THE CITY ON FILM has a long history, as do changing attitudes toward it. This is as true for Tokyo on film as it is for New York, London, or Paris. At the same time, however, national attitudes are usually different from each other. Hence, T will consider these Japanese attitudes in comparison with those of the West.
Originally, of course, in all countries, it was the city which was the primary subject of the infant cinema. The Lumiere views of Paris and those of anonymous movie cameramen of Tokyo’s Shimbashi are identical. The city is the spectacle and consequently the cityscape is shown rather than the countryside.
And shown, initially, only to city dwellers. The earliest theaters were in the city, and it was only later that towns and villages got theirs. People went to the little theater next to the big train station to see a short film about a train pulling into the station.
The theme of the city was so taken for granted in this very early cinema that no attitude at all toward the subject is to be discerned. The city was there to be photographed and looked at—like a forest fire or a naval battle.
Once movies started being shown in the provincial capitals, and then in smaller towns and villages, however, an attitude evolved. The city became visible as a theme.
In the West, the earliest reading of the city as theme saw it as a place of promise, where one went to make one’s fortune. In early story-films, predominantly in the United States but in Europe as well, the city was seen as home of wealth and conse quently culture. The manners of the country were seen as provincial, and loutishness became a favorite comic theme. At the conclusions of such pictures it was common to see the bucolic young couple setting off for the city all smiles at the prospect. Often indeed they set off walking, since this made a better pictorial effect.
Though Japanese cinema early imitated the American, this reading of the city as promise had no place in the early Japanese story-films. The city was often enough shown, but a division between city and country was not indicated—though it later would be.
The reason, perhaps, was that Japan already had an attitude so persuasive that such dichotomies between city and country, and the attaching of qualities to both, were understandably late in developing. This was (and is) the Japanese insistence upon the primacy of thefurusato, the hometown.
In Japan a mystique is given this location which is much stronger and more persuasive than anything an American or German or Italian might feel about the town in which he happened to have been born. In the West such regard (and such resultant films) are usually dismissed as sentimental.
Not in Japan. The early cinema was filled with celebration of life in the furusato and a consequent anguish experienced when separated from it. This was the initial reading of the city theme in Japanese cinema and so for a time remained. One might mention two films by Kenji Mizoguchi actually named Furusato. The latter (1929) was a talkie, starred the tenor Yoshie Fujiwara, and featured a song about these singular small-town virtues.
This theme continues even now. Certainly one of the reasons for the success of Yoji Yamada’s Tora-san series is that the lovable hick after all sorts of big-city adventures always returns to his hometown, little Shibamata. This is pictured as a place that may have had some existence in the 1960s when the series began but which is in the late 1980s pure film set. Always romantic, the Tora-san series has now become historical fiction.
Nonetheless, many Japanese still subscribe to the myth of hometown where everything was good, where people were nice, where things were, somehow, much better than elsewhere.
Elsewhere was early defined in Japan. It was the city. Originally it was not that the city was bad, it was simply that it was urban and consequently small-town virtues could not exist in it. That these films were made during a time when the millions were first beginning to pour from the furusato into the metropolis indicates nothing—except, of course, that this hometown longing is something that the Japanese exhibit more often and more readily than do other peoples.
The idyllic qualities of small-town life are seen in the West mainly as reflections of their lack in the big cities. After the initial view of the city as promise came the opposite, though complementary, view of the city as place of betrayal. The happy couple had walked into a scene of menace.
In many films the city was regarded with the most grave suspicions. Lang’s Metropolis (1926), Murnau’s Sunrise (1927), and Vidor’s The Crowd (1928), among many other films, looked askance at the big city. It was in popular cinema the home of the gold digger and the city slicker. Innocent folks from the country (no longer seen as laughable bumpkins) were here fleeced and sent back to where they came from sadder but wiser.
Just as Japan had no reason to glamorize the city (since it was glamorizing the furusato), it had no reason for denigrating the city. Nonetheless, damnation makes for better drama than celebration and—following the American example—the city was shortly being seen as a place of trauma.
After 1929 Mizoguchi dropped the furusato theme and was making films about the disappointing city. Both Tokyo March (Tokyo Koshinkyoku) and Metropolitan Symphony (Tokai KokyoRaku) were about the lives of proletarian families of rural origin unable to make a living in the heartless capital. By the following year such films as Kiyohiko Ushihara’s The Great Metropolis: Chapter on Labor (Daitokai Rodohen) had deepened and widened accusations of coldness and lack of fellow feeling.
Later, in the tradition of Bowery-based or Limehouse-set Western films, Japanese were even discovering “dangerous” sections in Tokyo itself, always the safest of cities. One such was the later but typical LiRhts of Asakusa (Asakusa no Hi), directed by Yasujiro Shimazu in 1937. Here the old section of Tokyo is seen as home of the “criminal.”
In the same year, Tomu Uchida made The Naked Town (Hadaka no Machi), in which the city conspires to beat down a good man. He acts as guarantor to a bad friend, then must go to the moneylender, and from then on tumbles to the depths. At one point, even his cat (city bred, no doubt) refuses the milk he went to some lengths to obtain.
