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.

Fires on the Plain (Kon Ichikawa, 1959)

Tamura: Eiji Funakoshi
Yasuda: Osamu Takizawa
Nakamatsu: Mickey Curtis
Sergeant: Mantaro Ushio
Army surgeon: Kyu Sazanaka
Officer: Yoshihiro Hamaguchi
Soldier: Hikaru Hoshi
Soldier: Asao Sano
Soldier: Masaya Tsukida

Director: Kon Ichikawa
Screenplay: Natto Wada
Based on a novel by Shohei Ooka
Cinematography: Setsuo Kobayashi
Production design: Atsuji Shibata
Film editing: Tatsuji Nakashizu
Music: Yasushi Akutagawa

War films often have much in common with horror movies: the impending dread, the omnipresence of death and mutilation. But none that I've seen goes quite so far in that direction as Kon Ichikawa's Fires on the Plain, which eventually takes on the character of a zombie movie. I don't mean that flippantly or facetiously, because Fires on the Plain is very much a serious film, thoughtful and unsparing in its treatment of the horrors of war. But the images of a swarm of Japanese soldiers crawling across a road in the near-dark and of starving, wounded men staggering toward a hoped-for rescue inevitably evoke those movies and TV series about the walking undead. From the beginning, the film's protagonist, Tamura, is one of those undead figures: Gaunt and tubercular, he is turned away from his company of soldiers making a last-ditch stand because he is of no use as a fighter, and sent back to the field hospital from which he has already been turned away. The officer who sends him off gives him a grenade and tells him that if the hospital won't take him, he's to blow himself up. Tamura doesn't do that, but he begins a long trek across Leyte as things go ever worse for the Japanese, targets not only of the American army but even more so of the vengeful Filipinos -- at one point, an American convoy stops to take prisoners, but a Filipina accompanying the Americans gleefully guns them down instead. Eventually, the most zombie-like thing of all happens to Tamura: He comes face to face with starving soldiers who are eating human flesh. Some of them call it "monkey meat," but one mad and dying man offers his own body to Tamura as food. With this premise, the film could have gone deep into sensationalism -- or worse, into Christian iconography -- but Ichikawa makes it clear that the cannibalism he portrays is a metaphor for the ultimate degradation of war. Critics are often puzzled by Ichikawa's career, which is marked by a great variety of films, all of them made with extreme technical finesse. His other great anti-war film, The Burmese Harp (1956), for example, has moments of lyricism and tenderness that are completely absent from Fires on the Plain. So if you're looking for the consistency of an auteur, you won't find it in his work. But that doesn't keep him from being an extraordinarily daring filmmaker.   

A Legend or Was It? (Keisuke Kinoshita, 1963)

Kinuyo Tanaka and Shima Iwashita in A Legend or Was It?

Kieko Sonobe: Shima Iwashita
Yuri Shimizu: Mariko Kaga
Hideyuki Sonobe: Go Kato
Shiziku Sonobe: Kinuyo Tanaka
Shintaro Shimizu: Yoshi Kato
Goichi Takamori: Bunta Sugawara
Norio Sonobe: Tsutomu Matsukawa
Narrator: Osamu Takizawa

Director: Keisuke Kinoshita
Screenplay: Keisuke Kinoshita
Cinematography: Hiroshi Kusuda
Film editing: Yoshi Sugihara
Music: Chuji Kinoshita

Keisuke Kinoshita's A Legend or Was It? begins in an idyllic setting: a mountain valley in Hokkaido, gorgeously filmed in color, almost like a travelogue. But the narrator -- a rather obtrusive and unnecessary presence in the film -- tells us that it wasn't always inhabited by the kindly villagers we see going about their chores today. The setting remains the same as the film switches to black and white and we're told that it's now the summer of 1945. War is nowhere in evidence, but it's an inescapable presence. The villagers know that Japan is about to lose, and they're looking for ways to vent their frustration at having supported a losing cause. They find one in a family, the Sonobes, who have moved there after their home in Tokyo was bombed out. Suspicious and resentful of "city folk" on their turf, the villagers make the Sonobes a target after the daughter, Kieko, breaks off an engagement to Goichi Takamori, the son of the powerful mayor of the village, a wealthy landlord. Kieko's brother, on leave from fighting, has recognized Goichi, with whom he once served, as having killed and raped civilians, and urged Kieko not to marry him. In revenge, Goichi destroys the Sonobes' crops and begins spreading malicious rumors about them. A mob forms and a small-scale civil war breaks out. A Legend or Was It? is a highly kinetic film in its later parts, and the score by the director's brother, Chuji Kinoshita, helps create the kind of tension that needs to be released in action. Like Ennio Morricone, who punctuated Sergio Leone's "Man With No Name" trilogy (1964, 1965, 1966), with pennywhistle tweets and percussion, Chuji Kinoshita's score relies heavily on simple, perhaps even primitive instruments, setting up a pounding repetitive sound to propel the action. It  has something of the hypnotic quality of Philip Glass's music, though without the variations that keep Glass's themes from complete monotony.  Critics commenting on A Legend or Was It? sometimes compare it to Fritz Lang's Fury (1936) for its portrait of vigilante mob justice. It's an unforgiving film, without Kinoshita's typical lapses into sentimentality, and an effective one.

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.