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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My Voiceless Friends / あゝ声なき友 / Aa koe naki tomo (1972)

Obscure Japanese Film #268

Kiyoshi Atsumi

1944. Private Nishiyama (Kiyoshi Atsumi) comes down with a fever while serving in China. He’s sent to hospital to recover, but develops pleurisy, making him unfit for service. When the rest of his platoon hear he’s to be sent home, they all write letters to their loved ones and give them to Nishiyama to deliver. However, Nishiyama has to wait months before he can get a passage on a ship back to Japan, by which time the rest of his platoon have been wiped out. He decides that the least he can do is deliver the letters, but this proves to be no easy task in the turmoil of post-war Japan and he spends the next 8 years travelling the length and breadth of the country trying to track down the recipients…

After reading the 1960 novel Isho haitatsunin (‘Death Letter Delivery Man’) by Red Angel author Yorichika Arima (1918-80), actor Kiyoshi Atsumi – a very popular star thanks to his role as Tora-san in the long-running series – set up his own production company to turn it into this film in collaboration with Shochiku. Naoyuki Suzuki, the award-winning screenwriter of Tomu Uchida’s A Fugitive from the Past (1965) and a specialist in literary adaptation, came on board to write the script, while Tadashi Imai – always passionate about material with an anti-war theme – was hired to direct, shooting on many different locations across Japan.

Chieko Baisho

Aside from the Chieko Baisho segment, which feels rather awkwardly shoehorned in (perhaps to give Atsumi’s regular Tora-san co-star something to do), the episodic structure of the film works quite well, keeping tedium at bay and avoiding much in the way of repetition, while Atsumi’s completely straight, low-key performance is a definite asset and folk singer Hitoshi Komuro’s solo guitar score generally hits the right notes. Given the nature of the story, the film could have been unbearably mawkish, but as we see Atsumi deliver the letters to sundry familiar character actors, there’s not always the big emotional scene one might expect – in some cases the recipients have become quite indifferent by the time he gets round to them. The letters themselves are not always kind either, and one hapless father receives a hate-filled missive from his dead son saying that it should be the old who die, not the young. In other cases, Nishiyama finds himself stirring up trouble rather than bringing closure to the bereaved, and all the while his commitment to his quest means that he misses out on various opportunities in his own life. Is he really helping people or has he just made a rod for his own back due to a bad case of survivor’s guilt? Indeed, the real strength of this film is its questioning nature – there’s no sense of certainty that Nishiyama has done the right thing, and it's quite rightly left for him – and us – to ponder.

DVD at Amazon Japan (no English subtitles)

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When the Cookie Crumbles / 砂糖菓子が壊れるとき / Satogashi ga kowareru toki (1967)

Obscure Japanese Film #262

Ayako Wakao

with Takashi Shimura

Kyoko (Ayako Wakao) is a young model who allows herself to be photographed nude in order to pay her mentally-ill mother’s hospital bills. She subsequently attracts the attention of elderly film studio head Kudo (Takashi Shimura), who offers her a movie deal. He also wants to marry her, but to her he’s just a father figure; nevertheless, she’s devastated when he dies. She then goes on to have relationships with a young reporter (Masahiko Tsugawa) and a university professor (Eiji Funakoshi) before marrying a baseball star (Jun Fujimaki), and later a bespectacled, pipe-smoking writer (Takahiro Tamura). Kyoko’s relationships never seem to work out as each of the men is smitten by her looks rather than the person within. Failing to find the emotional fulfilment she craves, she becomes increasingly unstable and develops an addiction to sleeping pills…

Masahiko Tsugawa

Eiji Funakoshi

Jun Fujimaki

Takahiro Tamura

This Daiei production was based on a 1966 novel by Ayako Sono (1931-2025), a right-wing Christian whose work also provided the basis for Masahiro Shinoda’s Epitaph to My Love (1961) and a few other films; it was adapted by Sugako Hashida (1925-2021), probably Japan’s most successful female writer of TV drama. The story was based on the life of Marilyn Monroe, and it’s not hard to figure out which characters are Japanese versions of Joe DiMaggio and Arthur Miller. Admittedly, the idea of Ayako Wakao in effect playing Marilyn Monroe is intriguing if only for its weirdness, but the film proves to be less interesting than it sounds and Wakao’s breathy performance is not one of her best. The problem is that she’s required to be extremely sensitive and over-emotional in practically every scene, which soon becomes tiresome, while there’s too much repetition in seeing her stumble from one unsuitable relationship to another, rendering it largely ineffective as drama. It does, however, provide plenty of opportunities to display the star in an endless array of outfits, not to mention sporting every variety of haircut you can imagine bar an actual skinhead or peroxide job. In other words, it’s another of Daiei’s Ayako Wakao fashion parade / costume-change pics, which seemed to be a bankable formula for them at the time.

