Tag: Takanobu Hozumi

The Demon (鬼畜, Yoshitaro Nomura, 1978)

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By the late 1970s Japan had achieved its economic miracle, but it had yet perhaps to deal with the traumas of the immediate post-war era. Once again adapted from a story by Seicho Matsumoto, Yoshitaro Nomura’s shocking social drama The Demon (鬼畜, Kichiku) explores the radiating effects of orphanhood and economic privation on the family unit producing as a rather judgemental policeman eventually puts it a generation of parents who don’t know how to raise children and may even lack the inclination to do so even if thankfully not to the extent of the couple at the film’s centre.

Nomura opens with one of his trademark lengthy train sequences following a harried mother and her three children travelling in the sweltering heat from the countryside to the city as she makes a last, desperate attempt to remind the father, Sokichi Takeshita (Ken Ogata), of his responsibilities. Once a successful businessman, Sokichi has become financially ruined after a fire destroyed his print shop and no longer has the means to maintain a second household for his mistress and children at a discrete distance from the home he shares with his wife, Oume (Shima Iwashita). As Kikuyo (Mayumi Ogawa) points out to him, she is unable to support herself economically while caring for the children but he has little answer for her especially once the previously oblivious Oume overhears their conversation. After a series of heated arguments, Kikuyo makes the radical decision to simply abandon the children with their father and thereafter disappears having vacated her previous home and left no forwarding address. 

A part of the problem in the Takeshitas’ marriage had been that they have no children of their own, Sokichi remarking to Kikuyo, whom he met while she was working in a traditional teahouse where he used to take clients, that he had always wanted a child. Conventional gender roles have in a sense been reversed, Oume angrily insisting that her husband would never have made any money had not been for her while it appears that she is more or less in charge of their business affairs and he is the one largely looking after the children to the extent that they are “looked after”. To Oume, the siblings are partly a reminder that her husband betrayed her with another woman but also an attack on her femininity in reminding her that she was unable to become a mother while someone else has given birth to Sokichi’s children. For all of these reasons they are to her children which cannot continue to exist. She undermines Sokichi’s attachment to them by frequently questioning their paternity pointing out that they share little physical resemblance while reminding him that he met Kikuyo through her occupation on the fringes of the sex trade. 

Her mistreatment begins as neglect, refusing to feed or bathe “a stranger’s” child and then graduates to physical violence stuffing food into the mouth of Sokichi’s infant son Shoji after catching him playing with the dinner bowls. Yet when Sokichi finds her endangering the baby while moving heavy papers from a shelf he does nothing, suspecting his wife has become a threat to the children’s safety but also as she later implies wanting to be rid of them himself. The couple could, of course, have simply surrendered the children to an orphanage (it remains unclear how exactly their existence has been registered), but ultimately choose not to as if they wanted to obliterate the idea of them as if they had never been born. 

It may be tempting to view Sokichi as a helpless victim casting Oume as terrifying Lady Macbeth intimidating him into destroying the evidence of his indiscretion, but even if it was Sokichi “looking after” the children, it is finally he who must also “take care” of them. During his abandonment of his second child, 3-year-old daughter Yoshiko (Miyuki Yoshizawa), he takes her into a toy store where a group of boys are playing with remote control cars demonstrating that this is no longer an age of economic privation and that in the end the reason for the children’s second abandonment is not primarily financial even if Sokichi has been in a sense humbled, deluded into a false sense of security in his business success only to be robbed of the era’s increasing prosperity through a freak accident. “Everybody’s struggling” he eventually reflects as his assistant (Keizo Kanie) informs him that he is leaving, ironically to take better care of his ageing parents and small children presumably in a less toxic environment.

Yet as we discover the reasons for Sokichi’s sense of displacement stem back to his own post-war childhood, apparently born out of wedlock never knowing his father and then abandoned by his mother, bounced around between relatives all of them poor who viewed him as nothing more than a burden until effectively indentured to a print shop at ten years old by an uncle who stole his advance pay and once again abandoned him. These kinds of familial disruptions whether caused by a literal orphanhood or the economic constraints of the immediate post-war period have produced according to the moralising policeman at the film’s conclusion a generation of people who do not know how to parent because they were not effectively parented themselves many of whom go on to have children perhaps accidentally but have no idea how to relate to them, frightened of the responsibility or resentful of the “burden” as Sokichi eventually seems to have become. 

Nevertheless, Nomura ends on a note of ambiguity, the goodness in eldest son Riichi (Hiroki Iwase) emphasised as he refuses to name his father or reveal his abuse, an action interpreted by the police as an attempt to protect Sokichi but could equally be a trauma response owing to have been returned to him by the police once before. In any case the film asks if in being rescued from his toxic family circumstances, effectively orphaned, Riichi will simply end up continuing the cycle of displacement, another man unable to become a “father”. But then again, what of Kikuyo who branded Sokichi “inhuman” yet left her children with him and disappeared, perhaps as a neighbour implies with another man? A sympathetic policewoman (Shinobu Otake) reassures Riichi they’ll look for his mother, but as she too abandoned him would that actually help? The jury seems to be out on whether this sense of displacement, in essence the integrity of the traditional family, can ever effectively be repaired even as an increasingly consumerist society continues to erode its foundations. 

The Demon screens at the BFI on 12/19 December as part of BFI Japan. It is also available to stream in the US via Criterion Channel.

Original trailer (no subtitles)

Tokyo Bay (東京湾, Yoshitaro Nomura, 1962)

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Yoshitaro Nomura is most closely associated with the thriller and particularly with its lower end as a purveyor of B-movie noir, yet look a little closer and his films are perhaps not really about crime at all but about the complicated relationships between people in the ever changing post-war society. Just as Stakeout is really about a policeman’s marriage, Tokyo Bay (東京湾, Tokyowan) is less concerned with the radiating corruption of the smuggling ring at its centre than with frustrated male friendship and the wartime legacy.

