In 1951, the San Francisco Peace Treaty was ratified, and the following year, Japan regained its independence. GHQ film censorship was eliminated, and the complicated stipulations binding Japan’s film industry up to this time were abolished. The idea films of the immediate postwar period disappeared, and at the same time, the jidaigeki that had been de-facto banned quickly blossomed, gathering mass popularity. Although independent productions championing socialist realism saw a temporary boom, films that beautifully depicted nostalgia for the war were also produced one after another. As Japanese films swept up prizes at international film festivals, works came to be produced with the hope of gaining this recognition. Tōei grew with personnel returning from the old Man’ei taking a central role, and Nikkatsu began film production again, making for a six-studio system all mass-producing program pictures—films to be distributed as full programs with major and minor features (including shorts and newsreels) or as double-bills.1 In 1958, an unprecedented 1,127,000,000 Japanese went to the movies, and Japanese cinema was embarking upon a second golden age. Cinema became the king of entertainment, a gathering place for mass enlightenment, and the ultimate medium to restore the cultural pride that had been lost in the international arena.
The first films to be produced soon after the end of GHQ censorship were films that focused on the atomic bombings. Under the Occupation, as a general principle, any films that referred to the bombings of Hiroshima or Nagasaki were strictly banned, unless it was steeped with Christian sentiment like Ōba Hideo’s The Bells of Nagasaki (Nagasaki no kane, 1950). The Effects of the Atomic Bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki (Genshi bakudan no kōka—Hiroshima ■ Nagasaki, 1946), produced in the immediate postwar by a group led by Iwasaki Akira, was seized for a long time. Of course, Iwasaki, knowing well that if it were discovered he would be sentenced to hard labor in Okinawa, hid the print of the film (parts of it were released at last in 1967). Yoshimura Kōzaburō and Shindō Kaneto formed an independent production company called the Modern Film Association (Kindai eiga kyōkai), through which they produced and directed Children of Hiroshima (Genbaku no ko, 1952), a film that focused on the aftereffects of the bombs on children. Incidentally, this was also the year in which a flood of literature was related to the atomic bombs.
Major shifts also could be detected in the film images of the Second World War. The simple schema in which a war based on militarism was purely evil was jettisoned, and in its stead, innumerable works appeared that showed the war experience sentimentally. In Listen to the Voices from the Sea! (Kike wadatsumi no koe, 1950), Sekigawa Hideo depicted the anguish of students drafted into service as soldiers, and in Tower of the Lilies (Himeyuri no to, 1953), Imai Tadashi showed the young girls who fought and died fighting intensely on the battlefields of Okinawa, both films showing this experience movingly and beautifully. Kinoshita Keisuke’s 24 Eyes (Nijūshi no hitomi, 1954) narrated the sad fate of elementary school students from the view of their female teacher, while Ichikawa Kon’s Harp of Burma (Biruma no tategoto, 1956) offered a requiem for the souls of Japanese soldiers sent overseas. These films were not just movies; they were received as important events in Japanese society. What they held in common was the confirmation of the consciousness of the Japanese people of themselves as war victims. For example, in Tower of the Lilies, there is no mention of how modern Japan seized Okinawa, or how it exploited the educational system to make Okinawans into citizens of the Japanese Empire. Listen to the Voices from the Sea! and Harp of Burma totally erase the voices of the Burmese who were invaded by Japanese soldiers. That is to say that the idea that only the deaths of Japanese are worthy of having their souls comforted is one that somehow feels very good to the Japanese people, and this idea has continued in different forms up to the 1990s to be used as an appeal by neoconservatives.
Emperor Meiji and the Great Russo-Japanese War (dir. Watanabe Kunio, 1957).
