Tag: Satoshi Komori

Tengu Priest (お坊主天狗, Yasushi Sasaki, 1962)

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Disparate denizens of Edo are united in one thing in Yasushi Sasaki’s light hearted jidaigeki, Tengu Priest (お坊主天狗, Obozu tengu), revenge. Like many jidaigeki, what they really want is revenge against the evils of feudalism to which they have each fallen victim, but also acknowledge that they have found something better in being outside it in the solidarity that exists between them as outsiders free from the obligations of samurai society if also with loose ends waiting to be tied.

Once a hatamoto with a 1000 Koku stipend, Obo Kichiza (Chiezo Kataoka) is now a much feared figure keeping order in Edo. When some yakuza toughs are hassling the geisha Kozome (Hibari Misora) at the theatre, insisting that she serve them sake even as she reminds them she’s off the clock, one look from him stops them dead though Kichizo is also impressed with Kozome’s nerve. Like him, Kozome is also in Edo for revenge. Formerly a samurai’s daughter, she became a geisha to look for the man who killed her father in a stupid quarrel over a fencing duel. Kichiza, meanwhile, seeks revenge against the local lord, Honda Etsu (Masao Mishima), who killed his father in a fit of temper when he ordered him to commit seppuku for causing his son-in-law to fall off his horse but he refused. 

Loyal retainer Kinpei (Ryutaro Otomo) had begged for his forgiveness and insisted that he could get Etsu to reform but three years have passed and not only has he bribed his way to head office but his behaviour has declined still further. We see him cruelly cut down a maid seemingly for no reason, simply ordering his men to get rid of the body. Etsu has a reputation for random violence while drunk, but as he is the lord, there are no real consequences for him. His retainers cover up his crimes, and Kinpei’s sole attempt to talk some sense into him goes nowhere, meanwhile his chief adviser Shichinosuke (Sentaro Fushimi) is basically running the show telling others the lord is not in his right mind and cannot make decisions so he must make them for him.

They are all, including Etsu himself, victims of the feudal order in which the systems of power are necessarily corrupt. In his yakuza persona, Kichiza has struck up a friendship with another geisha, Kozuru (Naoko Kubo), who was actually a lady in waiting working as a maid at his estate. She has long been in love with him, but the class difference would have made any union impossible. Ironically, she remarks to Kozome that even in their present state they are still a Hatamoto and a lady in waiting so she dare not express her love for him. Only once his revenge is concluded and he’s fully abandoned his samurai status can Kichiza truly be free to embrace a relationship with Kozuru while conversely Kozome regains her life as a samurai’s daughter by avenging the death of her father.

Kozome asks for Kichiza’s help to track down the target of her revenge, but he also respects her wishes and understands that it’s something she must do herself as does eccentric sword sharpener Shinzaburo (Hashizo Okawa ) who actively stands back so she, another wronged woman, can stick the knife in. Hibari Misora’s role in the film is smaller than one might expect as her revenge subplot is secondary to Kichiza’s and she has relatively little screen time with only a brief musical sequence during a naginata dance though she does participate in the high octane final showdown in which all grievances are exorcised and a kind of order returned to the samurai realm even if it must be destroyed to so as Kinpei resolves to protect both the lives and livelihoods of their many retainers and the integrity of Kichiza, going so far as to congratulate Kozome on the successful completion of her revenge. 

Yet what made the whole thing possible was Kichiza’s own band of outlaw drifters whom he allowed to live in his home he later says just so that they would have a place to come and be together so that they might more easily reintegrate into mainstream society. He might have lost his domain and samurai status but has discovered something better in this accidental community. They may be in a sense almost like retainers to him, but if so they stay by choice rather than obligation and help out of a genuine sense of loyalty and affection. In essence, in taking his revenge, he frees himself from the oppressive nature of the samurai code and is able to live like an ordinary man lamenting that if only he and Kinpei had both been ronin they could have enjoyed their time together for longer. Lighthearted and cheerful despite its dark themes, the film is nevertheless a condemnation of the hypocrisies and abuses of a feudal society in which freedom is to be found only among those who live outside it.