Opening with an aerial pan over post-war Tokyo, a title card informs us that this is just one frame in the “intense struggle for existence” in a city of 10 million before we arrive at the titular bay and a boat which is presumably carrying drugs later passed from one hand to another. The fixer, Takeyama (Kei Sato), talks to a man in a car and instructs him to be in front of the Taiyo building before 10am to pick up a golf bag from his contact. Gazing up at a post-war construction site, however, the man, Saeki (Jun Hamamura), is shot in the head and killed by a bullet piercing the roof of his car, Nomura suddenly switching to a disorientating POV shot as he twists in a sudden death spiral. 

As it turns out, Saeki was a plant, an undercover cop with the drugs squad sent to expose the smuggling ring the shadowy owners of which will predictably turn out to have Chinese connections in another echo of post-war cinema’s continuing Sinophobia. Two officers are assigned to the case, the young and earnest Akine (Jiro Ishizaki), and the veteran Sumikawa (Ko Nishimura) who acts largely on a series of inexplicable policeman’s hunches. Their major lead, however, comes as a stroke either of dumb luck or dark fate as Sumikawa, dodging into a dodgy mahjong parlour while tailing Takeyama, runs into an old army buddy, Inoue (Isao Tamagawa), who just happens to be a left-handed sniper perfectly matching the profile of the man they’ve been looking for. 

While Sumikawa keeps tabs on his old friend, somehow feeling he has something to do with all this but ambivalent in his torn responsibilities, Akine travels to Inoue’s hometown of Onomichi and sympathetically concludes that he was merely “rather unfortunate”. His life derailed by the war, Inoue returned to discover the girl he hoped to marry had married someone else. Giving evidence at Inoue’s trial for pulling a knife on her husband, the young woman remarks that she never promised him anything and did not consider their relationship to be serious, merely treating him with the politeness due to someone about to leave for war. In any case, she asks, even if she had been in love and intended to wait for him, as an orphaned woman there were only two choices open to her to survive, marriage or sex work, what else could she have done?

Back in Tokyo, Sumikawa begins to catch up with his old friend, realising that his romantic disappointment set him on a dark course of bad relationships and a drift towards crime but that he seems to have turned himself around. He is now happily married to a woman he describes as “simple” who seems devoted to him and if he did this, he did it to start again. His one last job intended to take him back to Onomichi, a pleasant coastal town the bay of which he describes as far more beautiful than that of the grimy, industrial Tokyo and largely untouched by urban corruption. Sumikawa feels himself torn, not least on account of the debt that exists between the two men because Inoue once saved his life, but also knowing that he may have to arrest this man and destroy his attempt to return to a more innocent world leaving his wife alone. Disapproving of the nascent relationship between his younger sister Yukiko (Hiromi Sakaki) and his partner, Sumikawa worries Akine may be becoming the kind of man who cares more for making an arrest than friendship, a conflict presumably weighing on his mind, even as he agrees he’s a good man and a good police officer. Yukiko meanwhile fires back that Sumikawa’s wife left him not because he is a policeman but because he is selfish and arrogant, and more to the point incapable of understanding a woman’s feelings. 

Nevertheless, he’s acutely aware of the effect his actions or inactions may have on Inoue’s wife Yoshiko (Kyoko Aoi), especially as it’s suggested she may need a degree of looking after. Inoue, careful to admit nothing, reveals that the man who carried out the hit may not have known he was killing a police officer but may have assumed the target was fair game being, like themselves, a denizen of the underworld. Largely a MacGuffin, the smuggling ring is not as important as one might assume, the two men locked into a cycle of guilt and retribution each marked by wartime trauma and in a sense unable to claim their place in the post-war society. Twin betrayals lead to a fateful, train-bound showdown shot with fraught claustrophobia as each man engages in an intense struggle for his survival but also perhaps already defeated in a shared sense of fatalistic nihilism. Trekking through the half-constructed streets of the post-war city with shaky handheld Nomura hints at the radiating corruption exemplified by the growth of the trade in drugs, but perhaps one corruption is merely the result of another which may in turn be far less easy to cure. 

The Scarlet Camellia (五瓣の椿, Yoshitaro Nomura, 1964)

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Little known outside of Japan, Yoshitaro Nomura is most closely associated with post-war noir and particularly with adaptations of Seicho Matsumoto’s detective novels, yet he had a wide and varied filmography directing in several genres including musicals and period dramas. The son of silent movie director Hotei Nomura, he spent the bulk of his career at Shochiku which had and to some degree still has a strong studio brand which leans towards the wholesome even if his own work was often in someway controversial such as in the shocking child abuse drama The Demon or foregrounding of leprosy in Castle of Sand. Part of the studio’s series of double-length epics, 1964’s Scarlet Camellia (五瓣の椿, Goben no Tsubaki) is nevertheless an unusual entry in Nomura’s filmography, adapting a novel by Shugoro Yamamoto essentially setting a policier in feudal Japan and perhaps consequently shot largely on stage sets rather than on location. 

Nomura opens with artifice as Shino (Shima Iwashita) stares daggers at an actor on the stage but later returns to his rooms every inch the giggling fan before finally offing him with her ornate silver hairpin leaving behind only the blood red camellia of the title. The first in a series of killings later branded the Camellia Murders, we later realise that the actor had to die because of his illicit relationship with Shino’s mother whom he brands a “nympho” and as we later discover had several extra-marital lovers. Extremely close to her father who, as we’re told, perished in a fire while resting in the country due to his terminal tuberculosis, Shino is apparently on a quest for revenge against the faithless men who humiliated him though her feelings towards her mother seem far more complex. 

