Tag: Toho

Beast Alley (けものみち, Eizo Sugawa, 1965)

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In the opening title sequence of Eizo Sugawa’s Beast Alley (けものみち, Kemonomichi), a thick blob of inky blackness gradually expands over an aerial view of the city until it obscures it entirely. The title card which then appears is written in plain white, but will reappear at the film’s conclusion this time ashen as if it too had been singed by the deeply ironic flames with which the film ends. Based on a novel Seicho Matsumoto and scripted by The Beast Shall Die’s Yoshio Shirasaka, the film similarly takes an incredibly cynical view of the modern post-war society in which it is revealed the militarists are still basically in charge and presiding over a deeply corrupt social order. 

The big bad, Kito (Eitaro Ozawa), says as much when he states the need for reforming the nation’s “rotten political system” by which he means post-war democracy. Kito made his made his money doing deeply dodgy things in Manchuria in addition to running an exploitative coal mine in Japan. Now mainly bedridden, he basically runs the country as a far-right political fixer working in tandem with big business and the yakuza who have traditionally been big supporters of conservative and nationalist forces. Early on we see one of his underlings negotiating with politicians to ensure that Taiyo Roads will be hired be hired for a large scale construction project planning to put highways all the way through Tokyo. As we later discover, he’s prepared to go to great lengths in order to achieve his goal, going so far as to have a sex worker murdered to implicate the uncooperative CEO of a rival construction film into resigning by threatening to frame him for the crime so they can install their stooge in his position. 

It’s into this world that everywoman Tamiko (Junko Ikeuchi) is drawn while working as a hotel maid at a traditional Japanese inn. Trapped in a bad marriage to a man who is also bedridden yet still attempts to rape her when she returns home to find him in bed with the housekeeper, Tamiko longs for escape and is therefore ripe for the picking when approached by Kotaki (Ryo Ikebe), the manager of an upscale Western hotel, to join him in an unspecified enterprise which will apparently make her very rich. The only catch is that she will have to “get rid” of her “dependent”, which she probably wanted to do anyway, by burning down her house with him inside it. Once she’s done this, there is no turning back for her even if she had not developed complicated feelings for Kotaki who is both her salvation and damnation. 

Tamiko’s husband had failed to give her the comfortable life that he had promised, something which she thinks Kotaki can deliver even if it requires her to become the plaything of Kito whom does she actually seem to like even if aware of the precarity of her position and still in thrall to Kotaki. Leaving the hotel so abruptly was however a strategic error as it arouses the suspicious of (originally) earnest cop Hisatsune (Keiju Kobayashi) who quickly realises that Tamiko set the fire to kill her husband. Though he seemed to be motivated by justice, Hisatsune too is soon corrupted explaining to Tamiko that he has become cynical and jaded. Years of police work have shown him that true criminals know how to break the law and get away with it so he can’t do anything about them, but “good” people, like he implies Tamiko, are pushed into crime by desperation and are easily caught. Tamiko wields her sexuality against him by agreeing to a tryst, though when it doesn’t go to plan he tries blackmail and then rape before she, ironically, manages to escape from his bungled crime. 

Hisatsune’s corruption is gradual and self serving. He starts with suspicion, tailing Tamiko in the interests of justice but also because he desires her, before stumbling on the conspiracy, putting the pieces together, attempting to use them for his own gain and trying to blow a whistle mostly out of resentment. Kito’s reach is all encompassing. Hisatsune is warned off investigating certain aspects of the crime by his senior officers and is then fired on Kito’s instructions for fiddling his expenses after harassing Tamiko. He tries to give his findings to his boss but it goes nowhere and then tries the press but is given the brush off, the editor his reporter friend refers him to gently implying he’s just a crank with an axe to grind. Of course, it turns out that the reporter is already in league with dodgy lawyer Hatano (Yunosuke Ito) who is Kito’s right-hand man. 

The connections between the three men, Kotaki who was once a communist, Hatano, and Kito go back to Manchuria and the corruptions of militarist era which it becomes clear has never really ended. Kito has only one rival and it’s another faction of the conservative ruling party who are probably just waiting for him die. Attempts are made on his life and they don’t go well for those who make them. Even if Hatano hoped to simply inherit an empire he, as he points out, put in much of the work to build he is sorely mistaken while Tamiko may intellectually understand that Kito’s death would place her in a precarious position but carries on regardless. “You never know who will betray you in this world” Kotaki laments, echoing Kito’s later claim that his Buddhist statues are the only ones will never betray him even as sleeps next to a statue of Aizen Myo whom he ironically claims protects mankind from their lust and desire. 

It could be said that desire is Tamiko’s undoing, but as Hisatsune had suggested perhaps you couldn’t blame her for longing to be free of the bedridden husband who had not delivered what he promised her. As she said, she was doing what could to survive even if you’d think she’d know putting on a ring taken from the finger of a murdered woman is akin sealing your own fate. Sugawa shoots with a noirish sense of dread, tracking Tamiko with her coat drawn up around her face as she tries to leave the scene of her crime, and makes the most of his fiery imagery before ending on a note of cynical laughter amid the inescapable hell the of post-war society. 

Original trailer (English subtitles)

Late Chrysanthemums (晩菊, Mikio Naruse, 1954)

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The post-war economy was difficult for most, though by the mid-1950s the situation was perhaps improving. The four former geishas at the centre of Naruse’s Late Chrysanthemums (晩菊, Bangiku) , adapted once again from a series of stories by Fumiko Hayashi, are all in their way attempting to find a way through to the modern society but are nevertheless stuck in the past, unable to move forward as women more or less left behind by a changing idea of “modernity” which no longer has a place for them. 