Flesh Pier (女体桟橋, Teruo Ishii, 1958)

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Teruo Ishii may be most closely associated with his exploitation work for Toei in the late ‘60s and ‘70s but in actuality he began his career at Toho, later joining Shintoho where he served as an AD to among others Mikio Naruse whom he regarded as a lifelong mentor. After making his debut with boxing movie King of the Ring: The World of Glory in 1957, he worked mainly in children’s sci-fi tokusatsu serials before sliding into B-movie noir of which 1958’s Flesh Pier (女体桟橋, Nyotai sanbashi) is an early example. 

Set firmly in the contemporary era, Ishii opens with a documentary-style voiceover exoticising the seedy underbelly of the city’s entertainment district hidden away in otherwise sparkling Ginza. Shooting in a bold reportage style, he captures a sense of natural spontaneity reminiscent of early American independent cinema transitioning directly into nightclub Arizona where a woman is furiously dancing. Arizona is as we’ll see the nexus of the recent proliferation of “call girl” businesses which have arisen since sex work was criminalised and in this case at least dependent on an international sex trafficking network backed by an American gangster, Thompson (Harold Conway). Salaryman Keizo (Ken Utsui) is a new customer, double checking that the business is “safe” before being reassured that they don’t deal with anyone they don’t know and have already vetted his identity, but when he reaches the hotel room he’s been handed the key for, he discovers the body of a woman lying in the bathtub and is forced on the run. The twist is that Keizo isn’t a bored executive after all but an undercover policeman working on breaking the trafficking ring. 

Co-scripted by Akira Sagawa, Flesh Pier seems to draw frequent inspiration from Casablanca only with the roles slightly reversed as replacement hostess Rumi (Yoko Mihara) finds herself wondering why of all the gin joints in Ginza Keizo had to walk into hers while the bar’s musician, Teruo (Teruo Hata), quite clearly in love with her himself, completes the triangular relationship. The couple even enter a Moroccan-style room while echoing Rick and Ilsa’s painful rehash of their Paris break up as Rumi tries and fails to explain why she left him on some previous occasion, Keizo remembering that she wore a white sweater and a blue coat to mimic Rick’s “the Germans wore grey, you wore blue” while the film’s ending is also hugely reminiscent of Casablanca’s “beginning of a wonderful friendship” only with additional romance. 

Nevertheless, the crime here is bigger and darker than most contemporary noir with awkward echoes of Japan’s prewar sex trafficking industry embodied by the karayuki as it becomes clear the gang’s business model relies on finding young women and luring them abroad with promises of good jobs only to force them into them sex work. Meanwhile one of the regular policemen, Hayami (Hiroshi Asami), gets a shock when he sets up a meeting with one of the call girls and is met by his own fiancée who, unbeknownst to him, has resorted to sex work in order to fund her brother’s tuition. “What else could I do?” she tearfully asks him making plain that in the difficult if improving economic environment of late 50s Japan sex work is still the only viable option for many women needing to support their families in the absence of men given persistent societal sexism which often locks them out of other kinds of well-paying jobs. Hayami perhaps understands this, drowning his sorrows with his veteran partner insisting that he’s sick of being a policeman and plans to quit only for the older man to sympathetically tell him not to give up so easily. 

Then again, Keizo’s secondary love interest Haruko (Akemi Tsukushi) is an intrepid undercover reporter posing as a model in order to bait the trafficking ring. Even so the primary drama revolves around Keizo and Rumi’s unfinished business along with her musician’s jealousy, the implication being more that her feelings for Keizo have clouded her judgement rather than reawakened a sense of moral goodness. Like many femme-fatales in post-war B-movie noir she is made to pay the ultimate price for her transgressive femininity in having firstly climbed the in-gang ladder and then damned herself in her conflicted love for the earnest Keizo even while suspecting he may be an undercover cop despite his acting like an underworld thug. These are indeed a new breed gangster much more like those seen in European and American noir rather than traditional yakuza while the environment of the Arizona is also something of a liminal space as the opening voiceover puts it in but not of Japan. 

While nowhere near as lurid as some of Ishii’s later work, Flesh Pier is certainly daring for the time period in the griminess with which it depicts the successor to the red light districts along with its air of forbidden allure even while its club scenes are in keeping with those found in other contemporary gangster tales if lent a little more realism in the immediacy with which Ishii shoots them making full use of documentary-style handheld. Expressing a degree of anxiety as regards Japan’s increasingly global outlook along with that of increasing social change, Flesh Pier is formally daring from the young Ishii artfully playing with classic noir while fully embracing the transgressive thrills of B-movie crime.