Indeed, Shino regards her mother’s carrying on as “dirty” and seems particularly prudish even as she wields her sex appeal as a weapon in her quest for vengeance. Yet it’s not so much the free expression of sexuality which seems to be at fault but excess and irresponsibility. Shino resents her mother primarily for the ways in which she made her father suffer, off having fun with random men while he shouldered the burden of her family business which, Shino might assume, has contributed to his illness. Aoki (Go Kato), the Edo-era policeman to whose narrative perspective the second half turns, advances a similar philosophy in that there’s nothing wrong with having fun, he has fun at times too, but people have or at least should have responsibilities towards each other which the caddish targets of the Camellia Killer have resolutely ignored. He can’t say that he condones the killer’s actions, but neither can he condemn them because her motivations are in a sense morally justifiable. 

Realising the end is near, Shino indulges in a very modern serial killer trope in leaving a note for Aoki alongside one of her camellias in which she claims that she is exacting vengeance for “crimes not punishable by law”. There was nothing legally wrong in the way these men treated her mother or any other woman, but it is in a sense a moral crime. “You’re a woman and I’m a woman too” she later tells another scorned lover, a mistress thrown over by her patron with two small children after he tired of her, as she hands over a large sum of money and encourages her to return to her family in the country. Shino’s quest is essentially feminist, directed against a cruel and patriarchal society in which the use and abuse of women is entirely normalised, yet it is also slightly problematic in her characterisation of her mother as monstrous in her corrupted femininity for daring to embrace her sexuality in exactly the same way as her male counterparts though they, ironically, mainly seem to have been after her money rather than her body. 

Shino’s mother’s death is indeed regarded as “punishment from heaven” presumably for her sexual transgressions and neglect of her family, rejecting both the roles of wife and mother in a ceaseless quest for pleasure. Yet even in her resentment, Shino’s ire is directed firmly at the men taking the last of her targets to task when he justifies himself that women enjoy sex too and are therefore equally complicit by reminding him that he gets his moment of pleasure for free but the woman may pay for it for the rest of her life. Just as Shino’s mother neglected her family, the men harm not only their wives in their illicit affairs but cause concurrent damage to the mistresses they may later disown and the illegitimate children they leave behind. Abandoning the naturalism of his contemporary crime dramas for something much more akin to a ghost film with his eerie lighting transitions and grim tableaux of the skewered victims, Nomura crafts a melancholy morality tale in which the wronged heroine turns the symbol of constrained femininity back on the forces of oppression but is eventually undone by the unintended consequences of her quest for vengeance even as she condemns the architect of her misfortune to madness and ruin. 

Shitamachi no Taiyo (下町の太陽, Yoji Yamada, 1963)

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(C) Shochiku 1963

Shitamachi no Taiyou DVD coverYoji Yamada’s debut feature, The Strangers Upstairs, was very much of its time as it attempted to capture the aspirational fighting spirit of the post-war era through the struggles of a nice young couple who are trying to “get on” and escape their humble origins for the salaryman dream through achieving the goal of home ownership as quickly as possible. His second film, Shitamachi no Taiyo (下町の太陽, also known as The Sunshine Girl / Sunshine in the Old Neighbourhood), takes a slightly different look at a similar issue as a young woman from Shitamachi – a working class industrial area on the outskirts of Tokyo, agonises over her future prospects as she considers a marriage to her longterm boyfriend who has ambitions to join the salaryman revolution.

Yamada opens with shots of Shitamachi and its prominent smokestacks while the now famous song plays in an instrumental version over the credits, before abruptly shifting to visions of the upscale Ginza where Machiko (Chieko Baisho) and her boyfriend Michio (Tamotsu Hayakawa) are enjoying a demonstration of an extraordinarily expensive, state of the art radio before retreating to a cafe where they agree that sometimes its more fun to “aspire” to things than actually obtain them. After all, there’s no way they could ever afford the diamond rings they walked past on their way out of the department store unless they decided to rob the place. Both Machiko and Michio are residents of Shitamachi and work in a local soap factory. Michio, however, has his sights firmly set on the path to a middle-class life and is planning to take the exam for a promotion to head office – though he lacks qualifications, Michio is confident because he’s studying hard (though more so because his dad and his section chief served together in the war so Michio is sure a good word will be put in for him).

Despite her fondness for Michio, Machiko has her doubts about his overriding ambition to get out of Shitamachi. Since her mother died, Machiko has been the lady of the house and primary caregiver for her naughty little brother Kenji (Joji Yanagisawa) while her older brother Kunio (Toshio Suzuki) is the family brainbox and also planning to bust out only through the path of education rather than advancement. Having left education behind, Machiko is happily contributing to the family finances with her job on the packing line at the soap factory which is, all things considered, not too bad – the work may be dull and methodical but also relatively quiet and stress free, not to mention sweet smelling. Nevertheless, Machiko does not necessarily want to work on the shop floor all her life but knows her opportunities are limited.

This fact is one cruelly brought home to her by a moody Michio when descends into a major sulk on learning that he hasn’t passed the test for head office because another of his colleagues outdid him – both in terms of his study ranking and in one upping him in having a direct connection to the director. While Machiko tries her best to sympathise and put up with his moody petulance, Michio chooses to throw her sympathy back in her face by abruptly announcing that she can’t understand the pain he’s going through because careers are irrelevant to women who only use them as a stopgap until they get married. Thoroughly annoyed, Machiko leaves Michio to his wallowing before things get any worse but she can’t argue with the fact that he’s only said what most people think.

