Tag: Shigeo Kato

Flowing (流れる, Mikio Naruse, 1956)

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The denizens of a moribund geisha house contemplate visions of independence in post-war Japan Mikio Naruse’s thriving ensemble drama, Flowing (流れる, Nagareru). There is indeed a flowing through the geisha house, a tumble of comings and goings though mostly connected to money which is itself constantly flowing though the for geisha mainly in the wrong direction. Released in the year of Prostitution Prevention Law, the film casts a shadow over the lives of these women who are unwittingly living in their industry’s twilight but asks if it’s really possible for a woman to survive without a man while each of them is in one way or another badly let down by an inconstant lover. 

We’re constantly told that Tsutanoya is the most respectable geisha house in town yet despite its well appointed interiors, it’s clear that business is not good. As the film opens, a young geisha, Namie, is accusing the owner’s daughter Katsuyo (Hideko Takamine) of diddling her on her pay. Katsuyo acts indignant and tries to shift the blame back onto Namie but later admits that the house has indeed been skimming a little more off their wages than was agreed claiming all the geisha houses do it which is probably true but doesn’t make it right. In any case Namie will eventually quit and end up working at “some third rate place” while her uncle (Seiji Miyaguchi) causes problems for proprietress Tsuta (Isuzu Yamada) complaining that Namie was exploited and wanting both the backpay he feels she’s owed and compensation though it seems unlikely any of that money is finding its way back to Namie. Meanwhile the house is a geisha down with only former office worker Nanako (Mariko Okada) and 50-year-old veteran Someka (Haruko Sugimura) on the books.

Despite their financial situation, Tsuta hires a new maid, Rika (Kinuyo Tanaka) who is immediately renamed “Oharu” on her arrival. Oharu is a salt of the Earth type, infinitely capable, maternal, kind and loyal bringing a much needed sense of stability to the ever flowing geisha house while also fascinated by this exotic and arcane world. But then as Tsuta cautions her geisha houses may look glamorous from the outside but the life inside them isn’t always fun. Oharu runs into trouble on her first trip to the grocers when they inform her Tsuta hasn’t paid her tab and they can’t let her add to it until she does. A 45-year-old widow whose only child died a year previously, Oharu is also trying to live an independent life, a conflicted Tsuta struck with wonder at her ability to survive without a man, but may also have struggled, grateful to have been offered the job which others might have declined because of the stigma towards the sex trade as finding employment as a middle-aged woman is near impossible. 

At the film’s conclusion even she may imply it isn’t really possible to live as a woman without some kind of support or losing one’s humanity suggesting that she may return to her husband’s hometown and the family she claims not have gotten along with after learning of Tsuta’s betrayal at the hands of an old friend and former geisha, Ohama (Sumiko Kurishima), who at any rate seems to be living quite well as the proprietress of a restaurant. Traditionally, the profession of geisha was seen as a kind of independence in itself but it’s also one that by its nature is reliant on men. Tsuta is often described as someone who is not able to do anything else yet is highly skilled at music and dance having spent a lifetime in training. Without a patron she is stuck and as we learn she threw hers over to pursue a man she loved but he left her in the lurch having mortgaged the geisha house to invest in his business by taking a loan from her older sister who seems to have a nice sideline as a polite loan shark also having loaned money to Someka. 

The most outwardly cheerful, Someka is in other ways a dark vision of a geisha’s future surviving on nothing but nihilistic hedonism while apparently living with a much younger man who eventually leaves her to marry into another woman’s family. Katsuyo has rejected the geisha life explaining that she is unable to, as Nanaka puts it, say silly things to men in order to earn her keep and is essentially incapable of ingratiating herself with men she doesn’t like. She claims she has no desire to marry, unconvinced that any man would be interested in a geisha’s daughter while certain that for a man marrying into a woman’s family is humiliating while suggesting the same would be true for her. Putting her faith in industry, she buys a sewing machine and sets about figuring out how to use it less because she envisages being able to support herself and her mother through taking in needlework than she just wants to feel as if she’s doing something. 

Meanwhile, Tsuta’s niece Fujiko observes all the comings and goings of the geisha house learning the traditional arts in preparation for a future which will soon be obsolete. In a typically Narusean touch, Tsuta comes to a resolution about her future and envisages a new beginning for herself but is unaware the rug is soon to be pulled from under her by the underhanded capitalist Ohama who plans to turf her out to turn the geisha house into another restaurant. “My days of seeking favours from men are over,” Tsuta admits, not of her own volition but simply understanding that she no longer has access to that kind of independence though in essence surrendering her autonomy in leaving herself to the mercy of Ohama in order to escape her older sister’s control. Someka had laughed raucously at Katsuyo’s insistence that she need not be dependent on a man (and after everything she’s seen why would she want to be?) but the younger woman is undeterred even as we see her struggling, doubting that her efforts will in the end be enough to win her her freedom. Ever the optimist, Tsuta is perhaps doing something similar but even Oharu is considering giving up and going home, too good to survive in the dog eat dog world of the contemporary capital where the flow of currency is the lifeblood of the city implying that perhaps the answer to her question is no, a woman can’t survive alone, nor can she rely on female solidarity, but she’ll have to try anyway because there is no other choice. 

The Phoenix (火の鳥, Kon Ichikawa, 1978)

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The people of early Japan contemplate different visions of immortality in Kon Ichikawa’s sprawling adaptation of the first chapter in Osamu Tezuka’s manga series, The Phoenix (火の鳥, Hi no Tori). Featuring a mix of animation and live action, the film takes place in an ancient, pre-modern Japan in which just about everyone chases the mysterious fire bird in belief that drinking its blood will confer eternal life. They each want it for different reasons, some more to stop someone else getting it than for themselves but all discover that there are other ways of living on than the strictly literal. 

Broadly speaking the film takes place during the era of possibly mythical sorceress queen Himiko (Mieko Takamine) who rules over the nation known as Yamatai which is the name given to a kingdom in Japan in ancient Chinese sources. Himiko wants the phoenix because she fears that her power is founded on a youth and beauty which has begun to fade while the people are beginning to lose faith in her magic, not least because her rule is oppressive and authoritarian. She also fears that should the Chinese emperor drink the phoenix blood first, they will forever be under his yoke yet the seal that confers her rule was in fact given by him so perhaps they are already. Her brother, Susano (Toru Emori) whom she also fears may usurp her, enlists famed hunter Yumihiko (Masao Kusakari) from the state of Matsuro to help them capture the phoenix seeing as the two nations have some kind of treaty. Yumihiko says he doesn’t really care about that, but ends up helping anyway.

