Tag: Nikkatsu

Crossroad (死の十字路, Umetsugu Inoue, 1956)

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An adulterous industrialist finds himself in a sticky situation after accidentally killing his wife in Umetsugu Inoue’s bizarre noir Crossroad (死の十字路, Shi no Jujiro). Based on a story by Edogawa Rampo, the film like any good noir suggests that in the end you can’t outrun your fate and all transgressions must be paid for but also turns on cosmic irony and strange coincidence in the great “tapestry” of life in which everything really is connected.

Shogo Ise (an aged-up Rentaro Mikuni) is the director of a construction firm about to complete a hugely expensive dam project which requires the sinking of a village and quarry. Apparently unhappily married to a woman obsessed with Nichiren Buddhism believing it helped to cure her of a serious illness during the war, he more or less lives with his secretary/mistress Harumi (Michiyo Aratama) who has been receiving incredibly weird and definitely threatening letters from Shogo’s wife Tomoko (Hisano Yamaoka). Tomoko claims that she has received an order from the “Child of the Sun” insisting that she must exact vengeance for the “great sin” Harumi has committed. The letter seems to be the last straw for Shogo who has decided to leave his wife, despite her incredible wealth, and set up home with Harumi permanently. 

Shogo hadn’t taken the threat very seriously, but sure enough Tomoko later shows up with some kind of ceremonial dagger and barges in to attack Harumi in the bath. During the struggle, Shogo accidentally kills Tomoko while trying to wrestle the knife from her. After briefly considering turning himself in, he realises that doing so will involve them all in scandal so he decides the best thing to do is dump her body in a well at the quarry which is shortly to be sunk. However, the plan soon goes awry and not least because a random man with a head injury climes into his car after he has a fender bender on a set of crossroads and later dies there leaving Shogo no choice but dump him alongside Tomoko. 

Inoue casts the abandoned quarry in truly eerie light, filled with gothic winds as if Shogo were being chastised by the gods themselves. In a sense, he’s paying not only for his sexual transgression but for the breaking of a taboo. A homeless man who once lived in the village later relates that he stayed until the last day because he did not want to leave his ancestors’ land. Shogo is part of the post-war construction boom but there’s also an underlying implication that this industrialisation is harmful to the land itself, not least in constraining a natural flow with the imposition of a dam in addition to causing a displacement of the people who once lived in the village while literally drowning the ancestral spirits. 

Harumi too speaks of feeling as if they’re both sinking beneath the waves, chasing a happiness to which they have no entitlement though she herself seems completely blameless save for her involvement in an extra-marital affair and strangely wholesome in comparison to the film’s otherwise sordid atmosphere. Even for a noir, Inoue’s sensibility is surprisingly sleazy for the world of 1956 and more than a little suggestive. A detective that randomly shows up, Minami (Shiro Osaka), lives with his foxy assistant and the interaction between them is constantly sexually charged while Inoue frequently returns to the backstreets of a neon city and the bars that line the streets approaching the crossroads where Shogo’s fate will align. 

It could be inferred that Shogo is a man whose life was marked by the war, his marriage perhaps in haste and then regretted while his wife developed her illness and subsequent obsession with Nichiren because of its corruption. Nevertheless, he’s portrayed as a basically “good” man in a very bad situation who made some very bad choices he wasn’t in the end bad enough to carry through properly hence the amazing series of collisions that seal his fate. On the one hand, like the young couple related to the drunk man who ended up in Shogo’s car, he and Harumi are just two otherwise ordinary people who decided to chase happiness albeit through an extra-marital affair only to pay a heavy price for daring to dream of a better future. Inoue has his usual amount of fun playing with noir archetypes as men strike matches in darkened alleyways and silhouettes of mysterious men in trench coats line the walls, not to mention the gothic sense of dread in the abandoned quarry, while constantly wrong footing us only to set us on our own collision course with the vagaries of post-war morality. 

The Hunter’s Diary (猟人日記, Ko Nakahira, 1964)

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Ko Nakahira is most closely associated with the seminal Nikkatsu Sun Tribe film Crazed Fruit which sent Yujiro Ishihara to stardom though he began his career at Shochiku in 1948 alongside Seijun Suzuki who like Nakahira would transfer to the newly re-established Nikkatsu when it resumed production in 1954. Suzuki was rather famously let go in 1968 due to creative differences with Nakahira also leaving the studio that year in similar circumstances having decamped to Shaw Brothers in Hong Kong in 1967 where he remade some of his previous hits including 1964’s Hunter’s Diary (猟人日記, Ryojin Nikki). 

Based on a mystery novel by Masako Togawa who in fact stars in her only film role as the hero’s little seen wife, Hunter’s Diary is one of a string of films in the mid-1960s critical of the functioning of the legal system in the post-war society. Nakahira opens with a lengthy sequence introducing new forensic technologies which anticipate the use of DNA as an investigative tool in the use of blood type analysis to place a suspect at a crime scene. This science will however be undercut by the sympathetic lawyer Hatanaka (Kazuo Kitamura) who reminds us that the presence of such evidence is not proof in and of itself in much the same way that DNA has since become the new smoking gun and is as susceptible to misuse as any other kind of forensic technique. 

It’s a problem for the hero, Honda (Noboru Nakaya), because his blood type is incredibly rare. In fact he was once in the paper for saving a baby by coming to the rescue with a donation just in time which as we later discover is ironic because much of his behaviour is shaped by the loss of his own child who was born with osteogenesis imperfecta and did not survive. The traumatic circumstances of the birth left his wife, Taneko, with a fear of pregnancy that eventually destroyed their marriage. The couple now live largely apart, she in her family’s country mansion painting disturbing pictures and he in the city “hunting” women for one night stands adopting the persona of a man who is foreign or part-Japanese. There is something of the fear of foreignness seen in other similarly themed films of the era in the fact that Honda’s child is born in Mexico while the couple had met and married in the US, Taneko convinced that had they returned to Japan earlier her baby may have survived while Honda claims that “intellectual” women are drawn to foreign men as he assumes his rather creepy “Monsieur Soubra” alter-ego complete with a funny accent and slightly broken Japanese. 

