Tag: Mantaro Ushio

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

Posted on by

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)

Posted on by

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)

Posted on by

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.

Disobedience (親不孝通り, Yasuzo Masumura, 1958)

Posted on by

After finding out his older sister has had an abortion after her lover tells her he has no interest in marriage, a college student vows revenge in Yasuzo Masumura’s Disobedience (親不孝通り, Oyafuko Dori). The film’s Japanese title translates as something like “lack of filial piety street” and refers to an area where youth congregates to misbehave, bringing shame on their families with their debauched behaviour. It’s into this world that the cynical hero attempts to drag the sheltered heroine as part of his revenge plot while she apparently decides to stick with him even after he raped her during a college camping trip.

It is though notable that neither of them have much parental input to begin with. Kaneko’s (Hitomi Nozoe) mother has died and we’re told that their father spends all his time with a mistress and never comes home leaving her in the care of older brother Shuichi (Eiji Funakoshi), a salaryman. It’s not exactly clear where Katsuya’s (Hiroshi Kawaguchi) mother is, only that she lives somewhere else and occasionally writes while he is technically in the care of his older sister Akie (Yoko Katsuragi) who works as a tailor in a boutique store selling western fashions. Akie had been carrying on an affair with Shuichi she assumed would lead to marriage and was initially happy about the pregnancy only to be blindsided by Shuichi’s reaction. When he tells her that he has no intention to marry, she realises that the relationship is at a dead end and that an abortion is her only real option given the situation.

The irony is that Katsuya resents Shuichi for failing to take responsibility as a man and vows to take revenge by doing the same thing to his sister and seeing how he likes that. Though Akie points out that it’s nothing to do with Kaneko and tries to stop him, Katsuya is hellbent on playing the cad to make a point. Of course, he may also resent Shuichi, an executive salaryman, precisely because of the position he is in. There has been an economic downturn and he’s having trouble securing a job for after his university graduation. Some companies have halted recruitment entirely and another of Katsuya’s friends has already been through 11 unsuccessful interviews. Other young men have taken to politics, protesting new authoritarian legislation and investing in socialism. Katsuya and friends find this to be disingenuous, assuming it’s just another shrewd move to get on the ladder by finding employment in government or unions. The salaryman dream is a fairly new post-war invention, but it seems to be dying already and Katsuya can’t even really see what his education was for. He tells Kaneko that he only studies well enough to pass so that he can get a good job and the point of life is to figure out how to make money. If he can’t do that, then his life is meaningless and futile. That might be why he spends his time scamming entitled Americans (the only people with money), beating them at bowling, and hanging out in jazz bars. Though the Occupation is long over, the film has a strong but subtle sense of anti-Americanism as symbolised by the aeroplane flying above as Katsuya rapes Kaneko out in the mountains. 

But for Kaneko the situation is not much different. The young women complain it’s even harder for them to secure employment. Katsuya dismisses Kaneko’s university education by calling it a bridal academy, though most of the women lament that marriage is the ultimate job and perhaps the point of university for them is meeting a husband, just as it’s securing employment for Katsuya. Later, when he confronts Shuichi, Katsuya describes Kaneko as damaged goods now that she’s no longer a virgin and is currently carrying a child for which he accepts no responsibility. That may be one reason that she decides to stick with her rapist, realising that her situation is now impossible given it may be difficult for her to marry someone else while supporting herself financially as a single woman is not yet a viable option. By pursuing a relationship with Katsuya, she reasserts control over the situation along with the narrative of what happened between them on the mountains. 

On learning the truth, however, she makes a different decision from Akie in declaring that she will drop out of university and move to Osaka to live with an aunt and raise the baby alone there, declaring that she has decided to go on loving Katsuya no matter what he might think about it. Kaneko’s decision prompts a reversal of Akie’s thinking too. Though she had decided to be independent, starting her own business rather than planning for marriage, she returns to Shuichi and suggests they should get back together. To her the idea of running her own business and being married seem incompatible. Chastened by this whole affair, Shuichi’s thinking seems to have reversed too, to the extent that he decides to marry Akie after all, while Katsuya also decides to accept responsibility and go to Osaka with Kaneko where they will marry and stay together forever. It’s a strange “happy” ending, though it’s difficult to see how these marriages could ever really be happy given the circumstances that led to them and the discordant music that strikes over an ironic Merry Christmas sign as the film comes to an end suggests they probably won’t be. Nevertheless, the ending reverses a lack of filial piety in the shift toward conservatism through heteronormative marriages and the formation of new families as Katsuya, at least, takes responsibility for his paternity and exits the nihilistic world of clubs, bars, and bowling alleys in which his friends remain trapped.