In any case, Matsuro is soon overrun in a surprise attack by warlord Jingi (Tatsuya Nakadai) from Takamagahara who is set on colonisation, which is in its way another bid for “immortality” if culturally rather than literally. After all, he claims “I will implant our civilisation in these lands” before explaining that “not even the greatest kings live forever” but history will. Meanwhile, Yamatai doctor Guzuri (Ryuzo Hayashi) is washed up on the shores of remote kingdom Kumaso where Uraji (Masaya Oki) is hunting the phoenix in the hope of saving his seriously ill wife Hinaku (Reiko Ohara). Uraji is soon burnt to a crisp by the Phoenix’s light, but Guzuri is able to save Hinaku using “modern” medicine, that is by applying “blue mould” which as the onscreen text explains contains penicillin. Perhaps feeding someone mould doesn’t sound much more scientific than the bizarre folk medicine proposed by the witchdoctor which involves rubbing the severed heads of cats and ravens together and putting fish bones on the patient’s head while burning their buttocks, but it works which is not exactly a means of “immortality” but does promise the ability of temporarily overcoming death without the Pheonix’s help. 

But medicine can’t help you with an invasion, and when the Yamatai suddenly turn up and raze the village to get better access to the phoenix after realising it lives in a nearby volcano only Hinaku and her brother Nagi (Toshinori Omi) survive. Hinaku reluctantly remains with Guzuri and vows to rebuild her kingdom through childbirth vowing that she will enable the survival of Kumaso by passing her culture on through successive generations. Uzume (Kaoru Yumi), a dancer from Matsuro, later says something similar to Jingi in reminding him that “women have their own weapons” and he will “never be able to destroy life” as an abstract concept. There might be something a little uncomfortable in the implication that the phoenix is an allegory for childbirth in suggesting that one body is born in the ashes of another, but it is in the end the continuity of a lifecycle which wins out as the natural order of things. In the film’s concluding moments, the son of Hinaku and Guzuri in a sense experiences a kind of rebirth as, guided by the phoenix, he climbs out of the cave in which he has lived all his life and gazes at the vast expanses of a new world all around him. 

Ichikawa originally trained as an animator and includes several animated sequences throughout the film from cartoonish special effects when an elderly courtier bangs his head to a trio of foxes dancing to pink lady. His visual design is also heavily influenced by Tezuka’s manga with the young boy Nagi in particular striking Tezuka-esque poses and otherwise resembling Astroboy who does in fact make a surprise appearance in a brief animated sequence in which Nagi is kicked by a horse. Similarly, the conflicted general Saruta (Tomisaburo Wakayama) later gains a ridiculous Tezuka-style nose after being locked in a room filled with wasps, and Ichikawa’s vistas sometime echo the centrefold of a manga with the heroes reduced to tiny figures dwarfed by the majesty of the landscape. Even so, a rain-soaked battle pays ironic homage to Seven Samurai, while Ichikawa otherwise keeps violence to a minimum. The heads are chopped off horses and fall like cushions, entirely bloodlessly, but there is also a scene of implied attempted rape which may be out of keeping with the otherwise family-friendly approach. Despite the sense of defeat which may colour some of the closing scenes, the film ends on a note of optimistic wonder in a new journey for humanity emerging from scenes of desolation towards a bright new world. 

Rhapsody in August (八月の狂詩曲, Akira Kurosawa, 1991)

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“People do forget everything, and quickly too” a teenage girl laments preparing to meet her half-American uncle and feeling a little awkward having been admonished by her parents for inadvertently confronting him with the realities of the wartime past. The middle generation in Kurosawa’s tri-generational tale of the legacy of warfare Rhapsody in August (八月の狂詩曲, Hachigatsu no Rhapsody) have it seems an ambivalent attitude they’re in the process of imparting to their children that views talk of the atomic bomb as almost taboo, tiptoeing around it with their newfound American relatives lest they offend them but mostly out of a desire for economic gain that reflects an early post-war mentality almost entirely alien to their Bubble-era teenage kids.

It’s the children who are keenest to learn about their past, staying with their elderly and seemingly frail grandmother Kane (Sachiko Murase) over the summer while their parents have travelled to Hawaii to investigate after receiving a letter from Kane’s long lost younger brother Suzujiro who emigrated in the 1920s and has since become a wealthy man running a pineapple plantation. The problem is that Kane had a large number of siblings, at least 11, and honestly doesn’t remember one called Suzujiro who did after all leave the country 60 years previously and was never seen again. The children, Tadao (Hisashi Igawa) and Yoshie (Toshie Negishi), think her refusal to visit him in Hawaii is partly down to a lingering resentment for the dropping of the atomic bomb which killed her husband, but as she later tells the grandchildren that was 45 years ago and she no longer has any strong feelings either way about the Americans adding only that it was all the fault of the war.

Nevertheless, it’s clear that Kane lives with a sense of loss and the continuing trauma of witnessing the flash that is expressed by the bald spot on the back of her head. As the grandchildren ask her questions she begins to reflect more on the past, remembering a younger brother, Suzukichi, who witnessed the flash with her and later had some kind of breakdown locking himself away endlessly drawing pictures of eyes that she later explains mimicked that of the flash itself. Kurosawa depicts this memory with surrealist imagery, a red sky splitting open just as Kane described exposing an eye which seemed to stare down at them. Youngest grandson Shinjiro (Mitsunori Isaki) draws such an eye on the blackboard in the study room in his grandmother’s house, an eye which continues to observe the children as they contemplate the recent past as well as an older Japan exemplified by their grandmother’s tales of the water imp living in a nearby pool who might once have saved Suzukichi’s life. 

