Mother Country / 山河あり/ Sanga ari (‘There are Mountains and Rivers’) 1962

Obscure Japanese Film #40

Hideko Takamine

 

In 1955, Japan’s top screen actress Hideko Takamine married screenwriter Zenzo Matsuyama in a match arranged by director Keisuke Kinoshita, for whom both had worked – Matsuyama had been assistant director on Kinoshita’s two Carmen films and written The Tattered Wings (in all of which his future wife starred), while Takamine had also played the lead in Kinoshita’s Twenty-Four Eyes. By the time of Mother Tongue, she had made a further four films for Kinoshita and was said to be his favourite actress. This 1962 production for Shochiku was very much a family affair, then – Matsuyama co-wrote and directed it, Takamine headed the cast and Kinoshita received a credit for ‘planning’ (a credit common in Japanese films at the time, but one seldom used in the West, where similar duties are usually covered by a ‘producer’ credit). Prior to this, Matsuyama had worked as a screenwriter for Masaki Kobayashi on a number of films including The Human Condition trilogy and made his first feature film as director the previous year with The Happiness of Us Alone, in which Takamine played a deaf-mute, a performance for which she won a number of awards. Her co-star from that film, Keiju Kobayashi, also appears here; in the West, he’s most familiar for his comic performance as the samurai who gets locked in the cupboard in Akira Kurosawa’s Sanjuro, but he was a major name in Japan. 

Keiju Kobayashi

 

Yoshiko Kuga

Hideko Takamine receives another plum role courtesy of her husband in this film. She plays Kishimo, a young woman who emigrates to Hawaii with her husband, Yoshio (Takahiro Tamura), around 1918. They have been ‘chased out of Japan’ for rather vague reasons which seem to be something to do with her husband engaging in a relationship with her before she was married and while he was a teacher. On the ship, they become friends with a couple in a similar position, Kyuhei (Keiju Kobayashi) and Sumi (Yoshiko Kuga, another major star). Arriving in Hawaii, they begin work as farmers and find themselves treated little better than slaves. However, when both women fall pregnant, their husbands are motivated to work as hard as possible to lift themselves out of poverty and build a future for their children. 10 years pass. Yoshio has become a teacher and Kyuhei a shopkeeper. Their children know some Japanese but prefer to talk English. A further seven years go by – the parents are by this point fairly well-off and their now grown-up children are able to live the sort of carefree life their parents never experienced, but are disturbed by reports of Japan’s increasing aggression and begin to feel embarrassed about their background. Then the Japanese air force bomb Pearl Harbour and the families find themselves torn between two cultures, both of which now regard them as the enemy. 

 

 

The only other film I know of about the plight of Japanese-Americans during World War 2 is Alan Parker’s Come See the Paradise (1990), so Matsuyama deserves credit for tackling a thorny subject more usually swept under the carpet. Working from an original screenplay co-written with Kurosawa collaborator Eijiro Hisaita, mostly shot on location in Hawaii (I think) and covering a span of 30 years or so, it’s certainly an ambitious production. Unfortunately, it has a tendency to lapse into sentimentality, a quality often underlined by Chuji Kinoshita’s alternately string-laden and Hawaiian score. Despite a few scenes which hit home, the overall result is a well-produced melodramatic weepie topped off by a superb performance from the great Takamine, who also receives a credit for ‘costume supervision’ and even gets to perform a traditional Hawaiian song in one scene. Another bonus is the presence of splendidly acerbic character actor Koji Mitsui as the extremely forthright elder of the Japanese immigrant community. 

Koji Mitsui

 

The Mysterious Edogawa Ranzan /怪奇 江戸川乱山 / Kaiki Edogawa Ranzan (1937)

Obscure Japanese Film #39

 

Ramon Mitsusaburo

A samurai horror film from 1937, no less! Although clearly a minor work, this is certainly a fascinating curio, albeit one with a slightly misleading title – the picture has nothing to do with the famous Japanese mystery writer Edogawa Rampo (1894-1965), but the choice of the protagonist’s name was probably intended to make audiences believe that it did.

 

As the film begins, we see a man’s body being carried to an isolated house by an old geezer with a long beard and fingernails that would make Fu Manchu green with envy. He lays the body out on a table and performs a black magic ritual which revives the dead man. A turning waterwheel introduces a flashback sequence revealing that the man is a samurai named Edogawa Ranzan who was assassinated by henchmen of the local Mr Big. Needless to say, Ed wakes up in a foul mood and sets about revenging himself on those responsible, indulging in a blood-curdling laugh every time he dispatches another victim.

