Tag: Masao Shimizu

The Ball at the Anjo House (安城家の舞踏会, Kozaburo Yoshimura, 1947)

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“Old things die out so new things can be born,” according to the ruined patriarch of a once noble house in Kozaburo Yoshimura’s Chekhovian drama Ball at the Anjo House (安城家の舞踏会, Anjo-ke no butokai), though he might as well be speaking to the post-war society. The Anjos are like the declining aristocracy of the earlier 20th century mourning the disappearance of their world of privilege and gaiety and reflecting that they too must now, as younger daughter Atsuko (Setsuko Hara) says, learn to serve others.

Atsuko is really the only one who accepts the age of the aristocracy has passed and that it is only right and proper that they should join this newly egalitarian, democratic society. Her sister Akiko (Yumeko Aizome) has recently returned home after 12 years having left her husband because of his adultery, but cannot now face it that she no longer has a place here. Approached by their former chauffeur Toyama (Takashi Kanda) who has long carried a torch for her, Akiko snaps that she will always be a noblewoman in heart, unable to let go of outdated customs of class and propriety. She seems to have feelings for the chauffeur too, but won’t let herself embrace them, calling him “dirty” and resenting herself for her attraction to a man who is not her social equal. 

But times are very different now and the aristocracy has been abolished which has in all other senses dissolved the class barrier between them. The tables have turned and Toyama is now a wealthy man having done well for himself in business through honest hard work. Akiko asks him for help as a kind of symbolic gesture as if she were making recompense by handing the house to its rightful owner in their former servant. He insensitively tells patriarch Tadahiko (Osamu Takizawa) that he can easily spare a few thousand to throw away on the house as a sentimental gesture, but does so largely without malice. Only after Akiko has turned him down at the ball and he begins to drink does he start to crow, if a little sadly, that now this base and ugly servant has bought the master’s house. On his way out, he knocks over the suit of armour that had stood in the hall as if literally bringing down the feudalistic military legacy of this once great family and sending it crashing to the floor. The camera suddenly tilts to emphasise that this world is now out of kilter and has been destabilised beyond repair. It’s only this action that frees Akiko from her self-imposed repression as she skips over the armour and chases Toyama out the door. Tumbling down a sand dune she literally descends to his level leaving her pearls and shoes behind. 

The class barrier has been fully dissolved, and Tadahiko too permits himself to marry his long-term mistress, the geisha Chiyo (Chieko Murata), who declares that she doesn’t care about his loss of status and invites him to live with her if he has to sell his house. But it seems as if Tadahiko can’t let go of his ancestral legacy nor his childhood home. In truth, this Western-style country house by the sea can only have been built after the Meiji Restoration which means it’s under a hundred years old and most likely built by Tadahiko’s father, the gentleman in European-style military dress in the portrait. As such, it was likely constructed to look forward to a new era as the samurai class rebranded itself into a European-style aristocracy. Tadahiko’s older sister, married to a lord who’s faring better in this new world, tells an enraptured collection of younger women of the time she danced with a prince a year after the Russo-Japanese war when she was only 19. But this will be the last ball at the Anjo House, in memory of a “beautiful way of life” that has been now been eclipsed.  

Tadahiko had faith that they would be saved essentially through the good chap system in his relationship with a nouveau riche upstart named Shinkawa (Masao Shimizu). Shinkawa holds the mortgage on the house, and there are all sorts of rumours about his shady business. He made most of his money on the black market. Shinkawa had arranged a marriage between his daughter Yoko (Keiko Tsushima) and Tadahiko’s son Masahiko, which gave him even more confidence. But as Atsuko says, Shinkawa was only friendly with him because of his aristocratic title and now it’s gone he has nothing to offer. In marrying Yoko to Masahiko (Masayuki Mori), Shinkawa would have gained the legitimacy of a connection with nobility while Tadahiko would have gained an injection of cash that would save his social status. But none of that matters any more now that the aristocracy has been abolished under the post-war reforms that have also seen Tadahiko’s lands confiscated and estate broken up. It seems that Tadahiko let Shinkawa use his name for a munitions factory during the war, which might not play so well now, just as Akiko’s decision to part with her adulterous husband may also have been influenced by the fact that he was a general who is presumably little in demand in the wake of defeat. Still, Tadahiko prefers Shinkawa to letting the house go to a former servant like Toyama who must himself be enamoured enough with that old world to want to become master of it rather than tear it down.

For Masahiko’s part, he has little interest in marrying Yoko but on learning the engagement has been unilaterally called off and Shinkawa is little more than crook decides to rape Yoko to get back at him. His cruelty is a symptom of post-war nihilism, and we soon discover he’s been sleeping with a maid, Kiku (Akemi Sora), to whom he made promises of marriage he had no intention of keeping. But Like Akiko it seems as if he does care for her after all, only he won’t let himself feel anything in the numbness of his loss of privilege preferring instead to laugh too loudly with his boorish friends. Only on seeing the class barrier dissolve when his father marries Chiyo and his sister Akiko takes off after Toyama does he allow himself to embrace Kiku and express genuine emotion.