It may seem surprising that this film was directed by the leftist Tadashi Imai, but he’d been struggling to find film work and stuck in the doldrums of television for the previous couple of years. When Joan Mellen – who had published a feminist biography of Monroe in 1973 – questioned him about it in her interview with Imai for her 1975 book Voices from the Japanese Cinema, he had this to say:

“I was asked to make the film by Daiei. ...I am one of those Japanese directors who cannot afford to make only the films I want to make, so I accepted. In some respects I enjoyed making it, but it is not a film I really want to talk about. … Directors in Japan are not very wealthy and often they have to do films they don’t especially like.”

Indeed, there was nothing I could see that marked the film out as a Tadashi Imai picture, but at least it enabled him to resume his cinema career even if his best work was behind him.

A note on the title:

Although When the Cookie Crumbles seems to be the official English title, the English expression is more usually 'that's the way the cookie crumbles', which is used in a similar way to 'c'est la vie' when you have to accept the inevitable. The Japanese title translates more literally as 'the moment the sugar candy breaks', which I think does not mean quite the same thing, and it’s pretty clear that the ‘sugar candy’ in question is Kyoko / Marilyn.

Watched without subtitles.

DVD at Amazon Japan (no English subtitles)

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Yukiko / 由紀子 (1955)

 Obscure Japanese Film #224

 

Keiko Tsushima

1932. Intending to kill herself in a beautiful place, high school girl Yukiko (Keiko Tsushima) travels to Lake Towada in northern Honshu, but her plans are foiled by Kyosuke (Jukichi Uno), an older artist who happened to be contemplating suicide in the same spot. Kyosuke is disabled as a result of contracting polio at the age of 30 and is miserable because his wife has left him and run off with his apprentice.

 

Jukichi Uno

As Yukiko tells her story to Kyosuke, we learn in flashback that she is an orphan brought up by her cold-hearted aunt (Sachiko Murase), who considers Yukiko’s mother to have been a slut as she had Yukiko out of wedlock and who thinks that Yukiko will go the same way. Yukiko’s best friend, Tatsuko (Chieko Seki), has already dropped out of school and become a dancer at the Casino Follies in Asakusa, run by dapper gangster Aoto (Eitaro Ozawa), who has already broken up Tatsuko’s relationship with her fiancé Miyoshi (Isao Kimura). 

 

Chieko Seki

Yukiko finds herself in the awkward position of becoming an intermediary between Tatsuko and Miyoshi, but the result is that she falls out with Tatsuko and becomes close to Miyoshi, who gets in a fight with Aoto, stabs him in self-defence and is forced to flee. Yukiko is then expelled from school for having been friends with Miyoshi, who is now wanted by the police. 

 

Isao Kimura

 

Back in the present, Yukiko and Kyosuke become close companions. Four years pass, and it’s now 1936. When the attempted coup of February 26 occurs, they head south to escape the chaos, and she suggests going to Innoshima island. Her hidden motive is that she knows this is where Miyoshi fled to and is hoping to see him again. She finds him in a remote fishing village where he has now become engaged to fisherman’s daughter Tome (Hitomi Nozoe)…

 

Hitomi Nozoe

This independent production by by Chuo Eiga (who made the previously-reviewed Sisters the same year) was based on a popular radio serial of the time by the prolific Kazuo Kikuta (male, 1908-73), who also provided the source material for Kurosawa’s The Silent Duel (1949), Hideo Oba’s What’s Your Name? (trilogy 1953-54) and wrote the play version of Fumiko Hayashi’s autobiographical Horo-ki filmed by Mikio Naruse in 1962 (the film is known in English as A Wanderer’s Notebook). 

 

Sachiko Murase

It’s difficult to see what director Tadashi Imai saw in this corny and sentimental misery fest – certainly, it’s quite a dull watch and there’s little of interest in it in terms of direction, although he does do an excellent job of recreating the Asakusa of 1932. This neighbourhood was largely destroyed in bombing raids during the war, but the Casino Follies was a real venue located, oddly enough, above an aquarium, and the mock-up constructed for this film looks identical.*

 

Keiko Tsushima

Matters are not helped by the miscasting of the 29-year-old Keiko Tsushima, who’s entirely unconvincing as a high school teenager and immediately looks more comfortable as soon as her character’s finally grown up a bit and shed the sailor suit uniform. The organ music featured prominently on the soundtrack is another poor choice.

