Tag: Tanie Kitabayashi

Sisters (姉妹, Miyoji Ieki, 1955)

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Two sisters find their paths diverging amid the changing society of post-war Japan in Miyoji Ieki’s adaptation of the autobiographical novel by Fumi Kuroyanagi, Sisters (姉妹, Kyodai). Updated to the present day and co-scripted by Kaneto Shindo, the film paints the sisters as representing a generational divide with the older, much more conservative of the girls is drawn to a traditional lifestyle while equally corrupted by the city in her conversion to Christianity, while the younger is a truth-telling free spirit deciding that she doesn’t want that kind of life and will find a husband for herself if indeed she ever decides to marry.

The Kondo family is evidently quite progressive in that they are not wealthy but have chosen to send both of their older daughters to study at middle and high school in the town where they lodge with their mother’s sister (Yuko Mochizuki). They also have three younger brothers who have stayed with their parents in the village, while their father (Akitake Kono) works at a hydroelectric dam. The fact that he works at a power plant aligns him with the post-war recovery which is largely built on the back of these new engineering endeavours, but there is little discussion of the ways in which they’ve changed and disrupted rural life. 

As New Year approaches, everyone is looking forward to them meeting their end of the year challenge so they’ll get a 1000 yen bonus only for a sudden outage to occur on the deadline day. The older sister, Keiko (Hitomi Nozoe), becomes fond of a worker named Oka (Taketoshi Naito) who is part of the labour movement and often sings Russian songs but is an economic migrant from another town living frugally while sending most of his pay back to his mother and siblings. He is already supporting a family, and therefore has no prospect of marriage for the foreseeable future. Even if he and Keiko have taken a liking to each other, they each accept the practical reality and agree that it is better that Keiko accept an arranged match her parents have set up for her with a young man who works in a bank. The groom’s occupation echoes the increasing urbanisation of the nation, as the parents clearly believe the marriage will buy Keiko a much more comfortable life in a higher social class even if Keiko seems to want to stay in the village.

While they lived in the town, Keiko converted to Christianity out of loneliness because she could talk to God any time she wanted. Toshiko (Hitomi Nakahara), the younger sister, points out it might have been a better idea to make friends who were a bit more local, but despite appearances Keiko seems better suited to a more old-fashioned way of life. Christianity reinforces her conservatism in that she hopes to always be pure and correct and takes against those she does not think to be. On their visit home, the girls witness a young woman they know be beaten by her husband who is much older than her. Keiko takes against the woman and rudely leaves her home. Later the woman is beaten again because her husband discovers a young man in their home. No additional explanations are sought, the woman is assumed to have been involved with another man more her own age, but surprisingly some of the villagers speak in her defence telling her husband he’s being unreasonable and raising the double standard that men do this sort of thing all the time. The woman tells Keiko to be careful whom she chooses for a husband. She came to this village never having met the man she would marry, and now she’s stuck here with a child. Her only ray of light is that she will raise her son to be a better man than his father. 

Keiko’s future happiness depends entirely on the nature of a man she doesn’t know. In the town, the girls had been somewhat disillusioned when their long-absent uncle Ginzaburo (Jun Tatara) returns home from working away and they catch him drunk in the street cavorting with geisha. This is really a double betrayal, not only stepping out their aunt, but selfishly spending what little money they have on trivial pleasures for himself. But like an inverted picture of village life, their aunt seems not to mind and accept it as just something men do. The same uncle is also picked up for illegal gambling, which is more of problem in a practical sense aside from additional evidence of this moral failings. 

All of these experiences have certainly soured Toshiko’s view of marriage, and most particularly of arranged ones which are something that belongs to the older Japan that Keiko still inhabits. A worker at the plant asks Keiko if she’ll be going to university, but she replies that girls in her family don’t and that she’d rather be married. Toshiko, meanwhile, on witnessing the suffering of those around her and most particularly the poor decides she’d rather be a doctor or politician to try and change society. She supports the strikers at the plant who are protesting against job cuts, but also says they should have resisted more when the protests fail as if they were somehow at fault in their lack of commitment. Her father’s reaction to failing to stop the lay-offs is to stop Toshiko going on her school trip because the other workers’ children can’t even go to school now their fathers have been let go, which doesn’t really make sense and is not really fair, though he is also worried about his job amid this very changeable society. 

For Toshiko’s part, she remains staunchly of the village but is ironically more suited to life in the town, which is to say the future. People are always telling her that she speaks her mind too often and that people in the town aren’t as forgiving as those in the village, but she continues to speak as she finds and indifferent to censure. Keiko criticises her for behaving like a boy, wearing rustic work clothes and chopping wood while they’re home for New Year and not helping out with the domestic work like cooking and cleaning which she thinks of as a daughter’s duty. Toshiko develops a friendship with a wealthy girl from school who apparently likes her more than a friend and asks her to be her first kiss, lending a queer-coded dimension to Toshiko’s rejection of traditional gender roles and desire for a more independent life in the town. 

She recognises both that greater class disparities exist in the urban environment than they did in the village, but also feels sorry for her friend who shares the same name but is trapped by her privilege. When Toshiko visits their home, it’s clear the girl’s mother looks down on her because she’s not of their social class, while Toshiko’s friend has an older sister and younger brother with apparent disabilities that the family keeps hidden away in shame. Meanwhile, the sisters become aquatinted with an elderly couple who are both disabled themselves while their daughter is ill with TB. Without thinking, Toshiko uses a slur word to describe a disabled person when talking about her friend’s family without thinking about the fact that the father is also blind. They don’t mind at all, but if even Toshiko is thoughtless enough to use a word like that it only reinforces the prejudice of the world around her.

