Tag: Kuniko Igawa

The Tattered Wings (遠い雲, Keisuke Kinoshita, 1955)

April 26, 2020by Hayley Scanlon

“Why can’t a woman have the freedom to pursue her own happiness?” wails an extremely conflicted woman in Keisuke Kinoshita’s The Tattered Wings (遠い雲, Tooi Kumo), though it appears she may have completely misinterpreted the desires of the woman she is speaking to. By 1955, provincial Japan had perhaps returned to a kind of peaceful normality but times were changing here too, just in ways that seem slightly unexpected. In this case, the problem is not curtain twitching grannies keen to enforce the social order, but a pair of young punks hoping to stir up trouble through malicious gossip for motives which are entirely unclear save resentment and desire to rebel against their own lack of prospects in an otherwise rigid society.

All the trouble starts when brooding intellectual Keizo (Takahiro Tamura) returns from Tokyo for a 10 day visit with his family before taking up a job transfer to Hokkaido after which he claims he will not be able to see them for several years. Before he left, Keizo had been sweet on Fuyuko (Hideko Takamine), but she eventually consented to an arranged marriage to support her parents’ failing business and is now a widow with a small daughter. Though the marriage was abusive, since her husband’s death Fuyuko has been happy in her married home, spending time with her husband’s sensitive younger brother Shunsuke (Keiji Sada) and there is some talk that they may later marry.

Though this kind of quasi-incestuous union of a widow and her brother-in-law may have fuelled countless other melodramas, it is not the problem here so much as its potential solution. After running into him by chance at her husband’s grave, a strange place to reencounter an old lover, Fuyuko is seen in several places around the town walking and talking with Keizo. There is nothing more to their relationship than that, a man and a woman talking at a respectful distance in public, but the young toughs at the station who always carried a torch for the beautiful Fuyuko decide to start a nasty rumour that there is something improper going on.

In real terms, of course, there isn’t, but there is a kind of silent pull between Keizo and the lonely Fuyuko that is much more difficult and ambiguous than one might expect it to be. Keizo clearly wants to pick up where they left off, but is intense and awkward, motivated to urgency by the briefness of his stay. He forgets that he’s been gone a long time and Fuyuko is no longer the carefree 19-year-old she was when he left, but the mother of a young girl who claims that she has long since lost the ability to dream. Brutalised by her abusive husband, she is unwilling to stake her hopes on new romance and is wary of becoming a middle-aged woman chasing a return to the past in embracing an idealised first love in flight from its complicated reality. She accuses Keizo of trying to project his own dream of the past onto her, wanting to return to the possibilities of his youth rather than really in love with a woman he now barely knows.

Meanwhile, Fuyuko is pulled in two directions by her respective families. Her older sister is embittered, resentful of their mother who refused her permission to marry a man she loved because he wasn’t wealthy and they wanted a son to marry in, while her younger sister has herself long carried a torch for Keizo and is acting more out of jealousy than genuine concern. Faced with crisis, the families of both Fuyuko and Keizo affirm that they don’t care what anyone might say about it so long as their children are happy, but the problem is that Fuyuko no longer knows what she wants. Keizo accuses her of tearing off her wings rather than using them to fly, but perhaps what she wanted all along wasn’t an excuse to leave but one to stay. Maybe what she wants isn’t actually what everyone expects it to be, and the permission she’s trying to give herself is the right to be comfortable with a slow and steady kind of love at the side of a patient and compassionate sort of man who’d be content to let her choose and know he’d been her choice. Fuyuko’s wings may be tattered, but she is in a sense pursuing her own happiness in choosing the present over an unrealistic dream of adolescent romance.

Opening and titles (no subtitles)

The Eternal Rainbow (この天の虹, Keisuke Kinoshita, 1958)

September 27, 2019by Hayley Scanlon

Famously, towards the end of the war, Keisuke Kinoshita got himself into trouble with a dialogue free scene of a mother’s distress as she sent away the son she’d so carefully raised “for the emperor” towards an uncertain future in the midst of hundred of other, identically dressed faceless boys. Army might have showcased the director’s propensity for resistance, but one could also argue that there was just as much propagandistic intent in the post-war films as their had been in the militarist era even if the messages they were selling were often more palatable. 1958’s The Eternal Rainbow (この天の虹, Kono Ten no Niji) is a case in point. A portrait so positive one wonders if it was sponsored by Yahata Steel, The Eternal Rainbow is nevertheless conflicted in its presentation of defeated post-war hope, exploitation, and growing social inequality even as it praises its factory city as a utopian vision of happy industry and fierce potential.