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

Posted on by

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.

Floating Weeds (浮草, Yasujiro Ozu, 1959)

Posted on by

An oft-repeated criticism of the work of Yasujiro Ozu is that it is all the same. The similarity of the English-language titles with their ubiquitous seasonality doesn’t help, but you have to admit there is some truth in it. On closer inspection, however, it becomes clear that Ozu was not so interested in uniformity or repetition as he was in dialogue with himself. Thus Late Spring becomes Late Autumn and the abandoned father a conflicted mother, the two boys of I Was Born But… who rejected their father’s descent into corporate lackydom become arch consumerists seceding from society until their parents give them a TV set in Good Morning. Ozu refrained from remarking on the repurposing of old plots for new dramas, but did expressly regard his 1959 Floating Weeds as a “remake” of the 1934 A Story of Floating Weeds updated to the present day and filmed in the, by then, classic Ozu style. 

As in the 1934 version, the action centres on the arrival of a theatrical troupe to a small town which they have not visited in some years, in this case 12. This time around, the troupe is a little more exulted, performing kabuki-style narrative theatre rather than rustic entertainment, but is subject to many of the same problems. Kihachi is now Komajuro (Ganjiro Nakamura), a much older man though cheerful and energetic. He has chosen this town because it is home to an old flame, Oyoshi (Haruko Sugimura), who is the mother of his adolescent son, Kiyoshi (Hiroshi Kawaguchi). Kiyoshi thinks that Komajuro is his mother’s brother and that his father is long dead. He recognises Komajuro right away and is pleased to see him, though they evidently have not met in many years. 

The 1934 version had revolved around Kihachi’s corrupted paternity in his shame regarding the stigma of being a travelling player. By 1959 that is simply no longer so much of an issue, but whereas the financial difficulties Kihachi’s troupe faced were partly a symptom of the depression and partly of their misfortunes, those of Komajuro take on a more melancholy quality because it is obvious that this is a way of life which is coming to an end. When Kihachi says he’s going to start over, it seems futile but he is still young enough to have a credible chance. Komajuro is already “old” and it’s clear that he will struggle to support himself as a travelling actor simply because it is no longer a viable occupation. 

Thus Komajuro’s story is less one of frustrated fatherhood than of melancholy resignation to the vagaries of a lifetime. “Life is an unknown course”, he tells Oyoshi, “the only constant is change”. Like Kihachi he doesn’t want his son to see the show, though perhaps more out of embarrassment. Kiyoshi complains that the character in his play is “unrealistic” because he doesn’t relate to the modern world. Komajuro objects but explains that he is “a character from another era”, making it plain that he is talking as much about himself. Komajuro is a man left behind by time and incapable of understanding the world in which he now lives which may be one reason he seems to hang on to an intense desire to save Kiyoshi from being affected by the stigma of being the son of a travelling actor even though that is no longer something he would need saving from. 

This slight disconnect, along with Gajiro Nakamura’s cheekily comical performance, adds to the genial comedy which characterised the majority of Ozu’s colour films though this one is admittedly slightly less colourful owing to being produced by Daiei as one of a handful of films made outside Ozu’s home studio of Shochiku. Komajuro becomes a tragicomic rather than purely tragic figure, a man suddenly realising he has become old and facing the decline of his patriarchal authority. Like Kihachi he turns violence on both his mistress, Sumiko (Machiko Kyo), and the young actress Kayo (Ayako Wakao) who has fallen for his son, but it’s futile and born of desperation. A more sympathetic figure than 1934’s Otaka, Sumiko seems to genuinely like Komajuro and is hurt as well as jealous and threatened by the existence of his “secret” family. Her petty revenge is taken in response to Komajuro’s bitter claim that his son “belongs to a higher race” moments after bringing up her past as a sex worker. Rather than a simple desire for chaos and upset, she intends to pull Kiyoshi down to her level through getting him to sleep with Kayo, but Kayo falls for him for real only to worry she is perhaps ruining his bright future. 

