(Continued from page 1)

Rebel With a Silly Cause

The cause for which Hyōkichi sacrifices his academic career, a protest against the erection of a statue honoring the wife of the university president, strikes me as bizarrely trivial, as well as more than a bit sexist (particularly since all the students are male). Though Hyōkichi suggests a constructive alternative – he proposes that the school instead build a statue depicting a late, beloved professor who, in his view, had best embodied the values of the university – the whole affair seems a very strange hill to die on.

As Keiko McDonald writes, “This is no idealized picture of youthful idealism. Hyōkichi and his fellow protesters are shown drunk and rowdy in what looks like Uchida’s celebration of carefree youthful energy of the kind that commonly goes awry, degenerating into grown-up posturing and violence, the very stuff of politics. He shows that happening too, and soon enough, as students bicker and split into factions over questions of university reform.”^{1 2}

I suspect that Hyōkichi by this point in his life had been searching, consciously or not, for a way to test his commitment to his father’s values, primarily as a means to earn the old man’s respect and admiration. If so, the plan ultimately worked. Hyōtarō, just before he dies, expresses pride in his son’s principled stance, even though this means that he himself, having mortgaged literally everything he had to fund the foolish young man’s education, has wasted all his wealth – and Hyōkichi’s inheritance – for nothing, since the son, forced out of the university, will never receive his expensive degree.

In a strange scene, Hyōkichi, having left school but still wearing his uniform, is walking in the woods with other young men who have also quit the university, all shouting, or perhaps singing, “Fool” at the top of their lungs. (Title cards explain that the students’ anti-statue movement had expanded into a demand to reform the entire university administration, and that they were forced to quit school.) Are they directing this insult at their adversaries in the university administration and the student body? Or, as seems far more likely, are they calling themselves “fools” for throwing away their futures on a battle they couldn’t possibly win? If the latter is true, Hyōkichi displays much greater self-awareness than his beloved father… though this does him no good at all.

The Good Yakuza

The extreme editing of the film has had the result of making the actions and motives of the very important character of the yakuza Kira Tsune³ very difficult to understand. This is unfortunate, because the personality of Kira Tsune is very interesting, and Yamamoto Reizaburō gives a memorable performance in this key role.

He first appears literally out of nowhere when he intervenes to defend the boy Hyōkichi from the servile flunky Jin, as the latter threatens to beat the child for getting into a fight with Jin’s own son, Sanpei. It’s never explained either in the dialogue or the intertitles exactly who Kira Tsune is, but it’s clear that Jin is afraid of him, as he completely changes his behavior because of this intervention.

Years later, when the yakuza is freed from prison, he returns to Tatsumiya and his boss, Hyōtarō. In these scenes, Kira Tsune assumes the role of surrogate son to the old man. Such a relationship would be, in fact, perfectly appropriate for a “chivalrous” yakuza in his dealings with his oyabun, or godfather, as pointed out in Paghat the Ratgirl’s review of the much later yakuza film that Uchida fashioned from the writings by Ozaki Shirō, Hishakaku and Kiratsune: A Tale of Two Yakuza (Jinsei gekijō: Hishakaku to Kiratsune, 1968).

In these later scenes, Kira Tsune has to do “double duty” as a yakuza: he must at the same time deal with Hyōtarō’s obnoxious creditors, who mostly seem to be allied with the old man’s enemy, Jin, and with a completely unrelated complication involving a man named Matsu no Kimura, whom he apparently kills. In these scenes, he fills the role of “action hero” that the anti-heroic protagonist cannot. In the climactic scene involving the comic confrontation, at the father’ funeral, between Hyōkichi and Jin, Kira Tsune even assumes the role of surrogate father, providing the parental approval to the son that the deceased Hyōtarō can no longer give.

It’s interesting to compare the characters of Kira Tsune and Jin. Jin never kills anybody, yet he remains throughout a contemptible human being: greedy, obsequious, tactless, spineless. Kira Tsune, on the other hand, though a killer, is depicted as wholly admirable: brave, generous, steadfast and loyal. However, the character seems to me to be not so much a rebel against the bourgeois values of the Meiji and Taishō eras as a throwback to the ethic of the samurai: Kira Tsune is a man out of time, not ahead of his time.