The 1950s also saw the production of many films that exalted nostalgia for the war, such as Battleship Yamato (Senkan yamato, 1953), Eagles of the Pacific (Taiheiyō no washi, 1953), and Admiral Yamamoto and the Allied Fleet (Gunshin Yamamoto gensui to rengō kantai, 1956). The significance of these films is difficult to evaluate and even critics at the time argued over whether such films should be considered “antiwar” or “prowar.” For the general audience, that was not a particularly pressing issue. They simply wallowed in stories of the war, which had been banned. Tower of the Lilies, along with its appeals for peace and against war, also served unconsciously to inflame sentiments of revenge for America’s cruel acts. On the surface, postwar leftist Japanese filmmakers were adamantly antiwar, but underneath they were anti-American patriots and ethnic nationalists. This has similarities to the complex consciousness found in Tower of the Lilies. The appearance of Watanabe Kunio’s Emperor Meiji and the Great Russo-Japanese War (Meiji tennō to nichiro dai sensō, 1957), produced at Shin Tōhō, was an extension of such nostalgic sentiment. Casting Arashi Kanjurō—who had played the Robin Hood–like hero Kurama Tengu for so many years—as Emperor Meiji, proved tremendously successful. This film took on the emperor system, which in the prewar period was considered untouchable and sacred, and turned it into a commodity. This conversion perfectly symbolizes Japan’s postwar society.
The 1950s was the first time in which Japanese films were exposed in a real way to the gaze of those outside Japan—especially to that of Europe. In 1951, Kurosawa Akira’s Rashōmon won the Grand Prix at the Venice Film Festival. Mizoguchi Kenji followed this by winning prizes at the Venice Film Festival three times between 1952 and 1954 for Life of Oharu (Saikaku ichidai onna), Ugetsu (Ugetsu monogatari), and Sanshō the Bailiff (Sanshō dayū). The year 1954 was especially significant, because Mizoguchi’s Sansho the Bailiff competed with Kurosawa’s Seven Samurai at Venice. In addition, Kinugasa Teinosuke’s Gate of Hell (Jigokumon) was submitted to the Cannes Film Festival in the same year, where it was crowned with the Grand Prix. European critics and audiences were astonished at these films that had arrived from an unknown land in the far East, and at the same time, this gave birth to the myth of the “Great Master,” a myth that continues to be the way of thinking about film directors to this day.
Why is it that such works gained the world’s attention during this period? Apart from the question of the quality of the individual works, we can consider three causes.
The first is that such films were all set in prewar Japan; the presence of kimono and samurai gave them a character that readily fulfilled Orientalist desires. Had these films been set in the present, there almost certainly would not have been so many prizewinners. One bit of proof is that the films of Ozu Yasujirō and Kinoshita Keisuke were not introduced until much later. Second, the trend toward auteurism emerged among the new Western critics—represented by Cahiers du Cinema—in accord with the rise of international film festivals in postwar Europe. As a result, all manner of filmmakers that had been out of the spotlight—from Hollywood B directors of the past to new directors from India and Sri Lanka—were equally designated as auteurs. The critics’ darlings were masters in the realist vein, like Rossellini and Renoir; Mizoguchi, with his distinct and sophisticated film grammar, was considered a perfect fit for this category. Third, with an eye on international film festivals, Daiei’s Nagata Masaichi produced films with themes and narratives that were sure to draw the interest of “foreigners.” Gate of Hell is the perfect example of such a film. Nagata then expanded his ambitions into South East Asian markets, having Mizoguchi shoot Princess Yang Kwei-Fei (Yō Kihi) as a coproduction with Hong Kong.
Of course, any time one discusses 1950s Japanese cinema, it is never acceptable to focus exclusively on this handful of mythologized films. Behind Seven Samurai lay countless B-level jidaigeki films, and Ugetsu shows how Mizoguchi’s tale of cruelty was achieved only after a long struggle with shinpa melodrama. In what follows, I take a closer look at the conditions of cinema at the time.