Masahiko is played by a young Masayuki Mori who was the son of the novelist Takeo Arishima. Arishima was also a member of the aristocracy but one who became a socialist and dissolved his estate which was something of a fashion in the 1920s. The situation is however complicated by the fact that the Anjos’ servants remain loyal and don’t want to leave them. After all, this is as much their home too and they don’t have anywhere to go either because a world with no masters has no need for servants. We too are encouraged to mourn this world, but its end is also presented as a kind of liberation in which the family are finally permitted to embrace their own desires only after casting off the shackles of the aristocracy and preparing to forge new futures in a changing world leaving the feudal past behind and waltzing into a new and brighter future.

That Guy and I (あいつと私, Ko Nakahira, 1961)

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Likely intended as a slightly silly student rom-com, Ko Nakahira’s That Guy and I (あいつと私, Aitsu to Watashi) captures a sense of the changing gender roles and sexual mores of the early 1960s, if through a very male and at times even middle-aged lens. Adapted from a serialised novel by Yojiro Ishizaka and set amid the ANPO protests of 1960, the film is narrated by its heroine, a very ordinary young woman from a typical, moderately wealthy middle-class family, as she struggles with her attraction to a fabulously wealthy young man who pretends to be a boor but is actually a nice guy and unexpected feminist.

One of a new generation of women attending university with a prospect of independence, Keiko’s (Izumi Ashikawa) horizons seem to be broadening. She’s not exactly conservative and openly jokes about sex and dating with her friends, but is quite settled with her life, not particularly wanting anything more than she already has. Her psychology tutor highlights the problem of social inequality in their school that she had already raised in her opening voiceover in remarking that the rich kids all have cars and can drive themselves to school, while others are having to work to support themselves while they study. When he asks how much pocket money they all get, some are outraged and keen to stress they don’t get any help at all, but Keiko reveals that her parents actually give her a healthy allowance. It’s just that she has no real urge to spend it, so it’s been mounting up quietly in a desk drawer in her childhood bedroom while she still lives at home close to the university.

Saburo (Yujiro Ishihara), by contrast, boasts that he gets more than some people’s monthly wage as an allowance from his mother and blows it on drink, gambling, strip clubs and sex workers. It’s this last point that scandalises the female students who are all shocked and disapproving, even going so far as to ask the teacher to throw Saburo out because they don’t feel comfortable sharing a space with a man like that. The teacher also says he’s disappointed and wishes Saburo hadn’t added the last bit, only for Saburo to call him a hypocrite because sex work was legal in his day and he simply doesn’t believe that he’s never paid for sex. Most of the other boys join in on Saburo’s side, insisting that no man sees any problem with visiting sex workers which they regard as a natural right because the male sex drive is driven by “uncontrollable forces”.

But then there’s something unexpected that occurs among the female students in that some of them are obviously attracted by this very rough form of masculinity. “I’d rather have a wild beast than a meek sheep,” one intones, but nevertheless goes to join the group of girls confronting Saburo at the pool in the hope of gaining an apology for the offence he caused them. They’ve since found out that he probably made it up anyway, which is ironic because he claimed he’d only spoken the truth when they asked him to leave, but that’s somehow even worse because it means he said it deliberately to upset them. The upshot of it all is that Saburo ends up in the pool and is then forced to borrow some of the girls’ clothes while his dry off, signalling his awkward positioning between traditional masculinity and femininity in that he’s otherwise surprisingly sympathetic of women and makes sure to look out for them but in a way that encourages their independence and is never patronising. 

That might, in one way, be because of his unusual upbringing which is far more modern and bohemian than Keiko’s and in the beginning, at least, quite confusing for her. Saburo’s mother Motoko (Yukiko Todoroki) is a famous entrepreneur with a beauty shop empire. She writes her name in Western order and uses katakana for her first name which makes look foreign and therefore exciting and sophisticated even though it obviously isn’t. It was Saburo’s mild-mannered father who gave up his career in insurance to raise him, while his mother apparently blows off steam through numerous affairs. His father occasionally gets upset about this and the pair go through a charade of him leaving her while she professes her love for him, which seems to have a sexual dimension in itself. Perhaps this has given Saburo an alternative view of romantic relationships, though we also later discover that he was subject to what we’d now see as a form of sexual abuse as a teenager when his mother got a young but still adult woman, Michiko (Misako Watanabe), to essentially give him practical lessons in sex and satisfy his teenage urges, only he thought it was an organic romantic relationship and feels more than anything else emotionally betrayed. 

But then again, the film has a very of its time and defiantly male view of rape which is dealt with in a fairly flippant manner. Keiko rings her mother to tell her she’s realised that the reason she didn’t like the idea of her being at the ANPO protests was because she feared she’d be raped, which is at any rate an odd conversation to be having. Her mother asks her what her virginity has to do with ANPO, which is a fair question, but also implies that it’s not so much the physical and psychological harm of sexual assault that bothers her mother but the shame of premarital sex. One of the girls who goes to the protest, Ayako (Shigako Shimegi), is actually raped by the two boys she went with who deliberately plied her with alcohol and took her to a hotel knowing that she trusted them, but her roommate, who had a crush on one of the boys, immediately turns against her. Sadako (Kazuko Yoshiyuki), the most political of the students, calls her a slut who parades herself in front of men and says Ayako must have led them on. Only Keiko takes her side, walking her to the bath and waiting outside for her while admitting that she has conflicted thoughts about Saburo. She throws things at him to shoo him away, feeling that his presence as a man is inappropriate and not wanting him to see Ayako in this moment of vulnerability, but also she admits to herself because she’d be jealous and doesn’t want him to see a naked woman that isn’t her.

