On This Earth / 地上 / Chijo (1957)

Obscure Japanese Film #150

Hitomi Nozoe and Hiroshi Kawaguchi

Kanazawa, central Japan, c.1920. Heiichiro (Hiroshi Kawaguchi) is a student who lives in a small first floor flat in the red light district with his widowed mother, Omitsu (Kinuyo Tanaka), who earns her living from needlework. Although once part of a wealthy family, they are now struggling to get by, and Heiichiro’s school fees are overdue. 

 

Kinuyo Tanaka

Kyoko Kagawa

One evening, a naïve country girl, Fuyuko (Kyoko Kagawa), is brought to the geisha brokerage downstairs by her uncle and sold. The broker (Kichijiro Ueda) intends to sell her on to a geisha house the next day, but not before he’s taken advantage of her himself. When he gets drunk and tries to rape Fuyuko, she flees the house and is taken in for the night by Omitsu. However, she has no choice but to return in the morning, when she is taken to the geisha house as planned and must prepare to learn her new trade. Omitsu is subsequently offered a job as a live-in seamstress at the same geisha house, so she and Heiichiro go to live there. Omitsu develops an affection for Heiichiro, but resigns herself to her fate, and is ordered by the head of the house (Kyu Sazanka) to sleep with local bigwig Amano (Shin Saburi). 

Kyu Sazanka

 

Shin Saburi

Meanwhile, Heiichiro has a chance meeting with his former childhood sweetheart, Wakako (Hitomi Nozoe), and he falls in love when he sees her in a ridiculous Bo Peep bonnet and dress. She’s the daughter of a wealthy factory owner whose employees go on strike. One of these employees is a friend of Heiichiro’s, which leads to him being suspected of helping the strikers. Despite the efforts of a sympathetic teacher (Kinzo Shin), Heiichiro finds himself expelled from school by the headmaster (Eitaro Ozawa) …

Hitomi Nozoe

 

Eitaro Ozawa

On This Earth was adapted by Kaneto Shindo based on the first part of a long four-part autobiographical novel by Seijiro Shimada (1899-1930), whose life is closely reflected in the character of Heiichiro. Shimada was apparently something of an angry young man, and after his book was a huge success he was said to have become unbearably arrogant, which led to his early supporters dropping away and his success being a short-lived one. Shimada’s dissatisfaction with the state of the world and socialist beliefs are evident in the film – Shindo and director Kozaburo Yoshimura portray a society in which the vast majority accept its inherent injustice unquestioningly because the exploitative economic eco-system in which they must survive is so inflexible. If – like Heiichiro’s uncle (Taiji Tonoyama), who is in a position to help  due to his job working for the council, but refuses to stick his neck out – they are lucky enough to have found themselves a niche, they dare not risk losing it. The filmmakers are obviously in sympathy with Shimada on this point, and make it pretty clear how they feel – for instance, a scene in which a female striker is dragged off screaming by the police cuts abruptly to a shot of fat cat Saburi enjoying himself in a geisha house. 

Taiji Tonoyama

 

Where the film is less successful is in the way that every female character in the film seems to conclude that Heiichiro is the best thing since sliced bread within a few seconds of meeting him. In fact, the character is mysteriously held in such high esteem by everyone that even Wakako’s brother (Keizo Kawasaki) encourages her love affair with Heiichiro against their parents’ wishes, and Fukai (Yosuke Irie), a mutual friend of Heiichiro and Wakako, who might have been expected to have feelings for Wakako himself, is only too willing to act as a go-between. It could well be that this assumed acceptance that Heiichiro is special without any apparent justification is also a weakness in the novel, which would make sense given Shimada’s reputation for arrogance, but in any case, I felt that it worked against the film. 

Kyoko Kagawa and Kinuyo Tanaka

 

On This Earth benefits from a strong cast, but the story is nothing special and the cliché count is high. The main reason it remains worth watching in my opinion is the cinematography – the film was shot (much of it on location) using Daiei’s own colour process and was one of their last using the old academy ratio format, but it looks rather wonderfully like a moving painting. 

