Tag: Ryuji Ishiyama

Passing Fancy (出来ごころ, Yasujiro Ozu, 1933)

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“We have to help one another” a sympathetic soul insists towards the conclusion of Yasujiro Ozu’s Passing Fancy (出来ごころ, Dekigoroko). Ozu’s depression-era silents are not as devoid of hope as it might at first seem, but it is a much more positive statement and perhaps surprisingly the central messages lie more in the necessity or otherwise of repaying kindness and the kinds of forms that action may finally take. It is also, however, the first in a loose trilogy of films revolving around a single father named “Kihachi” and the only one in which he is not (at least potentially) exiled from the family he has been trying to protect. 

This Kihachi (Takeshi Sakamoto) has one young son, Tomio (Tokkan Kozo, AKA Tomio Aoki), and casual job working in a brewery though he is hardly a model employee and is often late due to oversleeping after a night of heavy drinking. A roguish womaniser, he is also a kinder soul than he seems which is why he stops to talk to a pretty young woman, Harue (Nobuko Fushimi), wandering around in distress late in the evening. His first approach is slightly crass, responding to her question about lodging for the night by explaining that he has a kid and no wife but then he takes her to a local cafe he frequents and persuades the owner, Otome (Choko Iida), to take her in. Otome takes a liking to her, and decides to offer her a job as a waitress. 

Kihachi develops a hopeless crush, comically dolling himself up in his fanciest kimono and getting an advance from work to buy a pretty comb, an unmistakably romantic gift, to present himself to Harue. Of course, she’s grateful but sees him as a nice older gentleman rather than a potential husband. In fact and somewhat surprisingly she develops a crush of her own on the brooding Jiro (Den Obinata) despite the fact he is constantly rude to her and more or less implies she’s an untrustworthy woman out to take advantage of “vulnerable” men like himself. There is something quite touching and unusual in the brotherly friendship between the two men that occasionally comes off as something more in Jiro’s deep antipathy to Harue, which is to say she isn’t going to come between them but the situation is indeed complicated. 

Harue is, in that sense, a distraction that takes Kihachi’s eyes off his proper role as responsible father. He and Tomio have a close, interdependent relationship and it’s clear that it’s often little Tomio, older than his years, who finds himself managing Dad. Kihachi is immensely proud of his son, fond of saying he’d be top of his class if only he had better manners. Like any father what he most wants for him is that he escape their life of poverty which is why he’s so glad that the boy does well at school. But little Tomio finds himself bullied precisely because of Kihachi’s lack of standing. The other boys mock his illiteracy, unable to believe a man could reach adulthood without being able to read. When his son is taken ill, Kihachi laments circumstances even more. “It’s horrible not having an education”, he tells Jiro, “I got my son sick and I can’t even pay the doctor’s bill”.

The depression may be less visible than in Ozu’s other ‘30s films, but its evidence is everywhere. Harue ends up on the streets after losing her job at a silk mill and having no family to fall back on. At the naniwabushi performance which opens the show, a series of spectators hopefully open a lost wallet but find it empty. Kihachi notices the discarded purse is slightly bigger than his own and makes a swap as a hopeful investment for the future. Just before the performance ends, several of the guests seem to be plagued by fleas. Kihachi is forever asking for advances for frivolous reasons but assumes he’ll be able to manage hand to mouth only to enter a moment of crisis when hit by the unexpected expenses of his son’s illness for which he feels responsible in attributing it to an excess of luxury after giving a him a pocket money bonus which he unwisely blew in one go on sweets (like father, like son after all). 

Yet what shines through is compassion and camaraderie. A friendly barber loans Jiro the money for a doctor, which is one reason he intends to leave for Hokkaido even after realising his feelings for Harue. As with the other Kihachis, this Kihachi rediscovers a sense of fatherly duty in feeling as if this debt must be his, that he should be the one to go to Hokkaido to repay it even if that means leaving his son behind. The barber tells him not to bother, the sentiment is enough for him and he doesn’t mind missing the money knowing it saved a boy’s life. “We have to help one another”, kindness doesn’t necessarily have to be repaid directly but can be paid forward in becoming a way of life. The Kihachis of A Story of Floating Weeds and An Inn in Tokyo are exiled from their families and serve their sons only by abandoning them, but this Kihachi turns back, his sense of “responsibility” perhaps a “passing fancy” but one that’s taught him the true meaning of fatherhood and what it is to live in a society.

