Bakumatsu taiyo-den* (1957)

Saheji, a pickerup of unconsidered trifles

Non-Japanese viewers rarely get a chance to see a Japanese comedy, so on those grounds alone Bakumatsu taiyo-den would be significant. But it is also a comedy that, even in translation, is often quite funny and at the same time provides a fascinating cross-section of Japanese society at a critical point in history, the Bakumatsu era just after the foreigners had arrived and before the Shogunate collapsed.

The most remarkable aspect of the movie is its central character, Saheji “the Grifter,” a commoner who wanders the land living by his wits alone. I simply can’t recall such a character in any other jidai-geki that I’ve seen. There are lots of wandering ronin, while wandering commoners like Zatoichi are always yakuza, businessmen, messengers, or monks, people who belong at least at one end of their journey. The Euro/American literary and film tradition is full of such wandering grifters, but if they were common in Japanese entertainment, they have remained hidden to western viewers like me thus far.

Like village-oriented societies the world over, the vast majority of Japanese, in movies as in life, stayed in their place, both socially and physically, and after 1600, village boys did not even have the option of running off to the wars. But there was one place where the wandering con-man could function, the rest stops on the major highways where strangers outnumbered the locals on a regular basis.

Saheji appears from nowhere,** picking up a pocket watch dropped in the street, in Shinagawa, the first rest stop outside Edo and so busy it has 100 brothels. After the titles, he reappears with four guys he doesn’t actually know whom he promises to treat in one of those brothels. Unfortunately, he hasn’t a penny to his name and has to work off the very substantial bill as a servant in the establishment, where his eagerness to earn “tips” and his ingenious solutions to daily crises soon makes him indispensable to both the staff and the patrons.

Through the life in the brothel we get a cross-section of not only the brothel’s world but also of politics, for one of the guests is Shinsaku Takasugi (Yujiro Ishihara)

Shinsaku Takasugi coolly considers while all around are losing their heads

who heads a samurai group that wants to burn down the new foreign settlement, though how they think they can keep the plan secret while shouting out their plans at each other in that samurai command voice in a building with paper walls is beyond me. Takasugi was a genuine and significant figure in the history of the time, which firmly grounds the film in reality for Japanese audiences.

We also meet an enormous number of characters who are sometimes hard to keep apart, because they are relatively unfamiliar actors and actresses from Nikkatsu, still in the early stages of its reorganization. There is Osome, one of the top women, who despite her active client list has no money and tries to get a client to commit suicide with her so people will think it is a love suicide rather than merely a way to escape her debts. Her chief competitor, Koharu, has so many men waiting for her at one time that she can’t remember who is in which room and eventually finds she has promised to marry both a businessman and his son.

Koharu lectures father and son clients

Ohisa works in the kitchens, but her father loses so much money gambling that he sells her to the brothel. Tokusaburo is the wastrel son of the brothel’s owners who spends every cent he can get from his folks at competing brothels and tries to steal their strong box. Kisuke is the struggling servant who makes the mistake of inviting Saheji into the house, is held responsible for his bill, and threatened with being sold to a male brothel when Saheji doesn’t pay. Saheji of course eventually finds solutions to all of their problems, including the samurai who turn out to need his help as well, plus a few others I don’t have space to mention.

There is no hemming and hawing about geisha or prostitute — at the party Saheji orders geishas, who come from outside, to provide the music and dance and four women from the brothel itself to provide the fawning and the sex for his compatriots (though not for him, oddly enough).

Saheji is played by Frankie Sakai, a popular comedian who would have a long career as a character actor in addition to several popular comedy series.

To discuss the jokes thrown in along the way would be a great spoiler, but I can’t help but mention the bookseller whose wares are all “Love Suicide at X.” Kisuke is played by Masumi Yokadu, whose mother was Danish, which leads to repeated jokes along the lines of, “Funny, you don’t look like you’re from around here.”

Yet there are moments of surprising humanity, such as the prostitute who still works with an eye patch

The prostitutes at a quiet moment

and her baby or the way Saheji’s face falls when he is left alone in his new cubbyhole where the “cobwebs are a nice touch.” And Ishiwara’s character reminds us what the samurai thought they were fighting for when he says he had been to Shanghai and had seen first hand what the foreigners do to places where they “just want to trade.”  In fact, the westerners first appear on horseback (in top hat no less) shooting the samurai who dropped the watch that Saheji first picks up, and we later see parades of armed men in kilts.

At the same time, the movie is packed with enough cultural detail to occupy a graduate seminar for a year at least.

Saheji’s juggling of duties requires he stay in constant motion, and that motion is matched by the director Yuzo Kawashima’s skillful handling of it all. It’s hard to believe this is the same director as for the searing Suzaki Paradise. The movie never drags, and none of the bits seem forced, though there is one extra scene in a graveyard as he tries to sneak away that might be cut to no great harm. But even that bit leads to a summary for the movie as Saheji says, “There is no heaven or hell — I have a life to live.” The script is credited to Kawashima and Shohei Imamura, but whoever wrote those specific words, they could be a fair motto for almost all of the films Imamura would later write and direct.  

Japanese critics consistently regard this as one of the greatest of all Japanese films, unusual not only because it is all but unknown outside Japan but also because it is a comedy, and comedies almost never make critics’ Ten Best lists anywhere. It is unknown in America primarily because Janus/Criterion never picked it up, but an excellent DVD restoration was issued in Britain, where I found my copy. That needs a Region 2 player, but you may be able to find a Region 1 or 0 version if you scour the internet. It’s worth the extra effort. It is a comedy that is not only full of humor but full of life, and no one interested in Japan or Japanese movies — or movies in general — should miss it.

* There are so many variable English versions of the title that I have not listed them all, but all refer to sun or sun tribe in some way. It is possible that this is supposed to draw some parallel to Japan in the 1950s, when many saw their society under as great a threat as in the 1860s, but if so the connection is too subtle for me to find. It is also possible that it was just thrown into the title because the cast included Ishihara, who after Crazed Fruit became the personification of the Sun Tribe, and Nikkatsu wanted to make sure they attracted a younger audience to a period film. 

* *Later he tells us he has been in Yokohama where he was treated for TB by Dr. Hepburn, the first American missionary/doctor in Japan who also developed the romanji system of transliteration that is still in use in some form today (including in this blog). Of course, this may be a lie as well. He certainly spends a lot of his spare time brewing up strange concoctions of his own to treat his cough.