Something similar happens when she finds out about Saburo’s past and is jealous and resentful of Michiko, irrationally angry with Saburo, and on another level protective of him knowing that happened when he was a teenager was wrong. After she runs out into the rain and the pair argue about it, Saburo forces a kiss on her which, again, Keiko seems like in a show of robust manliness. Saburo is though also protective and sympathetic towards Ayako, insisting that that the way for her to move past her rape is to ensure she becomes financially independent and successful so that she can see it as just something unpleasant that happened to her rather than something that ruined her life or makes her unworthy of another man’s love. He even helps her to do that by getting her a job at his mother’s company. 

Saburo’s mother Motoko, meanwhile, gives Keiko some frank advice in disclosing the secrets of her life and Saburo’s birth. Even when Saburo suddenly announces their engagement without actually asking her, Keiko does not merely swoon but reflects that she’s got to have a proper think before actually agreeing which she is still free to do or not. Nevertheless, the film seems to have hit on a contradiction in redefining masculinity as both tough and soft. Keiko is despite herself attracted to Saburo’s forcefulness, but also his chivalrous nature and awkward kindness, his fair-mindedness and care, and recognition of women as actual human beings with interior lives and a right to independence. Nakahira may be a little less surreal than usual, but leans heavily into absurdity, on the one hand acknowledging the somewhat superficial quality of these privileged students’ lives in having them confront a band of angry rural workers and half-heartedly take part in the ANPO demonstrations without much thought to what they’re for or what they mean, but, in the end, characterises them as merely ordinary, slightly lost amid the rapid changes of the post-war society but otherwise cheerful and looking ahead to a bright future stretching out in front of them.

Trailer (no subtitles)

School of the Holy Beast (聖獣学園, Norifumi Suzuki, 1974)

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“Why is sex wrong?” a rebel nun enquires, hinting at the hypocritical atmosphere of the convent which comes to stand in for the patriarchal superstructure of the contemporary society. That it does so might in a way be surprising given that Christianity has relatively little cultural relevance in Japan save its stance as a persecuted religion during the feudal era. Director Norifumi Suzuki jumps on the nunsploitation bandwagon but does so with a baroque romanticism mixed with punkish youthfulness as two young women find themselves rebels in the house of God.

They are both there for reasons largely unconnected to religion. 18-year-old Maya (Yumi Takigawa) is searching for the truth behind her birth and her mother’s death, while Sister Ishida (Emiko Yamauchi) claims she’s been sent there by a wicked stepmother. Ishida also kicks up a stink during a class by questioning the truth of immaculate conception which is quite odd for someone who wanted to become a nun, while otherwise punished for drinking whisky in the middle of the night. Punishment does seem to be the main thrust of their religious practice with the transgressions of “adultery”, which includes all impure thoughts, murder (!), and theft taken the most seriously. On her first night at the convent Maya is woken by the sound of another nun furiously whipping herself though in fairness there just isn’t much else to do. 

Suzuki rams home the erotisicm of ritual in the baptism Maya undergoes during her initiation as a nun in which she is totally nude and instructed to stand with her arms out as if on the cross in front of the altar. She must then bend to kiss the crucifix before receiving her veil as a bride of Christ. The nuns talk of lives of eternal virginity while burying themselves in asceticism in an effort to deny their natural desires but have to a degree sublimated their lust in violence. The most common form of punishment is whipping, while Maya is later tortured with thorns and artfully battered by roses. When one nun steals money in guilt for having abandoned her impoverished family to begin her spiritual journey to Christ, she confesses herself to a priest who offers her the same amount so that she can help her family and ease her conscience by returning it. But in reality the priest has tricked her. He resents that she feels as if her sin has been forgiven and she may forget her guilt, cruelly telling her that she will never hear the voice of God before going on to violate her. 

The act of betrayal, of himself breaking the code to which he should subscribe, is only a echo of an societal corruption which allows men to abuse their power often with the complicity of the women around them such as the abess who has long been in love with him. Kakinuma (Fumio Watanabe) is a man whose faith has been shaken. He bears the scars from exposure to the atomic bomb in Nagasaki which is centre of Christianity in Japan. After telling Hisako (Yayoi Watanabe) that God will not see her, he asks if anyone has actually seen him and why he does nothing when his people suffer. 

Both he and the abbess are trapped in a hell of their own making, though as the girls both say the convent is akin to a prison. When Hisako’s sister visits her they talk to each other through glass as if she were a prisoner, though in many ways she is oppressed by her own repressed desires while those of the other nuns have begun to drive them quietly out of their minds and into sadomasochistic fury. This peculiar madness is only deepened by the arrival of a new Mother Superior who returns from Europe insistent on rooting out “witches” in league with the devil. Suzuki signals the absurdity by playing a chorus of elation when a tortured nun wets herself over a tablet featuring a crucifix in the inversion of a bizarre Edo-era ritual designed to identify secret Christians who were at that point illegal. 