In the aftermath of the McCarthyism that began in the American Senate in 1947, a red purge was carried out in the Japanese film world in 1950. Directors including Kamei Fumio, Yamamoto Satsuo, Imai Tadashi, Miyajima Yoshio, and Katō Tai, alongside actors from the leftist Kabuki theater troupe Zenshinza, were expelled from major studios. Yamamoto shot City of Violence (Bōryoku no machi, 1950), a film produced by the union, which had battled in the Tōhō strikes. Imai teamed up with Zenshinza to make And Yet We Live (Dokkoi ikiteru, 1951). Focused on the poorest day laborers, the film exposed contradictions and class discrimination in postwar society. The following year, 1952, saw the releases of the aforementioned Children of the Atom Bomb by Yoshimura and Shindō, as well as Yamamoto Satsuo’s Vacuum Zone (Shinkū chitai), and an independent production boom was born. It was a time when the Korean peninsula was almost entirely occupied by the Communist Army, and the Communist Party in Japan was consumed by factional struggles. In any event, the boom was not sustainable and ended around 1955. Its collapse was due to the fact that the socialist realism championed by the films was swallowed up by political formalism, which led to boring films, and the system of film production for the major studios had been restructured at this time.
The person who was at the center of these movements in the early 1950s was Imai Tadashi. Imai had a hit at Tōhō in 1949 with Blue Mountains (Aoi sanmyaku), and in 1950, he made Until We Meet Again (Mata au hi made). The latter is an antiwar film depicting youth during the war, based on a piece of short fiction by Romain Rolland. The reason why they went to the trouble of sourcing the material from a European novel is obvious: in reality, effectively no strongly antiwar college students in Japan during the war could serve as a model. The film was criticized as being a kind of pretty fairy tale, but it attracted attention because it had a scene in which two people, separated by a window glass, kiss. Imai gave up on Tōhō and left, throwing himself into independent production, and it was just after this that he made And Yet We Live. While skillfully navigating between independent production and major studios, he had a hit with Tower of the Lilies, and with Darkness at Noon (Mahiru no ankoku, 1956), he dealt with a true story of false accusation in a criminal case, preserving his commitment to being a director of social justice films. Imai was the director who throughout the 1950s received the most number-one film awards in the annual polls by the journal Kinema Junpō, among the most authoritative periodicals of the film world at the time.
The major companies from during the wartime—Tōhō (including Shin Tōhō), Daiei, and Shōchiku—were in the process of establishing a system to distribute program pictures at the start of the 1950s. Tōei joined this system in 1951, and in 1954, pulled ahead of the other companies with double-bill programs, which consisted of two feature films. Finally, in 1954, Nikkatsu restarted its production, but it was prevented from getting the actors it sought by the Five Company Agreement between the major studios. Using this exclusion to its advantage, Nikkatsu began producing action films, which is discussed at the end of this chapter.
The three characteristic features of Tōhō during this period are as follows: (1) the Shachō series, (2) Kurosawa Akira (1910–1998), and (3) kaiju movies. The Shachō series showed a dynamic but hapless company president and his loyal group of assistants. This quintessential product of Japan in its time of economic growth would continue into the 1960s. Morishige Hisaya, who played the protagonist “Shachō” (company president) from the middle of the series, defined the character of businessman comedies made by Tōhō in the 1960s—its fundamental atmosphere was full of bright, cheerful, humanist sentiment. This atmosphere at Tōhō expanded the world of shōshimin films made by Shōchiku in the 1930s by recasting them within the postwar era of high economic growth. The worldview of the urban petit bourgeoisie became an anchor for film companies in the wake of the dissolution of the system of militarism.
Kurosawa Akira raced through the 1950s as though nothing could stop him. After writing numerous screenplays, beginning with Escape at Dawn (Akatsuki no dassō, 1950) for Taniguchi Senkichi, he continued to direct a series of works without pause: Ikiru (Ikiru, 1952), whose title means “to live”; Seven Samurai (1954); Throne of Blood (Kumo no sujō, 1957), whose title means “the spider’s nest castle”; and The Hidden Fortress (Kakushi toride no san’akunin, 1958). Ikiru relays the story of an old man who, when informed he has little time left to live, anguishes over the question of how best to spend his remaining time. The hole in his body from cancer, the hole in his spirit, and the hole of the abandoned wetland in the middle of town, overlap with one another as objects that the man must confront in a process of self-healing. The old man is played by Shimura Takashi, and through a performance that complicates the figure of the serious and purely righteous man by filling him with doubt, showed Japanese people an alternate way of aging in contrast to the more philosophic and resigned way of Ryū Chishū in Ozu Yasujirō’s films. Seven Samurai provided the template for numerous action films. To be sure, both Kurosawa’s way of establishing characters, and the striking battle scenes are breathtaking, and the phony samurai played by Mifune Toshirō, as both heroic and childish, is an extremely compelling figure. What Kurosawa was truly interested in pursuing, however, was the defeat of the samurai, who until the end were never really trusted by the local peasants, and mourning for warriors killed in battle. Kurosawa must have felt remorse for the facile way in which the protagonist joined the agricultural enlightenment movement at the end of No Regrets for Our Youth. Throne of Blood is an extraordinary adaptation of Macbeth, incorporating multiple formal aspects of mugen Noh2 into its narrative construction. Finally, The Hidden Fortress—the film that was the inspiration for Star Wars (1977)—displays the most dynamic sense of space among Kurosawa’s works.
