Kizu-darake no okite / 傷だらけの掟 (1960)

Obscure Japanese Film #287

Hiroyuki Nagato

When Yasuo (Pigs and Battleships star Hiroyuki Nagato), an apparently naive student, allows himself to be dragged into a bar by Yuki (Sanae Nakahara), a young woman who accosts him on the street, he’s easily persuaded to treat her and her friends to cocktails. Predictably, when the bill comes it’s higher than expected and he’s unable to pay, but he’s allowed to go after leaving his watch with the yakuza who run the place; they’re members of the Hanayama gang. We then discover that Yasuo is actually a young con artist who sells fake Rolexes and that his older brother, Goro (Ryoji Hayama), is a member of a rival yakuza gang, the Noda-gumi.

Ryoji Hayama

When the Hanayama gang catch up with Yasuo and take him prisoner, Goro intercedes and gets him released. Yasuo then abducts Yuki, intending to rape her in revenge, but when the hotel is raided by the cops before he can do so, they escape together and hide out in the carriage of a stationary goods train, where she gives herself to him willingly after he slaps her a couple of times. Then they fall in love, but, like Romeo and Juliet, it’s not long before their rival gangs are at war. Can the self-sacrificing Goro help the young couple escape this life of crime before it’s too late?

Nagato with Sanae Nakahara

Set in Tokyo’s Ikebukuro district, this Nikkatsu production was based on a story by ‘Masaharu Kawase’, a pseudonym of Masaharu Segawa, a young director who was then under contract to Toei but had previously been an assistant to Yutaka Abe, who directed it. Segawa became best-known for comedies, but later made Four Sisters, while Abe was a 64-year-old veteran famous for having worked in Hollywood in the 1920s and brought some of its style back to Japan before building a highly successful post-war career largely on literary adaptations. By this point, he was regarded as old-fashioned – perhaps not unfairly as he was responsible for films like Confession – so his career was in decline and he had to take whatever directing work he could. This yakuza genre piece is by no means typical of his work, then, and was presumably a studio assignment intended to cash in on the increasing popularity of this type of material at the time. However, it speaks to Abe’s adaptability that he clearly had no trouble with the new emphasis on sex and violence and there’s no sense that this is the work of an old fuddy-duddy. It didn’t help him, though – after three more films for Nikkatsu (the latter two of which were very minor B-movies), he reportedly quit when they cut his pay and it seems that he received no further offers of work from any studio.

Nobuo Kaneko

The screenplay was co-written by prolific Nikkatsu contract hack Iwao (aka Gan) Yamazaki together with Takashi Nomura, who went on to become a director and made A Colt is My Passport (1967). It’s stylishly shot by cinematographer Yusuichiro Yamazaki, who also did Shunkin monogatari (1954) and the score by Riichiro Manabe is classier than expected for this type of fare. Still, the formulaic and unoriginal story together with the regrettable inclusion of the rape-leads-to-love cliché prevent this from being anything special even if it is well made and very watchable.

Also notable in the cast are Yoko Minamida as a widowed florist who provides the love interest for Goro, plus Nobuo Kaneko and Hideaki Nitani as the rival gang leaders.

A note on the title:

The title doesn’t translate easily into English, but the film is sometimes listed as The Law’s Bloody Wounds, which seems a reasonable attempt, although I’m not sure that was ever an official release title. At least it’s better than Tarnished Rule, which I’ve also seen it called. On some Japanese sites, the English title is listed as The Ogre in Mt. Oe, but that’s clearly not right!

Watched with dodgy subtitles.

Trailer on YouTube

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Koroshita no wa dareda / 殺したのは誰だ (‘Who is the Real Killer?’, 1957)

Obscure Japanese Film #286

Ichiro Sugai

Misako Watanabe

Eikichi (Ichiro Sugai) is a widowed 55-year-old car salesman with two adult children: Katsuko (Misako Watanabe), a bar hostess who sometimes sleeps with her customers, and Jiro (Asahi Kobayashi), a student who seems to have dropped out, works part-time at a car wash and plays billiards for high stakes when he has the cash. Eikichi has shacked up with Yurie (Toshiko Yamane), who has a cheap eatery ironically named the ‘Peaceful Oasis Diner’. However, nobody seems to actually eat there, only to drink, and it’s patronised mainly by a former salesman turned chronic alcoholic (Jun Hamamura) and assorted flies.