The most successful of the women, Kin (Haruko Sugimura), has become a ruthless moneylender engaging in real estate speculation. As the film opens she’s waiting for the arrival of a business associate for a meeting about a house she’s trying to flip, clear that they’ll need to kick out the desperate widow who is currently living there. Kin has lent money to her old “friends” with whom she spent her youth as a geisha before the war. Otamae (Chikako Hosokawa) and Otomi (Yuko Mochizuki) are widows with unfilial children, Otamae now working as a maid in a love hotel while her son Kiyoshi (Hiroshi Koizumi) struggles to find a job, and Otomi a washerwoman selling blackmarket cigarettes as a sideline while her daughter Sachiko (Ineko Arima) is a forthright modern woman who refuses to enable her mother’s irresponsible vices. Nobu (Sadako Sawamura), meanwhile, married late to a man from outside of Japan and has opened a small bar where she hopes to start a family, brushing off Kin’s insensitive insistence that she is already too old to bear a child. 

Kin has prospered and become wealthy, but she’s done so largely at the sacrifice of maternity. She disparages the other women, telling them she’s grateful not to have had children because not even they can be depended upon, but is also embittered that she’s missed out on life and love, substituting material wealth for emotional fulfilment. Otomi and Otamae have problems with their children and regrets about their lives, but they both resent Kin for her heartless rationality. Kin is in a sense supporting them with her money, even if she wants it back with interest, and continues to see herself as doing a favour for women she considers friends, hurt that they often run or hide when they see her coming but insisting that she is only trying to survive while implying that the other women have failed to achieve the self-sufficiency she has achieved because they’ve lived irresponsibly by placing their trust in men and frittering their money away on the temporary pleasures of drink and gambling. 

Otomi’s thoroughly modern daughter Sachiko thinks something much the same. When Otomi approaches her for a loan, she says no, fearing that her mother has another lover she will end up subsidising or that she will spend it all on drink and pachinko. Sachiko does, however, offer to buy her mother dinner which at least ensures she will get a good meal. Sachiko’s shock news is that she plans to marry an older man, though he seems not to be particularly wealthy seeing as she later sarcastically asks Kin to buy her a house because they’ll be living with other tenants in a small flat. Otomi objects, not only because Sachiko hasn’t mentioned any of this to her before, but because she thinks Sachiko is being overly practical and gives her some surprisingly transgressive advice to the effect that she should have her fun with various men while she’s young so she’ll be able to figure out which is the best to spend a life with. Sachiko quite reasonably asks how that worked out for her, to which Otomi obviously has no answer and leaves the restaurant feeling dejected enough to ask Kin for the money she was after instead. 

Otamae’s problem is of the opposite order. Her son Kiyoshi cheerfully rolls home in the morning after staying out all night and tells her he’s become a kind of gigalo, dating a slightly older woman who is technically the kept mistress of another man. The situation is ironic in the extreme, but despite her own past as a geisha, Otamae doesn’t like it that her son is engaging in a compensated relationship, while he suggests that perhaps she messed him up by making him refer to her as his sister in public. Eventually Kiyoshi is offered a job in a mine in Hokkaido, salmoning the post-war migratory movement and leaving his mother (as well as the mistress) behind to fuel the economic recovery from the provinces. 

Otomi and Otamae have only each other to rely on, men and children have all proved undependable. Kin, the most fiercely independent, is literally haunted by the spectre of failed romance. Nobu, snaps that Kin made her money by swindling her clients, which might be why she takes the side of Seki (Bontaro Miake), a man who tried to commit double suicide with Kin but survived and was ruined. Kin sees it differently. Seki tried to kill her when she refused to die with him, so understandably she is not keen to reconnect. Nobu advises him to visit her and ask for money as “compensation”, which whichever way you look at it is crass and troubling, that Kin is expected to compensate a man for his ruined prospects caused by his obsessive romantic violence towards her which she claims has put her off men for life. Nevertheless, she continues to meditate on the memory of Tabe (Ken Uehara) whom she loved when he was a student, even visiting him in his Hiroshima barracks after he was drafted. She is thrilled to receive a letter from her first love, but declares herself disappointed minutes after he arrives for a visit. Tabe is just another failed salaryman who thinks women like her have it easy and harps on about how looking at his “old” wife makes him nostalgic for the women he loved in his youth. Like everyone else, he’s after her money. Kin burns the photo of him in uniform and gives up any lingering dream she might have had of romantic fulfilment. 

The women find themselves trapped by conflicting visions of “modernity” which are wildly different from those of their youth. They miss their “carefree” lives as geishas, now perhaps somewhat romanticised, along with the misplaced idealism of their time of Manchuria, while lamenting that as single older women they cannot be anything other than dependent. Only Kin is able to achieve self-sufficiency, but does so effectively as the film suggests at the cost of her “femininity”, becoming hard and cold, ruthlessly practical but not perhaps uncaring even as she continues to subsidise the only “friends” she has perhaps in the knowledge that they fiercely resent her. Yet their lives continue. Nobu runs her bar, Otomi and Otamae send their children off with grudging respect while vowing to follow their examples, and Kin, after a moment of crisis, ventures off towards new prospects. For good or ill they shift towards the modern world, more understanding of its rhythms and their place within it than before, but perhaps no more secure.

Get ’em All (「みな殺しの歌」より　拳銃よさらば, Eizo Sugawa, 1960)

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A recently released young man is forced onto a nihilistic path of meaningless violence when his bank robber brother is killed in a hit and run in Eizo Sugawa’s moody post-war noir, Get ‘em All (「みな殺しの歌」より　拳銃よさらば, ‘Minagoroshi no uta’ yori kenju yo saraba). Adapted from a novel from Japan’s hardboiled master Haruhiko Oyabu who also provided the source material for Sugawa’s The Beast Shall Die, the film is as much about defeated aspiration and personal despair as it is about the corrupting influence of money and the futility of vengeance.

After waiting a year to divide the loot from a bank robbery, a random syndicate of crooks is shocked to discover that it has gone missing from its hiding place in an ancestral tomb belonging to one of their members along with a gun connected to the crime which is presumably being kept for insurance purposes. Everyone is convinced someone else has taken it with Tanabe (Tetsuro Tanba), the owner of the tomb, most particular about getting his hands on his share as quickly as possible and directing his suspicion towards the heist’s mastermind, Koromogawa (Akihiko Hirata). 