In some ways, it’s almost as if the middle generation has been passed over. The grandchildren are very close to their grandmother and resentful of their parents, irritated by their constant references to their American relatives’ wealth with Shinjiro directly asking them why they haven’t asked how Kane has been or bothered to say hello to her before showing off photos of the Hawaiin mansion owned by Suzujiro. Kane also sets them right after deciding she’d like to visit after all, explaining that she couldn’t care less or if he’s rich or not she’d just like to see her brother. Her refusal to accept him was perhaps an expression of her own inability to make peace with the past, having literally forgotten only latterly coming to believe that Suzujiro really is her brother and wanting to reintegrate him into her life as an expression of peace between nations. 

Kane had said that Tadao’s conviction that they should avoid mentioning the bomb was illogical and ridiculous, an attitude later borne out by the unexpected arrival of Suzujiro’s half-American son Clark (Richard Gere) who speaks pigeon Japanese and is somewhat mortified by his own ignorance not having realised that his uncle must have died in the atomic bombing of Nagasaki until inadvertently tipped off by eldest grandson Tateo’s (Hidetaka Yoshioka) telegram. Clark bonds with Kane and sadly reflects on his own lack of knowledge after visiting the school where his uncle died and seeing scores of contemporary children flood into the playground where the twisted metal of a melted climbing frame serves as a memorial for the young lives that were lost. The intention is not however to provoke an apology or apportion blame only to mourn the folly of war while trying to put the past aside to ensure it never happens again.

The kids wear jeans and T-shirts with the logos of American universities on, but are determined to fix the out of tune harmonium in their grandmother’s parlour as if literarily setting the past to rights. The song they play sings of a red rose in a field, a rose that Shinjiro later sees near the shrine during the memorial service for the bombing that comes to resemble Kane in the closing frames as she charges through the rain with her blown umbrella while her children and grandchildren chase after her as the ants had trailed the rose. “People will do anything just to win a war,” Kane admonishes her son, “sooner or later it will be the ruin of us all” reminding him that dropping the bomb didn’t stop people killing each other, even 45 years later war continues to ruin people’s lives. Like the rose “blossoming in innocence” she stands for peace and mutual compassion amid an expressionist storm of fear and resentment.

Rhapsody in August screens at the BFI Southbank, London on 19th & 25th February 2023 as part of the Kurosawa season.

Original trailer (no subtitles)

I Live in Fear (生きものの記録, Akira Kurosawa, 1955)

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Which of us is “crazy”, the man who lives in fear or the rest of us who live in its denial? By 1955, a decade had passed since the bombs fell on Hiroshima and Nagasaki, but even if the world seemed “peaceful” it was only superficial. The Korean War had “ended” in an uneasy truce only two years earlier and the world was already mired in a cold war which daily threatened to turn hot with both sides in possession of a nuclear deterrent. Akira Kurosawa’s I Live in Fear (生きものの記録, Ikimono no Kiroku) asks us if we can really say a man is “insane” if his life is ruled by a rational anxiety and if it is our refusal to accept the threat he sees which eventually drives him out of his mind. 

Our guide is gentle dentist Harada (Takashi Shimura) who has a sideline as a mediator at the family court. The case he has been called in on one particular afternoon is that of the Nakajima family which is attempting to have the ageing patriarch, Kiichi (a near unrecognisable Toshiro Mifune), declared legally incompetent on account of his increasing paranoia about nuclear attack and latent radioactivity. A wealthy self-made man and foundry owner, Kiichi has frittered away vast sums on harebrained schemes to keep himself and his family safe but after a plan to build a bunker in a remote area had to be abandoned, he’s set his heart on moving everyone to Brazil where he believes they will be safer. 

The problem is partly one of changing times as Kiichi, “despotic and selfish” as his son describes him, attempts to railroad his family into a safety they do not want or need. His two legitimate sons now operate the foundry and their lives are dependent on it, which is not to say that they are dependent on Kiichi, but if he goes through with selling the the foundry to finance his new life it will leave them all high and dry. It would be, to a certain way of thinking, the ultimate paternal betrayal but in Kiichi’s mind all he’s trying to do is “save” his family from an invisible threat. 

That family, meanwhile, is one he’s already undermined through patriarchal selfishness in fathering a series of illegitimate children he is also supporting financially but has never legally acknowledged. The parents of the illegitimate kids are worried that if the family succeeds in having Kiichi declared legally incompetent, his wife will get her hands on the purse strings and they’ll be left out in the cold. Kiichi, meanwhile, has an old-fashioned view of filial relations and never considers that the other kids might not want to come with him either even if it’s unexpectedly nice of him to include them, or that inviting your two mistresses to live in the same house as your legal wife might be awkward for all concerned. 

On the face of it, the case is open and shut. If a man causes his family to suffer through frittering money away on drink or pachinko, they would approve the motion to give another family member legal control over his finances. So why is it taking them so long to decide if Kiichi is a liability to his family or not? The problem is, his fear is entirely rational. It’s only its extent which is the problem. It’s perfectly understandable to be afraid of the ebola virus or brain-eating amoeba, but we can’t afford to spend every minute of every day consumed by fear and so they retreat into the background anxiety of our lives while we try to go on living. Yet, could it be that Kiichi has it right and we’re merely living in denial, sleepwalking into a preventable disaster while he alone has a plan for survival? 

“No place is safe” Kiichi’s son-in-law exasperatedly explains to him after he has taken drastic and somewhat ironic action, a kind of scorched earth policy designed to force his sons to follow him into a new world of safety. Pushed over the edge, Kiichi gets a rude awakening, realising that it was perhaps selfish of him only to think of salvation for his immediate family when his actions will essentially throw his workforce under the bus. Belatedly, he promises to find a way to take them to Brazil too, never realising that people have their own lives that aren’t so easily uprooted. He thinks Brazil is safer because the currents of the world seem to blow ill winds over Japan, but there are already more than enough nuclear bombs lying in warehouses to destroy the planet several times over. 

In any case, Kiichi has already destroyed his family through his various transgressions. They don’t want to go in part because they don’t particularly like him, are sick of his gruff authoritarianism, and resent his tendency to make unilateral decisions on their behalf. Strapped for cash he tries asking the illegitimate kids to return some of the money he gave them, but they too are insecure in their positions and cannot trust that they will continue to be provided for if Kiichi is deposed. Meanwhile, when Kiichi falls ill the legitimate children are only too quick to start discussing the inheritance in the absence of a will. Perhaps Kiichi isn’t much more to them than a walking wallet, all of which lends a rather poignant quality to his continual attempts to protect his family from the nuclear apocalypse in fulfilment of his fatherly duty even as he wagers their economic security to do so. 