Still, Machiko isn’t even sure she wants to get married. One of her friends, Kazuko (Kyoko Aoi), recently won the jackpot – she married a nice man who did get a promotion to head office and won the housing lottery for a home on one of the shiny new “danchi” – brand new apartment complexes for upwardly mobile young couples and the very embodiment of post-war aspiration. However, when Machiko and a friend visit the new bride they find that she is not quite as happy as one might expect. Though married life is peaceful enough and she and her husband evidently get on, Kazuko is also intensely lonely. With her husband away at work all day and often out playing golf with colleagues on Sundays too (not to mention after hours drinking and miscellaneous get togethers), there’s precious little for Kazuko to do, stuck at home all day cooking and cleaning while waiting for her husband to return. Having moved to the danchi she’s also lost her community and is no longer close enough to her friends to see them very often.

Meanwhile, Machiko is also somewhat disturbed by Kazuko’s collection of expensive cosmetics which her husband has instructed her to buy because he’s “very particular” about her appearance. Kazuko makes sure her makeup is on point before her husband gets home because that’s apparently what he likes. Machiko, however, does not like this – to start with, she thinks Kazuko looks better without. Not that there’s anything wrong with wearing makeup because you want to wear it, but the idea of wearing it because someone told you to and you’re worried they’ll “get bored” with your face doesn’t strike her as a particularly healthy relationship dynamic. If this is what a love marriage is like, perhaps Machiko would rather do without.

Despite her otherwise close relationship with Michio, it quickly becomes obvious that she does not love him and if she decides to marry him it will be because it’s the “sensible” decision rather than any great romantic desire. Annoyingly enough, Michio hasn’t really even asked her, he just assumes they will marry once he gets his promotion. He also assumes that Machiko, like him, will want to shake the dust of Shitamachi off her feet for good for the bright lights of Tokyo. Machiko, however is not so sure. “Getting on” is one thing and there’s nothing wrong with “aspiration”, but that doesn’t mean you need to look down on the people who come from the same place as you – after all, the sun still shines even in Shitamachi and there’s nothing wrong in choosing to be happy here rather than always chasing an unattainable dream of conventional success.

Another possibility presents itself when Machiko meets an unrefined boy who has an ordinary job in the steelworks. Though their first meeting did not make a good impression – he creepily chased her off a train and then made a mess of trying to explain why, they later bond when she realises he has befriended her troubled little brother and the pair then end up spending a pleasant evening together which is far more romantic than any of her dull and conventional outings with Michio. Then again the choice she faces isn’t between two men but whether or not to embrace her own ability to make a definitive choice about her future. What she rejects is cold and selfish path of men like Michio who only want to get ahead and are willing to step on anyone who gets in their way to make it happen. Machiko doesn’t want fancy radios and diamond rings, she just wants to not have to worry too much about money and for someone to actually listen to what she’s saying. She doesn’t want to end up like Kazuko, all alone in a sparkling apartment with nothing to do but knit. When Michio tells her to shut up and do as he says because he’ll definitely make her happy, the choice seems clear. Hard work, community, and maybe the fiery boy who seems determined to get a yes rather than assuming he already has one. Who wouldn’t want to live here?

Original trailer (no subtitles)

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3GP13Tmm6TA

Famous title song performed by Chieko Baisho

Everything Goes Wrong (すべてが狂ってる, Seijun Suzuki, 1960)

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Everything goes wrong posterThe Tokyo of 1960 was one defined by unrest as the biggest protests in history filled the streets urging the government to rethink the renewal of the security treaty Japan had signed with America after the war in order to provide military support in the absence of a standing army. Yet the protests themselves are perhaps an indication of the extent to which the nation was already recovering. With the Olympics just four years away, post-war privation had been replaced by a rapidly expanding economy, dynamic global outlook, and increased possibilities for the young who enjoyed both greater personal freedom than their parents’ generation and a kind of optimism unthinkable merely ten years previously. Nevertheless, this sense of the new, of unchecked potential was itself disorientating and had, as some saw it, led to a moral decline in which youth aimlessly idled its time away on self indulgent pleasures – namely drink, drugs, promiscuous sex and American jazz.

This dark side of youth had become a talking point thanks to a series of notorious “Sun Tribe” movies produced by the youth-orientated Nikkatsu studios. The films were so controversial the studio was eventually forced to stop making them, but all they really did was tone down the shock factor to one of mild outrage. Seijun Suzuki, picking up the Sun Tribe mantle, goes further than most in Everything Goes Wrong (すべてが狂ってる, Subete ga Kurutteru), painting post-war malaise as a tragedy of generational disconnection as the chastened wartime generation, accepting their role in history, watch their children hurtle headlong down another alleyway of self destruction but are ultimately unable to save them.

Our “hero”, Jiro (Tamio Kawaji), is as someone later poignantly puts it, “a nice boy”. A student, he spends his spare time on the fringes of gang of petty delinquents who get their kicks freaking squares, engaging in acts of casual prostitution, and enacting non-violent muggings. Jiro’s main problem in life is his fierce attachment to his single-mother, Masayo (Tomoko Naraoka). After Jiro’s father was killed in the war (apparently run over by a Japanese tank), Masayo became involved with a married man who has been supporting herself and Jiro for the last ten years. Young enough to have an almost completely black and white approach to moral justice, Jiro cannot stomach this fact and accuses his mother of being a virtual prostitute, accepting money for sex without love.

Jiro repeatedly accuses the older generation of hypocrisy, that they lie about their true feelings and motivations whilst denying their responsibility for the war which took his father’s life. Yet, Nambara (Shinsuke Ashida), his mother’s lover, is a kind and honest man who answers every question put to him honestly and with fierce moral integrity. He admits his responsibility for the folly of war – something he feels keenly seeing as he is a weapons engineer by trade, but rejects Jiro’s characterisation of his relationship with Masayo as something essentially immoral. His justifications are perhaps, as Jiro puts it, “philanderer’s clichés”, but that doesn’t mean they aren’t true. Nambara, as a young man, entered into an arranged marriage with the daughter of a now deceased general. The marriage is loveless and emotionally dead, but Nambara is an earnest person and will honour the commitment he made to his first wife even if it brings him personal pain. Masayo has always known this and even if he cannot legally marry her, Nambara has given her his heart and will also honour that commitment in continuing to try and make her son see that he is not the enemy, just another man who loves his mother.