 

The story may be nothing to write home about, but there are some nice visual flourishes, such as a shot of a spider’s web which is refocused to resolve into a shot of Ed’s weeping fiancée, who has been abducted by Mr Big. Other visual elements such as shadows, swirling fog and tilting gravestones and streetlamps lend a suitably spooky atmosphere and suggest the influence of the Universal horror films of the early 1930s. However, the film does not quite live up to its opening and gets rather talky in the middle before recovering a bit in a couple of the later scenes, in which Ed makes a surprise attack through a ceiling and emerges from a swamp. The climax, though, feels somewhat fumbled and thrown away as if the filmmakers were running out of time and money, which perhaps they were.

 

While the picture quality remains surprisingly good, the same cannot be said of the crackly soundtrack. There were also a couple of abrupt and confusing cuts which made me wonder if the extant print could be missing a couple of scenes.

So, was this film a one-off or were other similar films produced in Japan at the time? Rather disappointingly, star Ramon Mitsusaburo (1901-76) proves not to have been the Japanese Boris Karloff, but a star of silent chambara (sword-fighting) films who by this stage in his career was a little down on his luck. The film was made for the short-lived Imai Eiga company, which cranked out a number of B-movies during its two years of existence (1937-8), many of them starring Mitsusaburo. However, judging by the titles, none of the others were horror films.

 

The film was written and directed by Kenji Shimomura (1902-93), a cinematographer-turned-director whose feature film career ended soon after this work, although he continued to make short documentaries into the 1970s. He deserves credit for bringing more visual flair to The Mysterious Edogawa Ranzan than is usually seen in such a low-budget programmer and even for venturing into the horror genre in the first place – this type of film only became popular in Japan around the mid-1950s and earlier examples are rare (with the exception of the many versions of The Ghost of Yotsuya). 

Given the timing of the film's release, it's tempting to conclude that the story was intended as a metaphor about the need to revive Japan's warrior spirit. But then again, perhaps it's just a horror movie after all...

Watch on YouTube (no subtitles)

One Day at Summer's End / 濡れた二人 / Nureta futari (1968)

Obscure Japanese Film #38

Ayako Wakao

In the 19^th of her 20 films for director Yasuzo Masumura, Ayako Wakao stars as Mariko, the frustrated wife of Tetsuya (Etsushi Takahashi), a salaryman who works long hours and spends little time at home. They plan a holiday away together, but it’s no surprise to Mariko when he decides he simply can’t afford the time off. She decides to make a solo trip to a fishing village in Izu to stay with Katsue (Hiroko Machida), who used to work for her parents but is now married with two young children. Mariko has barely got off the bus before she has attracted the attention of the local stud, Shigeo (Kinya Kitaoji) as well as the enmity of the local good-time girl, Kyoe (Mayumi Nagisa).

Kinya Kitaoji dangles his lady-bait

Shigeo’s seduction technique is to fling a large dead fish at girls he likes – it works with Kyoe, so he tries it on Mariko too, but she seems less impressed. However, she begins to feel lonely and Shigeo is the only one paying her any attention, so she gives into him after he’s slapped her around a bit and kicked sand in her face. Unfortunately, just as she’s begun enjoying gallivanting around the village with Shigeo, her husband unexpectedly turns up.

Mayumi Nagisa

 

Having seen almost all of the Masmura-Wakao collaborations now, it’s hard not to feel that they should have called it a day after number 17 (The Wife of Seishu Hanaoka). The projects they worked on together after that are noticeably less ambitious, presumably because Daiei Studios was feeling the squeeze due to the increasing popularity of television in Japan at the time. One response to this was to make cheaper movies, while another was to provide content that TV could not – namely sex, violence and nudity. Both reactions are in evidence here. Wakao’s co-stars are less distinguished than usual and there’s little evidence of any significant amounts of money having been spent on the production. In fact, it all looks a bit cheap and hastily-shot, and further signs of desperation can be found in Mariko’s nude scenes, obviously achieved by means of a body double as her face is always conveniently obscured in these shots. One wonders whether Wakao even knew what they were up to. 

Etsushi Takahashi and Ayako Wakao

 

Wakao is really the only reason to watch this and gives her usual excellent performance.  Shigeo, with his greased-back hair, leather jacket and motorbike is so macho he seems absurd nowadays, especially as Kitaoji’s acting is nowhere near Wakao’s standard, at least at this stage in his career. Worse still, the film feels padded even at a slender 82 minutes, with Masumura having two very similar motorbike-race scenes close together, while a sequence in which Shigeo rides round and round Mariko and her husband at a bus stop in an effort to intimidate them goes on so long it becomes boring. While One Day at Summer’s End is not a terrible film, it’s not a good one either and I would probably rank it as the least of the Masmura-Wakao collaborations, although she does have a better role here than in some of the others.

Kitaoji and Wakao

  

The source of the simple story is a novel by Saho Sasazawa (1930-2002), a prolific writer of pulp mysteries who occasionally attempted something more serious; he also later played the heroine’s father in the bonkers horror comedy House (1977).

The Japanese title, Nureta futari, means 'The Two Who Got Wet', but ‘wet’ has a double meaning in Japan, so could equally be translated as ‘The Two Who Made Love.’