To break free of the covent and return to her liberated life in contemporary Japan as seen in the cheerful opening sequences of her date with Kenta (Hayato Tani), Maya must also free her mother’s ghost and the souls of her sisters by forcing Kakinuma to reckon with his crimes if in the most ironic of ways. Suzuki shoots with febrile romanticism, the pastel colours of the church lending it a hellish glow even before the resurrection of a ghost enacts karmic revenge in a feverish atmosphere of romantic jealously and masochistic repression.

Original trailer (no subtitles)

*Norifumi Suzuki’s name is actually “Noribumi” but he has become known as “Norifumi” to English-speaking audiences.

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

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

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

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

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

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

Original trailer (no subtitles)

The Wolves (狼, Kaneto Shindo, 1955)

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

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

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

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

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

Sanjuro (椿三十郎, Akira Kurosawa, 1962)

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Adapted from a novel by Shugoro Yamamoto, Akira Kurosawa’s Yojimbo had taken place in a world of collapse in which the foundations of the feudal order had begun to crack while the disruptive allure of hard currency had left ordinary people at the mercy of gang intimidation in place of exploitative lords. A quasi-sequel or perhaps more accurately termed a companion piece, Sanjuro (椿三十郎, Tsubaki Sanjuro) by contrast, takes place in a world that should be peaceful and orderly but suggests that the corruption was there all along and tolerated to the extent of being coded into the system. 

The accused man, Mutsuta (Yunosuke Ito), says as much at the film’s conclusion explaining that he meant to deal with the matter “more discreetly” after amassing incontrovertible evidence he could he could offer to his superiors in the capital if only his hot-headed nephew and the idealistic young samurai with him hadn’t jumped the gun by naively thinking they could expose conspiracy by force of will. This time around, the wandering ronin who gives his name as Sanjuro (Toshiro Mifune) finds himself adopting a fatherly position trying to convince the youngsters to think before they act. Overhearing their conversation, he explains to them that they have mostly likely been misled, Mutsuta is innocent and his attempt to warn them off well-meaning while the superintendent Kikui (Masao Shimizu) is the real villain and almost certainly intends to have the lot of them bumped off before they figure out what’s really going on. 

Unlike Yojimbo, Sanjuro takes place entirely within samurai society which ought to be an orderly place where everyone follows the same code and does their best to act honourably. This sense of stability is reflected in Kurosawa’s composition which leans closer to the classicism of the historical drama than the windswept vistas of the lonely ghost town in Yojimbo, and by the contrast so often drawn between the wandering ronin and the young samurai who are shocked by his rough way of speaking and wilful rejection of the politeness with which they have been raised. As a captured prisoner points out, Sanjuro has a sarcastic manner and a tendency to insult where he means to praise which further fuels the doubt some have in him, unsure whether they can really trust this “outspoken and eccentric” drifter fearing he will simply sell himself to the highest bidder and betray them. Mutsuta sympathises with this to some degree, forgiving the boys for having thought him a villain but lamenting that his long face has often got him into trouble. They thought he was the bad guy because he looked like one and trusted Kikui because he looked honest, laying bare the childish superficiality soon corrected by the well honed instincts of the veteran Sanjuro. 

It’s this superficiality that also leads them to dismiss the advice of Lady Mutsuta (Takako Irie) as “hopelessly naive” while only Sanjuro can see that she has a full grasp of the situation at hand and accepts her admonishment that he has the “bad habit” of killing too easily when another solution may be available. When the boys catch one of Kikui’s henchmen they suggest killing him because he’s seen their faces, but Lady Mutsuta decides to invite him into their home, assuring him he won’t be harmed and even giving him one of their fancy kimonos to wear. The man seems to have been won over by their hospitality, sometimes emerging from the cupboard where he is (voluntarily) imprisoned to offer a word of advice along with a defence of Sanjuro having observed him and figured out that he is a good man with an admittedly gruff manner that makes him a bad fit for conventional samurai society. “He would find it too confining here,” Mutsuta agrees, “he wouldn’t wear these fine garments or be a docile servant of the clan.”

In any case, the film doesn’t particularly reject samurai society only suggest that if you’re going to live within it you should follow the rules and if you can’t you should follow your own path as Sanjuro has been doing in a sense “freed” by his ronin status serving no master but himself. Lady Mutsuta had a point when she said that he glistened like a drawn sword, something he too concedes after facing off against his final foe, Heibei (Tatsuya Nakadai), whom he describes as much like himself another drawn sword in a society in which direct violence is inappropriate as the explosive spray of blood on Heibei’s all too matter of fact defeat makes plain. “The sword is best kept in its sheath” she reminds him, she and her husband both suggesting that this world is ruled by intrigue which is why Mutsuta hoped to handle the corruption “discreetly” though he won’t condemn the young men for their desire to enforce the rules of their society and stand up against corruption and injustice. Their rebellion has accidentally led to unnecessary deaths because of their youthful hot-headedness and tendency towards the simplistic solution of violence, but all things considered it has worked out well enough for all concerned. And so, his work done, Sanjuro is left to wander telling the boys not to follow him because he too is a disruptive and dangerous a presence in this codified world of peace and order in which a sword loses its value the moment it is drawn.