He positions his “hunting” as a way of dealing with the collapse of his marriage and his guilt over the death of his child overcoming his sense of impotence through transgressive sexuality though many of the women Hatanaka later interviews describe him as disappointingly vanilla and as we discover his games might have begun long before. Meanwhile the women are themselves judged for their sexuality, the discovery of a male muscle magazine in the home of a mousy spinster somewhat amusing to Honda while the unintended darkness of his sport is brought home by the film’s opening sequence in which a 19-year-old woman who became pregnant after he seduced and abandoned her takes her own life in shame and desperation only to be branded an “idiot” by her grieving sister for having slept with a man she had only just met. When a previous conquest of his is murdered in her apartment, Honda is momentarily worried but assumes it’s a grim coincidence. When her death is followed by that of a woman who could have provided him with an alibi he comes to the conclusion that someone is trying to frame him. 

Hatanaka’s conviction is that “the law is everything in court” and that Honda should not be judged on his moral character for his sleazy philandering only on the basis of the evidence presented which he believes may have been deliberately planted to incriminate him. His investigations take him to unlikely places discovering the potentially unethical practices of blood donation programs along with the illegal sale of blood and other bodily fluids such as semen while seeing the tables turned on visiting a gay bar where a male sex worker reports a weird encounter with a suspicious client, and salesman continues to frequent a Turkish bath hoping to run into a woman who seduced him but may only have been interested in his blood type. Honda soon forgets the name of the woman who took her own life, but is haunted by the visions of the women he has harmed while simultaneously rejecting the labels placed on him as a pervert or a predator and believing that his child’s death is punishment for his “abnormal sexuality” as some may brand it. 

This sense of guilt is also reflected in his worry that he is a “spreader of death”, as if though he did not kill them directly he were the carrier of a disease or else some kind of grim reaper beckoning these women towards their demise though he evidently thinks little of them outside of their status as trophies and does not stop to consider the consequences of his actions on others. Above his bed in his city hideout (officially he lives in a hotel) there is a picture of a fox hunt making plain that his satisfaction lies in the chase rather than its conclusion yet otherwise his motives are rather banal. He cannot leave his wife because he married into her prominent family and his social standing depends on his connection to them, likewise he decides against alerting the police or the building’s caretaker on discovering one of the women’s bodies because his reputation would be ruined if were to become involved in a murder and his secret life exposed. Ironically his salvation comes precisely because of this social standing when his wealthy father-in-law hires Hatanaka to handle his appeal and save him from the death penalty. 

Hatanaka had resigned from a previous position in opposition to the system, disappointed on meeting the lawyer who defended Honda at trial and realising they did not attempt to mount a defence nor investigate his case simply try to mitigate it in the hope of working it down to a custodial sentence. He instructs his naive young assistant who wonders if Honda is the sort of man they should be saving that she should approach every case on its merits as if the defendant is innocent without bringing in external moral judgements on his character. As he tells him, Honda may be legally vindicated but his moral judgement would depend on how he lives his life from then on later offering him a kind of absolution in telling him that one of his conquests, who does not want to be identified, gave birth to a son who is healthy and happy signalling that his is not an original sin and he does not bear that kind of responsibility for the death of his child. Veering towards the avant-garde Nakahira makes frequent use of superimposition and dissolves to reflect Honda’s fracturing mental state along with the persistence of his guilt while shifting into the purely documentarian in his lengthy explanation of forensic techniques and the science behind blood types but always returns to the Hitchcockian interplay of sex, death, and remorse which is true source of Honda’s trial. 

DVD remaster trailer (no subtitles)

Tomodachi (ともだち, Yukihiro Sawada, 1974)

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As the Japanese studio system began to implode in the late 1960s, Nikkatsu which had specialised in youth cinema, pivoted towards softcore pornography rebranding itself as Nikkatsu Roman Porno. At the same time, however, they also launched an unexpected sideline of family films with strong educational aims under the Nikkatsu Children’s Films banner. Selected by the Ministry of Education and recommended by various educational and parent and teacher associations, the second feature put out under the label, 1974’s Tomodachi (ともだち), is in its own way instructional with a strong anti-bullying theme but also has something to say about the literal pollution of the contemporary society. 

As such, the film revolves around the originally unsympathetic hero, Shinta (Hitoshi Abe), who openly bullies a girl in his class by kicking a football at her because she alone has been excused the after school duty of sweeping the school yard. Having transferred from rural Tohoko, Yoshiko (Noriko Suzuki) has developed serious asthma from living in the centre of industrial Kawasaki and has been instructed to avoid physical exertion or activities which might cause her to breath in additional dust and smoke. Shinta and his friends are however entirely insensitive, literally surrounding Yoshiko while they hound her with questions insisting she’s not really “ill” and merely shirking her duty. When the teacher tries to explain to them that Yoshiko has been excused because it would be bad for her heath to be sweeping dust, Shinta and his friends all immediately claim to be ill too, fake coughing and wheezing despite having just been playing football rather than doing their after school chores like the other kids. 

What doesn’t occur to Shinta is the loneliness, isolation, and embarrassment Yoshiko must feel on being singled out because of her illness. Rather poignantly, the school nurse and others describe how cheerful and friendly Yoshiko was when she first arrived only to reflect on how depressed and withdrawn she’s since become. This is partly as Shinta later learns because her classmates rejected her once she became ill. Asthma is obviously not a contagious disease, yet many of the other parents stopped their kids playing with her because of the stigma surrounding any kind of “illness” while simulataneously unwilling to bear the responsibility of needing to care for her if she should undergo an asthma attack while in their home or under their care fearing they would then suffer a reputational loss if they failed to treat her properly. 