A lengthy opening sequence featuring voice over narration recounts the history of the Yahata Steel Works which began operations in 1901 in Northern Kyushu and now employs thousands of people, many of whom live nearby in the ever expanding company dorms the newer models of which feature bright and colourful modern designs in contrast to the depressing grey prefab of the traditional workers’ homes. Gradually we are introduced to our heroes – chief among them Mr. Suda (Yusuke Kawazu), a young man from the country who saw a factory job as his over the rainbow but is rapidly becoming disillusioned with its dubious gains. Rather than the company dorms, Suda rooms with the foreman, Kageyama (Chishu Ryu), and his wife Fumi (Kinuyo Tanaka) whose young son Minoru (Kazuya Kosaka) didn’t qualify for a factory job on account of his small frame and his been unable to stick at anything in the precarious post-war economy. Meanwhile, Suda has made friends with an older worker, Sagara (Teiji Takahashi), who has fallen for a secretary, Chie (Yoshiko Kuga), but her family are dead against her marrying a factory worker while she is also in a relationship with a college educated engineer, Machimura (Takahiro Tamura), but is beginning to doubt the seriousness of his intentions.

The drama begins when Sagara employs Kageyama to act as a go-between in a formal proposal of marriage to Chie’s parents, the Obitas. Kageyama didn’t really want to be a go-between because it’s gone badly for him before and he thinks this one is a non-starter too – women around here have their sights set on office workers, no one in the arranged marriage market is looking to marry someone on the shop floor. The Obitas feel much the same. Mrs. Obita is keen for Chie to marry up and is somewhat offended by the proposal, granting it only the customary consideration time to not seem rude in turning it down flat. Sagara is stoic about the matter, but the abruptness of the rejection greatly offends Suda who cannot stand for the Obitas snobbish put down of working people.

Herein lies the central conflict. Suda was a country boy who’d been sold an impossible dream. He believed that a job in the factory, for which he had to sit an exam and has been chosen out of thousands of other hopefuls, was his ticket out of rural poverty. Now that he’s working there he realises he is little more than a wage slave, working long hours for almost nothing with the only goal of his life being to earn enough to feed a family with a little (very little) left over for his old age. Minoru, the Kageyamas’ son, feels much the same and has already turned cynical and desperate. He can’t abide his father’s work ethic and wants more out of life than there perhaps is for it to give him. Suda repeatedly asks how people can learn to be happy in this sort of life, wondering if those that claim to be have simply given up their hopes and aspirations in resignation. When Minoru decides not to go to Tokyo it ought to be a victory, but then perhaps it is more that he has simply accepted that there is no hope there either.

Nevertheless, the depiction of Yahata as a place to work is ridiculously positive even as Kinoshita undercuts it with the disillusionment of both Suda and Sagara. A factory city, Yahata is characterised as a cornerstone of the burgeoning post-war economy, literally making the rails on which the new Japan will run. The works provides affordable accommodation for families, guaranteed employment, insurance, a “self service” supermarket right on site, social clubs, cultural activities, and festivals. They even get a large scale show from Tokyo every year.

Even so, an immense and seemingly unbridgeable gap exists between the steelworkers and the company men. Mrs. Obita might seem self serving and mercenary, but she’s had a hard life and perhaps it’s only natural that wants better for her daughter. Suda is angry to think a good man like Sagara who might be a bit old fashioned and unsophisticated but has taken the trouble to do things the “proper” way would be dismissed out of hand simply out of snobbery. His attitude is, however, somewhat problematic in that he begins bothering Chie to find out her reasons for declining the proposal, refusing to recognise that she doesn’t need to offer any reason besides her own will. Chie, meanwhile, is conflicted. A proposal of marriage from a man she doesn’t even really know is not something she was minded to consider in any case, but her feelings for Machimura are tested once she becomes aware that he is not quite in earnest and may have been messing around with his landlady while enjoying the attention he receives as an eligible bachelor around town.

Machimura, like Suda, Sagara, and Minoru, is somewhat listless and apathetic even if for the opposite reason in that his life is far too easy and he hasn’t had to make a lot of concrete decisions about his future. Chie doesn’t deny that his college education and urban sophistication are part of the reason she was attracted to him, but as she later tries to explain to Suda, she wasn’t simply angling to marry up – she just fell in love with someone who happened to be of a higher social class which isn’t the same as looking down on working people. She has a right to her feelings whatever political label an increasingly resentful Suda might like to put on them. Even so, if she had been trying to marry up who could really blame her for that? In a society in which women are still entirely dependent on a man, being largely prevented from pursuing a career in their own right, a marriage is effectively a job for life. Shouldn’t she pick the offer with the best benefits, just as Suda did when he chose to leave the country for a factory job?

Progressive factories are often presented as an ideal solution the problem of post-war poverty, but here Kinoshita does not seem so sure. Despite the emphatic tone of the infrequent voice over and the central messages that factory jobs are good jobs and looking down on manual work nothing more than snobbery, Suda and Sagara remain conflicted. This work is dangerous, pays little, and offers nothing more than false promise. If the vast cities like Yahata are the engines repowering the economic growth of a still straitened Japan, what will be the end result? Metropolis made flesh, the “eternal rainbow” is exposed as a self serving lie but what, Suda might ask, else is there for men like him in a society like this?