Sanjuro screened at the BFI Southbank, London as part of the Kurosawa season.

Original trailer (English subtitles)

I Live in Fear (生きものの記録, Akira Kurosawa, 1955)

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Which of us is “crazy”, the man who lives in fear or the rest of us who live in its denial? By 1955, a decade had passed since the bombs fell on Hiroshima and Nagasaki, but even if the world seemed “peaceful” it was only superficial. The Korean War had “ended” in an uneasy truce only two years earlier and the world was already mired in a cold war which daily threatened to turn hot with both sides in possession of a nuclear deterrent. Akira Kurosawa’s I Live in Fear (生きものの記録, Ikimono no Kiroku) asks us if we can really say a man is “insane” if his life is ruled by a rational anxiety and if it is our refusal to accept the threat he sees which eventually drives him out of his mind. 

Our guide is gentle dentist Harada (Takashi Shimura) who has a sideline as a mediator at the family court. The case he has been called in on one particular afternoon is that of the Nakajima family which is attempting to have the ageing patriarch, Kiichi (a near unrecognisable Toshiro Mifune), declared legally incompetent on account of his increasing paranoia about nuclear attack and latent radioactivity. A wealthy self-made man and foundry owner, Kiichi has frittered away vast sums on harebrained schemes to keep himself and his family safe but after a plan to build a bunker in a remote area had to be abandoned, he’s set his heart on moving everyone to Brazil where he believes they will be safer. 

The problem is partly one of changing times as Kiichi, “despotic and selfish” as his son describes him, attempts to railroad his family into a safety they do not want or need. His two legitimate sons now operate the foundry and their lives are dependent on it, which is not to say that they are dependent on Kiichi, but if he goes through with selling the the foundry to finance his new life it will leave them all high and dry. It would be, to a certain way of thinking, the ultimate paternal betrayal but in Kiichi’s mind all he’s trying to do is “save” his family from an invisible threat. 

That family, meanwhile, is one he’s already undermined through patriarchal selfishness in fathering a series of illegitimate children he is also supporting financially but has never legally acknowledged. The parents of the illegitimate kids are worried that if the family succeeds in having Kiichi declared legally incompetent, his wife will get her hands on the purse strings and they’ll be left out in the cold. Kiichi, meanwhile, has an old-fashioned view of filial relations and never considers that the other kids might not want to come with him either even if it’s unexpectedly nice of him to include them, or that inviting your two mistresses to live in the same house as your legal wife might be awkward for all concerned. 

On the face of it, the case is open and shut. If a man causes his family to suffer through frittering money away on drink or pachinko, they would approve the motion to give another family member legal control over his finances. So why is it taking them so long to decide if Kiichi is a liability to his family or not? The problem is, his fear is entirely rational. It’s only its extent which is the problem. It’s perfectly understandable to be afraid of the ebola virus or brain-eating amoeba, but we can’t afford to spend every minute of every day consumed by fear and so they retreat into the background anxiety of our lives while we try to go on living. Yet, could it be that Kiichi has it right and we’re merely living in denial, sleepwalking into a preventable disaster while he alone has a plan for survival? 

“No place is safe” Kiichi’s son-in-law exasperatedly explains to him after he has taken drastic and somewhat ironic action, a kind of scorched earth policy designed to force his sons to follow him into a new world of safety. Pushed over the edge, Kiichi gets a rude awakening, realising that it was perhaps selfish of him only to think of salvation for his immediate family when his actions will essentially throw his workforce under the bus. Belatedly, he promises to find a way to take them to Brazil too, never realising that people have their own lives that aren’t so easily uprooted. He thinks Brazil is safer because the currents of the world seem to blow ill winds over Japan, but there are already more than enough nuclear bombs lying in warehouses to destroy the planet several times over. 

In any case, Kiichi has already destroyed his family through his various transgressions. They don’t want to go in part because they don’t particularly like him, are sick of his gruff authoritarianism, and resent his tendency to make unilateral decisions on their behalf. Strapped for cash he tries asking the illegitimate kids to return some of the money he gave them, but they too are insecure in their positions and cannot trust that they will continue to be provided for if Kiichi is deposed. Meanwhile, when Kiichi falls ill the legitimate children are only too quick to start discussing the inheritance in the absence of a will. Perhaps Kiichi isn’t much more to them than a walking wallet, all of which lends a rather poignant quality to his continual attempts to protect his family from the nuclear apocalypse in fulfilment of his fatherly duty even as he wagers their economic security to do so. 

If Kiichi is a Cassandra prophesying the end of the world, we won’t be here to be sorry we didn’t listen, but Harada and other more rational minds are shaken by the intensity of his vision. They cannot say that he is “mad” even if his anxiety has consumed his life, but nor can they allow him free rein to pursue his plans because they do not concern only himself but greatly affect the lives of others. They are forced to wonder if it isn’t we who are “insane”, quietly living our lives while all these preventable threats hover in the background, ignored. Kiichi’s mistake was perhaps that he wanted only to be “safe” in an unsafe world, not to cure it of its dangers. Few us are actively trying to eliminate ebola or brain-eating amoebas, just as few actively opposed an increasingly nuclear society, powerless as we are and were in the face of a greater threat. Perhaps Kiichi was the sanest one of all, retreating into a world of madness and infinite safety in a delusional bubble of survival in an otherwise crazy world.