My Elder Brother (私の兄さん, Yasujiro Shimazu, 1934)

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A wastrel son and runaway daughter get a few lessons in filiality in Yasujiro Shimazu’s genial ‘30s comedy, My Elder Brother (私の兄さん, Watashi no Niisan). Reflecting the changing the times, the film is in many ways about navigating the sometimes fraught relationships among a blended family though like many hahamono, it’s the stepson who is most devoted to his mother while the birth son is consumed by a sense of guilt and inadequacy in his accidentally awkward positioning within the family hierarchy.

The filial piety of eldest son Shige (Reikichi Kawamura) is established early on by the fact he’s not at work because his mother is ill and he’s off visiting her. He does in fact return late at night, though there’s a question mark over his qualities as a boss as the drivers at the taxi firm he runs remark that he’s been ignoring their attempts to negotiate with him for better conditions not least the provision of assistants which has been given additional weight by one driver’s experience with a disturbed fare who attempted to strange him with his belt.

The strange and violent opening sequence in which a cabbie is attacked by a crazed passenger is never referenced again and out of keeping with the otherwise lighthearted tone of the film though does add to a sense of danger later echoed in the appearance of two guys who first seem like yakuza but are actually just two grumpy old men trying to retrieve a young woman who’s run away in defiance of an arranged marriage. In any case, tearaway brother Fumio (Kazuo Hasegawa), who arrives drunk in the back of a cab, has indeed fallen into bad company with yakuza whom he describes as his friends though Shige warns him they’re probably just after his money.

Fumio has returned because he’s learned his mother is ill, though he’s reluctant to see her given his present condition. When he does actually meet her, she says that she hates him and calls him a good-for-nothing, worthless man. It seems her animosity is partly motivated by a sense of guilt and embarrassment that her biological son has brought shame to the family she married into and especially to Shige. For his part, Shige acknowledges that he also felt resentful when Fumio and his mother moved in but explains that he was still a child clinging to the memory of his late birth mother. Fumio explains to the young woman he picks up, Sumako (Kinuyo Tanaka), who is on the run from her uncle and the man her stepmother wants her to marry, that he left home because of his precarious status and sense of inadequacy but liked the sense of freedom his independence gave him even if he is ashamed of the kind of life he’s lived on the fringes of the underworld. 

Sumako is experiencing a similar dilemma as she feels herself unable to bond with her stepmother to the extent that she has not been able to articulate that she objects to the arranged marriage her relatives have set up for her. She laments that if it were her birthmother she should be able to tell her everything, but Fumio counters that Shige had been jealous of him because he could exchange harsh words with his mother because of their closeness in a way he never could because he is not her biological son. Reinforcing a sense of obligation between parents and children might have been an important message in the mid-1930s, but the film is perhaps unexpectedly progressive in its openness and desire to embrace these then considered less usual family arrangements born of second marriages in emphasising the brotherly bond between the two men and Sumako’s successful escape from an unwanted marriage simply by speaking her true feelings to her mother not to mention the suggestion of a cross class romance between rich girl Sumako and the middle-class Fumio.

Meanwhile, the film also has an international bent in the prominent signs for Chevrolet and Hollywood-esque aesthetics, drawing inspiration from American and European crime films for the violent opening sequence and underworld setting. Shimazu hints at the shadiness of Fumio’s backstreets life, but equally of Sumako’s uncle and his moustachioed friend lending an undertone of darkness to the mid-30s society but otherwise keeps things light in the innocent courtship between Fumio and Sumako who can mediate their attraction only by remarking on the beauty of a sunset. 

A Woman Crying in Spring (泣き濡れた春の女よ, Hiroshi Shimizu, 1933)

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woman crying in spring still 1The later legacy of Hiroshi Shimizu has largely been one of melancholy humanism shot through the unjaded eyes of children who have found themselves for one reason or another excluded from mainstream society. His first talkie, 1933’s A Woman Crying in Spring (泣き濡れた春の女よ, Nakinureta Haru no Onna yo, AKA The Lady Who Wept in Spring) is among his more pessimistic efforts, adopting the trappings of the classic melodrama but repurposing them as a coming of age tale for a woman who is already a mother herself set against the backdrop of the precarious contemporary economy among migrant workers and self-trafficking women. Though the overall tone is one of defeat and resignation in which the only possible salvation lies in learning to accept one’s fate, Shimizu does at least allow his heroines the possibility of a brighter future having actively decided on its course.