Original trailer (no subtitles)

The Girl I Loved (わが恋せし乙女, Keisuke Kinoshita, 1946)

August 27, 2019by Hayley Scanlon

The post-war era, as confusing and chaotic as it was, offered several choices, among them that to change to course, choose to create a better, kinder world than the one which had led to so much suffering. As always, however, the human temptation is to choose the opposite and allow anger and resentment to make everything even worse than it had been before. Occasionally censured for his sentimentality, Keisuke Kinoshita was perhaps among the more defiantly positive of the post-war humanists whose fierce love human goodness knew no bounds. In The Girl I Loved (わが恋せし乙女, Waga Koiseshi Otome) he puts his ideas to the ultimate test as a young man recently returned from the war must learn to cope with various kinds of disappointment but eventually resolves to take solace in other people’s happiness even at the cost of his own.

The tale begins some years earlier when a baby girl is abandoned in front of the Asama Ranch, her mother apparently having taken her own life by jumping from a nearby cliff. The Asamas are good people and moved by the letter they find with the baby so decide to take her in. Yoshiko (Kuniko Igawa) is raised alongside older brother Jingo (Yasumi Hara) as an adopted sister always aware of her origins but very much a full member of the family.

Flash forward to the present day and Yoshiko has become a beautiful young woman. Jingo has returned from five years of war in perfect physical health, keen to resume his idyllic farm life in the beautiful Japanese countryside. The fact is that Jingo has long been in love with Yoshiko, though the situation is understandably complicated seeing as they were raised as siblings even if there is no blood relation between them. Somehow it seems a perfectly natural idea that the pair will marry and many assume this will be the case. Jingo, however, remains somewhat reticent and afraid to voice his feelings. It seems Yoshiko has something to tell him too and so he dares to hope as they both agree to share their respective secrets after the harvest festival.

At the festival, however, Jingo gets a shock. He sees the way Yoshiko looks at another man and realises that what she wanted to tell him was probably that she had fallen in love with someone else. Shaken and confused, Jingo bites his tongue. He knows to say anything now would only create more pain and suffering for everyone while he alone will suffer if he decides to stay quiet.

Nevertheless the temptation is there. Mr. Noda (Junji Soneda), Yoshiko’s intended, is a quiet man, an intellectual who returned from the war early thanks to injury and still walks with a cane. Yoshiko has been fearful that her family may object to the marriage on the grounds of Noda’s disability – something he has also been aware of and warned her about in explaining the potential hardship she may have to endure as his wife seeing as he is also merely a poor schoolteacher. Jingo could try to refuse her permission to marry, try to force her to marry him instead, or refuse to give his blessing for her to marry anyone at all, but if he did that all he’d be doing is condemning both of them to eternal misery. It would be understandable if he began to resent Noda and most particularly his disability which brought him home from the war early and enabled him to be here to fall in love with Yoshiko while Jingo was away and dreaming of home, but then it could so easily have been the other way around.

In the end, Jingo’s love is selfless and good. What he wants is for Yoshiko to be happy and if being with Noda is what that means then Jingo will not stand in her way no matter how much it may hurt him to stand aside. After all, as Noda says, aren’t they both lucky to be alive in this beautiful place? Having suffered so much, the two men understand how precious life is and know it’s far too short for pettiness or resentment. A quiet, gentle tale The Girl I Loved is a sad story of youthful disappointment in love, but it’s also a kind of melancholy manifesto for the new post-war world built on compassion and understanding as a young man decides to take the noble path in accepting that the girl he loved loves someone else and that’s sad but it’s also happy and if you can learn to rejoice in someone else’s happiness even in the midst of your own pain then perhaps everything will be alright after all.

Titles and opening scene (no subtitles)

Victory of Women (女性の勝利, Kenji Mizoguchi, 1946)

March 26, 2019by Hayley Scanlon1 Comment

Female suffering in an oppressive society had always been at the forefront of Mizoguchi’s filmmaking even if he, like many of his contemporaries, found his aims frustrated by the increasingly censorious militarist regime. In some senses, the early days of occupation may not have been much better as one form of propaganda was essentially substituted for another if one that most would find more palatable. The first of his “women’s liberation trilogy”, Victory of Women (女性の勝利, Josei no Shori) was released in 1946 and expressly embraced the democratic philosophy espoused by the American authorities which necessarily included a motion towards female emancipation.