In the better Japanese films about cities, the theme is not so much what the city is as what it isn’t. In Ozu’s The Only SOH (Hitori Musuko), a 1936 picture, the mother works hard so that her child can go to Tokyo and make something of himself. She is later invited to visit. The stay is not a happy occasion. Both he and his wife make only just enough money—they are cut off from communal life. This is not claimed as the fault of the city, but there is nevertheless the implication that the city is less caring, indeed less human than the town from which he came. It is not the fault of the city, but nonetheless the city is seen as no proper place to live.
This attitude is one often seen in the films of Ozu. Its major statement is in the 1953 Tokyo Story (Tokyo Monogatari), where the city is contrasted with the town (Onomichi, a port on the Inland Sea) and found wanting. There is the suggestion that the children’s selfishness might have something to do with their living in a metropolis. After all, the story of the consequences of this coldness is called Tokyo Story.
In Ozu’s later statement on big-city life, the 1956 Early Spring (Soshun), the young couple is seen at the end going off to live in the country (he has been transferred), and this constitutes an indication that their marriage may now be saved, since it will no longer be subjected to urban stresses.
Just what these consist of is seen in the opening sequence of the film, which shows people moving from the distant suburbs to their work in the city. At first there are only one or two persons catching their trains at rural stations. Soon, however, these numbers grow, the various trains grow crowded, then packed. When the passengers are disgorged at Tokyo Station they are anonymous, faceless—an impression that Ozu intensifies by shooting the final scenes of this opening sequence from high up, reducing the workbound people to the size—and status—of insects.
The people, it will be noted, were human enough when they left the suburbs. This is because in Tokyo—as in London and New York—these are viewed as a kind of buffer zone between the hometown and the city. Ozu seems to have found them this—he lived his adult life in the suburbs of Kamakura. And even now a majority of Tokyo workers are happy to commute enormous distances daily so that they can have a bit of the country, a sort of Jurusato.
Heinosuke Gosho’s 1931 The Neighbor’s Wife and Mine (Madamu to Nyobo), Japan’s first talkie, is about the suburbs. A philandering husband contemplates adventures with the vamp next door, something that would not have been allowed in the hometown and would have been thought much too dangerous in the big city. In Ozu’s 1932 I Was Bortl, But . .. (Umarete wa Mita Keredo) the trouble in the office worker’s new home in the suburbs is caused by conditions in his office in Tokyo. In its 1958 “remake,” Good Morning (aha yo), we are again in the safe suburbs, and the problem is that big-city presence, TV.
Later films about the suburbs, however, seem to have indicated that (on film at any rate) the city infects as it grows. The 1957 Candle in the Wind (Fuzen no Tomoshibi) of Keisuke Kinoshita shows the suburbs as home of avarice and violence. In Susumu Hani’s 1963 She atld He (Kanojo to Kare) the suburbs are seen as mere anteroom to the city, a place almost as cold and impersonal as the metropolis itself is thought to be.
Still, Japan has never had a genre of suburban films as devastatingly detailed as those of the American Peyton Place variety. Perhaps one of the reasons for this was that city-as-villain was never as strong a theme as it was in the United States—ending there with the full horror of Soylerlt Greetl, Escape from New York, and Blade Runner.
In Japan it was not city-as-villain so much as it was life-as-villain, and life can be awful just anywhere, even in the furusato. And it is indicative that Japan almost alone has a rehabilitating city-film genre, one that attempts to find hometown-like qualities in the heart of the city itself.
Kurosawa’s 1947 One Wonderful Sunday (Subarashiki Nichiyobi), for example, is about a poor young couple in Tokyo who one Sunday construct an urbanfurusato for themselves. Gosho’s 1953 From Where Chimneys Are Seen (Entotsu no Mieru Basho) is about a real furusato right in the heart of the city, as is, in a way, Kurosawa’s Drunken Angel (Yoidore Tenshi). This 1948 film even has its small-town figures: the doctor, the young gangster, the tubercular schoolgirl, and so on.
One of the reasons that such a genre is possible is that Tokyo is actually in its construction more a collection of small towns, or neighborhoods, than it is big, hard-core-city. It is not centralized, there is no good and bad side of the tracks, no zoning, no real slums. Rather, it is a series of villages, each with its identical parts—supermarket, beauty parlor, sushi shop, and so forth. Consequently Tokyo is, indeed, not a cold or heartless city at all, at least by comparison with, let us say, Paris. Yet, big-cityitis threatens.
Hence a theme often seen in Japan’s city films is the change from warm, accepting city unit into cold, aloof big city proper. In Kurosawa’s 1952 [kim it is the city government itself which is the villain. The dying Kanji Watanabe wants to make a warm, living, small-town-like children’s park, a furusato for the neighborhood children, and eventually he succeeds in doing so.
In Yasuki Chiba’s 1957 Downtown (Shitamachi) the poor widow finds a warm, hometown-like friend in the truck driver, but it is the cruel city that kills him. In Mikio Naruse’s 1960 Flowing (Nagareru), the little town of the geisha in the middle of modern Tokyo is going to be destroyed after the film is over—yet one more living unity rendered lifeless.
