And Yet We Live / どっこい生きてる / Dokkoi ikiteru (1951)

Obscure Japanese Film #274

Chojuro Kawarasaki

Mori (Chojuro Kawarasaki) is one of many day labourers scrambling for jobs clearing up the rubble of post-war Tokyo. After failing to find work one day, he returns to the slum where he lives with his wife, Sato (played by Kawarasaki’s real-life wife, Shizue), and two children only to learn that they’re to be evicted the following day. Sato decides that she should take the kids and stay with her sister until Mori can find a new place.

Mori has a chance of improving his lot when he’s offered a job as a lathe operator, but there’s one problem – how can he survive until payday when his boss won’t give him an advance? Old lady Akiyama (Choko Iida) comes to the rescue by gathering the day labourers together and getting them all to chip in a few yen for Mori, but if it weren’t for bad luck, Mori wouldn’t have any luck at all…

Chojuro and Shizue Kawarasaki (or Kawarazaki)

After his blacklisting from the major studios for being a member of the Communist Party, director Tadashi Imai founded Shinsei Eigasha (the New Star Film Company) with fellow director Satsuo Yamamoto and producer Takero Ito. This was the first film produced by the company and they actually financed it by getting members of the public to contribute 50 yen each. Considering that Imai also managed to produce a good film which was well-reviewed and made a profit, this is an impressive achievement indeed.

Under such circumstances, it’s not surprising that there are no big movie stars in the film, although leading actor Chojuro Kawarasaki was a major star of the kabuki theatre and played the lead role in occasional films, such as Sadao Yamanaka’s Priest of Darkness (1936). A communist sympathiser since the late 1920s, he and his theatre group, Zenshinza (the ‘Progressive Troupe’), joined the Japanese Communist Party en masse in 1949, and it was apparently Zenshinza which was largely responsible for raising the money to make And Yet We Live by soliciting donations from their audiences as they toured the country. (According to Japanese Wikipedia, Kawarasaki was later expelled from the JCP in 1967 for being a Maoist.) Kawarasaki and his troupe were later featured in Kozaburo Yoshimura’s excellent The Beauty and the Water Dragon (1955), which I have previously reviewed. His performance here is decent if unremarkable; there’s a drunk scene I disliked, partly because Kawarasaki – like most Japanese actors of the time in such scenes, it seems – overdoes it, but also because I thought that Mori wouldn’t have been so stupid and irresponsible in his situation. However, it is the fact that Mori is portrayed as a flawed individual rather than an idealised working class hero which helps the film to rise above mere commie propaganda. In terms of acting, though, it’s Choko Iida who provides the most memorable characterisation as the feisty old woman.

Choko Iida

In A Hundred Years of Japanese Film, Donald Richie states that ‘The film’s inspiration was De Sica’s The Bicycle Thief (1949) [sic]. Imai shot on the streets of Tokyo, around the major downtown railway terminal of Ueno. His camera was often hidden, and the camera was sometimes placed in real situations.’ While not quite the classic that De Sica’s film certainly is, And Yet We Live is still a very well-made and effective film in the same neorealist vein.

The film benefits from an interesting and mostly excellent score by Masao Oki (1901-71), a highly-regarded composer whose film work was limited, although he worked for Imai on a number of films. His Symphony No.5 ‘Hiroshima’ (1953) is generally regarded as his masterpiece, but is unrelated to the film Hiroshima released the same year.

Watch And Yet We Live with English subtitles on my YouTube channel here.

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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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