If Kiichi is a Cassandra prophesying the end of the world, we won’t be here to be sorry we didn’t listen, but Harada and other more rational minds are shaken by the intensity of his vision. They cannot say that he is “mad” even if his anxiety has consumed his life, but nor can they allow him free rein to pursue his plans because they do not concern only himself but greatly affect the lives of others. They are forced to wonder if it isn’t we who are “insane”, quietly living our lives while all these preventable threats hover in the background, ignored. Kiichi’s mistake was perhaps that he wanted only to be “safe” in an unsafe world, not to cure it of its dangers. Few us are actively trying to eliminate ebola or brain-eating amoebas, just as few actively opposed an increasingly nuclear society, powerless as we are and were in the face of a greater threat. Perhaps Kiichi was the sanest one of all, retreating into a world of madness and infinite safety in a delusional bubble of survival in an otherwise crazy world.

I Live in Fear screens at the BFI Southbank, London on 6th & 13th February 2023 as part of the Kurosawa season.

Ikiru (生きる, Akira Kurosawa, 1952)

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The Japanese economy may have embarked on a path towards recovery thanks to the stimulus of the Korean War, but in the early 1950s many might have thought it too soon to ask if survival in itself was enough yet this is exactly what disillusioned civil servant Kenji Watanabe finds himself asking after receiving the devastating news that he has advanced stomach cancer and year at most to live. “To live” is apt translation of Akira Kurosawa’s intensely moving existential melodrama, Ikiru (生きる), which tackles the compromises of the salaryman dream head on along with those of the contradictions of the sometimes dehumanising post-war society. 

As the opening voice over reveals to to us, Watanabe (Takashi Shimura) is man who died long ago or perhaps has never truly been alive. In some senses, he is nothing more than an embodiment of the seal he uses to stamp documents day in day out, a mere piston in an ever turning machine of relentless bureaucracy. A young woman, Miss Odagiri (Miki Odagiri), working in the Public Affairs department loudly reads out a joke someone has written about their boss, Watanabe, who has taken not a single day’s holiday in 30 years suggesting that it’s less that he fears city hall will grind to a halt without him than they’ll suddenly figure out city hall has no need of him at all. The irony is city hall does indeed grind to a halt in Watanabe’s absence as he, unthinkably, fails to turn up for work for days on end as the papers pile ever higher on his desk. “Nothing moves here without his seal” one of the workers admits, bewildered by this sudden break with protocol while salivating over its implications in the possibility that Watanabe’s chair may soon be empty. 

Yet Watanabe’s crisis is that he’s realised he’s wasted his life on a pointless bureaucratic career that’s done little more than keep a roof over his head. Even the roof is a fairly modest one and it’s clear that his grown up son Mitsuo (Nobuo Kaneko) considers him to be a stingy old miser, unable to understand why he’s never spent so much as a penny on himself and lives in a kind of self-imposed austerity. Perhaps to Watanabe this is what constitutes properness. He’s done everything he was supposed to do, got a steady job at city hall and eventually became the head of department, but now he feels foolish and lonely. Mitsuo and his wife seem to resent him and talk openly about their plans to use their inheritance, along with Watanabe’s retirement bonus, for a downpayment on a “modern” home the polar opposite of the pre-war townhouse where the family continue to live. 

Mitsuo and Kazue (Kyoko Seki) are perhaps emblems of the increasingly empty consumerism of the post-war era, emotionally disconnected from Watanabe and seeking only the flashy and new. Miss Odagiri, the young woman from work, immediately says that she’d love to live in a home like Watanabe’s rather than the crowded multiple occupancy flat she currently inhabits with her family. Cheerful and outgoing, Odagiri is on the other hand a symbol of a new generation that wants something more out of life than simple material comfort and might even be willing to trade it for a small amount of happiness. Having worked at city hall for all of 18 months, she decides that she just can’t take it anymore and is quitting to get a job in a factory making toy rabbits that she says allow her to feel as if she’s making friends with all the babies in Japan. 

To that extent, Watanabe is himself also a baby craving Odagiri’s company admitting that he envies her youth and vitality in realising he squandered his own and will never get it back. How uncomfortable it must be for her, their final meeting in a restaurant sandwiched between a loving couple and teenage girl’s birthday party as Watanabe, gaunt and shrunken, claws at the air and begs her to help him live. Yet even within the grotesquery the tone is ironic, the strains of “Happy Birthday” accompanying Watanabe down the stairs as a the high school climbs up to meet her friends signalling his (re)birth as a man with purpose and determination. Just as Odagiri had found meaning in the rabbit, Watanabe finds it deciding to get a playground built over a post-war swamp in the slums filled with raw sewage and mosquitos that left the local children ill. 

Yet children’s parks aren’t particularly profitable which is presumably why the petition to build one had been kicked all round city hall in the infernal wheel of bureaucracy in which Watanabe too is trapped. “You call this democracy?” one of the women bringing the petition asks, taking the clerk to task complaining that all they do is fob them off insisting it’s someone else’s responsibility to help while determined only to guard their own turf. “You’re not supposed to do anything at city hall” someone ironically adds, “the best way to protect your place in this world is to do nothing at all”. Watanabe did nothing at all for 30 years and it got him nowhere, his dedication to his job disrupting his relationship with his son though Watanabe is ironically one of the most emotional men and engaged fathers seen on screen in the post-war era. 

After his death, in the park he helped build for which the deputy mayor has taken credit, his colleagues put him on trial at the wake trying to work out why he did it and whether or not he even knew he was dying seeing as he told no one close him not even the son whom he felt he could no longer trust. They deny his role while both praising and condemning his passion as somehow improper, disrupting the dispassionate rhythms of the bureaucratic machine with human emotion. It was only coincidence, they say. The deputy mayor wanted an election and the yakuza wanted to turn the swamp into a red light district. “Did he think he could just build a park?” someone adds, bemused by his effrontery as a man from Public Affairs straying into the Parks Department’s territory. You have to protect your turf after all. Finally moved by Watanabe’s last ditch bid to make his life mean something, to feel alive and know he has lived, the the drunken salarymen, all but one who retreats to look at Watanabe’s photo above the altar, swear to follow his example. 

