Tag: Michiko Takano

The Whale God (鯨神, Tokuzo Tanaka, 1962)

May 13, 2023by Hayley Scanlon

“You’re all mad” the hero of Tokuzo Tanaka’s The Whale God (鯨神, Kujiragami) finally exclaims, perhaps in a sense cured of the overwhelming mania that has defined his life but only at the cost of it. Adapted from the Akutagawa Prize-winning novel by Koichiro Uno which owes a significant debt to Moby Dick, Tanaka’s tokusatsu-adjacent drama is part haunting morality tale cautioning against the destructive absurdity of obsessive vengeance, and a kind of treatise on life in traditional village at a moment of eclipse as the burgeoning modernity of early Meiji washes up on its shores.

Tanaka opens with a brief prologue in which an elderly man is killed attempting to destroy the “Whale God” only for his son to swear vengeance before being killed himself. The man’s mother instructs his sons to vow revenge, 10 years passing before she sends the oldest one out against the whale. He is also killed, instantly. The last of his line, young Shaki (Kojiro Hongo) is burdened with this piece of filial responsibility, forced to bear the weight of his family’s vengeance while the village elder (Takashi Shimura), a samurai, wants to ensure the Whale God’s destruction and offers up his own daughter, Toyo (Kyoko Enami), along with his lands and title to any who can bring him the snout of the whale. Shaki throws himself forward though he has little desire for the prize obsessed only with vengeance, while another challenger soon appears, Kishu (Shintaro Katsu), a uncouth drifter deciding to hang around after confirming that the offer is open to all no matter their origins.

Origins do, however, matter. The village elder instructs Kishu to step back lest he spear his “stinking guts” for failing to know his place, a commoner with the temerity to encroach on a samurai’s personal space. The two men, Shaki and Kishu, in a sense represent two halves one whole, one resigned and contemplative and the other rough and greedy. Kishu attempts to challenge Shaki directly but is rebuffed, later settling for besting him through raping his girlfriend, Ei (Shiho Fujimura), who conceives a child as a consequence of the attack but somehow manages to keep the pregnancy entirely secret. Both the woman and the whale become a surrogate battleground for a contest of masculinity, Kishu symbolically ahead in having violated Ei while Shaki remained too consumed with vengeance to have consummated their union.

Toyo, meanwhile, the samurai’s daughter, insists that she won’t be “the prize for a fisherman’s ambition”, rejecting the idea of becoming the wife of a lowly villager which would of course mean for her great shame. Nevertheless, she is as powerless as Shaki in her inability to shake off patriarchal authority or refuse her duty to obey her father’s orders even as he tells her it’s all a cruel joke, he doesn’t believe that any fisherman could kill the Whale God and survive. Nevertheless she develops a fascination with Shaki and is intensely offended to discover that he wants no part of her father’s bargain and has in fact married Ei claiming her child as his own. He does this in part in order to ensure that someone will exist in order to avenge his own death which he is sure is coming at the fins of the Whale God, resigned with fatalistic nihilism to the ancestral curse which has haunted him for almost all his life living only for vengeance.

Yet he does in fact manage to kill the Whale God and live, if only for a brief time but long enough to hear Toyo echo that she must marry the man who killed the god in accordance with her father’s promise despite knowing he is already married with a child. His curse lifted, he understands that the whole village is affected by a kind of madness no longer understanding why a samurai’s daughter would agree to marry a man she didn’t love who was not her social equal. In a beatific state, he reflects on his rivalry with Kishu whom he comes to believe deliberately sacrificed himself in order to assure Shaki a survival he does not appear to want in order to ensure his own child would have a father. Discomfortingly, he asks Ei to forgive Kishu because of this fact, little acknowledging her suffering and reducing her once again to a token traded between men in their now concluded battle for masculine dominance.

An old man having escaped the village’s madness had encouraged Shaki not to die for nothing, to live his life in rejection of his mother’s fatalistic deathbed instruction only to live until you die. In achieving his vengeance he reaches a kind of apotheosis becoming a Christ-like figure sacrificed on behalf of the village which has been liberated of the tyranny of the Whale God even if the Whale God has been exposed as merely a larger than average sea creature. Meanwhile, we can also see that modernity is hovering on the outskirts, the whale’s arrival is signalled by telegraph while Shaki’s childhood friend Kasuke (Yosuke Takemura) alone is able to see through the village’s “madness” leaving to study medicine in Nagasaki. When he returns a year later, Shaki relents and asks him to take his sister with him away from the maddening village towards a more enlightened land.

The village is also surprisingly enough Christian, though the new religion does not seem to have eclipsed their traditional beliefs or practices. The fishermen still perform a ritual dance before a whale hunt and continue to demand vengeance against the Whale God even when cautioned against it. Shooting in intense gloominess Tanaka emphasises the sense of spiritual dread that accompanies this “ludicrous” vendetta, the village seemingly always cloaked in darkness as if awaiting its own destruction eventually hastened by the elder’s transgressive offering which in itself represents a small revolution that would make a peasant a king and therefore implode a feudal order that is already on its way out. The elder wants vengeance for glory, Kishu wants vengeance for gold, but only Shaki desires vengeance for peace and later wins it only to have nothing left to live for, ominously telling Ei to raise their son to become “a proud whaler”. Making great use of miniatures, Tanaka’s parabolic drama may park itself in the realms of tokusatsu but is in its own way stranger, and darker, yet also poetic in its examination of destructive obsession, traditional masculinity, feudalistic patriarchy, and existential futility through the story of a young man born to die for a father’s transgressive failures.