“One can’t suddenly show up out of nowhere and assert one’s parental authority,” Komajuro eventually realises. His hopes are dashed by Kiyoshi’s relationship with Kayo not because of her proximity to the world of the travelling actor, but because he fears it means that Kiyoshi is just like him, an irresponsible womaniser. He wanted to save Kiyoshi as a means of saving himself, pushing his son into a more respectable world he had been unable to enter. Kiyoshi, however, rejects his sacrifice, describing his parents as “selfish” for keeping the secret all this time only to drop a bombshell now. He complains he’s been fine these 20 years and does not want or need a father beyond the one he already thought to be dead. Rather than the nobility Komajuro’s of paternal sacrifice, the focus is pulled back towards the son and his filial responsibility to live up to it by becoming a fine and upstanding young man while Komajuro is once again exiled back to the moribund world of the travelling actor. 

Of course, the world of 1959 was very different to that of 1934. The economy was at last improving and consumerist pleasures were very much on the horizon, meaning that for many life was comfortable at last. Japan was at peace if not completely free of political strife which removes the constant anxiety felt by those trying to survive the mid-1930s. But Ozu himself was also 25 years older and had perhaps reached that sense of resignation with the world that allowed him to sigh and laugh where before he may have trembled with fear or rage. Komajuro is as he always was, a floating weed, a man without a home, but now perhaps one of many rootless wanderers off the post-war landscape.

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

Posted on by

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.

The Great White Tower (白い巨塔, Satsuo Yamamoto, 1966)

Posted on by

“It’s about the right thing to do, it’s about conscience, and Prof. Zaizen lacks conscience” according to a star witness at the conclusion of a medical malpractice trial in Satsuo Yamamoto’s adaptation of the novel by Toyoko Yamasaki, The Great White Tower (白い巨塔, Shiroi Kyoto). One of a series of films heavily critical of the medical system in the midst of rising economic prosperity, Yamamoto’s tense political drama presents the succession intrigue at a university hospital as an allegory for the nation as a whole implying that lingering feudalistic and authoritarian thinking has poisoned the contemporary society. 

This is in part reflected in the way in which major hospitals are often run as large family businesses where succession is a dynastic matter. In this case, however, the scene is a prominent university hospital in Osaka at which the head of the surgical department, Azuma (Eijiro Tono), is about to retire. Generally, one of his assistant professors would simply move up after being approved by a board comprised of other department heads but the problem is no one, and especially not Azuma, is particularly happy with the most likely candidate, Zaizen (Jiro Tamiya). The issue between them seems to be one of ambition and authority. Zaizen is regarded by all as an excellent doctor with a stellar track record but he is also cold and arrogant with no regard for departmental protocol all of which of course offends Azuma as does his background and person. The son of a country teacher, Zaizen prospered through the dedicated labour of his widowed mother along with family connections before marrying into the extraordinarily wealthy and influential Zaizen family who run a large obstetrics clinic. Consequently, he is free to pursue his interests and lacks the economic anxiety that might make another employee wary of pushing his luck. 

His humble background might have placed a chip on Zaizen’s shoulder but it’s also clear he’s part of a new generation that does things differently from the last, apparently keen to build a public media brand appearing in a glossy magazine which brands him “the magic scalpel” thanks to his success in treating pancreatic cancer. While they might not be able to argue with his track record, other doctors worry that Zaizen has developed a god complex and is slapdash with his practice often timing his operations and smugly pleased with himself when hitting a new record. Azuma first picks him up on this in the case of elderly patient, questioning his treatment decisions in accusing him of neglecting to fully consider the patient’s post-op wellbeing. This then becomes something of a recurring theme as good doctor Satomi (Takahiro Tamura) is minded to bring Zaizen in on the tricky case of a man, Sasaki (Nobuo Minamikata), he suspects may have pancreatic cancer but has been repeatedly diagnosed with chronic gastritis. 