Koromogawa is currently doing quite well for himself, having recently married and moved into a fancy new flat on a danchi. His brother Kyosuke (Hiroshi Mizuwara) has just been released from prison for an undisclosed juvenile crime and evidently has never met his sister-in-law Mamiko (Yukiko Shimazaki). Strangely buoyant and incredibly naive for someone who’s spent time inside, Kyosuke is determined to go straight and is intending to save money to buy a truck he can use to start his own business. He has no idea that his brother’s newfound wealth is down to robbing banks and is absolutely certain that he is a morally upright person who’d never have anything to do with criminality. When Koromogawa is killed in a hit and run after leaving to meet Tanabe, the suspicion is that he’s been murdered by one of the crooks in a dispute over the money though that would admittedly be quite a counterproductive move as if he really has taken it now that he’s dead no one knows where it is.   

Kyosuke is shocked by Mamiko’s apparently indifference to her husband’s death, even going so far as openly flirt with him. After discovering a receipt for a coin locker in his brother’s wallet, he opens it and finds a pistol first planting the seeds of doubt in his mind about Koromogawa’s life and death. The gun, however, begins to take him over. After reuniting with old girlfriend Yuriko (Akemi Kita), Kyosuke was beaten up by her new squeeze but when he tries the same thing again and notices the pistol tucked into Kyosuke’s waistband he immediately backs down. With the gun in his hand, Kyosuke is able to completely humiliate him, forcing the man to crawl on the floor like a pig and drink dirty water from a puddle in the road. This new sense of ultimate power fuels his desire for revenge setting him on a killing spree starting with Tanabe in an effort to figure out what happened to his brother, an exercise often frustrated by his killing those concerned before turning up any real information. 

Meanwhile, using the gun is also quite a stupid and naive thing to do as the police already have it on file from a shot that was fired during the robbery bringing the crime back into police consciousness and therefore making it impossible for any of the men to spend the money should they finally get their hands on it. Each has a different reason for wanting the loot, a clockmaker wanting to support a daughter left with disabilities after contracting polio, a former record producer realising that he’s aged out of his industry, a former boxer with a lame leg (Tatsuya Nakadai) dreaming of buying a small plot of land, and a couple of embezzlers looking for ways out along with in one case divorcing a wife to marry a bar hostess mistress. But then as in the last two cases and Koromogawa’s own it is perhaps the allure of rising consumerism that has already corrupted them. So much of the action revolves around big American cars, while we’re also told that the gun was one manufactured in Nazi Germany and was most likely bought or stolen from an American serviceman. 

So drunk is Kyosuke on the power of the gun that he doesn’t really take stock of what he’s doing until it’s already too late, realising he’s become an accidental serial killer and no longer has a possibility of leading a normal life. He had begun to feel that way before, especially in the wake of his brother’s death, as he finds each of his job applications failing when prospective employers learn of his criminal past. He’s repaid his debt to society, but if society refuses to give him a second chance then realistically he has no other avenue than heading deeper into crime. Kyosuke liked it that the gun made people fear him but is confronted by the illusionary quality of its power when a child suddenly grabs it in the middle of a game of cops and robbers, pointing the gun at him believing it to be a toy while passers-by laugh at the amusing sight of this little boy holding a grownup hostage. It seemed to confuse Kyosuke that Yuriko had not been afraid of him even with the gun in his hand, but her sudden terror on realising that he has killed and may yet kill her only shows him what he’s become. 

He wanted revenge for his brother’s death, but what if it really was just an accident? The gang begin to turn on each other after the money disappears, some believing Koromogawa took it for safekeeping to prevent them incriminating each other by spending it too early and others that he just took it for himself while each suspecting one another believing one of them is slowly killing the others to pocket the whole amount for themselves. But in the end it’s all for nothing, they couldn’t spend it anyway and several of them decide they’d rather not have the bother and are ready to live quiet lives in the country only it’s too late for that now. A final revelation confirming his brother’s criminality coupled with the betrayal of a friend’s well-meaning attempt to keep him in the dark lead only to an internecine confrontation with the futility of crime. With its noirish jazz score and photography reminiscent of contemporary American independent cinema Sugawa captures a sense of restless youth but also the latent desperation of those left languishing on the margins of an increasingly prosperous society.

Original trailer (English subtitles)

High and Low (天国と地獄, Akira Kurosawa, 1963)

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A self-made man is landed with an unthinkable dilemma when his chauffeur’s son is kidnapped in place of his own just at the moment he’s staked his entire fortune on a manoeuvre to outsmart cynical executives set on taking over his company in Kurosawa’s post-war crime film, High and Low (天国と地獄, Tengoku to Jigoku). The movie’s Japanese title, Heaven and Hell, might hint more strongly at the growing economic disparities in the era of the economic miracle but also at the dualities embodied in the hero’s choices. “Success isn’t worth losing your humanity” his wife tells him, but he still struggles with the validity of choosing his heart over his head knowing that to pay anyway even though it’s another man’s son means financial ruin, the final question being if he is really prepared to allow a child to die simply to maintain his own wealth and status. 

The problem is that Gondo (Toshiro Mifune) has attempted to mount a rebellion against the evils of consumerism, incurring the ire of the cynical executives who attempt to get him on their side in their attempt to oust the boss whose outdated ideas are running the business into the ground. Though Gondo appears sympathetic, hinting that he might be interested if there’s a good enough promotion in it, he later tells them where to go on seeing that their business plan is to start producing poor quality disposable footwear. Gondo started on the factory floor and he doesn’t want to put the company’s name on such shoddy produce nor does he think that their admittedly fair point that if the shoes are well made and last a long time no one will need to buy any is a good way to do business. He doesn’t think the boss is right either and wants to make shoes his own way which is why he’s remortgaged the sizeable mansion he owns on top of a hill overlooking the city and has pretty much run through his wife’s dowry to buy a majority stake in the company.