For his part, Shinta is intensely resentful when the teacher sits him next to Yoshiko in the hope that his cheerfulness will help bring her out of her shell. Exclaiming that he hates sick people and thinks that Yoshiko is boring and creepy because she doesn’t really say anything, he begins to have second thoughts when the teacher implores him to help “as a man” suddenly discovering a sense of honour and justice that he doesn’t want to let down. His first action however is to continue kicking footballs at her, but strangely it works rather well providing a physical activity which is compatible with her asthma in not needing to move around while allowing her to feel part of the game. As he gets to know her more, Shinta comes to sympathise with his new friend and is angry with the other kids who reject her but discovers that his own parents are not much different refusing him permission to invite Yoshiko over on talking to other parents at the PTA in part because they run a bento store and are nervous of coming under suspicion if anyone notices a girl with a heavy cough coming and going and questions their hygiene practices. 

Shinta does, however, visit her small apartment which is unfortunately right behind a dusty construction site. As she explains, Yoshiko’s parents were part of a new agricultural drive which later failed and left them with massive debts which is why they had to leave the country to work in a factory in Kawasaki. As her parents often work late shifts for the extra money, she has to look after not only herself but her younger brother with only a pet squirrel for company. Constant references are made to other children having to change schools because their parents moved into a company dorm, while the poor quality of the air is repeatedly given as the cause of Yoshiko’s illness literally choked by the thoughtless post-war economic drive that continues to disrupt not only family lives but the local environment, Shinta also revealing that his parents used to farm seaweed but were forced to stop because of industrial pollution in local rivers. 

This destructive industry also creates unintended divisions among the children along class lines between those whose parents work manual jobs in the factories and those whose families are wealthier and involved in white collar work. The ring leader of the girls who reject Yoshiko, Ayako (Masayo Koga) is the daughter of a wealthy conservative family living in a large house with a mother (Yoshie Kitsuta) who wears kimono. When Ayako shuns her the other girls follow, Yoshiko inviting them to her birthday party only to discover them all together eating cake at Ayako’s house instead. She’d invited them partly out of worry that they were offended she hadn’t invited them to her small apartment, only then realising that they rejected her because of the stigma towards her illness leaving her feeling hopeless and dejected. As Shinta later points out, this kind of emotional pain negatively impacts her medical condition coming to despise the adult world describing his father as the worst in his class for his insistence that he should accept the way the world works rather than idealistically trying to help his new friend. 

The message of the film, however, is that it’s wrong to leave people out and that children in particular should always attempt to friendly with each other. Developing appendicitis, Shinta comes to a new appreciation of how difficult it can be being ill while his mother too starts to regret her decision finally inviting Yoshiko to come and visit them at their home after spotting her sadly walking around outside uncertain if it’s alright to come and visit Shinta on his sickbed. Shinta’s two best friends had also been not entirely supportive of his decision to bring Yoshiko into their group, referring to her as “goldfish poo” in her tendency to trail along behind them, though partly out of jealousy along with the natural awkwardness of a girl suddenly being introduced into a previously all male club but even they eventually come round and decide to reaffirm their friendship. Despite this rosy conclusion in which the other children are convinced to abandon their unfair prejudices and become friends with each other, the eventual conclusion seems rather cruel if returning to the minor theme of the destructive effects of increasing industrialisation even as Shinta’s father is also reminded of the importance of friendship in stating an intention to attend his own primary school reunion. A touching coming-of-age tale, Tomodachi puts its young hero through the emotional wringer but also allows him to discover a strong sense of justice and empathy towards those rejected by their society. 

Step on the Gas! (新宿アウトロー ぶっ飛ばせ, Toshiya Fujita, 1970)

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A recently released former gangster and the bored son of a CEO look for new directions in early ‘70s Japan in Toshiya Fujita’s Step on the Gas! (新宿アウトロー ぶっ飛ばせ, Shinjuku Outlaw: Buttobase). Released between his two instalments in the Stray Cat Rock series, Fujita’s freewheeling underworld drama is high on irony and shot in a surprisingly warm colour palate replete with pastels seemingly eschewing the seriousness of Nikkatsu’s earlier youth dramas for sense of youthful ennui eventually granting its mismatched heroes if not the direction they seek then at least possibility in their forever floating existence. 

“Angel of Death” Yuji (Tetsuya Watari) waltzes out of prison to be met by no one, only for another man it later transpires he does not know to attempt to flag him down in his military jeep. Ignoring him, Yuji jumps in a taxi and asks to go to Shinjuku, presumably his old stomping ground, before changing his mind and travelling on to Yokohama instead. This would indeed be a fantastically expensive journey, Yuji ironically taking the cabbie for a ride only for the mysterious man to appear and pay his fare for him. Giving his name as Nao (Yoshio Harada), he eventually explains that he’s trying to recruit Yuji for a job hoping to make use of his fearsome reputation to help him recover some missing drugs and get a gang of bikers off his back. 

As we later discover, however, Nao is not some street punk but the son of a wealthy businessman if one obviously at odds with this conservative father. That might be why he seems so hopelessly out of his depth in his relationship with the delinquent bosozoku motorcycle gang led by Rikki (Masaya Oki) who is perhaps equally in over his head in his rather naive approach to criminal enterprise. Nao and his friend Shuhei were supposed to handle a shipment of marijuana for the gang, but the deal went south and the drugs went missing along with Shuhei so now Nao owes them big time. He wants to use Yuji’s “Angel of Death” skills to find out what happened to Shuhei and retrieve the drugs to settle things with Rikki. 

Inevitably, events have a connection to Yuji’s former Shinjuku life Nao employing a woman he used to know, Shoko (Meiko Kaji) who is also Shuhei’s sister, to run his bar, while the icy enforcer working for the big enemy, corporatised yakuza, also turns out to be someone he knew before in the aptly named and distinctly creepy “Scorpion” (Mikio Narita) a former policeman turned amoral gangster. “His power lies not in fearlessness or being a good shooter but in the fact he doesn’t care about anything” Yuji later explains, describing him as the kind of man willing to knock off anyone in his way without a second thought be it a woman or a partner. One might have thought the same of Yuji in his breezy insouciance, but he is at heart noble despite his fearsome nickname displaying compassion and empathy for those around him along with old-fashioned values like loyalty siding with Nao against the twin threats of Scorpion and the biker gang with whom he later proposes a mutually beneficial alliance. 