The implication is that if the old couple lived in the village, there would be people around to help them, but in the town everyone is anonymous and indifferent. The state should be filling in for the community, but it isn’t and there’s no one to help the vulnerable in the increasingly capitalistic post-war society. The irony is that Uncle Ginzaburo says everything was better in the war and that Japan can’t survive without conflict, while the fact the economy is improving in the mid-1950s is entirely due to the stimulus of the Korean War. Even so, Toshiko remains generous of spirit. She doesn’t agree with her sister’s decision and is worried for her, but also agrees that they can only be true to themselves and follow their own paths. This is what Keiko has chosen, no matter how it might turn out, while Toshiko has rejected it, insisting she’ll find her own husband if she wants one and vowing to be useful and fight injustice in the wider world whatever form that may take. She wishes her sister good luck as she watches her disappear over the horizon, and sets off on her own path into a future that’s equally of her own choosing.

Heat Wave Island (かげろう, Kaneto Shindo, 1969)

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The death of a bar owner in Onomichi sparks a complex investigation into the condition of the islands surrounding the Seto Inland Sea in Kaneto Shindo’s darkly ironic crime drama, Heatwave Island (かげろう, Kagero). Produced by Kindai Eiga Kyokai, the independent production company founded by Shindo, Kozaburo Yoshimura, and the ubiquitous Taiji Tonoyama, the central thesis is that industrialisation has poisoned the waters surrounding the Japanese heartland, but also that the collection of weird islands had their share of darkness to begin with.

Indeed, having solved the crime, unusually chipper detective Oishi (Rokko Toura) states that it was the island that killed her. “Your traditions turned an island woman’s life to ruin,” he tells the very compromised village chief (Taiji Tonoyama) who refused to let a woman leave the island to seek medical treatment for her baby because of a taboo about setting sail on the night of a shipwreck. That’s not so much a supernatural fear or practical concern as much as a pact between islanders who have been killing shipwreck survivors and looting their boats. Nevertheless, the woman is eventually forced off the island when the men who killed her husband begin fighting over her body. The village chief tells her she has to go to preserve the “unity” of the island while her child, who survived but with brain damage, will be cared for by the other islanders.

Yet all the woman wants is to return to the island to live with her child after gaining the money to build a big house where everyone can see it. Some justification is given for the island’s cruelty in that it has essentially been starved out by post-war industrialisation. The fishing industry is dying, and the island terrain is only suited for growing wheat and potatoes, making farming unviable as a commercial enterprise. A man from another island says that as the salt fields were closed down factories arose in their place and leaked pollution into the surrounding seas, killing off all the fish. He is now bedridden due to industrial illness having worked on Poison Gas Island during the war. His wife now works in one of the “enemy” factories. “That’s how we survive,” he laments of the faustian pact between rural communities and large corporations. 

In any case, most of the young people have been forced into the cities in one way or another where they often lack the skills to find well-paying work and end up in crime and the nightlife industry. The late bar owner, Otoyo (Nobuko Otowa), was herself once from an island village, as was her bar girl Michiko (Toyama Masako). Both of them are dreaming of better lives while filled with a sense of futility. A young man who gave up on fishing to work in factories is injured in a workplace incident and is prevented from leaving hospital until he can pay his extortionate medical bills which the company evidently isn’t going to cover.

The irony is that Oishi is from a farming background too. Rich kids don’t become detectives, Otoyo points out. A poor man’s son commits a crime, and a poor man’s son will catch him, she adds signalling the ways in which the poor work against each other rather than their common enemies such as the exploitative corporations which have ruined the beautiful natural scenery of Japan’s islands along with their traditional communities. Then again, Oishi is a slightly compromised figure in other ways too. He probably shouldn’t be investigating this case given that he used to drink in Otoyo’s bar and seems to have a crush on her, which interferes with his ability to accept some of the less pleasant things they begin to find out about her past. He also has more than a fatherly interest in young Michiko and is unwilling to accept she could be involved with the crime having taken out a sizeable advance on her salary to care for her father who is also bedridden following a stroke.

The implication is that these murders are more like earthquakes, an inevitable result of friction between people caused by conflicting societal forces. Oishi concludes his investigation, but it only seems to result in a further fracture that severs the connection between the islands and the mainland, leaving another woman in a state of limbo waiting for someone who may or may not return. The convoluted, island-hopping mystery taking place under the blazing sun of a sticky summer has its degrees of absurdity, from the weirdness of these retreating cultures to the poignant presence of the dog, who alone seemed to want justice for Otoyo, who, whatever her other faults may have been, was always kind to him when others often weren’t.

A Good Man, A Good Day (好人好日, Minoru Shibuya, 1961)

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It’s funny, in a way, that life can hold so much goodness in it even with an underlying, barely visible melancholy. Goodness does indeed breed goodness for the sometimes misunderstood heroes of A Good Man, a Good Day (好人好日, Kojin Kojitsu) who struggle to adjust themselves to changing times but at the end of the day just want each other to be happy and for life to be blissfully dull and free of complication.

