Mori no Ishimatsu / 森の石松 (‘Ishimatsu of Mori’, 1949)

Obscure Japanese Film #267

Susumu Fujita

Takashi Shimura 

Ishimatsu (Susumu Fujita, best-known for playing the title role in Kurosawa’s Sanshiro Sugata) is a poor tenant tea farmer fed up with working like a slave for a pittance. After losing the little money he had in a dice game against gambling boss Shimachidori (Takashi Shimura), he resolves – with the encouragement of tea house hostess Oshin (Kyoko Asagiri) – to abandon agriculture and turn to crime despite the objections of his mother (Choko Iida) and best friend Gosaku (Taiji Tonoyama). He finds employment with the famous yakuza Jirocho Shimizu (Komei Minami) but has little success in his new endeavour until, determined to make a name for himself, he shows reckless bravery in a fight but loses an eye in the process. Now with a formidable reputation to live up to, he falls in love with Ofuji (Yukiko Todoroki), but she won’t marry him unless he gives up his life of crime…

Yukiko Todoroki

Mori no Ishimatsu was said to have been a subordinate of the real life Jirocho Shimizu (1820-93), but it’s unclear whether Ishimatsu was, in fact, a real person. In any case, he had already been the subject of at least half a dozen movies by the time this one was made and would go on to inspire many more, most of which seem to be comedies, which is understandable given that Japanese Wikipedia states that he was traditionally portrayed as ‘a lovable character who is a drunken ruffian but has a strong sense of loyalty and compassion, and is somewhat absent-minded.’

This Shochiku production was based on an original screenplay by Kaneto Shindo and directed by his regular associate Kozaburo Yoshimura. Also frequently comic in tone, with a rather dim-witted hero and the sword fighting scenes emphasising the clumsiness and reluctance of the opponents, their film nevertheless has its serious side and criticises both gangsterism and the exploitation of workers by the old feudal system. Indeed, it was probably these themes that saw it approved by the censors of the Occupation authorities, who prevented many period films from being made at the time (this was Yoshimura’s first) as they felt that such stories often gave tacit approval to feudalism, the mindset of which had allowed the military to take over the government of Japan and lead it into war.

Taiji Tonoyama

As a film, this is no lost masterpiece, but it is a well-made and enjoyable watch which clearly had quite a lot of effort put into it – the period details, for example, look quite authentic, and there is some effective use made of real locations, nifty tracking shots (courtesy of Yoshimura’s regular cinematographer at the time, Toshio Ubukata) and a number of complex, well-staged scenes in which elaborate sets and large numbers of extras are also used. Another asset is the cast, in which Shimura makes a fine villain, while Choko Iida stands out as Ishimatsu’s put upon, sutra-chanting mother. Other notables featured are Koji Mitsui, Sadako Sawamura and an almost unrecognisable Chishu Ryu. 

Choko Iida

Chishu Ryu

Note on the title:

Although it’s often translated as ‘Ishimatsu of the Forest’, there’s no sign of a forest; apparently, the ‘Mori’ of the title actually refers to Mori-machi village, in what was then the Enshu region, and is where Ishimatsu was said to be from.

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Forever, My Love / 佳人 / Kajin (‘Beautiful Woman’/ ‘Good Person’, 1958)

Obscure Japanese Film #252

Ryoji Hayama

1943. Shigeru (Ryoji Hayama) is a student returning from Tokyo to his hometown of Toyooka in Hyogo Prefecture on western Honshu (then part of the San’in region). There, he will have a farewell party before going off to war, but most of all he hopes to see his childhood sweetheart, Tsubura (Izumi Ashikawa), who has been unable to walk since contracting polio at an early age. This has caused her to be largely housebound and live rather like one of the dolls in glass boxes we see in her home.

Jukichi Uno and Sachiko Murase

On the train, Shigeru replays memories from their childhood when, as a boy (played by Hayama’s own kid brother, Kunio Yamaguchi), he would visit her and her kindly mother (Sachiko Murase), while her stern father (Jukichi Uno) looked on disapprovingly. Shigeru would often stop off at the tofu shop, where the girl, Tokie (Miori Karuhata), was jealous of his love for Tsubura. One day, she lured him into the back and seduced him despite the fact that he was yet to reach puberty (the film later backtracks on this somewhat and suggests that they did not go all the way).