I Live in Fear screens at the BFI Southbank, London on 6th & 13th February 2023 as part of the Kurosawa season.

Ikiru (生きる, Akira Kurosawa, 1952)

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The Japanese economy may have embarked on a path towards recovery thanks to the stimulus of the Korean War, but in the early 1950s many might have thought it too soon to ask if survival in itself was enough yet this is exactly what disillusioned civil servant Kenji Watanabe finds himself asking after receiving the devastating news that he has advanced stomach cancer and year at most to live. “To live” is apt translation of Akira Kurosawa’s intensely moving existential melodrama, Ikiru (生きる), which tackles the compromises of the salaryman dream head on along with those of the contradictions of the sometimes dehumanising post-war society. 

As the opening voice over reveals to to us, Watanabe (Takashi Shimura) is man who died long ago or perhaps has never truly been alive. In some senses, he is nothing more than an embodiment of the seal he uses to stamp documents day in day out, a mere piston in an ever turning machine of relentless bureaucracy. A young woman, Miss Odagiri (Miki Odagiri), working in the Public Affairs department loudly reads out a joke someone has written about their boss, Watanabe, who has taken not a single day’s holiday in 30 years suggesting that it’s less that he fears city hall will grind to a halt without him than they’ll suddenly figure out city hall has no need of him at all. The irony is city hall does indeed grind to a halt in Watanabe’s absence as he, unthinkably, fails to turn up for work for days on end as the papers pile ever higher on his desk. “Nothing moves here without his seal” one of the workers admits, bewildered by this sudden break with protocol while salivating over its implications in the possibility that Watanabe’s chair may soon be empty. 

Yet Watanabe’s crisis is that he’s realised he’s wasted his life on a pointless bureaucratic career that’s done little more than keep a roof over his head. Even the roof is a fairly modest one and it’s clear that his grown up son Mitsuo (Nobuo Kaneko) considers him to be a stingy old miser, unable to understand why he’s never spent so much as a penny on himself and lives in a kind of self-imposed austerity. Perhaps to Watanabe this is what constitutes properness. He’s done everything he was supposed to do, got a steady job at city hall and eventually became the head of department, but now he feels foolish and lonely. Mitsuo and his wife seem to resent him and talk openly about their plans to use their inheritance, along with Watanabe’s retirement bonus, for a downpayment on a “modern” home the polar opposite of the pre-war townhouse where the family continue to live. 

Mitsuo and Kazue (Kyoko Seki) are perhaps emblems of the increasingly empty consumerism of the post-war era, emotionally disconnected from Watanabe and seeking only the flashy and new. Miss Odagiri, the young woman from work, immediately says that she’d love to live in a home like Watanabe’s rather than the crowded multiple occupancy flat she currently inhabits with her family. Cheerful and outgoing, Odagiri is on the other hand a symbol of a new generation that wants something more out of life than simple material comfort and might even be willing to trade it for a small amount of happiness. Having worked at city hall for all of 18 months, she decides that she just can’t take it anymore and is quitting to get a job in a factory making toy rabbits that she says allow her to feel as if she’s making friends with all the babies in Japan. 

To that extent, Watanabe is himself also a baby craving Odagiri’s company admitting that he envies her youth and vitality in realising he squandered his own and will never get it back. How uncomfortable it must be for her, their final meeting in a restaurant sandwiched between a loving couple and teenage girl’s birthday party as Watanabe, gaunt and shrunken, claws at the air and begs her to help him live. Yet even within the grotesquery the tone is ironic, the strains of “Happy Birthday” accompanying Watanabe down the stairs as a the high school climbs up to meet her friends signalling his (re)birth as a man with purpose and determination. Just as Odagiri had found meaning in the rabbit, Watanabe finds it deciding to get a playground built over a post-war swamp in the slums filled with raw sewage and mosquitos that left the local children ill. 

Yet children’s parks aren’t particularly profitable which is presumably why the petition to build one had been kicked all round city hall in the infernal wheel of bureaucracy in which Watanabe too is trapped. “You call this democracy?” one of the women bringing the petition asks, taking the clerk to task complaining that all they do is fob them off insisting it’s someone else’s responsibility to help while determined only to guard their own turf. “You’re not supposed to do anything at city hall” someone ironically adds, “the best way to protect your place in this world is to do nothing at all”. Watanabe did nothing at all for 30 years and it got him nowhere, his dedication to his job disrupting his relationship with his son though Watanabe is ironically one of the most emotional men and engaged fathers seen on screen in the post-war era. 

After his death, in the park he helped build for which the deputy mayor has taken credit, his colleagues put him on trial at the wake trying to work out why he did it and whether or not he even knew he was dying seeing as he told no one close him not even the son whom he felt he could no longer trust. They deny his role while both praising and condemning his passion as somehow improper, disrupting the dispassionate rhythms of the bureaucratic machine with human emotion. It was only coincidence, they say. The deputy mayor wanted an election and the yakuza wanted to turn the swamp into a red light district. “Did he think he could just build a park?” someone adds, bemused by his effrontery as a man from Public Affairs straying into the Parks Department’s territory. You have to protect your turf after all. Finally moved by Watanabe’s last ditch bid to make his life mean something, to feel alive and know he has lived, the the drunken salarymen, all but one who retreats to look at Watanabe’s photo above the altar, swear to follow his example. 

