Obscure Japanese Film #70
Isuzu Yamada
The story begins in 1932. Sayo (Isuzu Yamada) and Kisaku (Jukichi Uno) are a married couple with two young children living in Akita Prefecture. Times are hard and they are struggling to make ends meet. Kisaku decides that the only thing for it is to go off to Hokkaido and work in the coal mines. He very quickly realises his mistake when he witnesses a co-worker being tortured to death by a supervisor. Kisaku decides to run away, but on the day of his escape there’s an explosion at the mine and he is presumed to be among the fatalities.
Jukichi Uno
Hearing nothing from her husband, Sayo travels to Hokkaido with her children, where she is informed of his death. She decides to stay on and work as a miner herself. Eventually, she becomes involved with a male co-worker, Kaneko (Isao Numasaki), but he is drafted into the army and killed in World War 2. After the war, the harsh military regime rapidly collapses and conditions at the mine improve a little, enabling Sayo to get an easier job sorting the coal away from the mine. Her eldest son, Kiichi (Jinkichi Orimoto), hates the life of a coal miner and runs off with a nurse, Fumiko (Yoshiko Sakurai), while her younger son, Kiyoji (Taketoshi Naito), joins the union and starts going out with Takako (Hatae Kishi), but becomes involved in a conflict with her father, who has been collaborating with the bosses.
Given the subject matter and the fact that one of the screenwriters is Kaneto Shindo, it will be no surprise to learn that this is a very left-wing film. Like some of Satsuo Yamamoto’s similarly-oriented films of the same period, it was made outside the studio system with money raised from thousands of union members each making a small contribution. The production company responsible, Kinuta Productions, had been established with funds paid by Toho Studios to the Japan Film and Theatre Workers’ Union in settlement of a legal dispute. Kinuta Productions had already made Haha nareba onna nareba (something like ‘A Mother is also a Woman’) the previous year, also starring Isuzu Yamada and directed by Fumio Kamei (1908-87). Kamei was a radical who had studied in the Soviet Union and subsequently worked at Toho before the content of his work had angered the Japanese authorities, who actually put him in prison for some time as a result. He also made documentaries, but the fact that he had to work outside the studio system due to his politics seems to have restricted his output more than it did that of his friend Satsuo Yamamoto, partly because Woman Walks the Earth Alone was a commercial failure.
Tanie Kitabayashi
As the film was shot on location, the cast and crew stayed with local coal mining families, lending authenticity, but perhaps partially explaining the lack of well-known names among the cast. Aside from Isuzu Yamada and Jukichi Uno, the most familiar faces are probably Kon Ichikawa favourites Tanie Kitabayashi (as a friend of Sayo’s) and Jun Hamamura, the latter in an uncharacteristic role as a bullying supervisor. Although Yamada is the ostensible star, the film spends a lot of time with its other characters and her role is not one of her most memorable. One reason the film is not better known may simply be because, as a non- studio picture, it has fallen through the cracks somewhat, but it would also be difficult to claim this as a forgotten masterpiece. Some of the characters are too one-dimensional, the ending is sentimental, and it occasionally lapses into melodrama, with the brutality of the supervisors particularly being overdone and straight out of the playbook of Soviet propaganda cinema.
Originally, the film ran at 164 minutes, but an organisation known as the Film Ethics Committee (or ‘Eirin’ for short) objected to the references to the Korean War, and this was apparently the reason why it was cut to 132 minutes (the pressure to increase coal production that leads to the miners’ protest towards the end of the film was originally attributed to aiding the U.S. military in the Korean War, in regard to which Japan was officially neutral). The shorter version is the one I have seen and I feel that it would probably have more impact in the longer cut (which, happily, still survives, although is yet to be released on home video).
Isuzu Yamada
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