Skipping between strangely whimsical folk music and a melancholy jazz score, Fujita’s freewheeling crime drama hints at a kind of aimless ennui Yuji and Nao both in differing ways emerging from a obsolescent past into a new and confusing world, Yuji realising the kind of life he lived before is no longer viable while Nao rejects his wealthy upbringing for a life of unglamorous crime engaging in drug use which he at one point hints has left him impotent. Meanwhile, the fading grandeur of old school yakuza is very much apparent in the cowardliness of the gang’s corporatised boss who hires a man like Scorpion to protect him because he cannot defend himself, planning to make off with the stolen money in a helicopter he has waiting rather than honourably facing off against Nao and Yuji in their quest to retrieve what was stolen from them. Constant red and white imagery recalling the Japanese flag clues us in to the sense of futility in their violence, but even so Fujita closes on an ironic note cementing the friendship of the two men but leaving them free floating with no clue how to land floundering for direction above an increasingly confusing society. 

Red Handkerchief (赤いハンカチ, Toshio Masuda, 1964)

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The moral compromises of the post-war era are brought home to a trio of frustrated lovers in Toshio Masuda’s Nikkatsu “mood action”, Red Handkerchief (赤いハンカチ, Akai Handkerchief). Starring an ageing Yujiro Ishihara perhaps cast slightly against type as an ultra noble policeman choosing self-exile after accidentally shooting dead a key witness, who also happens to be the father of the woman he loved, in order to save his partner, Masuda’s noirish melodrama takes aim squarely at the radiating effects of social inequality and the moral bankruptcy of an increasingly prosperous society. 

Masuda opens, however, with an old-fashioned foot chase as cops Mikami (Yujiro Ishihara) and Ishizuka (Hideaki Nitani) attempt to run down a drug mule carrying a briefcase full of illicit substances. The suspect later gets hit by a truck and killed while the briefcase is nowhere to be found. Concluding the mule must have abandoned it at a ramen stand he ran past on the way, the cops haul in the old man running it, Hiraoka (Shin Morikawa), who seems to know more than he’s letting on but is too terrified of the gangsters to consider giving anything up. In an effort to get him to talk, Mikami pays a visit to his relentlessly cheerful factory worker daughter Reiko (Ruriko Asaoka), becoming instantly smitten with her as she quickly packs a bag of warm clothing and miso soup assuming her dad’s in for a bit of drunk and disorderly. Their romance is however not to be. Apparently feeling himself out of options, Hiraoka opts for suicide by proxy, grabbing Ishizuka’s gun and firing at police. An Olympic sharpshooter, Mikami draws his pistol to save his friend and the old man is killed. Guilty, the pair attempt to apologise to Reiko, but unsurprisingly she is not in the mood to accept it. 

Four years later, Mikami has left the force for a life of wandering doing odd jobs all over Japan while entertaining his co-workers with sad songs about lost love. Yokohama detective Tsuchiya (Nobuo Kaneko) eventually tracks him down in frosty Hokkaido, encouraging him to return with tales of Ishizuka’s wildly improbable success as a supermarket entrepreneur now apparently married to Mikami’s lost love Reiko. Tsuchiya thinks Mikami was set up and that Ishizuka is a dirty cop who’s been living the high life while Mikami has been slumming it in an unnecessary act of atonement for something that wasn’t really his fault. 

Though they were apparently good friends and loyal partners, Ishizuka flags up a potential source of tension early on in his solo interrogation of Hiraoka explaining that unlike Mikami he’s not an educated man and understands how difficult it is to be poor. Tsuchiya later posits this same sense of class conflict as one reason that Ishizuka may have betrayed him, that he felt inferior and that he would not be able to compete with his elite partner. Ishizuka later implies something similar in his dog eat dog view of the world, explaining to a newly conflicted Reiko that life is a matter of winning and losing and that Mikami is the very image of defeat. He views himself as a winner thanks to his burgeoning supermarket empire, taking full advantage of the rising consumerism of the post-war era and willing to do whatever it takes in order to achieve success even if that means crossing a line that Mikami would never cross. Yet he is also like Mikami hobbled by his love for the “beautiful”, “pure” Reiko, allowing his insecure acquisitiveness to turn violent in his determination to keep her or at least keep her from any other man. 

“Money rules everything!” Ishizuka insists, attempting to justify himself for his turn towards selfish individualism willing to sacrifice not only a “worthless” old man but even friendship in the conviction that he is “a man of great value, a winner!” and therefore entitled to move beyond conventional morality while using his ill-gotten gains to support needy orphans. Even he, however, is later undone by love, perhaps the one true form of “justice”, in realising that Reiko has chosen nobility in the form of Mikami and could never accept the man he is or the things he’s done. A romantic melodrama masquerading as a crime thriller, Red Handkerchief finds Masuda in expressionist mode, the pounding machinery at the foundry where Reiko works pulverising Mikami’s noble heart as his romantic dreams are crushed, the highway streetlights dancing across Reiko’s windscreen as she returns in confusion, and in the constant use of weather to indicate the mood, the sky suddenly brightening behind Ishizuka as his confidence returns. Echoing in The Third Man in its melancholy ending, however, even if slightly inverted, Masuda sets his battered hero adrift in the confusions of the post-war era striding into the mist guitar in hand a perpetual wanderer. 