But of course the bureaucratic wheel keeps turning, another dangerous sewage problem diverted to another department continuing the literal pollution of the capitalistic post-war society. A kind of ghost story, Kurosawa lights Shimura from below, shadows cast across his gaunt face even by his “rakish” new hat while his huge eyes have a somehow haunted, grotesque quality filled with hungry desperation. Yet it’s to childhood that Watanabe eventually returns, “perfectly happy” sitting on a swing singing a song from his youth about the price age while surrounded by snow and at last painfully, absurdly alive. 

Ikiru screens at the BFI Southbank, London on 4th & 15th February 2023 as part of the Kurosawa season.

Original trailer (English subtitles)

The Blossom and the Sword (日本侠花伝, Tai Kato, 1973)

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After joining the studio in the mid-1950s, Tai Kato quickly made a reputation for himself with Toei’s key brand of ninkyo eiga yakuza movies set in the chivalrous world of pre-war gangsterdom. By the early 70s, however, the genre was already played out and Kato began to work more frequently with other studios and in various genres but 1973’s The Blossom and the Sword (日本侠花伝, Nihon kyoka den), produced for Toho the studio which he had first joined at the beginning of his career in 1937, takes him back to his ninkyo roots if less directly in a politicised tale revolving around the 1918 rice riots. 

The film opens, however, a few years earlier with the heroine, Mine (Hiroko Maki), attempting to sell children’s educational picture books aboard a train (an activity strictly prohibited). As she explains, they are in the middle of a recession and times are hard for everyone though as we discover the reason for Mine’s journey is that she is in the process of eloping with the mild-mannered Minoru (Kunio Murai), the son of a wealthy family with literary dreams, who is prevented from marrying her because of the class difference between them. The couple are doing well enough evading detection, but are caught out when accidentally implicated in the murder of a treacherous politician by left-wing agitator/noble gangster Seijiro (Tetsuya Watari) who fatefully locks eyes with Mine while trying to escape forever binding their fates together. 

Epic in length the film was originally released in two parts with an interval in-between, this first half focussing on Mine’s doomed romance which is thwarted in part by the outdated social codes of the early Taisho society and the moral cowardice of her lover who finds himself unable to resist them. The pair are thrown in prison as possible co-conspirators and beaten by the police, Mine striking up a friendship with a woman, Tsuru (Junko Toda), imprisoned for distributing pamphlets as a labour activist who later helps her to get a waitressing job and teaches her rudimentary writing while Minoru lounges around in their home sort of writing a novel. Tsuru seems to be touched by their cross-class romance, “where love is concerned to hell with social status!” she insists berating Minoru for giving in so easily when the pair are finally tracked down by his austere mother. Her socialist activism may not directly rub off on Mine but does perhaps inform her later actions after discovering the depths of Minoru’s spinelessness, rescued after a failed bid at double suicide by a truly good man, Kinzo (Meicho Soganoya), who also happens to be a traditional yakuza heading a harbour gang in Kobe. 

After becoming his wife, Mine comes to witness the persistent unfairness and exploitation all around her as mediated by the outcry surrounding the fluctuation of rice prices in the late 1910s caused by attempts at profiteering and the necessity of supplying the military forces then participating in the war in Europe. Meanwhile, would be local dictator and amoral yakuza Kishimoto (Toru Abe) is intent on squeezing the Osada gang out of the harbour further pushing up rice prices while in cahoots with corrupt local authorities. Seijiro re-enters her life when dispatched to assassinate Kinzo on the orders of Kishimoto but stabbing him as carefully as possible to make sure he doesn’t die, thereafter switching sides to fight for the rights of the poor who he warns face even greater oppression should a man like Kishimoto be allowed to dominate the harbour. 

With Kinzo out of action, Mine assumes her natural destiny as a local leader doing her best to stand up to Kishimoto and the corrupt authorities but still faces difficulty getting her voice heard without a man standing next to her. On taking Kinzo’s place at a meeting of local bosses, she is dismissed as “just a woman” before a sympathetic naval officer decides to hand her a lucrative job shifting rice intended for sailors overseas because of her knowledge of current affairs undercutting Kishimoto’s attempts to game the system. It’s the trust the navy have in her that later saves her again when she is arrested and brutally tortured by corrupt policemen working with Kishimoto intent on tracking down Seijiro for the murder on the train all those years previously. Mine’s rise is also in a sense Seijiro’s redemption as he atones for the attack on Kinzo, rejects his association with Kishimoto to re-embrace his socialist beliefs, and fulfils the romantic destiny sparked when their eyes met on the train. 

Drawing a direct line between burgeoning militarism and gangsterdom along with the amoral exploitations of an increasingly capitalist society, Kato makes his intentions clear by dropping a ninkyo eiga hero into a world of infinite corruptions in which he eventually becomes a defender of the poor. Kato’s striking composition and use of colour along with expressionistic imagery lend the air of legend implied by the title as Mine fights her way through the oppressions of her era as a figurehead for justice in an increasingly unjust society.

Seven Samurai (七人の侍, Akira Kurosawa, 1954)

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An eclipse of the accepted order allows a temporary truce in the ongoing class conflict that defines feudal society in Akira Kurosawa’s seminal post-war historical epic, Seven Samurai (七人の侍, Shichinin no Samurai). Set in the late 16th century, the action takes place in a world on the brink of collapse. The Sengoku era is drawing to a close but is also in a moment of intense crisis which has left large numbers of highly skilled warriors essentially orphaned, wandering the land torn between their basic needs for food and shelter and their dignity as members of a theoretic aristocracy. 

Plagued by bandits, many of whom may be these orphaned swordsmen, a small village contemplates the unthinkable in hiring samurai, otherwise their oppressors and uniquely responsible for the chaos which surrounds them, for protection. “Land tax, forced labour, drought…and now bandits!” one woman exclaims shortly before suggesting they simply surrender all their grain and then hang themselves. As they can offer only expenses in the form of rice, the only samurai they can hope to recruit are already desperate, so hungry that they may be willing to deign to defending their social inferiors with whom they would not usually mix unwilling to accept that they are both victims of the inherently corrupt social order. This explains why the villagers’ early entreaties are met with such scorn and cynicism, either rudely rejected out of hand or ending only in deception. 