The obvious point of friction is that 20-something daughter Tokiko (Shima Iwashita) has had a proposal. She behaves as if it’s an arranged marriage, but in reality Ryuji (Yusuke Kawazu) is actually her boyfriend and the two of them have mutually decided to formalise their union but are doing things the “proper” way perhaps in part because Ryuji’s family run a 200-year-old ink shop and are intensely conservative. Though it’s Tokiko’s fuddy-duddy professor father Hitoshi (Chishu Ryu) who is often regarded as the sticking point, it’s equally Ryuji’s family and particularly his traditionalist grandmother (Tanie Kitabayashi) who isn’t sure that Tokiko is really good enough. She is however the only member of the family who thinks it’s not a big deal after discovering that Tokiko is adopted while others regard her with an increased suspicion and the prejudice often held towards orphans that they don’t want to let someone into their family whose familial lineage they don’t know.

It’s most likely for their benefit that Tokiko and Ryuji are intent on compromising by doing everything the “proper” way rather than as her mother Setsuko (Chikage Awashima) tells her just get married on their own without worrying about what anyone thinks. But in this awkward mix of tradition and modernity we can see that times have changed and Ryuji and Tokiko have decided their future for themselves. They firmly believe it will work out so they’re remaining patient, but should that patience run out they will decide to prioritise their own happiness. 

For his part, Hitoshi later says that he never actually objected to the marriage but just hates the idea of big weddings which he regards, not without reason, as stupid and pointless. In any case he warms to Ryuji when he loses his temper and calls him an “old fart,” realising that he’s a young man with a backbone and possibly worthy of Tokiko. A professor of mathematics, Hitoshi is an awkward man who doesn’t quite fit into polite society but has a good heart even if he has a funny way of showing it. When he wins an important medal from the government for his contribution to scholarship and it gets stolen, he won’t let the hotel owner report it because of his embarrassment but when the chastened thief brings it back he sends Tokiko after him with money for his train fare and a little more as a thank you. 

Still, he was probably not an easy man to live with and Setsuko’s not so secret sake habit is likely a result of the strain of dealing with him and his constant faux pas in the boredom of a rural life in which she says all she does is make pickles. But despite that, she still tells Tokiko that marriage is essential to a woman’s happiness if also encouraging her to fight for what she really wants. Tokiko is already doing just that, but has lingering doubts over her parentage and wants to know who her birth parents may have been partly out of curiosity but also a mild fear of the implications it may have. But what Hitoshi eventually tells her is that she is a war orphan which makes her a kind of everywoman and a symbol of the young, post-war generation which is making a break with the past. 

The film in fact includes a small satirical, anti-war sequence in which Hitoshi is accosted by a snooty nationalist who shouts out that he lacks “patriotism” for allowing the medal the emperor so generously gave him to be stolen. The man tells him he should face the direction of the Imperial Palace and apologise all which makes him look quite mad and paints Hitoshi as the figure of exasperated sanity. He also rejects contemporary consumerist culture in continuing to live like a student counting every last yen and rejecting the TV set Ryuji buys him because it would deprive him of going to the coffee shop to watch baseball games instead (though he does regret it later). In any case, Hitoshi’s guileless goodness does seem to ameliorate the world around him in making others, like the thief, want to live up to it as he, like Tokiko, defiantly does what he wants and though at times perhaps insensitive generally has his heart in the right place.

The Greatest Challenge of All (喜劇 一発勝負, Yoji Yamada, 1967)

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A prodigal son rocks the social order in Yoji Yamada’s anarchic nonsense comedy, The Greatest Challenge of All (喜劇 一発勝負, Kigeki: Ippatsu Shobu). The greatest challenge may be trying to manage Kokichi (Hajime Hana), a roguish Del Boy-like figure with an impossible dream of striking it rich. While in some senses he anticipates the equally  anarchic yet basically goodhearted Tora-san, he also represents a modernising and aspirant Japan determined to leave behind dusty old tradition for a new “deluxe” future.

Having taken to the road after being disowned by his conservative father (Daisuke Kato), Kokichi returns 15 years  later a middle-aged man with seemingly nothing to show for his many years of wandering. He has no idea that he has a daughter, Mariko, by a local woman that his parents took in and raised as if she were theirs which was not an especially uncommon solution to the problem of illegitimate birth in the post-war era. Nor did he know his mother had passed away before walking in on her annual memorial service. This sense of parental disconnection one level reflects a lack of filiality that marks him out as a “modern” man uninterested in these familial obligations or a sense of duty towards his family, but it’s also true that it’s to family that he’s returned having mellowed in middle-aged and in a way looking to settle down.

In any case, his life seems to have been a series of crazy episodes from briefly becoming a sumo wrestler to meeting a mysterious woman on a bridge who gets him a job as a snake charmer. When two yakuza types kick up a fuss about not being able to have their usual room at the inn during his mother’s memorial service, Kokichi manages to frighten them off just with bluster, hinting at the way he may have lived for the last 15 years. He also has two friends who turn up to see him, one of whom is a former yakuza who refers to Kokichi as if were his boss and they were a little trio of crime-adjacent buddies.

But it does appear that Kokichi has come with a business plan in mind, convinced that he can find the source of a hot spring in the town and build a resort hotel on top of it. To do this, he tries to convince his father to sell him his land and the inn the family run so he can knock it down and build a “deluxe” modern, Western-style hotel in its place. Kokichi’s father obviously isn’t keen. This inn has been in the family for generations, he really wouldn’t want to ruin that and especially not for one of Kokichi’s harebrained schemes. Yet again this brings us back to the battle between the conservatism of Koikichi’s father, and Kokichi’s own consumerist modernism that is more individualistic and no longer sees beauty in the past, only backwardness and stagnation. When he finally does find his hot spring, he builds a vast modernist complex with a botanical water park housed in a giant Hawaiian-themed conservatory complete with dancing hula girls. 

