The Tycoon / 傷だらけの山河 / Kizudarake no sanga (1964)

Obscure Japanese Film #144

Ayako Wakao and So Yamamura

Having delivered a mega-hit for Daiei studios with Shinobi no mono (1962) and also directed its first sequel the following year, director and lifelong Communist Party member Satsuo Yamamoto was in a strong position to make what he wanted, and so chose the latest novel by Tatsuzo Ishikawa, a writer who shared his political sympathies and had previously provided the source material for Yamamoto’s The Human Wall (1959). 

 

Adapted by one-man scriptwriting machine Kaneto Shindo, The Tycoon stars So Yamamura as the titular character, Kappei Arima, a business magnate with his fingers in numerous pies who has plans to build a new railway line and buy up as much land as possible around the proposed locations of the rail stations. Protests by residents are dealt with through bribery or intimidation. Although married, Arima also has two mistresses, and his wife and both mistresses each have a grown-up son. However, he feels that these women are all past their prime so, when he notices an attractive young woman, Mitsuko (Ayako Wakao), working in his office as a poorly-paid bean counter, he hatches a plan to make her his new mistress. 

Keizo Kawasaki

 

Mitsuko is living with Sakai (Keizo Kawasaki), a struggling artist who believes that he could be successful if he could only study in Paris. She is largely supporting him on her meagre salary, and is thoroughly fed up with living in poverty. One day, she finds herself unexpectedly summoned to Arima’s office and receives a shocking proposal: Arima offers to pay to send Sakai off to France for three years and provide Mitsuko with an apartment and an ample allowance if she will be his mistress while Sakai’s away. Understandably shocked, she initially refuses, but, after talking it over with Sakai, thoughts of the money encourage them to take a more pragmatic view, and they decide to accept the offer. Meanwhile, Arima’s illegitimate sons have both become dissatisfied with their status and decide in their different ways to do something about it…   

Mitsuko makes her Faustian pact

 

Arima’s avarice and selfishness leave a trail of broken lives in his wake, which explains why the Japanese title translates as something like ‘Mountains and Rivers of Wounds’. The character was loosely based on the real-life Yasujiro Tsutsumi, who passed away at the age of 75 just three weeks after this film was released. Oddly, opera singer Yoshie Fujiwara (1898-1976) was originally cast as Arima at the suggestion of producer Masaichi Nagata. According to Satsuo Yamamoto in his autobiography, it quickly became apparent that Fujiwara could not act, so he was replaced by So Yamamura – who had actually been Yamamoto’s first choice but was unavailable, then luckily became available again. Yamamura proved to be the perfect choice and won a Kinema Junpo Best Actor Award for his performance. The strength of his portrait is the way in which it shows Arima not as a mere bully, but as a charismatic man of some humour and charm who knows how to persuade people to come round to his way of thinking, as he does very effectively with Mitsuko. 

 

Like many Yamamoto films, The Tycoon is rather long (152 minutes), and in this case it feels it. There’s no real development of the main protagonist – Arima is a greedy capitalist bastard at the beginning of the film, and he’s still a greedy capitalist bastard at the end – and it all gets a bit repetitive as he lights another big cigar and steamrollers the opposition in yet another board meeting. The sons do not make for very compelling characters, and Mitsuko’s chance meeting with Arima’s only legitimate son, Akihiko (Koji Takahashi), which leads to an affair, just seems like a clumsily contrived excuse to pile on the melodrama. That’s not the silliest part, though – that prize must be reserved for the scene in which Sakai explains to Mitsuko that he has been visited by a private detective wanting to investigate the two of them without saying why and Sakai has told him everything he wanted to know instead of telling him to sod off as any sane person would do. 

 

Yamamoto was a good (but in my opinion not great) director, and this is a well-made film, but sometimes his ideological stance veers too close to communist propaganda, and I feel that The Tycoon is a case in point. It’s certainly true that people like Arima exist, but it’s not clear what the film has to tell us other than that greed is bad, so the two-and-a-half-hour running time feels unwarranted. Wakao manages to give her part more depth than most would have managed, and we can see how conflicted Mitsuko is, but still, it’s a supporting role and the focus is not on her for the most part. However, despite its flaws, the film was well-received at the time and ranked 7^th on Kinema Junpo’s best films of the year list. 

Yatsuko Tan'ami as one of Arima's mistresses, with a Noh mask of Ko-omote perhaps representing her long-lost innocence

 

Thanks to A.K., and to Coral Sundy for the English subtitles which can be found here.