Nobuo Kaneko

Izumi Ashikawa

Tsubura gives Shigeru three stones in a pouch, which he carries with him throughout the war. When he finally returns, it’s on the very day that she’s to be married to the local villain, Tachio (Nobuo Kaneko), who had previously run off with Tokie before abandoning her after six months. Now, he’s taken advantage of Tsubura and her mother’s hardship after her father’s death and pressured her into marriage in order to improve his social status. When Shigeru tries to visit her, Tachio won’t even let him in the house, so there’s little he can do but accept the situation. As he walks off despondently, he runs into Tokie (now played by Misako Watanabe), who is now working as a bar hostess (and, it’s implied, is also engaged in some form of prostitution). Initially, she tries to seduce him again, but he’s still too much in love with Tsubura. When Tokie is offered a job keeping the books for Tachio, she becomes a go-between for Shigeru and Tsubura, delivering messages between the two. Meanwhile, although it’s always been assumed that Tsubura is unable to have sex, she finally has her first period – something her mother hopes to keep secret from Tachio, who has begun bringing prostitutes home and forcing Tsubura to watch while he has sex with them...

Ryoji Hayama and Misako Watanabe

This Nikkatsu production was based on the debut novel of Shigeo Fujii (1916-79), who worked in magazine editing and had managed to get it published as a magazine serial the year before. According to Japanese Wikipedia, it ‘was highly praised by Yasunari Kawabata and nominated for the Akutagawa Prize’. When Nikkatsu bought the rights, he quit his day job and devoted himself full time to writing. Wikipedia also notes that, ‘During his lifetime, he believed that, "If I have saké, I don't need anything else." His clumsy and impulsive personality made him feared by editors, and sometimes even made them dislike him.’ Three further films (all obscure B-movies) were adapted from his work, but he’s remained unknown outside Japan. Like his protagonist, Fujii was also from Toyooka and apparently coached the actors in the local dialect. Unfortunately, I have to say that I found the story to be a contrived and excessively sentimental one, though it seems that such fare was eagerly lapped up by quite a large part of the Japanese cinemagoing audience at the time.

Izumi Ashikawa

The emerging new wave filmmakers of the era, on the other hand, had little patience for this kind of material and, although the sexual frankness of the piece is something you wouldn’t see in a Hollywood picture of this era, it sits awkwardly in what is at heart an old-fashioned (even for its day) tearjerker. As I’ve come to expect from director Eisuke Takizawa, the film is very well-made and it’s hard to find fault with the direction, only in what is (to me, anyway) the poor choice of material.

In terms of the cast, nominal star Izumi Ashikawa first appears 33 minutes in (the childhood prologue is a lengthy one) and I almost felt sorry for her in being stuck with such a role – Tsubura is so ridiculously self-sacrificing it’s actually kind of annoying. For his part, Jukichi Uno manages to escape his nice guy image briefly and play a bit of a bastard pretty well (intriguingly, his name does not appear on the poster, whereas Chishu Ryu’s does, suggesting that Uno took his role; perhaps it was felt that the gentle father of the Ozu films would not be accepted in such a part). However, the best performance comes from Misako Watanabe, who makes the perhaps unlikely character of Tokie feel more like a real human being than anyone else manages to do here. Watanabe, who won a Blue Ribbon Award for her performance in Shohei Imamura’s Endless Desire the following year and is also a well-respected stage actress, is still with us at the time of writing at 93 and has been acting as recently as 2024.

Misako Watanabe

DVD at Amazon Japan (no English subtitles)

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Daikon to ninjin / 大根と人参 / (‘Radishes and Carrots’, 1965)

 

Chishu Ryu

 

 

 

Yamaki (Chishu Ryu) is a typical middle-aged salaryman who has worked his way up into a comfortable senior management position. He’s been married to Nobuyo (Nobuko Otowa) for 28 years, has four adult daughters and is a creature of habit who rarely deviates from his daily routine. As his younger brother and subordinate co-worker Kosuki (Hiroyuki Nagato) says, he’s ‘as ordinary as radishes and carrots’. 