His corrupting presence is most discernible in the changing role of Fumi (Tanie Kitabayashi), the family’s housekeeper who generally dressed in kimono but on moving to Kokichi’s mansion she begins wearing Western dress. Fumi had at one time left the family because Kokichi had unwittingly forced her to betray it in helping him get his hands on a precious family heirloom to pawn as capital for his new business venture. Having done so brings her to a confrontation with the contradictions of her role within the family, both a surrogate mother to Kokichi and also a servant who is expected to abide by a certain code with not stealing from your employers a key tenet. She feels she can no longer look Kokichi’s father in the eye and must now return to her home in the country even though she has likely not seen it since she was a young woman. Having undergone this change, she can no longer return to the inn but is brought back to Kokichi’s modernist home once he strikes it rich. 

But Kokichi too is later confronted by hypocrisies of his own position as a free-spirited man and finally a father on learning the truth about Mariko. Hanging out at the hot spring, the 16-year-old Mariko has attracted the attentions of a couple of fashionable young men and wants to leave with them to visit Tokyo. Despite the intrusion of the modern in the hot springs resort, Mariko doesn’t want to stay in this “deadbeat” town and longs for the bright lights of the big city. Kokichi’s father understandably says no, but Kokichi is originally all for it, perhaps seeing his own desire to be free of his father’s oppressive authority. However, he soon changes his tune on assuming his paternity. He too tells Mariko she can’t go and strikes her for talking back. But just as he had, she leaves anyway. His modernity is no longer modern enough, and the young will always walk towards the future.

One exception might be Kokichi’s painter sister Nobuko (Chieko Baisho) who appears to be happy enough living at the inn and with seemingly no intention of marrying which might be her own kind of rebellion against traditional mores. While other similarly themed films may have emphasised the importance of hard work and the reality of the salaryman dream, this one suggests that it really is possible to bumble along and then strike it lucky but also that you never really travel as far from home as you might think. The desire for patriarchal control rises in Kokichi, but is now ineffectual. Though he didn’t raise her, Mariko is a child of the world he’s created and simply chooses to leave with a final sock in the eye to traditional filiality. 

Trailer (no subtitles)

The Sands of Kurobe (黒部の太陽, Kei Kumai, 1968)

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Kei Kumai’s three-hour epic of human engineering The Sands of Kurobe (黒部の太陽, Kurobe no Taiyo) opens with a titlecard to the effect that the film testifies to the courage of the Japanese people who brought the nation back to life after the war. Partly produced by Kansai Electric Power along with the production agencies of stars Toshiro Mifune and Yujiro Ishihara, the film is therefore somewhat conflicted, part bombastic celebration of Japanese engineering skill and ambivalent critique of the wilful decision to place success above all else including the welfare and safety of ordinary workers.

This critique is most evident to the flashbacks to the construction of Kuro 3 in 1938 which as many point out was conducted by the military under brutal and primitive conditions. The construction of the new Kurobe hydroelectric dam, by contrast, is a much more modern, enlightened affair in which workers have proper equipment and are not simply hacking at rocks with pickaxes wearing only a vest. But then as the conflicted Takeshi (Yujiro Ishihara) points out, it’s all effectively the same. Just because no one is pointing a gun at their heads, it doesn’t mean the men actually building the dam aren’t being exploited rather simply pressured by a vague notion of national good that they should be ready to lay down their lives. Could it be that “prosperity” is worse thing to die for than “patriotism”, especially when it appears as if your employer cares little for your physical wealth and economic wellbeing simply pledging that they will support the families of men killed during the dam’s construction. 

That there will be deaths seems inevitable. The man placed in charge of building a tunnel through the mountain, Kitagawa (Toshiro Mifune), is haunted by the vision of a man falling from a cliff that he witnessed when they first hiked to the dam site. He originally described the project as “crazy” and wanted to resign but was convinced to stay on. Kitagawa is himself fond of insisting on safety first where others are minded to cut corners, but also troubled by domestic issues in the film’s sometimes insensitive use of his daughter’s terminal leukaemia as a mirror for the dam project in considering what is and isn’t possible through human endeavour. The suggestion is that Kitagawa wants to believe the miracle of the dam is possible because needs to keep believing in a scientific miracle that can save his daughter, though obviously even if it is ultimately possible to build this dam that’s designed to fuel the post-war rocket to economic prosperity there are limits and unfortunately decades later we have still not found a cure for cancer though treatment may be more effective. 

Takeshi meanwhile has a similar battle with his hard-nosed father whose devotion to the dam project he describes almost like an addiction, suggesting that he values nothing outside of tunnelling and is willing to sacrifice everything in its name including the lives of himself and others. A flashback to to 1938 reveals that he asked his own teenage son to place dynamite and inadvertently caused his death though lax safety procedures which is the understandable reason why his wife eventually left him taking Takeshi with her. But the strange thing is for all his original opposition, Takeshi too is later captivated by the immensity of the challenge if also wary that the workers are falling victim to the same sickness as his father and are still being exploited by those like him who expect them to offer up their lives while paying them a pittance and complaining when the project does not proceed along their schedule. 