The film begins with a collection on men being counted onto a ship, onto which they are eventually followed by a collection of women. The men are going north to Hokkaido to work in the newly opened mines, while the women are following them to work in the newly opened bars. This is not a western, but it is a frontier town being made anew by the ongoing economic flux of ‘30s Japan.

The foreman reads out some rules for migrant workers arriving at the mines which boil down to – no women, no sake, no gambling, and the foreman’s word is law. The first two of these will turn out to have been good advice which was not followed, but it is the foreman himself who kicks off the drama by taking two of the miners, Kenji (Den Obinata) and Chuko (Shigeru Ogura), to the local bar run by one of the boat’s female passengers, Ohama (Yoshiko Okada). Ohama has a small daughter, Omitsu (Mitsuko Ichimura), whom she often neglects while she operates her slightly taboo business. Meanwhile, bar girl Ofuji (Akiko Chihaya) has taken a liking to the handsome and sensitive Kenji who tried to comfort her while she was crying on the boat. Ohama, however, has also taken a liking to him which has created an awkward situation among the women at the bar, though Kenji himself is a solitary sort and perhaps not really thinking of taking up with either woman.

The dilemmas are romantic, largely, but their implications wider. The first “issue” stems from the running of the mine itself which is shown to be inefficient and unsafe. The owners care only for money and not for the men who are all poor migrants unable to secure other, safer work in more palatable industries. The same is largely true of the women at the bar who have “fallen” into this line of work through poverty and lack of other options. Ofuji, possibly new to this world of casual prostitution, weeps on the boat despite having come to terms with her decision while a letter from home letting her know that her mother is seriously ill continues to weigh on her mind. She is touched by Kenji’s kindness and perhaps sees in him a possible escape from the increasingly oppressive nature of her life as a lowly bar girl.

Ohama, however, thinks something similar though her conflict is a slightly different one. Already a mother, Ohama is a middle-aged woman and the bar’s owner, which is to say she is in part the oppressor of these other women and in the business of marketing them to the local miners. Demonstrating his continuing sympathy for lonely children, Shimizu lets Ohama’s daughter Omitsu take centrestage through her mother’s continuing emotional distance. Ohama continually shuts Omitsu out of her bedroom (which is, technically, a place of work) as somewhere which is “unfit for children”, but ignores the inconvenient fact that this world is completely unfit for raising a child. Cast out, Omitsu wanders alone around the physically dangerous mine while she is surrounded by rough men who are often drunk and violent – all dangers her mother refuses to see in being entirely self-involved and overly conscious of the illicit nature of her business.

Ofuji and Ohama both see Kenji as a way out of their dead end lives, but Ohama is gradually made to realise that her opportunity for escape through romance has already passed. Like the later A Mother’s Love, Shimizu seems to suggest that a woman must cease to be a woman when she becomes a mother and that Ohama’s salvation is not a man but in accepting her role as Omitsu’s guardian and protector. Thus, chided by Kenji who has befriended the lonely little girl and noticed how keenly she feels her mother’s coldness towards her, Ohama begins to abandon her romantic fantasies and accept herself as a middle-aged woman with a child. Though this evidently means that she has both the right and the duty to continue on “alone” as a single woman raising a daughter, it is also a mild endorsement of the notion that single women with children must dedicate themselves entirely to childrearing and have lost all rights or hopes for future romantic fulfilment through the slightly taboo idea of “second” marriage.

The Japanese title is noticeably ambiguous and could as easily be a general statement on the unhappy state of 1930s women told through the melancholy tale of two trapped in the Hokkaido snows long after “spring” has supposedly sprung. Ohama, accepting her fate, sacrifices herself for Ofuji, enabling Ofuji’s flight in the knowledge that for her the ship has already sailed. His first talkie, Shimizu makes interesting use of sound in his frequent musical motifs but makes sure to leave space for the mournful sound of the boats departing as a woman watches sadly from an open window while the snow continues to fall silently before her.