Although he may have a tendency to get lost in the shadow of Kurosawa’s vibrant activity, Naruse Mikio (1905–1969) shot a number of extremely subtle, mature films adapted from the writings of Hayashi Fumiko. In complete contrast to Kurosawa, Naruse liked to portray protagonists who are always indecisive and melancholic, existing solely in their relations with others. If any director within Japanese cinema could properly be called a “woman’s” (joryū) filmmaker, it is hard to imagine anyone other than Naruse during this period.
In 1954, the year that Seven Samurai was released, Godzilla was unleashed on the world by Honda Ishirō (1911–1993), who had entered PCL at the same time as Kurosawa. Tsuburaya Eiji, who was in charge of special effects, had worked as an assistant director to Josef von Sternberg the previous year on Anatahan (1953). If the chiaroscuro was especially striking when the ancient monster was revived through hydrogen bomb tests, and crossed Tokyo Bay at night to attack greater Tokyo, that is probably because this member of the crew was trained by the director who had used such striking and singular lighting to present Marlene Dietrich before the world.
Godzilla would go on to be a huge moneymaker for Tōhō, launching the globally unprecedented genre of the kaiju eiga, but it was originally an antinuclear film with an ecological perspective. The idea of a threat to Tokyo, born in the south seas, is unthinkable without considering the air raids by the American forces that scorched the Japanese archipelago just nine years before the film was shot, as well as offering repose for the Japanese soldiers sent to the south seas. Here, too, the presence of the war can be seen. In the wake of Godzilla, for more than half a century, Tōhō would produce films about monsters attacking Japan, monsters like Matango, Radon, Mothra, and King Ghidorah. The characterization of Godzilla continued to change gradually throughout its serialization. In King Kong vs. Godzilla (1962), he stood on the side of Japanese nationalism, squaring off against the giant ape that came from the United States. In that work, he no longer bore the slightest trace of that frightening threat he once presented in his first movie appearance.
Mothra (dir. Honda Ishirō, 1961).
At Shin Tōhō, which began as a subsidiary and then became independent of Tōhō to forge its own management policy, there was an atmosphere that indulged all kinds of absurd movies. Ichikawa Kon (1915–2008), with Pu-san (1953), drew attention for his freshly humorous sensibility. He later shot the Izumi Kyōka classic Nihonbashi (1956) at Daiei, making bold use of gaudy colors at the center of the frame against a black background, casting a distancing effect on viewers accustomed to shinpa. At the same time, Nakagawa Nobuo (1905–1984), a veteran who had shot Enoken comedies during the prewar period, filled the screen with a sense of the grotesque rooted in Japanese views of life and death with his version of a Kabuki ghost story in The Ghosts of Yotsuya (Tōkaido Yotsuya kaidan, 1959) and The Afterworld (Jigoku, 1960). He displayed a penchant for peering into the abyss of evil in Japanese people.
Under the leadership of Nagata Masaichi, Daiei took their first postwar steps away from the production of crude melodramas with a series of “mother films” (haha mono) featuring Mimasu Aiko. The origins of this series go back to Henry King’s Stella Dallas. The films are based on stereotypical narratives of an uneducated but pure-hearted mother, played by Mimasu, who hides her emotion with a stoic face through everything as she hopes for her children to rise in class. Beginning with Mori Kazuo’s Wildcat Lady (Yamaneko reijō, 1948), thirty-one films were produced in the series through the late 1950s. What put a definitive end to this series, as I will detail, was Mizoguchi Kenji’s 1956 film Street of Shame (Akasen chitai).