The almost nationalistic, bombastic quality of the film seems at odds with some of Kumai’s previous work save the discussion of the building of the 1938 tunnel though this largely serves as a contrast to imply that this time is different because they’re doing it for love of country rather the forced patriotism of the militarist past. Kitagawa justifies himself that if they don’t build the dam, economic prosperity will stall, companies will go bust, and people will lose their jobs but it seems somewhat hollow in the knowledge many men are certain to die while building this dam. Kumai undercuts the bombast with a series of scenes shot like a disaster movie in which supports collapse and the tunnel floods, or men are hit by falling rocks, eventually closing on an ironic Soviet-style statue dedicated to the labour of the workers that seems to question the immense loss of life along with the destruction of the natural beauty of Mount Kurobe but cannot in the end fully reconcile himself, torn between a celebration of human endeavour and its equally human costs. 

Original trailer (no subtitles)

The Wolves (狼, Kaneto Shindo, 1955)

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Post-war desperation drives a collection of otherwise honest men and women towards a criminal act that for all its politeness they are ill-equipped to live with in Kaneto Shindo’s biting social drama The Wolves (狼, Okami). “Wolves” is what the criminals are branded, but the title hints more at the wolfish society which threatens to swallow them whole. After all, it’s eat or be eaten in this dog eat dog world, at least according to a cynical insurance salesman hellbent on exploiting those without means. 

Each of the five “criminals” is an employee at Toyo Insurance where they’re immediately pitted against each other, reminded that in order to qualify for a full-time position they need to meet their quotas for six months. The orientation meeting is cultilke in its intensity, the boss insisting that only in insurance can you become a self-made man while recounting his own epiphany as to the worthiness of his profession. They are told that the only two things they need are “faith and honesty”, and then “faith and pursuasion”, while encouraged to think of their work as an act of “worship”, “for the salvation of everyone”. 

Yet they’re also told to exploit their friends and family by pressuring them into taking out life insurance policies in order to help them meet their quotas. As one man points out, friends and relatives of the poor are likely to be poor themselves, but these are exactly the kind of people they’re expected to target. They’re told there’s no point going after the weathly because they’re already insured, but there’s something doubly insidious in trying to coax desperate people who can’t quite afford to feed themselves into paying out money they don’t have on the promise of protecting their families from ruin. One man even asks if the policy covers suicide and is told it does if you pay in for a year, sighing that he doesn’t want to wait that long.

“Suicide or robbery, choose one,” one of the salespeople reflects after failing to make their quota once again. They each have reasons to be desperate, all of them already excluded from the mainstream society and uncertain how they will find work if the job falls through. Akiko (Nobuko Otowa) is a war widow with a young son who is being bullied at school because of his cleft palate for which he needs an expensive operation. She’s already tried working as a bar hostess but is quiet by nature and found little success with it. Fujibayashi (Sanae Takasugi) is widowed too with two children and five months behind rent for a dingy flat in a bomb damaged slum where the landlord is about to turn off her electric. Harajima (Jun Hamamura) used to work in a bank but was fired for joining a union and is trapped in a toxic marriage to woman looking for material comfort he can’t offer. Mikawa (Taiji Tonoyama) too is resented by his wife, a former dancer, having lost his factory job to a workplace injury while the ageing Yoshikawa (Ichiro Sugai) was once a famous screenwriter but as he explains people in the film industry turn cold when you’re not hot stuff any more. 

Their unlikely descent into crime has its own kind of inevitability in the crushing impossibility of their lives. They may rationalise that what they’re doing is no different from the insurance company that exploits the vulnerable for its own gain, thinking that if they can just get a little ahead they’d be alright while feeling as if robbery and suicide are the only choices left to them and at the end of the day they want to survive. Perhaps you could call them “wolves” for that, but they’re the kind of wolves that give the guards from the cash van they robbed their train fare home after bowing profusely in apology. The real wolves are those like Toyo who think nothing of devouring the weakness of others, promising the poor the future they can’t afford while draining what little they have left out of them. As the film opens, Akiko looks down at a bug writhing in the dirt attacked by ants from all sides and perhaps recognises herself in that image as the sun beats down oppressively on both of them. Breaking into expressionistic storms and unsubtly driving past a US airbase to make clear the source of the decline, Shindo paints a bleak picture of the post-war world as a land of venal wolves which makes criminals of us all. 

Terror in the Streets (悪魔が呼んでいる, Michio Yamamoto, 1970)

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How much bad luck can one person have before they start thinking someone’s out to get them? Released as part of double bill with The Vampire Doll and based on a novel by Kikuo Tsunoda, Terror in the Streets (悪魔が呼んでいる, Akuma ga Yondeiru) draws inspiration from contemporary folk horror and the paranoia thriller as one young woman finds herself in the crosshairs of mysterious forces seemingly hellbent on derailing her otherwise very ordinary and aspirational existence. 

Yuri (Wakako Sakai) worries that her status as an orphan has set her back in life, attributing her inability to find permanent employment after managing to put herself through university by working as tutor to a societal stigma against people with no families. Up to now, things had been going pretty well. Though she was only a temp, she had a good gig as office admin staff at big company in the city, lived in a modest but homely flat complete with a small television, and was dating her college sweetheart. But then one day her boss looks at her with an odd expression and then abruptly drops the bombshell that he’s terminating her contract without offering a reason why. When Yuri calls her boyfriend he gives her the same look and says he’s breaking up with her, also refusing to give any kind of explanation aside from not wanting to see her anymore. If all that weren’t enough, her landlady then explains that someone else is very interested in her flat and will pay double for it so she wants Yuri out by the end of the month. 