Played by Mizoguchi’s muse Kinuyo Tanaka, our heroine is Hiroko – a young woman working as a lawyer defending women against the cold and hard face of the law. Her family situation is, however, complicated. Her father having passed away, Hiroko’s sister Michiko (Michiko Kuwano who sadly passed away during shooting after collapsing on set) married the prosecutor Kono (Kappei Matsumoto) who financially supported Hiroko so that she might become the lawyer she is today. Meanwhile, Kono is also responsible for the arrest and incarceration of Hiroko’s fiancé Yamaoka (Shin Tokudaiji), a liberal intellectual. The political situation having changed, Yamaoka is to be released from prison after five years but is now in extremely poor health. Hiroko intends to return to him, resume their former relationship and marry once his health recovers. This is anathema to Kono who still objects to his liberalist views and views himself as having a hold over Hiroko’s future as the head of her family and in having supported her financially.

Financial support is a cornerstone if not the full foundation of Kono’s position of entitled superiority over Hiroko and her family. Despite the melodramatic underpinning of the case at hand, the real questions are the ones defining the direction of the post-war world in pitting the feudal values of “duty” and “womanliness” against a modernising liberality that prizes freedom and equality above hierarchy and obligation.

Kono, perhaps to his credit, does not appear object to the idea of female lawyers and has indeed facilitated Hiroko’s rise to just such as position but otherwise affirms that “a woman’s duty is easy. All that is required of her is self-sacrifice”. The idea of “self-sacrifice” is one which is brought up in the closing speeches of the trial in which Hiroko makes an impassioned plea in the case of a mother, Moto (Mitsuko Miura), who, mad with grief, held her baby too closely and may have suffocated it. Kono’s argument is that Moto’s transgression is against nature and the social order, that she has “failed” as a woman in rejecting her maternity by murdering her child. He rejects the “extenuating circumstances” of her grief and desperation by painting her “crime” as a selfish one in choosing to save her own life rather than sacrifice herself on her child’s behalf. Insisting that she has “disgraced the morals of women”, Kono requests she be punished severely as an example to the others.

In refuting Kono’s argument, Hiroko not only restates the extenuating circumstances of the intense strain on Moto’s mental health but attacks his entire way of thinking in positioning “motherhood” as the primary female “duty”. She does not deny that there have been many wonderful stories of women who valiantly sacrificed their own lives for their families, but reminds the court that these stories have often been misused as a kind of propaganda in service of female oppression, that under the feudal system which militarists prized so highly women were little more than slaves to men with no rights or agency. Further more, she points to the corruption of the hierarchical society which has left Moto in such a difficult position following her husband’s early death as a result of an accident at the factory for which the factory paid but only until the end of the war at which time he was cruelly cast away like so many of his generation who had perhaps been similarly exploited to serve a similar idea of “duty” only this time to the state. Kono blames Moto, insisting that her “crime” occurred because her character is “weak”. Hiroko does not blame Moto at all but the society which placed her in such an impossible position and has all but broken her spirit.

The argument is between a fair and just society in which the law exists for the protection of the people, and an austere and cruel one in which the law exists to oppress and tyrannise. Kono, an arch and unreconstructed militarist, believes in the primacy of the law. He is rigid and uncompromising, branding Hiroko’s summation as “sentimental” and “romantic”, dismissing an “irrational” woman’s logic from his elevated position on the podium. As others point out to him, his way of thinking is outdated and his tendency towards an entitled assumption that it will eventually prevail through being the proper order of things is extremely misguided yet he clings fiercely to feudalistic values which have ensured power remains in the hands of people like him since time immemorial, uncompromising to the last.

Rather than focus on Moto and her trial, Mizoguchi and his scriptwriters Kogo Noda and Kaneto Shindo, return to the realms of melodrama in shifting into the domestic as Hiroko’s older sister Michiko struggles between the feudal duty to her husband (however much she appears to dislike him) and her love for her sister whose modern liberal way of thinking still strikes her as immoral. Michiko, it seems, was forced to sacrifice herself for her family in marrying Kono for financial support. The sisters’ mother, now committed to Hiroko’s way of thinking, willingly married her daughter off telling her never to return believing it to be the proper way of things. Having suffered so long in service of an ideal no longer current, Michiko gradually comes to the realisation that she now has a choice – she does not have to stay with a husband who she does not love and does not love her, she is free to leave him and live as a full and independent woman if that is her individual will.

Nevertheless, the slightly awkward framing perhaps casts the choices of Hiroko and her sister as being defined by their respective men – Hiroko swept along by Yamaoka’s socialist politics and Michiko by her husband’s conservatism. Both men are in different senses problematic – Yamaoka vindictive and unsympathetic to Michiko’s attempts to make peace, no more forgiving than Kono while also patronising in his last impassioned speech which places such great responsibility in Hiroko’s “tiny hands”. Nevertheless, Hiroko’s clearsighted fight not only for her own freedom but for a fairer, more compassionate society founded on the idea of a literal social justice in which the law exists in service of its people rather than to oppress them is remarkably forward thinking, moving beyond “propaganda” for the new regime to the better world so often envisaged by the post-war humanists.

