YAGUCHI Shinobu

(b. May 30, 1967)

矢口史靖

A proficient director of mainstream comedies, Yaguchi won the PIA Film Festival Grand Prize for his 2-part 8mm film Rain Woman (Ame onna, 1990), about two young female thieves. His first theatrical feature, made with PIA scholarship funding, was Barefoot Picnic (Hadashi no pikunikku, 1993), which dramatized the disastrous chain of events which ensnares a high school girl after she is caught without a ticket by an inspector on a train. It earned Yaguchi praise for his pacy, rhythmic cutting. His next feature, The Secret Garden (Himitsu no hanazono, 1997), was another rather dark-toned comedy, about a money-fixated young woman’s obsessive search for a cash-filled suitcase lost in a failed bank heist. The decision to focus on such an unlikeable protagonist was rather brave, and Yaguchi avoided any sentimental final redemption. A similar tone of mild amorality was visible in Adrenalin Drive (Adorenarin doraibu, 1999), about a driver and a nurse who, after another improbable chain of events, find themselves in possession of a box of yakuza takings. The implication that the hero and heroine deserve the cash merely because they are nicer than the gangsters was dubious, but the film was well-paced and entertaining.

The heroine of The Secret Garden takes up swimming and rock climbing to further her quest for the money, and the theme of characters who excel in surprising hobbies was at the heart of Yaguchi’s most popular comedies, Waterboys (Wōtābōizu, 2001) and Swing Girls (Suwingu gāruzu, 2004). In both films, a group of high school kids unwillingly take up an activity (synchronized swimming in the former, jazz in the latter), and proceed to make a success of it. The sharper edges of Yaguchi’s earlier films had been smoothed away in these crowd-pleasing stories celebrating teamwork and self-respect; both were slightly pat in development and broad in characterization, and Waterboys especially was a little over-reliant on physical gags. But they were inventively shot and engagingly acted, and their predictability was their charm.

1987 Furasutureitā / Frustrator (8mm short)

1988 Kaikisen / Tropic (8mm short)

1990 Asaki yumemishi / Life in a Dream (8mm short)

Suisen terebi / Tap and Television (8mm short)

Ame onna / Rain Woman (8mm)

1993 Hadashi no pikkunikku / Barefoot Picnic / Down the Drain (16mm)

1996 Bādo uotchingu / Birdwatching (16mm short)

1997 Himitsu no hanazono / The Secret Garden / My Secret Cache / My Secret Place

1999 Adorenarin doraibu / Adrenaline Drive

Wan pīsu / One Piece (co-director)

2001 Wōtābōizu / Waterboys

2002 Paruko fikushon / Parco Fiction (co-director)

2004 Suwingu gāruzu / Swing Girls

2007 Kayōkyoku da yo, jinsei wa / Tokyo Rhapsody (lit. Life’s a Popular Song) (co-director)

YAMADA Yōji

(b. September 13, 1931)

山田洋次

Yamada has almost single-handedly sustained the bittersweet “Ōfuna flavor” of Shochiku’s classic comedies and melodramas through more cynical times. Having written scripts for Shochiku stalwart Yoshitarō Nomura, who recommended his promotion to the director’s chair, he made his debut with a comedy, Stranger on the Second Floor (Nikai no tanin, 1961). In the sixties, he also made occasional serious films such as Flag in the Mist (Kiri no hata, 1965), a thriller based on a Seichō Matsumoto novel, and Sunshine in the Old Neighborhood (Shitamachi no taiyō, 1963), a politically progressive story about a young woman rejecting a salaryman’s proposal in order to avoid a conventional married life. This marked his first collaboration with actress Chieko Baishō, who was to become a regular in his films.

His specialty, however, was heartwarming comedy. The roguish protagonists of such films as Honest Fool (Baka marudashi, 1964) and The Loveable Tramp (Natsukashii fūraibō, 1966) became the prototypes of Yamada’s most famous character, Tora-san, a rough-edged, irresponsible, yet sincere, enterprising, and basically decent fellow who, with the long-suffering family of which he is the black sheep, personified the spirit of the old Tokyo shitamachi quarter. Played with impeccable comic timing and a well-judged balance of tough and tender by Kiyoshi Atsumi, Tora-san appeared in 48 episodes under the umbrella title “It’s Tough Being a Man” (Otoko wa tsurai yo) between 1969 and 1995, Yamada directing all but two. Basically salutes to the close-knit urban communities that had been eroded by war and development, the films were nostalgic from the start and somewhat formulaic (Tora-san inevitably meeting, falling for, and losing the girl). Nevertheless, their gentle warmth and cozy charm made them tremendously popular, and they kept Shochiku solvent through the seventies and eighties. After Atsumi’s death in 1996, Yamada paid tribute with The Man Who Caught the Rainbow (Niji o tsukamu otoko, 1996), a Tora-san-like sentimental comedy about a cinema manager in Tokushima Prefecture, and a toast to the film medium itself. Yamada’s cinephilia had also expressed itself in another of his non-Tora-san films, Final Take (Kinema no tenchi, 1986), a loving, if somewhat inconsequential, recreation of moviemaking at Shochiku in the thirties.

Yamada has achieved critical success with a number of other non-Tora-san films. Displaying similar virtues—sureness of touch, human warmth, performances of spontaneity and vitality—these have been set in less idealized, more realistic communities. Where Spring Comes Late (Kazoku, 1970) followed a family’s move from Kyushu to northerly Hokkaido; Donald Richie commented that “it had emotional honesty, humor, and concern for ordinary feelings that many thought had deserted Japanese cinema forever.” Home from the Sea (Kokyō, 1972) was a drama about life in the island communities of the Inland Sea; Yamada focused with subtle poignancy on the problems of poverty, depopulation, and unemployment. The Village (Harakara, 1975) was a sunnier treatment of country life, following the efforts of a local community to mount a stage musical; it was largely saved from sentimentality by engaging performances.

These serious films revealed Yamada’s liberal attitudes and his respect for flawed people, qualities also visible in The Yellow Handkerchief (Shiawase no kiiroi hankachi, 1977) and A Distant Cry from Spring (Haruka naru yama no yobigoe, 1980), two dramas about criminals seeking to make new lives for themselves. An interest in socially marginalized characters was sustained during the nineties in the School (Gakkō) series about teachers working in difficult circumstances. Of these, the first focused on a night school educating students who failed to graduate from high school, including several also marginalized by their immigrant status. The second touchingly examined the problems involved in caring for mentally disabled children. Perhaps Yamada’s best film, however, was My Sons (Musuko, 1991), which evoked the spirit of Ozu. Indeed, with its story of the distant relationship between a father in the countryside and his sons in Tokyo after the death of the mother, it could almost have been conceived as a sequel to Tokyo Story (Tōkyō monogatari, 1953). In recent years, Yamada has widened his range with three well-crafted period films: The Twilight Samurai (Tasogare seibei, 2002), The Hidden Blade (Kakushi ken oni no tsume, 2004), and Love and Honor (Bushi no ichibun, 2006). Though atypical in setting, they focused characteristically on ordinary or marginalized people: the protagonists of the first two films were low-ranking samurai, while the hero of Love and Honor, employed as a food taster for a local aristocrat, goes blind after sampling a poisoned dish. The Hidden Blade, in particular, was a moving account of an ordinary man striving to act decently in turbulent times.

Despite his liberal politics, Yamada has sometimes been criticized for stylistic conservatism. Certainly, his films lack the formal innovation of his New Wave contemporaries, but he is an undoubted auteur, always scripting his own films, and his sensitivity as a director of actors is undeniable. He has also displayed a nearly postmodern sophistication in casting; in the seventies, for instance, the regular Tora-san actors appeared in non-Tora-san films so that, as with Ozu’s work, a surface realism was disrupted by the viewer’s consciousness of the stars’ established personae. Though Yamada, unlike Ozu, has sometimes let tenderness slip into sentimentality, he has probably brought more pleasure to more people than any other Japanese director of his generation.

1961 Nikai no tanin / Stranger on the Second Floor / The Stranger Upstairs

1963 Shitamachi no taiyō / Sunshine in the Old Neighborhood / The Sunshine Girl

1964 Baka marudashi / Honest Fool

Iikagen baka / The Irresponsible Fool

Baka ga tanku de yatte kuru / The Fool Comes on a Tank

1965 Kiri no hata / Flag in the Mist / The Trap

1966 Un ga yokerya / Gambler’s Luck

Natsukashii fūraibō / The Lovable Tramp

1967 Kyūchan no dekkai yume / Let’s Have a Dream (lit. Kyu-chan’s Huge Dream)

Ai no sanka / Song of Love

Kigeki: Ippatsu shōbu / The Greatest Challenge of All

1968 Hana Hajime no ippatsu daibōken / The Million Dollar Pursuit

Fukeba tobu yona otoko da ga / The Shy Deceiver

1969 Kigeki: Ippatsu daihisshō / Vagabond Schemer

Otoko wa tsurai yo / Tora-san, Our Lovable Tramp / It’s Tough Being a Man (lit.)

Zoku otoko wa tsurai yo / Tora-san’s Cherished Mother / Tora-san 2

1970 Otoko wa tsurai yo: Bōkyō hen / Tora-San’s Runaway / Tora-san 5

Kazoku / Where Spring Comes Late / The Family (lit.)

1971 Otoko wa tsurai yo: Junjō hen / Tora-san’s Shattered Romance / Tora-san 6

Otoko wa tsurai yo: Funtō hen / Tora-san, the Good Samaritan / Tora-san 7

Otoko wa tsurai yo: Torajirō koiuta / Tora-san’s Love Call / Tora-san 8

1972 Otoko wa tsurai yo: Shibamata bojō / Tora-san’s Dear Old Home / Tora-san 9

Kokyō / Home from the Sea / Homecoming / Native Place (lit.)