DVD at Amazon Japan.

A Hole of My Own Making / 自分の穴の中で / Jibun no ana no nakade (1955)

 Obscure Japanese Film #134

Rentaro Mikuni, Mie Kitahara and Jukichi Uno

Tamiko (Mie Kitahara) is a young woman living at home with her stepmother, Nobuko (Yumeji Tsukioka), and her bedridden brother, Junjiro (Nobuo Kaneko). Tamiko’s parents are both deceased and she’s approaching the usual age for marriage, so candidates are being discussed. Her father had wanted her to marry Komatsu (Jukichi Uno), an easygoing nice guy who works in a munitions factory, but she’s not attracted to him. Tamiko prefers the more aggressive and ambitious Ihara (Rentaro Mikuni), a medical doctor who spends most of his time experimenting on animals when he’s not womanising. However, she mistakenly believes that Nobuko wants him for herself, and this becomes a major source of friction between the two women. Meanwhile, Junjiro – who has never got over the fact that his wife left him – is becoming increasingly obsessed with investing in stocks and shares…

Yumeji Tsukioka

 

This Nikkatsu production was based on an untranslated 1955 novel of the same name by the left-wing writer Tatsuzo Ishikawa (1905-85), whose work was also to provide the basis for several Satsuo Yamamoto films, including The Human Wall (1959). Ishikawa had actually been imprisoned by the Japanese authorities for a few months in 1938 as a result of his novel Soldiers Alive, which criticised the Japanese presence in China; he subsequently avoided such topics until after the war. A Hole of My Own Making was adapted for the screen by Yasutaro Yagi, who had written a number of scripts for this film’s director, Tomu Uchida, back in the 1930s, before Uchida disappeared into Manchuria for a decade or so. The fact that Uchida chose to work with these two writers and that the resulting film shows so little regard for commercial considerations (with the possible exception of its casting) leaves little doubt that it was a personal passion project and by no means a routine studio assignment. 

Nobuo Kaneko

 

Like Uchida’s previous film, Twilight Saloon, it also seems to be something of an allegory for post-war Japan, perhaps most obviously in the character of Junjiro, a disillusioned and broken man pursuing financial wealth for its own sake from his sickbed. However, despite the rich symbolism that can be found throughout, I’ve seldom seen a film which leaves it so much up to the audience to decide how to feel about the characters, especially in the case of Tamiko and Nobuko. Who exactly are we supposed to be rooting for here? It’s so unclear that it’s almost disorienting in comparison to the majority of movies, and it’s difficult even to be certain about which character is referred to in the title – a hole of whose own making? Initially, I thought it must have been referring to Komatsu, who is introduced at the beginning of the film sleeping in a drainage tunnel (?), but by the end I thought it made more sense referring to Tamiko… Anyway, I personally enjoyed the film’s ambiguity, though I can imagine that some might feel exasperated and lose patience. 

Mie Kitahara

 

Even more unconventional is the harpsichord score by Yasushi Akutagawa (son of Rashomon writer Ryunosuke Akutagawa!), which at times sounds like it's being played by a demented chimp. Weirdly, I kind of liked this too, and you certainly can’t accuse anyone of going for the obvious here. Talking of music, Nobuko and Ihara attend a koto concert around half an hour in, and the blind musician we see performing is quite something. He is Michio Miyagi (1894-1956), one of the all-time greats of traditional Japanese music.*

Michio Miyagi

 

The actors are all well cast and the performances solid all round. Mikuni dissects a live frog at one point, and doesn’t appear to have faked it – unsurprising as he was known for taking realism to extremes. The point was presumably to underline the character’s lack of feeling, but I have to say that I thought it was unnecessary. 

Mikuni with another unfortunate co-star

 

To return to the film’s use of metaphors, a new sports centre is being built outside Tamiko’s family home, and construction noises are audible in every daytime scene set in that location – clearly a deliberate if unusual choice, and one that I think was intended to suggest that the old way of life is coming to an end. As in the recently-reviewed film A Rainbow at Every Turn (1956), military jets fly over in several scenes, including right at the end, implying an uncertain future not just for Tamiko and what’s left of her family, but for the Japanese people as a whole. But Uchida never represents his characters in this film as simple victims of change – many of them are unlikeable and are pursuing selfish goals, and in various ways they bring their misfortunes on themselves. Perhaps the title refers to more than one of the characters after all, and of course it could be taken to refer to the Japanese nation as a whole, so A Hole of Our Own Making might have been a better fit.