It’s undoubtedly been quite a bad day, but Yuri tries to stay upbeat reflecting that she didn’t particularly like the job anyway and intends to apply for a position as an editor on literary magazine which would suit her better. But after that nothing quite goes to plan and everything she tries to improve her situation backfires until she finally considers taking her own life at railway crossing only to be rescued by a mysterious man, Fujimura (Takashi Fujiki), who appears as her saviour but then convinces her to take some kind of pill to calm her nerves which predictably leaves her dazed and confused. He then takes her back to her apartment and claims they’re legally married, but when Yuri wakes up the following morning he’s dead with a knife in his chest. 

It’s not the first time that Yuri has experienced an apparent gap in her memory which causes her re-evaluate her sense of reality. She’s beginning to feel as if something or someone is out to get her, realising that Fujimura was the same sinister man she’d caught sight of before staring into her window. Meanwhile, she often hears a strange tune played on an ocarina that sounds like a medieval fugue. The film’s Japanese title is “the Devil calls” and it’s not a huge stretch to assume that Yuri’s been caught up in some kind of dark magic or supernatural curse, yet it’s also the collision of outdated and feudalistic notions of class and patriarchy that have her in their clutches. All of these weird men seemingly want to marry her or at least make her theirs with less than romantic overtures while chief among her aggressors Katagiri (Hideji Otaki) describes himself as an Earl and insists that noble blood is the most valuable thing in the world.

But far as she knows Yuri has no noble blood and is alone and friendless as an orphan with only a “distant relative” she mentions in passing who does not live in Tokyo. She has in effect been made a pawn in a cruel and ironic game played by a distant aristocracy which makes sport of the innocent and powerless by wielding the privileges of wealth and class. The only way she can escape is by renouncing her claim on its legacy, declaring herself uninterested in their games or rewards while ceding the prize to another woman who seems to have been driven out of her mind by a similar series of torments that may have lasted her entire adult life. Yamamoto films the contemporary city in an eerie light, a place of greed and darkness inhabited by sinister and shady forces that prey on the innocent and earnest like Yuri but then there is something to be said for the idea that in the end you can’t con an honest man and Yuri’s pure hearted rejection of unearned wealth just might be her salvation.

Original trailer (no subtitles)

The Possessed (妖婆, Tadashi Imai, 1976)

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Shinto priests, black magic, and demonic possession. As the opening voiceover of Tadashi Imai’s The Possessed (妖婆, Yoba) remarks, you can hardly believe that such things could happen in the modern world alongside cars, trains, and telephones yet the tale we’re about to be told begins in 1919. Based on a story by Akutagawa, the film is however less a contemplation of ancient superstition amid rising modernity than the destructive patterns of class and patriarchy which conspire against the lives of two women who had once been good friends. 

In 1919, Shima (Machiko Kyo) marries Shinzo (Shinjiro Ehara) who has taken her name and become the presumptive heir of her family. Everyone at the wedding remarks on what a good catch he is, adding almost as an after thought that Shima seems happy about it too. The problem is that Shinzo is repeatedly unable to consummate the marriage. Part of this seems to be down to his wounded masculinity in having married into the family. He resents being under the thumb of his father-in-law along with the rumours that he only married Shima for her money even though this appears to be exactly what he has done. Perhaps further humiliated by his inability to perform, Shinzo tells Shima that it’s her fault because there is something wrong with her body that prevents him from becoming sufficiently aroused. Being a sheltered woman of the Taisho era, Shima wonders if her husband has a point and visits a doctor to find out but as expected he tells her there’s nothing at all wrong with her and it’s most likely Shinzo’s performance anxiety that is to blame. 

However, when her cousin Sawa’s (Kazuko Ineno) comb is found inside Shinzo’s kimono sleeve, the family begin to realise that the problem is he prefers her. He later admits as much and reveals that he’s planning to move closer to the family’s goldmine in Hokkaido and install Sawa in a house there as his common law wife with Shima left behind as a spouse of symbolic value. Shima has already felt herself haunted, but it’s at this point that the family brings in a Shinto priest who explains that Shinzo is possessed by an evil spirit though also giving the more rational advice that she should probably divorce him. Shima is forced to endure a strange ritual including purification by waterfall, but is also sexually assaulted by the randy priest though it it’s not completely clear that she fully realises what has happened to her. 

The implication is that the family treated Sawa as a kind of poor relation they trotted out to keep Shima company because she was an only child. Having grown resentful of Shima’s class privilege, Sawa’s jealousy manifested as covetousness that made her intent on taking whatever Shima had. She too later resorts to shamanistic black magic, fearful that Shima bears her a grudge for ruining her life and hoping to neuter any dark energy that she might be emanating in order to protect her teenage daughter Toshi (Miki Jinbo) who, ironically, has been betrothed to the son of a kimono shop named Shinzo (Taro Shigaki). 

Sawa never married and bore her child out of wedlock. She implies that she depended on men for financial support but never elaborates further. Shima, meanwhile, has been able to build an independent life for herself as a well-respected tailor. “It’s not normal for someone to suffer this much” a shamanically-inclined midwife later tells her when she too becomes pregnant out of wedlock but loses both the child and the man. The boot is perhaps on the other foot, Shima envies the life Sawa has with the one thing that will always be denied her, a child of her own. The midwife had once again told her that she was possessed, this time by the vengeful spirit of her lover’s daughter with his legal wife she fears may have been drowned deliberately by her mother out of jealousy. 

