Always: Sunset on Third Street / Always san-chome no yuhi (2005)

Of the young Japanese film-makers appearing around the millennium, none has been more completely devoted to CGI development than Takashi Yamazaki. Most of his movies have been built around sci-fi subjects, where we would expect a lot of CGI, reaching some sort of culmination in the recent Godzilla Minus One. In 2005, he rather surprisingly turned his attention to average people in Tokyo of 1958, making Always: Sunset on Third Street.

Third Street is a typical tiny Tokyo neighborhood street seen in so many of the Japanese movies made in the fifties and early sixties, and in a way the movie is both a trip down nostalgia lane and a tribute to the movies made at that time. Three overlapping stories show us both the variety of life on the street and the still slippery world of the people who are just beginning to feel a sense of the nation’s recovery, symbolized by the Tokyo Tower visible over the houses at the end of the street as it gradually rises throughout the course of a year.

Mutsuko comes to Tokyo because she has already found a job with Suzuki Auto,* which much to her disappointment turns out to be a tiny repair shop that does not offer her the lovely office work she expected. Suzuki had selected her because he thought she was already an auto mechanic (she actually said she was good at bicycle repairs), and is about to throw her out on the streets when he realizes his mistake and as an apology decides to train her instead. As the families on the street go, Suzuki’s is prosperous, the first to get each of what the wife calls the “three treasures” – TV, refrigerator, and washing machine – while the Granny at the news and tobacco stand has the first Coca-Cola bottle seen on the street, which Suzuki refuses to try because it looks like soy sauce.

Across the street is a candy shop grudgingly run by Chagawa, a writer who has not been able to follow up on his earlier acclaim and now writes pulp stories for the Boy’s Adventure Stories. The neighborhood bar is run by Hiromi, who has left her life as a “dancer” but who suddenly finds herself with young Jun, the child of another dancer at her former job who has deserted him. She tempts Chagawa into taking the boy, whom Chagawa does not want once he sobers up. Jun refuses to talk until he learns that Chagawa writes the wonderful stories Jun so loves.

All of this is given the warm glow (though not quite golden) and moderate over-playing associated with humorous nostalgia films. Whenever characters leave the street for the rest of the city, they seem to be placed into digitally colorized scenes from fifties films rather than full CGI recreations or any attempt to reconstruct the period in sets, though I could be wrong about specific details of the process. Yamazaki and his production team have matched the mostly brown and muted red and grays tone of real Third Street with those of the colorized versions of the past, so the transitions are seamless.

However, not all is sweetness and light. Just as we start to think the title has been translated wrongly and should be Always Sunny on Third Street, we are reminded of some of the realities of the fifties. The local doctor, whom the kids call the Devil because he gives them shots, goes home drunk most nights to an empty house filled with memories of his family killed in the 1945 fire-bombing. Suzuki’s short fuse can be traced to his un-detailed war experiences, and Hiromi’s background as a “dancer” is almost certainly a euphemism, given what we know about single women who grew up during the Occupation and later opened their own bars. And, of course, there are the abandoned children like Jun. When Jun accidentally learns of his mother’s new address, Ippei convinces him to go see her, but she hides from him when he shows up at the door of her new man’s business. Mutsuko had been forced out of her home in the far north due to her family’s extreme poverty, and her arrival among a group of students who have traveled much too far for a simple school trip may have been one of Japan’s work schemes for teens from poverty-stricken areas, since the adult guide introduces her directly to Suzuki.

The eagerness of Suzuki’s son Ippei for the expected TV and his mended sweater is an obvious allusion to Ozu’s Good Morning, just as the orphan boy abandoned with someone who doesn’t really want him suggests Ozu’s Tenement Gentleman. However, Yamazaki is a 21^st century film-maker fully committed to  the digital camera and CGI, so Ozu’s low camera placement and static shots are not for him. He opens with a bravura shot that follows Ippei from inside the house out into the street where he launches a rubber-band airplane that is followed seamlessly into the sky and out of the little street until it comes down in a busy downtown Tokyo avenue full of cars, streetcars, and people. Nor are we in the world of Ozu’s understatement; performances are a large scale, especially Shinichi Tsutsumi as the short-fused Suzuki, that Ozu, Mizoguchi, Naruse, and many others would never have allowed. Specific film references are not so immediately obvious, with the situations and characters reflecting those seen in hundreds of other movies of the earlier decade.

We even see the first appearance of Santa Claus on the street with a set of tiny Christmas gifts, until we are brought back to some of the realities of the fifties. Some are humorous, such as the whole street showing up to watch the TV on its first night until it shorts out in the middle of an American style wrestling match. Others are simply passing views, such as the sad iceman gradually losing his livelihood as the new refrigerator moves in. Others more significantly affect the central characters. Hiromi disappears after selling herself to pay her father’s doctor bills. However, perhaps since brothels were legally closed by 1958, Hiromi sells herself back into the world of dancing, almost certainly stripping, rather than into the sex trade itself, though there are strong hints that she and Jun’s mother had been hostesses or open prostitutes in earlier years. Certainly, she uses the wiles of a bar hostess on Chagawa to get him to take the boy. Jun’s real father suddenly arrives to claim him, leaving Chagawa bereft, and we also learn why Mutsuko thinks she can’t go home for New Year. But Yamazaki, or the original manga by Ryohei Sagan, finds a way to turn the severe emotional losses for all into a hopeful, if sentimentalized, finale. As Ippei tells us while the various cast members look at the completed Tokyo Tower on New Year’s Eve, sunset will always be beautiful on Third Street.

Just as we had seen some nostalgic looks at the Occupation years during in the nineties, built mostly around children, it is no surprise that the early 2000s would see a similar appearance of nostalgia about the fifties and early sixties, again centered on stories of children who now as adults remember the familial love, excitement, and humor rather than the struggles of the “good old days” when everything seemed possible, especially since these same adults were still feeling the effects of the economic bubble that had burst in the nineties. The movie was immensely popular with critics and audiences alike, with a sequel that followed the characters into 1959 (including an appearance by Godzilla) and then another set in 1964, the year of the Olympics when the Japanese came to feel that they once again had taken their true place among the world’s nations. While it is far more engrossing and engaging than such sentimentalized fare usually turns out to be, it is not an attempt to recreate the time but the memory of the time, an era when hope, after the Depression, War, and Occupation, at last seemed not only possible but genuine.

* This is in no way related to Suzuki Motors, which by 1958 was already selling motor-cycles and some of its early small cars and trucks in factory production.