Rise, Fair Sun / 朝やけの詩 / Asayake no uta (‘Poem of the Morning Glow’, 1973)

 

Tatsuya Nakadai

 

The Shinano Plateau, Nagano. Left without a position after Japan’s defeat, former naval officer Sakuzo (Tatsuya Nakadai) is now a comparatively poor but hard-working and extremely proud farmer with a teenage daughter, Haruko (Keiko Takahashi), and two younger children, all of whom he is raising by himself. His wife, Yaeko (Kaneko Iwasaki), seems to have been unable to bear the drudgery, has developed a drinking problem and left him for an easier life, shacking up with Kamiyama (Yosuke Kondo). He’s the president of Apollo Tourism, who want all the farmers in the area to clear out so they can use the land to build a holiday resort. As the farmers are all in debt to local bigwig Inagi (Shin Saburi), Kamiyama conspires with him to make them an offer they can’t refuse, but some – like Sakuzo – prove inconveniently stubborn. When land surveyors are sent in, violence breaks out… 

 

Kaneko Iwasaki and Keiko Takahashi

 

Rise, Fair Sun was a co-production between Toho and Haiyuza, the theatre company to whom Nakadai and a number of his fellow cast members (including Kaneko Iwasaki and Yosuke Kondo) belonged. The film was directed by Kei Kumai and based on his original screenplay, co-written with the little-known Akiko Katsura and the slightly better-known Hisashi Yamanouchi, who had worked on three of Shohei Imamura’s early pictures. Like many of Kumai’s films, it has an obvious left-wing, social conscience theme. 

 

Shin Saburi and Nakadai

 

In the early 1970s, many Japanese feature films returned to using the old academy ratio that the studios had originally abandoned around 1957, and this film is one example of such. As I understand it, this was mainly done because it was cheaper and the studios’ profits were diminishing, but I also wonder whether it may have been related to the more TV-friendly nature of the academy ratio as the sale of films to television after their cinema run was more of a concern by this point. In any case, it’s part of the reason why Rise, Fair Sun has something of a TV miniseries feel to it. However, that’s not to say that the film fails to impress visually – mostly shot on location, it features some beautiful scenery and attractive cinematography by Kozo Okazaki (Goyokin, Inn of Evil) which includes a spectacular shot of Haruko and her young lover silhouetted against the sun towards the end. Another plus is the score by Kumai’s regular composer, Teizo Matsumura, which is refreshingly free from the usual clichés. 

 

 

The film is generally very sympathetic to Sakuzo despite the clear suggestion that his wife has been a victim of domestic violence, an implied additional motivation for her absence. Like Toshiro Mifune in Redbeard, there’s a scene in which Nakadai appears to forget that he’s not in a samurai movie and launches a one-man attack on multiple opponents – in this case grabbing a surveying pole and going into full Sword of Doom mode on the unfortunate surveyors. As if to compensate for this violent side, he tries to save a bloated cow (by stabbing it!) and, while digging on his land, he discovers an ancient pot from the Jomon people (who were believed to have lived in harmony with nature to a remarkable degree). This instantly turns his farm into a major archaeological site, and when a Jomon face sculpture is dug up, he declares it better than anything in the Louvre (which he has apparently visited while in the navy). This unexpected plot thread is quickly dropped, but – with symbolism not too hard to decipher – we will later see a shot of a bulldozer carelessly running over another piece of Jomon pottery. 

 

 

 

 

The film marked veteran star Shin Saburi’s return to the big screen after an absence of 12 years, during which time he had been very active as both an actor and director in television. It was his first film opposite Nakadai and there’s a memorable confrontation scene between the two, who were reunited the following year in Satsuo Yamamoto’s The Family. Nakadai had known his other co-star, Kaneko Iwasaki, since the very beginning of his acting career and the two had appeared in a number of films together. Though she has seldom had leading roles in feature films, Iwasaki is the official representative of Haiyuza at the time of writing and remains a highly respected stage actor who played the King Lear equivalent in Haiyuza’s 2024 production Dokoku no Ria (‘Lear’s Lament’). 

