Tag: Michisaburo Segawa

Sanshiro Sugata (姿三四郎, Akira Kurosawa, 1943)

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It might seem curious in some ways to make a film about the importance of humanity in martial arts during a time of war, but Akira Kurosawa’s debut feature Sanshiro Sugata (姿三四郎, Sugata Sanshiro) does just this in depicting the hero’s coming of age as a gradual progress towards awakening as he learns to attain control over body and mind through the modern discipline of judo. Based on a novel by Tsuneo Tomita, the film is in many ways a typical martial arts drama in which a young hopeful seeks a master and must eventually face a rival, but lends a note of poetry to the tale which is in other ways perhaps out of keeping with its times. 

The times of the film, however, are late Meiji as demonstrated in the lively opening sequence which ventures into a town in transition where policemen in Western-style uniforms walk the streets alongside townspeople dressed largely in kimono as is the hero, Sanshiro Sugata (Susumu Fujita), who’s come looking for a famous jiujitsu master. Taken on as a pupil, he overhears the master, Momma (Yoshio Kosugi), disparaging a rival, Yano (Denjiro Okochi), who has come up with a new martial art he calls judo which is fast gaining both respect and popularity. Momma thinks it’s all just a branding exercise and Yano’s “judo” is just repackaged jiujitsu, irritated that he seems primed to take a prestigious position as a trainer to the police force which runs its own martial arts contest. Sanshiro goes with them when they attempt to ambush Yano and teach him a lesson only to be easily defeated and humiliatingly thrown in the local river. Sanshiro immediately switches his allegiance, discarding his geta to give Yano a ride home in his rickshaw.

As Yano repeatedly tries to teach Sanshiro, judo is more than a martial arts discipline and places humanity at the centre of everything. This is a difficult lesson for the hot-headed Sanshiro to learn, quickly falling foul of his new master after brawling in the red light district and dramatically throwing himself into the pond. Clinging to a pole, he refuses to get out until Yano forgives him, but in true master fashion Yano merely says that getting out of the pond or not is entirely up to him. It’s while he’s in there, and after a few words from a Buddhist monk, that he witnesses a lotus flower slowing unfolding and achieves a kind of enlightenment that allows him to realise he’s been childish and petulant, finally getting out of the water to submit himself to the rigorous discipline of the martial arts life. 

The flower motif recurs several times, not least being its subversion when antagonist Higaki (Ryunosuke Tsukigata) sprinkles the ash of his cigarette over it. Making his first appearance in dandyish Western dress, Higaki is described as a snake-like villain, his evilness emphasised by his non-Japanese attire in contrast to pretty much everyone else who continues to dress in kimono. Higaki vows that his fight with Sanshiro must be to the death, in part a fight between the nascent art of judo originating in the post-feudal society and the traditional art of jiujitsu, but echoing Sanshiro’s first fight with former master Momma which resulted in his death and plunged the hero into spiritual conflict. He then experiences something similar when realising that he has inadvertently fallen in love with Sayo (Yukiko Todoroki) the pure-hearted daughter of another rival, Murai (Takashi Shimura), who also desires to fight him but as it turns out only in his desire to face a worthy opponent. Sanshiro wants to back away, afraid that he may humiliate or even kill the father of the woman he loves but is brought back to himself by more words from the monk who tells him that he must be as innocent as she is and engage in the fight in a sportsmanlike fashion as a spiritual as well as physical contest. 

This is also to some degree true of his final confrontation with Higaki which too is a confrontation with the evils of the age if less comfortably also satisfying the censors by allowing Higaki to stand in for foreignness in general. Higaki is indeed often accompanied by the sound of the wind which echoes his modernity, the fight taking place in a large windswept field below roiling clouds as the two men grapple despite the advice of their intermediary to call it off before one of them really dies. Higaki does in a sense die a sort of death in that we’re told after the fight he reformed and also managed to find a similar kind of enlightenment to Sanshiro who is then bashful and romantic while heading off on another journey from which he assures Sayo he will soon return. It’s true enough that there doesn’t seem to be much that would appeal to the censors of 1943 save the implied defeat of Western powers and celebration of Japanese martial arts given that humanity is repeatedly emphasised as the core component of judo and that Sanshiro achieves an individual enlightenment rather than finding peace as a member of a team or community, but they did otherwise decide to cut a substantial amount of the film said to contain a love scene and references to alcoholism that they deemed improper. Nevertheless, there are shades of Kurosawa’s later greatness even here in his dramatic composition and expressionistic use of nature to detail one boy’s journey into manhood through the spiritual rather than physical gymnastics of the philosophy of judo. 

In Search of Mother (瞼の母, Tai Kato, 1962)

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The toxic hyper-masculinity of the yakuza world conspires against a sensitive young man who longs to reclaim his place in society through reuniting with the mother who was forced to abandon him at five years old in Tai Kato’s hugely moving jidaigeki, In Search of Mother (瞼の母, Mabuta no Haha). Adapted from a kabuki play by Shin Hasegawa, Kato’s wandering tale is perfectly tailored for post-war concerns situating itself in a world of mass displacement, economic inequality, and lonely regret in which the secrets of the immediate past have become a threat to the promise of the near future which may then in itself prove unrealisable. 

