Kirai Kirai Kirai / 嫌い嫌い嫌い / (‘Hate hate hate’, 1960)

 

Ichiro Sugai

 

Sojuro Shinkawa (Ichiro Sugai) is the elderly chairman of the Shinkawa conglomerate, a position which he was hoping his son, Sotaro (Kenji Sugawara), would succeed him in. However, Sotaro has rebelled and gone off to do his own thing, so Sojuro gathers the presidents of the six companies which make up the conglomerate and asks them each to select their most promising employee and send them to head office, where they will compete to marry his granddaughter, Kikuko (Atsuko Kindaichi), and the winner will be groomed to become the new chairman. 

 

Atsuko Kindaichi

 

The six men chosen run the gamut from the ultra masculine Nagaoka (Ryuichi Ishii) with his impressive chest hair to the effeminate Hirose (Kanji Matsumoto), who drinks only milk, a thermos of which he always carries with him. Other candidates include Sakurai (future director Juzo Itami), who used to be friends with Kikuko as a child, the handsome and modest Tsujimoto (Jiro Tamiya), who appears to be the favourite, and coal miner Fukumitsu (Gen Mitamura), who is conflicted due to his secret love for co-worker Sumiko (Junko Kano)…

 

Jiro Tamiya

 

This Daiei production was based on a novel entitled Hana no sarariman (‘The Flower Salaryman’) by Keita Genji (1912-85), a writer well-known for this type of material whose work also provided the basis for many other films including Masumura’s Blue Sky Maiden (1957) and The Most Valuable Wife (1959). 

 

Junko Kano

 

Sachiko Hidari

For me, the main appeal was that it provided a rare chance to see another film by Hiroshi Edagawa, whose Roses Bloom on The Rose Bush (1959) I liked so much. However, this one is less interesting as it’s basically a piece of fluff, albeit a well-made one which is not unentertaining. It’s an ensemble piece with no real star at the centre, although Jiro Tamiya and Junko Kano were both beginning to get popular at the time and Sachiko Hidari also appears prominently, although in a role that has little bearing on the story, while Kazuko Matsuo pops up singing the title song in a nightclub (to which you can listen on YouTube here). Even Bokuzen Hidari makes an appearance as one of the company presidents - which may well be the most untypical role he ever played. Anyway, for the most part, it's a pleasant enough time-passer, though the gay stereotyping of Kanji Matsumoto’s character is regrettable. 

 

Bokuzen Hidari

 

A note on the title:

Kirai can also be translated as ‘I hate it’, ‘I hate you’, etc, so the tag line on the Japanese posters should probably be read as ‘I hate him because he’s handsome! I hate him because he’s rich! I hate him because he has chest hair! Is that really true?’

 

Kazuko Matsuo

 Watched with dodgy subtitles. 

The Seasons of Love / 四季の愛欲 / Shiki no aiyoku (‘Four Seasons of Love’, 1958)

 

Shoji Yasui

 

Gyo (Shoji Yasui) is a famous writer married to self-centred model Ginko (Yuko Kusunoki), but their marriage is not registered and they have told few people about it, fearing that to make it public might damage their careers. Ginko hates Gyo’s mother, Urako (Isuzu Yamada), believing that she abandoned Gyo when he was a child and only got back in touch after he became famous so she could sponge off him. Now 48, Urako is a widow, but in many ways she behaves like a young woman and has a lover, Hirakawa (Tomo’o Nagai), who owns a fabric wholesale business (at one point, she even takes him to see a blue movie). 

 

Yuko Kusunoki

 

Tomo'o Nagai and Isuzu Yamada

She also has two other adult children. One, Momoko (Yoko Katsuragi), is married to the older Tatabe (Jukichi Uno), but does not love him even though he treats her kindly and they have a young son. Unfortunately, she’s fallen in love with Tatabe’s cousin, Akaboshi (Yuji Odaka), a two-faced womaniser who laughs at her love letters behind her back. (After he tears one up and throws it in the wastepaper basket, we see his secretary taping it back together so she can read it). 