Original trailer (no subtitles)

Velvet Hustler (紅の流れ星, Toshio Masuda, 1967)

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Perhaps overlooked in comparison with his better known contemporaries, Toshio Masuda was a bankable talent at Nikkatsu directing some of the studio’s biggest box office hits largely thanks to his long association with tentpole star Yujiro Ishihara. Nine years on from their collaborative debut Rusty Knife, however, times had perhaps begun to change. Featuring vibrant colour production design by Tokyo Drifter’s Takeo Kimura, a frequent Seijun Suzuki collaborator, 1967’s Velvet Hustler (紅の流れ星, Kurenai no Nagareboshi, AKA Like a Shooting Star) is a reworking of Masuda’s own Red Pier, itself inspired by Julien Duvivier’s 1937 French thriller Pepé le Moko, with Tetsuya Watari in the role originally filled by Ishihara. Apparently drawing inspiration from Godard’s Breathless, Velvet Hustler is a thoroughly post-modern retake, a parodic tale of gangster ennui and post-war emptiness in which rising economic prosperity has brought with it only despair. 

When we first meet petty gangster Goro (Tetsuya Watari), he’s coolly standing by, leaning on a fencepost like a bored gunslinger as he waits for the perfect getaway vehicle. Jumping into a fancy red convertible which it seems has already been stolen by the young man who parked it in this packed car park, the wires handily hanging striped and exposed, Goro barrels along the highway and and performs an infinitely efficient drive-by shooting on a rival gang boss. According to the man who hired him, Goro was only supposed to cause serious injury, not death, but as he points out if the guy insists on dying that’s hardly his problem. Taking his paycheque, Goro agrees to lie low in Kobe for the next six months after which his boss will come and get him. A year later, however, and he’s still there doing not much of anything, hanging out with the local kids and acting as a procurer dragging sailors on shore leave into gang-run clubs where Americans get into fights with Vietnamese émigrés. So desperate for escape are they that Goro’s underling even suggests they go to war, later thinking better of it when he remembers seeing horrific photos from the front.  

In a convenient but unsatisfying relationship with bar hostess Yukari (Kayo Matsuo), Goro explains that it’s not that he doesn’t like her, but he’s bored, “bored with fooling around with women”, but also of the business of living. The sun comes up, the sun goes down, and then it comes up again, every day all the same. His life has become completely meaningless and he has no idea what to do about it. He longs to go back to Tokyo, but is trapped in this strange Kobe limbo land, an end of the line sea port in which there is ironically no sense of escape. He doesn’t know it yet, but there’s a killer (Jo Shishido) on his trail, a killer who eventually reminds Goro that even if he kills him first another man will come. The bullets you fire are aimed squarely at yourself, Goro’s destiny is already set. There is only one way out of Kobe and it doesn’t lead back to Tokyo. 

Meanwhile, another possibility presents itself in the beautiful Keiko (Ruriko Asaoka), a temporary visitor from the capital looking for her missing fiancé presumed to have done a bunk with her father’s money. Keiko is a distinctly cool yet self-assured figure, generating an instant connection with the affable gangster at once reassured by a sympathetic mama-san that Goro is good but also warned that he’s still a yakuza and as such no good for a smart young woman like her. Keiko thinks that Tokyo is pretentious and boring, confused by Goro’s insistence on getting back there but like him perhaps in waiting. “I love you to death” she later ironically confesses while simultaneously insisting that men and women are different. There is no escape for her. Goro is tired of running but refuses to be handcuffed, choosing perhaps the only path to freedom presented to him. 

A nihilistic tale of gangster ennui in which life itself no longer has value, Velvet Hustler is a curiously cheerful affair despite its essential melancholy, Goro and Keiko sparring in a romantic war of attrition while he almost flirts with the dogged detective (Tatsuya Fuji) determined to bring him down. The kitschy production design gives way to Antonioni-esque shots of a strangely empty city while an ethereal sequence of dissolves eventually leaves the pair alone on the dance floor as if to imply their single moment of romance is but a brief dream of emotional escape. The trappings of post-war success are everywhere from Keiko’s elegant outfits to the cute red sports car and the weird club where Goro dad dances in front of his minions, not so much older than them but clearly out of place in this distinctly unhip seaside bar, but finally all there is is a dead end and an infinite emptiness the embrace of which is, perhaps, the only viable path to freedom. 

Temptation (誘惑, Ko Nakahira, 1957)

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Ko Nakahira made his name with the seminal Sun Tribe movie Crazed Fruit, a nihilistic tale of bored, affluent post-war youth. Released a year later, Temptation (Yuwaku), adapted from a novel by Sei Ito, is in some ways its inverse pitting a melancholy widower harping on dreams of lost love against his relentlessly practical daughter for whom “Sex is life. Art is money” but finding in the end perhaps more commonality than difference save for the fact the youth of today may have no real dreams to betray. 

Now 55 years old, Sugimoto (Koreya Senda) is the proprietor of the Sugimoto Dried Goods store in upscale Ginza. Father to an only daughter, Hideko, now that his wife has passed away he finds himself carried back towards the past and is planning to turn the upstairs space in the store into a small gallery. For her part Hideko (Sachiko Hidari) and her coterie of artist friends are hoping to convince him to allow them to exhibit in the gallery for cheap, but he, slightly more conservative in his old age, views them all as low class Bohemians and fails to understand why Hideko hangs out with them in the first place. He has, it seems, an internal conflict symbolised by the beret he’s taken to wearing in which he is unable to let go of the broken dreams of his youth when he was a struggling artist forced to give up his first love, Eiko (Izumi Ashikawa), because he had no money or prospects while she eventually consented to an arranged marriage.  

The world of 1931 being very different, Sugimoto and Eiko never did anything beyond holding hands (later a key plot point), though in her parting letter she laments that she regrets not having let him kiss her and mildly berates him for not having been more forceful. A slightly uncomfortable sentiment, but diffidence seems to be the force defining Sugimoto’s life. At the store he finds himself dissatisfied with his senior salesgirl Junko (Misako Watanabe) whose brusque manner with customers and refusal to wear makeup he fears are harming sales, but is unable to say anything until his rather half-hearted attempt to talk to her provokes a mutual misunderstanding, he thinking she may be anxious about being fired and she wondering if he’s about to make a proposal. 