In this there is an echo of the world of 1954 which was beginning edge away from the chaos and privation of the immediate post-war society, bandits standing in for thieves and profiteers themselves a product of intense food insecurity. Yet here it’s desperation that allows a temporary merging of the world of lord and peasant, brokered finally by unexpected compassion on the part of a noble samurai who, in an act of extreme transgression, symbolically erases his elite status by shaving his head in order to save a child taken as a hostage by another desperate man. Kambei (Takashi Shimura) may be somewhat reduced in circumstances but refuses to give in to the immorality of the world around him, finally agreeing to help the villagers essentially out of a sense of pity willing to accept only the gift of sustenance moved by the villagers’ sacrifice in discovering that they give him the last of their white rice while subsisting only on millet. 

Yet having taken this step, the villagers remain uncertain they can really trust the men they’ve hired to protect them who are after all each trained in death. Later we discover that they have, like many of the time, occasionally finished off the odd lone samurai fleeing the battlefield in order to loot the bodies as a large stockpile of samurai armour later discovered by the samurai-pretender Kikuchiyo (Toshiro Mifune) testifies. On being confronted with this uncomfortable reality, the samurai fall silent knowing this armour was stripped from men much like themselves, but can ultimately offer little by way of defence when presented with an angry rant from Kikuchiyo who points out that they are themselves responsible in having created this world of chaos through their internecine quests for power. “In war you burn their villages, trample their fields, steal their food, work them like slaves, rape their women, and kill ‘em if they resist. What to you expect ‘em to do?”

When Kambei and the others first arrive in the village, there is no welcoming committee. The villagers all hide, frightened to leave their homes partly because of paranoia spread by widowed father Manzo (Kamatari Fujiwara) convinced that randy samurai are going ravish all of their daughters who will, doubtless, be overcome with awe by these sophisticated men of the elite. In an echo of Kambei’s transgression, Manzo forces something similar on his teenage daughter Shino (Keiko Tsushima), roughly cutting her hair while she cries and resists before dressing her up as a boy so that she’ll be safe from lusty samurai. The plan, however, backfires in that she later engages in a doomed romance with the young Katsuhiro (Isao Kimura). Their eventual union is the symbolic merging of the two worlds, a moment of eclipse in the usual hierarchy, but it’s born of the same impulses than brought Kambei and the others to the village. In fear and desperation, they behave as if there’s no tomorrow, only tomorrow must come and just as sun and moon must eventually move apart and resume their regular orbits so the relationship between Katsuhiro and Shino is an impossibility. 

Like Kambei, Katsuhiro had occupied a slightly liminal position because of his relative youth, neither boy nor man. He first encounters Shino while marvelling at the natural beauty of the forest, only to berate her for doing the same. “Is this any time for an able-bodied man to be picking flowers?”, he ironically asks her, yet he is repeatedly forced back towards conventional masculinity as marker of adulthood virtually ignoring her when tasked with carrying a dummy to the ridge, while she later returns the same gesture reassuming her femininity in joining the rice planting, a peasant woman once again. “What’s wrong with two people in love?” the wounded Rikichi (Yoshio Tsuchiya) asks Manzo, trying to smooth over this moment of cross-class crisis, only for Monzo to ask what he’s supposed to now his only daughter has become “damaged goods”, unfit for marriage in a fiercely patriarchal society in which it is impossible to survive without a husband. 

Katsuhiro cannot marry her, this sense of solidarity if not quite equality can be only temporary. Kambei himself admits as much as he reflects that the battle has been won but the victory belongs not to them but to the peasants, anticipating his a sense his own obsolescence the end of the Sengoku era bringing about a change in the nature of the samurai that two centuries later will lead to its abolition. Our sympathies might shift, witnessing Kambei’s obvious disapproval of the peasants’ relish in taking revenge on the bandits who have caused them so much misery in their own way perhaps perpetuating the cycle of violence and resentment that drives the feudal engine. One cannot help but pity him, displaced once again returning to a life of ceaseless wandering, his presence in the village now no longer necessary and in fact inappropriate. 

Returning to the world of 1954, there might be something a little uncomfortable in this lament for the death of the samurai who can have no place either in the modern society or in a peasant village in 1587, as there may be in the implication that the peasants are savage and vindictive while Kambei alone is good and kind even if the roots of his compassion lie in his willingness to literally sever himself from his elite status. The roles had in a sense been reversed, the samurai hired hands to peasant bosses, but the inversion can be only temporary. In insisting that only by protecting others can one hope to protect oneself, Kambei may be advocating for a more compassionate society but as much as he has attempted to remove himself from the class system he can not in the end overcome it. Nevertheless, in the gruelling battle scene that closes the film, all rain, mud, death and misery, Kurosawa himself deals the final blow to the samurai in the nihilistic futility of violence manifesting itself once again in the lingering feudalism of the mid-century society. 

Seven Samurai is re-released in UK cinemas in its recent 4K restoration as part of BFI Japan on 29th October.

BFI re-release trailer (English subtitles)

Too Young to Die (死ぬにはまだ早い, Kiyoshi Nishimura, 1969)

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Perhaps more or less forgotten for reasons we’ll come to later, Kiyoshi Nishimura was for a time a successful director associated with Toho’s line of noirish B-movie action dramas. When the Japanese cinema industry entered its decline in the 1970s, Nishimura shifted into similarly themed TV drama and was well respected for his ability to turn in on time and on budget. None of that mattered however when he was engulfed in scandal in 1987 after being caught operating spy cams in the female only area of a public bathhouse bringing his career to an abrupt end. Directing a few more projects under the name Yusai Ito, he sadly took his own life a few years later in 1993 at the age of 61. 