On top of a hill is a good place to live if you want a good vantage point to oversee the land below, but while you’re looking down others look up and not all of them kindly. Gondo is as he says a self-made man, but also out of touch with contemporary society and not so far from an ambitious courtier always after a little more. He says it isn’t about getting the top job but getting shoes made right, but it seems he too had been bitten by the consumerist bug and is otherwise unable to affirm his status without material proof. When he thinks it’s his own son that’s been kidnapped, he’d have given it all away but when it’s the driver’s boy it’s a different question. Shinichi (Masahiko Shimazu) isn’t his responsibility and as he points out there are plenty of other wealthy men, why is he the only one to pay? While his wife (Kyoko Kagawa) tearfully urges him to do the right thing, his assistant (Tatsuya Mihashi) tries stop him, insisting he should take the sizeable cheque they’ve had drawn up to Osaka and the stakeholder he’s buying the shares from. 

While he vacillates, the driver, Aoki (Yutaka Sada), is humiliated and forced into servitude. Gondo seems to have the old-fashioned idea that the kidnappers would simply let Shinichi go on realising they’ve got the wrong boy and his father can’t pay, but Aoki knows there’s nothing he can do to save his son but throw himself on Gondo’s mercy. He falls to the ground and prostrates himself, but later retracts all telling Gondo it doesn’t matter, that he hadn’t realised what he was asking of him, and insisting that Shinichi is a bright boy who will look for a chance to escape on his own. Once the boy is returned he treats him harshly, interrogating him about anything he might have forgotten and later driving him around looking for the hideout where he was kept in an attempt to do something and repay the debt he now feels he owes to Gondo by helping the police retrieve the money Gondo eventually agreed to pay for him. 

In agreeing to give up the money, Gondo is in a sense unburdened knowing he has made the right choice and realising that he would never live a comfortable life in that house if cost a child’s life to keep it. Part of his rationale for not wanting to pay had been that though he had been poor before and might be again, his wife had not been and does not truly understand what it is to live in poverty much as she says her life of luxury means nothing to her. She has never wanted for anything, after all. As for the kidnapper, Ginjiro (Tsutomu Yamazaki), we know little of his motives save for his intense resentment living quite literally in the shadow of Gondo’s mansion and feeling as if it were mocking him. Then again, though his life is hard Ginjiro already had a path to success in that he would soon have completed his medical studies implying at least that he or someone else was able to cover his tuition and costs of living, that he was able to continue in education, and really had no need to take such drastic action in rebellion against the antagonistic capitalism of the post-war society. “Do you think we have to hate each other?” Gondo asks him, but Ginjiro has no answer only his intense resentment for everything he represents.

The “hell” that Gondo inhabits is a backstreet wasteland peopled by the hopeless. Tokura (Tatsuya Nakadai), the earnest policeman, follows him through thronging clubs and on into “dope alley” where Ginjiro picked up his accomplices so desperate to escape their suffering that they’d agree to help him kidnap a child. Though it costs him his job, Gondo decision to do the right thing makes him a national hero, the working class millionaire who mows his own lawn and can still knock up a pair of shoes should the occasion call while women across the country decide to boycott the company in protest at his treatment. Ginjiro can only howl like a caged animal while facing a death sentence for the coldblooded murder of his accomplices. The light bouncing off his mirrored sunshades gives him an eerie supernatural quality, a demon arising from depths of hell to wreak havoc in heaven but finding only infinite tragedy in the contradictions of the consumerist post-war society.

High and Low screens at the BFI Southbank, London on 19th January 2023 as part of the Kurosawa season.

Original trailer (English subtitles)

Bullet Wound (弾痕, Shiro Moritani, 1969)

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“Your love for your country can’t change anything now” the conflicted hero of Shiro Moritani’s conspiracy thriller Bullet Wound (弾痕, Dankon) is advised as a villainous chaos agent attempts to convince him to switch sides. Like many of Toho’s gunman dramas of the late ‘60s, Bullet Wound anticipates the cinema of paranoia which would take hold in the following decade set against the constant anxiety of the ANPO protests while the Japanese-American CIA agent hero struggles with his uncertain place in a world of geopolitical instability. 

Takimura (Yuzo Kayama) is a man with two countries, born in the US to Japanese parents but later orphaned, now working for the CIA in Japan. Perhaps tellingly, we can’t initially tell what side he’s on even as he tries to prevent an assignation attempt on some kind of dignitary connected to the US. The main crisis occurs when Takamura helps a Chinese man, Yang (Shin Kishida), escape a trade summit in order to defect and chase freedom in America. The Americans, however, then torture him until he finally admits that he’s a stooge, the defection was merely a means of getting him into the US as a spy while the trade delegation is only a front for an upcoming arms deal with a international smuggler known as “Tony Rose” (Andy Seams). Takimura and his team are obviously keen the transaction not take place, but are unable to take Rose out because as Takimura’s boss points out they’ve used him too and he’s too well connected. If they move against him, someone will move against them. 

The Chinese arms deal is linked back to a sense of cold war paranoia which spreads to the young students protesting the ANPO treaty. Takimura’s boss calls them “terrorists” unable to understand how there can be Japanese people who could do this to their own country seemingly unaware of the minor irony in his statement. Meanwhile, he prepares to sacrifice Takimura as need be, callously remarking that a man with two countries who can’t choose between them can be dangerous while admitting that his services have been useful to the Americans but they may not always be so. The Americans meanwhile make crass racist remarks while chasing down the Chinese spies, taking altogether too much pleasure in eradicating them while the hitherto stoical Takimura looks on with disapproval mixed with hurt and shame beginning to wonder if he’s really on the right side. “You and the US will never defeat us” his rivals insist, revealing a mind-blowing piece of info that sets Takimura on a collision course with fate. 

