Sazae-san no seishun / サザエさんの青春 (‘Sazae-san’s Youth’, 1957)

Obscure Japanese Film #246

Chiemi Eri

This third film in the Toho series kicked off by the previously-reviewed Sazae-san was the first to be shot in colour, but otherwise director Nobuo Aoyagi repeats much the same recipe, even down to Chiemi Eri dancing along the street singing ‘Bippidi-Boppidi-Boo’, as she had also done in the first film, although there are fewer songs this time around. 

Here Sazae-san becomes engaged to her long-term sweetheart, Fuguta (Hiroshi Koizumi), and tries to prepare herself for married life by taking on the household chores, helping to look after her cousin’s new baby and getting a job in a department store to contribute to the household income. Of course, she makes a mess of all three, and disaster is only narrowly averted when a female customer at the store takes a liking to Sazae and invites her round for tea – it turns out that she’s the wife of Sazae’s father’s boss and sees Sazae as a possible future wife for her son…

Released just in time for New Year, this would have been intended as a film that the whole family could enjoy together, and it retains an old-fashioned innocence and charm, while the new colour photography suits the material well, making it look appropriately more cartoonish than it did in black and white.

After skipping the second film, Tatsuya Nakadai reappears here as Sazae-san’s cousin, but has only one brief scene around 35 minutes in, in which he’s at a hospital waiting to see his newborn child for the first time (typically, Sazae-san manages to mix it up with someone else’s baby to comic effect). Incidentally, Nakadai is not the only Kurosawa favourite to pop up in these films – also present is Kamatari Fujiwara, who appeared in no fewer than 12 Kurosawa pictures, and even made it to Hollywood on one occasion, appearing in Arthur Penn’s underrated Mickey One (1965).

Also deserving a mention is Tomoko Matsushima, who plays Sazae-san’s big-eyed younger sister and is pretty funny in these films. Everyone knows about Johnny Cash’s famous prison gig, but Matsushima performed at Sugamo Prison in 1950 at the age of 5 and apparently reduced around 1,000 war criminals to tears with her rendition of a Japanese song entitled ‘The Cute Fishmonger’. Later in life, she became a TV presenter and was attacked twice by big cats – once by a lion, another time by a leopard, luckily surviving both incidents without major harm. It has been speculated that her large eyes may have been a reason for the attacks as it’s inadvisable to look a dangerous predator in the eye and presumably, therefore, even less of a good idea if you have big eyes...

Watched without subtitles.

DVD at Amazon Japan (no English subtitles).

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Sazae-san / サザエさん (1956)

Obscure Japanese Film #245

Chiemi Eri

Kamatari Fujiwara and Nijiko Kiyokawa

Sazae (Chiemi Eri) is a young woman still living at home with her father (Kamatari Fujiwara), mother (Nijiko Kiyokawa) and two younger siblings. She applies for a job at a women’s magazine but, after being directed to the wrong door by the handsome young Fuguta (Hiroshi Koizumi), she accidentally ends up working for a literary publisher instead. Her first task is to deliver the proof of a book to an author, but he turns out to be the same man she had had an embarrassing misunderstanding with in a department store and she is fired. Fuguta suggests she try to get a job at a detective agency instead – unexpectedly, she succeeds, but her first assignment happens to be to spy on her cousin, Norisuke (Tatsuya Nakadai), as his fiancee’s mother wants him investigated before agreeing to the marriage. She disguises herself as an old woman and begins to follow him around…

Chiemi Eri

This Toho production was their first in a series of ten musical comedies starring singing sensation Chiemi Eri as Sazae-san, a daydreaming tomboy with a strange hairdo. It was based on a comic strip by Machiko Hasegawa (1920-92), Japan’s first professional female manga author, which first appeared in 1946 and ran in various newspapers until 1974. There have been various other adaptations, most notably an anime TV series which has been running since 1969, making Sazae-san a true Japanese institution, albeit one that’s remained little-known in the West.

One of the ironies of Japanese cinema is that, the more westernised the characters, the less likely a film has been to receive distribution abroad. The overseas market has tended to favour tales of samurai, geisha and yakuza, and (as far as I’m aware), Sazae-san has never been distributed in Europe or the U.S. At the end of the film, we see the family celebrating Christmas – which, of course, is not a Japanese festival, and the film is full of instances of Japanese people attempting to emulate westerners. The most extreme example of this is seen in the department store, where none of the mannequins look remotely Japanese.