For unclear reasons, Junko seems to have a crush on Sugimoto, something which becomes a minor problem when he also becomes a target for Kotoko (Yukiko Todoroki), a middle-aged woman/insurance agent from Hideko’s floral arrangement class. Privy to their interior monologues, we can hear the two women squaring off against each other, Junko complaining that Kotoko is “meddling, talkative, and fat”, while Kotoko fires back that Junko wears “no makeup at all and is so stuck up” as they glare at each other through the shop window. Yet it’s not Sugimoto who eventually provokes a change in Junko, but another eccentric, struggling artist, Sohei (Shoji Yasui), who bluntly tells her that she is pretty and so should put some makeup on to bring it out. 

Junko later characterises this intervention as an act of salvation that sees her re-embrace her femininity, not only wearing makeup and having her hair styled but beginning to talk warmly with customers, improving the business but ironically giving Sugimoto the mistaken idea her friendly new demeanour may be partly for his benefit. For his part, Sohei, an unkempt artist suffering a seemingly permanent lice infestation, claims not to have cared very much about money or possessions which led him to accidentally abuse the generosity of his artist friends but has now been awakened, it seems, to a kind of consumerist mentality thanks to the interest of Junko and recognition of his art when some of Sugimoto’s old friends (well known artists Taro Okamoto, Seiji Togo, and critic Kimihide Tokudaiji) praise his paintings on seeing them in the gallery leading to them fetching a high price from prominent collectors. 

“The value of a work of art hinges on whether or not it sells” one of Hideko’s friends points out while she adds “We should be proud that art is profitable”, a sentiment that hugely offends Shohei (Ryoji Hayama), the beret-wearing leader of another artist circle the gang enlist to help them pay for the rental of the gallery. Though he concedes to Hideko’s argument that her father’s gallery is a business enterprise, not a charity, Shohei is somewhat horrified by the casual equation of art and commerce, shocked that the girls view their flower arranging as a practical more than an aesthetic skill. Still, in another irony it turns out that his talent is for business rather than art, shrewdly steering Sohei’s success rather than his own when it’s clear his work is the standout in the gallery. Just like Sugimoto had, he eventually resolves to give up his artistic dreams after falling in love with Hideko, planning to marry into her family and take over the Sugimoto store. She meanwhile, had described him as not good marriage material, “no poor painters for me, only rich men” but is apparently in favour of his selling out if only in that it ironically makes him more himself. 

As we discover there are more than a few reasons besides the beret that Sugimoto keeps feeling Shohei reminds him of someone else even as he finds himself wary of him, pointlessly trying to set Hideko up with someone more “suitable” just as she makes a point of inviting a series of alternative widowed, middle-aged ladies to the gallery opening not so much because she particularly objects to Kotoko but she’s worried her dad might get bamboozled into something without properly surveying his options. While Sugimoto remains maudlin and filled with regret though perhaps putting the past aside through a symbolic act of closure, the youngsters are cheerfully cynical, practical in the way the older generation are always telling them to be but are perhaps disappointed in them for not having dreams or aspirations beyond those of claiming or maintaining or their chosen status in life. “Art is money” Hideko is fond of saying, and it’s true enough in so much as money is an art and the one which seems at least to have captivated the post-war generation eagerly awaiting the advent of the consumerist revolution. 

Bad Girl (非行少女, Kirio Urayama, 1963)

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“It’s all because of poverty” according to the not-quite hero of Kirio Urayama’s Bad Girl (非行少女, Hiko shojo), and he’s right to an extent but then again not. Following his factory tale Cupola, Where the Furnaces Glow, Urayama shifts further into social realism, exploring small-town life at a midpoint in the post-war era in which the economic prosperity which was beginning to take root in a Tokyo about to host the Olympic Games had not yet been evenly distributed. The titular “bad girl” of the title is no Nikkatsu delinquent, merely a lonely young woman undermined by parental neglect and societal disdain who scandalously smokes, drinks, and steals the things she could never hope to afford. 

Wakae (Masako Izumi) claims she does these things in part because she hates her step-mother (Sumie Sasaki) whom she blames for her own mother’s death after returning from the hospital to tell her father that her mother had died only to find him with another woman. Emotionally neglected, she spends her time in bars enjoying the attentions of men without perhaps understanding the dangers. It’s in trying to escape two young toughs who think they haven’t got what they paid for when they took her to the cinema that Wakae runs into childhood friend Saburo (Mitsuo Hamada), recently returned from Tokyo after the factory he was working at went bust. Now 21, Saburo has a little education and was hoping for an office job but discovers that positions are generally open only to new graduates and is advised that his best option is to work for his brother (Asao Koike) with whom he does not get on. 

Where his brother is currently running for political office on a conservative ticket, Saburo is of a more liberal, progressive outlook, thinking back on the divisions in the town caused by protests against an American artillery test site which once occupied the local beach. He is extremely concerned that Wakae has been skipping school and is keen to help her study, even giving her money to help pay the fees as well as buying her a fashionable skirt to replace the worn through trousers which left her too ashamed to go. Unfortunately, Wakae loses the money after she’s accosted by a delinquent boy who tries to press her into sex work, leaving her both unable to attend school and embarrassed to see Saburo who is the only one encouraging her to think that she is worth something and can have a bright future. 

Poverty is in itself only one problem, the wider one being that everyone has already decided that Wakae is “bad girl” and that bad girls aren’t worth anything. Her disinterested father (Jun Hamamura) and stepmother are content to send her to her aunt who wants to make her a geisha, reinforcing an image of herself as somehow unfit for regular society and suited only to sex work. After losing Saburo’s money, she tries to rob the school but is caught by a caretaker who feigns sympathy but later offers her money for sex and then tells everyone that she tried it on with him so he wouldn’t turn her in. This coupled with a misunderstanding that she frittered away the money he gave her for the fees makes even Saburo lose faith in her, convincing him that they must have some time apart after he agrees to take a job on the chicken farm of a family friend to get away from his brother’s conservative authoritarianism. 