The Golden Demon (金色夜叉, Hiroshi Shimizu, 1937)

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vlcsnap-2016-09-22-02h33m21s455Perhaps best known for his work with children, Hiroshi Shimizu changes tack for his 1937 adaptation of the oft filmed Ozaki Koyo short story The Golden Demon (金色夜叉, Konjiki Yasha) which is notable for featuring none at all – of the literal kind at least. A story of love and money, The Golden Demon has many questions to ask not least among them who is the most selfish when it comes to a frustrated romance.

Poor relation Kanichi (Daijiro Natsukawa) is a university student living with friends of his deceased father. He and the daughter of the family which took him in, Miya (Hiroko Kawasaki), have grown up together and formed an emotional attachment they each believed would naturally lead to marriage. However, Miya has received a proposal from a wealthy gentlemen which her cash strapped father is strongly advising her to accept. Though she loves Kanichi deeply, Miya is torn – both by a feeling of duty to marry well and keep her parents in comfort, and by a fear of leaving her middle-class lifestyle for a life of uncertain poverty with the still studying Kanichi.

When she ultimately agrees to the arranged marriage, Kanichi becomes angry and accuses Miya of placing monetary concerns over true feeling. Disappearing from Miya’s life entirely, Kanichi determines to destroy himself in a vicious quest for revenge. Abandoning his idealistic, progressive concerns, Kanichi becomes a heartless money lender with a plan to one day amass a great fortune only to throw it in the face of his former love. When Miya’s husband, Tomiyama (Toshiaki Konoe), appears at his door apparently fallen on hard times, Kanichi’s plan looks set for success.

In true Shimizu fashion, he remains non-judgemental of his characters save for that of the elderly money lender who, when questioned by his son, offers a series of flimsy justifications for his line of work which his son brands dirty and disgraceful. The money lender points out that he’s only operating a business – he never attempts to hide his terms so customers know they will pay a heavy price for the loans, and thereafter the decision is their own. When his son points out how selfish a point of view that is and that all he’s doing is exploiting the desperation of vulnerable people, he’s told that he reads to many books and should learn to live in the “real world”. If Shimizu wants to criticise anything at all (even obliquely, this is 1937), it’s this “real world” thinking which legitimises the selfishness of those who seek to profit from the misfortune of others.

The same money lender has a somewhat strained relationship with his equally cynical wife. After she complains about his complaint about how much makeup she’s putting on “to go to a temple”, he tells her that his jealously proves he loves her. She’s a precious object that he’s afraid of losing to another man. To him all is about possession. Kanichi, who once thought himself so different is more or less the same as he refuses to think about why exactly Miya has made the decision she has, or even allow her the right to make that decision. Obviously broken hearted, he decides to abandon emotion all together as “you can’t trust the human heart.” He even attempts to enact the final terms of the usurious loans on the contracts of some of his university friends who, just as he was with Miya, are unable to understand how he could be so cruel to those he was once so close to. Even Tomiyama, who had hitherto looked after Miya as a husband should finally exclaims “I can’t love you without money” as if in a tacit acceptance of the fact that he essentially bought her, obtaining her duty and service but not, perhaps, her heart.

In contrast some of Shimizu’s other work he focusses much more on Kanichi’s moral meandering than on Miya’s suffering but she herself pays a heavy price throughout. In sacrificing her love for Kanichi and a chance at a self directed future in agreeing to the arranged marriage, Miya ultimately chose to familial duty over romantic feeling. Having grown up in comfort, a degree of fear may have also influenced her decision but the choice has broken her own heart just as much as Kanichi’s. Guilt and a regret threaten to frustrate her new married life even though she does her best to become the ideal wife. Miya searches for Kanichi to obtain his forgiveness but Kanichi is nowhere to be found.

The eventual reunion is one of chilling coldness and repressed emotions which causes only more pain for everyone involved. Neatly avoiding melodrama, Shimizu opts for a more realistic solution in which everyone realises the error of their ways. Kanichi perseveres in his desire for vengeance yet leaves feeling like “the stupidest man in the world”, pausing only to offer a few words of parting encouragement to Miya if stopping short of forgiveness (or an apology which she is most likely owed if only for the previous ten minutes of cruelty). The past remains the past and must be accepted as such, yet there is at least a glimmer of hope for Kanichi whose abortive plan of revenge may have reawakened within him the very thing he’d been trying to bury even if the future for Miya seems nowhere near as certain.

