Kimi shinitamo koto nakare / 君死に給うことなかれ (‘Don’t Die Before Your Time’, 1954)

Obscure Japanese Film #115

Yoko Tsukasa

1940. Baggy-suited university professor Wataru (Ryo Ikebe) falls for Kumiko (Yoko Tsukasa), the nurse looking after his ailing mother in the hospital. However, his best friend, Kojima (Yoshio Tsuchiya), is being sent off to war and wants Wataru to marry his sister, Reiko (Setsuko Wakayama). Wataru resists and, when Kumiko is reassigned to Hiroshima, he follows her but receives a telegram en route ordering him to report for military duty immediately. The two are separated and lose touch with each other amid the chaos of war. 

Ryo Ikebe

Five years later, Kumiko has survived the A-bomb and is working for a man (Takashi Shimura) who runs a nursery school for orphans in Hiroshima. However, she has radiation burns on her body and the doctors believe there is a strong chance of her developing leukemia. For this reason, she believes that she is no longer fit for marriage and has changed her name in case Wataru tries to find her. In fact, Wataru has already tried to do so and concluded that she must be dead; he has married Reiko, but remains heartbroken. When circumstances lead him to suspect that Kumiko may still be alive, he makes every effort to track her down…

Setsuko Wakayama

 

This wartime weepie was originally to star Ineko Arima, but she had to withdraw due to an eye problem and was replaced by Yoko Tsukasa, a Mainichi Broadcasting System employee who had never acted before but had just done her first modelling job and was spotted by director Seiji Maruyama on a magazine cover. Tsukasa proved that she was more than just a pretty face and became an instant star as a result. 

Takashi Shimura and Ryo Ikebe

On the basis of this film, it should be unsurprising that director Seiji Maruyama went on to become best-known for his later war films as, while some scenes are indifferently shot, the movie suddenly comes alive during the impressive action scene in which Wataru and Kumiko have to flee their train along with hundreds of other passengers due to an aerial attack.

Yoko Tsukasa

 

Given the storyline, this Toho picture can hardly fail to be moving, and indeed it is, but it also feels rather contrived at times, and the characters often fail to be as sympathetic as they’re presumably supposed to be. Wataru just seems to assume that his feelings are reciprocated by Kumiko and forces himself on her whether she likes it or not, while Kumiko appears to revel in playing the martyr. The film also tries to have its cake and eat it in that Kumiko’s only visible scar from the A-bomb (that we get to see anyway) is on one wrist, making it rather too easy for Wataru to dismiss it (compare this to the scene in A Night to Remember in which Jiro Tamiya is made to feel considerably more uncomfortable). One can’t help feeling that the bombing of Hiroshima in this film is little more than a convenient plot device. 

Judai no seiten / 十代の性典 (‘Teenage Sex Book’, 1953)

Obscure Japanese Film #114

Ayako Wakao

 

When high school student Fusae (Yoko Minamida) is excused from PE one day due to having her period, she finds herself opportunistically stealing the wallet of a classmate, Eiko (Ayako Wakao). She’s caught in the act by a male student who tries to blackmail her into kissing him. When she refuses, he grasses her up to the teacher, who tells Fusae not to be too hard on herself as many women do strange things when in this condition.

Yoko Minamida

Later, Fusae finds 10,000 yen in the street and gives 1000 to her father (Eijiro Tono) to pay the overdue electricity bill as he is being threatened with disconnection. Feeling that she had no right to this money either, Fusae is tormented by feelings of shame and decides that she needs to get a job, so she seeks help from Machiko (Ikiru’s Miki Odagiri), a friend who has already left school and is selling fish door to door.

Miki Odagiri

 

Akiko Sawamura

 

Meanwhile, 17-year-old Eiko has a crush on older female friend Kaoru (Akiko Sawamura), a senior student who is secretly dating Nitta (Ken Hasebe), a male art student. However, Kaoru does not allow Nitta to touch her as she has a fear of men, perhaps partly because she’s a Christian and believes she will go to Hell if she has sex before marriage. Asako (Yuko Tsumura), on the other hand, is a free and easy hedonist who is also in love with Nitta. When these three go ice skating together as part of a larger group, tragedy strikes…

Yuko Tsumura

 

 

This is a strange little film that comes across as some kind of Christian propaganda intended to persuade young women to hang on to their virginity until they are married; Ayako Wakao’s character even converts to Christianity at the end. Today, the film seems quaint and even ludicrous at times. For instance, it suggests that it’s perfectly normal for women to become kleptomaniacs when menstruating, and the strange sound effect we hear whenever a man gets too close to Kaoru soon becomes unintentionally comical.

Koreya Senda

 

Eijiro Tono

Yuko Tsumura and Eitaro Ozawa

The supporting cast includes Haiyuza Theatre founders Koreya Senda, Eijiro Tono and Eitaro Ozawa as the fathers of the main female characters, but the film will be of most interest today for fans of Ayako Wakao. According to Japanese Wikipedia, this film gave Wakao her breakthrough role and ‘received considerable criticism from educators, newspapers, and magazines, and for many years it was treated as taboo in interviews.’ If true, it’s hard to see why Teenage Sex Book was considered so controversial – the salacious title disguises a film which seems innocuous today and, although it was unusually frank regarding sexual matters for its time, there is nothing in it that seems designed to titillate. In any case, it clearly made money for Daiei studios as they turned it into a series and produced three follow-up films, although these were not direct sequels but separate stories with new characters. It’s also worth noting that Ayako Wakao cannot really be said to have the star role here – she is part of an ensemble, as can be seen from the fact that Yoko Minamida and Miki Odagiri also appeared alongside her in all of the sequels. Anyway, it’s fun to see Wakao at this early stage in her career, and she even engages in a little slapstick and executes an impressive pratfall at one point. Her real breakthrough role, though, was surely in Kenji Mizoguchi’s Gion Bayashi (aka A Geisha) the same year.

