Totsugu hi made / 嫁ぐ日まで (‘Until Your Wedding Day’, 1940)

Obscure Japanese Film #231

 

Setsuko Hara

Yoshiko (Setsuko Hara) lives with her widowed father (Ko Mihashi) and younger sister Asako (Akira Kurosawa’s future wife, Yoko Yaguchi, in her film debut). She’s being courted by Atsushi (Heihachiro Okawa), but feels that she cannot get married until her father finds a new wife to look after him and Asako. A suitable woman is found in the person of Tsuneko (Sadako Sawamura), but Asako is still very attached to the memory of her late mother, so will she accept another woman filling this role? 

 

Yoko Yaguchi

This domestic drama from Toho Eiga seems to prefigure the post-war films of Ozu, even down to the choice of Setsuko Hara as star. It’s well-made and features very natural performances from an impressive cast that also includes Haruko Sugimura as a piano teacher, but it’s arguably a little too low-key for its own good. It also features a couple of rather awkward ellipses and I must say that I found the ending completely unsatisfactory, perhaps largely because writer-director-producer Yasujiro Shimazu chose not to set it up in any way, so that when it comes it’s so out of the blue it feels almost random. 

 

Ko Mihashi

Shimazu, who died aged 48 of stomach cancer just after the war ended, was one of Japan’s most acclaimed directors of the 1930s. Credited with pioneering a new emphasis on realism and the lives of everyday people, it’s likely that he would have been much better known today had he survived and been able to continue directing for another decade or two. Keisuke Kinoshita, one of several fine directors who apprenticed under Shimazu, considered him a tyrant yet admitted he had learnt a great deal from him. 

 

Heihachiro Okawa

Intriguingly, there is a scene in which Asako’s school friends discuss going to see the 1938 French film about a reformatory school for teenage girls, Prison sans barreaux, which had recently been released in Japan, although it was unclear to me whether this was intended to say anything Asako's rebellion, mild as it is.  

 

Sadako Sawamura

 

Watch on my YouTube channel with English subtitles

https://BUYMEACOFFEE.com/martindowsing 

The Crab Cannery Ship / 蟹工船 / Kanikosen (1953)

Obscure Japanese Film #159

So Yamamura

Based on the 1929 novel of the same name by communist writer Takiji Kobayashi (tortured to death by the police in 1933 aged just 30), this independent production depicts the harsh conditions on board the titular vessel, where the men are not much better off than the crabs they’re tasked with catching. The ship itself is closely modelled on the real-life Hakuai maru, which had started life as a hospital ship before being purchased by a fishing company. The crab-catching is carried out using smaller boats, which then return to the ship, where the catch is processed and canned on board. According to Japanese Wikipedia, this put the ship in a legal grey area as the usual naval laws did not apply to a factory ship, and neither did the labour laws that applied to factories based on land. Of course, this makes it easy for the owners to exploit the workers mercilessly and without fear of legal consequences. Many of those doing the canning are mere children, while the men are worked like slaves, frequently beaten and occasionally lost overboard with no attempt being made to rescue them. This brutal regime is overseen by Asakawa (Ko Mihashi), who even gives orders to the weak and ineffectual ship’s captain (Minosuke Yamada), whom he forbids to respond to an SOS call from another ship. 

Ko Mihashi

 

Minosuke Yamada

The Crab Cannery Ship was the first of six films to be directed by So Yamamura, an actor perhaps most familiar outside Japan for playing Admiral Yamamoto in Tora! Tora! Tora! (1970). He gives himself a small part here as a fugitive who has joined the crew to escape the police. Yamamura also wrote the screenplay and invested his own money into the production. 

 

So Yamamura

It was the second film made by Gendai Eigasha, an independent company established in 1951 by former Toho employee Tengo Yamada (1916-88) to produce such left-wing, social conscience works as this and Tadashi Imai’s Darkness at Noon (1956). Since Yamada’s death, the company has been headed by his widow, Hisako Yamada (b.1932), and, although its output has been sporadic, continues to produce films at the time of writing. 

Jun Hamamura (left) and unidentified others

 

Unsurprisingly for this kind of story, there are no shades of grey to be found in the characterisations – everyone is either victim or victimiser, and the acting is pretty broad throughout. There is no star part, and the strengths of the film are in the realism of its setting, its fast pace and its often impressive camerawork. Cinematographer Yoshio Miyajima (who won an award for his work here) crowds the screen with grim, shadowy faces, lending the picture an almost tangible sense of claustrophobia while tilting the camera horizontally left and right appropriately (the film is not recommended to anyone prone to seasickness). Meanwhile, Akira Ifukube’s music is so ominous it sounds like he’s warming up for the following year’s Godzilla.

 

Ko Mihashi and unidentified others

Japan’s later economic recession led to the novel becoming a surprise best-seller again in 2008, and a remake appeared the following year. 

DVD at Amazon Japan (no English subtitles)