As the film opens, 25-year-old Chutaro (Kinnosuke Nakamura) is trying to stop his hot-headed friend Hanji (Hiroki Matsukata) from taking revenge on a rival gang on behalf of their boss who is to them something like a father figure. Chutaro reminds Hanji that he has other ties and should think about the mother and sister who wait for him in his hometown to whom he should return and attempt to live an honest life, the possibility of which Chutaro is deprived because he is an orphan with no home or family to turn to. His pleas fall on deaf ears, Hanji reminding him of the code by which they live. “What’s going to happen to my pride as a man?” he exclaims, later telling his mother “I’m not a man if I don’t accept their challenge”. “If that’s the case then don’t be a man” she counters, physically preventing him from leaving as if Hanji were a still a child but to him it seems life is not worth living if you are not accounted a proper “man” by the values of the society in which he lives. When Hanji’s sister Onui (Hitomi Nakahara) attempts to plead for him, the gangsters explain to her that they are trapped too, they cannot return without fulfilling this debt of honour. “That’s not how it works miss, if we let him go after he attacked our boss we won’t be able to survive in our world.” 

Just as Chutaro searches for his long lost mother in order to reclaim his place in mainstream society, he is pursued by the gangsters desperate to redeem themselves through revenge. Eventually arriving in Edo by winter, he adopts the rather unscientific tactic of stopping every middle-aged woman he comes across and asking her if she might once have had a son. The first of these is a blind shamisen player whom he witnesses being cheated by man who makes a point of dropping the coin he was to give her back in his own pouch to make it sound like he paid when he didn’t and then getting indignant when he she calls him on it. The woman gives her age as 50 though looks 20 years older and relates her own sad story of widowhood and a son she had to give up but is not Chutaro’s mother. In any case he gives her a large amount of money out of a kindness he might hope someone would show to his own mother were they in his position. 

He does something similar with the next woman, Otora (Sadako Sawamura), a sex worker, like him ostracised by the world around her, who had a son who died in infancy and is now rejected by a judgemental society for doing the only thing she can to survive. Kato films each of these poignant moments in long unbroken takes tinged with the desperation and loneliness of two people looking for something from the other which in the end they are not able to give each other only find relief in their shared sorrow. Nevertheless the encounters also expose the difficulties faced by women in this era in which they must be dependent on men, the shamisen player suffering in her widowhood and Otora left with no choice than to engage in sex work which then exiles her from society at large just as Chutaro is rendered an outcast because of his yakuza past yet as he later explains what else could a child without parents have done?

This is something which might press heavily on the minds of a post-war audience in which the plight of war orphans and otherwise displaced children was all too familiar. In terms of cinema, the yakuza is often presented as a surrogate family in which orphaned boys can replace unconditional love with the mutual solidarity of a brotherhood defined by highly codified existence. Yet Chutaro longs to repair his connection to mainstream society by finding his mother, carrying around money he has saved in order to help her should he discover that she, like Otora and the shamisen player, is living in poverty. What he did not consider, however, is that she may reject him. Acting from a tip off from Otora he pays a visit to a local store run by Ohama (Michiyo Kogure) who unlike the other women has been able to build an independent life for herself and is preparing to marry off her daughter Otose (Keiko Okawa) to a wealthy merchant’s son. When Chutaro first appears, she assumes he is a conman fed information by Otora, admitting that she once had a son by his name but was told he had died in an epidemic when he was nine. Just as we’d seen her reject Otora lest she expose her sex worker past, she rejects Chutaro in fear that his yakuza ties will ruin her reputation, wreck her daughter’s marriage, and disrupt the comfortable life which she worked so hard to create just at the moment of its fruition. 

“You are suspicious of people because you have wealth” Chutaro points out, making plain the various ways in which economic inequality continues to disrupt the bonds between people. As we discover, Ohama was forced to abandon him because his father was abusive. In that era it would not have been possible to take her son with her and so she made her peace with leaving him but despite herself is now conflicted on witnessing him crying in front of her like a child while afraid to acknowledge him lest it disadvantage her daughter. The problem here is not that her past is shameful or a secret, Otose knows she had an older brother, but the fact that Chutaro has become a yakuza with judgment unfairly placed upon him for simply doing what he could to survive without parents to care for or guide him. Too late, Ohama realises she has made a terrible mistake. She and Otose go out to look for Chutaro but either too hurt by the rejection or having come to believe that he cannot escape his yakuza past, he lets them pass him by resigning himself to the fate of a lonely wanderer. Shot entirely on stage sets more often from mid-height rather than his characteristically low perspective and with additional fluidity mimicing Chutaro’s restless sense of displacement, Kato’s take on this classic tale is a profoundly moving examination of the effects of oppressive social codes on even the most essential of connections. 

