Obscure Japanese Film #82
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| Hideko Takamine |
Taro Urashima is the mythical hero of a Japanese folk tale who rode on the back of a turtle which took him to an underwater palace where he stayed for what he thought was a few days before returning home to find that centuries had passed. The hero of this Toho production, Goro Urashima (Susumu Fujita, the star of Kurosawa’s Sanshiro Sagata films), is a former soldier newly returned to Japan after being stranded for 18 months on a south seas island. Sporting an impressive beard, he yearns for peace and democracy now that the war is over. When he is interviewed on the radio about his experiences, he tells of how the island natives would sometimes gather and let out a haunting, mournful cry which moved him deeply. He demonstrates the sound over the airwaves, after which it resonates with Japan’s workers, who begin imitating it.
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| Susumu Fujita |
Meanwhile, young reporter Akiko (Hideko Takamine) – accused of having ‘pretty face, empty head’ by her boss (Haruko Sugimura) – spots an opportunity and tracks down Urashima for an interview. Hoping to milk the story for as long as possible, she suggests that he perform his cry from the roof of the Diet building for several days, and she runs a series of articles in which she claims that he is a descendant of Taro Urashima. Goro’s wail becomes a rallying call and the workers build him up into their champion. But soon he is being unwittingly used by a fake democratic group called the Japanese Happiness Party, who actually intend to exploit the workers mercilessly once they get into power…
With its obvious pro-democracy, beware-false-prophets message, this is the sort of film that the occupying Americans strongly encouraged after the war. In fact, the story owes much to the Frank Capra movies Mr Smith Goes to Washington (1939) and Meet John Doe (1941), but here it’s all a bit po-faced. This type of material was clearly not director Mikio Naruse’s forte and it remains a real anomaly among his films – he did not repeat the error and only collaborated with screenwriter Yasutaro Yagi on one further occasion for the more enjoyable comedy Conduct Report of Professor Ishinaka (1950).
Apart from Hideko Takamine, it’s hard to find much to like about this film – Fujita seems uncomfortable in his role, while the music score is quite poor, perhaps explaining why it would be the final of just three screen credits for composer Toshio Yamada. Worse still, Goro’s cry sounds like a bad Tarzan impression and, unfortunately, it soon becomes grating and is repeated ad infinitum.
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