 

Hiroyuki Nagato and Nobuko Otowa

However, problems begin to pile up – a friend (Kinzo Shin) has cancer but hasn’t been told, Kosuki has embezzled money from the company and is expecting Yamaki to bail him out, and he’s been getting into increasingly aggressive arguments with his best friend, Suzuka (Isao Yamagata), to whose son his youngest daughter (Mariko Kaga) is sngaged. 

 

Isao Yamagata

Mariko Kaga

One day, his family are shocked when he fails to return from work. Unbeknownst to them, he’s gone off to Osaka, where he becomes involved with a cheerful call girl (Miyuki Kuwano) and her eccentric pimp (Daisuke Kato), who also has a Chinese medicine business he wants Yamaki to come in on with him…

 

Miyuki Kuwano

 

Daisuke Kato

This Shochiku comedy features an all-star cast which also includes Ineko Arima, Mariko Okada and Yoko Tsukasa as Yamaki’s other three daughters as well as Ryo Ikebe and Shima Iwashita, although some of these big names (especially Ikebe) are given precious little to do. At the beginning of the film, we’re presented with statistics informing us that over 80, 000 people go missing per year in Japan – a phenomenon which seems an odd topic for comedy. The film originated from an idea by Yasujiro Ozu, no less, who took his inspiration from a short story by Ryunosuke Akutagawa entitled ‘Yamagamo’, which centres around a quarrel between two old friends, and worked up a treatment with his regular collaborator Kogo Noda which remained unfinished. It seems likely that the theme of a man who goes missing was added later by credited screenwriters Yoshio Shirasaka and Minoru Shibuya, the latter of whom directed the film (his penultimate feature). 

 

Nobuko Otowa and Mariko Okada

 

Shima Iwashita

Although this is actually the first film I’ve seen by Shibuya, he was known for somewhat cynical comedies and it’s clear that Daikon to ninjin  is far closer to his usual style than it is to Ozu’s. In fact, one of the pleasures of the film is seeing its unlikely lead, Chishu Ryu, send up all those ‘perfect father’ roles he played for Ozu over the years. There’s also some surprisingly frank sexual dialogue that would not have been found in an Ozu picture. While Yamaki’s disappearance is not really given sufficient motivation, and the film does seem a rather messy, cobbled-together affair, it remains quite entertaining and likeable, and certainly worth a watch for anyone with an affection for the Japanese actors of the era.

Thanks to A.K. 

 

Kodomo no me / 子供の眼 / (‘Eyes of a Child’, 1955)

Obscure Japanese Film #162

Hideko Takamine

Kiyoko (Hideko Takamine) is a young woman living in Tokyo with her older brother, Shunji (Hiroshi Akutagawa), and his second wife, Sachiko (Mieko Takamine – no relation to Hideko), a dentist. They have a 10-year-old son, Osamu (Koji Shitara), by Shunji’s deceased first wife, and it’s left to Kiyoko to take care of him. 

 

Hiroshi Akutagawa

However, when Sachiko’s ageing father (Chishu Ryu) begins to have health issues, Shunji gets offered a promotion which involves moving to Nagoya, and Kiyoko receives a promising marriage proposal from factory worker Fujita (Minoru Oki), it becomes clear that this arrangement cannot last indefinitely and tensions arise… 

Mieko Takamine

 

Minoru Oki

This Shochiku production was directed by Yoshiro Kawazu, a former assistant to Keisuke Kinoshita who also often co-wrote screenplays with the writer of this film, Zenzo Matsuyama (who married Hideko Takamine the year this was made). Kawazu directed 24 films between 1955 and 1969, then went into TV when film work dried up before passing away at the early age of 46 in 1972 (I don’t know the cause). He won the 1956 Blue Ribbon Award for Best Newcomer for this film and Namida (‘Tears’), while the film itself shared the 1955 Golden Globe Award for Best Foreign Language Film with Dreyer’s Ordet (Denmark),  Michael Cacoyannis’ Stella (Greece), Laslo Benedek’s Sons, Mothers and a General (West Germany) and a Mexican film called Curvas Peligrosas (‘Dangerous Curves’) which has fallen into a profound obscurity. For some reason, this particular award was usually shared among entries from several countries at the time, but it’s still surprising that a modest little movie like Eyes of a Child would be submitted, let alone win. 