There is something quite ironic in Jiro’s strangely conservative moral universe which rejects the “impure” nature of his mother’s romance, while the older generation are better positioned to understand that things are never as simple as they seem. Jiro is rigid and unforgiving where his parents are flexible and empathetic. He rejects his mother for being a “whore” but throws money at a girl who is in love with him because he thinks that’s what women “want”. Unable to accept her emotional needs, he thinks of her as a prostitute and thereby abnegates his responsibility – the exact opposite of the “goodness” Nambara displays in offering financial support for a woman he loves which (in his eyes) has no particular strings and is given only with the intention of making her life easier.

Jiro, infected both by mother and madonna/whore complexes, is profoundly disturbed when another young woman tries to point out that aside from being his mother Masayo is also a woman with normal human needs both emotional and physical. Following his botched attempt to blacken Nambara in her eyes, he drags his mother to a breezy youth fuelled beach party where he throws her into a tent full of lithe young male bodies and tells her to have her fill. Nambara, still determined to talk Jiro around, laments to Masayo that they never had the opportunity to experience the kind of freedom that these youngsters feel themselves entitled to. If only they were not so trapped by the social codes of their era, they might have been happy. Yet these youngsters, with everything in front of them, are anything but – determined to destroy themselves in nihilistic confusion, caught in a moment of flux when nothing is certain and everything is possible.

At the film’s conclusion, a cynical journalist remarks to a sympathetic mama-san that “today, goodwill between people can’t exist anywhere, everything has gone wrong”. Jiro’s tragic fate is that he, like many “nice” kids like him, cannot reconcile himself to the moral greyness of the post-war world in which the “heroic sacrifice” of their parents’ is hypocritically held up as wholesome entertainment. Unable to accept the love and kindness of Nambara who only wants to act as a father to him and continues to believe that “one day he will understand” even after Jiro has hurt him deeply both emotionally and physically, Jiro has only one direction in which to turn.

Suzuki weaves Jiro’s tale around that of his friends – the unhappy delinquents and the struggling workers, women used by men who promise them love but reject their responsibilities, women who think they have to trade something to win love which ought to be freely given, and the older generation who can do nothing more than look on with sadness as youth destroys itself. Suzuki’s sympathies lie with everyone, but more than most with the Nambaras of the world who are desperately trying to fix what was broken but find that in a world that’s already gone crazy kindness is met with suspicion while money, corrupting true emotional connection, has become the only arbiter of bitter truths.

The Strangers Upstairs (二階の他人, Yoji Yamada, 1961)

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strangers upstairsLate into his career, veteran Japanese director Yoji Yamada has become synonymous with a particular brand of maudlin comedies and tearjerking dramas often starring veteran actress and long standing collaborator Sayuri Yoshinaga. He is, however, most associated with the iconic long running Tora-san series which revolved around the heartwarming adventures of the titular travelling salesman. Tora-san does indeed epitomise Yamada’s general philosophy which leans towards realistic humanism, finding resolution in kindness and decency yet accepting that oftentimes the rules may need to be bent in order to accommodate them. In this respect his Shochiku debut, featuring a script written by his mentor Yoshitaro Nomura, is a good indicator of Yamada’s future career in its humorous tale of a newlywed couple filled with ambitions of social mobility in the rapidly modernising post-war economy.

Salaryman Masami (Kazuya Kosaka) has taken out a huge loan to build a new house for himself and his new wife, Akiko (Kyoko Aoi), but, to keep costs manageable, they’ve decided to do without a bathroom (there’s a bathhouse across the street) and added an extra floor with the intention of renting it out for a little extra money. So far, married life is going pretty well – Masami and Akiko are a nice, well matched young couple happy in each other’s company and committed towards forging a harmonious future.

The problem is their lodgers are a little, well, difficult. Not having anticipated any “difficulty”, Masami and Akiko are becoming worried that their upstairs neighbours are already a few months behind on the rent and seeing as their contract also includes food, they’ve been eating for free. Not really wanting to broach this difficult subject, Masami and Akiko try gentle prodding to remind their lodgers they need to pay their dues only for the couple to act embarrassed and claim they’d forgotten because they’d always lived with their parents in the past. Finding out that the central concern is that the husband, Hisao (Masaaki Hirao), is currently unemployed, Masami decides to help him find a job but quickly finds out that working is just not Hisao’s thing. Meanwhile, Hisao’s wife, Haruko (Chieko Seki), is picking up extra money working as a hostess in a bar, rolling in roaring drunk in the middle of the night and singing loudly as she does so.

With their patience wearing thin, Masami and Akiko ponder the best way to evict lodgers who refuse to leave but they have another problem on their hands in the form of Masami’s cantankerous mother, Tomi (Toyo Takahashi), who has arrived from the country without warning for an “indefinite” visit after falling out with another of her daughter-in-laws. An unsophisticated country bumpkin with a wicked tongue and serious hanafuda habit, Masami’s mum does not quite fit with the couple’s upwardly mobile aspirations and, annoyingly, immediately sides with Hisao and Haruko whose self-centred laziness is more in keeping with her backstreet ways.