After accidentally setting fire to a chicken coop, Wakae is sent to a home for troubled children which turns out to be perhaps the best thing for her. Although she does not immediately bond with some of the other residents, she finds there what she never had at home – a supportive family, while the couple who run the facility do their best to instil confidence by teaching her skills that will allow her to reintegrate into regular society. Even there, however, members of the board are primed to write her off as a lost cause, just another “bad girl” not worth the effort. Only the head of the facility argues the problem is that no one’s ever given her a chance and if no one ever does then she’ll never have the opportunity to prove them wrong. 

Meanwhile, many of the other girls find themselves in the same position. Wakae’s friend Tomiko (Shizuka Yoshida) who ran away when she discovered that her parents were going to sell her, believes her future is hopeless because she’ll never be able to escape the “bad girl” label, but given courage by her time at the centre Wakae is able to tell her to stay strong, because you’ll never know if you don’t try. Wakae becomes an uncomfortable standard-bearer for the others, her eventual graduation another sign of hope but also perhaps a burden in knowing that if she fails to capitalise on her success she will only deepen their sense of despair. 

Yet her path forward begins to take her away from Saburo who makes a late night, romantic visit to the centre to apologise and tell her he’ll be waiting for her when she gets out. After a crisis of his own in which he too commits a crime in an attempt to buy a better future only to return beaten both literally and spiritually, Saburo has perhaps given in, agreed to work for his ultraconservative brother and bought his line of earnest hard work as the only path towards salvation. Wakae decides to take a promising job offer in Osaka and to leave without saying goodbye in case Saburo tries to convince her to stay local. That’s something he eventually tries to do in a last minute station dash, leaving Wakae torn and confused, enduring a public breakdown in a train station cafe literally stuck between one place and another. 

Saburo had complained that his problem was that he didn’t know what to do, confused by the volatile post-war society. Rather than a source of salvation he becomes a feckless suitor who can offer only a vague ideal of “love”, unable to protect Wakae and perhaps selfishly holding her back. As she tells him, she has made her decision, but ironically lacks agency. Her destiny is still to an extent in Saburo’s hands in his desire either to trap or free her. Meanwhile, there is also something insidiously uncomfortable in the fact that the only way to escape her “bad girl” image is by becoming economically productive, redeeming herself through honest hard work, while the desire to reject the label so totally also tacitly reinforces the idea of there being such a thing as a “bad girl” and that “bad girls” are worthless. Perhaps Saburo’s brother wins after all in his aspirational conservatism and its insistence on properness and industry. Nevertheless, Urayama leaves Wakae in a better place than we found her, given the confidence to pursue an individual destiny in the knowledge that she is not worthless, is deserving of love and happiness, and has a place to which to return as she makes her way into a promising post-war future.

Flame of Devotion (執炎, Koreyoshi Kurahara, 1964)

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Koreyoshi Kurahara, like Seijun Suzuki, began his career at Nikkatsu mostly working on its youth-orientated commercial cinema only to end up being fired for producing films deemed too “arty” for the studio’s target audience such as his 1967 Mishima adaptation, Thirst for Love. Released the same year as Black Sun, 1964’s Flame of Devotion (執炎, Shuen) is in someways a much more subdued affair, a fairly atypical melodrama critiquing not only the destructive legacy of war but also a cultural insistence on stoical endurance in the face of emotional difficulty which is itself the mark and enabler of militarism. 

Beginning at the end, Kurahara opens with a small collection of men and women in mourning clothes walking towards a memorial service, later followed by an elegant young woman in western dress who has just arrived by train. Today marks the seventh anniversary of the death of a young woman, Kiyono (Ruriko Asaoka), who drowned herself after learning that her husband would not return from the war. The action then jumps back 20 years to a much more peaceful time in which the 10-year-old Kiyono first encountered the 12-year-old Takuji, before shifting to the more recent past in which the youngsters fell in love, overcame many hardships, and married only to be torn apart by war. 

The love story is complicated by the fact that Kiyono is a resident of a small and secretive village who claim to be descendants of the legendary Heike. Kiyono is a mountain woman, and Takuji (Juzo Itami) is a man of the sea, the son of a fishing village expected to take over the family business. When he first re-encounters Kiyono in his late teens, Takuji is in the process of finding wood to carve his own boat with dreams of sailing it all around the world. A mountain man advises him of a shortcut home, which brings him to Kiyono’s village where he serendipitously stops to ask for water and is invited inside. Kiyono insists on walking him back to the beach where she makes plain that she remembers him as the boy from all those years ago though he is now a man. She declares that she loves the sea, because it is big, manly, and also kind, abruptly stripping off and jumping in much to Takuji’s surprise. He waits for her on the beach every day after that, and the couple fall in love but the spectre of war is already upon them. Takuji has to leave for his mandatory military service and they are parted for the first time. 

Unable to see him off on the train because she would be ashamed to become emotional in front of so many people, Kiyono for the first time laments that she is not a strong woman. She sees this quality in herself as a failing and is constantly upbraided for it by the women around her who are quick to point out that the ability to bear all is a woman’s sorry duty. They see her as being too soft for the world, or perhaps merely too uninhibited, her mother lamenting that she always preferred the sea to the mountains which is perhaps why they finally agreed to allow her to leave the village and marry Takuji though no woman had ever married an outsider before. 

Yet Kiyono is a strong woman just in a different way. We were torn apart by a single order, Kiyoko laments, but when Takuji is injured she travels to the navy hospital to visit him and fiercely resists the doctor when he advises amputating Takuji’s leg. Though she is warned that the wound may become infected and Takuji may not survive, she is adamant that she will nurse him back to health herself and in fact does just that. To keep him safe from the war, Kiyono convinces Takuji move into an isolated cottage in the mountains where they can live together without being bothered by anyone else. She helps him learn to walk again, ignoring the advice of Takuji’s cousin Yasuko (Izumi Ashikawa) as a medical doctor that she is being reckless with Takuji’s health in boldly stating that she only wants the Takuji from before, not one damaged by war. But her devotion is a double edged sword, once he is healed, Takuji can be drafted again. She starts to regret her decision to oppose amputation.