Marriage (結婚, Keisuke Kinoshita, 1947)

February 24, 2019by Hayley ScanlonLeave a comment

Generally speaking, the heroes in the world of Keisuke Kinoshita are those who stick steadfastly to their principles and refuse to become corrupted by the world around them. This is all very well but perhaps somewhat idealistic given the pressures of the post-war world. 1947’s Marriage (結婚, Kekkon) finds the director working with scriptwriter Kaneto Shindo whose view of humanity was perhaps a little more pragmatic than Kinoshita’s and therefore recasts his heroes as essentially good people who eventually come to the conclusion that their moral rigidity is causing more unhappiness than compromise might and that an acceptance of complicity may in fact be the only possible way forward.

Fumie (Kinuyo Tanaka) became engaged to Sugawara (Ken Uehara) before he went away to war and the couple have been waiting to marry ever since. Though Sugawara returned promptly, unharmed, and seems to be in regular employment, they have been unable to formalise their union because Fumie and her sister are the only members of her family currently working which means that they cannot do without her paycheck. Things begin to look up when Fumie’s father Kohei (Eijiro Tono), formerly an accountant who lost his job when his previous employer went bust, runs into an acquaintance who’s now the owner of a successful restaurant. Shimamoto (Eitaro Ozawa) promises him a job which has the family overjoyed, not least Fumie who may now finally be able to marry, but their happiness is to be short lived. Kohei realises that Shimamoto’s business is built on underhanded practices intertwined with black market profiteering and wants no part of it. The two men argue. Kohei refuses the job and storms out. Fumie is back to square one.

Though Sugawara reiterates that he understands the demands of the situation they find themselves in and will wait as long as is necessary, he too is under pressure from his family to bring the matter to a suitable conclusion. Sugawara’s mother is in poor health and wants to see him settled before she goes. She understands that he has someone in mind, but would rather he marry as soon as possible even if that means marrying someone else entirely – for example, a lovely girl from the village whose omiai photo his aunt has helpfully delivered. Sugawara bears all of this with good grace, but stands firm in insisting he will wait for Fumie even if that means he never marries at all.

The dilemmas are two fold and occur across two generations. Fumie finds herself torn between a duty to her family who are now almost entirely dependent on her as a breadwinner, and her romantic desire to become Sugawara’s wife – a promise made before the war which the post-war world conspires to make impossible. Despite their dire circumstances, the Matsukawas are a happy family doing their best to muddle through though there is obvious tension between teenage son Kei (Shozo Suzuki) and his father over Kohei’s rigid refusal to compromise himself as the times seem to demand. Kinoshita captures the atmosphere of a precarious household with easy confidence, an icy silence descending as Kohei returns with a face like thunder making plain that his job opportunity has not worked out as planned. Everyone is upset and disappointed, but no one has the energy for an argument and so silence is all there is.

Fumie becomes ever more conflicted, especially after a strained meeting with Sugawara’s aunt who seems nice enough but drops a few hints about the girl waiting in the country and Sugawara’s sickly mother. She begins to wonder if her romantic dreams are selfish in a world so wracked with ruin that it seems unlikely that she will ever be in a position to marry. Perhaps it would be more responsible, or just less painful, to end things with Sugawara for good so that he at least can move on. As things stand, the couple only have their Sundays which are endlessly prolonged with additional activities to put off the time that they must part as long as possible. The destabilising visit from the aunt is followed by an awkward, almost celebratory dinner in which sake pushes difficult emotions to the fore. Fumie vacillates, unable to dance she eventually decides to give things a go, affirming that she will simply hold onto and follow Sugawara – seemingly unaware of the wider implications of her statement. During the dance, however, in which she is literally swept off her feet, she changes her mind again, shamed by her brief moment of joy into feeling selfish and self involved as if all those around her suffer in service of her eventual romantic fulfilment.

Where Kinoshita might have introduced a deus ex machina in which the Matsukawas would be the beneficiaries of divine reward for their selfless goodness, Shindo makes way for a more realistic (though perhaps equally melodramatic) solution in which Kohei reassumes his role of the head of the family and chooses his daughter’s happiness over his principles. As such he recognises that he must make the sacrifice that will save them all in abandoning moral righteousness and becoming complicit with the murkiness of the world in which he lives. Pragmatism, this time, wins out but only as a lesser evil in which a compromise is made in the favour of happiness which might, in a round about way, produce a greater change in an already unhappy world.