Meanwhile, a strange young artist crafts horrifying statues displaying the “agony of loneliness” and longs to escape Japan for South America where they apparently have the best stone. But as someone later tells her, the desire to go to a new land is not born of hope, and expectations are almost always betrayed. Only love can change everything into hope he tells her, as she pins hers on running away with Takimura while he tries to tie up a few loose ends. Yet there’s also a kind of fatalism that defines their relationship, Takimura reflecting on watching a man die up close and haunted by the searching look in his eyes as if he were trying to understand the meaning not of life but of death. An ironic street singer sings a sad song about those who die and what they leave behind, the soldier apparently leaving not a trace of peace. 

The implication is perhaps that Takimura’s dual nationalities are not viable, that a man with two countries cannot escape by choosing a third nor can he survive without sacrificing one or the other. Meanwhile, Moritani slides into anti-Americanism painting the CIA as duplicitous and exploitative as they simultaneously demonise the Japanese and position men like Tony Rose as international chaos agents destabilising the global order. Handheld photography adds to the sense of anxious immediacy and confusion as Takimura attempts to define his own identity only to discover perhaps that he no longer has one caught as he is between two nations as two selves at the heart of a silent war. 

You’ll Fall For Me (君は僕をスキになる, Takayoshi Watanabe, 1989)

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Two mismatched friends find themselves caught up in an ironic love square in Takayoshi Watanabe’s infinitely charming Christmas rom-com, You’ll Fall for Me (君は僕をスキになる, Kimi wa Boku wo Suki ni Naru). A bubble-era nonsense comedy filled with surreal humour and zany gags along with genuine heart, the film pits friendship against love but not only of the romantic kind as the two women each consider acts of selflessness in knowing that pursuing, or preventing the other from pursuing, their romantic destiny will necessarily cause each of them pain. 

Beginning in the summer the film opens with a bizarre incident in which mousy pudding-obsessed librarian Tomoko (Yuki Saito) thinks she sees her neighbour across the way, Chika (Kuniko Yamada), jump off the roof of a nearby building only it turns out to be a strange practical joke. Chika certainly has a flair for the dramatic along with an unusual personality that has made her something of an outcast at her office job while even her friendship with Tomoko seems somewhat one-sided with her constant refrains of “you’re my best friend!” which are generally met by a blunt reply from Tomoko of “we’re not friends”. In any case, Chika’s current dilemma is that she doesn’t have a date lined up for Christmas Eve and thinks she’s jinxed because she always seems to get dumped right before the big day, while Tomoko is rather shy and it seems had no expectations of getting a boyfriend anyway. 

Their prospective suitors are a couple of salarymen, the feckless son of a CEO, Kyosuke (Masaya Kato), and his nerdy best friend Junpei (Senri Oe) who like Tomoko is a spectacles wearer. The pair have a typical meet cute when they bump into each other at a crossing and knock each other’s glasses off, each ending up with the wrong pair and not realising until it’s too late. Meanwhile, at the office, Kyosuke is being pressured by his father (Jo Shishido) to embrace adult responsibility and meet a prospective candidate for an arranged marriage who looks suspiciously like Chika though Kyosuke never looks at the photo. To get him off his back, he says he’s dating a woman from the company. Because he’s just that popular, a stage event is organised at which Kyosuke is supposed to announce who it is he has his eye on but he scandalises just about everyone by naming Chika who wasn’t really in the running. 

In the opening scenes, however, the guys had been indulging in a bit of 80s excess dribbling champagne from a helicopter some of which had rained down on Tomoko as if anointing her from above. She ends up having a second meet cute, this time with Kyosuke, who accidentally hypnotises her to think she’s a dog leading her to then attack him. A similar thing happens to Chika who is looked after by Junpei after having too much to drink on a date with Kyosuke at a nightclub where Tomoko had also agreed to go on an awkward date with Junpei. Inconveniently, the entirely mismatched Kyosuke ends up falling for the mousy charms of Tomoko who at this point doesn’t know that he’s “dating” Chika.

While the film presents an interesting picture of women in the workplace at the height of the bubble era, it also subtly undermines the prevailing consumerist culture of the age while preserving the romanticisation of Christmas. They two women each want to find a boyfriend to spend Christmas Eve with partly for reasons of social status and partly because they are simply quite lonely, Chika in particular very invested in her friendship with Tomoko while she, much more introverted, seems continually exasperated but despite herself allows Chika to dominate her existence. After becoming aware of their romantic conflict, the two women end up spending Christmas Eve together at a nice restaurant prioritising friendship over romance until one of them realises the other is unhappy and after discovering a note from their suitor asking them to meet in a local park chooses to spend the rest of the evening alone so her friend can go get her man. 

Then again, there’s a clear idea that Tomoko in particular is undergoing a kind of transformation signalling her shift away from Junpei by deciding to get contacts, putting on lipstick, and dressing in a slightly less mousy fashion while Chika’s attempt to become the sort of woman that Kyosuke would date by dressing and acting more like the other women in the office largely backfires. Meanwhile Kyosuke and Junpei are also changing, Kyosuke giving up his womanising ways and becoming more serious in his pursuit of Tomoko while Junpei comes to appreciate the vulnerable force of nature that is Chika. The film takes its title from Kyosuke’s attempt at hypnotising Tomoko into falling in love with him only to find that he’s the one who’s fallen under her spell as they move towards the anticipated Christmas Eve climax accompanied by the now classic song by Tatsuro Yamashita. Faced with the choice, the women do indeed choose friendship over love but discover that it isn’t really a choice at all because they both just want their friend to be happy even if it means a lonely Christmas for themselves as the ironic role reversal of the closing coda makes clear.

Original trailer (no subtitles)

Tatsuro Yamashita – Christmas Eve

The Creature Called Man (豹は走った, Kiyoshi Nishimura, 1970)

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By the late 1960s, Japan had more or less achieved its economic miracle yet there was still a degree of political tension manifesting itself in a second round of widespread protests towards the automatic renewal of the security treaty with the Americans in 1970. The third feature from Kiyoshi Nishimura, The Creature Called Man (豹は走った, Jaga wa Hashitta) anticipates the cinema of paranoia which was to take hold in the 1970s but as confused as its internal politics sometimes are, reflects the continuing sense of dissatisfaction in the wake of the student movement’s failure in its attempt to critique ongoing complicity with American foreign policy in Asia as well as Japan’s checkered geopolitical history. 