Shima is given a talisman of beads from the goddess of mercy, Kanon, and told that she can have what she wants if she prays hard enough, but Sawa is told the same thing and ends up going too far with the help of a shamaness praying to Basara Okami who later affirms that Sawa’s request comes with a price for the god wants Shima as a human sacrifice which is not really what Sawa had in mind. There is perhaps something symbolic in Shima’s gradual wasting away, becoming old before her time in her loneliness and sorrow (she is only supposed to be 33 at the film’s conclusion, actress Machiko Kyo was 52 at the time) even if she were not having the life force sucked out of her by a supernatural entity, though both women eventually pay a heavy price for their jealousy set against each other by a fiercely patriarchal and classist society which forces them to compete for husbands and standing. 

Imai’s photography is noticeably eerie if occasionally surreal as in the frequent and increasing sight of frogs, usually sign of good fortune or fertility but here ominous harbingers of supernatural dread in league with dark shamanistic forces. As the voiceover admits, it’s difficult to believe that these primitive ideas can exist side by side with the motor car but then again jealousy is as old as time itself and unlikely to disappear from the human psyche anytime soon even if in this case it could have been avoided if only the world were a little more equal. The film’s conclusion suggests it may now be, in a way, with a love match in the younger generation bringing the cycle of envy and resentment to a close even if the vengeful ghost of Shima may still be lurking somewhere in the shadows. 

Scandal (醜聞, Akira Kurosawa, 1950)

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“Freedom of the press or harassment?” The more things change, the more they stay the same. Akira Kurosawa’s attack on the declining moral standards of the post-war society as reflected in the duplicity of the gutter press has unexpected resonance in the present day in which the media is simultaneously unwilling to challenge authority and in thrall to the populist allure of celebrity gossip with sometimes tragic results. The aptly named Scandal (醜聞) is essentially a morality tale which draws additional power from its seasonal setting and embodies the soul of the contemporary society in a conflicted lawyer consumed by internal struggle against despair and hopelessness. 

The more literal scandal however revolves around a well known singer, Miyako Saijo (Yoshiko (Shirley) Yamaguchi), and a motorcycle-riding artist, Ichiro Aoe (Toshiro Mifune), who meet by chance while staying at the same remote mountain inn. Having ironically headed to the mountains to escape the various “annoying things” that plague her in the city, Miyako has been pursued by two muckrakers from the tabloid press who take umbrage at her refusal to see them. They are then fairly delighted when they manage to snap a picture of Ichiro and Miyako standing on her balcony looking out at the mountains like a young couple in love. They deliver the photo to their seedy boss, Hori (Eitaro Ozawa), who is over the moon with excitement at his new business prospects. Suddenly Ichiro and Miyako are on posters all around the city with headlines such as “Love on a Motorcycle” and “Miyako Saijo’s secret love – revealed!”. 

Though Ichiro is a semi-public figure himself having been featured in magazine spreads as an artist on the rise, he is not a worldly man and is shocked by the idea that the press can make something up and print it with no consequences. He feels he must resist not just on a personal level angry to have been misrepresented but for the post-war future to ensure that the press is held to account and that it does not misuse its power to breach the privacy of ordinary citizens. To his mind, they only get away with it because most people just ignore them and wait for the scandal to pass, a sentiment born out by Hori who dismisses a concerned underling with the reminder that they’ve never yet been sued so they need have no fear saying whatever they like whether it’s true or not. “The kind of snobs we target think the law is beneath them” he adds, suggesting that most people prefer to think of the gutter press as something they can safely ignore and that it’s only themselves that they show up in their torrid obsession with the lives of others. 

But Hori also ironically defends his right to press freedom and quickly hits back that he’s being oppressed by those who wish to silence his right to free speech even when what he’s saying isn’t true. Lawyer Hiruta (Takashi Shimura) who offers to represent Ichiro in his lawsuit quickly identifies Hori as a duplicitous conman but also allows himself to be manipulated accidentally accepting a bribe after being led to believe that Hori has a top legal expert on retainer and the case is hopeless unless Miyako, who has so far maintained a dignified silence, can be persuaded to join as co-plaintiff. Ichiro had decided to accept Hiruta’s offer of representation largely on meeting his teenage daughter, Masako (Yoko Katsuragi), who has been bedridden with TB for the last five years. Masako is a pure soul whose isolation from the contemporary society has allowed her to maintain her innocence and humanity but it’s also true that it’s the society that made her ill in the first place.

The morality play reaches a climax on Christmas Day as Ichiro delivers a tree on his motorbike while Miyako sings carols for a radiant Masako who is at least sitting up and looking much healthier than she’s ever been before. But the more Hiruta debases himself, caught between an accidental debt to Hori, his own lack of conviction, and the frustrated desire to do right, the sicker she gets as if poisoned by post-war duplicity. Even so, Ichiro continues to defend him insisting that Hiruta isn’t a bad person just a weak one and that in the end he won’t be able to go through with betraying him but will eventually come clean and tell the truth when it counts. Ichiro’s faith is as much in the institutions of the new democratic Japan as it is in Hiruta as he explains at the trial admitting that he may have been naive in placing too much trust in the legal system thinking that he couldn’t lose because he knows he’s in the right. As the opposition lawyer points out, that’s not a very good legal argument because his client thinks he’s in the right too only he doesn’t know that Hori is both a liar and an idiot who’s staked everything on the assumption that Hiruta won’t expose him for bribery, which would at least strongly imply he can’t back up his story, because it would mean destroying himself. 

