji Funakoshi) who declares that he doesn’t need models, though evidently captivated by her, while declaring himself too successful and overworked. He doesn’t want more money, he just wants some free time and no one seems to want to let him have any, though he doesn’t exactly get a lot of writing done on this wild goose chase looking for Saya’s missing hometown. Absurd as it is, this unlikely rom-com between a beautiful pickpocket and bumbling policeman does at least end in a moment both of constraint and liberation as Saya finds herself content with her famous legs cuffed and Kita content to wear a different hat as they ride off on a decidedly unusual honeymoon.

365 Nights (三百六十五夜, Kon Ichikawa, 1948)

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For his second film at Shintoho, Kon Ichikawa had wanted to adapt a story by Ryunosuke Akutagawa that later inspired Rashomon, but was handed a standard melodrama to direct first. Ichikawa apparently did not think much of the novel the film was to be based on nor the script by Kennosuke Tateoka which he subsequently brushed up with the help of his new wife Natto Wada, and it’s not difficult to see why he might have felt he had an uphill battle. Melodrama is after all a genre that is founded on coincidence, though 365 Nights (三百六十五夜, Sambyaku-rokujugo ya) quickly strains credulity with the sheer number of unlikely events and surprise reappearances along with its rather strange take on the contemporary post-war society which is undoubtedly influenced by the demands of the Occupation censorship regime. 

Indeed, the setting itself seems reminiscent of 1930s cinema following the dashing hero Koroku, played by the equally dashing Ken Uehara, an architect who has walked away from his privileged upbringing as the son of a successful construction magnate. His problem is that he’s being aggressively courted by the haughty Ranko (Hideko Takamine), also the daughter of a successful but shady businessman, who to modern eyes is basically stalking him. Grinning with an evil glint in her eye, she tells her minion Tsugawa (Yuji Hori) that she’ll have seduced Koroku within 365 days which by melodrama standards seems to give her quite a lot of leeway.

Clueing us up to her villainy, Ranko is always seen wearing incredibly stylish Western outfits but otherwise behaves in a transgressively masculine fashion ordering her male employees about while set on the sexual conquest of Koroku who despises her for everything she is. It’s difficult not to see an inherent criticism of the new post-war woman and an anxiety regarding the power that comes with wealth being wielded by someone who is not a man. The contrast between Ranko and traditional femininity is rammed home by the fact that Teruko (Hisako Yamane), the daughter of the landlady in the house where Koroku finds new lodging after moving home to escape Ranko, is always dressed in kimono and otherwise naive and innocent. 

This positions Ranko, and her minion Tsugawa who is also in love with her, as the villains who are rebelling against the kind of earnestness expressed by Koroku and Teruko. From more humble origins, Tsugawa is deeply resentful of Kokoku’s class privilege and feels that he looks down on him which is one reason he seeks revenge by destroying his life along with his sexual jealously that Ranko pays him no attention yet is fixated on Kokoku perhaps precisely because he is entirely uninterested in her though it remains mystery why you’d want to be married to someone who strongly dislikes you. 

Yet for all his own earnestness, Koroku is almost betrayed by the capitalist father of whom he also seems to disapprove when he asks him to consent to an arranged marriage with Ranko to save his business. Meanwhile, it also transpires that Teruko’s father has been absent from her life because he two has a criminal past further tainting the legacy each of them bear. Ichikawa stages each evolution of their relationship at the same, noirish street corner that seems to exist as a kind of border between the illicit underworld that seeps out from Tsugawa’s bar into the post-war society, and the geniality represented by Teruko’s otherwise nice, middle-class home. 

It’s the this transgressive quality, of being caught between these two worlds, that starts to eat away at Koroku leaving him a broken and shabby man little better than a tramp. In a break with melodrama norms, though he is aware that he has led Teruko into Tsugawa’s trap he comes to believe that she has betrayed him while she clings fiercely to her love and in the end attempts to sacrifice it basically giving Koroku to Ranko whom she believes can better care for him in his now corrupted state. Though events become grim with a wedding that is staged like a funeral and takes place at a death bed, there is also the sense that something must come right that seems a little incongruous and perhaps a concession to the censors board as may be the coda implying that Ranko, despite having undergone a kind of redemption, will also have to pay for all her dodgy dealings. Though clearly hampered by the material, Ichikawa crafts some stunning images such as the final scene at Tsugawa’s bar along with a surprisingly energetic action sequence during which Koroku fights off burglars at Teruko’s home and wins her heart with his manliness. In any case despite the hints at redemption the implication remains that this is a world dark at its core in which not even the earnest can escape its creeping corruption. 