Original trailer (no subtitles)

The Wandering Princess (流転の王妃, Kinuyo Tanaka, 1960)

November 30, 2018by Hayley ScanlonLeave a comment

As in her third film, The Eternal Breasts, Kinuyo Tanaka’s fourth directorial feature, The Wandering Princess (流転の王妃, Ruten no Ouhi), finds her working with extremely recent material – in this case the memoirs of Japanese noblewoman Hiro Saga which had become a bestseller immediately after publication in 1959. Tanaka’s filmic adaptation arrived mere months later in January 1960 which was, in an ironic twist, a year before the real life tale would meet something like the conventional romantic ending familiar from classic melodrama. Nevertheless, working with Daiei’s top talent including Kon Ichikawa’s regular screenwriter (and wife) Natto Wada, Tanaka attempts to reframe the darkness of the preceding 20 years as the defeat of compassionate idealism at the hands of rigid austerity and unstoppable oppression.

Tanaka opens with a scene taking place in 1957 which in fact depicts a somewhat notorious incident already known to the contemporary audience and otherwise unexplained on-screen in which the older Ryuko (Machiko Kyo) tenderly bends over the body of lifeless schoolgirl. The camera then pulls back to find another girl in school uniform, Ryuko, twenty years earlier. A young woman with innocent dreams, Ryuko’s life encounters the usual kind of unwelcome disruption in the unexpected arrival of a marriage proposal but this is no ordinary wedding. Ryuko, as the oldest daughter of a prominent noble family, has been selected as a possible bride for the younger brother of the former Qing emperor now installed as the symbolic leader of the Japanese puppet state of Manchuria. Against the odds, Ryuko and her new husband Futetsu (Eiji Funakoshi) are well matched and endeavour to build a happy home together just as they intend to commit themselves to the creation of a new nation born from the twin legacies of the fallen Chinese empire and the resurgent Japan.

Foregrounding Ryuko’s experience, the film does its best to set “politics” aside but the inescapable truth is that each of our protagonists is a prisoner of the times in which they live. The second scene finds Ryuko in 1937 as an innocent schoolgirl gazing at the young men in uniform as they march past her. She remains out of step with them, walking idly and at her own uneven rhythm while they keep rigorous and seemingly unstoppable time. The family are understandably wary of the implications of the marriage proposal, especially as it comes with a military escort, with Ryuko’s beloved grandmother the only one brave enough to ask to see whoever’s in charge of this outrage only to be told that their fates are in the hands of the nebulous concept known as “army” which knows no individual will.

Assured by her family that the decision rests with her, Ryuko consents – not only to becoming a stranger’s wife (which would have been her fate in any case) but to being a kind of ambassador, the presentable face of imperial ambition. On her marriage she’s presented with a deep red cheongsam and continues to dress in Chinese fashion for remainder of her life in Manchuria where she learns to speak Mandarin and devotes herself to becoming as Chinese as it’s possible to be. Meanwhile, her husband Futetsu busies himself with a complementary desire to become Japanese, intensely worried that the sometimes degrading treatment he and his family receive is exclusively caused by his problematic nationality. When their daughter, Eisei, is born, the couple determine to raise her as the child of a new world, the embodiment of idealised cultural integration.

The world, however, is not so kind and the blunt force of militarism continues to present a barrier to familial harmony. Futetsu is prevented from seeing his brother by the officious forces of the military police while the lonely, paranoid “emperor” suspects that Ryuko is nothing more than a Japanese spy sent to undermine his rule. Ryuko was sent to Manchuria to be the bridge between two cultures. Her, in a sense, feminine energy which attempts to build connection through compassion and understanding is consistently contrasted with the prevailing male energy of the age which prizes only destruction and dominance. Filled with the naivety of idealism, she truly believes in the goodness of the Manchurian project and is entirely blind to the less altruistic actions of her countrymen engaged in the same endeavour.

Confronted by some children in a park while pushing the infant Eisei in a pram, Ryuko is identified as a Japanese woman by her accent while conversing in Mandarin. She assures the children that Eisei is Manchurian like them, and that seeing as she married a Manchurian she is now too despite her Japanese birth. The kids are satisfied, so much so that they warn her that some Manchurians were killed recently in this park by Japanese soldiers, adding a mild complaint that it upsets their parents when Japanese people come to their restaurant and leave without paying. Mortified, Ryuko decides to use some of her (meagre) resources to buy all of the kids and everyone else in the park some sweets from a nearby stand, fulfilling her role as a Japanese ambassador even while insisting that she is a proud citizen of the newly born state of Manchuria.

Nevertheless the Manchurian project is doomed to fail, the kind of idealism fought for by Ryuko and Futetsu crushed under the boot of militarism. Despite everything, Ryuko still wants to be the bridge if only to prevent a catastrophe of this kind happening again (while perhaps refusing to engage with some of the reasons it happened in the first place) but in Eisei’s eventual death, foreshadowed in the melancholy opening, a deeply uncomfortable implication is made that the kind of cross-cultural harmony that Ryuko dreams of may not be viable. In contrast to the salaciously reported real life events (somewhat alluded to by presence of a schoolboy’s cap next to the body) which hinted at a suicide pact or murder, Ryuko attributes Eisei’s decision to end her life to an inability to reconcile her twin heritage coupled with the heavy burden of being the last descendent of the Qing Dynasty. Despite this minor misstep of tying the fate of Eisei to the failure of the Manchurian dream and the loss of its misplaced idealism, Ryuko ends her account on a hopeful note in admiring the flowers she planted finally in bloom and looking forward to a more hopeful age governed by warmth and compassion rather than violence and austerity.

The Wandering Princess was presented by Japan Foundation London as part of a series of events marking the publication of Tanaka Kinuyo: Nation, Stardom and Female Subjectivity.