'Kuruwa' yori Muho ichidai / 「廓」より 無法一代 (From 'Red Light District': The Lawless Age, 1957)

Obscure Japanese Film #265

Tatsuya Mihashi and Michiyo Aratama

1906, the 39^th year of the Meiji Era. Kanta (Tatsuya Mihashi) and O-Gin (Michiyo Aratama) arrive in Chushojima, the red light district of Fushimi City near Kyoto, with the intention of setting up their own brothel with the help of O-Gin’s somewhat reluctant uncle (Jukichi Uno). They find an ideal property, but are less lucky in finding prostitutes – of the three they initially hire, one (Haruna Kaburagi) comes down with a venereal disease and has to be hospitalised, another (Harue Tone) is planning to abscond with her yakuza boyfriend (a pre-cheek-job Joe Shishido) and the remaining one, Kikuno (Izumi Ashikawa), is unable to reconcile herself with her new profession and is utterly miserable. If that weren’t bad enough, Kanta finds himself in conflict with Ikarigawa (Misao Shimizu), the local yakuza boss, and the Salvation Army are spreading anti-prostitution propaganda. It’s a tough life being a ponce…

Jukichi Uno

Joe Shishido

This Nikkatsu production was based on the first part of a bestselling trilogy of novels entitled Kuruwa by Katsumi Nishiguchi (1913-86) published between 1956 and 1958. According to Japanese Wikipedia, Nishiguchi had himself been born into a family that owned a brothel in Chushojima, and Nikkatsu’s website states that Kanta was based on his father. In 1957, prostitution was a hot topic in Japan as the Prostitution Prevention Law had just been passed and was due to come into force the following year, hence there were a number of films on the topic produced around this time, most famously Kenji Mizoguchi’s Akasen chitai, but also Yuzo Kawashima’s excellent Suzaki Paradise: Red Light District, another Nikkatsu production starring Mihashi, Aratama and Ashikawa released the previous year to this one. Nishiguchi, a member of the Japanese Communist Party, seems to have been strongly opposed to prostitution despite his family background, and this film has an obvious anti-capitalist message at its heart.

Izumi Ashikawa (front) and friends on display for passing customers

Tatsuya Mihashi

Tatsuya Mihashi, the film’s leading man, would have had little sympathy with Nishiguchi’s communist beliefs – the actor had been a prisoner of war in Siberia, and subsequently refused to take any plane that flew over Russian airspace. Mihashi was known as ‘the Japanese Cary Grant’ due to his alleged resemblance to the Hollywood star, though I can’t really see it myself. In any case, this is one of the best roles he ever had in the movies.

One interesting aspect of this film is the choice to make the perpetrators rather than the victims the main protagonists as one can hardly root for people like these. However, they’re certainly not one-dimensional villains – Kanta seems to have become obsessed with money only as a result of witnessing how the poor can be victimised by the rich and powerful with impunity, and he has a reckless courage in taking on a gang of yakuza single-handed. For her part, O-Gin’s love for her husband is strong enough to override her misgivings, at least at the beginning. The rounded performances by the two leads also ensure we never completely despise them and, in fact, do root for them in one way, at least – by hoping they will come to see the error of their ways. But perhaps that’s not easy for them in a world where the other local business owners see it as their right to exploit women by forcing them into sexual slavery. By showing all this so clearly, the film forces the audience to think seriously about Japan’s uncomfortable history with prostitution and the price that is paid when people decide to choose money over morality.

Misao Shimizu

The unconventional ending strongly suggested to me that there was supposed to be a sequel, but for some reason one was never made. I think the film may have rubbed people’s noses in it a bit too much to have been a box office success, but this is pure speculation on my part. In any case, this is a very well-done film all around and the best I’ve seen so far by director Eisuke Takizawa, here working from a screenplay by the prolific Toshio Yasumi.