It is not so much that the city is bad. Rather, the danger is always that the little-towns of which the city is made will be crushed to death, exterminated by this tremendous accumulation of people.
In the West, of course, the city is bad because it really is. Most American cities and many in Europe are truly dangerous. A film like The French Connection is only showing it as it happens to be. Thus when cities in the West get destroyed it is usually because they deserve it.
Tokyo has been destroyed on film any number of times, but never, I believe, because it deserved to be. Usually, Tokyo seems chosen for earthquake or fire or monster-attack simply because this is a place where the most people can be gratifyingly gotten rid of. This highly pragmatic attitude does have, however, further dimensions.
From Godzilla (Gojira, 1954) on, the attacker is, whatever else, uniquely Japanese. Though this particular monster was awakened by the 1953 U.S. atom bomb tests at Bikini, he is nonetheless Japanese in that he was sleeping in his ownfurusato in Tokyo Bay (to where he in true Japanese fashion returns at the end of the picture). Though he may destroy other cities—Osaka and Fukuoka in later films—he has never touched Kyoto, Japan’s officialJurusato. And in his latest (1984) appearance it is no longer the historical downtown of Tokyo that he pulverizes, but the new skyscrapers in Shinjuku. Godzilla has become conservative, which is very Japanese of him.
Even so, the civic destruction wrought by monsters, by alien invasions, by mysterious clouds, by earthquakes, and by conflagrations (all of them disasters to which Tokyo on film has been treated) is never occasioned by anything specific about Tokyo itself Rather, in a country that is always being shaken by earth tremors and visited by typhoons, full disaster seems a part of the climate and is not used—as it is in the West—to make moral observations.
It is interesting that when Westerners use Tokyo in their films they bring along their moral conceptions. Samuel Fuller in his 1955 House of Bamboo found Tokyo’s innocent Asakusa to be a home of oriental evil. Chris Marker, on the other hand, in films such as Le Mystere Koumiko and Sans Soleil, finds Tokyo filled with a charm and a beauty that are purely Parisian. Also, Tokyo’s size, relentless modernity, and resolute artificiality made it the model for the Los Angeles of the future in Blade Runner. However, Ridley Scott made all of this malignant—his own contribution. Actually, modern Tokyo is as benign as the Disneyland it has now come to resemble.
One further singularity about Tokyo on film might be noted in this brief listing of attitudes. This is that, unlike all other major cities, Tokyo is itself very rarely seen in the films. That is, location-work in Tokyo is very rare. If one sees a crew on the street, one may be fairly certain they are making something for TV.
Among the reasons might be that Tokyo itself, as many have noticed, looks just like a film set. The Tokyo street photographed in a film looks somewhat unreal. More real looking were those sections of Tokyo—”the Ginza,” “a Shinjuku alley,” “an apartment house”—that one used to find in the open sets of the major motion picture studios.
Indeed, the few times that Tokyo has actually been used as setting, Susumu Hani’s The Inferno of First Love (Hatsukoi Jigokuhen, 1968) and Nagisa Oshima’s The Man Who Left His Will on Film (Tokyo Senso Sengo Hiwa, 1970) as well as portions of his Diary of a Shin juku Thief (Shin juku Dorobo Nikki, 1969), the theme has been the artificiality of modern life and the anonymity of Tokyo itself.
Another reason for Tokyo itself so rarely appearing in films about Tokyo is that reality (at least in Japan) is so much better contrived and controlled on the sound stage. Kurosawa’s wonderfully detailed and mercilessly hot Tokyo in A Record of a Living Being (Ikimono no Kiroku, 1955) is all studio set. So are the ruins of Tokyo in The Bad Sleep Well (Warui Yatsu Hodo Yoku Nemuru, 1960).
All of Ozu’s beautiful little Tokyo streets, all of the intimate bars, all of the offices and sitting rooms and kitchens—these are movie sets. Actually Tokyo is sometimes to be seen between them, however. When Noriko takes the old couple on a tour of Tokyo in Tokyo Story, it is the real Tokyo we see; when father and daughter take the suburban train in Late Spring (Bamhun, 1949) from Kamakura to Tokyo, it is the actual progression of that journey which we see in the picture.
Attitudes toward Tokyo on film remain constant, but as the city proliferates, as land grows daily more expensive, as the suburbs press further out, there are new numbers of films that continue to question urban life—films such as Shinji Somai’s Luminous Woman (Hikari Onna, 1987), which has a noble savage from Hokkaido coming to rescue the Tokyo-stranded heroine. At the end he carries her back to an idyllic furusato where the rabbits and the foxes play happily in the grassy lawns of the couple’s house in the country. And, of course, Tora-san continues to be as popular as he ever was.
The attitude toward Tokyo as seen in the film is one much more benign than are the various attitudes shown by other countries toward other world capitals, but at the same time, the evidence is that of disapproval. Though there is no reason for a reading of city-as-hell, there also exists no reading of Tokyo as city-as-heaven, which is odd when one considers that it is the furusalo for millions.
—1988