The Phoenix (火の鳥, Kon Ichikawa, 1978)

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The people of early Japan contemplate different visions of immortality in Kon Ichikawa’s sprawling adaptation of the first chapter in Osamu Tezuka’s manga series, The Phoenix (火の鳥, Hi no Tori). Featuring a mix of animation and live action, the film takes place in an ancient, pre-modern Japan in which just about everyone chases the mysterious fire bird in belief that drinking its blood will confer eternal life. They each want it for different reasons, some more to stop someone else getting it than for themselves but all discover that there are other ways of living on than the strictly literal. 

Broadly speaking the film takes place during the era of possibly mythical sorceress queen Himiko (Mieko Takamine) who rules over the nation known as Yamatai which is the name given to a kingdom in Japan in ancient Chinese sources. Himiko wants the phoenix because she fears that her power is founded on a youth and beauty which has begun to fade while the people are beginning to lose faith in her magic, not least because her rule is oppressive and authoritarian. She also fears that should the Chinese emperor drink the phoenix blood first, they will forever be under his yoke yet the seal that confers her rule was in fact given by him so perhaps they are already. Her brother, Susano (Toru Emori) whom she also fears may usurp her, enlists famed hunter Yumihiko (Masao Kusakari) from the state of Matsuro to help them capture the phoenix seeing as the two nations have some kind of treaty. Yumihiko says he doesn’t really care about that, but ends up helping anyway.

In any case, Matsuro is soon overrun in a surprise attack by warlord Jingi (Tatsuya Nakadai) from Takamagahara who is set on colonisation, which is in its way another bid for “immortality” if culturally rather than literally. After all, he claims “I will implant our civilisation in these lands” before explaining that “not even the greatest kings live forever” but history will. Meanwhile, Yamatai doctor Guzuri (Ryuzo Hayashi) is washed up on the shores of remote kingdom Kumaso where Uraji (Masaya Oki) is hunting the phoenix in the hope of saving his seriously ill wife Hinaku (Reiko Ohara). Uraji is soon burnt to a crisp by the Phoenix’s light, but Guzuri is able to save Hinaku using “modern” medicine, that is by applying “blue mould” which as the onscreen text explains contains penicillin. Perhaps feeding someone mould doesn’t sound much more scientific than the bizarre folk medicine proposed by the witchdoctor which involves rubbing the severed heads of cats and ravens together and putting fish bones on the patient’s head while burning their buttocks, but it works which is not exactly a means of “immortality” but does promise the ability of temporarily overcoming death without the Pheonix’s help. 

But medicine can’t help you with an invasion, and when the Yamatai suddenly turn up and raze the village to get better access to the phoenix after realising it lives in a nearby volcano only Hinaku and her brother Nagi (Toshinori Omi) survive. Hinaku reluctantly remains with Guzuri and vows to rebuild her kingdom through childbirth vowing that she will enable the survival of Kumaso by passing her culture on through successive generations. Uzume (Kaoru Yumi), a dancer from Matsuro, later says something similar to Jingi in reminding him that “women have their own weapons” and he will “never be able to destroy life” as an abstract concept. There might be something a little uncomfortable in the implication that the phoenix is an allegory for childbirth in suggesting that one body is born in the ashes of another, but it is in the end the continuity of a lifecycle which wins out as the natural order of things. In the film’s concluding moments, the son of Hinaku and Guzuri in a sense experiences a kind of rebirth as, guided by the phoenix, he climbs out of the cave in which he has lived all his life and gazes at the vast expanses of a new world all around him. 

Ichikawa originally trained as an animator and includes several animated sequences throughout the film from cartoonish special effects when an elderly courtier bangs his head to a trio of foxes dancing to pink lady. His visual design is also heavily influenced by Tezuka’s manga with the young boy Nagi in particular striking Tezuka-esque poses and otherwise resembling Astroboy who does in fact make a surprise appearance in a brief animated sequence in which Nagi is kicked by a horse. Similarly, the conflicted general Saruta (Tomisaburo Wakayama) later gains a ridiculous Tezuka-style nose after being locked in a room filled with wasps, and Ichikawa’s vistas sometime echo the centrefold of a manga with the heroes reduced to tiny figures dwarfed by the majesty of the landscape. Even so, a rain-soaked battle pays ironic homage to Seven Samurai, while Ichikawa otherwise keeps violence to a minimum. The heads are chopped off horses and fall like cushions, entirely bloodlessly, but there is also a scene of implied attempted rape which may be out of keeping with the otherwise family-friendly approach. Despite the sense of defeat which may colour some of the closing scenes, the film ends on a note of optimistic wonder in a new journey for humanity emerging from scenes of desolation towards a bright new world. 