A note on the title:

The film begins by displaying the character 廓 (kuruwa), then 無法一代 (muho ichidai) is superimposed over the top. Most Japanese sites list the film as 「廓」より　無法一代  (‘Kuruwa yori Muho ichidai’, which is perhaps best translated as ‘From Red Light District: The Lawless Age’), but sometimes the film is listed simply as Muho ichidai, omitting the reference to the title of the novel. Others have translated muho ichidai as ‘Outrageous Generation,’ but in my opinion this is a poorer fit for the material and was never an official English title as far as I can see. I believe the standard Japanese for ‘red light district’ is akasen chitai; kuruwa is an alternative which I suspect had fallen out of use or was only used in a specific area, but if anyone knows better, please leave a comment below. 

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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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Shirobamba / しろばんば (1962)

Obscure Japanese Film #248

Toru Shimamura

This Nikkatsu production was based on the autobiographical novel of the same name by one of Japan’s major writers, Yasushi Inoue (1907-91). The book was translated into English by Jean Oda Moy in 1991, but Inoue’s sequel, Zoku Shirobamba, has been neither filmed nor translated, and the fact that Nikkatsu never made the sequel suggests that this film was not especially profitable. The story concerns Inoue’s own childhood in Izu in the early Taisho period (1912-26) when Inoue was around seven years old, and the title refers to the white aphids that the children would try to catch in the autumn.

Izumi Ashikawa

Inoue’s alter ego is Kosaku (played here by Toru [later Miki] Shimamura), whose rural upbringing is unusual in that his parents, though living, are absent, and he’s brought up by his late great-great uncle’s mistress, known as Granny Onui (Tanie Kitabayashi). He’s all she’s got, so she spoils him, and he’s very attached to her as a result. The only other person he really likes is Sakiko (Izumi Ashikawa), whom he calls his elder sister although she’s actually his aunt. Unfortunately, she looks down on Onui and there’s no love lost between the two women. Sakiko lives in the ‘Upper House’ nearby with Kosaku’s other relations, but he feels uncomfortable there and avoids them. Kosaku gets the highest grades in his year at school and his family has a higher social status than his classmates’, so he feels different to the other boys and great things are expected of him.

Jacket of the novel in English translation

Reading the novel in translation a while ago I was reminded of the films of Keisuke Kinoshita and wondered if the book had ever been filmed; looking it up, I found that not only had it been, but that the screenwriter was none other than Keisuke Kinoshita himself. However, it’s directed not by him, but by Eisuke Takizawa, who seems to have been Nikkatsu’s director of choice for their more prestigious literary adaptations during this period (not a genre they’re widely remembered for).

Jukichi Uno

I had high hopes for this film but, although its superficially faithful, one of the strengths of the book is its lack of sentimentality, and it was disappointing to see the story sentimentalised as it has been here, especially in regard to composer Takanobu Saito’s clichéd use of mandolin and harp. There’s also been an overall softening of tone – to give a couple of examples, in the book, the schoolteachers think nothing of dishing out corporal punishment, and Sakiko is an arrogant snob, while here the teachers (one of whom is played by a twinkly-eyed Jukichi Uno in old man make-up) are far more genial and Sakiko – perhaps partly due to the casting of popular star Ishikawa – is a much gentler character.

Tanie Kitabayashi

Talking of casting, I felt that a lack of imagination was evident in hiring 51-year-old character actress Tanie Kitabayashi to do her old granny act yet again when Sachiko Murase would have been a far better fit for the complex character described by Inoue. Well-made though it is, ultimately I couldn’t help feeling that the film would have had more depth if it had been cast and scored differently and directed by Kinoshita or Miyoji Ieki instead of Takizawa.

A note on the title:

The title can be written as Shirobamba or Shirobanba in English; the character ん is usually written as ‘n’ in translation, but when pronounced before a ‘b’, it’s natural to close the mouth more fully, so it comes out sounding more like an ‘m’. This is also the reason why both Tetsuro Tanba and Tetsuro Tamba can be considered correct.