Nishimura’s 1969 debut Too Young to Die (死ぬにはまだ早い, Shinu ni wa Mada Hayai), however, is a masterclass in high tension filmed with shaky handheld set largely in a single location and imbued with a singular irony replete as it is with cosmic coincidences as a collection of customers at a roadside bar are taken hostage by a crazed criminal with a gun intent on finding the lover of the girlfriend he claims to have murdered for her infidelity. The heroes, however, are ennui-filled couple Matsuoka (Koji Takahashi) and Yumiko (Mako Midori) who are in fact not married, or at least not to each other, but carrying on an extra-marital affair which may be on the cusp of fizzling out. A former racing champ who claims he just got bored with the sport one day and now works for a company selling accessories for toy cars, Matsuoka is supposed to drive Yumiko home where she’s expecting a call from her controlling husband, away on a business trip, at 1am. These are all reasons they are unusually nervous about a police checkpoint searching for an armed fugitive, deciding to stop off at a roadside bar for a stiff drink and something to eat. Only, shortly after their arrival a young man (Toshio Kurosawa) in denim enters giving each of the other men intense side eye before shooting a policeman who comes in to make enquiries about the fugitive. 

The unnamed young tough takes the entire bar hostage intent on finding his lover’s lover, overcome with a sense of cosmic irony when Matsuoka calmly points out he may have arrived too early and the man he’s looking for had not yet arrived when he put the place in lockdown. Before the gunman’s arrival, Nishimura introduces us to each of the other customers via the handy device of two teenage girls apparently stranded and asking around for a lift back to the city. A middle-aged doctor (Chuzaburo Wakamiya), apparently a regular, eventually offers to take them but is dissuaded by the barman (Kazuya Oguri) who reminds him he’s been drinking too heavily to take passengers, while a taxi driver (Shigeki Ishida) who seems to be feeling unwell flat out refuses. The other customers are a suspicious looking man in a trenchcoat (Daigo Kusano) sitting in the corner piling matchsticks, and a newlywed couple who we later learn saved up for their wedding for three years, the wife (Nami Tamura) already going through her accounts book irritated by her friends’ decision to graffiti their car and wondering how much it’ll cost to get it cleaned up while the husband (Tatsuyoshi Ehara) disappoints her by wanting to rush home because he’s planning to return to work the next morning ahead of schedule. 

The relationships of the two couples are often directly contrasted, Matsuoka and Yumiko unsure of their connection as adulterous lovers while the newly married couple also seem be under strain even before the traumatic events about to take place. Apparently brokenhearted, the gunman collapses over the jukebox playing a series of melancholy songs about lost love, Matsuoka later darkly musing that perhaps he was only able to kill his lover because he loved her so much. Unlike the other customers, Matsuoka appears entirely unperturbed by their predicament calmly talking to the gunman and even ringing the police to ask them to temporarily stand back so they can evacuate a hostage in need of medical treatment. The gunman sends Matsuoka and the newlywed husband to take the injured party out, taking Yumiko hostage as security while she fears Matsuoka does not value her enough to return though both men do in fact come back rather than abandon their respective women. The newlywed husband, however, later fails a test of manhood when the enraged gunman goes off on a misogynistic rant and tries to force the doctor to rape the newlywed wife to prove that all women are faithless “whores”, the husband reduced to a gibbering wreck cowering in the corner unable to protect his new wife or challenge the gunman’s authority as Matsuoka later does when he orders Yumiko to remove her clothes in front of the other hostages. 

Though Yumiko had feared the affair was on its way out, ironically describing Matsuoka as not so different from her husband while lamenting that their connection seemed to have dwindled, the traumatic experience seems to reinforce the reality of their love as something more than a casual extra-marital fling even as Matsuoka forgives her for not trusting him because their relationship is not founded on the same idea of “commitment” as the married couple. The question for the other customers is how much the lives of others they’ve only just met really mean to them, the two teenage girls deciding to attempt escape while the gunman takes Yumiko hostage to use the bathroom, the doctor edging round the sides as Matsuoka tries to stop them to protect her while the newlyweds similarly waltz towards the door. All the while the TV crackles with an inane variety show complete with its cheerful advertisements while the police apparently have the place surrounded ironically convincing the gunman he has no way out and therefore nothing to lose. A tense meditation on interpersonal relationships, Too Young to Die is not without its share of ironies in strange number of coincidences and misapprehensions as the siege eventually draws to an unexpected close sending our conflicted lovers back into the night if perhaps a little more alive for their brush with death. 

The Last Gunfight (暗黒街の対決, Kihachi Okamoto, 1960)

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“Times may change but there’s always a bunch of greed-blinded old men to rip you off” according to the sidelined noble yakuza pushed into the shadows of Kihachi Okamoto’s anarchic gangster romp The Last Gunfight (暗黒街の対決, Ankokugai no Taiketsu). Another of Okamoto’s early crime movies, Last Gunfight, adapted from the novel by hardboiled king Haruhiko Oyabu, as its name implies finds a stranger in town arriving at the tail end of a gang war in which the wrong side seems to have won hoping to offer a course correction for the post-war future. 

Branded a “dirty cop” and demoted to small-town Kojin, Fujioka (Toshiro Mifune) is a maverick officer exploring the local landscape by getting into fights with foot solders from differing outfits, quickly finding out that the Ooka gang are currently in the ascendent while old school Kozuka flounders. Improbably enough, the local flashpoint is over control of the gravel dredging business currently operated by Kozuka but contested by Ooka. Fujioka meanwhile is caught in a complex web at the nexus of which is Tetsu (Koji Tsuruta), a former Kozuka man who now runs a bar while he plots revenge for the death of his wife in a traffic accident he suspects may have been foul play possibly at the hands of Ooka man Niki, brother of brassy bar girl Sally (Yoko Tsukasa). 

Arriving on the same train as dodgy lawyer Tendo (Akihiko Hirata) and an exotic dancer destined for the club, Fujioka keeps his cards close to his chest leaving his loyalties all but clear. The station are less than thrilled to have him, especially as he spends his first night in town in one of their cells after starting a bar fight, waking up right under a sign which reads “stop violent crime”, while another earnest young officer reminds him that “policemen should never be involved in violence”. Fujioka continues to play both sides, cosying up to both Ooka and Tetsu, walking the line between cop and thug while seemingly scoping out the terrain on either side of the tracks. 