Though it’s political intrigue that in some senses leads him to Zaizen, Satomi is otherwise depicted as the responsible physician who deeply cares for his patients’ wellbeing and not much at all for interoffice politics. Thus he continues to investigate Sasaki’s case even when other doctors tell him he’s wasting too much time on one patient and should just leave it at gastritis. Zaizen, meanwhile, is the exact opposite taking one look at the X-rays and deciding it is pancreatic cancer after all but thereafter ignoring Satomi’s advice after taking over the case refusing to run a CT scan to verify that the cancer hasn’t spread to the lungs as Satomi fears it might have. 

For Zaizen Sasaki ceases to matter, to him the human body is no different to a machine and he perhaps more engineer than doctor even as he proclaims medicine more art than science in insisting that he just knows the early signs of pancreatic cancer while others are unable to detect them. After the first operation we see him perform, a grateful wife stops to thank him profusely for saving her husband’s life though he treats her coldly and implies it’s all part of the job before going outside to celebrate his private glory in his record-breaking feat. It’s then a minor irony that he finds himself later slapped with a malpractice suit by Sasaki’s wife upset that he was unavailable as her husband was dying because he was preoccupied with the ongoing elections for Azuma’s successor.

The implication is that the dehumanisation of the health industry has reduced it to the status of any other company, the head doctors no better than ambitious salarymen whose lives are defined by their job titles. The various department heads eventually descend into factions with Azuma plumping for an external candidate, Kikukawa (Eiji Funakoshi), while others line up behind Zaizen or his internal rival Kasai (Koichi Ito). Influence is brokered largely by outright bribery or industry manipulation by external influential players including Zaizen’s wealthy father-in-law and a professor in Tokyo who can offer monetary perks, access to funding, and potential promotions to those willing to vote for their chosen candidate. The main argument against Zaizen is his bad character, yet the fact he has been carrying on an affair with a bar hostess is never used against him even as they prepare to smear a rival candidate with his mistress even suggesting they hire a hitman to take him out completely. Zaizen’s minions meanwhile make an ill-advised visit to Kikukawa to ask him to withdraw bizarrely stating the importance of maintaining “democracy” even as they themselves deliberately undermine it for their own gain.  

It’s this sense of feudalistic, fascistic authoritarian chumminess that Azuma’s daughter Saeko (Shiho Fujimura) later decries in asking her father why he did nothing to change such a destructive system while he himself had the power to do so the implication being that he saw no need because he continued benefit from it. Only she and Satomi present any kind of challenge to the hypocrisy that pervades the medical system but eventually discover that there is no place for integrity in the contemporary society. Zaizen miraculously falls upwards every time because his success is more expedient that his failure. Even the Tokyo professor brought in as an expert witness during the malpractice suit declares that Zaizen is unfit to be a physician because of his arrogance and total lack of human feeling but pulls back from testifying that he caused the death of his patient through negligence later explaining to a colleague that if a university professor were to be found guilty of malpractice it would undermine public faith in the medical system. 

If can’t they can’t have faith in the medical system, the very people who are supposed to care for them when they are most in need, how can they have faith in anything else? As the rather bleak conclusion makes clear, the entire system is rotten to the core and no longer has any place for idealists like Satomi who are continually pushed to the margins by those jockeying for power in this infinitely corrupt society defined by hierarchy and cronyism while ordinary people, like Sasaki, continue to pay the price. Just as in his opening sequence, Yamamoto takes a scalpel to the operations of the medical industry to expose the messy viscera below but ultimately can offer no real cure in the face of such an overwhelming systemic failure. 