If Masami and Akiko disliked Hisao and Haruko essentially for being too common, their second set of lodgers present the opposite problem. Taizo (Tatsuo Nagai) and Yoko (Reiko Hitomi) seemingly have money to burn, so why are they renting an upstairs room in an “up and coming” area of the city? Akiko is quickly taken with their small luxuries, in awe of her lodgers’ sophistication and upperclass elegance and obviously happy that they won’t be having the same kind of troubles that they had with Hisao and Haruko. When Taizo and Yoko offer to front the money to build a bathroom, Masami and Akiko are surprised but eventually grateful even if taking a “loan” from the people who are renting from you presents a definite shift in power dynamics.

The dynamic shifts even further with another crisis sparking the return of Masami’s mum who has once again been kicked out by a disgruntled relative. Masami’s older brother, who put up some of the money for the house, insists that he honour a vague promise he made that family members in need of refuge would be free to stay with him by kicking out his lodgers and letting his mother live in the upstairs room. Not really wanting to take responsibility for his troublesome mother, and feeling friendly with Taizo and Yoko, Masami refuses and promises to pay his brother back instead – ironically borrowing the money from Taizo.

As predicted Taizo and Yoko are not quite all they seem, but like Masami and Akiko, they are a fairly new couple trying to make a go of it in the often cruel post-war world. On finding out the scandalous secret about their lodgers, Masami and Akiko are torn – they like Taizo and Yoko, plus they’re massively indebted to them thanks to the loan and the money for the bathroom, but they also worry about becoming an accessory or being accused of aiding and abetting. Their first reaction is to feign politeness and carry on as normal pretending not to know whilst asking around to see if they can borrow more money from other friends to pay back Taizo and Yoko before asking them to leave quietly.

Masami and Akiko, like many of their peers, have aspirations beyond their current pay level and have put themselves at a huge disadvantage trying to live up to the salaryman dream. Yamada opens with an ironic title sequence featuring a series of “Lego” model houses – something which Masami later plays with while lamenting the seemingly small possibility of hanging on to his new home. Homeowning is unexpectedly complicated and becoming a landlord even more so. Masami and Akiko wanted their own mini castle – a status symbol (the policeman’s wife from behind is very jealous), but also a space to call their own which reflects their individual hopes, dreams, and aspirations. They’ve forgone the convenience of a bathroom for the impact of a second floor all while hoping it will pay for itself until they’re ready to use it to expand their family. Until then, they’re content to live in one room and share a kitchen, even providing communal meals if necessary.

The money, however, is a constant worry – the original debt which they accrued to build the house quickly brings its own share of troubles, shifting from one creditor to another as the couple try to invest their fortunes with “nicer” or “worthier” people. Not everyone is nice, as Akiko finds out when she asks Masami’s lecherous boss if he’d mind lending them the money only for him to hint at an extremely indecent proposal. Though Masami seems to be a decent and honest sort who wants to work hard and get on, he is still subject to the salaryman chain of command which means doing his boss’ bidding out side of work hours which turns out to entail further “alibi” duties when he discovers they’re virtually neighbours (though the boss’ house is obviously far more impressive).

Despite all their difficulties, the goodness of Masami and Akiko eventually pays off, their one and only row quickly resolving itself without rancour. Taizo and Yoko, neatly matched in kindness with their former landlords, are grateful for the brief time they spent in the upstairs room and resolved not to bring any trouble into the lives of the nice young couple from downstairs. Masami and Akiko, equally grateful for the consideration, commit themselves to moving forward with a little more temperance, saving the money to pay back Taizo and Yoko and help them in turn when they might need it. Hard work, honesty, and a kind heart, it seems, are what you need to be happy in the burgeoning post-war economy and Masami and Akiko are happy indeed.

Original promo roll (no subtitles)

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5NS8TwUdwr0

Flag in the Mist (霧の旗, Yoji Yamada, 1965)

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flag in the mist poster 2In theory, we’re all equal under the law, but the business of justice is anything but egalitarian. Yoji Yamada is generally known for his tearjerking melodramas or genial comedies but Flag in the Mist (霧の旗, Kiri no Hata) is a rare step away from his most representative genres, drawing inspiration from America film noir and adding a touch of typically Japanese cynical humour. Based on a novel by Japanese mystery master Seicho Matsumoto, Flag in the Mist is a tale of hopeless, mutually destructive revenge which sees a murderer walk free while the honest but selfish pay dearly for daring to ignore the poor in need of help. A powerful message in the increasing economic prosperity of 1965, but one that leaves no clear path for the successful revenger.

Kiriko (Chieko Baisho), a twenty year old typist from Kyushu, has taken an arduous train journey into Tokyo to get a meeting with a top lawyer she hopes will defend her older brother and only living relative from a trumped up murder charge. The clerk attempts to dissuade her – Mr. Otsuka (Osamu Takizawa) charges a hefty sum for his services and, in any case, his docket is too full to be travelling back and forth to Kyushu never mind the additional travel and accommodation costs. Kiriko is disappointed but undeterred – she thinks she can manage the expenses, but asks for a discount on the fee. The clerk finds this amusing and does at least ask Otsuka who finally agrees to see Kiriko seeing as she’s come all this way. She makes an impression on him but ultimately he tells her he’s just too busy and she’s better off looking for a lawyer closer to home.

Kiriko leaves disappointed but refuses to give up, missing her original train to try again by telephone but Otsuka has already gone out “to see clients” and so she finally has to accept her mission to save her brother may have stalled. While Kiriko was using the public phone, she was overheard by a reporter, Abe (Yosuke Kondo), who wants to write something on the case but his Tokyo based bosses aren’t so keen on a local interest story from halfway across the country.

A year later, Kiriko’s brother Masao (Shigeru Tsuyuguchi) has been convicted and sentenced to death. After his second appeal fails, Masao dies of illness in prison before the sentence could be carried out. Kiriko writes a bitter letter to Otsuka blaming him for her brother’s death which forces Otsuka to reconsider his decision not to take the case. He comes to the conclusion that the case was unwinable and therefore his decision not to take it made no difference but then, he spots something that no one else seems to have noticed.