The villagers, meanwhile, who had abandoned their initial scepticism to see Kiyono as a fine wife, now think her selfish and neurotic. They wonder why Takuji has not been to see his mother who is seriously ill, and for their own benefit want him to return so that he can communicate with the government who have requisitioned too many of their ships and left them unable to work. Kiyono has tried to create a space of her own into which the war may not enter, as if she were living in hiding. Nevertheless it is true that once Takuji makes the decision to leave the mountain the spell is broken, the war takes him, and there’s nothing Kiyono can do but “endure”. 

One of the ironic gifts brought to Kiyoko in the mountain is a Heike mask designed to contain all the pain and bitterness of a woman watching her husband march away to war. Yasuko, worried for her own husband, wonders if men and women are really so different. Kiyoko ironically replies that the men marching off to battle have an oddly beatific look, as if they too are in some way “enduring” in conforming to an idea of manliness though they too must be afraid, but if a woman looks that way it means she has gone mad. It’s the look that Kiyono herself eventually has, taking on the appearance of the mask, when her spirit is broken and she enters a kind of fugue state suspecting that Takuji will not return. 

Old women watching the few remaining men being recalled to the front remark on the cruelty, that they’re only going there to die because it’s quite obvious that the war is lost. It’s war which has divided the mountain and the sea, destroyed a fated a love, and created so much suffering. In an earlier time, Kiyono’s “devotion” might indeed have been seen as selfish, a desire to isolate herself and the man she loved and keep him from his duty because of her own pain. Now however, her tale is only tragedy. Not so much a woman driven mad by an excess of emotion, as a country by the lack of it.

Original trailer (no subtitles)

Inn of the Floating Weeds (浮草の宿, Seijun Suzuki, 1957)

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Another of Nikkatsu’s crime inflected pop song movies, Inn of the Floating Weeds (浮草の宿, Ukigusa no Yado) makes space for the singer of the song which gives the film its name, Hachiro Kasuga, but only in a minor role as a supportive friend. Directed by Seijun Suzuki under his birth name Seitaro (he’d change it to Seijun for Underworld Beauty the following year), the film is in some ways typical of his early work as a B-movie director at the studio but nevertheless displays flashes of his later brilliance in its unconventional composition and wistful sense of irony. 

Company man Shunji (Hideaki Nitani) gets into a fight during which Shida, a high ranking executive at Marubishi construction, is stabbed to death. Shunji is kicked into the water and left for dead, while his fiancée, Kozue (Hisano Yamaoka), pines for him at a nearby bar. Five years later Shunji resurfaces hoping to reunite with Kozue after having fled to Hong Kong and taken a job at a shipping company. At the bar, however, he discovers a woman that looks exactly like his lost love but turns out to be her younger sister, Mio (also played by Hisano Yamaoka), the bar’s madam and apparently the mistress of Murayama (Toru Abe), the current head of Marubishi. 

Shunji’s survival and subsequent reappearance is inconvenient for everyone so it’s no surprise that Murayama wants to have him bumped off, but Shunji is determined to stay and find out what’s happened to Kozue who, according to her sister, went missing in suspicious circumstances three years earlier while desperately searching for Shunji. 

Haunted by memories of lost love, Shunji finds himself drawn to the mysterious Mio who closely resembles her sister, while pulled towards a nexus of criminal activity unwittingly positioned between Murayama’s Marubishi and the avaricious interests of his American colleagues operating out of Hong Kong. Indeed, Shunji has himself it seems taken on an alternate identity as Hong Konger Kang Ho-chun, interpreter to the mysterious Mr. Green (Harold Conway). Perhaps still naive, Shunji appears to be unaware of his boss’ shadiness, warned off by good Samaritan Haruo (Hachiro Kasuga) who rescues him after he’s beaten up by Marubishi goons and allows him to rest in his apartment where he’s nursed back to health by his cheerful kid sister Yuri (Ikuko Kimuro). 

The strange goings on on the Saganmaru perhaps testify to an ambivalence with Japan’s new globalising presence which echoes through Nikkatsu’s “borderless” action dramas. Mr. Green is certainly not on the level, later revealed to be involved with drug smuggling through Marubishi and employing a large number of Chinese stewards (he operates out of Hong Kong after all) which plays into a sense of Sinophobia common across the series. The major problem, however, is Murayama whom Shunji later learns tried to assault Kozue after he left and may be connected with her disappearance. Perhaps trying to warn him off, Mio fires back at Shunji that this all his own fault, that Kozue couldn’t live with the knowledge he was a murderer and in the end he broke her heart, while he meekly protests his innocence and vows revenge on Murayama.

Meanwhile, he’s pulled back towards innocence by Haruo and his relentlessly cheerful sister who has obviously taken a liking to him. Mio, echoing the femme fatale, remains enigmatic, concealing key information about her sister, later confessing that she too has been desperate for vengeance but fears that Murayama has grown too powerful. Haruo, singing the mournful song about past regrets and lost love, observes from the sidelines trying to decide if Shunji is rotten inside or merely in danger of being swallowed by a vortex of crime and violence. 

Yet, as it so often is, the gangster world is in danger of collapse, destroying itself through internecine power struggles and petty betrayals. Murayama thinks he’s the top dog but there’s always someone agitating from below. Shunji, didn’t kill Shida, and maybe he’s close enough to finding out who did, clearing his name while figuring out what happened to Kozue, but in someways it hardly matters because the true battle is for the future, not the past. Like the singer of the song, he reflects on what a fool he’s been, resolving to put the past aside as he walks towards a less complicated future and an eventual return to a compassionate and forgiving society.

Title song by Hachiro Kasuga