Otoko wa tsurai yo: Torajirō yumemakura / Tora-san’s Dream Come True / Tora-san 10

1973 Otoko wa tsurai yo: Torajirō wasurenagusa / Tora-san’s Forget Me Not / Tora-san 11

Otoko wa tsurai yo: Watashi no Tora-san / Tora-san Loves an Artist / Tora-san 12

1974 Otoko wa tsurai yo: Torajirō koiyatsure / Tora-san’s Lovesick / Tora-san 13

Otoko wa tsurai yo: Torajirō komoriuta / Tora-san’s Lullaby / Tora-san 14

1975 Otoko wa tsurai yo: Torajirō aiaigasa / Tora-san’s Rise and Fall / Tora-san Meets the Songstress Again / Tora-san: Love under One Umbrella / Tora-san 15

Harakara / The Village

Otoko wa tsurai yo: Katsushika risshi hen / Tora-san the Intellectual / Tora-san 16

1976 Otoko wa tsurai yo: Torajirō yūyake koyake / Tora-san’s Sunrise and Sunset / Tora-san 17

Otoko wa tsurai yo: Torajirō junjōshishū / Tora-san’s Pure Love / Tora-san 18

1977 Otoko wa tsurai yo: Torajirō to tonosama / Tora-san Meets His Lordship / Tora-san 19

Shiawase no kiiroi hankachi / The Yellow Handkerchief / The Yellow Handkerchief of Happiness (lit.)

Otoko wa tsurai yo: Torajirō ganbare / Tora-san Plays Cupid / Tora-san 20

1978 Otoko wa tsurai yo: Torajirō waga michi o yuku / Stage-Struck Tora-san / Tora-san 21

Otoko wa tsurai yo: Uwasa no Torajirō / Talk of the Town Tora-san / Tora-san 22

1979 Otoko wa tsurai yo: Tonderu Torajirō / Tora-san, the Matchmaker / Tora-san 23

Otoko wa tsurai yo: Torajirō haru no yume / Tora-san’s Dream of Spring / Tora-san 24

1980 Haruka naru yama no yobigoe / A Distant Cry from Spring / A Distant Cry from the Mountains (lit.)

Otoko wa tsurai yo: Torajirō haibisukasu no hana / Tora-san’s Tropical Fever / Tora-san 25

Otoko wa tsurai yo: Torajirō kamome uta / Foster Daddy, Tora / Tora-san 26

1981 Otoko wa tsurai yo: Naniwa no koi no Torajirō / Tora-san’s Love in Osaka / Tora-san 27

Otoko wa tsurai yo: Torajirō kamifūsen / Tora-san’s Promise / Tora-san 28

1982 Otoko wa tsurai yo: Torajirō ajisai no koi / Hearts and Flowers for Tora-san / Tora-san 29

Otoko wa tsurai yo: Hana mo arashi mo Torajirō / Tora-san the Expert / Tora-san 30

1983 Otoko wa tsurai yo: Tabi to onna to Torajirō / Tora-san’s Song of Love / Tora-san 31

Otoko wa tsurai yo: Kuchibue o fuku Torajirō / Tora-san Goes Religious? / Tora-san 32

1984 Otoko wa tsurai yo: Yogiri ni musebu Torajirō / Marriage Counselor Tora-san / Tora-san 33

Otoko wa tsurai yo: Torajirō shinjitsu ichiro / Tora-san’s Forbidden Love / Tora-san 34

1985 Otoko wa tsurai yo: Torajirō ren’ai juku / Tora-san the Go-Between / Tora-san 35

Otoko wa tsurai yo: Shibamata yori ai o komete / Tora-san’s Island Encounter / Tora-san 36

1986 Kinema no tenchi / Final Take (lit. The World of Cinema)

Otoko wa tsurai yo: Shiawase no aoi tori / Tora-san’s Bluebird Fantasy / Tora-san 37

1987 Otoko wa tsurai yo: Shiretoko bojō / Tora-san Goes North / Tora-san 38

Otoko wa tsurai yo: Torajiro monogatari / Tora-san Plays Daddy / Tora-san 39

1988 Dauntaun hīrōzu / Downtown Heroes / Hope and Pain

Otoko wa tsurai yo: Torajirō sarada kinenbi / Tora-san’s Salad-Day Memorial / Tora-san 40

1989 Otoko wa tsurai yo: Torajirō kokoro no tabi / Tora-san Goes to Vienna / Tora-san 41

Otoko wa tsurai yo: Boku no ojisan / Tora-san, My Uncle / Tora-san 42

1990 Otoko wa tsurai yo: Torajirō no kyūjitsu / Tora-san Takes a Vacation / Tora-san 43

1991 Musuko / My Sons

Otoko wa tsurai yo: Torajirō no kokuhaku / Tora-san’s Confession / Tora-san 44

1992 Otoko wa tsurai yo: Torajirō no seishun / Tora-san Makes Excuses / Tora-san 45

1993 Gakkō / A Class to Remember (lit. School)

Otoko wa tsurai yo: Torajirō no endan / Tora-san’s Matchmaker / Tora-san’s Marriage Proposal / Tora-san 46

1994 Otoko wa tsurai yo: Haikei Kuruma Torajirō-sama / Tora-san’s Easy Advice / Tora-san 47

1995 Otoko wa tsurai yo: Torajirō kurenai no hana / Tora-san to the Rescue / Tora-san 48

1996 Gakkō II / The Learning Circle / A Class to Remember 2 (lit. School 2)

Niji o tsukamu otoko / The Man Who Caught the Rainbow / The Rainbow Seeker

1997 Niji o tsukamu otoko: Nangoku funtō hen / The Man Who Caught the Rainbow: Invigorating Fight in the South Country

1998 Gakkō III / The New Voyage (lit. School 3)

2000 15-sai: Gakkō IV / Fifteen / A Class to Remember 4: Fifteen (lit. Fifteen: School 4)

2002 Tasogare Seibei / The Twilight Samurai

2004 Kakushi ken oni no tsume / The Hidden Blade

2006 Bushi no ichibun / Love and Honor

YAMAMOTO Kajirō

(March 15, 1902–September 21, 1974)

山本嘉次郎

Yamamoto is remembered today largely as mentor to Akira Kurosawa, who assisted him on Horse (Uma, 1941), Composition Class (Tsuzurikata kyōshitsu, 1938), and The Loves of Tojuro (Tōjūrō no koi, 1938). At his best, however, he was a distinguished filmmaker in his own right. Having directed a handful of films in the mid twenties, he served from 1926 to 1932 as scenarist for Kenji Mizoguchi, Tomu Uchida, and Tomotaka Tasaka. Subsequently he joined P.C.L. (later Toho), a company specializing in literary adaptations; his two versions of novels by Sōseki Natsume, Botchan (1935) and I Am a Cat (Wagahai wa neko de aru, 1936), were somewhat academic in style, but revealed a talent for light comedy and social satire. A rather broader comic touch was evident in the many star vehicles he directed for comedian Enoken, who essayed parodic impersonations of famous samurai heroes. Of these films, Pickpocket Kinta (Enoken no Chakkiri Kinta, 1937) is considered the best.

Among Yamamoto’s other prewar films, The Loves of Tojuro was an Edo-period drama with interesting metatheatrical elements, its actor hero finding inspiration for his role in memories of a youthful love affair. Best known today among his films of the era, however, are two realist accounts of life in northern Japan, both starring the young Hideko Takamine. Composition Class was a fascinating account of a teenage writer whose honesty offends her community. Horse was a touching story of a girl raising a colt; the drama was anchored in a semi-documentary portrait of a Tohoku farming community through four seasons. Yamamoto’s rightist attitudes were implicit in the resolutions of these films: the heroine of Composition Class learns, in Peter High’s words, “to dissemble in the face of intimidation,” while in Horse the colt is finally sold to the army.

His pro-militarist sympathies and realist approach made Yamamoto a logical choice to direct The War at Sea from Hawaii to Malaya (Hawai-Marē oki kaisen, 1942), a big-budget, meticulously detailed reconstruction of the attack on Pearl Harbor, released on its first anniversary. He followed this with Kato’s Falcon Fighters (Katō hayabusa sentōtai, 1944), a biopic of an ace pilot who had died in combat in 1942, and Torpedo Squadrons Move Out (Raigekitai shu­tsudō, 1944), a glorification of kamikaze pilots. After the war, Yamamoto was a co-founder of Motion Picture Art Association, the company that produced Kurosawa’s Stray Dog (Nora inu, 1949). His own postwar work spanned various genres. He directed several gangster pictures, for instance, Underworld (Ankokugai, 1956) and A Man among Men (Dansei No. 1, 1955), and realized The Adventures of Sun Wu Kung (Songokū, 1959), a fantasy about the Buddhist monkey of Chinese folklore. But he continued to specialize primarily in comedy, making the popular film about salarymen, Mr. Hope (Hōpu-san: Sararīman tora no maki, 1951), and Toho’s first color production, Girls among the Flowers (Hana no naka no musumetachi, 1953). His later films, however, lacked the distinction of his best prewar work.