 

Yoko Katsuragi and Yuji Odaka

 

Urako’s other daughter is Harue (Sanae Nakahara), who dislikes Ginko and wants her brother, Gyo, to dump her and date her friend, Shinako (Shinako Mine) instead. However, when he takes them both to a hot spring inn for a treat, he gets chatting to the barmaid, Yuriko (Misako Watanabe), and when she casually mentions being troubled by athlete’s foot, he jumps behind the bar, removes her socks and smears her toes with a remedy he happens to have handy, kick-starting a love affair… 

 

Misako Watanabe

 

This Nikkatsu production was based on a 1957 novel entitled Shiki no engi (‘The Four Seasons of Acting/Performance’) by Fumio Niwa (1904-2005), whose work also provided the basis for Women of Tokyo (1939), The Beloved Image (1960) and Four Sisters (1962) among other films. Like many films by director Ko Nakahira, it takes a pretty dim view of human nature on the whole, although in this case some of the characters are quite sympathetic despite the amount of adultery going on. In any case, it’s clear that we’re a long way from Ozu and the world of Tokyo Story here, and perhaps that’s partly the point. There’s no genial Chishu Ryu-type father figure in this film, nor any father figure at all for that matter. The screenplay was written by the intriguing if not very prolific Keiji Hasebe, also known for his collaborations with Shohei Imamura, so new-wavers like him and Nakahira were likely reacting against the cosier domestic dramas of Ozu and others. In fact, the ending piles coincidence on top of coincidence in a way that strongly suggests that Nakahira and Hasebe were taking the piss. 

 

Yoko Katsuragi

 

If you can accept the film’s (possibly deliberate) absurdities, there’s much to enjoy, with Isuzu Yamada and Yoko Katsuragi taking the acting honours among a strong cast. There’s also an effective score by Toshiro Mayuzumi, albeit one of his more conventional efforts.

Thanks to A.K.

Okuman choja / 億万長者 (‘Billionaire’, 1954)

 

Isao Kimura

 

Karoku (Isao Kimura) is a tax collector so self-effacing he barely exists, so it’s easy for the people he’s supposed to collect from to send him away empty-handed. These include an unemployed photographer, Juji (Kinzo Shin), and his wife (Toyo Takahashi), who have 18 children and a lodger, Sute (Yoshiko Kuga). Like Karoku, Sute is an orphan who lost her parents to the atom bomb. She believes that the only way to protect peace is for Japan to have its own nuclear weapons and is now devoting all her energy to making them herself. 

 

Yoshiko Kuga

 

Karuko is attracted to his boss’s liberated daughter, Asako (Sachiko Hidari), who works in the same office, and she inspires him to become more aggressive in his collecting, but this only leads to him being bribed rather than paid. Realising the extent of corruption in the tax business, Karuko is persuaded by scheming geisha Hanakuma (Isuzu Yamada) into keeping a record of all the tax evaders. He intends to use this to expose corrupt politicians like Ebizo (Yunosuke Ito), but she has her own ideas…

 

Isuzu Yamada

 

This Shintoho release was produced by the Young Actors' Club (later known as Gekidan Seihai), which had been founded in 1952 and also produced Satsuo Yamamoto’s Hi no hate the same year. According to Japanese Wikipedia,

Isao Kimura, the lead actor, actually lost his family in the atomic bombing of Hiroshima. It was Kimura who also appointed Kon Ichikawa as director.

The film was originally intended to be a film adaptation of Marcel Pagnol's play Topaz, starring Junkichi Orimoto, Kobo Abe was initially tasked with writing the screenplay, and had already completed a first draft. However, due to differences with Ichikawa, who had been appointed director, Abe's abstract script was not adopted. Ichikawa's wife, Natto Wada, quickly completed the script, and [cartoonist] Taizo Yokoyama and others contributed their opinions and ideas to the final screenplay, and are credited as scriptwriters…

This film does not have a director's name credit. Initially, it was to be distributed by Shochiku, but, after many twists and turns, it was eventually distributed by Shintoho. However, the producers agreed to cut the final scene, depicting the explosion of the atomic bomb, a blend of reality and hallucination, without Ichikawa's consent. This led Ichikawa to protest and refuse to have his name credited as director... Ichikawa later testified that the reasons for his removal from the credits were that the Young Actors' Club, the producers, had begun production without completing fundraising and were enthusiastic about it, and that it was Ichikawa's first independent production job and he had proceeded with filming without understanding the circumstances.