 

Akiko Sawamura

 

The fate of the film’s other star, Akiko Sawamura, remains something of a mystery – she appeared in the first sequel, then changed her name to Michiko Sawamura and made a few more films for Daiei before disappearing from the screen in 1954, after which she surfaced just one more time, appearing in The Story of Iron-Arm Imao, a baseball movie directed by Ishiro Honda for Toho in 1959.

 

Director Koji Shima (1901-86) was a former leading actor of the 1920s and ‘30s who worked frequently for directors Kenji Mizoguchi and Tomu Uchida. Most of these films are now lost, with Uchida’s Sweat (1929) being a notable exception. As a Daiei contract director during this period, it’s no surprise to learn that he also directed Wakao in ten other films including The Phantom Horse (1955). However, his most widely-seen film is Warning from Space (1956).

 

The Human Wall / 人間の壁/ Ningen no kabe (1959)

Obscure Japanese Film #113

Kyoko Kagawa

Fumiko (Kyoko Kagawa) is a teacher at an elementary school in Saga Prefecture in the south of Japan. Her pupils are mainly from poor families in which the men are employed at the nearby coal mine or work as fishermen. When the local council wants to cut costs by laying off 259 staff, Fumiko comes under pressure to resign from her bosses, who explain that, as she is married, she has her husband’s income to fall back on, and that’s why they’ve singled her out. However, the real reason is that they suspect her husband, Kenichiro (Shinji Minamibara), of being a communist. Fumiko loves her job and refuses to resign. Kenichiro is an executive committee member of the local teacher’s union, but he’s a careerist rather than an idealist, and the relationship between the couple worsens when he wants to use their savings to bribe an official so that he can get elected chairman. 

Shinji Minamibara

 

Jukichi Uno

Meanwhile, Fumiko’s colleague Sawada (Jukichi Uno) has troubles of his own – catching three of his pupils bullying a disabled classmate, he pushes them away, but then finds himself accused of assault. This situation is exploited by the Liberal Democratic Party, who attempt to use him as a political pawn. The school’s other self-sacrificing teachers also continue to be treated unfairly, but eventually – led by Fumiko – they learn the power of collective action…

Kyoko Kagawa

 

Based on a novel by Tatsuzo Ishikawa (1905-85) which was itself based on real events that occurred in 1957, this independent production was made by director Satsuo Yamamoto’s own company and financed by the Japan Teachers’ Union, who were encouraged by the success of Yamamoto’s previous film (Ballad of the Cart-Puller) and the fact that he had a distribution deal with Shin-Toho. After being blacklisted by the studios as a communist in 1950, Yamamoto had managed to produce a number of high-quality and often commercially-successful films mostly financed by unions – a remarkable feat which would eventually see him re-employed by the studios, who could not ignore his impressive track record. In 1962, he made the hugely successful Shinobi no mono for Daiei, launching both the ninja genre and a series which ran to nine films, the first three of which are soon to be released on Blu-ray by Radiance Films.

 

One reason that The Human Wall is languishing in obscurity today may be that the topical nature of the material appears to make it of little contemporary relevance. However, I would argue that similar things continue to happen to people today and the film still works well as an effective piece of drama. At the time, it was a critical as well as a commercial success, ranked 6^th best film of the year by Kinema Junpo and winning three Mainichi Film Concours awards: Jukichi Uno for Best Supporting Actor, Yamamoto for Best Director (for this and Ballad of the Cart-Puller) and Hikaru Hayashi for Best Score (for this, Ballad and Lucky Dragon No.5). It’s a shame that Kurosawa favourite Kyoko Kagawa was overlooked, as she gives an excellent performance and carries the film in what must be one of her best movie roles. At the time of writing, Kagawa is still with us at the age of 92 and has only recently retired. 

 

Eitaro Ozawa

Tanie Kitabayashi

Masao Mishima

Among the familiar faces in the supporting cast are Ken Utsui, Eijiro Tono, Eitaro Ozawa, Taiji Tonoyama, Tanie Kitabayashi, Masao Mishima, Teruko Kishi and Yunosuke Ito, but the most surprising performance for me was that of Sadako Sawamura, an actress I can only remember previously seeing as downtrodden types, but who here plays a strong, no-nonsense woman most effectively. 

Sadako Sawamura

 

Director Satsuo Yamamoto sometimes phoned it in when working on later studio assignments such as Zatoichi the Outlaw (1967) and The Peony Lantern (1968), but he clearly took a lot of care over projects close to his heart such as this one, and it shows, especially in his sensitive direction of the child characters and his impressive skill in the way he manages to coordinate large groups of them on location. While this film could easily have been a worthy bore, good work in all departments prevents this from being the case, and the excellent cast bring their characters vividly to life.

 

Bonus trivia: Author Tatsuzo Ishikawa also provided the literary sources for the later Yamamoto films Kizudarake no sanga (aka The Tycoon, 1964) and Kinkanshoku (1975).