At the same time that Daiei produced excellent films by prewar veterans Inagaki Hiroshi and Itō Daisuke set in contemporary times like Children Holding Hands (Te o tsunagu kora, 1948) and The Shōgi Master (Ōshō, 1948), the studio also poured their energy into jidaigeki during the 1950s. At the heart of this movement was the Zenigata Heiji Detective Series (Zenigata heiji torimonochō, 1951–1961) by Hasegawa Kazuo. They also seized a golden opportunity by employing new actors with contrasting personalities—the handsome young star Ichikawa Raizō and leading man Katsu Shintarō. In terms of actresses, Wakao Ayako, with the healthy, friendly face of ordinary Japanese people, was just beginning to distinguish herself.
With the success of Jigokumon, as the first film in Japan to use Eastman Color, Nagata Masa’ichi had its director, Kinugasawa Teinosuke, direct four full-color shinpa melodramas starring Yamamoto Fujiko, a great beauty who was originally Miss Nippon. Within this postwar period of high economic growth, this ended up as a grandiose anachronism. Shinpa films based on Kyōka’s writings had long constituted the core of Japan’s melodramas, but when Misumi Kenji shot the fifth and final version of A Woman’s Pedigree (Onna keizu) in 1962 with Ichikawa Raizō, this trend truly came to an end.
Few would dispute that the single most important figure for Daiei during this period was Mizoguchi Kenji (1898–1956). He was overly conscious of the new democratic ideals of thought under the occupation, of which he had only a simple-minded understanding, and that kept him from projecting his view of women adequately on screen. However, Life of Oharu (Saikaku ichidai onna, 1952), which he shot at Shin Tōhō, marks a turning point, after which he would direct eight additional films in the four remaining years of his life. Each of these works would boost his reputation as a master filmmaker. Ugetsu (Ugestu monogatari, 1953) is replete with elegant camera movement and a sense of ghostly presence, a direct display of the ideals of the culturally Japanese construction of space he saw in Japanese paintings, especially scroll paintings (e-makimono). The director clearly projects himself into his work in Sanshō the Bailiff, a work that reinterpreted its literary source—Mori Ōgai’s neo-Confucian historical fiction version of a medieval sekkyō bushi ballad—through the lens of a Buddhist sense of impermanence. In his final film, Street of Shame, he depicted the vicissitudes of a varied group of women on the margins, assembled at a Tokyo brothel. After Mizoguchi devoted his life to gazing on woman as the other, this is a work he could finally make now, at the end of his career. Here, he ventured to cast the star of maternal melodramas Mimasu Aiko as a crazed, old prostitute, depicting the cruel encounters she has with her grown son. A grotesque parody of the ideology of getting ahead (risshin shusse), the ideology at the heart of modern Japan, Street of Shame served at the same time as the explication of the logical conclusion of the melodramas that he had previously directed with such passion.
In the postwar era, Shōchiku’s production focused on humanist stories of the common folk and on melodramas for women. Ōba Hideo’s What Is Your Name (Kimi no na wa, 1953–54) provided the model. A man and woman who are strangers to one another happen to meet on a bridge in Ginza during the wartime. During the postwar chaos, they look for one another throughout Japan, but they keep missing each other. This three-part work, whose introduction recalls Mervyn LeRoy’s Waterloo Bridge (1940), ends with a sightseeing map covering the entire nation put up on screen for the viewers. Conversely, the person who embodied Shōchiku’s human comedies most authentically was Shibuya Minoru. With works such as Crazy Uproar (Tenya wanya, 1950), Freedom School (Jiyū gakkō, 1951), and Crazy Village (Kichigai buraku, 1957), he managed to depict the tumult of postwar society with tremendous humor.
