Tag: Masatoshi Kawase

The Heart of Hiroshima (愛と死の記録, Koreyoshi Kurahara, 1966)

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Sayuri Yoshinaga was the top female star at Nikkatsu in the mid-1960s. Together with her regular co-star Mitsuo Hamada, she starred in a series of hit youth romances such as The Mud-Spattered Pure Heart, The Sound of Waves, and Gazing at Love and Death which was Nikkatsu’s biggest box office success at the time. The Heart of Hiroshima (愛と死の記録, Ai to Shi no Kiroku) was intended as the latest in the series, but Mitsuo Hamada was attacked by a drunk customer at a bar shortly before filming after which he needed surgery to save his eyesight. Normally, the film would be postponed, but Nikkatsu was having financial difficulties at the time and refused to wait despite pleas from Yoshinaga and even from the actor who replaced him, Tetsuya Watari, who was a good friend of his. 

At the same time, Yoshinaga was now 21 years old and uncertain how long she could convincingly go on performing in Nikkatsu’s typical teen dramas. The studio was also worried about the possibility of losing their top star if she decided to move into more serious dramatic roles while they did not believe they had a suitable replacement. They were currently on bad terms with Ruriko Asaoka who ended her exclusive contract that year and moved to Ishihara Pro, and were worried that their other popular actresses such as Chieko Matsubara weren’t ready to take on that kind of responsibility. To try to convince Yoshinaga that the film would be more artistic in nature they hired New Wave director Koreyoshi Kurahara rather than studio stalwarts like Buichi Saito who’d directed Gazing at Love Death, but when she again tried to refuse insisting they wait for Hamada, they forced her hand by simply beginning to shoot the film on location in Hiroshima without her. Casting Tetsuya Watari may have also been an attempt to shake up the franchise as at that point he was known more for action and hadn’t really played this kind of very intense, romantic role before.

Though it follows a familiar pattern in exploring a doomed romance between a boy and a girl whose pure love is obstructed by social division, the film does deal with some quite controversial themes in touching on the discrimination faced by those who were affected by the atomic bomb. Yukio (Tetsuya Watari) lost his whole family in the blast and was taken in by Mr Iwai (Asao Sano) after being released from a long-term hospital stay. He’s doing well working at Mr Iwai’s print shop and has no current health worries when he has a meet cute with Kazue (Sayuri Yoshinaga) knocking into her on his bike and smashing some records she was carrying which he insists he compensate her for, though he doesn’t know she works in a record shop so it doesn’t really matter. After a comical misunderstanding in which Yukio mistakenly thinks Kazue is dating his friend, and she thinks he’s a creep who’s coming on to her while dating another girl from the shop, they fall in love and want to get married.

However, Yukio’s symptoms start to resurface and he asks himself if he really has a right to start a romantic relationship and get married, especially as there’s a risk any children he may have could be born with genetic abnormalities. Because of the stigma directed towards those who were affected by radiation from the bomb, he feels he can’t explain any of this to Kazue and continues to blow hot and cold, while she too is close to a young woman (Izumi Ashikawa) who seems to have had a romantic past with her brother but once tried to take her own life because she has a large radiation scar on her face. She has since resigned herself to living for her parents, suggesting that she will not marry. When Yukio eventually has to tell Kazue, he does it inside the dome at the Hiroshima Peace Memorial Park where she, of course, says it doesn’t matter and is only hurt and upset that he suggested they break their engagement.

The underlying suggestion is that those who were affected by the atomic bomb are being denied love by an unforgiving society that has avoided fully processing its traumatic past. Though it’s strongly suggested to her that Yukio will not survive his leukaemia, Kazue remains devoted to nursing to him but is also placed into an impossible position. She tells Yukio that she is already his wife and will stay with him, but is persuaded to leave by her mother and sister-in-law who tell her it’s “improper” for her to be with him overnight in the hospital despite the fact he’s in a communal ward with several other people there all the time as well as the medical staff. Her friend advises her to leave permanently, but then also calls her heartless knowing Yukio has no one else when Kazue begins to waver and suggests he may give in to the pressure given the emotional toll the whole experience is already taking on her. Nevertheless, she never really gives up on Yukio and is ultimately unable to reconcile herself to a world in which he would become “a man that no one could love”. The film ends on a rather bleak and ghostly note as a group of school children walk past the dome, suggesting that to some these comparatively recent events have already become history rather than a living memory and lingering trauma hanging over a rapidly changing society.