A tenacious and strong willed young woman – you’d have to be to jump on a long distance train from a tiny village all the way to the big city on your own in 1965, Kiriko is determined to save her brother but finds herself facing an uphill battle against a society deliberately structured to ignore her voice and those of everyone like her. Kiriko is an orphan and so her older bother is also a kind of father figure as well as the only living relative she has left. Masao had been a primary school teacher, which is to say a respected member of society, but found himself involved with a loanshark who was later murdered after he lost some cash collected from students to pay for a school trip and borrowed money he couldn’t pay back from a ruthless old woman. Masao has made a mistake he’s going to pay for dearly – disgraced and humiliated, it was easy work to frame him for a violent crime and force him into a confession through the usual police methods. Kiriko won’t stand for it, but she’s powerless to help him.

Otsuka is, in a sense, entitled to charge what he wants for his services. He’s clearly a talented lawyer, very much in demand, and so why “should” he trek all the way out to Kyushu for a case that doesn’t interest him when he has enough clients already. He does, at least, bother to listen to Kiriko’s pitch before letting her down gently, but just when it seems he might be about to change his mind he tells his clerk to cancel all his appointments and winds up on the golf course with his girlfriend. So much for being too busy to save an innocent man’s life.

Kiriko’s “whole life has been desecrated by one incident” as she cuttingly writes later in a letter which forms a crucial part of her plot of revenge against the man who refused to save her brother’s life (half talking about something else). Forced out of her hometown where she’s the murderer’s sister, she finds work as hostess going by the club name of Rie in a Tokyo bar which has a Kyushu theme. This brings her back into contact with the reporter, Abe, and that isn’t the last of the coincidences as Kiriko finds herself swept up by circumstances which allow her to turn an unfortunate series of events into a cunning plan to ruin Otsuka by neatly echoing the precise circumstances of her brother’s case. Now it’s Otsuka forced to plead with her night after night, begging on his knees that she agree to testify and turn over key evidence that proves his client is innocent all while Kiriko adamantly sticks to her story.

Yamada conjures a tense and gloomy film noir world, following Kiriko down foggy passageways as she tries to navigate the city from the shadows, chasing the spectre of the unjust but losing herself in the process. Masao dies because he was too poor to hire a good lawyer to save him from the police who were supposed to be protecting him, but decided it was easier to stitch up someone without influence than find the real killer. His sister destroys herself to get revenge not just on lawyers more interested in fame and success than in serving justice but on an entire society which believes her existence is insufficiently important to merit full consideration. Otsuka is not a bad man, he is not corrupt or incompetent, he is merely selfish in all the ways his society encourages him to be. Originally letting himself off the hook with the excuse that his decision made no difference, he’s genuinely horrified when he realises he’s noticed a crucial clue which could have exonerated Masao even if it’s an equally selfish guilt he feels more than a recognition that he’s failed his duty to justice by letting an innocent man die while a guilty one lives to kill again. No one wins in this case, everyone emerges ruined and broken by the increasing inequalities and selfish individualism of the post-war world. Justice is blind, so they say, but perhaps she needs to open her eyes.

Original trailer (no subtitles)

Akitsu Springs (秋津温泉, Kiju Yoshida, 1962)

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akitsu springsKiju (Yoshishige) Yoshida is best remembered for his extraordinary run of avant-garde masterpieces in the late 1960s and early 1970s, but even he had to cut his teeth on Shochiku’s speciality genre – the romantic melodrama. Adapted from a best selling novel, Akitsu Springs (秋津温泉, Akitsu Onsen) is hardly an original tale in its doom laden reflection of the hopelessness and inertia of the post-war world as depicted in the frustrated love story of a self sacrificing woman and self destructive man, but Yoshida elevates the material through his characteristically beautiful compositions and full use of the particularly lush colour palate.

At the very end of the war, consumptive student Shusaku (Hiroyuki Nagato) finds his aunt’s house destroyed by aerial bombing. Attempting to find her but proving too ill to go on, Shusaku is taken to a nearby inn by a good samaritan where he first encounters the innkeeper’s daughter, Shinko (Mariko Okada). Despite her mother’s protestations, Shinko takes a shine to Shusaku and is determined to nurse him back to health. Shusaku, however, is a gloomy sort of boy and, ironically, longs only for death. Though the pair fall in love their youthful romance is forever tinged with darkness as Shusaku declares his love not with a ring but with a rope – he asks Shinko for that most classically theatrical of unions in proposing a double suicide.

Shinko agrees, but is not quite ready to die. In another dose of irony, Shinko’s tears of fear and despair on hearing the Emperor’s final wartime broadcast confirming his surrender inspire Shusaku to want to live but the pair are eventually separated. Reuniting and parting over and over again, their complicated love story repeats itself over a period of seventeen years but the painful spectre of the past refuses to allow either of them the freedom to move beyond Akitsu Springs.

Mariko Okada was only 29 in 1962, but she’d already worked with some of the best directors of the age including Ozu whose An Autumn Afternoon was released the same year, and Naruse in Floating Clouds which has something of a narrative similarity to Akitsu Springs. This prestige picture was her 100th screen appearance for which she also took a producer credit. Despite the obvious importance attached to both of these elements, the studio took a chance on a rookie director with only three films under his belt. Two years later Okada would become Yoshida’s wife and go on to star in some of his most important pictures including Eros + Massacre and Heroic Purgatory. At first glance her role here is a conventional one – a love lorn, melancholy woman unable to let the ghost of a failed romance die, but Okada’s work is extraordinary as Shinko travels from flighty teen to rueful middle aged woman, hollowed out and robbed of any sense of hope.