Original trailer (no subtitles)

Odd Obsession (鍵, Kon Ichikawa, 1959)

Posted on by Leave a comment

odd-obsessionJunichiro Tanizaki is widely regarded as one of the major Japanese literary figures of the twentieth century with his work frequently adapted for the cinema screen. Those most familiar with Kon Ichikawa’s art house leaning pictures such as war films The Burmese Harp or Fires on the Plain might find it quite an odd proposition but in many ways, there could be no finer match for Tanizaki’s subversive, darkly comic critiques of the baser elements of human nature than the otherwise wry director. Odd Obsession (鍵, Kagi) may be a strange title for this adaptation of Tanizaki’s well known later work The Key, but then again “odd obsessions” is good way of describing the majority of Tanizaki’s career. A tale of destructive sexuality, the odd obsession here is not so much pleasure or even dominance but a misplaced hope of sexuality as salvation, that the sheer force of stimulation arising from desire can in some way be harnessed to stave off the inevitable even if it entails a kind of personal abstinence.

Our narrator for this sardonic tale is an ambitious young doctor, Kimura (Tatsuya Nakadai), who opens the film in an unusually meta fashion with a direct to camera address taking the form of a brief lecture on the decline of the human body (which begins at age ten and then gets progressively worse). Kimura reminds us that we too will grow old, but his warning is intended less to engender sympathy for the elderly patriarch who will become our secondary protagonist than it is to raise a grim spectre of the inescapability of death.

The story Kimura wants to tell us of a man who fought against senility centres on antiques expert and respected cultural critic Kenmochi (Ganjiro Nakamura). Advanced in years, Kenmochi is beginning to feel the darkness encroaching along with the desire to resist it through restored virility. For this reason, he’s been making regular appointments at Kimura’s clinic which he keeps secret from his wife who would be unhappy to know he’s been getting mysterious injections to help with his sex drive but which also come with a number of side effects including dangerously raising his blood pressure.

Eventually Ikuko (Machiko Kyo), Kenmochi’s slightly younger wife and mother of his grown up daughter Toshiko (Junko Kano), does indeed find out though what she does not appear to know is that Kenmochi has also been drugging her so that he can take photos of her naked body and enjoy his rights as her husband without her needing to be 100% present at the time. Kenmochi’s plan is to lure Kimura into having an affair with his wife so that the resultant jealousy will stimulate his system, staving off senility and other unwelcome effects of ageing. This would be strange enough on its own were it not that Kenmochi has also been trying to set up a marriage between Toshiko and Kimura who are already engaged in a discreet affair.

In contrast with the source material which takes the form of a number of diary entries providing differing perspectives on events, the film takes the point of view of the cynical and morally bankrupt doctor Kimura who feels himself above this “pathetic” old man with his sexual preoccupations and diminished prospects. As the narrator, Kimura evidently believes himself in control but Ichikawa is keen to play with our sense of the rules of storytelling to show him just how wrong he could be. Intrigue is everywhere. Kenmochi may think he’s using all around him in a clever game to prolong his own life but he’s entirely blind to a series of counter games which may be taking place behind his back.

Sex is quite literally a weapon – aimed at the heart of death. Kimura recounts a dream he sometimes has in which he is shot through the heart in an arid desert, only for this same scene to invade the mind of a paralysed Kenmochi on gazing at the naked body of his wife. The marriage of Kenmochi and Ikuko has apparently been a cold (and perhaps unhappy) one with Kenmochi berating his wife for remaining “priest’s daughter” all these years later, prudish and conventional. Nevertheless, Ikuko – the kimonoed figure of the traditional Japanese wife, subservient yet mysterious and melancholy, becomes the central pivot around which all the men turn, eclipsing her own daughter – a Westernised, sexually liberated young woman rendered undesirable in her very availability. Kimura is not quite the destructive interloper of Pasolini’s Theorem so much as he is a “key” used by Kenmochi to “unlock” a hidden capacity within himself but one which, as it turns out, opens many doors not all of them leading to intended, or expected, destinations.

Ichikawa continues with a more experimental approach than was his norm following the bold opening scene in which Kimura directly addresses the audience with a straight to camera monologue. A pointed symbolic sequence of a train coupling, freeze frames, dissolves and montages add to his alienated perspective as he adopts Kimura’s arch commentary on the ongoing disaster which is the extremely dysfunctional Kenmochi family home. Middle class and well to do, the Kenmochis’ lives are nevertheless empty – the house is mortgaged and the beautiful statues which taunt Kenmochi with their physical perfection have all already been sold though Kenmochi refuses to let the buyer take them home. Old age should burn and rave at close of day, but as the beautifully ironic ending makes plain it will be of little use, death is in the house wearing an all too familiar face which you will always fail to recognise.