1924 Nekka no jūjiro / Hot Fire at the Crossroads

Kagonotori / Caged Bird

Dan’un / Scattered Clouds

Renbō kouta (Shōdoshima jōwa) / Short Song of Love (Love Story of Shodoshima)

Yama no shinpi / Secret of the Mountain

Kōfuku jidai / Time of Happiness

1925 Mori no asa / Morning in the Forest

Hito o kutta hanashi / The Story That Mocked a Man

Bakudanji / Bomber Kid

Kagayakeru tobira / Gateway to Glory

1926 Danji no ichidaku / The Boy’s Agreement

Matsuda eiga shōhinshū / Matsuda Collection of Short Films (co-director)

Haha ni chikaite / Vow to Mother

Tōsan no urimono / Father’s Goods

1932 Sai-kun shinsenjutsu / Wife’s New Tactic

Junanka / Passion Flower / Ordeal

Hohoemu Nikkatsu / Smiling Nikkatsu

1933 Sōkyū no mon / Gate to the Blue Sky

Momoiro no musume / The Pink Girl

Ren’ai hijōji / Love Crisis

Nyōbō seifuku / Conquest of a Wife

1934 Furusato harete / Brightening Hometown

Ren’ai sukījutsu / Love and the Art of Skiing

Enoken no Seishun Suikoden / Enoken’s Youthful Liquor Margin

Arupusu taishō / General of the Alps / Alpine Victory

1935 Botchan

Sumire musume / The Violet Girl

Itazura kozō / Tricks of an Errand Boy

Enoken no Kondō Isami / Enoken Plays Isami Kondo

1936 Enoken no Donguri Tonbei / Enoken’s Tombei of the Acorns

Wagahai wa neko de aru / I Am a Cat

Enoken no Senman chōja / Enoken the Billionaire

Zoku Enoken no Senman chōja / Enoken the Billionaire 2

Shinkon ura omote / Two Sides of a New Marriage

1937 Otto no teisō: Zenpen: Haru kureba / A Husband’s Chastity: Part 1: When Spring Comes

Otto no teisō: Kōhen: Aki futatabi / A Husband’s Chastity: Part 2: Autumn Once More

Nihon josei dokuhon / Japanese Women’s Textbook

Enoken no Chakkiri Kinta (Zenpen; Kōhen) / Pickpocket Kinta (lit. Enoken’s Kinta the Pickpocket) (Parts 1 and 2)

Utsukushiki taka / Beautiful Hawk

1938 Tōjūrō no koi / The Loves of Tojuro / Loves of a Kabuki Actor

Tsuzurikata kyōshitsu / Composition Class

Enoken no Bikkuri jinsei / Enoken: Life Is a Surprise

1939 Enoken no Gatchiri jidai / Enoken’s Time of Shrewdness

Chūshingura (Zenpen; Kōhen) / The Loyal 47 Ronin (Parts 1 and 2)

Nonki yokochō / Easy Alley

1940 Roppa no Shinkonryokō / Roppa’s Honeymoon

Enoken no Zangiri Kinta / Enoken’s Slashing Kinta / Enoken’s Cropped Hair

Songokū (Zenpen; Kōhen) / The Monkey King (Parts 1 and 2) / Monkey Sun

1941 Uma / Horse

Chimata ni ame no furu gotoku / Like Rain in the Neighborhood

1942 Kibō no seishun / Hopeful Youth

Hawai-Marē oki kaisen / The War at Sea From Hawaii to Malaya

1944 Katō hayabusa sentōtai / Kato’s Falcon Fighters

Raigekitai shutsudō / Torpedo Squadrons Move Out

1945 Amerika yōrō / Straight to the Americans (uncompleted)

1946 Asu o tsukuru hitobito / Those Who Make Tomorrow (co-director)

1947 Yottsu no koi no monogatari / Four Love Stories (co-director)

Shin baka jidai (Zenpen; Kōhen) / The New Age of Fools / These Foolish Times (Parts 1 and 2)

Haru no kyōen / Spring Banquet

1949 Kaze no ko / Child of the Wind / Children of the Wind

Haru no tawamure / Spring Flirtation

1950 Datsugoku / Escape from Prison

Shinju fujin: Shojo no maki / Mrs. Pearl: Virgin Reel

Shinju fujin: Hitozuma no maki / Mrs. Pearl: Wife Reel

1951 Erejī / Elegy

Hōpu-san: Sararīman tora no maki / Mr. Hope (lit. Mr. Hope: Primer for the Salaryman)

Onnagokoro dare ga shiru / Who Knows a Woman’s Heart?

1952 Nanairo no machi / Town of Seven Colors

1953 Koi no fūunji / Lucky Adventures of Love

Hana no naka no musumetachi / Girls among the Flowers / Girls in the Orchard

Yūgatō / Light Trap

1954 Botchan shain / Mr. Valiant (lit. The Young Master as Company Man)

Zoku botchan shain / Mr. Valiant Rides Again (lit. The Young Master as Company Man 2)

Doyōbi no tenshi / Saturday’s Angel

1955 Dansei No. 1 / A Man among Men / No. 1 Man (lit.)

Ore mo otoko sa / I’m a Man Too!

Muttsuri Umon torimonochō / The Casebooks of Sullen Umon

Ai no rekishi / History of Love

1956 Ankokugai / Underworld

Ojōsan tōjō / A Young Lady on Her Way

Manasuru ni tatsu: Hyōkō 8125-mēta / Standing on Manaslu: 8125 Meters above Sea Level

1957 “Dōbutsuen monogatari” yori: Zō / From “Zoo Story”: Elephant

Zenta to Sanpei monogatari: Kaze no naka no kodomo / The Tale of Zenta and Sanpei: Children in the Wind

Zenta to Sanpei monogatari: Obake no sekai / The Tale of Zenta and Sanpei: World of Monsters

1958 Jazu musume ni eikō are / Glory to the Jazz Girls

Tōkyō no kyūjitsu / A Holiday in Tokyo

1959 Songokū / The Adventures of Sun Wu Kung / Monkey Sun / The Monkey King

1960 Ginza taikutsu musume / Ginza Tomboy (lit. Bored Girl in Ginza)

1964 Tensai sagishi monogatari: Tanuki no hanamichi / Story of a Genius Swindler: A Raccoon Dog’s Path to Success

Hana no Ōedo no musekinin / Flowers of Edo

1965 Tanuki no taishō / General Raccoon Dog / Samurai Joker

1966 Tanuki no ōsama / King Raccoon Dog / Thief on the Run

Tanuki no kyūjitsu / The Raccoon Dog’s Day Off / Swindler Meets Swindler

YAMAMOTO Satsuo

(July 15, 1910–August 11, 1983)

山本薩夫

An avowed social critic and polemicist long affiliated with the Japanese Communist Party, Yamamoto spent the prewar years at the progressive, Western-oriented studio P.C.L. (subsequently Toho), then something of a refuge for left-wingers. Several of his early films betrayed the influence of Western models: thus, Pastoral Symphony (Den’en kōkyōkyoku, 1938) adapted André Gide’s novel about a pastor’s love for a blind girl, while Mother’s Song (Haha no kyoku, 1937) was a haha-mono inspired by the classic American melodrama of suffering motherhood Stella Dallas. Even in the early postwar period, Who Turned Me into This Kind of Woman? (Konna onna ni dare ga shita, 1949) continued to draw on foreign literature, relocating Thomas Hardy’s Tess of the D’Urbervilles to a wartime field hospital.

Like most directors of his generation, Yamamoto was unable to avoid making patriotic films during the war, but his contributions were not especially propagandist in nature. In the Kurosawa-scripted Winged Victory (Tsubasa no gaika, 1942), about the relationship between two aviators who had been raised as brothers, “the old didacticism is almost overwhelmed by the film’s real theme of love” (Peter High’s words). Soon after the war, he collaborated with documentarist Fumio Kamei on War and Peace (Sensō to heiwa, 1947). A powerful drama about a woman who remarries after being informed that her soldier husband has died, only for him to return alive, this was sometimes over-rhetorical in style, but inescapably moving.

Since the major studios refused to support his explicitly political projects, Yamamoto became a pioneer of independent production. Street of Violence (Pen itsuwarazu: Bōryokugai no machi, 1950), based on a true story, depicted a crusading journalist’s campaign against organized crime; The Sunless Street (Taiyō no nai machi, 1954) charted a strike at a printing factory; Vacuum Zone (Shinkū chitai, 1952) was a savage indictment of the brutality of the Japanese army; and Storm Clouds Over Hakone (Hakone fūun roku, 1952) was a historical epic about peasants building a canal in defiance of the local aristocracy. These films were all visually striking: location shooting in the town where the original events had occurred gave Street of Violence an effective quality of documentary realism, while Storm Clouds Over Hakone evoked the montage and compositional techniques of Soviet silent film. However, their polemical intention stripped them of subtlety; the use of heavy close ups and hectoring camera angles, especially in Vacuum Zone, was less hard-hitting than bludgeoning. Donald Richie has complained that Yamamoto “uses an axe where he should use a scalpel”; certainly, his polarization of humanity into a heroic proletariat and villainous militarists, capitalists, and aristocrats was a little simplistic.

In fact, Yamamoto’s political commentary was most effective when indirect. The independently produced Ballad of a Cart (Niguruma no uta, 1959) and the Daiei-made The Public Benefactor (Kizudarake no sanga, 1964) had an untypical depth of characterization, thanks to intelligent scripts by distinguished screenwriters (Yoshikata Yoda and Kaneto Shindō, respectively). These films allowed their social critiques to emerge naturally from the drama. The former, chronicling an unhappy marriage from the Meiji period to the end of the war, detailed the oppression of Japanese women in exceptionally moving fashion, and was probably Yamamoto’s masterpiece. The latter criticized big business largely through its depiction of a selfish tycoon’s destructive effect on those around him. Also interesting was Trouble about a Typhoon (Taifū sōdōki, 1956), a witty and revealing satire about small-scale political corruption, in which a typhoon-hit village deliberately demolishes its unharmed school in order to claim extra compensation. The film now seems to foreshadow the growing collusion in Japan between government and the construction industry, a concern which Yamamoto would later explore in Total Eclipse (Kinkanshoku, 1975), a thinly fictionalized assault on the leading politicians of the seventies.

Working mainly under contract at Daiei during the sixties, Yamamoto made several more socially aware comedies. Red Water (Akai mizu, 1963) was another sharp satire on small-town politics, about the machinations of councillors and the local priest seeking to capitalize on a possible hot spring development. The Burglar Story (Nippon dorobō monogatari, 1965), a wry account of a thief attempting to go straight, touched on a notorious act of sabotage which Yamamoto had treated more seriously in The Matsukawa Derailment Incident (Matsukawa jiken, 1961). It also formed something of a pair with The Bogus Detective (Nise keiji, 1967): although the protagonists of the two works (superbly played by Rentarō Mikuni and Shintarō Katsu, respectively) were on opposite sides of the law, both were naive men bewildered by the complexities and corruption of the world. Mikuni also played the arrogant surgeon anti-hero of The Ivory Tower (Shiroi kyotō, 1966), a slickly made but overlong indictment of Japanese medical ethics and of the machinations surrounding an election to a professorship in a university hospital.