Sugai, Toshiko Yamane and Ko Nishimura

Eikichi is having a run of bad luck at work, partly because he keeps getting undercut by ruthless rival salesman Nakagawa (Ko Nishimura), who has also taken a liking to Yurie. When Nakagawa tempts Eikichi and his friend Frank (Taiji Tonoyama) into a dangerous criminal scheme for some supposedly easy money, more than one person ends up dead…

Yamane, Sugai and Taiji Tonoyama

The title of this Nikkatsu production might lead you to expect a whodunit but, written as an original screenplay by leftist Kaneto Shindo, the answer to the titular question is presumably supposed to be ‘society’. Unusually, Shindo places the focus largely on middle-aged failure Eikichi rather than his troubled offspring. The 50-year-old Ichiro Sugai suits this part very well (it was likely tailor-made) and gives a fine performance in what was a rare leading role for him. Apparently, he had first come to prominence playing Inspector Javert in a now lost film version of Les Miserables directed by Tomu Uchida in 1931. He went on to become a favourite not only of Shindo, but also of Mizoguchi, Kurosawa, Kozaburo Yoshimura and Kon Ichikawa and appeared in over 300 films, even directing two himself, before his passing in 1973.

Sugai with Toshiko Yamane

The film was directed by Ko Nakahira*, best-known for Crazed Fruit (1956). With his customary flair and economy, he paints a vivid picture of a cutthroat post-war world in which people are desperate enough to do almost anything to make a few yen and American culture has been unquestioningly embraced, along with all the emphasis on materialism and capitalism that goes with it. It’s significant that the film opens with a driver’s POV shot of a dashboard bearing the legend ‘Cadillac’; yet when we see the driver’s hand turn on the radio, it’s not American rock and roll or jazz we hear, it’s a melancholy theme provided by the film’s composer, Akira Ifukube, of Godzilla fame. This is the first indication that this will be a film that does not play out along familiar lines.

Jun Hamamura with fly

There’s some effective if not especially subtle symbolism involving spiders and flies, while performances are solid all round, although Jun Hamamura is given a little too much license to scene-steal and be weird. And that’s not the only element which doesn’t always work – Sugai’s drunk scene is over the top and a billiards scene, though cleverly shot and edited, goes on too long – but there are some great, unexpected moments along the way that make this one well worth watching, and it’s stylishly shot by Shinsaku Himeda, who would later win awards for his work with Shohei Imamura.

*IMDb lists Shindo as co-director, but Japanese sites do not.

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Misako Watanabe

Fudotoku kyoiku koza / 不道徳教育講座 (‘Lectures on Immoral Education’, 1959)

Obscure Japanese Film #276

Shiro Osaka

Fujimura (Shiro Osaka) is an unrepentant criminal released from prison only to find two yakuza whose money he has stolen waiting for him outside. He flees and boards a train bound for Yamashiro, but they follow him onto the train. However, Fujimura finds that he has a doppelganger among the passengers and manages to swap clothes with him while he’s asleep in an effort to shake off his pursuers. It works, but when Fujimura reaches Yamashiro he realises that Bunpei Sagara (also played by Osaka), the man whose identity he has assumed, is a representative from the Ministry of Education whose mission is to deliver a lecture on the importance of morality and decide if the town is worthy of receiving a 10 million yen grant. The town’s VIPs queue up to kiss his butt and Fujimura continues to play the role of Sagara...

Yukio Mishima

If the basic plot of this Nikkatsu production sounds familiar, that’s because it’s an uncredited reworking of Gogol’s play The Government Inspector. However, the credited source is a series of essays by Yukio Mishima originally published in the weekly magazine Shukan Myojo, so it was presumably the screenplay authors (Atsundo Kubota* and director Katsumi Nishikawa) who came up with the idea of raiding Gogol for the storyline. The film retains the title of the essay series which, according to Japanese Wikipedia, ‘is modelled after Ihara Saikaku’s Twenty Unfilial Acts of Japan, which parodies the Chinese Twenty-Four Paragons of Filial Piety and contains carefully selected stories of “unfilial children”.’ Mishima’s essays, which were later collected in book form, have yet to appear in English, but were, apparently, humorous attacks on the hypocrisies of the time. In any case, he clearly approved of the film as he even appears in it as himself in a brief prologue and epilogue.

Hiroyuki Nagato

The upright facade presented by the town of Yamashiro soon proves to be a complete sham, and the place is populated largely by amoral eccentrics: two young students plotting the perfect murder, a high school girl raffling off her virginity, a middle-aged Christian housewife (Chieko Misaki) fantasising about her young muscleman driver, an anti-moral education protest group, and a nerd who claims to be a lady-killer (Pigs and Battleships’ Hiroyuki Nagato). 

Yumeji Tsukioka

The biggest star in the film, Yumeji Tsukioka, is absent for most of the picture but plays a TV star returning to her hometown to think about her future, while leading actor Shiro Osaka was usually found further down the cast list but acquits himself well in the comic double role. Director Nishikawa seems quite at home with all the absurdist comedy and keeps things moving at a steady pace.

Shiro Osaka

*Sometimes incorrectly translated as Atsuto Kubota.

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Chieko Masaki

'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