Throughout the 1950s, the director Japanese people trusted most was Kinoshita Keisuke (1912–1998). With the cooperation of Fuji Film, he shot Japan’s first color film, Carmen Comes Home (Karumen kokyō ni kaeru, 1951). He cast Takamine Hideko as a cheerful stripper with a heart of gold, depicting her triumphant return to her hometown in all its radiance. In Times of Joy and Sorrow (Yorokobi mo kanashimi mo iku toshitsuki, 1957), he developed what might be called his own “theory of the essence of the Japanese” (Nihonjinron)3 by depicting the life of a lighthouse keeper who wanders through the hinterlands of Japan.
In the immediate postwar years, like his colleague Shibuya, Ozu Yasujirō (1903–1963) tried to focus on the gentle humor that wafts through the lives of everyday people, but this did not seem to match his natural inclinations. Apparently, postwar society was already too complicated for him to film remakes of the Kihachi films he specialized in during the prewar period. Thus, following Late Spring (Banshun, 1949), he shifted the scene to Kamakura, or to the bourgeois residences of the tonier parts of Tokyo, polishing his philosophical mode of resignation even more than he previously had. What Tokyo Story (Tokyo monogatari, 1953) presents is nothing other than the gradual collapse of the family system. Ozu’s film boldly depicted this collapse through rigorous attention to the size of the figures within the frame. He consistently used reverse cuts—in which the camera shifts back and forth across the 180-degree axis4—filming characters head-on from a frontal angle. The dialogue was so distilled it would be impossible to eliminate even a single word. It must be the most austere film in Japanese film history. By appearing in Ozu’s films, Hara Setsuko, the goddess-like figure of postwar democracy, utterly reversed her myth as an actress. She switched from her role as an activist urging the destruction of feudalism to being the last to embody a traditional pure and virtuous woman in the second conversion in her life as an actor.
In the immediate wake of the war, Tōei was under the wing of Tōyoko films, which had been scraping along. Tōei was newly established as a production company in 1951, with Man’ei’s Negishi Kan’ichi jumping on board. Negishi brought in his former colleagues, who had returned from the continent, one after another as film personnel, putting Makino Mitsuo in charge of production. He did not hesitate to welcome leftist film personnel who had been abandoned by other companies during the red purge, including Imai Tadashi, Sekigawa Hideo, and Ieki Miyoji. We could even say that Man’ei’s legacy served as the undercurrent for Tōei.
In establishing itself, Tōei made use of prewar jidaigeki stars, who had been making mostly films set in contemporary times, like the Tarao Bannai series, as they were unable to find work elsewhere. Once the studio truly opened in Kyoto, however, the proportion of jidaigeki grew considerably, with Kataoka Chiezō’s Tattooed Magistrate (Irezumi hankan) and Ichikawa Utaemon’s The Idle Vassal (Hatamoto taikutsu otoko) both becoming series. In 1952, when Japan regained its independence, it was Tōei who quickly put out the Kataoka Chiezō vehicle Akō Castle (Akōjō, 1952) and had Hagiwara Ryō direct. When they acquired the “new faces” of Nakamura Kinnosuke, Azuma Chiyonosuke, and Ōkawa Hashizō, Toei became a temple of jidaigeki program pictures, far surpassing Nikkatsu’s output during the 1930s. These actors displayed none of the brutality and intensity of prewar stars like Bandō Tsumasaburō or Ōkōchi Denjirō, and instead, they created a bright, cheerful chanbara style. This can be called the manifestation of après-guerre in jidaigeki. Classic jidaigeki stories were remade in this mood as with Katō Tai’s In Search of Mother (Mabuta no haha, 1962) and Yamashita Kōsaku’s Yakuza of Seki (Seki no yatappe, 1962), which both featured Kinnosuke in the lead.