Screened as part of the Japan Foundation Touring Film Programme 2017.

Opening scene (no subtitles)

Giants & Toys (巨人と玩具, Yasuzo Masumura, 1958)

Posted on by 2 Comments

91C6JzGDYTL._SL1500_

Less acerbic than Masumura’s later Black Test Car, Giants & Toys (巨人と玩具, Kyojin to gangu) is an altogether more humorous, if no less piercing look at post-war consumerism. This time the battle ground is confectionary as the Japanese sweets industry laments the all powerful American candies taking over the Japanese landscape. Three sweet companies are duking it out for the hearts of Japanese consumers and the hard working salarymen in the PR & marketing departments are becoming ever more desperate to find the key to becoming Japan’s top selling sweet maker.

The three companies are Giant, Apollo and World, each of which is currently trying to come up with an advertising campaign which has a competition element that will really hook in the populace. Our main focus is with World whose top PR man, Goda, is currently stumped when he spots quirky hillbilly Kyoko in a bar and hatches on an idea to make her the central poster girl of his ad campaign. Kyoko is 18 with gap teeth and a childlike innocence that makes her a great fit for selling their confectionary products to the adult market. At the same time, Goda’s assistant Nishi meets an older female executive from Apollo who’s trying to shift a set of spacesuits. This fits in neatly with another of Goda’s space themed ideas and a suitably bizarre campaign is launched with the gangly Kyoko dressed up in a kitsch spacesuit and pointing a ray gun which is somehow supposed to encourage people to buy sweets. Kyoko is a hit! However, the more popular Kyoko becomes the more her innocent charms begin to dissipate. What will become of her, and of the campaign, as the competition mounts?

For an area that’s supposed to be so totally frivolous and cheerful, confectionary sales are serious business. Goda is working himself into an early grave just to sell sweets to grownups and old people. It’s advertising and marketing but like everything else in life it’s just so much spin. What they’re really trying to sell is frivolous fun and a return to childhood’s freedom all packed into a momentary suck on a salted caramel. In the Japan where “everyone works all the time” this may be quite an attractive idea, especially to the put upon members of the confectionary marketing board.

However, trivial as sweets are, they represent the fleeting unimportance of pop culture memes. During one of Kyoko’s recording sessions we meet one of the solitary female producers (labelled a “machine” by two of the other women waiting to be seen) who laments that a has been star keeps hassling her for work though her time has passed and no one’s interested. This is most likely how things will wind up for Kyoko, five minutes of being everywhere followed by a lifetime of being nowhere at all. After signing with World for their TV and radio advertising she becomes a break out personality attending events as a celebrity in her own right and later even becoming a pop star complete with a totally strange, South Pacific themed musical number referencing some kind of cannibalistic genocide where they’ll sell back the remains of the men they’ve killed to the native wives. Pointed satire in more ways than one.

Goda wants to build a kind of mass media dictatorship, cleverly controlling the public mood through all pervasive advertising (a prescient thought, if ever there was one). Having taken things too far, he’s taken to task by his underling, Nishi, who’s had a bit of a rethink following a series of heartbreaks involving friends and lovers. “I won’t sacrifice my dignity” he says, only to be shown doing just that a couple of minutes later as he himself dons the ridiculously camp space suit, takes the ray gun in hand and wanders out into the streets to be met by a series of bemused stares from the passersby. Eventually, the woman from Apollo with whom he’d been having an affair spots him and with an equally amused expression instructs him to “smile warmly”, at which point he grimaces before managing to turn it into a robotic grin.

Still oddly current, Giants & Toys is an absurdist’s guide to corporate politics where personal integrity is sacrificed on the altar of commerce. Everyone runs round in circles working hard to sell things no one really wants or needs to other hardworking people just to keep the wheel spinning. “Kanban Musume” come and go, one ridiculous meme follows another and we all just fall over ourselves to chase whichever unattainable ideal they pitch us. It would be nice to think the world has moved on since 1958, however…

Giants & Toys is available on R1 DVD with English subtitles courtesy of Fantoma.

Trailer