 

Eitaro Ozawa and Chieko Seki

The only people to come out of this film well are Sachiko Murase (later the elderly heroine of Kurosawa’s 1991 film Rhapsody in August), whose performance suggests a thin line between puritanism and sadism, and Eitaro Ozawa as the foppish, narcissistic bully Aoto. Ozawa seems to have got into his role a bit too much, in fact, as I swear he’s hitting poor Isao Kimura for real during their big confrontation scene.

*Go to this link if you’d like to compare the two.

Watched with dodgy subtitles.

Ths Shogun and His Mistresses / 大奥(秘)物語 / Ooku maruhi monogatari (‘Secret Tales of the Inner Palace’, 1967)

Obscure Japanese Film #188

Masaya Takahashi

 

Three stories set in the vast and labyrinthine inner chambers of Edo Castle during the reign of the sixth shogun, Ienobu Tokugawa, who held the title from 1709-12. (Nearly 50 at the time, Tokugawa is portrayed here as a somewhat younger man by the 37-year-old Masaya Takahashi.) With the exception of the shogun, only women are permitted in the inner palace, where power plays and factional battles are the norm… 

 

Junko Fuji (left) and Reiko Hagi

 

In the first story, Fusa (Reiko Hagi) is brought to the castle at the request of concubine Okon (Junko Miyazono), who is in poor health and no longer able to bear children, in the hope that she will catch the eye of the shogun and have his child, thus weakening the position of the rival faction of women headed by Osume (Naoko Kubo). However, the shogun prefers the maid that Fusa brought with her instead, Omino (Junko Fuji). But when Osume gets pregnant first, Omino conspires with Okon’s senior attendant Matsushima (Isuzu Yamada) to get pregnant secretly by another man and claim that it’s the shogun’s child…

 

Kyoko Kishida (left) and Tomoko Ogawa

In the second story, the shogun has his eye on the innocent Shinonoi (Tomoko Ogawa) for his next bed partner, but she enters into a lesbian relationship with her mistress, Urao (Kyoko Kishida, in another lesbian role after Manji). But Shininoi has no choice but to obey when summoned to the shogun’s boudoir, which leads Urao to become dangerously jealous… 

 

Kaneko Iwasaki (lying) and Yoshiko Sakuma

 

In the third story, Ochise (Yoshiko Sakuma), a maid to senior lady-in-waiting Asukai (Kaneko Iwasaki), is about to finish her three years of indentured servitude, after which she plans to leave the castle and marry fabric dyer Chokichi (Kunio Murai). No prizes for guessing what happens when she too catches the eye of the lustful shogun…

 

Kunio Murai and Yoshiko Sakuma

 

This Toei production was based on an original screenplay with four contributors, none of whom are especially well-known. Its director, Sadao Nakajima, started out as an assistant director around 1959 at Toei’s Kyoto studios – which meant that most of the films he worked on early on had period settings – before directing his first film, Female Ninja Magic, in 1964. With this debut, he (together with Kyoto studio head Shigeru Okada) was responsible for introducing a new eroticism to the jidaigeki (costume drama) genre, something which is also in evidence in The Shogun and His Mistresses. Although these films were classified as ‘for adults only’ at the time, it should be noted that they were not pornographic, though other filmmakers would copy the template and add nudity and more explicit sex scenes in the years to come. As is often the case, Nakajima’s career was more schizophrenic than that of many directors in the West, and went on to encompass a wide range of material from yakuza flicks and sex documentaries to more highbrow (or at least middlebrow) period dramas. His Meiko Kaji vehicle Jeans Blues: No Future (1974) has a minor cult following, while his passion project The Seburi Story (1985) was nominated for the Golden Bear at the Berlin Film Festival. Nakajima’s career as a feature film director ended in the late 1990s, but not quite – he can be seen playing the part of a director at Toei Kyoto studios (much like himself) in Uzumasa Limelight (2014) and returned to the director’s chair one last time at the age of 84 for Love’s Twisting Path (2018) before passing away in 2023. 

 

Isuzu Yamada and Junko Fuji

 

The most striking direction in this film occurs towards the end of the first story, when Omino arrives at the secluded house with the aim of being impregnated by a stranger and we hear the cries of the cicadas reaching fever pitch on the soundtrack before we get a POV shot from the bottom of a well down which the old lady who owns the house drops her bucket. No other scene is quite as memorable, but it’s a strong film overall, although not without its technical flaws – the wire attached to a fake firefly is visible at one point, while more depth of focus would have been preferable in some scenes, when the actors in the background are reduced to blurry blobs. 

