Policeman’s Diary/Keisatsu nikki (1955)

There is a type of movie the Japanese have regularly made that I have rarely found in any of the other major film cultures. It’s not quite a comedy, though there are often many chuckles (rather than laughs). It’s not quite a tragedy, though things often end badly for many of the characters. It’s not quite a melodrama, though there are often sentimental moments, for it has no over-arching plot line and sometimes seems completely plotless. It often feels and looks like a documentary, except that it is carefully scripted and almost always the casts are fully professional. One of the most interesting of these is Policeman’s Diary. People often call this a shomin-geki, but that is a much broader category that basically includes anything “modern,” and almost always deals with the middle classes, especially the salaryman’s world. The films of which this is a superb example generally aim a little lower on the social scale or deal with life away from Tokyo.

Released in 1955, Policeman’s Diary is rarely seen outside of Japan, even though it did make the Kinema Junpo top ten list. It is a type of film most often associated with Gosho or Shimizu, but as it is directed by Seiji Hisamatsu, a director all but unknown outside Japan, it gives us a chance to look at this genre without being distracted by the critical literature that colors our understanding of so much Japanese film. Though it’s title suggests the story of a policeman, it is really a sampling of the life of a small-town police station in the mid fifties. It doesn’t even begin with the police but with a bus carrying a bride and her family to a wedding, which passes a young carter pulling her trousseau along the road (and whom she was in fact in love with). It ends with another girl going off to a wedding, this time to an old man who has agreed to pay the family’s debts  and thus, in effect, has bought her, though for a wife rather than a concubine.

Within that framework, we follow several other story lines: two small children are abandoned at the train station, and a kindly older policeman scours the town looking for someone to take them in; another woman is arrested regularly for shoplifting, because her husband has gone to Tokyo to find work and left her with nothing to feed the kids; a young woman is sold her to a labor broker, who will then sell her on for a profit to a factory owner. This girl will be rescued by a young policeman, since the selling of women is supposed to be illegal, but she is very angry about the rescue and is in fact the girl who will be sold off for the wedding at the end.

None of these story lines sound particularly cheerful, and that is the peculiarity of this genre.  Most of the time, things end badly in these films.  The term mono no aware is sometimes used to express the feeling, indicating a feeling of resignation that this is just the way life is.

As with real life, things are leavened with humor, not in the way of “comic relief”, but more as just something else that’s happening that is sort of funny. For example, the town fire truck often breaks down and has to be pushed to the fires. A politician comes home to show off how well he has done, and the town fathers throw him a party. But the lights go out, and when they come back on the demure mannerly Japanese ritual celebration in the dark has turned into a bunch of drunks playing with swords and pawing the geishas. The rather pompous police chief gets in an absurd jurisdictional dispute with an even more pompous bureaucrat. No pratfalls, no complicated jokes, but nevertheless a sort-of comedy.

Everything is directed with a light touch and acted with an underplayed casualness that seems almost improvised. But most of all you feel as if you are seeing somehow a bit of real life, obviously shaped, structured, occasionally with a bit of sentimentality, yet real. That’s not the way Americans make movies, certainly not the way they made them in the 30s, 40s, & 50s.  Nor can I find any similar tradition in France, where films in lower-class settings often end badly, but still are suffused with a romantic intensity and glamour that is entirely missing from this particular genre of Japanese film making. And it is a type of film making that has never disappeared completely, with obvious examples like Dodes’ka-den,  Itami’s The Funeral, the Tora-San films, or far more recently, many of Kore-eda’s movies or the Netflix TV series Midnight Diner.

It was filmed around Fukushima, so you get a chance to see the area long before it became world-famous. The principal young policeman is Rentaro Mikuni, 25 years before the searing Vengeance is Mine, and in a true touch of realism, though he is the ostensible principal male, his uniform doesn’t fit properly.  The rest of the adult roles are filled out by the magnificent stable of character actors & actresses that kept the studios functioning and whose faces you will recognize once you’ve begun watching Japanese films, even if you never quite sort out their names. Jo Shishido is one of the younger policemen, seeming incredibly tall but still all but unrecognizable, since this was made  before the surgery that gave him his chipmunk cheeks. And the kids look and act like kids, not child actors, another peculiarity of  Japanese films of this era.

If you’re looking for something outside the Mizoguchi-Ozu-Kurosawa triad that occupies so much attention in Western commentary on this period, this will be a real eye-opener for you. It’s not easy to find at the moment (I got my copy on e-bay) but it’s more than worth the effort.  It’s an unknown classic that really deserves to be better known.