Sisters / 姉妹 / Kyodai (1955)

Obscure Japanese Film #197

Hitomi Nozoe and Hitomi Nakahara

 

Keiko (Hitomi Nozoe) and Toshiko (Hitomi Nakahara) are teenaged sisters whose family home is in the mountains close to a hydroelectric dam where their father (Akitake Kono) works. Their three younger brothers stay at home with their mother (Hiroko Kawasaki), but Keiko and Toshiko attend school in the city, so during term time they stay with aunt Otami (Yuko Mochizuki) and uncle Ginzaburo (Jun Tatara).  The relations get on well together, but Ginzaburo is prone to drinking, gambling and cavorting with geisha and Otami sometimes has to hide from creditors. At least Ginzaburo is preferable to their other uncle (Taiji Tonoyama), who beats his wife (Setsuko Shinobu). 

 

Yuko Mochizuki

 

As Keiko’s parents cannot afford to send her to university, they’re already looking for a match for her though she’s only 17. She likes power station worker Oka (Taketoshi Naito) despite his strange passion for dried squid, but his prospects are poor. The more tomboyish Toshiko is only 14 but already has a strong individualistic streak and equally strong opinions. Although the two girls are like chalk and cheese, they’re also unusually close, but seem fated to part sooner or later…  

 

Hitomi Nakahara

 

Shot mostly on location, this character-driven piece produced by the independent company Chuo Eiga has little plot, but plenty of comedy and tragedy in equal measure. Chuo Eiga was something of a haven for leftist filmmakers unable to get their projects accepted by the major studios. Sisters touches on some typical socialist concerns, such as the lay-offs of power station workers, but for the most part wears its politics lightly. The source was a semi-autobiographical 1954 novel by Fumi Kuroyanagi (1912-65), for whom the younger sister, Toshiko, was something of an alter ego. Perhaps for largely practical reasons, the setting has been changed from pre-war Niseko in Hokkaido to post-war Matsumoto in Nagano Prefecture. 

 

 

Director Miyoji Ieki (who also co-wrote the screenplay with Kaneto Shindo) was known for his films focusing on the difficulties faced by young people growing up, and Sisters is typical of his work. Although largely forgotten these days, there’s no doubt that Ieki qualifies as a true auteur due to the consistency of his theme and frequent input in the writing of his pictures. As usual, he elicits fine performances out of his young principals, although it should be noted that Hitomi Nakahara (also featured prominently in Ieki’s All My Children), who plays a 14-year-old most convincingly, was actually 19 at the time and, ironically, one year older than her namesake, Hitomi Nozoe, who plays her older sister. Ieki may not have been the most stylish of directors, but like his films Stepbrothers (1957), All My Children (1963) and The Wayside Pebble (1964), this is an intelligent, sensitive and genuinely moving piece of work.

 

Thanks to A.K.

DVD at Amazon Japan (no English subtitles)

 

 

 

Woman Walks the Earth Alone / 女ひとり大地を行く / Onna hitori daichi o yuku (1953)

Obscure Japanese Film #70

Isuzu Yamada

The story begins in 1932. Sayo (Isuzu Yamada) and Kisaku (Jukichi Uno) are a married couple with two young children living in Akita Prefecture. Times are hard and they are struggling to make ends meet. Kisaku decides that the only thing for it is to go off to Hokkaido and work in the coal mines. He very quickly realises his mistake when he witnesses a co-worker being tortured to death by a supervisor. Kisaku decides to run away, but on the day of his escape there’s an explosion at the mine and he is presumed to be among the fatalities. 

Jukichi Uno

 

Hearing nothing from her husband, Sayo travels to Hokkaido with her children, where she is informed of his death. She decides to stay on and work as a miner herself. Eventually, she becomes involved with a male co-worker, Kaneko (Isao Numasaki), but he is drafted into the army and killed in World War 2. After the war, the harsh military regime rapidly collapses and conditions at the mine improve a little, enabling Sayo to get an easier job sorting the coal away from the mine. Her eldest son, Kiichi (Jinkichi Orimoto), hates the life of a coal miner and runs off with a nurse, Fumiko (Yoshiko Sakurai), while her younger son, Kiyoji (Taketoshi Naito), joins the union and starts going out with Takako (Hatae Kishi), but becomes involved in a conflict with her father, who has been collaborating with the bosses. 

Given the subject matter and the fact that one of the screenwriters is Kaneto Shindo, it will be no surprise to learn that this is a very left-wing film. Like some of Satsuo Yamamoto’s similarly-oriented films of the same period, it was made outside the studio system with money raised from thousands of union members each making a small contribution. The production company responsible, Kinuta Productions, had been established with funds paid by Toho Studios to the Japan Film and Theatre Workers’ Union in settlement of a legal dispute. Kinuta Productions had already made Haha nareba onna nareba (something like ‘A Mother is also a Woman’) the previous year, also starring Isuzu Yamada and directed by Fumio Kamei (1908-87). Kamei was a radical who had studied in the Soviet Union and subsequently worked at Toho before the content of his work had angered the Japanese authorities, who actually put him in prison for some time as a result. He also made documentaries, but the fact that he had to work outside the studio system due to his politics seems to have restricted his output more than it did that of his friend Satsuo Yamamoto, partly because Woman Walks the Earth Alone was a commercial failure.

Tanie Kitabayashi

 

As the film was shot on location, the cast and crew stayed with local coal mining families, lending authenticity, but perhaps partially explaining the lack of well-known names among the cast. Aside from Isuzu Yamada and Jukichi Uno, the most familiar faces are probably Kon Ichikawa favourites Tanie Kitabayashi (as a friend of Sayo’s) and Jun Hamamura, the latter in an uncharacteristic role as a bullying supervisor. Although Yamada is the ostensible star, the film spends a lot of time with its other characters and her role is not one of her most memorable. One reason the film is not better known may simply be because, as a non- studio picture, it has fallen through the cracks somewhat, but it would also be difficult to claim this as a forgotten masterpiece. Some of the characters are too one-dimensional, the ending is sentimental, and it occasionally lapses into melodrama, with the brutality of the supervisors particularly being overdone and straight out of the playbook of Soviet propaganda cinema. 

Originally, the film ran at 164 minutes, but an organisation known as the Film Ethics Committee (or ‘Eirin’ for short) objected to the references to the Korean War, and this was apparently the reason why it was cut to 132 minutes (the pressure to increase coal production that leads to the miners’ protest towards the end of the film was originally attributed to aiding the U.S. military in the Korean War, in regard to which Japan was officially neutral). The shorter version is the one I have seen and I feel that it would probably have more impact in the longer cut (which, happily, still survives, although is yet to be released on home video).

Isuzu Yamada

 

Watch on YouTube (no subtitles)