As such, Nishimura opens with hand-coloured stock footage of civil unrest in an Asian nation while the accompanying voiceover features protestors chanting “down with Jakar”, later revealed to be the ousted dictator of “Southnesia”, seemingly a stand-in for the recently assassinated Sukarno of Indonesia. As opposed to the rather pompous English title, the Japanese is simply “Jakar got away”, a phrase repeated during the opening titles and which appears as “Jaguar got away” on a typewriter sitting above the Japanese title in red which uses the character for leopard in place of Jakar’s name. In fact, animal codenames will later become something of an ironic motif with the hero referred to as a German shepherd while his rival brands himself a wolf and is referred to by his handlers as the black panther. 

This slightly tongue-in-cheek use of spy movie cliche is in keeping with the brand of humour often found in Toho’s ‘60s spy spoofs though this is largely a much more serious affair if one with an undercurrent of absurdity. The hero, Toda (Yuzo Kayama), is an Olympic sharpshooter working for the Tokyo police before he is abruptly asked to resign so that he can take part in a “special mission” which turns out to be as a backup bodyguard for Jakar who has been smuggled out of his home nation and intends to defect to America which has, it is implied, been backing his regime as a bulwark against communism in Asia while his rise to power was facilitated by Japanese soldiers who stayed in the country after the war. He’s supposed to be staying for a few days in a top hotel while the Americans figure out the paperwork for him to seek asylum at their embassy but the top brass are worried the revolutionaries might try to assassinate him on Japanese soil which would be very bad for diplomatic relations and potentially create political instability across the continent. 

As Toda later says, he’s just doing his job (even though he’s technically no longer a policeman), so he doesn’t give much thought to the wider political context of his actions only concentrating on preserving a man’s life no matter now steeped in blood that life might be. Meanwhile, a duplicitous corporation, Dainihonboeki (lit. Great Japan Trading) is attempting to cut some shady deals apparently having facilitated Jakar’s escape but now frustrated that the Revolutionary Government won’t honour their contracts for military equipment and so is offering to help assassinate him to prevent his forming an alternative government in exile and creating additional problems for the new regime. 

Kujo (Jiro Tamiya), the killer for hire, and the dutiful policeman Toda are exposed as two sides of the same coin, Toda later killing an innocent woman mistaking her for a member of the conspiracy against Jakar only to later learn she is in fact a war widow whose fiancé was an American GI killed in Vietnam. Her exaggerated death sequence filmed with expressionist flare in mimicking that of a soldier gunned down in battle. The two men face off against each other in what is essentially a battle of wits, Toda not taking aim at Kujo but anticipating his plan and foiling it before it takes effect. Leaning in to the Toho spoof, there is considerable absurdity in their machinations, waiters falling to the ground after the rope they were climbing to sneak in through a window is shot through, or sex workers brought in to shine a guiding light towards the target, but there’s a lot of blood and terror too not to mention some sleaze and a general sense of nastiness. Once the Jakar matter is concluded, the men still have a score to settle, facing off in a one-on-one duel in a disused aircraft hangar firing potshots at each other from behind various pieces of military equipment their life and death struggle shot in elegant slow motion until they each collapse into the swirling dust in a moment of nihilistic futility as another civil war quietly brews in Southnesia precipitated by their actions. 

Strikingly composed capturing the neon-lit nightscape of an increasingly prosperous Tokyo filled with the shining lights of new corporate entities and scored with noirish jazz and occasional flights into expressionism, Nishimura’s paranoid political thriller takes aim at a new world of geopolitical instability while making villains of amoral capitalists and indulging in a mild anti-Americanism but most of all is a tug of war between a hitman inconveniently regaining his humanity and a policeman temporarily abandoning his in questionable national service. 

The Vampire Moth (吸血蛾, Nobuo Nakagawa, 1956)

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“You’ve become an evil beast that sucks blood!” intones ace detective Kindaichi, though just as his later The Lady Vampire featured no lady vampires, there is no literal bloodsucker involved in Noburu Nakagawa’s Vampire Moth (吸血蛾, Kyuketsuga). Inspired by one of Seishi Yokomizo’s mysteries featuring his iconic detective here played by the rather suave Ryo Ikebe cutting a very noirish figure in contrast to the famously disheveled eccentric from the original novels, the film is for a time at least a werewolf movie though as usual the villain turns out to be post-war greed and amorality. 

This is perhaps rammed home in the open sequence as the camera pans around the neon-lit nighttime city before entering a small cabaret bar where a fashion competition is currently in progress. A note of discord is immediately introduced by a white-haired grumpy old man (Eijiro Tono) sitting in the front row who appears to be in an incredibly bad mood, later exclaiming that the winning design by rising star Fumiyo Asaji (Asami Kuji) does not seem very original to him. Some of the models later complain about the strange spectator who’s evidently come to several other shows and has begun to creep them out. Meanwhile, an aloof, conservatively dressed woman brushes past them. Fumiyo’s assistant Toru (Ichiro Arishima) explains that she is Tazuko Kusakata (Chieko Nakakita) who had been the previous number one before Fumiyo returned to Japan after an extended stay in France. The real drama begins however with the arrival of a masked man with a box for Fumiyo who reveals his wolf-like face to Toru in an effort to convince him to deliver it. After opening the box and finding an apple with a few distinctive bite marks on the outside, Fumiyo promptly collapses.  