 

 

 

 

 

The production of the film was overshadowed by the publicity around the nude swimming scene featuring an 18-year-old Keiko Takahashi – then known as Keiko Sekine – who had already been a popular star for a couple of years at this point. Although the inclusion of such a scene may have been a cynical move by the producers, it was tastefully shot by Kumai, but in any case it was not enough to make Rise, Fair Sun a hit either at the box office or with the critics. Though screened in competition at the Berlin Film Festival, it failed to win any prizes. This is not too surprising as, despite some good work in a number of departments, it’s basically a noble effort which doesn’t quite gel – mainly, I think, due to the flawed script and somehow unconvincing characters. In my view, stories of this type often work better with a more Ken Loach-type approach, in which the use of improvisation by a cast of mainly non-professionals can be more effective.

The Berkeley Art Museum and Pacific Film Archive (BAMPFA) Film Library in Californiaa has a 35mm print of this film with English subtitles

Thanks to A.K.

 

Wounded Beast / 傷つける野獣 / Kizu tsukeru yaju (1959)

Obscure Japanese Film #195

 

Tamio Kawaji

Kasahara (Tamio Kawaji) is a young man who bungles an attempt to rob a bank in Yokohama, shooting one of the staff in the process, and is forced to flee the scene without the loot. Detective Kizaki (Hideaki Nitani) is assigned to the case and soon discovers that the bullet matches a gun stolen from a detective killed in Osaka a few days before. Kasahara seeks refuge in the house of his sister (Tomoko Ko), but the police soon arrive and he only just manages to give them the slip. 

 

Hideaki Nitani

 

Kizaki’s investigations reveal that Kasahara was orphaned during the war and subsequently slid into a life of delinquency and petty crime. He loves Yoshiko (Hisako Tsukuba), who reciprocates his feelings, and we learn that he attempted the bank robbery after happening to see a vox pop interview in a cinema newsreel in which Yoshiko was asked by a reporter what it was she most wanted and replied ‘Money!’ The police now realise that all they have to do is follow Yoshiko and Kasahara will turn up sooner or later…

 

Hisako Tsukuba

 

This Nikkatsu noir credits notable future director Kei Kumai with its screenplay (his first) and has a separate credit for the prolific Hajime Takaiwa for ‘adaptation’, although it seems not to have had a literary source. Director Hiroshi Noguchi* directed his first eight feature films for Nikkatsu between 1939 and 1941, after which the war led to the studio becoming part of Daiei until 1954, when Noguchi became a director again, having spent most of the intervening years as an A.D. at Shochiku. He never made the top tier and remained a B-picture man until his premature death from a heart attack in 1967 at the age of 54, shortly after having completed his 85th film, Nikkatsu’s only monster movie, Gappa, the Triphibian Monster. However, if Wounded Beast is anything to go by, he was clearly not without talent, as it’s a fast-moving, stylish and entertaining piece of work. 

 

Joe Shishido

The majority of the cast are not terribly well-known (at least outside Japan), but – as one of the detectives – it does feature a young Joe Shishido, who appears to have begun but not yet completed the cheek augmentation surgery that would eventually lead to him resembling a hamster with the mumps. The underrated Yoko Minamida also pops up as Detective Kizaki’s girlfriend. 

 

Yoko Minamida

 

The opening credits sequence benefits from a cool jazz theme by composer Teizo Matsumura featuring what sounds like metal pipes being struck; this is followed by an abrupt silence and an attention-grabbing opening shot of a gun pointed directly at the camera. Noguchi also makes effective use of real locations and handles the action sequences very well. However, the most surprising aspect of the film is the amount of sympathy it has for Kasahara, even though he’s killed two people, one of whom was a police detective. The film’s liberal message is clearly that he’s really just a scared kid who’s had a lousy life and is desperately trying to act tough because he lacked a positive role model. 

*Aka Haruyasu Noguchi, real name Shigeichi Noguchi

Bonus trivia: Hisako Tsukuba later produced Piranha (1978) and several of its sequels.