Nightshade Flower (夜来香, Kon Ichikawa, 1951)

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A couple who met briefly in Manchuria are reunited in Kobe five years later but find their joy short-lived amid the vagaries of the post-war society in Kon Ichikawa’s tragic romance, Nightshade Flower (夜来香, Ieraishan). The film takes its name from a song “夜来香” known as “Ieraishan” in Japanese, a transliteration of the Mandarin pronunciation (yèláixiāng) in katakana, which was released in a Chinese-language version in Shanghai in 1944 performed by Manchurian Japanese actress Yoshiko Yamaguchi (山口淑子) who also went by the names Ri Koran/Li Hsiang-lan (李香蘭) and later Shirley Yamaguchi at various times in her career. A song of lost love, it seems to echo a sense of despair among the wartime generation who cannot reconcile their pasts with the post-war present. 

Akiko (Asami Kuji), a sex worker, first meets Seki (Ken Uehara), an army doctor, when he pulls her out of the way of an oncoming vehicle in a crowded market place in Northern China in June, 1944. As she is dressed in cheongsam and angrily shouts at him in Mandarin, he assumes her to be Chinese and carries on along his way while she remains ambivalent about the encounter especially as the sleeve of her dress has been torn. In any case, it’s clear that the situation has become precarious and most of the Japanese population are preparing for evacuation. The owner of the brothel where Akiko and her friend Gin (Harue Tone) are employed has hopes of carrying on her business further behind the lines where army bases are still in operation though the pair would prefer to head home as soon as possible, jumping off the repatriation truck organised for them by the madam with the intention of returning to the city and boarding the next one bound straight for the mainland. 

But Gin falls off a cliff and injures her leg, leaving Akiko to go in search of a doctor incongruously rocking up at Seki’s medical clinic. Though she is originally unwilling to have him treat Gin, she soon comes around and the pair begin seeing each other with Akiko pledging to stay behind after putting Gin on a truck. Nevertheless the pair are separated during an air raid with Akiko believing that Seki has been killed in a direct hit to the shrine they were sheltering in when he left their foxhole to check on a crying baby. Five years later, Seki has returned to Kobe to look for Akiko but has had no luck while staying with the family of one of his men, Toshio (Yuji Kawakita), who has fallen into post-war despair and given up his promising future in medicine to peddle black market drugs with shady fixer Kameyama (Reikichi Kawamura). 

The crisis comes when Seki realises he is losing his sight, apparently a delayed reaction to the head injury he sustained in Manchuria which was not fully treated due to the war’s end. Though he reunites with Akiko, he believes that he can no longer have a future with her because of his impending blindness and in fact that his life is now over. Akiko meanwhile has also fallen into despair. Believing Seki was dead she gave up on the idea of finding him and has returned to sex work, she and Gin working in a small backstreet bar and living in adjacent rooms of a rundown tenement block. Seki had always known that she was a sex worker, but she believes he may now reject her because she has failed to live up to the promise she made him of living a more “honest” life ironically because without him she had no reason to do so. 

Meanwhile, Seki is intent of saving Toshio whom he had first met as a naive private openly crying over the death of his mother having picked up a venereal disease after losing his virginity to a sex worker in an attempt to overcome his grief. Toshio is an embodiment of the despair felt by young men who went to war as innocent teenagers and are filled with disillusionment and confusion. Though Toshio is luckier than most who struggle to find work in the difficult post-war economy, he came from a middle-class medical family and if he finishes his training of which he only has a year left he would inherit his father’s clinic, he no longer sees a future for himself and actively rejects his privilege as an act of self-harm by taking up with Kameyama and becoming involved with crime. He resents his father for remarrying soon after his mother died, taking the family maid as his second wife, and is reluctant to marry their nurse, Chiyo (Chiaki Tsukioka), who is also Kameyama’s younger sister, as everyone expects him to despite otherwise carrying on an affair with her which later results in a pregnancy. He says that he wants to earn his own living and be his own man but claims he cannot see the bright future Seki speaks of for him and continues along a dark path of crime and vice. 

The constant rumblings of the train along with its flickering light strongly foreshadow the tragic denouement but also hint at the automatic motion of society that damns the trio and frustrates their attempts to move on from the war and find happiness in its aftermath. Even so, to modern eyes the motif of Seki’s literal blindness which robs him of the ability to perceive a happy future with Akiko cannot but seem a little ableist even as Akiko points out that many men lost their sight in the war but are living good lives with wives and children and that she does not see his disability as a barrier to their ability to make new lives for themselves in the post-war society much as he doesn’t regard her past in sex work as a reason to reject her.

Even so, Seki is dragged into the post-war morass after becoming involved with Kameyama in a futile attempt to save Toshio only to discover that Kameyama has betrayed them by getting them both to work on the same job as a payment for a debt taken out by Seki on Toshio’s behalf to free him from his life of crime. Ichikawa embraces a sense of melodrama with frequent closeups and an underlying theatricality, but also captures something of post-war confusion in the noirish fog that surrounds Akiko as she considers one last job to pay for probably useless medical treatment to save Seki’s sight. The cruelty of the ending is in its way too difficult to bear but perhaps apt for the view from 1951 in which the possibility of escaping the legacy of wartime corruption lies only in painful memories. 