Yamamoto’s political commitment was sustained in several more generic films. Band of Assassins (Shinobi no mono, 1962), although essentially a conventional jidai-geki vehicle for popular star Raizō Ichikawa, preserved the director’s customary sympathy for little people exploited by the powerful, while Blood End (Tengutō, 1969) showed how a group of warriors initially dedicated to the cause of liberating the farming and merchant classes disintegrated through mutual mistrust and the corruption of egalitarian ideals. More psychological in emphasis was Freezing Point (Hyōten, 1966), a melodrama probing issues of personal guilt and responsibility through a couple’s reactions to their daughter’s murder.

Though somewhat less personal than his independent work, Yamamoto’s studio productions were more elegant: witness the flair of the opening crane shot over the battlefield in Band of Assassins, the shadowy figures emerging onto the railway tracks in The Burglar Story, and the eerie nighttime festival scene in the otherwise ordinary ghost story, The Bride from Hades (Botan dōrō, 1968). Yamamoto continued to work until his death: the two Nomugi Pass films (Ā, Nomugi Tōge, 1979 and 1982) were scathing accounts of the ill-treatment of Meiji-era silk workers by their employers. Though he has long been championed by Tadao Satō, Yamamoto’s approach is currently unfashionable. Still, if his films lacked the complexity with which Kei Kumai examined similar issues, his limitations should not obscure the power of his best work.

1937 Ojōsan / The Young Miss

Haha no kyoku (Zenpen; Kōhen) / Mother’s Song (Parts 1 and 2)

1938 Den’en kōkyōkyoku / Pastoral Symphony

Katei nikki (Zenpen; Kōhen) / Family Diary (Parts 1 and 2)

1939 Shinpen Tange Sazen: Hayate hen / Sazen Tange, New Version: Hayate Chapter

Uruwashiki shuppatsu / Beautiful Departure

Machi / The Street

Ribon o musubu fujin / A Lady with a Ribbon

1940 Soyokaze chichi to tomo ni / In the Breeze, with Father

Kyōdai no yakusoku / Sisters’ Promise

1941 Utaeba tengoku / Heaven When I Sing

1942 Tsubasa no gaika / Winged Victory

1943 Neppū / Hot Winds / Searing Wind

1947 Sensō to heiwa / War and Peace / Between War and Peace (co-director)

1949 Konna onna ni dare ga shita / Who Turned Me into This Kind of Woman?

1950 Pen itsuwarazu: Bōryoku no machi / Street of Violence (lit. The Pen Does Not Lie: Street of Violence)

1952 Hakone fūun roku / Storm Clouds Over Hakone

Shinkū chitai / Vacuum Zone

1954 Hi no hate / To the End of the Sun

Taiyō no nai machi / The Sunless Street

1955 Ai sureba koso / Because I Love / If You Love Me (co-director)

Ukigusa nikki / Duckweed Story

1956 Nadare / Avalanche

Taifū sōdōki / Trouble about a Typhoon

1958 Akai jinbaori / The Scarlet Cloak

1959 Niguruma no uta / Ballad of a Cart / Song of the Cart / A Song of the Wagon

Ningen no kabe / The Human Wall

1960 Buki naki tatakai / Battle without Arms

1961 Matsukawa jiken / The Matsukawa Derailment Incident

1962 Chibusa o idaku musumetachi / The Girls Who Embrace Udders

Shinobi no mono / Band of Assassins / The Ninja

1963 Akai mizu / Red Water / The Red Tattoo

Zoku shinobi no mono / Band of Assassins 2 / The Ninja Part 2

1964 Kizudarake no sanga / The Public Benefactor / The Tycoon / Scarred Nature (lit.)

1965 Nippon dorobō monogatari / The Burglar Story

Shōnin no isu / The Witness Chair

Supai / The Spy

1966 Hyōten / Freezing Point

Shiroi kyotō / The Ivory Tower / The Great White Tower

1967 Nise keiji / The Bogus Detective

Zatōichi rōyaburi / Zatoichi the Outlaw / Zatoichi Breaks Jail (lit.)

1968 Dorei kōjō / Slave Factory

Botan dōrō / The Bride from Hades / A Tale of the Peony Lantern

1969 Betonamu / Vietnam

Tengutō / Blood End (lit. Party of Goblins)

1970 Sensō to ningen: Daiichibu: Unmei no jokyoku / Men and War: Part 1: Fate’s Overture

1971 Sensō to ningen: Dainibu: Ai to kanashimi no sanga / Men and War: Part 2: Landscapes of Love and Sadness

1973 Sensō to ningen: Daisanbu: Kanketsu hen / Men and War: Part 3: Conclusion

1974 Karei naru ichizoku / The Family (lit. The Glorious Family)

1975 Kinkanshoku / Total Eclipse

1976 Fumō chitai / Barren Zone / The Marginal Land

Tenpō Suikoden: Ōhara Yūgaku / Tenpo-era Water Margin: Yugaku Ohara

1978 Kōtei no inai hachigatsu / August without an Emperor

1979 Ā, Nomugi tōge / Nomugi Pass

1981 Asshiitachi no machi / Town of Lovestruck Boys

1982 Ā, Nomugi tōge: Shinryoku hen / Nomugi Pass: Fresh Pastures

YAMAMURA Sō

(February 24, 1910–May 26, 2000)

山村聡

A distinguished actor with a long career in cinema, Yamamura also directed several creditable films, the best-known being his independently made debut, The Crab-Canning Ship (Kanikōsen, 1953), which described the ill-treatment and abortive mutiny of the workers on a factory ship off Northern Japan. Set in the 1920s, it was derivative in style of Soviet silent-film techniques; however, the homage was skillful, and though the characterizations tended to slip into caricature, it achieved a considerable force. A less partisan social conscience was visible in Yamamura’s second film, The Black Tide (Kuroi ushio, 1954), about a reporter’s quest to uncover the truth, obscured by slanted editorial approaches, about the death of a Japanese National Railways president. His next work, Sal Flower Pass (Sara no hana no tōge, 1955), focused on the problems of farmers in a remote village.

Yamamura later directed three films at Toei. Mother-and-Child Grass (Haha­kogusa, 1959) was a remake of a wartime film by Tomotaka Tasaka about a sacrificing mother. Maidens of the Kashima Sea (Kashimanada no onna, 1959) was another film about life among farmers, set in the countryside of Chiba Prefecture east of Tokyo. Yamamura’s last film, Deep River Melody (Fūryū Fukagawa uta, 1960) was an engaging Taisho-period drama about the problems affecting a planned marriage between the daughter of a restaurant owner and his chef. Displaying a heartwarming optimism and humanity in its treatment of potentially bleak subject matter, this was also directed with something of the tenderness and stylistic invention of Heinosuke Gosho, confirming that Yamamura, despite the brevity of his directorial career, had a genuine talent as a filmmaker.

1953 Kanikōsen / The Crab-Canning Ship

1954 Kuroi ushio / The Black Tide

1955 Sara no hana no tōge / Sal Flower Pass

1959 Hahakogusa / Mother and Her Children / Mother-and-Child Grass (lit. Cottonweed)

Kashimanada no onna / Maidens of the Kashima Sea

1960 Fūryū Fukagawa uta / Deep River Melody / The Song of Fukagawa (lit. Elegant Song of Fukagawa)

YAMANAKA Sadao

(November 7, 1909–September 17, 1938)

山中貞雄

Yamanaka’s brief career, precocious talent, and premature death have earned him a reputation comparable to that of Jean Vigo in the French cinema. Becoming a director at the age of 22, he made nearly two dozen films in less than six years, of which just three are preserved complete. Of his silent films, only fragments from the action sequences survive; these display his skill in choreographing combat, but are doubtless unrepresentative of the tone of the original films, since the distinction of Yamanaka’s work was in shifting the focus of the jidai-geki from action to character. His directorial debut, Sleeping with a Long Sword (Iso no Genta: Dakine no nagadosu, 1932), was admired for eschewing scenes of swordplay completely, while his second film, Money Trickles Down (Koban shigure, 1932), which won praise for its rhythmic montage techniques, narrated a distinctly unheroic plot about a ronin working in an Edo restaurant. Similarly, The Elegant Swordsman (Fūryū katsujinken, 1934) told the story of a ronin’s search for his parents, but was primarily a group portrait of life in a Tokugawa-era tenement. Among Yamanaka’s lost sound films, The Village Tatooed Man (Machi no irezumimono, 1935) followed a criminal’s experiences after his release from prison, while Ishimatsu of the Forest (Mori no Ishimatsu, 1937) recounted the tragedy of a young outlaw.

In the still extant Kochiyama Soshun (Kōchiyama Sōshun, 1936) and Humanity and Paper Balloons (Ninjō kamifūsen, 1937) Yamanaka essayed anti-heroic reworkings of Kabuki narratives, bringing realism to stylized plots and deglamorizing flamboyant characterizations. Both films expressed an ironic attitude to human aspiration: in Kochiyama Soshun, the most resourceful character sacrifices his life for the most worthless, while the tenement dwellers in Humanity and Paper Balloons attempt to improve their lot by seeking patronage or by turning to crime, all to no result. Nevertheless, the excellence of the acting and precision of observation turned the films into celebrations of human vitality, ingenuity, and the capacity to endure, so that their desolate endings seemed incongruous. Less realistic in tone was The Pot Worth a Million Ryo (Tange Sazen yowa: Hyakumanryō no tsubo, 1935) the other Yamanaka film to be preserved today. This breezy farce also satirized aspiration as the whole of Edo embarks on a fruitless search for a lost pot which contains a map pointing to a priceless treasure. Again, Yamanaka subverted stereotypes in his portrayal of one-eyed, one-armed samurai Sazen Tange as a soft-hearted layabout, while also finding hope in the affections of the surrogate family established when he and his lover adopt an orphaned child.