 

Tomoko Ogawa and a blurry Kishida

 

But these niggles are more than made up for by the quality cast, excellent score by Hajime Kaburagi (which utilises traditional instruments to great effect) and the fact that, with all the colourful kimono on display, this is exactly the type of film that benefits most from colour cinematography. The film was a huge hit, which not only spawned two sequels directed by Nakajima, but created a whole new subgenre of female-oriented jidaigeki which came to be known in Japan as ‘Ooku’ (inner palace) stories and would include the previously reviewed Tales of the Inner Chambers. 

 

Isuzu Yamada

 

Bonus trivia:

Most of the young actresses featured in the film had never worn the type of kimono known as uchikake before, so jidaigeki veteran Isuzu Yamada (on loan from Toho) had to spend half a day training them how to walk without falling over. 

Director Tadashi Imai was originally attached to the project, but his reluctance to emphasise the erotic aspects of the story led to him being taken off it by studio head Shigeru Okada.

Thanks to A.K.

DVD at Amazon Japan (no English subtitles) 

 

Kyoko Kishida

 

Ai sureba koso / 愛すればこそ / (‘Only If You Love’, 1955)

Obscure Japanese Film #166

Isuzu Yamada

This omnibus film comprised of three stories was an independent venture co-produced by two companies. One, Kindai Eiga Kyokai, was formed by director Kozaburo Yoshimura, screenwriter Kaneto Shindo and actor Taiji Tonoyama in 1950. The first episode is directed by Yoshimura, written by Shindo and features Tonoyama in a minor role as a bartender. 

 

Taiji Tonoyama

 

The other company involved, Chuo Eiga, was established in 1952 by Akihiro Hoshino, who wanted to encourage cultural exchange between Japan and the Soviet Union and was responsible for distributing The Battleship Potemkin (1925) for the first time in Japan in 1955. Given these facts, it should be no surprise that episodes 2 and 3 are directed by Tadashi Imai and Satsuo Yamamoto respectively – both Communist Party members.

Shot in 10 days with cast and crew apparently all working for free, it’s a well-made film which packs so much into its scant 83-minutes that it’s not really possible to get bored. The individual stories are as follows:

 

Yoshiko Machida

 

Flower Girl

Michie (Nobuko Otowa) is a Ginza bar waitress who takes pity on Tamiko (Yoshiko Machida), a young girl out selling flowers in the rain one night. When tragedy strikes them both in similar ways, the two end up forming an unlikely friendship…

 

Nobuko Otowa and Takashi Kanda

 

 

 

Kyoko Kagawa

The Bride Who Jumped In

Factory worker Kono (Taketoshi Naito) is surprised to be woken up by his landlady (Toyo Takahashi) one morning and informed that he has a visitor who turns out to be Kuniko (Kyoko Kagawa), a young woman whom his family have arranged to be his wife without his knowledge…

 

Kyoko Kagawa and Taketoshi Naito

 

Isuzu Yamada

Only If You Love 

Yaeko (Isuzu Yamada) is an ageing widow who works as a cleaner at the racetrack and has developed a stoop from her years of menial labour. Her son, Shigeru (Kei Taguchi), is in prison for clashing with police during a student protest, so Yaeko is left on her own to deal with an unhappy 27-year-old daughter, Toshiko (Hatae Kishi), whose marriage is on hold until Shigeru gets out, and her equally unhappy younger sister, Minako (Sanae Nakahara). One day, their uncle, Goro (So Yamamura), turns up and says that all Shigeru has to do to get released is express repentance for his actions… 

 

Hatae Kishi, Sanae Nakahara and Isuzu Yamada

 

The first two stories are heart-warming enough, though slight, while Yamamoto and his screenwriter (and fellow communist) Yusaku Yamagata – who also wrote episode 2 – attempt something more ambitious in part 3. Unfortunately, it’s shameless propaganda in which the message is that it’s preferable to ruin the lives of those close to you than it is to be thought of as having betrayed your principles. Still, at least we get an excellent lead performance from Isuzu Yamada – I can’t think of another Japanese actress who went from being a leading lady to becoming such a versatile character actor – and a last-minute cameo from Yoshiko Kuga as Perfect Communist Girlfriend. The film was released in the Soviet Union in 1957. 

 

Yoshiko Kuga

 

Thanks to A.K.

DVD at Amazon Japan (no English subtitles)