 

Bonus trivia: This was the second film (after Masumura’s The Kiss) out of 21 to co-star Hiroshi Kawaguchi and Hitomi Nozoe. They married in 1960 and remained together until his death in 1987. 

DVD at Amazon Japan.  

Thanks to kagetsuhisoka for the English subtitles, which can be found here. 

Additional thanks to A.K.

A Dangerous Age / 続十代の性典 / Zoku judai no seiten (1953)

Obscure Japanese Film #118

 

Ayako Wakao

The Japanese title of this film (which translates as ‘Teenage Sex Diary Sequel’) is somewhat misleading as this is a separate story from Judai no seiten and, while it again features Yoko Minamida, Ayako Wakao and Miki Odagiri, they are playing new characters.

Yoko Minamida

 

Akiko (Minamida) is an 18-year-old high school student at a single-sex (possibly Catholic) school. One day, seeing Yoda (Ken Hasebe), a male student, drop a watch in the street, she picks it up and runs after him to return it, but he jumps onto a train before she can do so. She manages to find him at the station the next day, when he treats her to coffee and cake before inviting her to see his flat. Akiko naively accepts, but flees the place after he makes a pass. As she leaves, Yoda calls after her, saying that she is welcome to visit anytime. 

Jun Negami

 

Meanwhile, Akiko’s best friend, Natsuko (Wakao), accepts an invitation from Toshio (Yosuke Irie) to a party but is forced to stay home by her mother, who wants her to study maths at home with the new tutor she’s hired, a medical student named Masato (Jun Negami). Feeling guilty at standing up Toshio, Akiko pays him a visit the next day to apologise. However, when she failed to appear, he had ended up being seduced by an older woman (Murasaki Fujima) and losing his virginity. Natsuko has no knowledge of this, so she’s shocked to find that the sweet, gentle boy she had known has changed overnight and now thinks that he’s Dan Duryea. When Toshio tries to force himself on her, she gives him a few slaps and a good telling off, and decides not to see him again. Despite her annoyance, Natsuko takes the incident in her stride, forgets about him and moves on.

 

Akiko, on the other hand, proves less able to handle this kind of situation. Natsuko’s new tutor is actually Akiko’s cousin, whom she has feelings for, so she begins to feel jealous as she sees Masato taking an interest in his new pupil, even though this jealousy proves groundless. Masato is actually so much in love with his cousin that his thesis is on the viability of incestuous marriage. Nevertheless, Akiko’s feelings of insecurity are compounded when she discovers that her widowed mother (Kuniko Miyake) has been having a clandestine relationship with a businessman, Ueda (Nobuo Nakamura). Believing herself unwanted, she remembers her open invitation to Yoda’s apartment and foolishly goes there, where she is not only raped but impregnated. When she misses her period, her bitchy classmate (Miki Odagiri) begins to suspect the truth and starts spreading rumours. Things come to a head when the pregnant Akiko finds herself cast as that icon of purity, Joan of Arc, in the school play… 

Miki Odagiri

 

Ayako Wakao, Yoko Minamida and Michiko Saga

This is a slight improvement on Judai no seiten as it’s not quite as risible despite some daft moments. Director Koji Shima has been replaced by the younger Kozo Saeki (1912-72), who also made The Girl Who Tamed Beasts. At first, I thought that the Christian propaganda featured in the first film had been scrapped until I noticed that Michiko Saga (in one of her first film appearances, here playing another classmate of Akiko’s) was wearing a crucifix, and then Ayako Wakao appeared playing a bishop in the school’s Joan of Arc play. I’m unsure how to account for the Christian theme, but perhaps screenwriter Katsuya Susaki or producer Itsuo Doi (both of whom worked on all four films in this series) were Christians, or perhaps it was normal during this period for reasonably wealthy Japanese families to send their daughters to Catholic schools. In any case, although we may laugh at certain aspects of these movies today, it’s not difficult to see how they might have served a valuable function at the time in encouraging discussion of awkward subjects.