Two dippy salarymen finally rise up against a feudalistic corporate culture in a rare comedy from Mikio Naruse, Both You and I (俺もお前も, Ore mo Omae mo). Essentially a vehicle for real life manzai double act Entatsu Yokoyama and Achako Hanabishi, it’s also an Occupation-era social message movie intended to discourage workers from extending too much deference to their employers, though its positioning of the left-wing student movement as the future countering the militarist past is perhaps surprisingly radical.
In other ways, however, it harks back to the salaryman movies of the 1930s such as Naruse’s own Flunky, Work Hard and Ozu’s I was Born, But… in which the male office worker has been essentially emasculated and forced to debase himself in order to please his boss. As the film opens, Ooki (Achako Hanabishi) and Aono (Entatsu Yokoyama) are guests at their boss’ dinner party at a geisha house where they’ve been ironically invited as entertainment. The pair of them take the place of the geisha doing a silly dance to entertain the boss who quips that they’re cheap considering how much it would cost to hire a pair of comedians. It’s worth saying that Ooki and Aono are not particularly doing this in a calculated way but actively appreciate being appreciated by the boss and see it as their duty to keep him happy. At times, others suggest that it’s their attempt to ingratiate themselves with him, though they seem quite surprised by the suggestion in part because they still believe in an old-fashioned idea of the employer-employee relationship in which the company is supposed to look after them, so they assume they’ll make career progress naturally by being affable team players and aren’t really worried about losing their jobs despite all this talk of restructuring.
Their boss, however, thinks the pair of them are idiots and takes advantage of their loyalty towards him by getting them to dig his garden and complete other inappropriate personal tasks. He gives them a pair of tickets for an onsen resort as a kind of reward, but once they get there, they realise he’s done it to get them to bring back his “luggage” which is actually black-market supplies for his daughter’s birthday party. The boss’ superiority over them is signalled by his large Western-style house, while Ooki and Aono both live in humbler, traditionally Japanese homes. Aono is a widower with four children though he can’t remember how old they are the oldest two daughters are of marriageable age. The boss even requests the eldest, Hatsuko’s presence at the party, but it quickly transpires that he wasn’t inviting her but asking her to do unpaid serving work signalling the class disparity between the middle-ranking salarymen and the boss.
But it’s at the party that things start to change as Hatsuko talks her father out of doing another silly dance as part of the entertainment, in part because of her embarrassment but mostly because her sister Yasuko’s (Itoko Kono) boyfriend is a guest and she’s worried it’ll put him off marrying her. This angers the boss, who insultingly suggests that Aono and Ooki aren’t even fully human and only become a whole person when together so one alone is as useless as an orphaned sandal. Meanwhile, Ooki’s son, whom he’s very proud to say is in university, is rehearsing a communist play that’s about a strike at factory. Ooki doesn’t really understand it, but is worried about the neighbours overhearing and the police getting involved. He still has a pre-war mindset and hasn’t realised that things like freedom of expression now exist. His son tells him that it’s only right to speak up. If you can’t say anything because you’re afraid of getting fired, then you’ll just end up getting exploited. But Ooki and his wife insist they feel too indebted to the boss to be able to talk about him like that. He thinks his son will change his mind when he enters the world of work. Sadao replies that he understands why his father had to do it, but insists that the world is unjust and has been created by the capitalists for their own benefit.
Pushed too far, Ooki and Aono do eventually decide to confront the boss even if they immediately back track when he arrives at the office by hanging up his hat and dusting his desk. They accuse him of being a wartime profiteer who caroused with militarists and made his money by exploiting their labour while he now abuses the black market. They find themselves supported by the other workers from the other side of the door as they insist they’ll fight the restructuring along with the boss’ underhanded plan to sell the company to a rival. They’ve discovered workers’ solidarity and resolved not to be complicit any more with a feudalistic working culture, though it’s unclear if anything will really come of it. They are nevertheless free from their lives of constant debasement and have reasserted their individual identities while otherwise being an unbreakable pair.
Windows on Worlds 