The film was released in December of 1956 as the main feature in a triple-bill which also included two Tenten Musume pictures of under an hour each – very similar fare directed, like Sazae-san, by Nobuo Aoyagi, who had earlier made the excellent World of Love and the previously-reviewed Hyoroku’s Dream Tale (both 1943), but by this stage in his career seemed happy to be directing anything. In this case, there’s little to say about his direction except that it’s competent. Still, there’s some fun to be had from Sazae-san’s antics, and Chiemi Eri proves herself an adept comedienne as well as singer. Incidentally, in her daydreams, Sazae has a sensible haircut, glamorous attire and sings American-style jazz songs.

Tatsuya Nakadai

It’s also amusing to see a young Tatsuya Nakadai as Sazae’s slightly slow-witted cousin in the days when he still had to take whatever roles he could get. It’s difficult to think of a less typical Nakadai role than this one, and it has to be said that he doesn’t look entirely comfortable singing along to Jingle Bells at the film’s climax. He managed to avoid the second film, but was roped back in for the third in the series before escaping for good.

Watched without subtitles.

DVD at Amazon Japan (no English subtitles)

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Girls in the Orchard / 花の中の娘たち / Hana no naka no musumetachi (1953)

Obscure Japanese Film #109

Mariko Okada

Toho’s first feature film in full colour concerns the Ishii family, who live in the rural area of Kanagawa, an hour away from Tokyo by train. The head of the household, Sahei Ishii (Makoto Kobori), grows pears and takes great pride in his work, stubbornly refusing to take the easy option and sell his land for what would be a considerable profit. It is assumed that his eldest son, Seitaro (Kiyoshi Kamoda), will inherit the land and continue the family business. 

 

Yoko Sugi

The older of Sahei’s two daughters, Yoshiko (Yoko Sugi), commutes to Tokyo, where she is employed at a hotel with hideously garish décor presumably designed to show off the new Fujicolor process. She has a boyfriend, Junichi (Hiroshi Koizumi), who works at the hotel as an electrician, but he’s been offered a better job in far-off Okinawa and wants her to join him. 

 

Keiju Kobayashi

 

Yoshiko’s younger sister, Momoko (Mariko Okada), is rather bored with country life and dreams of the bright lights of Tokyo. She’s also starting to become interested in the opposite sex so, when Kitakoji (Akihiko Hirata, the one-eyed scientist from the original Godzilla), a music student from the capital, moves in next door, she quickly falls in love with him and his fancy Tokyo ways. Then Seitaro gets hit by a truck and dies, so Sahei puts pressure on Yoshiko to marry Katsuzo (Keiju Kobayashi), a young local whose only ambition is to grow pears…  

 

Yoko Sugi

 

This is a very conservative film whose drama revolves around the classic Japanese formula of giri (obligation) versus ninjo (inclination), especially in the case of Yoshiko, who feels a strong sense of duty towards her family but wants to go off to Okinawa with Junichi. The film also pits the countryside against the city. Ultimately, giri and the countryside win – almost nobody gets what they thought they wanted, but it all works out alright in the end. Wanting to go off to Tokyo is seen as youthful folly, i.e. something the young naturally have to get out of their system before they can become sensible and mature human beings. The roles of the two sisters are reversed at the end when Momoko gets a job in Tokyo, but there’s a sense that sooner or later she’ll become disillusioned with city life and return to Kanagawa. 

 

Yoko Sugi and Mariko Okada

 

There’s also a subplot involving a Japanese-American woman at the hotel who is married to an American the cops want to arrest for fraud. This distrust-of-the-foreigner element may be partly due to the fact that the American occupation had ended the year before, so Japanese filmmakers were now free to be critical of the Americans again. However, Toho rather wants to have its cake and eat it on this point, as the music score by Raymond Gallois-Montbrun could hardly be less Japanese and smacks of Hollywood. 

 

 

Despite its questionable ideology, Girls in the Orchard is not without its charms, and most of the characters – which also include Eijiro Tono as a drunken uncle – are likeable and easy to care about. The success of the colour process is difficult to judge given the poor quality of the copy I watched, but it’s certainly not one of the more subtle uses of colour I’ve seen.

Girls in the Orchard was co-written and directed by Kajiro Yamamoto (1902-74), a director whose name has survived mainly as a footnote; he was Akira Kurosawa’s mentor, and few of his own films are easily accessible today.

Bonus trivia: The film contains an early example of blatant product placement in a couple of scenes featuring Lion toothpaste, a Japanese brand. 

 

Hiroshi Koizumi, Yoko Sugi and Lion Toothpaste

 

Note on the title: The Japanese title translates more accurately as ‘Girls in Blossom’ (although another possibility would be ‘Blooming Girls’, which of course is much better).