Thanks to A.K.

DVD at Amazon Japan (no English subtitles)

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Inoru hito / 祈るひと (1959)

Obscure Japanese Film #242

Izumi Ashikawa

Tsutomu Shimomoto

Yumeji Tsukioka

Yuji Odaka

Akiko (Izumi Ashikawa) is the only child of her father (Tsutomu Shimomoto) and mother (Yumeji Tsukioka) and is approaching marriageable age. She has always regarded her academic father as cold and remote and seen little evidence of love between her parents, so she’s keen not to make a mistake in choosing her own husband. Pressured into going on an arranged date with the boorish Hasuike (Yuji Odaka), she’s far from impressed when he takes her to the cinema to see a grade-Z western, but as she begins seriously thinking about her options for the future, she finds herself looking back at the past...

This Nikkatsu production was based on a novel of the same name by Torahiko Tamiya (1911-88) originally published as a serial in a women’s magazine the year before. His work is unavailable in English, but also provided the basis for the previously-reviewed Love is Lost (1956) and Stepbrothers (1957) among other films. Featuring some voiceover narration from Ashikawa’s character, the film unfolds in a sometimes confusing flashback structure and wanders off into some subplots of dubious relevance. However, despite these flaws, the film turns out to be a surprisingly serious and thoughtful story of a young woman finding out who her parents really are – and, by extension, who she really is. It’s also very nicely-handled by director Eisuke Takizawa, who elicits good performances all round and also made the recently-reviewed picture The Samurai of Edo.

On a cultural note, there’s a scene in which Akiko visits a bar popular with students where they sing Russian folk songs in Japanese and all seem to know the words, an odd phenomenon also featured in the 1956 film Gyakukosen. Incidentally, although there’s a close-up of the poster for the film Hasuike takes Akiko to at the cinema, I was unable to identify it despite translating the text – was it such a low-budget piece of crap that it’s vanished without a trace or was it a fictional film that never existed in the first place?

Inoru hito is sometimes translated (incorrectly in my view) as ‘The Praying Man’, which I don’t think was ever an official English title. While the standard translation of inoru is ‘pray’, it can also be interpreted less literally as ‘hope’, while hito is genderless and can be read as ‘person’ / ‘people’ / ‘human(s)’, etc. As there's a scene in which Akiko is shown in a praying posture, it seems likely that the title refers to her, and there’s certainly no male character it could relate to. A better English title, then, might be ‘One Who Prays.’

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Film at Amazon Prime Video Japan

Kaze no aru michi / 風のある道 / (‘Windy Road’, 1959)

Obscure Japanese Film #240

Izumi Ashikawa

Naoko (Izumi Ashikawa) is a young woman still living at home with her father (Shiro Osaka), mother (Toshiko Yamane) and younger sister Chikako (Mayumi Shimizu). Her older sister Keiko (Mie Kitahara) has just got married, and Naoko is expected to marry wealthy ikebana master Kosuke (Yuji Odaka). However, when she meets Kobayashi (Ryoji Hayama), a teacher of special needs children, she finds herself drawn to him despite the fact that he doesn’t have a pot to piss in…

Ashikawa, Yuji Odaka and Mayumi Shimizu

Ryoji Hayama

Based on an untranslated novel of the same name by future Nobel Prize winner Yasunari Kawabata which was published as a serial in a women’s magazine during 1957-58, this Nikkatsu production is the sort of material more usually associated with Daiei Studios. Although the plot hinges on one massively-unlikely coincidence, it’s not as contrived as some that I’ve seen and the film is generally a well-made and enjoyable watch. Having said that, it’s actually the parents who turn out to be the most well-rounded and interesting characters here, which I doubt was the original intention.

