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.

Fireworks Over the Sea (Keisuke Kinoshita, 1951)

Tarobei Kamiya: Chishu Ryu
Mie Kamiya: Michiyo Kogure
Miwa Kamiya: Yoko Katsuragi
Sami: Teruko Kishi
Kaoru Uozumi: Isuzu Yamada
Mitsu: Chieko Higashiyama
Shogo: Takashi Miki
Yukiko Nomura: Keiko Tsushima
Tsuyoshi Yabuki: Rentaro Mikuni
Kono Kujirai: Haruko Sugimura
Tamihiko Kujirai: Keiji Sada
Ippei Nagisa: Akira Ishihama

Director: Keisuke Kinoshita
Screenplay: Keisuke Kinoshita
Cinematography: Hiroshi Kusuda
Art direction: Tatsuo Hamada
Film editing: Yoshi Sugihara
Music: Chuji Kinoshita

Fireworks Over the Sea is an overlong (a little over two hours) and overplotted film about the tribulations of a family-owned fishing company. The always-welcome Chishu Ryu plays the head of the Kamiya family who has to struggle with not only keeping his business literally afloat but also the romantic entanglements of his daughters. There are love scenes and fist fights, as well as a dark family secret, but not much of an attempt on writer-director Keisuke Kinoshita's part to give it all coherent dramatic shape. The music track by Chuji Kioshita, the director's brother, doesn't help much by muttering about behind the scenes, sometimes inappropriately.

The Good Fairy (Keisuke Kinoshita, 1951)

Chikage Awashima and Rentaro Mikuni in The Good Fairy

Yoshio Nakanuma: Masayuki Mori
Itsuko Kitaura: Chikage Awashima
Rentaro Mikuni: Rentaro Mikuni
Mikako Toba: Yoko Katsuragi
Ryoen Toba: Chishu Ryu
Tsuyoki Kitaura: Koreya Senda
Suzue: Toshiko Kobayashi

Director: Keisuke Kinoshita
Screenplay: Keisuke Kinoshita, Kogo Noda
Based on a novel by Kunio Kishida
Cinematography: Hiroshi Kusuda
Art direction: Tatsuo Hamada
Film editing: Yoshi Sugihara
Music: Chuji Kinoshita

The Good Fairy is a shamelessly tearjerking snarl of plot threads, any one of which might have made a coherent movie, but together make for a complete mess. Nor would any of them justify the oddness of the title. (The original is Zen-ma, but Google Translate failed me.) It begins when Yoshio Nakanuma, a newspaper assigning editor, sends a young reporter, Rentaro Mikuni,* to track down Itsuko Kitaura, the runaway wife of a wealthy businessman. Naturally, there are complications: Nakanuma was once in love with Itsuko, who has a younger sister, Mikako, with whom Rentaro falls in love. She's dying, however, and by the film's end Rentaro is so devoted to her that he persuades her father, a former Buddhist priest, to let him marry Mikako on her deathbed. But Rentaro wants Nakanuma to witness the marriage, and by the time he gets there, Mikako is dead. Meanwhile, Rentaro has witnessed Nakanuma's cruelty to his longtime mistress, Suzue, whom he dismisses coldly now that he has reunited with his old love, Itsuko. Angered by his boss's treatment of Suzue, Rentaro sends Nakanuma away, then marries the dead Mikako. No, really. The thing is, this incredible nonsense seems to have been plausible to director and cast, all of whom do their best to make it work. At least the glimpses inside a Japanese newspaper office are interesting, but there are no fairies to be seen in the film, good or otherwise, unless it's Chishu Ryu's gentle, infinitely understanding ex-priest.

*Rentaro Mikuni is both the character and the screen name of the actor, born Masao Sato, who, like the American actors Gig Young and Anne Shirley, took his screen name from a role, in his case the first of a long career.

Tragedy of Japan (Keisuke Kinoshita, 1953)

Keiji Sada and Yuko Mochizuki in Tragedy of Japan

Haruko Inoue: Yuko Mochizuki
Utako, Haruko's Daughter: Yoko Katsuragi
Seiichi, Haruko's Son: Masami Taura
Sato: Teiji Takahasi
Tatsuya, a Street Musician: Keiji Sada
Masayuki Akazawa: Ken Uehara
Mrs. Akazawa: Sanae Takasugi
Wakamaru: Keiko Awaji

Director: Keisuke Kinoshita
Screenplay: Keisuke Kinoshita
Cinematography: Hiroshi Kusuda
Art direction: Kimihiko Nakamura
Music: Chuji Kinoshita

Tragedy of Japan is the Criterion Channel's title for Keisuke Kinoshita's film, but I prefer the one used on IMDb and elsewhere: A Japanese Tragedy. Not only does that title echo Theodore Dreiser's An American Tragedy, but it also particularizes the story better. What happens to Haruko Inoue and her children is not a microcosm of recent Japanese history but a product of it -- one among millions, including those told in Kinoshita's many films. The film also demonstrates something of Kinoshita's tendency to overreach, often with distracting innovations such as the oval masks that frame scenes in You Were Like a Wild Chrysanthemum (1955) or the color washes that creep into The River Fuefuki (1960). Here it's an unwise use of extensive documentary footage of the war and its aftermath as a frame for the fictional story. The contrast between the raw actuality of news footage and the artifice of movie storytelling works to the disadvantage of the latter. Which is unfortunate because Kinoshita has a good story to tell about Haruko's attempts to survive and to provide for her children and the unforeseen consequences of her efforts, as well as the problems faced by Seiichi in his ambitious pursuit of a medical career and Utako in her disastrous involvement with her English teacher. None of Haruko's good deeds, it seems, go unpunished, as the skirting of the law that she found necessary is held against her in more peaceful and prosperous times. Despite the mistaken attempt to fold these stories into a larger historical context, this is one of Kinoshita's better films, marked by some very good acting and genuine human dilemmas.