Living by Karate (無鉄砲大将, Seijun Suzuki, 1961)

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Nikkatsu’s brand of youth cinema could often have a nasty edge, its damaged heroes caught up in complicated rebellion but necessarily outsiders in a changing world which they feared held no real place for them. For each of those, however, there are others filled with life and possibility, not to mention a cartoonish sense of fun and infinite safety which perhaps largely disappeared from the films of the 1960s only to be found again in Kadokawa’s similarly aspirational teen movies of the bubble era. 

Living by Karate (無鉄砲大将, Muteppo Daisho, AKA Reckless Boss / A Hell of a Guy) once again stars Koji Wada as an earnest young man kicking back against the corrupt wartime generation. Still in high school, Eiji has a part-time job at an ice rink which he doesn’t treat quite as seriously as he ought to but his boss lets him get away with it because his handsome face is a hit with the local ladies. Eiji and two of his friends are keen members of a karate club and have decided to use their skills to fight for justice in their lawless town by going on “patrol”, clearing up the kinds of crimes the police might not make it to in time. Their plan backfires, however, when they come across the body of a recently deceased union leader and are arrested by a local bobby after getting caught with a joke knife one of the boys made for fun at his job on the family scrap yard. 

It comes as no surprise that Eiji’s arch enemy, sleazy mob boss Shinkai (Nakajiro Tomita), is behind the murder, apparently hired by a corrupt corporate CEO trying to stop his workforce exercising their legal rights. Eiji hates Shinkai because he bankrolled his widowed mother’s (Kotoe Hatsui) bar business but did so perhaps in return for being able to control her and by extension him by wielding his economic power against them. His loathing intensifies once he realises that the slightly older young woman he’s carrying a torch for, Yukiyo (Izumi Ashikawa), has fallen for one of Shinkai’s men, Goro (Ryoji Hayama). 

Goro is the classically “good” gangster who feels indebted to Shinkai because he took him in after the war, but wants to leave the underworld behind, going straight in Kobe where he intends to live a settled married life with Yukiyo. The modern yakuza is in many ways a Showa era phenomenon, a mechanism for men without families to protect themselves in the desperate post-war environment. By 1961, however, its existence was perhaps becoming harder to justify. The war orphans had grown up and had families of their own, the economy had significantly improved, and there was no need anymore to live a life of crime and heartlessness – a conclusion Goro has come to on his own after meeting the earnest Yukiyo who has similar problems with her goodhearted yet permanently drunk doctor father. 

Knowing he might have messed things up for his mother in interfering with her relationship with Shinkai, Eiji confesses that doesn’t “know what to do with the grownup world”. For him, everything is still very black and white. He hates yakuza because they prey on the vulnerable and Shinkai in particular because he does it so insidiously, forcing desperate people to accept loans on bad terms so that he can in fact “own” them and use them as he wishes. Eiji and his peer group kick back against what they see as the selfish corruption of the wartime generation, agitating for a fairer, more just world. The wealthy daughter of a corrupt CEO (Mayumi Shimizu) who has a crush on Eiji though he only has eyes for Yukiyo comes up with the idea of selling her fancy car to get money to help Eiji’s mother escape Shinkai’s control, but her father snaps at her that other people aren’t her responsibility and that she doesn’t understand how the real world works. 

Somewhat chastened by the youngsters’ pure hearted love of justice, he eventually comes up with a compromise in buying the car off her himself, but before that Eiji and his friends have to think carefully about the form they want their revolution to take. Taking him to task, Yukiyo points out that if all you do is fight with yakuza then maybe you’re a yakuza yourself, which shifts Eiji’s perspective towards ensuring that his rebellion is fully legal and involves the justice systems already in place. He comes to recognise that Goro is much like himself, and if he’s going to take down a sleazy brute like Shinkai it will take more than some fancy karate. Their resistance starts at home, giving others courage to stand up to yakuza oppression while living right themselves in the hope of creating a better, fairer world free of heartless organised crime.

