Gyakukosen / 逆光線 / (‘Backlight’, 1956)

Obscure Japanese Film #199

Mie Kitahara

Following on from the commercial success earlier in 1956 of their films Season of the Sun and Crazed Fruit, this was Nikkatsu’s stab at a female-centred ‘sun tribe’ movie - ‘sun tribe’ being a term adopted by the Japanese press in reference to the first film to describe what was then a new phenomenon: rebellious, spoilt teenagers, generally from wealthy families, who despised the older generation and were unapologetically interested only in gratifying their own desires. Like Season of the Sun, this one was directed by Takumi Furukawa, a lesser director than Ko Nakahira, who had made Crazed Fruit, the female star of which was Mie Kitahara, who stars again here. 

 

Kitahara and Shoji Yasui

 

Kitahara plays Reiko, a student who shares a dormitory with other female students and who, in this case, does not seem to be from a wealthy family or even to have a family – certainly no reference is made to one, and she has to take on various part-time jobs to get by. What marks Reiko out as different is her attitude to sex – she likes to take the initiative and, early on in the film, she makes advances to a male student, Maki (Shoji Yasui), literally throwing herself at him and biting the button off his jacket. The two begin having a relationship, but one in which traditional roles are reversed – in this case, it’s the man who wants marriage and complains that she only loves him for his body, while she wants no commitment, only to have a good time. Reiko also has a one-night stand with Teramura (Kyoji Aoyama), incurring the wrath of his fiancé / her classmate Motoko (Misako Watanabe) as a result. But it’s when she begins tutoring a young boy at his home and seduces his father (Hiroshi Nihonyanagi) that she really begins playing with fire… 

 

Hiroshi Nihonyanagi

 

Whereas the previous two films had been based on stories by Shintaro Ishihara, the source for Gyakukosen was a novel of the same name by Kunie Iwahashi (1934-2014). Apparently, on its publication (also in 1956), there was ‘a frenzy of media coverage of her as the female equivalent of Ishihara’ (Japanese Wikipedia). 

 

 

Although it may seem like fairly tame stuff today, there’s no doubt that the sexual frankness of this film and the carefully-calculated moments of uninhibited sensuality on Reiko’s part (another example being the scene in which she takes a drink of water from Teramura’s mouth at a drinking fountain) would have been quite shocking at the time. The problem with the film is that it comes across less as a heartfelt plea for sexual equality and more like a cynically motivated product designed to stir up controversy and extract as many yen as possible from the pockets of Japanese teenagers. The sun tribe genre proved to be extremely short-lived as there was some evidence that a number of rapes and sexual assaults had been committed by youngsters influenced by the films. This led to protests by concerned parents and teachers, who were successful in having the genre effectively banned by the end of the year. As Liam Grealy and Catherine Driscoll point out in an online article, there were really only five sun tribe films proper, all of which were released in 1956, the other two being Kon Ichikawa’s Punishment Room and Hiromichi Horikawa’s Summer in Eclipse.

 

 

One oddity of this film is that it features a great deal of group singing of Russian folk songs by the young people, presumably a reflection of the fact that communism had become popular in Japan during the post-war years and had inspired an interest in Russian culture. Gyakukosen is largely unremarkable in terms of cinematic craft – the ending is really the only part that is visually memorable – and probably only of interest to fans of Mie Kitahara or anyone with an interest in the sun tribe phenomenon. 

 

 Thanks to A.K. 

Season of the Sun / 太陽の季節 / Taiyo no kisetsu (1956)

 Obscure Japanese Film #12

 

Yoko Minamida and Hiroyuki Nagato

A bit of background may be useful here, so please bear with me before we get to the actual film…

Shintaro Ishihara, who died at the age of 89 two days before I write this, was a far-right politician who served as Governor of Tokyo from 1999-2012. He was also a writer who had won the prestigious Akutagawa Prize whilst still a student in 1956 for his short story Season of the Sun. This was a controversial choice and the prize jury themselves had been divided over the selection.

Having just read the English translation published by Tuttle in 1966 under the new title Season of Violence, I personally felt the story to be devoid of literary merit and found it more akin to a hastily-written first draft of a synopsis than a finished work of literature. If it has any value, it’s in the portrayal of a certain type of post-war Japanese teenager which became known as the ‘sun tribe’. These were the sons and daughters from well-to-do families who approached life with little concern for morality, living only to indulge their own hedonistic impulses. While Ishihara does not necessarily glamorise these characters, he certainly refuses to take a disapproving stance in regard to their casual cruelty and promiscuity. It was this that led Ishihara’s work to find favour with another right-wing writer with similar thematic concerns (the more talented Yukio Mishima), but also raised the hackles of the older generation, and there is some evidence to suggest that a certain amount of young Japanese at the time saw the ‘sun tribe’ life as something to aspire to. The controversy was, of course, great publicity for Ishihara, and the film rights to his story were immediately snapped up by Nikkatsu, who wasted no time in producing their adaptation.

With the exception of one notorious sexual scene which had to be omitted, the film is faithful to the story and even adds a little flesh to the bones. Tatsuya is a student who abandons basketball in favour of boxing. Despite his young age, he’s already a womaniser, but meets his match when he becomes involved with Eiko, a young woman who claims she’s unable to fall in love. They have an on-again, off-again relationship, which at one point sees Tatsuya (without Eiko’s knowledge) taking 5,000 yen from his brother, Michihisa, in exchange for leaving the two alone so that Michihisa can attempt to seduce her. The story is apparently based on gossip related to Ishihara by his brother, Yujiro. 

Tatsuya is played by Hiroyuki Nagato, best-known in the West as the lead in Shohei Imamura’s Pigs and Battleships, a film in which his co-star, Yoko Minamida, also appeared. Season of the Sun was their first picture together, but far from their last – they became a couple and went on to co-star in around 25 films. Fortunately, they were also more faithful than their on-screen counterparts; they married in 1961, remaining so until Minamida’s passing in 2009. 

Yujiro Ishihara (centre) in his film debut.

 

Season of the Sun is also notable for marking the film debut of Yujiro Ishihara, the brother of Shintaro, who appears in a small role as a fellow member of the boxing team, while Shintaro himself is briefly seen as a footballer. When Shintaro’s story Crazed Fruit was to be filmed the same year, he insisted that Yujiro be cast in the lead. The studio agreed and Yujiro Ishihara rapidly became one of Japan’s biggest movie stars as a result. Meanwhile, Shintaro Ishihara also played the lead in a couple of films, but was a good deal less successful – the response to his performance in A Dangerous Hero (Kiken na eiyu, 1957) was so poor that it effectively ended his film career. 

Shintaro Ishihara in his cameo as the footballer.

 

The director of Season, Takumi Furukawa, enjoys little in the way of reputation, although his later picture Cruel Gun Story (Kenju zankoku monogatari, 1964) popped up in Criterion’s Nikkatsu Noir box set some years ago. However, he makes good use of some still-life shots while staging all scenes effectively. Even if it’s not as strong a piece of work as Ko Nakahira’s Ishihara adaptation (the aforementioned Crazed Fruit), the film certainly impressed me more than the original story. Another plus is Masaru Sato’s restrained Spanish guitar score, which makes a nice change from the typical orchestrated movie music and may have begun the vogue for Spanish guitar in Japanese films of this period. Although the characters in the film seem shallow and unlikeable at first, the strong performances from the two leads lend them some much-needed depth and suggest an emotional vulnerability and confusion bubbling away beneath the surface.