Yamanaka’s skill was in the creation of plausible communities, a talent furthered by his ability to dovetail numerous plot strands, and by the imaginative use of staging in depth which ensured that his characters were seen in the context of their environment. Though he worked exclusively in jidai-geki, his friend and fellow director Yasujirō Ozu suggested that he would have turned to contemporary subject matter had he lived. Kimitoshi Satō has observed that “We find people in his films to be just as our neighbors are in this modern world,” and certainly, Yamanaka’s recreations of the social milieux of old Edo were almost as rich in realistic detail as Ozu’s depictions of contemporary Tokyo. He found his protagonists among the lower classes—the Edo-period equivalent of the shomin—with samurai and daimyo playing second fiddle to petty criminals, quack doctors, barbers, and pawnbrokers. Yamanaka was not a moralist; his films did not judge people, but explored the reasons for their actions. Yet his philosophy was not one of social determinism; rather, his concern was with society as constituted by the intricate interaction of individuals subject to various pressures, yet with their own intentions, motives, and desires.

Yamanaka’s death in China after his conscription made him seem a martyr for Japanese liberalism. His last scenario, The Night Before (Sono zen’ya), was realized in 1939 by Ryō Hagiwara; set against the background of the Shogunate’s downfall, it included a scathing portrayal of the Shinsengumi elite force of samurai. In the era of militarism, this had its contemporary relevance, just as his earlier films, with their precise depiction of the rigid class system of Edo-period Japan, expressed what Keiko McDonald terms “the sentimental realist’s view of the underdog’s life under an autocratic political regime.” However, Yamanaka’s social criticism was usually indirect. His primary concern was with the portrayal of people in their environment, and his abiding influence on the postwar jidai-geki lies in the meticulous atmosphere and behavioral realism which directors such as Kurosawa, Mizoguchi, and Kobayashi brought to their portrayals of the past.

1932 Iso no Genta: Dakine no nagadosu / Sleeping with a Long Sword (lit. The Genta Coast: Sleeping with a Long Sword)

Koban shigure / Money Trickles Down

Ogasawara Iki no kami / Ogasawara, the Governor of Iki

Kuchibue o fuku bushi / The Whistling Samurai

Umon torimonochō: Sanjūban tegara: Obitoke buppō / From the 30 Casebooks of Detective Umon: Sexual Salvation

Tengu kaijō: Zenpen / Tengu’s Circulating Letter: Part 1

1933 Satsuma hikyaku: Kōhen: Kenkō aiyoku hen / The Satsuma Courier: Part 2: The Passionate Sword

Bangaku no isshō / The Life of Bangaku

Nezumi kozō Jirokichi: Edo no maki / Jirokichi the Ratkid: Edo Reel

Nezumi kozō Jirokichi: Dōchū no maki / Jirokichi the Ratkid: Journey Reel

Nezumi kozō Jirokichi: Futatabi Edo no maki / Jirokichi the Ratkid: Another Edo Reel

1934 Fūryū katsujinken / The Elegant Swordsman

Ashigaru shussedan / A Footman’s Success Story

Gantarō kaidō / Gantaro’s Travels

1935 Kunisada Chūji / Chuji Kunisada

Tange Sazen yowa: Hyakuman-ryō no tsubo / The Pot Worth a Million Ryo / Sazen Tange and the Pot Worth a Million Ryo (lit.)

Seki no Yatappe / Yatappe from Seki (co-director)

Machi no irezumimono / The Village Tattooed Man

Daibosatsu tōge: Daiippen: Kogen ittōryū no maki / Daibosatsu Pass: Part 1: Fencing School Reel / The Great Bodhisattva Pass: Part 1: Fencing School Reel (co-director)

Kaitō shirozukin: Zenpen / The White-Hooded Burglar: Part 1

1936 Kaitō shirozukin: Kōhen / The White-Hooded Burglar: Part 2

Kōchiyama Sōshun / Kochiyama Soshun / Priest of Darkness

Uminari kaidō / Seacoast Highway

1937 Mori no Ishimatsu / Ishimatsu of the Forest

Ninjō kamifūsen / Humanity and Paper Balloons

YAMASHITA Kōsaku

(January 10, 1930–December 6, 1998)

山下耕作

A Toei stalwart, Yamashita directed at the studio from the sixties to the nineties, switching genres with changes in studio policy. His earliest films were jidai-geki, and he achieved critical notice with Yatappe of Seki (Seki no Yatappe, 1963), an adaptation of a Shin Hasegawa novel about an Edo-era professional gambler who acts as benefactor to the orphan child whose pickpocket father he saw killed. Particularly in the climactic scenes, this admirably displayed Yamashita’s ability to elicit emotionally intense performances from his actors, to draw out the pathos of situations, and to pay attention to female emotions as well as to combat between men. An interest in the situation of women in a man’s world was sustained in some of his later yakuza movies: thus, Samurai Geisha (Nihon jokyōden: Kyōkaku geisha, 1969) intelligently dealt with the situation of geisha whose lives touch the underworld of Meiji-era Kumamoto and dramatized a geisha strike in protest against the crimes of a wicked local boss. Yamashita was appropriately assigned to direct the first in the popular series Red Peony Gambler (Hibotan bakuto), starring Junko Fuji as a female professional gambler capable of transforming in an instant from delicate manners to ferocity. Among his later films, The Night Train (Yogisha, 1987) melded the genres of yakuza thriller and woman’s picture, while he also made two contributions to another female-centered crime series: Yakuza Wives (Gokudō no onnatachi).

More masculine in focus was the long-running The Fast Liver (Gokudō) series, of which Yamashita directed numerous installments during the late sixties and early seventies. These focused on a gangster seeking to rise up the Osaka racket; the early episodes were played straight, while the later ones moved towards comedy. By this time Toei’s yakuza movies had shifted from the romanticized ninkyō-eiga approach to the grittier jitsuroku-eiga; in the latter mode, Yamashita achieved a hit with The Yamaguchi Group: The Third Generation (Yamaguchi-gumi sandaime, 1973). In later years, he interspersed crime thrillers with jidai-geki such as The Man Who Killed Ryoma (Ryōma o kitta otoko, 1987), which described the assassination of pro-democracy advocate Ryōma Sakamoto from the point of view of the man assigned to kill him.

Yamashita did not develop a visual style as distinctive as the low-angle setups of his Toei colleague Tai Katō or the overt stylization achieved by Seijun Suzuki at Nikkatsu. Nevertheless, the unobtrusive mise-en-scène of his sixties pictures displayed the classical virtues of efficiency and narrative drive, and he was capable of turning out well-crafted and gripping entertainments.

1961 Wakadono senryōhada / The Young Master’s 1000-ryo Skin

Shin ogon kujaku-jō: Shichinin no kishi / New Golden Peacock Castle: Seven Knights

1963 Seki no Yatappe / Yatappe of Seki / Samurai and Orphan

1964 Edo hanzaichō: Kuroi tsume / Notebooks on Crime in Edo: Black Nails

Ōgenka / The Big Quarrel

1965 Hana to ryū / Flower and Dragon

Onmitsu samurai kiki ippatsu / Samurai Spy: Moment of Crisis

1966 Zoku hana to ryū: Dōkai-wan no kettō / Flower and Dragon 2: Duel at Dokai Gulf

Kyōdai jingi / Fraternal Honor / Family Obligations

Tairiku nagaremono / Girl Vagrants of Tokyo (lit. Drifters on the Continent)

Zoku kyōdai jingi / Fraternal Honor 2

Kyōdai jingi: Kantō sankyōdai / Fraternal Honor: Three Brothers of Kanto

1967 Isshin Tasuke: Edokko matsuri / Tasuke Isshin: Edoites’ Festival

Kyōdai jingi: Zoku Kantō sankyōdai / Fraternal Honor: Three Brothers of Kanto 2

Otoko namida no hamonjō / A Man’s Tears: Letter of Expulsion

Kyōdai jingi: Kantō inochi shirazu / Fraternal Honor: Daredevil in Kanto

Otoko no shōbu: Kantō arashi / A Man’s Match: Storm in Kanto

1968 Bakuchiuchi: Sōchō tobaku / Big Time Gambling Boss / Big Gambling Ceremony (lit. Gamblers: The Boss’ Gamble)

Otoko no shōbu: Byakko no Tetsu / A Man’s Match: Tetsu of the White Tigers

Gokudō / The Fast Liver

Zenkamono / The Ex-Convict

Kaette kita gokudō / The Fast Liver Returns

Hibotan bakuto / Red Peony Gambler

Ōoku emaki / Vanity of the Shogun’s Mistresses (lit. Picture Scroll of the Inner Palace)

1969 Matteita gokudō / The Fast Liver Was Waiting

Sengo saidai no tobaku / The Largest Gambling Den in the Postwar Era

Onna shikyaku manji / Female Assassin Gammadion

Nihon jokyōden: Kyōkaku geisha / Samurai Geisha (lit. Chronicle of Chivalrous Women of Japan: Chivalrous Geisha)

Hibotan bakuto: Tekkaba retsuden / Red Peony Gambler: Biographies from the Gambling Den

Shōwa zankyōden: Hitokiri karajishi / Tales of Showa Era Chivalry: Killer Lion

1970 Gokudō Kamagasaki ni kaeru / The Fast Liver Returns to Kamagasaki

Bakuchiuchi: Nagaremono / The Drifting Gambler

Nihon kyōkakuden: Tekka geisha / Chivalrous Chronicles of Japan: Gambler Geisha

Gokudō kyōjō tabi / The Fast Liver’s Criminal Journey

Noboriryū / The Rising Dragon

1971 Bakuchiuchi: Inochi fuda / Gambler: Card of Life

Nihon jokyōden: Kettō midarebana / Chronicle of Chivalrous Women of Japan: Bloody Duel, Flower of Chaos