From the introduction of the three loose “suspects” an ominous atmosphere takes hold in the certainty that something untoward is about to happen. Soon enough some of the models start getting bumped off in quite bizarre and unpleasant ways. The first girl’s body is shipped back to the studio in a mannequin box which later leaks blood, while the gang are then delivered a cake with the next victim’s name on it in pretty icing with a butterfly moth motif above. There may not be any vampires, but there are certainly moths. The old creepy guy is revealed to be a moth specialist living a giant gothic mansion with a butterfly room in the middle full of specimens nailed to boards. His front door even has a moth motif above it like a coat of arms, while a butterfly mural lies behind it in the hallway. The killer places a decorative moth on each of his victims to cover their modesty which would seem to indicate the grumpy professor but, once he finally arrives, Kindaichi isn’t quite so sure. 

Though this is technically a Kindaichi mystery and he does finally get to unmask the criminal, he is not actually in it very much and as previously mentioned is nothing like later incarnations of the famous detective such as that of Kon Ichikawa’s series of Kindaichi movies released throughout the 1970s. In a common B-movie motif, the main detective work falls to a male and female team in dogged reporter Kawase (Minoru Chiaki) and intrepid model Yumiko (Kyoko Anzai) who eventually succeed in digging up clues at the creepy mansion while simultaneously stumbling across a subplot involving plagiarism in the world of fashion with Tazuko implying that Fumiyo stole her winning outfit from another designer and then passed it off as her own thereby robbing Tazuko of her rightful place as the best designer in Japan. Partly because of all this stress and the vast amounts of money apparently needed to sustain a career in the fashion industry, Fumiyo’s well-meaning boyfriend wants her to abandon the profession but also admits that asking her to give up fashion would be like asking her to give up her life. 

Nakagawa ramps up the tension with a series of elegantly presented reversals, making us think we’re witnessing the killer stalking Fumiyo before pulling back to reveal it’s someone else or presenting the same scene of a masked man ominously peering out from behind a tree. The presence of the “wolf man” links back to a Japanese traveller who supposedly fell victim to a supernatural curse in France described as being akin to possession by a fox in Japanese mythology causing the infected person to gain wolf-like characteristics, become violent, and eventually be consumed by an overwhelming desire for human flesh, but perhaps also hints at the sense of voracious greed that has overtaken the killer and caused them to abandon their sense of of humanity in favour of material riches. Filled with a sense of the gothic along with noirish dread in Nakagawa’s foggy, kilted angles eventually giving way to an atmospheric chase sequence strongly recalling that of The Third Man, The Vampire Moth presents a banal evil with palpable anxiety yet suggests justice will be done to those who however briefly stray from the path. 

Fallen Blossoms (花ちりぬ, Tamizo Ishida, 1938)

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By the late 1930s, film censorship had tightened and it was perhaps all but impossible to rebuke the militarist regime through the silver screen. Nevertheless, as always setting your film in the past can make the impossible possible through thinly veiled allegory. This may not have been its primary intention, but it’s impossible to ignore the subtext of Tamizo Ishida’s Fallen Blossoms (花ちりぬ, Hana Chirinu) which sets itself entirely within the confines of a geisha house on the night of the Kinmon incident or Hamaguri Gate Rebellion in 1864 during which anti-Shogunate forces from Choshu marched on Kyoto with the intention of kidnapping the emperor in order to restore imperial rule. The incident ended in devastating defeat for Choshu with rebel forces setting fire to the city as they bid their retreat. 

There is therefore an uncomfortable anxiety in the context of the Japan of 1938 as the women trapped inside the teahouse remark on the chaos outside with unfamiliar soldiers on the streets and townspeople deciding to remain at home which is of course very bad for their business. Aside from the sense of danger, the major problems inside the house are economic with constant talk of declining revenues and the recent closure of similar establishments while even the guests that have come have done so to drown their sorrows as their own business is also going badly because of the rumours of imminent unrest. The situation is all the more acute for Akira (Ranko Hanai), daughter of the house’s madam, because she’s secretly fallen in love with a young man of Choshu she fears may be marching on the city which is one reason she deflects her mother’s attempts to encourage her to accept an offer of marriage from a wealthy associate. 

As Akira later puts it, her mother was born in the teahouse, became a geisha and then its madam. She sees herself sharing the same fate but wants to experience a different kind of life, curious about what lies outside the pleasure district. Maid Miyako (Kimiko Hayashi) was sold to the geisha house as a child because her family was poor, she doesn’t think the life outside is anything worth seeing. Yet she too wonders what her fate might be, believing herself to be too plain to make it as a geisha and particularly to attract the kind of wealthy patron who could provide an escape route. Matsuba (Ayako Ichinose), a former geisha, did just that but now she’s come back apparently regretting her decision because she’s neither wife not maid in her new home but also occupies a liminal status in the teahouse, her actions deliberate or otherwise reinforcing the idea that she is no longer a geisha in her inability to tie Akira’s obi and claims to have forgotten the words when asked to rehearse a piece of music with another of the women. “Surely it’s OK for a girl to dream, even in the Kuruwa” Akira fires back but perhaps on some level knowing that her mother has a point when she says that samurai don’t marry young women of the pleasure district. 


Even so Akira’s romantic fantasy takes on even greater import when a man begins loudly banging on their door and demanding to be let in, presumably in fear for his life. Akira rushes forward to open it, but is held back by her mother and the other women. After a while the sound of fighting stops and it’s assumed the man has been killed. Akira doesn’t know if the man was her lover or not, but it makes no difference. Someone called for her help and she refused it. Guilt and shame overwhelm her. Her mother’s decision may prove to be a prudent one, though she is in any case later arrested by the pro-shogunate Shinsengumi police presumably suspicious the geisha house may have harboured rebel soldiers. Akira’s double sense of guilt that what’s happened to her mother is partly her own fault prevents her from leaving with the others when it becomes certain that their only choice is to evacuate the city. Her only point of refuge is on the watchtower, apparently unique to her geisha house and said to be haunted by someone murdered by the Shinsengumi, where she sees the smoke of fires glowing on the horizon. Her lover’s poem falls from her hand as if in admission that her dream is ended and there will be no escape for her from the environs of the Kuruwa.