At Akitsu Springs time passes and it doesn’t all at once. Yoshida refuses to give us concrete demarcations, preferring to simply show a child being born and growing older or someone remarking on having been away. The inn becomes a kind of bubble with Shinko trapped inside, but Shusaku comes to regard the place as a temporary haven rather than a permanent home or place to make a life. For her everything real is at the spring, but for him everything at the spring is unreal – an unattainable paradise. She cannot leave, he cannot stay. Only for short periods are they able to indulge their romance, but the time always comes at which they must part again often swearing it will be for the last time, never knowing if it will.

Yoshida neatly bookends the relationship with announcements over loudspeakers as Shinko originally fails to understand the Emperor’s speech in which he remarks on enduring the unendurable, only to be prompted into later action by the banal drone of a train station tannoy. It’s almost as if their lives are being entirely dictated by outside forces, powerless drifters in the post-war world, condemned to a perpetual waiting sustained only by hopelessness.

Shinko may have convinced Shusaku to live but his growing successes only seem to deplete her. Wasting away at an inn she always claimed to hate, Shinko grows old while Shusaku grows bitter yet successful in the city. They move past and through each other, unable to connect or disconnect, yearning for the completion of something which consistently eludes them. Yoshida films the standard melodrama with appropriate theatricality but also with his beautifully composed framing as the lovers are divided by screen doors or captured in mirrors. Okada glows in the light of falling cherry blossoms, acknowledging the tragic and transitory character of love, but her final action is one which echoes the beginning of her suffering and finally declares an ending to an unendurable romance.

Original trailer (no subtitles)

My Second Brother (にあんちゃん, Shohei Imamura, 1959)

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vlcsnap-2017-01-07-22h53m01s073Like most directors of his era, Shohei Imamura began his career in the studio system as a trainee with Shochiku where he also worked as an AD to Yasujiro Ozu on some of his most well known pictures. Ozu’s approach, however, could not be further from Imamura’s in its insistence on order and precision. Finding much more in common with another Shochiku director, Yuzo Kawashima, well known for working class satires, Imamura jumped ship to the newly reformed Nikkatsu where he continued his training until helming his first three pictures in 1958 (Stolen Desire, Nishiginza Station, and Endless Desire). My Second Brother (にあんちゃん, Nianchan), which he directed in 1959, was, like the previous three films, a studio assignment rather than a personal project but is nevertheless an interesting one as it united many of Imamura’s subsequent ongoing concerns.

Set in the early 1950s, the film focuses on four children who find themselves adrift when their father dies leaving them with no means of support. The father had worked at the local mine but the mining industry is itself in crisis. Many of the local mines have already closed, and even this one finds itself in financial straits. Despite the foreman’s promise that he will find a job for the oldest son, Kiichi (Hiroyuki Nagato), there is no work to be had as workers are being paid in food vouchers rather than money and strike action frustrates what little production there is. After receiving the unwelcome suggestion of work in a “restaurant” in another town, Yoshiko (Kayo Matsuo) manages to find a less degrading job caring for another family’s children (though she receives only room and board, no pay for doing so). With younger brother Koichi (Takeshi Okimura) and little sister Sueko (Akiko Maeda) still in school, it seems as if the four siblings’ days of being able to live together as a family may be over for good.

Based on a bestselling autobiographical novel by a ten year old girl, My Second Brother is one of the first films to broach the Zainichi (ethnic Koreans living in Japan) issue, even if it does so in a fairly subtle way. The four children have been raised in Japan, speak only Japanese and do not seem particularly engaged with their Korean culture but we are constantly reminded of their non-native status by the comments of other locals, mostly older women and housewives, who are apt to exclaim things along the lines of “Koreans are so shiftless” or other derogatory aphorisms. Though there are other Koreans in the area, including one friend who reassures Kiichi that “We’re Korean – lose one job, we find another”, the biggest effect of the children’s ethnicity is in their status as second generation migrants which leaves them without the traditional safety net of the extended family. Though they do have contact with an uncle, the children are unable to bond with him – his Japanese is bad, and the children are unused to spicy Korean food. They have to rely first on each other and then on the kindness of strangers, of which there is some, but precious little in these admittedly difficult times.

In this, which is Imamura’s primary concern, the children’s poverty is no different from that of the general population during this second depression at the beginning of the post-war period. The film does not seek to engage with the reasons why the Zainichi population may find itself disproportionately affected by the downturn but prefers to focus on the generalised economic desperation and the resilience of working people. The environment is, indeed, dire with the ancient problem of a single water source being used by everyone for everything at the same time with all the resultant health risks that poses. A young middle class woman is trying to get something done in terms of sanitation, but her presence is not altogether welcome in the town as the residents have become weary of city based do-gooders who rarely stay long enough to carry through their promises. The more pressing problem is the lack of real wages as salaries are increasingly substituted for vouchers. The labour movement is ever present in the background with the Red Flag drifting from the mass protests in which the workers voice their dissatisfaction with the company though the spectre of mine closure and large scale layoffs has others running scared.

One of the most moving sequences occurs as Koichi and another young boy ride a mine cart up the mountain and talk about their hopes for the future. They both want to get out of this one horse town – Koichi as a doctor and his friend as an engineer, but their hopes seem so far off and untouchable that it’s almost heartbreaking. Sueko skipped school for four days claiming she had a headache because her brother didn’t have the money for her school books – how could a boy like Koichi, no matter how bright he is, possibly come from here and get to medical school? Nevertheless, he is determined. His father couldn’t save the family from poverty, and neither could his brother but Koichi vows he will and as he leads his sister by the hand climbing the high mountain together, it almost seems like he might.