Onna toseinin: Otanomōshimasu / Woman Gambler: I Beseech You

Ninkyō retsuden: Otoko / Biographies of the Chivalrous: A Man

1972 Zorome no sankyōdai / Three Brothers with Matching Dice

Otoko no kaemon / A Man’s Second Crest

Bakuchiuchi gaiden / Gamblers’ Supplementary Biography

Hikagemono / The Outcast

1973 Mamushi no kyōdai: Musho gurashi yonenhan / Viper Brothers: Four and a Half Years in the Clink

Kamagasaki gokudō / The Fast Liver in Kamagasaki

Yamaguchi-gumi sandaime / The Yamaguchi Group: The Third Generation

Kaigun Yokosuka keimusho / Naval Prison at Yokosuka

1974 Yamaguchi-gumi gaiden: Kyūshū shinkō sakusen / Tattooed Hit Man (lit. Supplementary Biography of the Yamaguchi Group: Strategy for Attacking Kyushu)

Ā kessen kōkūtai / Ah, Decisive Battle in the Air

Gokudō vs furyō banchō / The Fast Liver vs. the Delinquent Boss

1975 Nihon ninkyōdō: Gekitotsu hen / The Japanese Way of Chivalry: The Clash

Nihon bōryoku rettō: Keihanshin koroshi no gundan / Japan’s Violent Archipelago: Kyoto-Osaka-Kobe Killer’s Gang

Gōtō hōka satsujinshū / Robber, Arsonist, and Murderer in Prison

1976 Yukaina gokudō / The Cheerful Fast Liver

Dassō yūgi / Game of Escape

Yoake no hata: Matsumoto Jiichirō den / Flag at Dawn: Chronicle of Jiichiro Matsumoto

1977 Pirania gundan: Daboshatsu no ten / The Piranha Gang: Ten in a Big Shirt

1980 Tokugawa ichizoku no hōkai / The Fall of the Tokugawa House

Kaigenrei no yoru / Night of Martial Law

1984 Shura no mure / Herd of Hell

1985 Saigo no bakuto / The Last Gambler

1987 Yogisha / The Night Train

Ryōma o kitta otoko / The Man Who Killed Ryoma

1988 Anazā wei / Another Way

1990 Gokudō no onnatachi: Saigo no tatakai / Yakuza Wives: The Last Struggle

1993 Shin gokudō no onnatachi: Kakugo shiiya / New Yakuza Wives: Be Prepared

1995 Haruka: Sugao no 19-sai / Haruka: Naked Face of a 19-year-old

1996 Naite waratte namidashite: Poco a poco / Crying, Laughing, Shedding Tears: Bit by Bit

1997 Danjiri bayashi / Danjiri Festival Music

Wakariaeru kisetsu / Season for Mutual Understanding

YAMASHITA Nobuhiro

(b. August 29, 1976)

山下敦弘

One of the most imaginative and individual of the youngest generation of Japanese directors, Yamashita has earned comparisons with Jim Jarmusch and Aki Kaurismäki for his deadpan accounts of the directionless post-bubble generation. Having trained at the Osaka University of Arts, he made two features focusing on young entrepreneurs working outside the margins of respectable society. Hazy Life (Donten seikatsu, 1999) was a study of two slackers dubbing homemade pornographic videos, while No One’s Ark (Baka no hakobune, 2002) detailed the attempts of a young couple to sell their unpalatable “health drink” in a small country town. A wry portrait of provincial life and a response to the collapse of the bubble economy, it was justly praised by Tony Rayns as “more droll and better observed than any major studio picture” on that subject. The director’s next feature, Ramblers (Riarizumu no yado, 2003), about a pair of aspiring filmmakers wandering aimlessly around the countryside while waiting to meet their lead actor, was a particularly well-observed work in which an inconsequential story allowed Yamashita to concentrate on revealing nuances of behavior and characterization.

These films were typified by a distinctive minimalist style, in which long takes, with a generally static camera and occasional simple tracking shots, merely observed the movements and gestures of the actors. Yamashita has commented that a simple visual style is suited to “films about people who move through life at a kind of languid pace.” Though well received in foreign festivals, Yamashita’s work remained a niche interest in Japan until Linda, Linda, Linda (Rinda Rinda Rinda, 2005), a lightweight but still engaging film in which his stylistic peculiarities were fastened to a more mainstream plot about a group of high school rock singers practicing for a festival. This subject matter, and the presence of popular Korean actress Bae Du-Na, earned Yamashita the commercial success that had previously eluded him. His next film, The Matsugane Potshot Affair (Matsugane ransha jiken, 2006), proved arguably his best work to date. Tracing the bleak consequences of a hit-and-run accident, Yamashita again realized a film of beguiling humor distinguished by surprising shifts in tone and the rich atmosphere of provincial Japan, while also achieving a new depth in his portrait of the troubled relations between a strait-laced policeman and his mildly delinquent twin brother. He would seem to have a bright future ahead of him.

1997 Kusaru onna / The Rotten Woman (16mm short)

1999 Donten seikatsu / Hazy Life (16mm)

2002 Baka no hakobune / No One’s Ark

2003 Mottomo kikenna deka matsuri / The Most Dangerous Cop Festival (co-director)

Sono otoko, kyōbō ni tsuki / Violent Stick (lit. That Man Pokes with a Crazy Stick) (short)

Yotchan (short)

Riarizumu no yado / Ramblers (lit. Realism Lodging)

2004 Kurīmu remon / Cream Lemon

2005 Rinda Rinda Rinda / Linda Linda Linda

2006 Matsugane ransha jiken / The Matsugane Potshot Affair

Yume jūya / Ten Nights of Dreams (co-director)

2007 Tennen kokekkō / A Gentle Breeze in the Village

YANAGIMACHI Mitsuo

(b. November 2, 1945)

柳町光男

An outsider like his protagonists, Yanagi­machi has worked infrequently, seeking independent funding for his austere, non-judgmental studies of the socially marginalized. His first film, God Speed You, Black Emperor (Goddo supīdo yū! Black Emperor, 1976), was a documentary account of Tokyo biker gangs; it suggested the influence both of Hollywood biker movies and of Kazuo Hara’s early documentaries, although it lacked Hara’s formal precision and political complexity. Here, Yanagimachi studied a close-knit alternative community, separate from conventional society, with its own distinct rules and codes of conduct. Subsequently, he shifted his focus to alienated individuals. A Nineteen-Year-Old’s Map (Jūkyūsai no chizu, 1979) was a grim depiction of a disenchanted teenage newspaper boy who plans to bomb the houses of his customers. The anticipated violence was ultimately withheld, the film ending with the protagonist’s realization that he lacks even the courage to destroy.

Yanagimachi’s films of the eighties broadened their scope to make the emotional dislocation of individuals a microcosm of the general alienation of modern Japanese from nature and from their cultural traditions. Farewell to the Land (Saraba itoshiki daichi, 1982) used the death of two brothers in a boating accident, and their father’s subsequent descent into infidelity, drug addiction, and violence, as a metaphor for the disintegration of traditional rural family structures. Yanagimachi’s best film, Fire Festival (Himatsuri, 1985), similarly focused on the clash of traditional lifestyles, exemplified by the fishing and forestry industries and the animist beliefs of the woodcutter protagonist, with the new economies of construction and tourism. The film’s setting, a tiny coastal settlement, seemed overshadowed by the imposing imagery of rain, sea, and mountains, suggesting the fragility of a civilization threatened by natural forces and primitive impulses.

During the nineties, Yanagimachi became interested in the culture and experiences of Chinese living outside the People’s Republic. Shadow of China (Chaina shadō, 1990), filmed in Hong Kong, focused on a former Red Guard member who becomes a successful businessman after illegally entering the colony. The Wandering Peddlers (Tabisuru Pao Jian Fū, 1995) was a documentary about itinerants selling traditional medicine in Taiwan. About Love, Tokyo (Ai ni tsuite, Tōkyō, 1993), more direct as social criticism than Yanagimachi’s earlier work, was a bitter account of the experiences of Chinese immigrants in Japan; it courted accusations of racism, but in fact its theme was the way in which widespread prejudice and discrimination could encourage criminality. The relative failure of these films led to a decade-long hiatus in the director’s career; he returned to work with Who’s Camus Anyway? (Camyū nante shiranai, 2005), a self-referential account of a group of student filmmakers preparing to film a Yanagimachi-esque story of an apparently motiveless murder. Characterized by a looser, freer camera style than his earlier films, and by a streak of dark humor which saved its postmodern aspects from accusations of pretension, this was arguably his most humanly engaging work to date.

Yanagimachi, who has acknowledged an affinity with Robert Bresson, is not a conventional dramatist; his characters, like Bresson’s, tend to lack psychological detail, so that their motives remain opaque. This fact, coupled with a detached visual style, has enabled his depictions of crime and violence to avoid both facile sociological explanations and simplistic notions of inherent human evil. Posing questions rather than offering answers, his work is both probing and disquieting.