But of course the bureaucratic wheel keeps turning, another dangerous sewage problem diverted to another department continuing the literal pollution of the capitalistic post-war society. A kind of ghost story, Kurosawa lights Shimura from below, shadows cast across his gaunt face even by his “rakish” new hat while his huge eyes have a somehow haunted, grotesque quality filled with hungry desperation. Yet it’s to childhood that Watanabe eventually returns, “perfectly happy” sitting on a swing singing a song from his youth about the price age while surrounded by snow and at last painfully, absurdly alive. 

Ikiru screens at the BFI Southbank, London on 4th & 15th February 2023 as part of the Kurosawa season.

Original trailer (English subtitles)

Drunken Angel (酔いどれ天使, Akira Kurosawa, 1948)

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A gruff yet well intentioned doctor does his best to cure the ills of post-war Japan in a rundown slum on the edge of a fetid swamp in Akira Kurosawa’s noir tragedy, Drunken Angel (酔いどれ天使, Yoidore Tenshi). The doctor is most obviously the drunken angel of the title though it could equally apply to the unhappy yakuza he tries so hard to redeem whom most agree is not suited to that kind of life and trapped by the feudalistic thinking of the pre-war past.

Matsunaga (Toshiro Mifune) is the big man around town, but jaded physician Sanada (Takashi Shimura) sees straight through him. “He acts tough and swaggers around but I know in his heart he’s incredibly lonely,” Sanada tells his assistant, Miyo (Chieko Nakakita), a young woman he took in to help her escape the clutches of the violent yakuza ex who left her with syphilis. Miyo bemoans Sanada’s terrible bedside manner and tendency to bully his patients but praises his dedication and remarks that few doctors go as far for those under their care as he does especially ones like these who don’t often have the money to pay. This is a little ironic given Matsunaga’s original objection that he doesn’t trust doctors because it’s not in their best interests to cure you, something which Sanada jokingly acknowledges while expressing the futility he feels in the face of the mass sickness that confronts him. 

When Matsunaga first comes into his office, Sanada remarks that’s its not just his lungs that are sick, he’s sick to the core. But still he seems to think that Matsunaga can be saved, not just physically but spiritually redeemed if only he can coax him away from the yakuza underworld. Matsunaga is suffering from tuberculosis, a common disease of the post-war era and closely linked to the squalid conditions in which he lives which are themselves symbolised by the swamp in the centre of town onto which Sanada’s clinic backs. Sanada tries to warn the local children not to play in it because of the risk of typhus not to mention the mosquitos it attracts but the kids don’t really listen to him and shout back that he’s “just a drunk”. Yet the swamp represents a world upside-down, the neon sign for the No. 1 cabaret bar constantly reflected in its bubbling waters while as the film opens we see a trio of sex workers preparing to head into the red light district and a pair of petty thugs fighting while a young man plays Spanish guitar on the ruins of a bomb damaged building. 

It’s as if it were this world that is slowly consuming Matsunaga, an old-school yakuza who insists “we still believe in things like honour and loyalty” certain that the big boss will side with him against the returned upstart Okada (Reizaburo Yamamoto), Miyo’s yakuza ex, even as Sanada tells him it’s money that matters and Matsunaga no longer makes any. Everyone tells him that he already looks like a ghost, his appearance increasingly gaunt in his parallel decline as the illness takes hold and he begins to lose his status to Okada only to overhear his boss call him an “amateur” that he was only keeping around as a potential sacrifice. In the end, Matsunaga is too good for this world. Naively believing in things like honour and loyalty which no longer mean anything in the dog-eat-dog post-war society he is left with nothing other than a nihilistic bid for vengeance and a desire to repay Sanada’s faith in him if only in the most ironic of ways. 

Like Matsunaga, Sanada sometimes says the opposite of what he means claiming that he doesn’t care what happens to Matsunaga but is determined to wipe out the TB inside him to stop it spreading it to others. He’s on a mission to “sterilise this contaminated town” by eradicating the twin threats of disease and the yakuza, calling Matsunaga a coward for failing to face his fear and loneliness succumbing to the quick fixes of his hedonistic yakuza lifestyle. He’s not perfect either, a doctor who drinks his medical ethanol supplies and berates his patients when he them catches out them out drinking when he told them not to, but is also very at home with who he is and doing his best with it. His disappointment in Matsunaga is mainly in his swagger, the false bravado that masks his human frailty and unwillingness to face his fear of death which manifests itself in a hauntingly expressionistic dream sequence. Using silent cinema composition and canted angles Kurosawa conjures a world of constant uncertainty amid the vagaries of the post-war society in which the only sign of salvation is a drunken doctor and his “rational approach” to the sickness of the age.

Drunken Angel screens at the BFI Southbank, London on 2nd & 10th February 2023 as part of the Kurosawa season.

