Obscure Japanese Film #61
L-R: Hitomi Nozoe, Shin Saburi, Ayako Wakao and Machiko Kyo
This comedy from Daiei studios stars Ayako Wakao as Kazuko, a modern young career woman working for Nissan Motors in Tokyo and living at home with her widowed father, Gosuke (Shin Saburi). Looking after him takes up much of her free time as he tends to come home drunk and is so useless in the kitchen that he can’t slice a lettuce without nearly severing a finger in the process.
Hitomi Nozoe
Kazuko’s spoilt younger sister Michiko (Hitomi Nozoe) is no help in the house and is focusing on her new career as a flight stewardess. Kazuko has a fiancée, Hanjiro (Kenji Sugawara), but she seldom sees him as he is working in Osaka. The engagement is an arranged one and Kazuko’s heart is not really in it, so she decides to break it off. Her best friend, Umeko (Machiko Kyo), also lives in Osaka, where she runs a restaurant with her stepbrother, Torao (Eiji Funakoshi), who hopes one day to marry his stepsister. When Umeko comes to see Kazuko in Tokyo, Kazuko asks her to pay a visit to Hanjiro and cancel the engagement on her behalf, but when Umeko meets him, she falls for him herself. Meanwhile, Michiko has a crush on Tetsu (Hiroshi Kawaguchi), a young man who delivers the laundry and attends night school, but he is smitten with Kazuko, so it seems that everyone is in love with the wrong person…
Ayako Wakao
Were it not for some quirky humour typical of director Kon Ichikawa, this could easily pass for a Yasuzo Masumura film and covers similar themes to Masumura’s Beauty is Guilty released the same year and featuring much of the same cast. Both films are concerned with the new possibilities which were opening up for women in Japan at the time and both feature a modern, Westernised woman (played by Ayako Wakao) contrasted with a more traditional counterpart who dresses in Japanese clothes (Machiko Kyo here, Fujiko Yamamoto in Beauty is Guilty) .
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| Machiko Kyo and Ayako Wakao |
Goodbye, Hello is also something of a twist on the films of Ozu in which Setsuko Hara ponders whether to leave home and get married or stay and look after widowed father Chishu Ryu. The ending of this film subverts the expectations that audiences would have had from familiarity with Ozu’s pictures.
Although it’s a minor work in the filmography of Kon Ichikawa, it’s certainly not without interest, especially as it features such a strong cast. Ayako Wakao and Machiko Kyo were paired by Daiei on quite a few occasions and clearly worked well together.
Kenji Sugawara, Hiroshi Kawaguchi and Eiji Funakoshi making their best drinking faces
Hiroshi Kawaguchi is actually quite funny and likeable for a change; he married frequent co-star Hitomi Nozoe the following year. There’s even a brief appearance by a skinny young Jiro Tamiya right at the beginning (when he was still known by his real name, Goro Shibata).
Jiro Tamiya (left)
The screenplay was co-written by Kon Ichikawa and his wife Natto Wada under their pen name of ‘Kurishitei’ in collaboration with Kazuo Funahashi. Some Japanese sources say that it had first appeared as a serialised novel. The Japanese title actually translates as The Password for You and I is ‘Goodbye, Hello’.
Watched without subtitles.
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