Being Two Isn’t Easy (私は二歳, Kon Ichikawa, 1962)

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With the Olympics still two years away, the Japanese economy had begun to improve by 1962 and the salaryman dream was on the horizon for all. But for young couples trying to make it in the post-war society things were perhaps far from easy and having more to want coupled with the anxieties of a newly consumerist society only left them with additional burdens. A surprisingly moving evocation of the cycle of life, Kon Ichikawa’s Being Two Isn’t Easy (私は二歳, Watashi wa Nisai) is as much about the trials and tribulations of its toddler hero’s parents as they try to navigate their new roles in a world which now seems fraught with potential dangers. 

This difference in perspective is brought home in the opening sequence in which soon-to-be two Taro (Hiro Suzuki) recalls his own birth in a slightly creepy voiceover, lamenting his mother cooing over him excited that he is smiling for her though he is not yet able to focus and has no idea the vague shadow above him is his mother or even what a mother is. His smiling is simply involuntary muscle contraction as he learns how to manipulate his body. Nevertheless, little Taro is a definite handful taxing his poor mother Chiyo (Fujiko Yamamoto) with frequent attempts to escape, managing to get out of the apartment and start climbing the stairs the instant she’s turned her back. “Always finding fault, that’s why grown-ups are unhappy” Taro complains, irritated that even though he’s quite proud of himself for figuring out not only how to undo the screws on his playpen but the string his parents had tied around it for extra protection, he’s not received any praise or congratulation and it feels like they’re annoyed with him. 

The landlord alerted by the commotion somewhat ironically remarks that “Japanese houses are best for Japanese babies” (being at least usually all on one level even if they also sometimes have their share of dangerously precipitous staircases), implicitly criticising the new high rise society. There do indeed seem to be dangers everywhere. Another baby playing on the balcony eventually falls because the screws are rusty on the railings only to be caught by a passing milkman in what seems to be an ironic nod to the film’s strange fascination with the new craze in cow’s milk to which Taro’s father Goro (Eiji Funakoshi) attributes Westerners’ ability to grow up big and strong. Taro does seem to get sick a lot, the doctor more or less implying that his sickliness is in part transferred anxiety from an overabundance of parental love. Visited by her older sister who lives on a farm in the country and has eight children, Chiyo becomes broody for a second baby (though not another six!) but Goro isn’t so sure, not just because of the additional expense or the fact that their danchi apartment is already cramped with the two of them and a toddler, but reflecting that he already lives in a world of constant fear why would you want to double it worrying about two kids instead of one?

Nevertheless, Goro is certainly a very “modern” man. He helps out with the housework and is an active father, taking on his share of the childcare responsibilities and very invested in his son. He accepts that his wife also “works” even if he also insists it’s not the same because she doesn’t have to bow to Taro and is not subject to the petty humiliations of the salaryman life. Tellingly, this changes slightly when the couple end up leaving the danchi for a traditional Japanese home to move in with Goro’s mother after his brother gets a job transfer. Grandma (Kumeko Urabe) is actively opposed to him helping out around the house, viewing it as distasteful and unmanly not to say a black mark against Chiyo for supposedly not proving up to her wifely duties. Living with Grandma also introduces a maternal power struggle under the older woman’s my house my rules policy which extends to criticising Chiyo’s parenting philosophy not to mention refusing to trust “modern technology” by insisting on rewashing everything that’s been through the washing machine by hand.

Yet when Taro becomes sick again it’s perhaps Grandma who has a surprisingly consumerist view of medical care. Exasperated by the couple’s failure to get Taro to take his medicine she offends the doctor by insisting on him having an injection as if you haven’t really been treated without one. Eventually she takes him to another clinic where they get on a conveyor belt of doctoring, rushed through from a disinterested receptionist to a physician who yells “bronchitis” to a nurse who violently sticks the baby in the arm. After that Taro vows never to trust grown-ups, though Grandma only gives in when she realises injections are not an instacure and didn’t do any good. 

For all that however there’s a poignancy in Taro’s reflecting on his birthday cake with its two candles that Grandma’s must have many more and in fact be brighter than the moon with which he has a strange fascination. He’s just turning two. He used to be a baby but now he’s a big boy and soon he’ll be a man. Goro reflects on time passing, for the moment he’s a father but might be a grandad soon enough. The wheel keeps turning which perhaps puts the hire purchase fees on the TV he bought to keep Grandma occupied and out of the way into perspective. From the experimental opening to the occasional flashes of animation and that banana moon, Ichikawa paints a whimsical picture of the post-war world as seen through the eyes of a wise child but ironically finds a wealth of warmth and comfort even in an age of anxiety.