Set in a quiet northern town, Shiro Toyoda’s Nightingale (鶯, Uguisu) finds the nation still struggling to emerge from the feudal past into the modern era. The film opens with a scene in the local train station, yet we’re also told that it is literally cut off from prosperity because the express train does not stop there and so it is relegated to the status of provincial backwater. Physically trying to flag the train down, the Mayor has been trying to get the town placed on the fast track but has had no luck so far.
The ticket man, who’d been more or less ignoring him, suggests they can’t put the station on the express line because the population of the town is decreasing presumably as young people migrate to the cities in search of work. One of the people waiting there is a man with two sons who tries to get the younger to pretend he’s younger than he is so he won’t have to pay for his ticket, though the ticket man refuses to give him a discount leaving the man with only the option to leave one of the boys behind while the family can no longer survive in the town. He explains that he’s been financially crippled by the medical fees to care for his now late wife and is clearly at his wits end trying to find a way to support his children.
The costs of medical treatment seem to be a direct driver of poverty and crime. Shifting to the local police station, we’re introduced to a man who’s become a serial chicken thief having begun stealing neighbour’s birds to pay for doctors to treat his sickly wife only she eventually left him for another man because he was always away conducting poultry heists so she thought he’d abandoned her due to her illness. His problem is compounded by the fact he had not formally registered their marriage intending to wait until the first child was born leaving him without a leg to stand on.
An official doctor later jokingly complains that he’s losing custom because no one in the area can afford modern medical care so they’re turning to dubious snake oil-style miracle cures proffered by a “fake priest” the police are about to arrest for fraud. Meanwhile, they’ve also arrested a middle-aged woman (Haruko Sugimura) who assists with births for violating the medical practice law. Branded a midwife she is really more of a wise woman who is well respected in the local community as someone who had had many children herself and also offers advice about folk remedies for various illnesses. She never claims to be a doctor and does not regard it as a job, merely as helping people even if she perhaps also enjoys the sense of being needed and important, and is unable to understand how that could ever be a crime. Unlike the priest, she takes no payment and uses her own resources though people sometimes give her small compensatory gifts such as parcels of rice as a thank you. When a woman goes into labour and the “official” midwife is not available, the policeman is unwilling to let her in but hearing the woman’s distress she runs to help her kicking all the policemen out of this very personal female space.
Her confusion bears out that within the general society as people struggle to adjust to a more ordered modernity and the encroachment of urbanity which is what the police themselves represent. Then again, they are presented as being more compassionate certainly than the staff of the railway and seemingly have a duty of pastoral care for the local area which is separate from their role in enforcing the law. A secondary drama that began at the train station involves a young woman who is being sold into sexual slavery by her father against her will. She is eventually rescued by an earnest school teacher who says the sale isn’t valid because she also signed a contract to become a teacher, convincing her father to change his mind with the help of the police who remonstrate with him that it’s wrong to sell your child even if the practice had been somewhat normalised which plays into a propagandistic element about the importance of moving on from “backward” rural practices still mired in the feudal era. The police also have access to a fund which can be used to get the broker out of the way in an effort to stamp out this morally indefensible situation in which parents sell their children into indentured servitude for reasons of poverty.
They also agree to help an old lady who’s arrived in search of a child she fostered a decade previously who was taken back by her birth mother and sold to a circus. Like the chicken thief, the old woman was caught out by the modern convention of paperwork. She had been led to believe the adoption had been processed and the child placed on her own family register, but was illiterate and therefore easily deceived. The old woman also becomes a victim of the dodgy priest and the disease currently spreading because of his problematic cure-alls which people have turned to out of desperation in their poverty.
But despite the police’s apparent altruism, the arrival of a young woman selling a captive nightingale reveals the irony that she’s come there because it’s the only place anyone has any money. Unfortunately it turns out that capturing a nightingale has also been ruled illegal, even if one of the policeman was interested in buying it if only it could sing, so she’s come to the wrong place and if she doesn’t release it she’ll end up with a fine. The nightingale’s song is later replaced by that of a flute player who had been arrested for being drunk and disorderly having spent some money he was given towards the funeral of his baby on drink.
The police are in some ways a disruptive influence, trying to bring a new urban order to this rural place which has its own laws and customs often at odds with those of the city. Their efforts tie in to a persistent message of modernising for the good of the nation which was particularly current in the late 1930s though the film is equally sympathetic towards the plight of the rural poor who are not after all being given very much support as the youngsters move to the city leaving the old behind, trapped on the slow line cut off from the benefits of modernity while otherwise expected to simply adapt to new visions of civility in a society still trying to emerge from the feudal past.
Hiroshi Shimizu is well known as one of the best directors of children in the history of Japanese cinema, equalled only by the contemporary director Hirokazu Koreeda. The Shiinomi School (しいのみ学園, Shiinomi Gakuen) is one of the primary examples of his genius as it takes on the controversial themes of the place of the disabled in society and especially how children and their parents can come to terms with the many difficulties they now face.
Windows on Worlds 