Apostasy (Keisuke Kinoshita, 1948)

Ryo Ikebe in Apostasy

Segawa: Ryo Ikebe
Oshiho: Yoko Katsuragi
Tatsutaro Inoko: Osamu Takizawa
Ginnosuke Tuchiya: Jukichi Uno
Takayanagi: Eitaro Ozawa
Inoko's Wife: Sachiko Murase
Segawa's Father: Kenji Susukida
Keinosuke Kazama: Ichiro Sugai
Bunpei Katsuno: Akira Yamauchi

Director: Keisuke Kinoshita
Screenplay: Eijiro Hisaita
Based on a novel by Toson Shimazaki
Cinematography: Hiroshi Kusuda
Art direction: Isamu Motoki
Film editing: Hisashi Sagara
Music: Chuji Kinoshita

The title of Keisuke Kinoshita's film Apostasy is generally acknowledged to be a bad mistranslation of the original, Hakai, which has a variety of meanings, including "destruction." The film is not about someone abandoning his religion, which is what the English "apostasy" means, but instead it's about the discrimination against Japan's feudal pariah class, the burakumin, literally, "people who live in villages." Which is again misleading if we think of villages as small communities of farmers, artisans, and merchants, all of whom had acceptable roles in feudal society. The burakumin were considered untouchable because their work associated them with death: butchers, tanners, undertakers, executioners, and so on, who, unable to associate with the "respectable" classes, formed communities and villages of their own. The taint of their work extended to their children's children -- even to those who managed to improve themselves with education and work in other fields, like the protagonist of Kinoshita's film, Segawa, who loses his job as a schoolteacher because he has hidden the fact that he's a "villager," as the English subtitles somewhat misleadingly call him. His secret is exposed when he goes home to his village, remote in the mountains near Nagano, for his father's death. The action of the film takes place in 1901, well after American influence had caused the Japanese government to lift the legal restrictions placed on the burakumin, though without erasing the deep-seated prejudice against them. But Kinoshita has a more contemporary purpose for his film: After World War II, Japan was adopting a new, and of course again heavily American-influenced, constitution, guaranteeing civil rights to all Japanese citizens. So Apostasy is a heavily didactic film about tolerance -- not unlike some of the preachier American films that promoted better race relations in the aftermath of the war. Its bigots are despicable and its heroes -- including a descendant of the burakumin who has become a lawyer and a crusader for equality -- are noble. There's a love threatened by prejudice that triumphs, and a tear-filled ending in which the children Segawa has taught come out to wave goodbye as he departs the town that scorned him. In short, it's Kinoshita at his most sentimental.

Utamaro and His Five Women (Kenji Mizoguchi, 1946)

Toshiko Iizuka and Minosuke Bando in Utamaro and His Five Women

Utamaro: Minosuke Bando
Okita: Kinuyo Tanaka
Seinosuke: Kotaro Bando
Oran: Hiroko Kawasaki
Takasode: Toshiko Iizuka
Oman: Kyoko Kusajima
Yukie: Eiko Ohara
Shozaburo: Shotaro Nakamura
Oshin: Kiniko Shiratao
Takemara: Minpei Tomamoto

Director: Kenji Mizoguchi
Screenplay: Yoshikata Yoda
Based on a novel by Kanji Kunieda
Cinematography: Minoru Miki
Production design: Isamu Motoki