Meanwhile, the town is mired in a battle for its soul as the amoral Ooka gang slowly take over. As Kozuka foot soldier Yata (Makoto Sato) puts it, his boss is the sort who won’t have anything to do with yakuza who don’t obey the code which is why he won’t simply cut a deal with Ooka. According to Kozuka (Jun Tazaki), others might lump him in with “fools and trash” but he’s the old school kind of yakuza providing a genuine service to the community. He dredged the river to stop it flooding and was given the gravel business as a thank you so he resents having it stolen out from under him by the likes of Ooka who makes his money primarily through the drugs trade trafficking “China White” and has seemingly corrupted the entire city council. 

Then again, as Kozuka points out ties based on greed are the most fragile of all and it appears Ooka has secrets he’d rather weren’t exposed. Living in a Western-style mansion complete with open fireplaces and hunting trophies on the walls Ooka is laying claim to a fiefdom as the new inheritor of the feudal legacy. Tetsu’s bar, meanwhile, seems to have a Wild West theme which perhaps speaks of his love of freedom and independence as opposed to Ooka’s elitist authoritarianism. As a representative of legitimate authority Fujioka walks a tightrope between the two but eventually shuns a potential love interest in bargirl Sally, currently Ooka’s squeeze but playing her own game hoping to find out what happened to her brother, in favour of a bromance with the wounded Tetsu.  

Like Okamoto’s other gangster movies from this era however and in contrast to the heaviness of the title, Last Gunfight is imbued with a strong sense of irony and the director’s characteristically cartoonish sense of humour with its ridiculous fight scenes, elaborate production design, and playful subversion of gangster movie tropes right down to the frequent musical numbers starring a trio of minions clad in black suits and lip-syncing to songs about killing the moon. Ending as it began, Okamoto’s elliptical narrative sees the strangers leaving town, job done, but laying themselves bare as they go now shorn of their cover identities and headed back into the heart of corruption in search of new destinations.

Original trailer (no subtitles)

Station (駅, Yasuo Furuhata, 1981)

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The thing about trains is, you can get off and wander round for a bit, but sooner or later you’ll have to go where the rails take you. You never have as much control as you think you have. The hero of Yasuo Furuhata’s Station (駅, Eki) is beginning to come to that conclusion himself, addressing the various stations of his life, the choices he made and didn’t make that have led him into a dejected middle-age, defeated, and finding finally that any illusion he may have entertained of living differently will not come to pass. 

In 1968, police detective Eiji Mikami (Ken Takakura) sends his wife (Ayumi Ishida) and son away for reasons which aren’t entirely clear. At this point in his life, he’s an aspiring marksman on Japan’s shooting team intensively training for the Mexico Olympics, which is perhaps why he felt he could no longer be a husband and a father, or at least not while also being a policeman. All that changes, however, when his friend and mentor is gunned down during a routine job, shot in the chest at point blank range by a man in a white Corolla while operating a check point to catch a killer on the run. In 1976, he goes to see his sister (Yuko Kotegawa) marry a man she might not love to escape a violent boyfriend and investigates a serial killer of women who rapes and murders girls in red skirts. In 1979, he’s haunted by the serial killing case coupled with his cool execution of hostage takers during a siege. Holing up in a small fishing village waiting for a boat home for New Year, he strikes up a relationship with a barmaid who is just as sad, lonely, and defeated as he is. 

When Mikami’s friend is shot, his wife tells the reporters that she thinks shooting at targets, which her husband had been training others to do, is a different thing than shooting at living beings. “One shouldn’t shoot at people” she tearfully insists, accidentally forcing Mikami into a double dilemma, knowing that his marksmanship skills were on one level useless in that they couldn’t save his friend while paradoxically told that they shouldn’t be used for that purpose anyway. But what really is the point in shooting holes in paper targets just to test your skill? Wandering into the hostage situation while posing as a ramen deliveryman, he cooly shoots the two bad guys without even really thinking about it, as if they were nothing more than paper. 

The Olympics overshadow his life. He gave up his wife and son for them, but no matter how hard you train, the Olympics eventually pass. Mikami is told he’s supposed to bring honour to Japan, representing not only the nation but the police force. He’s not allowed to investigate his friend’s death because they want him to concentrate on his shooting, but he is and was a policeman who wants to serve justice. While he’s waiting for the funeral, he sees a report on the news about a former Olympic marathon runner who’s taken his own life because he got injured and fell into a depression feeling as if he’d let down an entire nation. Mikami perhaps feels something the same, drained by responsibility, by the feeling of inadequacy, and by the potential for disappointment. After the Olympics he feels deflated and useless, wondering what the point of police work is while quietly rueful in suspecting the committee is about to replace him on the team after all. 

When he wanders into the only bar open on a snowy December evening, that is perhaps why he bonds so immediately with its melancholy proprietress, Kiriko (Chieko Baisho). The conversation turns dark. Kiriko tells him that a friend of hers who worked in a bar in the red light district killed herself last New Year, that it’s the most dangerous time for those who do this sort of work, not for any poetical reason but simply because it’s when their men come home. She tells him that she’s a lone woman, no virginal spinster but weighed down by the failure of old love. Swept up in the New Year spirit, Mikami starts to fall for her, but is also called back to the past by an old colleague who passes him his wife’s phone number and tells him she’s now a bar hostess in Ikebukuro. He starts to think about leaving the police and getting a local job, but fate will not allow it. Kiriko too sees her dream of love destroyed precisely by her desire to escape the pull of toxic romance. Back in 1976, Mikami had been party to a similar dilemma as the sister of his suspect kept her brother’s secret but secretly longed to escape its burden. Suzuko (Setsuko Karasuma) too lost love in trying to claim it and now works as a waitress in a small cafe in this tiny town, only latterly making an impulsive decision to try to leave and make a new future somewhere else. 

Mikami tears up the letter of resignation that declared him too tired of life to be a good policeman, once again boarding a train back to his rightful destination, knowing that a policeman’s what he is and will always be. He watched his wife wave goodbye from a station platform, saw a man betrayed on the tracks, and finally boarded the train himself, letting go of any idea he might have had about going somewhere else. Stations are after all transitory places, you can’t stay there forever. 

Original trailers (no subtitles)

Aki Yashiro’s Funauta which plays frequently throughout the film