Uchida Tomu, who stayed in Manchuria for eight years after Man’ei collapsed, helping Chinese film crews learn film technologies, was welcomed by Tōei when he returned to Japan. Although he worked vigorously to make jidaigeki with a somber sensibility, such as Bloody Spear on Mount Fuji (Chiyari fuji, 1955), the three-part series Sword in the Moonlight (Daibosatsu tōge, 1957–1959), and the five-part series, Miyamoto Musashi (1961–1965), he also shot the film A Fugitive from the Past (Kiga kaikyō, 1964), starring Mikuni Rentarō and set in contemporary times. Running throughout each of these works is the director’s sharp awareness of human karma and discrimination, and he was there able to grasp an extremely real sense of evil. Uchida’s existence was decidedly idiosyncratic from the perspective of Tōei’s brighter jidaigeki program pictures, but he is extremely important as a link between prewar and postwar jidaigeki.
The biggest event in the film world of the 1950s was brought about when Nikkatsu, Japan’s oldest film studio, announced that it would be resuming production. Quickly, young directors and staff were gathered from all over, but as far as actors were concerned, because of an agreement between the existing five major companies, the studios refused to let them work for Nikkatsu. The late-developing Nikkatsu was forced to hold auditions for “new faces.” This turned out to be a rather auspicious development, turning Nikkatsu into the greatest creator of program pictures.
Crazed Fruit (dir. Nakahira Kō, 1956).
In 1956, Furukawa Takumi adapted Season of the Sun (Taiyō no kisetsu), the novel by Akutagawa Prize–winning author Ishihara Shintarō that sent shock waves through Japan. This film depicted the decadence and everyday lives of bourgeois youth who hang around the beaches of Shōnan. The film was not quite as much a sensation as the novel, but it did provide the launching pad for the author’s younger brother, Ishihara Yūjirō, into the film world. Yūjirō was catapulted into a leading position with his next film, Crazed Fruit (Kurutta kajitsu, 1956), and he quickly began to build a myth as an action star. The first condition for Japanese actors, from Onoe Matsunosuke to Hasegawa Kazuo, was always a large face with distinguished features. But Yūjirō was different. He managed to seize hold of audiences not through his face, but through his height and his long legs. His most flattering shot was not a low angle, but a long shot, and the sharp, lively camerawork of the new director Nakahira Kō proved a perfect match. The second new feature of Yūjirō lay in the fact that, along with being the perfect manifestation of the individualism Japanese longed for in the postwar period, he was the very epitome of self-awareness: talking to himself, suddenly breaking into song, aimless wandering. Nikkatsu’s various characters, the personalities of its action stars—Shishido Jō, Kobayashi Akira, Akagi Keiichirō, and Watari Tetsuya—took Yūjirō’s “cool” self-consciousness as their starting point and then developed in their own distinctive ways from there. What they all shared was a certain difficult-to-grasp contradictory quality, a dandyism and solitude available only to those who had been abandoned by the communities of the family and the state.
Although it is only a coincidence, Francois Truffaut, who happened to see this work in Paris (this was before he directed The 400 Blows), quickly penned a long review praising it. In my opinion, Crazed Fruit also likely exerted a certain influence on Claude Chabrol’s Cousins (1959).
Two brothers fight over a single woman, and it all comes to a climax on board a motorboat. When Crazed Fruit was attacked for being against the public morals of the time, Nikkatsu ended the Sun Tribe Films line and had the veteran director Tasaka Tomotaka make the contemporary set film The Baby Carriage (Ubaguruma, 1956) and A Sunlit Street (Hi no ataru sakamichi, 1958), both starring Yūjirō. Kawashima Yūzō, when he was assigned to work with Yūjirō, boldly joked that he would make a jidaigeki Sun Tribe film, and he shot A Sun Tribe Myth from the Bakumatsu Era (Bakumatsu taiyōden, 1957).
Young, talented directors gathered at Nikkatsu in the late 1950s. I will discuss each of them individually in the following chapter. Like their peers in France, they were enamored by Hollywood film noir to no end, although they explored the possibilities for action films set in Japan. But they differed from the French nouvelle vague in that they had to produce their works at a fixed schedule as craftsmen, thoroughly ensconced within the studio system. This fact can be detected in Nakahira’s casual response whenever he was asked what he thought of the nouvelle vague: it is “amateurism.”5 In the contemporary moment, however, so many years after the genre reached its end, it is not overly difficult to see a certain historical parallelism between the two.
