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).

Summer Storm / 夏の嵐 / Natsu no arashi (1956)

Obscure Japanese Film #112

Masahiko Tsugawa and Mie Kitahara

Director Ko Nakahira’s first film following his famous ‘sun tribe’ movie Crazed Fruit again stars Mie Kitahara and examines the lives of disaffected youth in post-war Japan. The film opens dramatically with a brief but attention-grabbing pre-credits sequence in which we hear a startling scream from Kitahara, who is standing on a windy beach and shouting out to sea. “How unfair! You’ve gone forever, that’s so unfair. I’ll never forgive you for this! Never!” she yells before rushing into the stormy ocean. This scene is repeated again at the end of the film, by which point of course we have the context to understand it. 

 

Ryoko (Kitahara) is a young woman living with her family after having been raised by another woman they call ‘Aunt Maki’ (Ayuko Fujishiro) until she was 13, at which point Aunt Maki remarried and sent Ryoko back to her birth mother, Mitsu (granny-specialist Tanie Kitabayashi playing her real age for once). 

 

Tanie Kitabayashi

As a result, Ryoko not only feels unwanted by both women and resents them, but has grown up to be a cold and cynical person. Although she works as a teacher at a special needs school, it’s a job she has taken mainly because her parents were against it (for reasons which are unclear). The family live in a Western-style house and are practising Christians. Mitsu takes religion especially seriously and is insufferably self-righteous; Ryoko sees her sister Taeko (Yoko Kozono) as a carbon copy of her mother and despises her for this reason. Their father (Yo Shiomi) is an antiques collector with his head in the clouds most of the time, and the only family member Ryoko feels any kinship with is her younger brother Akira (Masahiko Tsugawa), mainly because he’s adopted. 

 

Masahiko Tsugawa

Into this already dysfunctional household steps Akimoto (Tatsuya Mitsuhashi), a young man who is newly-engaged to Taeko. He’s full of self-loathing after having survived a suicide pact with a former girlfriend who died. When Ryoko is introduced, she suffers a shock – by pure coincidence, Akimoto is the same man she once had a one-night stand with on a camping trip. Trouble begins when the two realise they still have feelings for each other…  

 

Tatsuya Mihashi

In an attempt to follow the huge success of Crazed Fruit (based on a Shintaro Ishihara story), Nikkatsu studios chose to adapt another controversial Akutagawa Prize-nominated story by an angry young author – in this case a female one, Michiko Fukai (1932-2015). This is the only one of Fukai’s stories to have been filmed, and her literary career seems to have been a short one. To my knowledge, none of her stories have been translated into English. Although information about Fukai is scarce on the web, she was apparently influenced by Luchino Visconti’s portrayal of self-destructive emotions in Senso (1954), which had been released in Japan as Natsu no arashi, or Summer Storm, and whose title she borrowed. 

Tatsuya Mihashi and Yoko Kozono

 

The film features a considerable amount of voiceover narration by star Mie Kitahara, and is quite a dialogue-heavy piece of work in itself. It’s extremely well-directed by Ko Nakahira, who helps to hold the interest with some unusual staging; for example, he has Kitahara play a whole scene lying face down on the floor at one point, while in another, Ryoko and her colleague Kido (Nobuo Kaneko) exchange lines in a sweltering staffroom while each try to commandeer the one electric fan available. Unfortunately, Ryoko and Akimoto are both such self-pitying characters that they soon grow tiresome, and they are also given to saying things like “I crave exhilarating drama that makes my head reel!” (Ryoko). Perversely, it’s only when Akimoto realises that Taeko doesn’t love him that he wants to marry her. “You can’t understand my delight at the living death she promises me!” he exults. It’s hard to imagine real people saying such things, and I doubt it would sound any less pretentious in Japanese as the subtitles by Stuart J Walton are excellent. For these reasons, the film ultimately left me cold, and I suspect that it was a good deal less well-received than Crazed Fruit considering that it’s nowhere near as well-known and there were no further collaborations between Ko Nakahira and Mie Kitahara, or adaptations of Michiko Fukai’s stories. Where Crazed Fruit successfully tapped into the zeitgeist, Ryoko and Akimoto are both a bit too weird for most people to relate to; consequently, Summer Storm’s themes of suicide and incest feel like a slightly misjudged attempt to appeal to the supposedly nihilistic and rebellious youth of the time through mere shock value. 

 

Bonus trivia: Mie Kitahara (b.1933) was one of Japanese cinema’s biggest stars of the late 1950s and is still alive at the time of writing. After making 20 films with fellow star Yujiro Ishihara in the space of five years, she married him and retired from films in 1960, subsequently appearing in only one TV drama in 1964. Known as Makiko Ishihara since she quit acting, she co-managed her husband’s production company for many years and continued to run it after his death in 1987.