Watched with dodgy subtitles

Amazon Japan (no subtitles)

 

Teigin Incident: Death Row Prisoner /帝銀事件 死刑囚 / Teigin jiken: Shikeishu aka The Long Death (1964)

Obscure Japanese Film #35 

 

Kinzo Shin

The debut film from director Kei Kumai (who also wrote the screenplay) is a docu-drama without stars which tells the true story of the Teigin Incident, one of the most notorious and bizarre crimes in the history of post-war Japan. On 26 January 1948, a man visited a bank in Tokyo just after closing time claiming to be an official from the health department. He informed the bank manager that he was there to protect the staff from an outbreak of dysentery in the area and it was necessary for them to take an oral vaccine. The manager gathered the staff together and the man demonstrated the correct way to take the medicine, apparently swallowing a dose himself to show that it was safe. The staff all took the ‘medicine’ together but within a very short time had been rendered helpless as a result of cyanide poisoning. The man stole 164,000 yen in cash and a cheque for 17,000 yen and left. He had even given a dose to the 8-year-old son of one of the staff, poisoning 16 people in total. Including the boy, 11 died at the scene, with one further victim expiring in hospital later. Perhaps the most disturbing aspect of the crime was the calmness with which the man had carried it out – although there seems little doubt that he knew the poison would be fatal, the survivors said that his hands had not even trembled as he administered it.

The police arrested a painter named Sadamichi Hirasawa on suspicion of the murders. There were three main reasons for this: there was proof that he had been given a business card which matched the one that the man had presented at the bank but he was unable to produce it; he resembled the description given by the survivors; and he had recently deposited 130,000 yen into his bank account, but refused to reveal the source of his windfall. Hirasawa eventually confessed, but later withdrew his confession, claiming to have been coerced by the police under considerable duress. Doubts about his guilt were also fuelled by the fact that most of the witnesses could not identify him confidently. Nevertheless, the court found Hirasawa guilty and he was sentenced to death, although the sentence was never carried out and he was to die in prison in 1987 at the age of 95.

The Teigin Incident was a big news story in Japan in its day, and one which ran for a long time due to the numerous legal appeals and occasional uncovering of possible new evidence. It also gave birth to a number of conspiracy theories. Perhaps this explains why Nikkatsu Studios thought a film about the case may prove popular even without stars. Kumai clearly believed Hirasawa to have been innocent and was hoping to raise awareness about what he saw as a miscarriage of justice. Personally speaking, from what I’ve read about the case, I believe he was probably guilty. One theory as to why he would not explain the source of his bank deposit is that he had been earning money by painting pornographic pictures and was ashamed to admit it; in my view, it’s difficult to believe that he would not have owned up to that under the circumstances. It would be a strange person indeed who would prefer to be thought guilty of murdering 12 people including a child rather than be exposed as a clandestine painter of lewd pictures. It is also worth noting that some of the works of respected Japanese masters such as Hokusai and Kyosai were pornographic in nature, so would this really have been considered such a shameful thing to have done? Furthermore, Hirasawa’s alibi was that he was walking close to the scene of the crime at the time; considering he had lived in that area in the past but was at that point living in Hokkaido, this must be the world’s worst alibi. 

 

Kumai chooses not to focus on any one character; instead, he concentrates his attention on details of the investigations by both the police and the press. He frequently crams the frame with large groups of policemen and journalists (often seen fanning themselves or wiping the sweat from their necks), painting a picture of post-war Tokyo as a hot, overcrowded and oppressive place just as he would in his later film Wilful Murder (1981), which has a great deal in common with this one. Wilful Murder differs in approach mainly in giving us a central character to identify with (the crusading journalist played by Tatsuya Nakadai) and is arguably more engaging for that reason. Kumai works hard to make his film more than a compilation of scenes of men explaining stuff by throwing in a couple of fights and generally keeping things moving as much as possible. His next film, A Chain of Islands, covered similar ground but used a fictional story, and he would go on to expose other incidents he viewed as injustices his country had tried to sweep under the carpet in a number of future works, such as Sandakan No.8 and The Sea and Poison.

Teigin Incident: Death Row Prisoner is a rather talky picture that tells a complex story, but it’s certainly well-made and features an effectively ominous score by Godzilla composer Akira Ifukube and atmospheric black and white camerawork by Umetsugu Inoue favourite Kazumi Iwasa. The large ensemble cast are mostly fine, while gaunt character actor Kinzo Shin nabs the key role of Hirasawa and portrays him with heartfelt sympathy as being unambiguously innocent. A familiar face from many Japanese films of the era, this was likely the highlight of his on-screen career.

Teigin Incident: Death Row Prisoner seems to have received some screenings abroad under the title The Long Death, but I was unable to find a subtitled copy. 

Nice use of a poster for Kurosawa's Drunken Angel (1948)