*Despite his blindness, Miyagi also composed the score for a 1935 version of Princess Kaguya photographed by special effects whiz Eiji Tsuburaya. A shortened version (33 minutes instead of the original 75) was rediscovered in the UK in 2015. An excerpt can be viewed on YouTube here. 

Thanks to A.K.

For more on A Hole of My Own Making, click here. 

The Human Wall / 人間の壁/ Ningen no kabe (1959)

Obscure Japanese Film #113

Kyoko Kagawa

Fumiko (Kyoko Kagawa) is a teacher at an elementary school in Saga Prefecture in the south of Japan. Her pupils are mainly from poor families in which the men are employed at the nearby coal mine or work as fishermen. When the local council wants to cut costs by laying off 259 staff, Fumiko comes under pressure to resign from her bosses, who explain that, as she is married, she has her husband’s income to fall back on, and that’s why they’ve singled her out. However, the real reason is that they suspect her husband, Kenichiro (Shinji Minamibara), of being a communist. Fumiko loves her job and refuses to resign. Kenichiro is an executive committee member of the local teacher’s union, but he’s a careerist rather than an idealist, and the relationship between the couple worsens when he wants to use their savings to bribe an official so that he can get elected chairman. 

Shinji Minamibara

 

Jukichi Uno

Meanwhile, Fumiko’s colleague Sawada (Jukichi Uno) has troubles of his own – catching three of his pupils bullying a disabled classmate, he pushes them away, but then finds himself accused of assault. This situation is exploited by the Liberal Democratic Party, who attempt to use him as a political pawn. The school’s other self-sacrificing teachers also continue to be treated unfairly, but eventually – led by Fumiko – they learn the power of collective action…

Kyoko Kagawa

 

Based on a novel by Tatsuzo Ishikawa (1905-85) which was itself based on real events that occurred in 1957, this independent production was made by director Satsuo Yamamoto’s own company and financed by the Japan Teachers’ Union, who were encouraged by the success of Yamamoto’s previous film (Ballad of the Cart-Puller) and the fact that he had a distribution deal with Shin-Toho. After being blacklisted by the studios as a communist in 1950, Yamamoto had managed to produce a number of high-quality and often commercially-successful films mostly financed by unions – a remarkable feat which would eventually see him re-employed by the studios, who could not ignore his impressive track record. In 1962, he made the hugely successful Shinobi no mono for Daiei, launching both the ninja genre and a series which ran to nine films, the first three of which are soon to be released on Blu-ray by Radiance Films.

 

One reason that The Human Wall is languishing in obscurity today may be that the topical nature of the material appears to make it of little contemporary relevance. However, I would argue that similar things continue to happen to people today and the film still works well as an effective piece of drama. At the time, it was a critical as well as a commercial success, ranked 6^th best film of the year by Kinema Junpo and winning three Mainichi Film Concours awards: Jukichi Uno for Best Supporting Actor, Yamamoto for Best Director (for this and Ballad of the Cart-Puller) and Hikaru Hayashi for Best Score (for this, Ballad and Lucky Dragon No.5). It’s a shame that Kurosawa favourite Kyoko Kagawa was overlooked, as she gives an excellent performance and carries the film in what must be one of her best movie roles. At the time of writing, Kagawa is still with us at the age of 92 and has only recently retired. 

 

Eitaro Ozawa

Tanie Kitabayashi

Masao Mishima

Among the familiar faces in the supporting cast are Ken Utsui, Eijiro Tono, Eitaro Ozawa, Taiji Tonoyama, Tanie Kitabayashi, Masao Mishima, Teruko Kishi and Yunosuke Ito, but the most surprising performance for me was that of Sadako Sawamura, an actress I can only remember previously seeing as downtrodden types, but who here plays a strong, no-nonsense woman most effectively. 

Sadako Sawamura

 

Director Satsuo Yamamoto sometimes phoned it in when working on later studio assignments such as Zatoichi the Outlaw (1967) and The Peony Lantern (1968), but he clearly took a lot of care over projects close to his heart such as this one, and it shows, especially in his sensitive direction of the child characters and his impressive skill in the way he manages to coordinate large groups of them on location. While this film could easily have been a worthy bore, good work in all departments prevents this from being the case, and the excellent cast bring their characters vividly to life.

 

Bonus trivia: Author Tatsuzo Ishikawa also provided the literary sources for the later Yamamoto films Kizudarake no sanga (aka The Tycoon, 1964) and Kinkanshoku (1975).