The moment is therefore one of eclipse and endings, a city a falling but not as the invaders are beaten back and defeated. Prophetic and chilling in its import as bells strike ominously in the background while the city burns, the film paints a bleak prognosis for a Japan of mounting imperialist ambitions. Drunken geisha Tanehachi (Reiko Minakami), herself trapped in the Kuruwa apparently because of a bad man she cannot escape, reveals that her father was beheaded in the street for disrespecting a samurai and if this is the beginning of their end then so be it, but even so “Kyoto is finished. No matter who loses it will make no difference.” Adapted from a stage play by Kaoru Morimoto, Ishida’s increasingly anxious drama never leaves the geisha house or repeats a shot and situates itself entirely within a world of women where men are heard but never seen, but finally leaves its heroine all alone watching helplessly as the fires creep closer. 

The Approach of Autumn (秋立ちぬ, Mikio Naruse, 1960)

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For a small boy in post-war Japan, childhood’s summer is already over in Mikio Naruse’s at times uncharacteristically cheerful The Approach of Autumn (秋立ちぬ, Aki Tachinu) . In truth, the Japanese title is the slightly more depressing “autumn has begun” echoing the dismal circumstances that the hero eventually finds himself in while working his way towards an understanding of the disappointments and loneliness of adulthood. Abandoned by his mother he remains alone, in a sense homeless, trapped between the new Japan and the old in a liminal space shrinking by the hour as the construction of modernity encroaches all around him. 

The amazement on Hideo’s (Kenzaburo Osawa) face is palpable as he exits a train station in the middle of Tokyo peering up at the high rise buildings amid busy city streets. He and his mother Shigeko (Nobuko Otowa) have travelled by train from rural Nagano following the death of his father intending to stay with his mother’s brother (Kamatari Fujiwara) who owns an old-fashioned grocery store in Ginza. What Shigeko has not really explained to her son is that they will not be living there together as she has taken a job as a live-in hostess at a nearby inn. 

Plunged into this unfamiliar world all alone, Hideo cannot help but feel awkward in the house of relatives he has never before met. His grown-up cousins playfully argue in front of him about having to share a room, while he makes a point of not eating too much at dinner though as Harue (Hisako Hara) jokes perhaps he doesn’t like the food seeing as his penny pinching uncle mainly feeds the family on fruit and veg from the store that’s gone past its best. Meanwhile, he struggles to make friends with the local children who mock his country bumpkin accent and use him as a scapegoat when it looks like they might get in trouble. His only companion is the precocious daughter of the owner of the inn where his mother works, Junko (Futaba Hitotsugi), who instantly takes to him and even goes so far as to beg her mother to adopt Hideo as an older brother. 

Junko is in a similarly liminal position herself as we later find out. Her mother (Murasaki Fujima) is the mistress of a wealthy businessman who only visits them every so often and appears to be well aware of the precarity of her position. Junko’s father, awkwardly inviting her out on a playdate with his other two children born to his legal wife who apparently knows everything and at least pretends to be alright with it, urges her mother to take advantage of rocketing Ginza land prices and sell the inn to buy a fancy new apartment but she is understandably wary. Running an inn is all she knows how to do and should he die or simply decide to drop her she’d be in trouble fairly quickly. Hideo’s cousins similarly nag their father to sell the shop, reminding him that with the increasing gentrification of the area there is no longer sufficient footfall to support it, and suggesting they use the money to buy larger premises in suburbia. Both Hideo and Junko are in a sense orphans of these liminal spaces, relics of a disappearing Japan soon to be eclipsed by endless office buildings symbols of the nation’s increasing economic prosperity. 

All of the sites on which the children play are earmarked for construction, Junko later explaining that the docks where they eventually head looking for the sea are built on reclaimed land big enough to build a baseball field. Like Hideo she longs for the country with clean air and unpolluted rivers though as Hideo points out it’s all the same to him, his mother isn’t in either place and so neither has any meaning for him. Her strange idea of adopting Hideo is in a way an attempt to anchor herself with family, assuring her mother that she’s old enough to understand but struggling to parse her family circumstances while deeply hurt on discovering she does have siblings after all only they don’t want to know her. She is looked down upon because of the choices her mother has made, as is Hideo especially after his mother leaves abruptly with a customer from the inn (Daisuke Kato) abandoning him with his uncle in search of romantic fulfilment which it seems she probably did not find considering a later telegram explaining she’s working as a maid at a hotel in the resort town of Atami. 

Shigeko is made out to be the villain, but she too is only chasing safety in a changing society hoping to find it in the arms of a reliable man be he a husband or not. Hideo may be an obstacle to that, but her anxiety is mostly maternal, unwilling to rely on her brother’s goodwill and knowing she will need to find a way to support her son even if she is not with him. Hideo’s cousins meanwhile are the youth of the new society. Harue has rejected the old-fashioned family grocers and now works in a department store while her former student protestor boyfriend is certain of getting a salaryman job seeing as there’s a massive labour shortage. Shotaro (Yosuke Natsuki), who is always kind to Hideo, runs around town on his scooter ferrying girls to the beach sometimes forgetting his melancholy cousin in favour of transitory pleasures. He envisages taking over the store and selling it to open up somewhere new, reassuring Hideo that there will always be a place for him there even while letting him down in the present. 

In the end, Hideo’s only friend is a beetle packaged in a box of apples from his grandma in the country which his uncle selfishly claims for the shop under the rationale that he can’t eat them all himself. A symbol of an older, rural Japan as well of the idyllic childhood for which Hideo’s longs, the beetle is as out of place in central Tokyo as he is the pair of them looking down on the sprawling city and out towards the barely visible sea from the roof of a department store which holds no sense of promise for them. Despite the bleakness of the ending, Naruse’s depiction of an ordinary childhood is deceptively cheerful perhaps implying that Hideo is merely enduring a period of adjustment only to leave him with the crushing weight of impossibility, trapped between the new society and the old with no home to go to. 

French release trailer (French subtitles only)