 

Mr. Thank You (有りがとうさん, Hiroshi Shimizu, 1936)

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Mr. Thank YouBus trips might be much less painful if only the drivers were all as kind as Mr. Thank You and the passengers as generous of spirit as the put upon rural folk travelling to the big city in Hiroshi Shimizu’s 1936 road trip (有りがとうさん, Arigatou-san). Set in depression era Japan and inspired by a story by Yasunari Kawabata, Mr. Thank You has its share of sorrows but like its cast of down to earth country folk, smiles broadly even through the bleakest of circumstances.

Mr. Thank You is everyone’s favourite bus driver. In fact, some of his passengers have even deliberately decided to “miss” the previous bus because they heard he was driving the next one. It’s not hard to see why, he’s a good a driver and a very polite, nice young man who’s been given the affectionate “Mr. Thank You” nickname because of his habit of shouting a loud thank you to everyone who moves out of the way for his bus to pass in the narrow mountain roads (the aforementioned pedestrians are also to be seen waving wildly and shouting his nickname back at him as he grins at them in the rear view mirror). He’s also prepared to stop and pick up passengers along the way as well as carrying messages between villages and filling requests for the latest records to hit Tokyo stores.

Mr. Thank You was apparently shot without a firm shooting script other than the inspiration of Kawabata’s story so the dialogue has a very immediate, contemporary feeling. There isn’t so much of a story as a journey taken with this disparate group of people all travelling from one place to another for various different reasons with the small interjections of other passersby on the roadside. The main drama occurs between a woman and her daughter who have such ashen faces they might as well be ascending the gallows, a very modern whiskey swilling travelling woman, and a grumpy guy with a handlebar moustache who seems very anxious about the bus being delayed by all these pleasantries. Along the way, Mr. Thank You offers commentary on some of the people he knows from his regular trips which amounts to a collection of sad stories decrying the state of the nation in which fathers are selling their daughters and mad men wander the streets searching for lost love.

“Young women used to laugh, but you never hear that now.” Says one passenger glancing at the sad face of a girl on a bus to the city. The mother and daughter seem reluctant to talk about their journey but it’s obvious to all that the girl is to be sold to a geisha house, never to see her home again. Mr. Thank You is sympathetic to her plight whilst silently listening to the lamentations of his customers like a sober barman. At one point he wonders out loud if he might be better off driving a hearse – acknowledging his own complicity in taking money for escorting this poor girl off to a life of rack and ruin. The flirtatious modern woman sitting behind him (most likely a prostitute herself) reminds him that women who pass these mountains rarely make a return journey, perhaps there is another way he could help her even if he can’t do the same for everyone.

Shimizu also stops a minute to consider the human costs of all this rapid progress. Taking a brief break from driving, Mr. Thank You chats to an acquaintance who has been working on the road building programme. A Korean migrant, she is among the most put upon of workers. She hoped she might have enough money to ride on Mr. Thank You’s bus just the once, but no sooner has one road been completed than she’s despatched off to build another one on another mountain so she’ll have to bid him goodbye. Mr. Thank You (seemingly quite taken with her and sorry to hear they may not meet again) offers to let her ride for free but she looks back at the masses of other people who are walking the mountain passes because they can’t afford the bus either and says it’s OK, she will stay with them, walking onward with everyone else caught in the same predicament as herself.

Filmed in 1936 Mr. Thank You has an extremely modern sensibility with a lot of naturalistic location shooting outside of the cramped environment of the bus which forms the main setting for the drama. The bus drives onward without stopping as obstacles fade from view only to reappear in the rear view mirror like ghosts, phantom images reflected on the landscape here one minute and gone the next. Time and history are marching on though one gets the impression Shimizu at least does not approve of the way his country is heading. The passengers on Mr. Thank You’s bus all have their troubles, but they’re trying to do the best they can by putting a brave face on it. They laugh, they drink, they sing but eventually they will all have to get off the bus, away from the careful protection of Mr. Thank You, and return to land of badgers and foxes where it’s every man for himself and those who cannot pay the fare will have to walk the rest of the way on their own two feet alone.

Mr. Thank You is the second of four films in Criterion’s Eclipse Series 15: Travels with Hiroshi Shimizu box set.

Scene featuring the Korean migrant worker (with English subtitles)