Titles and opening (no subtitles)

The Garden of Women (女の園, Keisuke Kinoshita, 1954)

January 18, 2019by Hayley Scanlon1 Comment

Things changed after the war, but not as much as some might have hoped. Sadly still topical, Keisuke Kinoshita’s Garden of Women (女の園, Onna no Sono) takes aim both at persistent and oppressive patriarchal social structures and at a compromised educational system which, intentionally or otherwise, systematically stifles attempts at progressive social change. A short few years before student protests would plunge education into crisis, Kinoshita’s film asks why it is that the establishment finds itself in conflict with the prevailing moods of the time and discovers that youth intends to have its brighter future even if it has to fight for it all the way.

The setting is an exclusive private woman’s university in the elegant historical city of Kyoto. The ladies who attend this establishment are mostly from very wealthy families who have decided to educate their daughters at the college precisely because of its image of properness. As one student will later put it, there are two kinds of girls at the school – those who genuinely want to study in order to make an independent life for themselves and intend to look for work after graduation, and those who are merely adding to their accomplishments in order to hook a better class of husband. Everyone, however, is subject to a stringent set of rules which revolves around the formation of the ideal Japanese woman through strictly enforced “moral education” which runs to opening the girls’ private letters and informing their families of any “untoward” content, and requiring that permission be sought should the girls wish to attend “dances” or anything of that nature.

As might be expected, not all of the girls are fully compliant even if they superficially conform to the school’s rigid social code. Scolded for her “gaudy” hair ribbon on the first day of school, Tomiko (Keiko Kishi) rolls her eyes at the over the top regulations and enlists the aid of the other girls to cover for her when she stays out late with friends but her resistance is only passive and she has no real ideological objection towards the ethos of the school other than annoyance in being inconvenienced. Tomiko is therefore mildly irritated by the presence of the melancholy Yoshie (Hideko Takamine). Three years older, she’s come to college late and is struggling to keep up with classes but is, ironically enough, prevented from studying by the same school rules which insist she go to bed early.

Meanwhile, dorm mate Akiko (Yoshiko Kuga), from an extraordinarily wealthy and well connected family, is becoming increasingly opposed to the oppressive atmosphere at the school. However, as another already politically active student points out, Akiko’s background means there are absolutely no stakes for her in this fight. She has never suffered, and likely never will, because she always has been and always will be protected by her privilege. Fumie (Kazuko Yamamoto), a hardline socialist, doubts Akiko’s commitment to the cause, worrying that in the end she is only staging a minor protest against her family and will eventually drift away back to her world of ski lodges and summer houses. Despite her ardour, Akiko finds it hard to entirely dispute Fumie’s reasoning and is at constant battle with herself over her true feelings about the state of the modern world as it relates to herself individually and for women in general.

This is certainly a fiercely patriarchal society. Even though these women are in higher education, they are mostly there to perfect the feminine arts which are, in the main, domestic. They are not being prepared for the world of work or to become influential people in their own right, but merely to support husbands and sons as pillars of the rapidly declining social order that those who sent them there are desperate to preserve. For many of the girls, however, times are changing though more for some than others. Tomiko rolls her eyes and does as she pleases, within reason, and even if she eventually wants to see things change at the school it is mostly for her own benefit. She sees no sense in Akiko’s desire for reform as a stepping stone to wider social change, and perhaps even fears the kinds of changes that Akiko and Fumie are seeking.

Akiko and Fumie, and to an extent, Tomiko, seem to have a degree of agency that others do not as seen in the tragic story of Yoshie whose life has been largely ruined thanks to the selfish and heartless actions of her father. From a comparatively less wealthy family, Yoshie worked in a bank for three years during which time she met and fell in love with an earnest young man named Shimoda (Takahiro Tamura). However, her father, having become moderately successful, developed an appetite for social climbing and is determined she marry “well” to increase his own sense of superiority as a fully fledged member of the middle classes. He sees his daughter as nothing more than a tool or extension of himself and cares nothing for her thoughts or feelings. In order to resist his demands for an arranged marriage, Yoshie enrolled in school and is desperate to stay long enough for Shimoda to finish his education so they can marry.

Yoshie is trapped at every turn – she cannot rely on her family, she cannot simply leave them, she cannot yet marry, if she leaves the school she will be reliant on a man who effectively intends to sell her, but her life here is miserable and there is no one who can help her. All she receives from the educational establishment is censure and the instruction to buck up or get kicked out. She feels herself a burden to the other girls who regard her as dim and out of place thanks to their relatively minor age gap and cannot fully comprehend her sense of anxiety and frustration.

Finally standing up to the uncomfortably fascistic school board the girls band together to demand freedoms both academic and social, insisting that there can be no education without liberty, but the old ways die hard as they discover most care only for appearances, neatly shifting the blame onto others in order to support their cause. “Why must we suffer so?” Yoshie decries at a particularly low point as she laments her impossible circumstances. Why indeed. The oppressive stricture of the old regime may eventually cause its demise but it intends to fight back by doubling down and the fight for freedom will be a long one even if youth intends to stand firm.