Cruel Gun Story (拳銃残酷物語, Takumi Furukawa, 1964)

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cruel-gun-story-poster.jpgIn the history of Japanese noir, the name Haruhiko Oyabu looms large. Oyabu’s gritty, pulp infused tales of tough guy heroes found their clearest expression in the hardline ‘70s with Toru Murakawa’s unique brand of macho action as seen in Resurrection of the Golden Wolf or The Beast Must Die, but a decade earlier they were also finding fertile ground in Nikkatsu’s harder B-movie noir. Based on a novel by Oyabu, Cruel Gun Story (拳銃残酷物語, Kenju Zankoku Monogatari) seems to owe more than a little to Kubrick’s The Killing in its crime never pays tale of honest crooks undercut by their unscrupulous comrades but the central message is that the gun is a cruel master and those living under its control will pay a heavy price.

Togawa (Jo Shishido) has just been (unexpectedly) given early release from a prison sentence incurred when he took revenge on the truck driver who knocked down his little sister (Chieko Matsubara) and confined her to a wheelchair for the rest of her life. Middle rank gangster Ito – formerly a crooked lawyer with a pencil mustache a supercilious air, has a job for him the gang thinks only he can do. The payout is 120 million yen – not to be sniffed at, but Togawa has reasons to be suspicious. He takes some convincing but finally relents when he finds out an old and trusted friend, Shirai (Yuji Kodaka), has already agreed. The gang have another three guys lined up but Togawa rules the third one out when he tests him and confirms he’s an untrustworthy blabbermouth. The other two are a former boxer with mild brain damage whose girlfriend has just left him, and an unscrupulous but clever chancer named Teramoto (Kojiro Kusanagi).

Following the general pattern, Furukawa walks us through the heist as it’s supposed to go if everything goes to plan complete with a 3D diagram and plastic toy cars but, of course, not everything goes to plan. The job is to steal the ticket money from the Japan Derby (much like the race course robbery in The Killing). The gang will set up fake road signs and station a “policeman” to divert the armoured car onto a small country lane where they will kill the police motorcycle escort, get rid of the guards, and load the truck onto a bigger lorry that they will then take to a disused US airbase they’ll use as their lair.

Disused American airbase could easily apply to the entirety of the surrounding area. Jets fly ominously overhead while the world Togawa and his guys inhabit is one of noirish jazz bars filled with foreigners, grimy boxing clubs, signs in English and the relics of destruction everywhere. This is a place for those who’ve already fallen through the cracks, even the gangsters are only really small fry – not yakuza but hoodlums ripped straight from the Edward G. Robinson playbook. This giant heist is the most audacious in living memory, pulling it off would be the finest achievement any of them would ever make, taking them out of their dead end environments and catapulting them into the criminal high life.

Togawa knows there’s something not right about this – he almost turns it down because he wants to be around to take care of his sister, but he also wants the money to pay for an operation he hopes will restore her mobility to assuage his guilt over having sent her out on the fateful day she was injured. Rie now lives in the care of kindly nuns and is a goodhearted, religious woman hoping for her big brother’s reformation. Togawa and his sister are also victims of war having lost their parents during the evacuation from Manchuria and have been essentially on their own ever since. Rie has become a living symbol of Togawa’s failures – his inability to protect her, to keep them both safe and together, and to free them of the ruined post-war landscape within which they both remain trapped. Rie pins her hopes on God, but Togawa says to hell with that – where has He been so far?

Having pinned his hopes on the gun, Togawa intends this to be the heist to end all heists. After this, he’ll be free to give his sister the life she deserves away from crime and the rundown town strewn with mementos of a distant, dethroned occupying power. The gun, however, is a divisive weapon and engenders nothing but mistrust among men. Resentful of Togawa’s solid friendships, the other guys turn on him as do his shady employers sending Togawa even further along the dark path to moral ruination than he already was. All that’s waiting for Togawa is a hollow victory and the intense disappointment of those whose faith in him was ultimately misplaced.