1976 Goddo supīdo yū! Black Emperor / God Speed You, Black Emperor

1979 Jūkyūsai no chizu / A Nineteen-Year-Old’s Map

1982 Saraba itoshiki daichi / Farewell to the Land

1985 Himatsuri / Fire Festival

1990 Chaina shadō / Shadow of China (Japan / U.S.A.; filmed in Hong Kong)

1993 Ai ni tsuite, Tōkyō / About Love, Tokyo

1995 Tabisuru Pao Jian Fū / The Wandering Peddlers (Taiwan)

2005 Camyū nante shiranai / Who’s Camus Anyway?

YOSHIDA Yoshishige

(b. February 16, 1933)

吉田喜重

Internationally the least famous of the major Japanese New Wave directors, Yoshida (latterly known as Kijū Yoshida) was one of the movement’s most distinguished representatives and arguably its most technically adept filmmaker. Like Nagisa Ōshima and Masahiro Shinoda, he worked initially under contract at Shochiku, where he had served as assistant to Keisuke Kinoshita. His first films, Good-for-Nothing (Rokudenashi, 1960) and Blood Runs Dry (Chi wa kawaiteiru, 1960), were crime movies cast in a similar mould to Ōshima’s early work. Escape from Japan (Nihon dasshutsu, 1964), another crime film, was distinctly overblown in style and plotting; like Seijun Suzuki, Yoshida used exaggeration to topple the codes of the genre into pastiche.

Perhaps the best of Yoshida’s studio films was 18 Who Cause a Storm (Arashi o yobu jūhachinin, 1963), a broadly neo-realist account of temporary workers employed in the shipbuilding industry in Western Japan. This revealed its director’s talent for capturing the atmosphere of a place and for orchestrating fluent, complex camera movements. Akitsu Spa (Akitsu Onsen, 1962), was a melodramatic account of an affair unfolding over two decades at a spa town; as in his thrillers, Yoshida made exaggerated use of generic staples and conventional symbolism (falling cherry blossoms as harbingers of death) to shift the film towards pastiche. But in using melodramatic conventions as a vehicle for commenting obliquely on Japanese society and history, the film anticipated Yoshida’s later work. It also marked his first collaboration with actress Mariko Okada, who would become his wife and star in all his films between 1965 and 1971.

Her presence enabled Yoshida to find financial backing for a remarkable series of independent films that narrated melodramatic stories in avant-garde fashion and dealt imaginatively with themes of transgressive sexuality and the situation of independent women in a conservative society. The atmospheric use of location—a decaying northern town and its environs in A Story Written with Water (Mizu de kakareta monogatari, 1965), the prosperous Shōnan coast in The Affair (Jōen, 1967)—contributed to a precise recreation of social milieux, but Yoshida’s primary concern, in contrast to the more direct social criticism of Ōshima and Shinoda, was with the depiction of individual psychology. His characters often suffer because they have internalized social taboos; thus, the disapproval expressed by the heroine of The Affair when her widowed mother takes a lover is really a way to disavow her own sexual feelings for the man. In A Story Written with Water, a young man’s repressed incestuous desires for his mother surface, with fatal consequences, when he discovers that his employer and father-in-law is her lover. Incest was also the metaphorical subject of the later Heroic Purgatory (Rengoku Eroika, 1970), about a girl who masquerades as a scientist’s daughter only to become his seducer.

Yoshida’s analysis of sexual mores achieved perhaps its most complex expression in Impasse (Honoo to onna, 1967), which charted the gradual disintegration of a marriage due to the husband’s sterility. The wife, having resorted to artificial insemination to bear a son, seeks to exclude the husband from the upbringing of “her” child. Here as elsewhere, Yoshida’s attitude was implicitly conservative; the technological advance that allows a sterile man to have a son cannot overcome an instinctive belief in the importance of biological fatherhood. The clearest example of this conservatism was, ironically, Yoshida’s most formally radical film, Eros Plus Massacre (Erosu + gyakusatsu, 1970), which juxtaposed the Taisho-period story of the relationship between a famous anarchist and a radical feminist with an account of life among the liberated, politicized youth of 1970. Here, Yoshida explicitly argued that the achievement of liberation will not lead to happiness, and that attempts to reform society are likely to founder on the impossibility of changing human nature. It may be significant that his only film to deal directly with power politics, Martial Law (Kaigenrei, 1973), was an account of a revolution that failed: the militarist uprising of February 26, 1936.

While Ōshima has been called the Japanese Godard, Yoshida has earned comparisons with Antonioni, whose work he acknowledged as an influence. Nevertheless, the two directors were distinct in tone and style: while Antonioni charted the enervation and emotional sterility of the wealthy classes, Yoshida’s concern was with bourgeois women possessed by feelings of destructive intensity. Indeed, Yoshida rejected Antonioni’s measured, meditative camera movements in favor of fragmented editing and rapid, wheeling tracks and pans, which served to reflect the inner turmoil of his heroines.

Like others of his generation, Yoshida found it difficult to sustain regular film production in the more commercially motivated environment of the seventies onwards. Instead, he made documentaries, worked in television, and wrote a book on Ozu. Of his few later feature films, A Promise (Ningen no yakusoku, 1986) was an examination of old age and euthanasia, told in flashback after the death of an elderly woman brings her entire family under suspicion of murder, while the strikingly stylized Onimaru (Arashigaoka, 1988) borrowed techniques from Noh theater in order to transpose Wuthering Heights (another story with incestuous connotations) to Japan. After more than a decade, Yoshida made Women in the Mirror (Kagami no onnatachi, 2002), obliquely linking the painful relations between three generations of Japanese women to the experience of the Hiroshima atomic bomb and subtly suggesting the power of past traumas to shape human lives.

1960 Rokudenashi / Good-for-Nothing

Chi wa kawaiteiru / Blood Runs Dry

1961 Amai yoru no hate / The End of a Sweet Night

1962 Akitsu Onsen / Akitsu Spa / An Affair at Akitsu

1963 Arashi o yobu jūhachinin / 18 Who Cause a Storm / 18 Roughs

1964 Nihon dasshutsu / Escape from Japan

1965 Mizu de kakareta monogatari / A Story Written with Water

1966 Onna no mizuumi / Lake of Women / The Lake

1967 Jōen / The Affair

Honoo to onna / Impasse / Flames and a Woman (lit.)

1968 Juhyō no yoromeki / Affair in the Snow

Saraba natsu no hikari / Farewell to the Summer Light

1970 Erosu + gyakusatsu / Eros Plus Massacre

Rengoku eroica / Heroic Purgatory

1971 Kokuhakuteki joyūron / Confessions among Actresses

1973 Kaigenrei / Martial Law / Coup d’Etat

1977 BIG-1 monogatari: Ō Sadaharu / Baseball’s Big One: Sadaharu O

1985 Kyōgenshi: Miyake Tōkurō / Kyogen Actor: Tokuro Miyake (16mm short)

1986 Ningen no yakusoku / A Promise / A Human Promise (lit.)

1988 Arashigaoka / Onimaru / Wuthering Heights (lit.)

1995 Lumière et Compagnie (co-director)

2002 Kagami no onnatachi / Women in the Mirror

2004 Bem-Vindo a São Paolo / Welcome to São Paolo (co-director)

YOSHIMURA Kōzaburō

(September 9, 1911–November 7, 2000)

吉村公三郎

Though his style and subject matter were more varied than those of the other Japanese masters, Yoshimura was a distinguished artist who engaged throughout his career with the changing social and cultural circumstances of his country. Working at Shochiku from the thirties, he achieved a major commercial success in 1939 with Warm Current (Danryū), a low-key melodrama about the romantic and professional travails of a young hospital superintendent. His next work, The Story of Tank Commander Nishizumi (Nishizumi senshachōden, 1940) has a reputation as a humanist war film, but during the war years Yoshimura also made several purely propagandistic films about espionage, such as The Spy Isn’t Dead Yet (Kanchō imada shisezu, 1942). His mature style was only properly formed after the war, when his films achieved a new complexity of theme and structural precision, thanks in part to the collaboration of screenwriter Kaneto Shindō, later a director in his own right.

Among their collaborations, Ishimatsu of the Forest (Mori no Ishimatsu, 1949) was an innovative jidai-geki which, in Kyoko Hirano’s words, “denounced in a satirical comedic style the useless vanity of yakuza loyalty,” while The Beauty and the Dragon (Kabuki jūhachiban Narukami: Bijo to kairyū, 1955) was an experimental Kabuki adaptation, compared by Anderson and Richie to Laurence Olivier’s Henry V (1944) for the way in which it shifted partway through from theatrical to cinematic techniques. Both these films used historical narratives to comment indirectly on the present and recent past. On This Earth (Chijō, 1957) and Cape Ashizuri (Ashizuri misaki, 1954), meanwhile, were more direct accounts of Japan’s recent history: the former was a Taisho-period story about a schoolboy aspiring to be a reformist politician, while the latter was a claustrophobic study of the impotence of liberal students in the prewar era of militarist domination.

Yoshimura’s most typical films, however, were dramas of contemporary life. The Ball at the Anjo House (Anjō-ke no butōkai, 1947), was an imaginatively shot melodrama about an aristocratic family in straitened circumstances forced to sell their mansion. Superbly acted by an excellent ensemble cast including Setsuko Hara and Masayuki Mori, this inaugurated the director’s intelligent examination of social changes in postwar Japan. He pursued this theme in films such as Waltz at Noon (Mahiru no enbukyoku, 1949), another study of the decline of the prewar aristocracy, and it reached its most distinguished expression in a sequence of films set in Kyoto, all focusing on women working in traditional professions in the old capital. In Clothes of Deception (Itsuwareru seisō, 1951) the topic was the geisha system, in Sisters of Nishijin (Nishijin no shimai, 1952) and Night River (Yoru no kawa, 1956), kimono design and production, and in A Woman’s Uphill Slope (Onna no saka, 1960), the making of Japanese confectionery. Meanwhile, The Naked Face of Night (Yoru no sugao, 1958) focused on another traditional female occupation, classical dance, in the more modern milieu of Tokyo. Each of these films was an affecting account of the situation of independent women in an era when conservative values persisted despite technological development; taken together, they constituted one of the Japanese cinema’s most complex accounts of the country’s social and cultural transformation in the early postwar years. Yoshimura suggested that change involves both gain and loss, but is inevitable; Sisters of Nishijin and Clothes of Deception expressed this theme with particular eloquence through their depiction of the changing appearance of Kyoto itself, at a time when its old streets were beginning to be demolished in favor of modernity. At the same time, these films were exceptionally poignant character studies dealing with fully rounded individuals: the heroine of Clothes of Deception combined a corrosive selfishness with the admirable qualities of practicality, resourcefulness and inner strength, while Night River was a precisely judged account of a woman’s ambivalent feelings over the course of a destructive love affair.