Titles and opening scene (no subtitles)

The Portrait (肖像, Keisuke Kinoshita, 1948)

September 6, 2018by Hayley ScanlonLeave a comment

The immediate post-war period was one of fear and hardship. You might survive, but you might not like the person you’ll have to become in order to do so. The (unexpected) heroine of Keisuke Kinoshita’s The Portrait (肖像, Shozo) thought she’d made her peace with her choices, only to be confronted by a vision of her essential self as seen through the eyes of a cheerfully innocent artist. Despite the harshness of the times, there are those who’ve learned to be happy in their lot, but is their talent for happiness inspiration or irritation for those who’ve chosen a different path?

Kinoshita opens with a comic scene in which two shady real estate brokers take a look at a local property. Deciding it’s overpriced and impractical, the pair nevertheless decide to buy it together with the intention of flipping it once they convert the downstairs workspace into more practical living accommodation. There is, however, a slight hitch in that there are sitting tenants – a painter and his family who live in the room upstairs and use the rooms below as a studio. Thinking it will be easy enough to evict them, the men aren’t bothered but the the family are all so relentlessly nice that no one has yet been able to tell them to go. As a last resort, one of the men, Kaneko (Eitaro Ozawa), decides to move into the upstairs with his mistress, Midori (Kuniko Igawa), in the hope that the family will feel so awkward and in the way they will decide to vacate. Innocent and unworldly, the Nomuras all assume Midori is her lover’s daughter rather than his mistress, and start treating her like a well to do young lady. Such sudden and unexpected respect starts to weigh on Midori’s mind as she finds herself playing along, pretending to be “nice” and “respectable” while knowing that the life she’s living is anything but.

The problem is that the Nomuras are so essentially kind and welcoming that they really don’t mind sharing the house. Mr. Nomura (Ichiro Sugai), the middle-aged painter, feels guilty that he doesn’t earn more money and is too poor to move, but he’s also the sort to get over excited about having grown a giant pumpkin that he can’t resist showing to absolutely everyone. As it turns out the Nomuras are also living with a private tragedy – their eldest son Ichiro (Toru Abe) whose wife Kumiko (Kuniko Miyake) and son Koichi also live with the family has not yet returned home from the war and his whereabouts are unknown. Still, they don’t mind talking about it and are as happy as they can be, dancing away under the light of the moon – an unexpected upside to constant power outages. Meanwhile, Kaneko complains loudly as he attempts to finish his accounts in the evening gloom.

Midori half envies, half resents her new neighbours. The longer she lives with the Nomuras the guiltier she starts to feel in deceiving them. Matters begin to come to a head when Mr. Nomura asks permission to paint her portrait. He thinks Midori has a very “interesting” face, in part because he can see a sadness in her eyes that is totally absent in those of his daughter, Yoko (Yoko Katsuragi). Midori agrees and swaps her usual Western attire for the kimono her mother once gave her, but the picture Mr. Nomura paints begins to bother her. The portrait is of a pure young woman, innocent and honest, which is about as far from the way she sees herself as it’s possible to be.

As a friend of Midori’s puts it, you have to survive somehow and Midori thought she’d made her peace with the way she has decided to live but the portrait reminds her that she wasn’t always like this and now she’s not sure which version of herself she ought to despise. She wishes she could paint herself over, but feels her fate is sealed and there’s no way back. Kumiko, a little more worldly wise than her in-laws, is perfectly aware of what’s been going on upstairs but isn’t at all bothered by it. She doesn’t blame Midori for the choices that she’s made and thinks the picture is accurate in capturing her true soul, advising her that it is possible to be that woman again if that’s what she really wants.

The Portrait was scripted by none other than Akira Kurosawa whose belief in the essential goodness of humanity was perhaps not quite as strong as Kinoshita’s but the Nomuras are nevertheless typical Kinoshita heroes and it’s their unguarded warmth and kindness which begins to change the world for those around them. Even the cynical Kaneko is eventually moved by their cheerful selflessness, forced to accept their accidental moral victory rather than continue with his nefarious plan. Midori, forced into a reconsideration of herself, stands in for a generation attempting to make peace with the compromises of the past, learning that they don’t need to define the future and that it isn’t too late to strive for a more authentic life of simple happiness even if you feel you may have already sunk too far.

The Nomuras dancing in the moonlight

The Snow Flurry (風花, Keisuke Kinoshita, 1959)

August 11, 2018by Hayley ScanlonLeave a comment

Studies of the post-war world have often made the cities their home. Filled with the starving, the ruined, and the hopeless, the cities of post-war Japan were places of defeat but also of perseverance as a betrayed generation struggled to survive in whatever way they could. Generally speaking, the rural countryside seems to fare better, coping only with the absence of lost sons and lonely daughters as life goes on much as it always has. Nevertheless things are changing even here. Recalling the subversion of his earlier Army, Keisuke Kinoshita’s The Snow Flurry (風花, Kazahana) employs a complex non-linear structure to examine the various ways in which the past continues to inform the future, trapping post-war youth in the same way their parents were trapped not only with a legacy of wartime rigour but with the weight of the feudal world pressing down upon them as they struggle to escape the authority of the generation by whom they have been betrayed.