The Quiet Woman

One of the most frustrating things about the truncated print of the film that survives is that the most prominent female characters, including Osode, the hero’s love interest, have been totally eliminated. As Paghat the Ratgirl points out in her review, the conventional “Meiji-mono” narrative, to which this film more-or-less conforms, involves a paradoxical contrast between strong, affectionate females and weak male heroes “who fail to make it through the changes of the Meiji Restoration with their own masculine authority intact.” The surviving version of this movie, by “disappearing” Osode, obscures this major theme.

Fortunately, the interesting character of Omine, the wife of Hyōtarō and mother of Hyōkichi, remains as an evocative, ghost-like presence in the narrative. Despite her character being given almost no dialogue, she manages to symbolize a quality – common sense – utterly lacking in the males of her household. Uchida generates considerable sympathy for her situation, as she’s forced to watch helplessly while her husband wastes their entire estate on his son, who in turn throws away his expensive privileges in a pointless and futile act of “protest.”

There is a particularly haunting shot that occurs just after Hyōtarō has mortgaged the estate. Omine is left alone in the next room, kneeling on the ground, looking very depressed, and Uchida shoots the scene through latticework, so that she appears to be in a prison. She is, in fact, trapped in a prison constructed of male privilege and anachronistic male “moral” principles, for which she, as much as anyone in the family, will soon pay a very dear price.

The most powerful and impressive scene in the entire existing film also involves Omine: the suicide of Hyōtarō. Kira Tsune hears the gunshot and runs into the inner room. Omine hears it, too, and both of them try to bind up the patriarch’s head wound, to no avail. When the old woman and Kira Tsune realize simultaneously that Hyōtarō is dead, the image, shot in near-total darkness, so uncannily resembles, in both the pose of the figures and their facial expressions, a 17^th Century painting in the Baroque tradition – by Rembrandt, say – that I wouldn’t be surprised if Uchida had had some actual European painting in mind as a model. As foolish as the old man was, his passing is portrayed by Uchida as something immense and tragic, which justifies the somber presentation. And it’s in scenes like this that, despite the degradation of the filmic image over time, we can grasp the dramatic effects that the cinematographer, Yokota Tatsuyuki, was aiming for.

Filling in the Blanks

Keiko I. McDonald has written extensively about Theater of Life and her commentary serves to help “fill in the blanks” regarding those passages of the film that are now missing and presumed lost. For example, she cites one passage in the film in which the protagonist’s love for Osode, the daughter of a restaurateur, is shown, by visual means, as slowly transformed from “youthful exaltation to depressing burden.” In the scene described by McDonald, as the young girl presses against Hyōkichi, “the camera singles out her geta (clogs) falling off and rolling down into the river.”^{4 5}

Anderson and Richie’s classic book The Japanese Film: Art and Industry gives us a fascinating glimpse into the lost original ending of this movie. The authors summarize the conclusion of the plot as follows: “Disgusted by the favoritism practiced in the school, the boy quits and marries the daughter of a small restaurant owner. The son returns home by the same train as a local girl who has become a Shimbashi geisha. At the station there is a big reception for her. She is a success, having conquered the capital; he remains unknown and unacclaimed.” Richie and Anderson go on to say, “The film itself was an oblique attack on the distorted values of an overly commercial society.”⁶

“Oblique attack” or not, it’s clear that the film, even in its truncated state, doesn’t endorse either those commercial values or the father’s masculine ideal of unsullied integrity, as theoretically worthy as the latter ideal may be. And the fact that the movie doesn’t really endorse any value system – except perhaps the feminine one of endurance through suffering, as represented by the mother – may be considered either a weakness in the work or a strength, depending on one’s point-of-view.

There is some humor in the film, for example, when the obnoxious Jin is discomfited at Hyōtarō’s funeral, as a monk sympathetic to the family, pretending to be preoccupied with his chanting, amusingly prevents him from lighting incense over Hyōtarō’s body. But overall, the work’s tone veers between a light, dispassionate irony and a more somber and tragic one. So it’s to be regretted that the ending that Richie and Anderson describe in their book, which would have added an appropriately ironic coda to Hyōkichi’s tale, has been jettisoned in the existing version for a rather flat ending apparently showing (the image is not quite clear) Hyōkichi and his mother looking out over the grand estate they are about to lose.

Another View

The Internet is a double-edged sword. It can induce intense frustration and headaches when one is searching for something vital to one’s research, but finds only false leads and dead ends. Then again, once in a while one idly searches with no expectation of finding much at all – and encounters the rarest of treasures.