Koji Shitara

 

Kawazu’s film (his second) was based on a then newly-published novel of the same name by Ineko Sata (1904-98; incorrectly listed on IMDb as ‘Ineko Sada’), a feminist and former member of the Communist Party who was eventually expelled for criticising the party. The presence of Chishu Ryu and child actor Koji Shitara recalls the films of Ozu, and this domestic drama is in a similar vein, though it mostly lacks the contemplative, bittersweet quality of Ozu’s work. There’s so little drama in the first half that it all seems rather inconsequential, but it does become more interesting once an element of conflict is introduced later in the film. Although the title suggests that the story is told through the eyes of a child, this is not the case, but there is more attention paid to his feelings than in most other films of its type. Keisuke Kinoshita’s brother Chuji provides a surprisingly low-key music score (used sparingly), there’s a cameo by famous rakugo storyteller Sanyutei Kinba III (1894-1964) and a gloriously weird modern ballet performance by the ‘Youth Ballet Group’. 

Sanyutei Kinba III

 

And, of course, there’s Hideko Takamine – not in one of her most interesting roles, perhaps, but still demonstrating the naturalness and subtlety of expression that made her one of the cinema’s finest actors. 

 

Love in the Mountains / わかれ / Wakare (‘Parting’, 1959)

Obscure Japanese Film #145

Haruko Wanibuchi and Isuzu Yamada

Teenager Kimiko (Haruko Wanibuchi) helps out at a ryokan (traditional inn) in Hakone owned by her widowed mother, Kuniko (Isuzo Yamada). One of the regular guests is a writer named Shimizu (Chishu Ryu), who likes to stay there and use the nearby golf course. On one visit he brings a student assistant, Keiichi (Eiichi Sugasawara), with him, and Keiichi and Kimiko fall in love. However, the course of true love never runs smooth, and matters are complicated by a proposal from a rival suitor as well as by a young man who works at the inn, Taiji (Shoji Yasui), who secretly loves Kimiko, and then there’s Keiichi’s domineering mother (Sachiko Murase), who has other plans for her only son… 

Eiichi Sugasawara

 

Although it throws in a couple of sub-plots involving a couple of Kuniko’s employees who have an illicit relationship resulting in a pregnancy and a former employee who now works in a restaurant to pay for her brother’s medical care, this Shochiku production feels a little thin in the story department even though it was based on a 1955 novel entitled Hana mizukara oshie ari (‘Flowers Teach Themselves’) by Jun Takami (1907-65).

Haruko Wanibuchi

 

It’s a sentimental film, and I found Haruko Wanibuchi’s wide-eyed naivety a tad cloying (I assume her character was supposed to be a little older), but it’s also well-shot and has a nicely varied music score by Mitsuo Kato. Chishu Ryu’s character is not much more than a plot device to bring Kimiko and Keiichi together, but he does manage to invest it with some personality. The dramatic highlight of the film, however, is the face-off between Isuzu Yamada and Sachiko Murase, two fine veteran actresses best-known for their work with Kurosawa – Yamada was, of course, the Lady Macbeth equivalent in Throne of Blood, while Murase was the elderly A-bomb survivor in Rhapsody in August. 

 

Isuzu Yamada

Sachiko Murase

 

Of the director, Masao Nozaki, I’ve been able to find out almost nothing, other than the fact that he directed seven films between 1952 and 1960, all for Shochiku. On the basis of this well-made film, I very much doubt that the abrupt end to his career could have been due to incompetence, so perhaps he passed away around 1960 or slept with the studio head’s wife.

Haruko Wanibuchi and Eiichi Sugasawara