The Balloon (風船, Yuzo Kawashima, 1956)

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The uncertainties of the post-war world are often conveyed through the familiar “cloud” metaphor, but in characteristic fashion Yuzo Kawashima opts for something earthier in the manmade “Balloon” (風船, Fusen). Less representative of its troubled humanists than the amoral villain Tsuzuki (Hiroshi Nihonyanagi) who likes to know which way the wind is blowing so he can go that way too, these balloons are up in the air because they’re afraid to land fearing the inevitable pop if they pick the wrong spot.

Our hero, former painter Murakami (Masayuki Mori), has become the head of a successful camera firm. His son, Keikichi (Tatsuya Mihashi), works with him, while his 20-year-old daughter Tamako (Izumi Ashikawa) is a reluctant student still living in the family home. Out of step with his times, he’s known as a decent and compassionate boss, offering his staff a significant wage increase in excess of that recommended by the union just because he thinks it’s the right thing to do. Unfortunately, Keikichi is much more like his conservative mother and does not quite share his father’s egalitarian principles. He’s currently engaged in a “relationship” with widowed bar hostess Kumiko (Michiyo Aratama) but treats her extremely badly, throwing money on the side table as he leaves her apartment to make it clear that he views himself as a customer and not as a lover. When Murakami re-encounters a family friend, Tsuzuki, at his father’s funeral it sets off a chain of events that will change his life completely. Now a shady nightclub entrepreneur, Tsuzuki is dead set on making his singer, Mikiko (Mie Kitahara), a star and thinks a good way to help make that happen might be to get her married to someone with money, like, for instance, Keikichi. 

Raised in Shanghai, singing in French, and forever wearing berets, Mikiko may indeed be the face of avaricious post-war youth, apparently having floated along with Tsuzuki halfway across the world in search of a place in the sun. Urged on by her manager, she goes to war against Kumiko who, in contrast to the “bar girl” image, is earnest and naive. Working as a hostess places her on the fringes of the sex trade, but does not necessarily imply that she makes a living by sleeping with her customers, and she certainly seems less than grateful to receive money from Keikichi whom she believes to be her boyfriend. Mikiko willingly weaponises her sex appeal and seemingly endures no consequences for doing so, while Kumiko is roundly rejected as a “fallen woman” and deemed an unsuitable match by Keikichi’s snooty mother. 

Tamako, by contrast, actively reaches out to Kumiko and attempts to make her a member of the family, never for a second considering that she might not be welcome because she can see that Kumiko is a “nice” person. Much more like her kindly father, she finds herself uncomfortable at home and mostly holes up in the attic painting. After suffering childhood polio, she’s been left with muscle weakness in her left arm and is treated like a child by her mother and brother who openly tell people that the illness has also made her “simple”. Despite all that, however, she sees only the best in people and desperately wants those around her to be happy. 

The difference in her own family is brought home to her when her father takes her with him on a business trip to the much quieter, more traditional Kyoto where he has reunited with a pair of youngsters whose late parents once rented him a room when he was temporarily displaced by post-war confusion. Like Kumiko, Rui (Sachiko Hidari) is a kind person in difficult circumstances. She too is working in a bar and has done some work as a photo model, even glamour shots to earn money to pay her brother’s university fees. Rui doesn’t want to go on doing that in the future, but doesn’t feel too bad about it either because she only exposed the outside of herself, and really who cares about that. 

Beginning to regret some of his life choices, Murakami wonders if he mightn’t be better to move back into the attic room in Kyoto and pray at the temple everyday like before instead of trying to make money he feels has slowly corrupted his family. Confronted with Keikichi’s near sociopathic self-involvement over his relationships with Kumiko and Mikiko, he comes to the conclusion that all he can do is cut him loose and hope he learns some humility through being forced to stand on his own two feet. Given a talking to by his father Keikichi doubles down with his misogynistic world view, insisting that “all women are whores” and all relationships are essentially transactions while claiming that he, himself, as well as men in general, is the real victim because he’s being forced to carry the can for the way the world works. Murakami isn’t having any of it, calmly asking him if he’d say the same thing to his mother, which he sheepishly admits he couldn’t. 

Mikiko likens Tsuzuki to one off his metaphorical balloons, pointing out that he was an imperialist in Shanghai and now seems to have it in for the bourgeoisie, but for all his cynicism he seems to have a kind of admiration for a woman like Kumiko who carried on loving one man no matter how poorly he treated her. If only he had a woman like that, he might have found a place to land and his life would have been very different, he muses. Murakami, meanwhile, has rejected the modern city, certain that his son is the way he is because his life has been too easy and access to wealth has given him a superiority complex that’s put him out of touch with ordinary people. Disappointed with his own family, he decides to make a new one with the two cheerful youngsters in Kyoto, hoping that he will at least be able to save his daughter from the ravages of a rapidly declining society which seems primed to swallow the sensitive whole.

Currently available to stream on Mubi in the US.