Obscure Japanese Film #131
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Ayako Wakao
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Kasumi (Ayako Wakao) is a young woman of marriageable age prone to
daydreaming who believes that arranged marriages are better than love matches,
while her best friend Chieko (Hitomi Nozoe) thinks the opposite. However,
Kasumi finds herself strangely drawn to womaniser Sawai (Hiroshi Kawaguchi)
despite the fact that her father (Masao Shimizu) thinks that one of his
company’s employees, Maki (Jiro Tamiya), is the most promising candidate for
her hand…
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Hitomi Nozoe
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This Daiei comedy is clearly intended mainly as a vehicle for
Ayako Wakao, who not only receives a great many close-ups, but also gets to
wear a different outfit in each scene – in fact, she apparently designed all 22
of these herself, and they were popular enough that one women’s clothes store
in Tokyo even had an ‘Ojo-san’ section for a while.
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Hiroshi Kawaguchi
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Surprisingly, this project came about due to Wakao’s association
with Yukio Mishima, who wrote the 1960 novel on which it was based. Although
Mishima is famous as a writer of highbrow literature, he also wrote more
lowbrow novels and stories to make a quick yen (most of which have not been
translated into English). Ojo-san is
clearly an example of the latter as it was originally published in serial form
in a women’s magazine and the story is complete fluff. I have nothing against
light comedies, but the film seemed neither particularly funny nor clever to
me, and I found the whole thing rather pointless, although watchable enough.
However, young women in Japan in the early 1960s may well have felt that it
spoke to them in some way.
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Jiro Tamiya
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Wakao had first met Mishima when she appeared in a film version of
his novel Nagasugita haru in 1957. He
admired her greatly and, when he starred in Afraid
to Die (1960) for Daiei, he requested Wakao for his co-star. It was during
the course of making that film that the two discussed Ojo-san – Wakao said she would like to play the part, and Mishima
sold the rights to Daiei on the condition that the role went to her. He even
wrote two essays about her: ‘Ayako Wakao – The Woman on the Cover’ (1960) and ‘In
Praise of Ayako Wakao’ (1962), although apparently they weren’t to see each other
again after Mishima left Japan in November 1960 to spend a couple of months
travelling with his wife. Later, Wakao appeared in film versions of Mishima’s Frolic of the Beasts (1964) and Spring Snow (2005) as well as in his
play Rokumeikan on stage in 1988.
Here is a rough translation of some extracts from Mishima’s essay ‘In
Praise of Ayako Wakao’:
During
the shooting [of Afraid to Die], I
first discovered (although it was a very late discovery) that "Ayako Wakao
is no ordinary actress."… What I will never forget is her performance at
the climax of the film, when, after being thoroughly beaten by me, a tough, weak
yakuza, she still refuses to abort the baby she is carrying, showing her
womanly determination… The instinct, naturalness and strength of her
performance, which delivers and enriches all the emotions required by the role,
and also blends the three stages of stylistic change in between realistically
to build up to a perfect climax, is absolutely magnificent, and as I watched, I
felt that I had fallen 100% in love with her in my role.
People
just can't resist that strawberry-like frozen taste [she has]. Because of this,
she has always been popular but, at the same time, I think it was a major
detriment to her acting talent being recognised… An actor has to fight against
their looks. The more the public loves their looks, the more they have to fight
against this. Ayako Wakao fought against this, and won splendidly.
The director of Ojo-san,
Taro Yuge (1923-73), joined Daiei as an assistant director in 1947 but had to
wait until 1960 to become a director himself. In the meantime, he had worked
under Yasuzo Masumura and Kon Ichikawa among others, but his career was not
terribly distinguished and ended when the studio went bankrupt in 1971. He went
missing the following year and his body was discovered a year after that, his
death believed to have been a suicide. This sad event is probably emblematic of
how difficult the collapse of Daiei must have been for a great many of its
employees at the time. Of course, on a more positive note, the wonderful thing is that their films are not mouldering away in a vault, but have been well-preserved and are more
accessible outside Japan now than they have ever been before.
Thanks to A.K.
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