We begin with the conventional “happy ending”. A middle-aged woman looks on with genuine happiness as a younger one leaves in a bridal outfit before running off to look for her son, Suteo (Yusuke Kawazu), who has run off towards the river with dark thoughts clouding his mind. Stepping back a little, we are told that 19 years previously Suteo’s mother, Haruko (Keiko Kishi), attempted double suicide with his father, Hideo (Masanao Kawakane) – the son of the local lords. Hideo, fearing that he would soon be sent away to war and knowing that his noble family would never approve of the woman he loved, felt death was his only solution but while his attempt succeeded, Haruko’s did not. Surviving she gave birth to a child and was eventually taken in by Hideo’s family, the Naguras, but only to avoid the gossip in town that their heartlessness was the cause of their son’s death. Haruko and Suteo, rather than living in the main house with the other family members, occupy a small shed to the side of the property and are treated as a maid and farm hand respectively. The only member of the family to treat them kindly is the grand-daughter, Sakura (Yoshiko Kuga), who is a little older than Suteo and remains unmarried at 25 while her grandmother insists on finding a wealthy man willing to marry into the family and save it from dying out altogether.

Though the main action takes place in 1959, not much has changed in the village and the eventual arrival of modern cars belonging to Sakura’s prospective suitors proves jarring in more ways than one. The Naguras, once the feudal landlords, have been greatly reduced in status thanks to the post-war agricultural reforms which limited the amount of land which could be held by one family to that which they could reasonably farm themselves. This obviously means that their income has sharply decreased which, coupled with the patriarch’s profligacy, makes their present way of life untenable unless they can find a wealthy man to marry into the family and re-inject it with cash while they figure out how to make money by farming their own land. Sadly, this will be hard because the Naguras are terrible people with a bad reputation thanks not only to their unpleasant personalities but the lingering stigma of Hideo’s death and the continuing existence of Suteo.

Nagura (Yasushi Nagata), a hard man, rejected his son’s remains out of shame for his “cowardice” in refusing to die bravely for the emperor. When Suteo is born in 1941, he takes it upon himself to register the child’s birth name without consulting the mother, insisting that the child is neither hers nor his but belongs to the nation and will be expected to sacrifice himself in his father’s place to make up for Hideo’s failure of duty. “Suteo” itself means “abandoned boy” and is hardly a warm legacy to leave to anyone let alone your own grandchild and the only offspring of your own late son.

Despite their reduced circumstances, the Naguras continue to behave like lords and are trapped within the feudal pre-war world, obsessed with status and position while those around them have entered the brave new era of promised equalities and modern possibility. Sakura, the only “legitimate” child of the last generation, is literally kept a prisoner by her hardline grandmother (Chieko Higashiyama) who has insisted on conferring various “accomplishments” such as traditional dance and learning to play the piano intended to hook an upperclass husband. Such things hardly matter now in the post-war world and any man who valued them is unlikely to make her very happy, but the Naguras care little for happiness and only for their own “good” name. Sakura wanted, like her friends, to go Tokyo for university but of course she couldn’t – her family wouldn’t even let her spend time with the other girls because there were boys around and they viewed even that as “improper” given her “position”. It’s no wonder that Sakura already feels as if her life will be “crushed by the weight of this house” and longs to leave it, as well as her cold and oppressive family, far behind her.

Suteo’s tragedy is the same has his mother’s, he has fallen in love with someone who can never be his because of outdated notions of social class and the unbreakable authority of the older generation. Sakura loves him too, though she hardly knew it until faced with her own dilemma and realises a marriage is the only way to escape her miserable existence even if she must sacrifice her feelings to do so. Despite all this lifelong suffering, grandma declares herself satisfied in having reasserted her noble status in marrying Sakura off to another prominent family, even if it is to a second son and no one could be persuaded to take on their family name. The Nagura family ends here and she gives her permission for the estates to be sold after she’s gone. All of this sacrifice in name of honour was, apparently, entirely pointless.

Employing a bold non-linear structure in which past and present inhabit the same space, Kinoshita mythologises his ordinary villagers through the repeated use of theatrical narration in the songs which accompany Sakura’s traditional dance, commenting on the action with a melancholy passivity. Trapped by circumstance and burdened by legacy, his protagonists are backed into corners with no way out other than to accept the paths before them. The future for Suteo lies in “abandonment” as he prepares to reject his cruel history and attempts to start again by walking bravely into the post-war world free of feudal oppression.

Original trailer (no subtitles)