Shunsetsu / 春雪 / (‘Spring Snow’, 1950)

Obscure Japanese Film #164

Yasuko Fujita

 

Takako (Yasuko Fujita) is a young woman who works on the ticket desk at her local train station in Denenchofu on the outskirts of Tokyo. The eldest child of a father (Takashi Shimura) who has been made redundant - though he doesn’t tell his family for a month - she hopes to wed train driver Toshio (Shuji Sano), but they cannot yet afford to marry. Not only are the family are struggling to get by, but Takako’s mother (Yuriko Hanabusa) is unwell and her younger brother (Teiji Takahashi) has started hanging out with a bad crowd. But when Takako’s younger sister Tomoko (Akiko Sawamura) finds work as a maid to a wealthy orchestra conductor (Ichiro Ryuzaki) who takes a shine to Takako, it looks like the family’s problems could be solved if she would only forget Toshio and marry him instead…

Takashi Shimura

 

Shuji Sano

 

Teiji Takahashi

Akiko Sawamura

This Shochiku production is unrelated to the later Yukio Mishima novel which shares its English title and was written as an original screenplay by Kaneto Shindo, one of around 40 he wrote for the director of this film, Kozaburo Yoshimura. I don’t remember the war itself being mentioned, but the poverty of the post-war years is emphasized throughout, and the family even try to grow vegetables in their garden to save a few yen. They tend to put up a  cheerful front when together, but often fall into depression on their own. We see Takiko riding a train and staring at the tracks as it speeds along as if seeing her life laid out before her in a straight line leading to nowhere, while her father eats his packed lunch in the ruins of the steelworks where he used to be employed and which was, presumably, demolished due to the war ending. Typically for Japanese drama, the story revolves around a classic giri (obligation) versus ninjo (inclination) conflict – in this case, if Takako marries the rich guy, her family will be saved. As it was made during the American occupation, however, the film also promotes western culture and values, and on one occasion we see Takako attending a ballet, while on another she and Toshio are seen sitting outside a Christian church where a wedding is taking place and admiring the sound of the choir singing a hymn within. 

 

Yasuko Fujita

The star of this film, Yasuko Fujita, was a theatre actress who had been hand-picked by Yoshimura to play the lead role despite never having appeared in a film before. It’s an impressive debut, and she not only looks the part, but acts it in such a way that she seems like a natural for the movies, betraying not even a hint of theatricality in her performance. Unfortunately for the Japanese cinema, she married a well-known music promoter in 1953 and retired from acting having made a dozen films, the most widely-seen of which is probably Yoshimura’s Clothes of Deception (1951), in which she co-starred opposite Machiko Kyo. Her Japanese Wikipedia page contains the enigmatic comment that ‘She reportedly made the most of her good looks when interacting with foreign celebrities.’ Yasuko Fujita passed away in 2015 aged 88.

Among the rest of the cast, the most notable is Takashi Shimura, and it’s nice to see that he’s not totally wasted here as he was so often when not working with Kurosawa. In Spring Snow, he gets to play a character with more than one dimension who goes through his own struggle against both himself and his circumstances. 

 

Although I wouldn’t go as far as to claim it as any kind of forgotten masterpiece, Spring Snow has quite a lot going for it, including the cinematography of Toshio Ubukata (who also worked for Kurosawa) and the mostly well-developed characters, who feel worth spending time with.

Thanks to A.K.

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).