Home Sweet Home / 我が家は楽し / Waga ya wa tanoshi (1951)

Obscure Japanese Film #67

Isuzu Yamada and Hideko Takamine

This Shochiku production stars Hideko Takamine as Tomoko, the eldest child of office worker Kosaku Uemura (Chishu Ryu) and housewife Namiko (Isuzu Yamada). As she has three younger siblings, there are a total of six members of the family living together. They are struggling to make ends meet on Kosaku’s modest salary, so Namiko works from home as a seamstress. A cheerfully self-sacrificing woman, she eats bread to save money while serving her family rice and never complains even though her slightly bumbling and absent-minded husband has not exactly set the world on fire.

Chishu Ryu

 

Tomoko is in her early 20s and has ambitions to be a painter. Her fiancé, Saburo (Keiji Sada), is a war veteran with tuberculosis; she goes to visit him regularly in the sanatorium where he is a patient. Tomoko’s 18-year-old sister Nobuko (Keiko Kishi in her film debut) has started to become very popular with the local boys, something which causes some concern for her parents. Meanwhile, Tomoko feels she should probably give up painting and get a job to ease the financial burden on her family, but when Kosaku gets a bonus at work, it seems as if all their problems will be solved. However, just at the moment their hopes have been raised, they hit a run of bad luck and everything starts to go wrong…

Hideko Takamine and Keiko Kishi

 

Cinema audiences of the time must have related strongly to the problems faced by the Uemura family in a Japan that was yet to have recovered economically from the war. As portrayed here by a remarkable cast of then-present and future stars, the whole family are so likeable that you really feel for them when bad luck strikes.

Keiji Sada

 

This is the only film I’ve seen by director Noboru Nakamura (not to be confused with the more Roger Corman-like Nobuo Nakagawa!). Apparently, this was the first film of Nakamura’s to receive a considerable amount of positive attention from the critics of the day. I can’t say that I noticed anything exceptional in his direction, but the film compares well to similar domestic dramas by such filmmakers such as Ozu and Naruse – in fact, screenwriter Sumie Tanaka often wrote for Naruse – and I would certainly recommend it to anyone who enjoys their work.

UPDATE: I've since seen director Noburo Nakamura's Koto (1963), a really excellent film featuring a great dual performance by Shima Iwashita. I haven't reviewed it as I felt I had little to add to Japan on Film's review, which you can read here.