Yoshimura’s sympathetic portrayal of female characters earned comparisons with Mizoguchi, and these were sustained by Night Butterflies (Yoru no chō, 1957), a story of nightclub hostesses in Tokyo’s Ginza district, and Osaka Story (Ōsaka monogatari, 1957), a satire on capitalist values in Japan’s most commercial city and a project inherited from Mizoguchi on his death. However, Yoshimura’s more direct attempts to echo Mizoguchi’s aesthetic, such as his prestigious adaptation of Lady Murasaki’s classic Heian-period saga, The Tale of Genji (Genji monogatari, 1951), achieved only a superficial prettiness. With The Ball at the Anjo House he worked effectively in an unusually baroque idiom, but at its best, his style was restrained, functional, and classical, and his films derived their strength less from their visual flair than from their meticulous creation of atmosphere and sensitive direction of actors. As his interest in female experience would lead one to expect, Yoshimura elicited particularly fine performances from women: Se­tsuko Hara, Fujiko Yamamoto, Mariko Okada, Ayako Wakao, and, above all, his regular collaborator Machiko Kyō, who starred in Clothes of Deception, The Tale of Genji, Night Butterflies, The Naked Face of Night, and A Design for Dying (Onna no kunshō, 1961).

Yoshimura continued to work through the sixties and into the seventies, with occasional successes such as Bamboo Doll of Echizen (Echizen take­ningyō, 1963), a stylish melodrama about the love affair between a craftsman and a fallen woman, which revealed intriguing Freudian undertones, but lacked the social context of his finest films. A social concern was again apparent in his last film, the privately financed The Tattered Banner (Ranru no hata, 1974), about the poisoning of land by runoff from the Ashio copper mine. Nevertheless, Yoshimura was clearly happiest working within the traditional studio system and after its collapse his output was relatively undistinguished. His best films in the forties and fifties, however, rank among the outstanding products of the classical Japanese cinema, and he merits proper retrospectives.

1934 Nukiashi sashiashi / Sneaking

1938 Gunkoku no haru / Spring of the Militarist Nation

1939 Onna koso ie o mamore / Women, Defend the Home!

Yōkina uramachi / Cheerful Alley

Ashita no odoriko / Tomorrow’s Dancers

Gonin no kyōdai / Five Brothers and Sisters

Danryū: Zenpen: Keiko no maki / Warm Current: Part 1: Keiko’s Reel

Danryū: Kōhen: Gin no maki / Warm Current: Part 2: Gin’s Reel

1940 Nishizumi senshachōden / The Story of Tank Commander Nishizumi

1941 Hana / Blossom

1942 Kanchō imada shisezu / The Spy Isn’t Dead Yet

Minami no kaze / South Wind

Zoku minami no kaze / South Wind 2

1943 Kaisen no zen’ya / On the Eve of War

Tekki kūshū / Enemy Air Raid (co-director)

1944 Kessen / Decisive Battle (co-director)

1947 Zō o kutta renchū / The Fellows Who Ate the Elephant

Anjō-ke no butōkai / The Ball at the Anjo House

1948 Yūwaku / Temptation

Waga shōgai no kagayakeru hi / The Day Our Lives Shine / The Brightest Days of My Life

1949 Shitto / Jealousy

Mori no Ishimatsu / Ishimatsu of the Forest

Mahiru no enbukyoku / Waltz at Noon

1950 Shunsetsu / Spring Snow

Senka no hate / Beyond the Battlefield

1951 Itsuwareru seisō / Clothes of Deception / Under Silk Garments / The Disguise

Jiyū gakkō / School of Freedom

Genji monogatari / The Tale of Genji

1952 Nishijin no shimai / Sisters of Nishijin

Bōryoku / Violence

1953 Senbazuru / A Thousand Cranes

Yokubō / Desires

Yoake mae / Before Dawn

1954 Ashizuri misaki / Cape Ashizuri

Wakai hitotachi / Young People

1955 Ai sureba koso / Because I Love / If You Love Me (co-director)

Ginza no onna / Women of the Ginza

Kabuki jūhachiban Narukami: Bijo to kairyū / The Beauty and the Dragon

1956 Totsugu hi / Day of Marriage

Yoru no kawa / Night River / Undercurrent

Yonjūhassai no teikō / 48-Year-Old Rebel

1957 Ōsaka monogatari / Osaka Story

Yoru no chō / Night Butterflies

Chijō / On This Earth

1958 Hitotsubu no mugi / A Grain of Wheat

Yoru no sugao / The Naked Face of Night / The Ladder of Success

1959 Denwa wa yūgata ni naru / The Telephone Rings in the Evening

Kizoku no kaidan / The Aristocrat’s Stairs

1960 Jokyō / A Woman’s Testament (co-director)

Onna no saka / A Woman’s Uphill Slope / Women of Kyoto

1961 Konki / Marriageable Age / Marriage Time

Onna no kunshō / A Design for Dying (lit. A Woman’s Medal)

1962 Katei no jijō / Their Legacy (lit. Family Situation)

Sono yo wa wasurenai / A Night to Remember / Hiroshima Heartache / I Won’t Forget That Night (lit.)

1963 Uso / Lies / When Women Lie (co-director)

Echizen takeningyō / Bamboo Doll of Echizen

1966 Kokoro no sanmyaku / The Heart of the Mountains

1967 Daraku suru onna / A Fallen Woman

1968 Nemureru bijo / House of the Sleeping Virgins (lit. The Sleeping Beauties)

1971 Amai himitsu / Sweet Secret

1973 Konketsuji Rika: Hamagure komoriuta / Rika the Mixed-Blood Girl: Juvenile Lullaby

1974 Ranru no hata / The Tattered Banner

YUKISADA Isao

(b. August 3, 1968)

行定勲

One of the most fashionable, and bankable, of younger Japanese directors, Yukisada worked initially as assistant to youth film specialist Shunji Iwai. His own early films, such as Open House (1998) and Luxurious Bone (Zeitakuna hone, 2001), were not unlike Iwai’s, with a similar, dreamlike visual style, a focus primarily on the young, and a talent for exploring the intensely private mental worlds inhabited by his characters. Popular success, however, came with Go (Gō, 2001), an atypically social realist drama examining the troubled life of a resident Korean teenager in Japan. Though marred, especially in its early scenes, by pop video editing techniques and camera rhetoric, the film contained many telling moments, such as the hero’s encounter with a bemused policeman unaware of his status as a “foreigner.”

Yukisada’s next films continued to focus on contemporary youth. A Day on the Planet (Kyō no dekigoto, 2004) was a perceptive mosaic of student life, revolving around a house party where the fears, desires, and insecurities of its characters are gradually revealed. Subplots about a trapped workman and a beached whale offset the theme of people metaphorically hemmed in by their own self-perceptions and psychological quirks; with its multi-layered characterizations and complex attitudes towards people, this was perhaps its director’s best film.

Yukisada’s biggest commercial success, however, was Crying Out Love, in the Center of the World (Sekai no chūshin de, ai o sakebu, 2004), a well-crafted melodrama about a thirty-something man remembering his youth and coming to terms with the death of his girlfriend from leukemia. Though emotionally overblown, the film made atmospheric use of the contrasts between the mellow sunlight of the romantic scenes, the cold, artificial glare of the hospital wards, and the cloudy, disenchanted present.

The popularity of this film earned Yukisada the budgets he needed to mount two period epics: Year One in the North (Kita no zeronen, 2005), the story of a samurai’s wife trying to settle in the wilderness of nineteenth-century Hokkaido, and Spring Snow (Haru no yuki, 2005), a sumptuously designed Taisho-period tale of amour fou, derived from the first novel in Yukio Mishima’s Sea of Fertility tetralogy. These films, too, achieved considerable box-office success, and led Mark Schilling to declare that Yukisada had become “Japan’s David Lean: a maker of big-budget, big-scale dramas set in a romanticized, sanitized past, that celebrate the purest of pure love.” His subsequent work has been characterized by a similar blend of immaculate production values, sentimental themes and excessive length. Closed Note (Kurōzudo nōto, 2007) was a drama about a trainee teacher impelled to make changes in her own life when she finds and reads the diary of a former tenant of her flat. Into the Faraway Sky (Tōku no sora ni kieta, 2007) was a children’s drama about the friendship between a Hokkaido farm boy and the son of a civil servant sent to the northern island to buy up land for the construction of a new airport. This storyline suggested at least a partial return to the social awareness of Go, but Yukisada’s films now generally seem more style than substance.

1998 Open House

2000 Himawari / Sunflower

Tojiru hi / A Closing Day / Enclosed Pain

2001 Engawa no inu / The Dog on the Veranda

Zeitakuna hone / Luxurious Bone

Gō / Go

2002 Rokkun rōru mishin / Rock’ n’ Roll Mishin / Rock ’n’ Roll Sewing Machine (lit.)

Tsuki ni shizumu / Sinking the Moon (short)

Jam Films (co-director)

2003 Kanon (short)

Sebunsu anibāsarī / Seventh Anniversary

2004 Kyō no dekigoto / A Day on the Planet

Sekai no chūshin de, ai o sakebu / Crying Out Love, in the Center of the World

2005 Kita no zeronen / Year One in the North

Haru no yuki / Spring Snow / Snowy Love Fall in Spring

2006 Yubisaki kara sekai o / Yubisaki (lit. From the Fingertips toward the World)

2007 Tōku no sora ni kieta / Into the Faraway Sky

Kurōzudo nōto / Closed Note

Shokora o mita sekai / The World that Saw Chocolate