A Whistle in My Heart / Whistling in Kotan / Kotan no kuchibue (1959)

Kotan is a village just outside an un-named city in Hokkaido. When we first meet the main characters – Masa a 15 year old girl, Yutaka her 13 year old brother, and Fue an older neighbor/cousin, it looks like any other small Japanese village as the teenagers prepare to go off to school in the morning. However, Kotan is a village for the Ainu, the local inhabitants indigenous to Hokkaido before the Japanese took the island over and thus not ethnically Japanese. Rather like the Native American tribes, they lost most of their lands and customs to the Japanese over the centuries and are now a sub-culture long treated as sub-human.

In a remarkable departure for Mikio Naruse, who was not known for movies about children or about minority groups, the movie follows the three teenagers through the course of a year. On the surface, relations with the Japanese seem to be relatively amenable. The kids go to the same school in town as the Japanese and the teachers treat them as equal to the other students. Nevertheless, the kids have problems with the other kids. When a wallet goes missing in class, the girl who lost it immediately accuses Masa. They attack her again when the art teacher selects her painting as one of the best in the class. When Yutaka arrives at school, Sato and his buddies call him a dog and later insist that he must have cheated when he got the top score on a math class. This eventually leads to a playground fight in which Sato’s buddy beats Yutaka with a baseball bat. Nevertheless, one of their Ainu neighbors is an elementary school teacher who reminds the kids regularly that things are improving, however slowly it might seem,  from the time when he or their parents were children.

For Fue, the problem is more complicated. A dancer who hopes to go to Tokyo to continue her studies, she is also the apparent crush of Yoshio, who is Japanese. Her elderly grandmother, fearing she is nearing death, wants to see Fue happily married and visits Yoshio’s father (Takashi Shimura) without telling either Fue or Yoshio. He is the principal of the school and is regarded as something of a god among the Ainu, for he has always insisted that the Ainu and the Japanese are absolute equals. But when Grandmother asks him to approve a marriage between Yoshio and Fue, this liberal facade crumbles; it’s one thing to preach equality in society and another to practice it in one’s own family. Fue disappears when she finds out what Grandma has done, never to be heard from again. Grandma stops eating and soon dies.

All is not sunshine within the Ainu community either. Masa and Yutaka’s father is killed in a work accident and they are thrown on the mercy of an uncle they have rarely seen. He takes their house and ships them off to work in a shop in town, and they learn that even the Ainu have bad people.

Most if not all of the cast is actually Japanese, including Masayuki Mori as the father all but unrecognizable behind his beard, Bozuken Hidari as the kindly neighbor who is also school janitor, and Eiko Miyoshi as Grandmother,

Eiko Miyoshi

but there is no particular effort to “redface” their make-up that I can see. The apparent distinction made is heavy shadow under the eyebrow to indicate a deeper eye socket than with the “Japanese” characters. There are lines about their Ainu hair not being as black as that of true Japanese, but in the color technology of the date I couldn’t detect any obvious difference except that Grandma in some shots seems to be going brown rather than gray. The only clear distinction is that most of the Ainu adult men had beards of various lengths, but I could not tell if the school friends of Masa and Yatuka are supposed to be Japanese or other Ainu.

The first half of the movie is accompanied by the sound of jets overhead, and we soon see that the kids’ father works at a US base. Only after it closes does he go back to his old work as a lumberjack, which is where he is killed. A nearby town has an “Ainu Museum,” and Yutaka and a cousin are humiliated to see Ainu women there performing traditional dances for tips from the Japanese tourists. One of Sato’s worst insults is to pin a sign on Yutaka’s back that says, “When I grow up I’ll be a tourist attraction.”

It is something of a frustration that when Fue disappears, she really disappears. The one moment of serious tension is perhaps unintended, when we see Yutaka spearing salmon in the river and, having seen decades of cop shows and numerous Japanese movies about suicides, we expect him to spear a body. But he doesn’t. Fue just leaves. This abrupt disappearance of a major character is something we have seen in many other Japanese movies, and there is no note, no letter, and no later accidental observation of her on the street somewhere as we would expect in an American movie to close that plot line.

As far as I can find, this is one of the first post-war movies to deal specifically with any of the various minority groups in Japan, with movies about Koreans or the children of GIs appearing in the same year, while a serious movie about the “untouchable” burakumin would shortly appear in 1962. The Ainu themselves would make regular appearances in the Rambling Guitarist series of the early sixties, where they are in fact treated as a “tourist attraction,” a group of essentially good but innocent people who have to be protected or saved by the Japanese Akira Kobayashi and/or Ruriko Asaoka. There does not seem to be any formal ghettoization of the Ainu in Kotan — they have lived there and fished in the salmon stream forever and the nearby town has just grown out to reach them. We aren’t told much about the Ainu culture, except that the bear and the salmon figure prominently among their many gods. If we didn’t have the Ainu identification, it would have been a movie about the problems of any children who become the target of the class bully or bad girl, which often happens from jealousy or for no particular reason at all but once in motion is impossible to stop. What pulls the movie out of the ordinary is the Guess Who’s Coming to Dinner moment when the noble liberal suddenly reveals that all his liberalism is very shallow, that the equality he preaches is only for other people, not his own family.