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