Utamaro and His Five Women is a film about the male gaze, but is it a celebration or a criticism of it? Kenji Mizoguchi is well-known for films like The Life of Oharu (1952) that explore the lives of women with deep sympathy and understanding, so it's easy to read the Utamaro biopic as a criticism, a portrait of the sometimes desperate existence of the women who inhabited "the floating world" of the 18th-century Japanese demimonde that was the subject of much of the artist's work. But the film also teeters over into exploitation even as it's revealing the seamy side of the male-dominated society. There's a satiric edge to the scene in which Utamaro and his assistants clandestinely observe a powerful lord's gathering of young women who strip to their underclothes and run into the water to catch fish. In a long pan down a row of the women, they disrobe in sequence like a chorus line in a musical. Meanwhile, the assistants are obviously taking more than an aesthetic interest in what's happening. Utamaro and His Five Women was Mizoguchi's first film after the war, and was made under the close observation of the occupying forces who were generally opposed to historical films for fear that they would celebrate the values of pre-war militaristic Japan. Fortunately, the film passed muster, probably because Mizoguchi's subject, a famous artist, represented the positive in Japanese culture. Even so, it's a subtle film with a sly double edge. 

Yotsuya Kaidan (Keisuke Kinoshita, 1949)

Ken Uehara and Kinuyo Tanaka in Yotsuya Kaidan

Oiwa/Osode: Kinuyo Tanaka
Iemon Tamiya: Ken Uehara
Naosuke: Osamu Takizawa
Kohei: Keiji Sada
Oume: Hisako Yamane
Yomoshichi: Jukichi Uno
Takuetsu: Aizo Tamashima
Kohei's Mother: Choko Iida

Director: Keisuke Kinoshita
Screenplay: Eijiro Hisaita, Masaki Kobayashi
Based on a play by Nanboku Tsuruya
Cinematography: Hiroshi Kusuda
Production design: Isamu Motoki

Yotsuya Kaidan is one of the most famous Japanese ghost stories, put in classic form in the kabuki drama written by Nanboku Tsuruya in 1825. But in adapting the tale of a ronin, a masterless samurai, pursued by the vengeful phantom of the wife he murdered, Keisuke Kinoshita and his screenwriters, Eijiro Hisaita and the uncredited Masaki Kobayashi, jettisoned the supernatural elements to turn it into a psychological drama with overtones of Shakespeare tragedy: the ambition of Macbeth and the jealousy of Othello, abetted by an Iago-like villain. The ronin of Kinoshita's film, Iemon Tamiya, was dismissed by his former master for failing to guard the storehouse from a thief; he now ekes out a living with his wife, Oiwa, making and selling umbrellas. But while drowning his sorrows in sake one evening, he is approached by Naosuke, who plants in him the idea of wooing the wealthy Oume, whose father has the connections that would enable him to find a master and restore his status as a samurai. Naosuke also plots with Kohei, with whom he served some jail time, to woo Oiwa, with whom Kohei has been infatuated since the days when she worked in a teahouse. Kohei's attentions to Oiwa arouse Iemon's jealousy, which Naosuke plays upon. As the prospect of marrying Oume becomes more likely, Iemon is given a poison to use on Oiwa, but he's initially reluctant to go that far. When Oiwa accidentally scalds her face, producing a horrible disfigurement, Naosuke provides an "ointment" that puts her in terrible pain and Iemon administers the poison. In the turmoil that follows Oiwa's death, Naosuke also kills Kohei. Freed to marry Oume, Iemon finds himself tormented by a guilty conscience, and when he learns that Naosuke was the one who robbed the storehouse that led to Iemon's dismissal by his former master, he turns on the conspirator. A fiery conclusion results. Kinoshita released the film in two parts, the first running for 85 minutes, the second for 73 minutes. Part I is more tightly controlled, efficiently introducing its characters -- there are lots of secondary ones, including Oiwa's sister, Osode (also played by Kinuyo Tanaka), and her husband, Yomoshichi, who provide a kind of grounding in normal life. Kinoshita is not as successful at marshaling all of the secondary plots in Part II, and I tend to blame the director's tendency to sentimentalize, including the search of Kohei's mother for her son, for the weaknesses in the later parts of the film. But he gives his characters depth -- there is more sympathy for Iemon in the film than in more traditional versions of the story, which has been filmed many times: Turner Classic Movies has Nobuo Nakagawa's 1959 film version on its schedule later this month.