This happened to me just recently when I was Googling for links to websites that might have material related to this movie, and discovered by chance, through a link on the Internet Archive, a PDF version of a Japanese book written in English that I’d never even heard of: Cinema Year Book of Japan 1936-37. Published in Tokyo in 1937 by a government-affiliated organization called The International Cinema Association of Japan, and edited by two of the most distinguished film critics of the day, Iijima Tadashi and Iwasaki Akira (along with another critic, Uchida Kisao, whose name was previously unknown to me), the Cinema Year Book, aimed at a foreign audience, gives a richly detailed portrait of the state of Japanese Cinema in 1936 – commercially, artistically and culturally – and contains a wealth of invaluable detail, including precise statistics as to how many movie theaters existed in the country and how many of these were wired for sound.⁷

There’s a section of the book containing reviews of nine important Japanese films released in 1936, of which the first is Uchida’s film, possibly because it was the earliest-released of these movies. The reviewer, Iijima Tadashi (his name strangely romanized in the book as “Tadasi Iizima”), a critic, researcher and, later, screenwriter, is quietly extravagant in his praise for the director’s achievement. He observes that previously it had been almost unheard-of for a Japanese film to offer a “hero with the stamp of character”: “There have been a variety of roles which called for types, but rarely one which steadily developed into a character that stood out as a human being” – referring, of course, to Hyōkichi.

Iijima saves his highest praise for the way that Uchida evokes the atmosphere of the era in which the film is set: “… the portrayal of the manners and customs of the Meiji era constitutes one of the fascinating features of this picture. Like the young hero of this story, the director, Tomu Uchida, has developed it with an ambitious will and determination.” (This observation confirms my suspicion that Uchida chose to adapt Ozaki’s novel because he identified with its protagonist.) Among the things that the critic claims were once possible during the time of the Emperor Meiji, but which were no longer possible in 1936, he cites “student movements pertaining to political affairs” – a subtle dig, perhaps, at the repressiveness of the government in Iijima’s time. Iijima finds “gratifying” the fact that the film, which he claims was not widely expected to be a commercial success, nonetheless became a hit, and he even attributes the new vogue for adapting “highbrow novels” to the screen partly to the success of this movie’s script.⁸

Among the many wonderful production stills near the front of the book are two pages of stills from Theater of Life, almost all from scenes not included in the existing version. One photo shows Uchida directing his actors Kosugi Isamu and Murata Chieko in a love scene. Two other stills also display scenes of these two actors together, while a fourth shows Kosugi with other male actors playing Hyōkichi’s expelled college friends. A fifth still shows Kosugi in makeup as Hyōtarō. The sixth is a bit mysterious: it shows Uchida and his crew directing a scene that takes place at some sort of ryokan (Japanese inn), in which Hyōkichi converses with a woman who seems to be a geisha, while a number of people gaze down at them from the balcony above.⁹

What comes through most inspiringly in reading this book is the pride and confidence that its editors express regarding their country’s film industry. Iwasaki concludes his detailed history of Japanese Cinema with the following passage: “In the history of Japanese screen art, 1936 may be regarded as having been the richest in its artistic harvest and the highest in importance. As we have observed, the degree of artistic advancement and the tempo of progress have been steadily increasing through the few dozen years of the short history of the Japanese film, and we may not be guilty of too great an optimism if we predict its attaining to the level of highest international standards in the very near future.”¹⁰

It’s entirely possible that Iwasaki was correct to regard 1936 as the best year in the history of Japanese Cinema up to that time, but at least one other during that decade would surpass it: 1939, a year of many masterpieces, including Uchida’s own Earth. But then, suddenly, it all ended. For in that same year, the Fascist government passed the Film Law, which instituted strict controls, including strict censorship, on the film industry, crushing what remained of the independence of Japanese moviemakers. Iwasaki himself, an open Marxist, would publicly protest the law and be sent by the thought police to the “pig box” (prison) for his trouble: the only Japanese critic to be arrested by the government during the entire war era. (He survived.)^{11 12}

Though some great movies were made during the war, it wasn’t until well after the Armistice (1949 to be exact) that the Japanese industry recovered fully. It was in that year that Ozu released his masterpiece film Late Spring (Banshun), inaugurating an age of cinematic wonders in Japan – films at “the level of [the] highest international standards” – that would last until the mid-1960s. It was the greatest, and possibly longest, Golden Age any nation’s cinema would ever experience. But Uchida himself would be unable to contribute his own genius to it until the mid-1950s, following his return from self-exile in China – entering the movie in the middle of the story, so to speak.