However, the version I saw does have a credit for Ichikawa as director, so I’m uncertain whether the Wikipedia article is incorrect or the credit was added to later prints. It’s perhaps also worth noting that, though many sources credit Ichikawa as a screenwriter, the film itself does not. 

 

Yunosuke Ito

Anyway, given the circumstances in which it was made, it’s perhaps not too surprising that the resultant film is a messy affair, albeit quite an enjoyable one with sterling work all around from an excellent cast. Though it’s a wacky satirical comedy in the vein of other Ichikawa films such as Pu-san (1953) and The Crowded Train (1957), it gets surprisingly dark in places and the underlying message to Japanese cinemagoers in 1954 seems to have been that the post-war problems of over-population, unemployment, poverty, corruption and atomic weapons meant that they were all screwed. 

Thanks to A.K.

DVD at Amazon Japan (no English susbtitles) 

 

Asakusa kurenai dan / 浅草紅団 / (‘The Scarlet Gang of Asakusa’, 1952)

 

Machiko Kyo

Maki (Nobuko Otowa) is a dancer at the Asakusa Follies,  Ryuko (Machiko Kyo) is a kabuki actress and quick-change artist who was adopted by local gang boss Nakane (Joji Oka) when she was a child. Maki is in debt to Nakane, who has designs on her and ordered his men to beat up her boyfriend, Shimakichi (Jun Negami), and scare him away from Asakusa. However, Shimakichi injured one of Nakane’s henchmen and escaped before disappearing for a year. Now he’s back in search of Maki, but Nakane has not forgotten about him and wants revenge, so he tricks Ryuko into luring Shimakichi into a trap…

 

Jun Negami

This Daiei production was supposedly based on Yasunari Kawabata’s 1930 novel of the same name, a fine English translation of which was published by the University of California Press in 2005 under the title The Scarlet Gang of Asakusa. However, the only thing this film has in common with the novel is that it concerns the criminal underworld of Asakusa, a pleasure district of Tokyo which was twice destroyed – first by the Great Kanto Earthquake of 1923, later by American bombs. Kawabata’s novel is a largely plotless and uncharacteristically modernist work consisting of a series of vignettes about the petty thieves and prostitutes who haunted the back alleys of Asakusa and kept an eye for out for each other. Not only is there no gang boss like Nakane, but none of the characters from the book appear in the film and the setting has been updated to the post-war era. While the nature of Kawabata’s novel would have made it difficult to adapt for the screen, it’s disappointing that screenwriter Masashige Narusawa failed to come up with a better story than the corny melodrama which unfolds here, especially considering the fact that he was responsible for many fine scripts, including a number for Mizoguchi.

 

Kyo in bumpkin mode

The other reason I found this film something of a let-down is that it was directed by Seiji Hisamatsu, whose later works Five Sisters (1954) and Policeman’s Diary (1955) I greatly enjoyed. On a more positive note, it does offer a fun role for Machiko Kyo, who gets to appear in a number of different guises, as she would also later do in The Hole (1957) and Black Lizard (1962). Watching the scene in which Ryuko pretends to be a country bumpkin, I even found myself wondering who the strangely familiar-looking actress was before realising it was Kyo. 

 

Joji Oka

Otherwise, Joji Oka is a rather hammy bad guy and Jun Negami a decent enough hero, while a young Nobuko Otowa gets to sing the theme song, dance and show off what Daiei touted as her ‘million dollar dimples’. Perhaps it was partly being reduced to a pair of dimples that led her to quit Daiei the year this film was released and pursue largely unglamorous roles from then on.

 

Nobuko Otowa and dimple

Presumably, the film proved popular as Daiei followed it with Asakusa monogatari (‘Asakusa Story’) the following year, Asakusa no yoru (‘Asakusa at Night’) in 1954 and Asakusa no hi (‘Lights of Asakusa’) in 1956, although I believe that each featured an entirely separate story.

 

Machiko Kyo

There had actually been an earlier film of the same title, again supposedly based on Kawabata’s book, back in 1930. It appeared before Kawabata had even finished the novel, which was being published in instalments in the Tokyo Asahi newspaper. Unfortunately, the 1930 film appears not to have survived.

 

 

Thanks to A.K.

 

DVD at Amazon Japan (no English subtitles)