In the end it’s Hiruta who puts himself on trial, baring his soul to the court which he acknowledges he has betrayed in his negligence and wilful obstruction of justice. It’s a victory for truth and decency and a turn away from the duplicitous, capitalistic mores of men like Hori who think they can do whatever they want and only laugh at those who value fairness and compassion. “In all my 50 years I’ve never seen a more confused age” Hiruta explains speaking of post-war chaos and the forced comprises of the intervening years of despair and desperation. As he coaxes the denizens of a small bar into an early rendition of Auld Lang Syne on Christmas Day, each vowing that this time next year things really will be better, many of them breakdown in frustrated longing drowning their sorrows as they continue to yearn for better times they do not really believe will come. But then like all the best Christmas films, this is also a redemption story of a man who decided that it wasn’t too late after all and that he might have to destroy himself in order make himself anew and be the man his daughter always knew he could be even if in the end he could not save her from the ravages of the post-war society.

Scandal screens at the BFI Southbank, London on 10th & 24th January 2023 as part of the Kurosawa season.

My Neighbor Totoro (となりのトトロ, Hayao Miyazaki, 1988)

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© 1988 Studio Ghibli

“Trees and people used to be good friends” explains a father to his little girls newly arrived in the idyllic countryside of post-war Japan seeking respite from the destructive modernity that has made their mother ill. Released alongside the harrowing wartime drama Grave of the Fireflies, My Neighbor Totoro (となりのトトロ, Tonari no Totoro) is a charming tale of childhood adventure if not quite without its shades of darkness in which two sisters embrace the wonder of the natural world while trying to come to terms with mortality and the uncertainties of adulthood. 

Satsuki (Noriko Hidaka) and her younger sister Mei (Chika Sakamoto) have moved into a large, ramshackle house in a rural village on the outskirts of Tokyo for the benefit of their mother’s health while she remains in hospital a few miles away. Living with their cheerful father (Shigesato Itoi), a professor in the city, the girls rejoice in exploring their new environment learning of the dust bunnies that inhabited their home before they moved in. An old lady from the village (Tanie Kitabayashi) who’s come to help keep house until the girls’ mother returns home explains that she could see the “soot spreaders” too when she was a child but presumably not anymore. The idea that the soot speakers will soon move on appears to make the sisters sad, and everyone including the parents is quite excited about the idea of living in a “haunted house” even if it’s one that rattles a little in the wind. It’s younger sister Mei who later follows the trail of acorns that mysteriously appear in their home and encounters a series of strange forest creatures she names “Totoro” that eventually introduce the girls to a parallel world of magic and fantasy. 

Their father probably doesn’t believe them, but indulges the girls’ stories and adventures while encouraging them to embrace a sense of wonder in their environment along with something deeper and older than contemporary modernity. “You probably met the king of this forest” he explains to Mei, pausing to offer a word of thanks to the ancient tree he says first drew him to the house that will be their new family home. Whether Totoro is “real” or simply a childish fantasy he helps the sisters escape their anxiety over their mother’s absence, not least by introducing them to new life in the seeds the girls plant in their garden and patiently wait to grow. The oldest, Satsuki, is perhaps a little more aware, worried that her father might not have told her everything about her mother’s condition and processing the idea that there is a possibility she won’t come home to them. She wants to protect her sister from the same fears but perhaps can’t, eventually losing her patience with her and instantly regretful when Mei goes off in a huff and gets lost.

There is darkness in the village too, a floating sandal in a nearby lake giving rise to fears that a child may have fallen in and drowned, but there’s also the gentle strength of the community in the kindly old lady and her shy grandson Kanta (Toshiyuki Amagasa) along with all the other villagers who come out in force to look for Mei fearing she may have tried to visit her mother at the hospital on her own. The old lady prays furiously while muttering Buddhist sutras and it’s probably not a coincidence that Mei sits by a row of Jizo statues after realising that she’s lost not knowing what to do. The girls are always careful to offer thanks at the Jizo shrine just as their father thanked the tree though it’s Totoro and the Catbus that eventually bring them back together echoing a sense that in a just world kindness will always be repaid. 

The countryside is in many ways closer to that just world, largely free of the evils of modernity such as the pollution of industry that has corrupted the cities. Technology is often unreliable, dad’s train is late, telegrams bring bad news, and telephone calls result in anxious waits, but life in the village is peaceful and happy and the people help each other when times are hard. It may be an idealised vision of rural living, but there’s no denying its appeal. Evoking a sense of nostalgia in its beautifully painted backgrounds, Miyazaki’s gentle drama is like much of his work an advocation for the importance of nature as a source of healing but equally for wonder in the fantastical adventures of two little girls finding strength and possibility in the heart of the forest.

My Neighbor Totoro screens on 35mm at Japan Society New York on Nov.4 as part of the Monthly Anime series. Japan Society will also be hosting a talk with puppet artist Basil Twist on Nov. 10 delving behind the scenes of the Royal Shakespeare Company’s currently running stage adaptation.

Trailer (English subtitles)

Images: © 1988 Studio Ghibli