My IMDb Rating

8

This film could have received a “10” rating if it still existed complete, and in a print comparable in quality to the one we have for Uchida’s Police Officer, released three years earlier. As it is, this very poorly-preserved fragment gives us at least some inkling of the masterpiece that the original work may very well have been.

Links

YouTube video of this film (no subtitles)

Theater of Life: A review by “Paghat the Ratgirl,” a very knowledgeable blogger about Japanese Cinema, of Uchida’s 1968 film Hishakaku and Kiratsune: A Tale of Two Yakuza, which is also based on material by Ozaki Shirō; the 1936 film is briefly mentioned. Other films not directed by Uchida that were derived from Ozaki’s fiction are also described.

Cinema Year Book of Japan 1936-37: Book originally published in Japan, in English, in 1937 with much material about the film, including a brief review and production stills and valuable background information and statistics about filmmaking and film viewing in that era.

Dialectics Without Synthesis: 2020 study which analyzes Uchida’s mid-to-late-1930s work in terms of his achievements in the junbungaku (literary adaptation) genre, beginning with Theater of Life. (Google Books preview)

1. McDonald, op. cit.
2. In the much later film Twilight Saloon (Tasogare Sakaba, 1955), Uchida would similarly mock the fervor of radicalized students.
3. Uchida in his penultimate film Hishakaku and Kiratsune: A Tale of Two Yakuza (Jinsei gekijō: Hishakaku to Kiratsune, 1968), also based on a work by Ozaki Shirō, would revive the character of Kira Tsune (spelled in the title “Kiratsune” and played by Tatsumi Ryutarō), who, now older and wiser, serves as mentor for that film’s yakuza hero, Hishakaku (Tsuruta Kōji).
4. McDonald, op. cit., p. 20. In this and other passages by McDonald about the film, it’s not clear whether the author is merely paraphrasing the writings of contemporary (that is, 1930s) Japanese reviewers, or if she had actually seen a more complete version of the work than is currently available to us; the latter possibility is unlikely, but not impossible.
5. In McDonald’s book, there is an interesting production still with the characters of Hyōkichi and Osode together, the former sitting on the grass, looking downcast, and the latter, also dressed in traditional garb, lying on the grass directly behind him and looking up at him lovingly. It’s a subtly erotic yet delicate pose. The crisp and beautiful black-and-white image suggests to me what the film might have looked like now, if any serious effect had been expended to preserve it. McDonald, op. cit., p. 21.
6. Richie, Donald and Anderson, Joseph L. The Japanese Film: Art and Industry – Expanded Edition, p. 121. Princeton University Press, 1959 (Revised 1982). ISBN: 0691007926.
7. In 1936, according to the book, there were 1,368 theaters equipped for sound film projection out of a total of 1,627 in the country. Since the theaters that showed either only foreign films (64), or else a combination of Japanese and foreign movies (433) would have had to have been wired for sound – as virtually all imported films by that time would have been sound pictures – the 259 Japanese theaters (that is, 1,627 minus 1,368) not yet wired for sound would have had to have been among the 1,130 that showed Japanese pictures exclusively. It was almost certainly in these 250-some theaters (between a fifth and a quarter of the total of Japanese-only theaters) that the existing silent version of Theater of Life would have been screened. Cinema Year Book of Japan 1936-37, eds. Iijima Tadashi, Iwasaki Akira and Uchida Kisao, p. 114 [p. 188 of the pdf document]. The International Cinema Association of Japan [Kokusai Eiga Kyōkai], The Sanseido Co., Ltd., Tokyo, 1937 (downloadable here).
8. Ibid, pp. 18-19 [pp. 92-93 of the pdf document].
9. Ibid, no page numbers [pp. 18-19 of the pdf document].
10. Ibid, p. 13 [pp. 87 of the pdf document].
11. Nornes, Abé Mark, Japanese Documentary Film: The Meiji Era Through Hiroshima, p.130. University of Minnesota Press, Minneapolis, 2003. ASIN: B0043XYP0Q.
12. High, Peter B., The Imperial Screen: Japanese Film Culture in the Fifteen Years’ War, 1931-1945, pp. 324-329. The University of Wisconsin Press, Madison, London, 2003. ISBN: 0299181340 (paperback).