Toshiko Yamane and Shiro Osaka

Masayoshi Ikeda’s music is a slightly eccentric mish-mash of styles, but quite effective on the whole, and the rather cheeky audience-teasing climax even features a passage that sounds similar to John Williams’s famous cello piece from Jaws. Another memorable use of music in the film is the counterpoint provided by the upbeat tune which plays on the jukebox while Kosuke is getting Naoko drunk so that he can have his wicked way with her.

Mie Kitahara

It’s surprising to see Mie Kitahara in such a small role here as she was, I think, Nikkatsu’s top female star at the time, but it’s an example of how Japanese studios back then tried to squeeze as much out of the stars they had under contract as possible – Kitahara featured in seven films released in 1959, which was actually taking it easy in comparison to some. This film is, instead, a vehicle for Izumi Ashikawa, who was touted as Japan’s answer to Audrey Hepburn and was a decent if unremarkable actor. She married fellow actor Tatsuya Fuji in 1968 and promptly retired but is still with us at the time of writing at the age of 90.

Ashikawa and Yamane

The director of this film, Katsumi Nishikawa (1918-2010), was especially well-known for films based around female stars, the previously-reviewed A Portrait of Shunkin (1976) being a good example. He worked in a wide variety of genres but never quite made the top rank, although he’s one of the few directors to have his own museum (located in Tottori Prefecture – click here for further information).

Rats of the Town / 江戸の小鼠たち / Edo no koizumi tachi / (‘Little Rats of Edo’, 1957)

 

Masahiko Tsugawa

 

1832. Jirokichi (Masahiko Tsugawa) is an angry young man living in a tenement in Edo (now Tokyo) at a time when poverty is widespread and corruption is rife. His namesake, the real-life thief Jirokichi (better-known as Nezumi Kozo, or ‘Rat Boy’)* has just been executed. Like many young men, Jirokichi idolises him as a sort of Robin Hood-figure who helped the poor and continually outsmarted The Man.  Unfortunately, his attempts to emulate his hero tend to cause trouble for his fellow tenement-dwellers, and he receives no parental guidance as his mother is dead, while his father (Akitake Kono) is unemployed and gambles away what little money they have. 

 

Izumi Ashikawa

 

The girl next door, Okin (Izumi Ashikawa), works at a teahouse and, to Jirokichi’s annoyance, is courted by a young samurai, Kakusaburo (Hiroyuki Nagato). Jirokichi picks a fight with him and wins, after which the two become friends. Some local yakuza who witnessed the fight decide to employ Jirokichi. Despite the fact that he had previously fought against the yakuza when he saw them ripping off the poor, he’s now happy to work for The Man as the other tenement-dwellers have come to see him as a troublemaker and turned against him. Only Okin still believes in him as she remembers all the times he protected her when she was a young girl…

 

Hiroyuki Nagato

 

This Nikkatsu production was based on a then newly-published novel by Genzo Murakami, a specialist in samurai tales. The two young male stars, Masahiko Tsugawa (17) and Hiroyuki Nagato (23), were not only brothers, but were also both associated with so-called ‘sun tribe’ pictures – Tsugawa with Crazed Fruit and Nagato with Season in the Sun (both 1956). Although this film is by no means a ‘sun tribe’ jidaigeki (period drama), it’s obvious that it was made to appeal to the youth market. 

 

 

Directed by veteran Taizo Fuyushima, who made Joshu karasu (see my review for more on him), like that film, this one is very well-made and entertaining with quite a lot of humour if not a great deal of depth, and also features some excellent cinematography, in this case by Shohei Imamura favourite Shinsaku Himeda. Transposed to another era, Jirokichi is akin to the typical nihilistic young rebel of post-war Japan who felt let down by the older generation (represented by here by his worse than useless father), but the light, conventional tone of the ending negates any impact the film might have had. 

Watched with dodgy subtitles.  

*This historical figure became the hero of various kabuki plays, novels and motion pictures in Japan; of the latter, Daisuke Ito’s Jirokichi the Rat (1931) is the most notable.

Nikkatsu DVD (no subtitles)