Stray Dog (野良犬, Akira Kurosawa, 1949)

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“And, yes, I think the world’s not right. But it’s worse to take it out on the world” the conflicted policeman at the centre of Akira Kurosawa’s Stray Dog (野良犬, Nora Inu) explains as he struggles to reacquire his sense of authority while weighing up its limits and his own right to pass judgement on what is right or wrong or merely illegal. He must ask himself how he can enforce the law while faced with the reality that the man he chases is an echo of himself, the him that took another path amid the chaos, confusion, and despair that followed in the wake of defeat and occupation even as his well-meaning mentor insists that some people are good and others bad and he won’t be able to do his job if he gives it much more thought than that.

The policeman, Murakami (Toshiro Mifune), is perhaps the stray dog of the title who can only follow the straight path towards his missing gun taken from him on a sweltering bus in the middle of summer while he was distracted not only by the heat but by exhaustion having been up all night on a stakeout. As we later discover, Murakami is a rookie cop and recently demobbed soldier trying to make a life for himself in the post-war society. In this he is quite lucky. Many men returned home and struggled to find employment leaving them unable to marry or support families, a whole pack of stray dogs lost in an ever changing landscape. This must have weighed quite heavily on his mind as he made the decision to resign from the police force to take responsibility for the laxity that led to the gun possibly ending up in the wrong hands only to discover his superiors don’t regard it as seriously as he does. His boss tears up the letter and tells him to turn his defeat into something more positive by trying to do something about it, which might in its own way be a metaphor for the new post-war society. 

So closely does Murakami identify himself with his gun that on hearing it has been used in a violent robbery it’s almost as if he has committed the crime and is responsible for anything it might do. There is an essential irony in the fact that this weapon that was supposed to prevent crime is being subverted and used in its service as if mirroring the paths of the two men who both returned to a changed Japan and had their knapsacks stolen on their way back home. Murakami has chosen the law, while the thief Yusa (Isao Kimura) is thrown into nihilistic despair unable to make a life for himself. Murakami’s sense of guilt is further compounded on realising that he may have frustrated Yusa’s attempt to turn back, returning the gun to the underground pistol brokers who make their living through selling illegal weapons stolen from police or bought from occupation forces.

As he admits, Murakami could have ended up committing a robbery but realised he was at a dangerous crossroads and made a deliberate choice to join the police instead. He literally finds himself walking the other man’s path when he’s told by a pickpocket, Ogin (Noriko Sengoku), that the underworld pistol dealers will find him if he walks around downtown looking like he’s at the end of his rope. Ogin, the woman reeking of cheap perfume who stood next to him on the bus, was once known for her fancy kimonos but is now in western dress, signalling perhaps a further decline. In this age of privation, only kimonos and rice have held their value and it’s not unreasonable to assume that she’s sold all of hers and joined the modern generation. Ogin doesn’t have anything to do with the theft, but seems to take pity on Murakami seeing him as naive and essentially unable to understand the way things work on the ground. His mentor, Sato (Takashi Shimura), seems to understand too well, on one level looking down on those like Ogin as simply bad but otherwise happy in her company knowing exactly how to get what he wants through their oddly flirtatious conversation as they suck ice lollies and smoke illicit cigarettes in the interview room. 

Dressed in a ragged military uniform, Murakami wanders around the backstreets of contemporary Tokyo past street kids and sex workers and groups of men just hanging around. Kurosawa employs montage and superimposition to reflect the endless drudgery and maddening circularity his of passage under the stifling heat of summer in the city that allows him a better understanding of what it is to live in this world. Even so, the boy who eventually makes contact seems to see through him pointing out that he looks too physically robust to pass for a desperate drifter. Yusa meanwhile is wiry and hollow, a frightened man who uses Murakami’s gun to affect an authority he does not own which might explain why both of his victims are women. Sato emphasises the worthiness of their victimhood, explaining that the first was robbed of the money she’d saved over three years for her wedding meaning she might have to wait even longer at which point there would be no point getting married at all, while the second woman was killed at home alone and defenceless. We’re also told that her body was nude when discovered which raises the question of whether she might have been assaulted before she died which would cast quite a different light on Yusa’s crimes no longer an accidental killer but a crazed rapist well beyond salvation. 

Yet the accidental nature of Yusa’s fall does seem to be key. The trigger seems to have been a childhood friend he’d fallen in love with gazing at a dress he could never afford to buy for her, pushed into a corner by his wounded masculinity and taking drastic action to reclaim it in much the same way Murakami later does in searching for his missing gun. In their final confrontation they grapple violently in existential struggle in a small grove behind some posh houses where a woman plays a charming parlour tune on the piano pausing only for a few moments to peer out of the window on hearing gunshots. Murakami retrieves his gun and the pair fall to the ground side by side to be met by the sound of children singing, provoking a wail of absolute despair from a defeated Yusa suddenly hit by the full weight of his transgressions. He too was a stray dog heading straight in one direction driven out of mainstream society by the unfairness of the post-war world. Sato tells Murakami that he’ll eventually forget all about Yusa, that he’ll become “less sentimental” and accept the world is full of bad guys and those who fall victim to them, but Murakami doesn’t seem too convinced, for the moment at least unable to forget that Yusa was man much like himself only less lucky or perhaps simply less naive.

Stray Dog screens at the BFI Southbank, London on 1st & 13th February 2023 as part of the Kurosawa season.