Kabei / Kabe (2008)

Continuing his looks toward the past begun in his 21^st century jidai-geki, Yoji Yamada’s Kabei uses the structure of the traditional “mother picture” to look at the early days of the War and the repressive government of the era.

Kabei is the nickname given to Kayo by her husband Shigeru, who nicknames all of the family members – the young daughters Hatsubei (Hatsuko) and Terubei (Teruyo) as well as himself (Tobei) – which is significant because every one, including the children, uses those nicknames when talking to each other. None of them says Father or Mother, which marks them as a very unusual Japanese family, especially for 1940.

Tobei is a college teacher whose latest book is banned. As an instructor in German language and philosophy, he is automatically suspect for his “foreign” ideas.  He has suggested that the invasion of China was a “war” rather than an “incident” or a “crusade,” the official terms used by the government, and has dared to suggest the government is not perfect, which leads to his arrest for treason under the Orwellianly named Peace Preservation Law. This leaves Kabei to cope with raising the family alone, with a place always set for Tobei at dinner with his picture, while she has only the salary from a part-time teaching job where she must watch elementary children being ceaselessly indoctrinated without daring to comment for fear of losing the only income she has.

For a while, Kabei has help from Tobei’s younger sister Hisako, who is in art school herself and has little money, and from Yamazaki, one of Tobei’s former students. Yamazaki is so poor that his socks have holes in them but has not been drafted because he has bad eyesight and is partially deaf. He is also more than a bit of a klutz – when he takes the girls to the beach during summer vacation, he is the one who has to be rescued by Kabei – but his persistence helps Kabei arrange visits to Tobei in prison and find books for him to read.

Kabei’s father is the police chief in their home town and tries to get Kabei to divorce her husband, not least because Tobei’s arrest reflects so badly on him that he will later be forced to retire. There is also an oaf of an uncle who arrives in the summer of 1941, but Kabei welcomes him because he is the one person who speaks his mind and around whom she too can relax without worrying about what she says. He leads us into one of the most striking episodes when he goes to Shinjuku for a movie and sees two young women in western dress being harassed by women who say no money should be spent on permanent waves or pretty clothes but should be donated to the government. When he says girls should be allowed to be pretty, the women turn on him because he wears a gold ring, which for him is the symbol of a lifetime of savings. Before we know it, he has been arrested as well but manages to talk his way out of the situation eventually. He makes lewd comments about Hatsubei’s growth into a curvaceous teenager, which so upsets the girl that he leaves, going home to commit suicide in the beloved forests of his home. But as he leaves Tokyo, he also leaves his ring to be sold when Kabei becomes truly desperate for money.

By the summer of 1942, Yamazaki is called up, despite his physical handicaps, and will never return, drowning when his troop ship is torpedoed because he still has not learned to swim.

Yamada is not the least bit nostalgic in his recreation of the times, though his tendency to use the even lighting of most of his movies disguises the darkness of the story. The result is the most detailed indictment of the repression of the pre-war era since Morning for the Osone Family and No Regrets for Our Youth. There are times when we might wish for more of the political context, but that is not his subject. His focus is repression’s effect on the most basic of cultural units, the family. Thus, he skips over the privation of the last years of the war, the bombings, the death of Hisako in Hiroshima, the Occupation, and the dire poverty of the fifties to remind his audience of how things were before they could blame everything on the Americans. This is a world the Japanese made for themselves, one in which the police could dine at inns on beef sukiyaki while regular people struggled to get rice, stood in line for hours for a bit of butter, or could get sake only as a celebration such as the fall of Singapore, and people could be arrested on the whim of a policeman for wearing a ring or not immediately heeding a call to stop. It was also a world in which dozens of men could be crowded into a single jail cell, beaten, starved, and refused medical attention simply because of a stray word. It is a world of absolute conformity, where small children sing daily hymns to the Emperor, where no one dares miss a community meeting, and where no meeting can even begin without bowing toward the Emperor. A meeting in which the group can’t decide whether they should bow toward the Tokyo Palace or the vacation home where the Emperor has gone seems funny, but it illustrates how desperately everyone seeks to do nothing that might be interpreted as the wrong thing.

This reaches down into the tiniest aspects of life. When the young Terubei pushes away from the policeman who is supervising Tobei, Kabei slaps the girl rather than object to the policeman. Any books finally allowed to Tobei in prison must have all his underlining and commentary carefully erased before he can read them again. If it weren’t for the kimonos, we might think we were in Stalinist Russia, with its bread lines, network of informers, and special privileges for the police, politicians, and military officers.

As an added fillip, he turns the traditional sentimental ending of the “mother picture” on its head. On her deathbed, surrounded by her successful daughters and their grown-up children, Terubei tells Kabei that she can at last be re-united with Tobei. Kabei whispers that she does not want Tobei in the afterlife but in real life.

As a good family drama should be, the film is anchored by the mother, portrayed by Sayuri Yoshinaga. The Kabuki actor Mitsugoro Bando X is a quiet and subtle Tobei, again reminding us that Kabuki actors could be subtle and realistic when called for, and the young children are completely natural as we have come to expect in Japanese movies, while Tadanobu Asano surprisingly is cast as the klutzy Yamazaki and acquits himself well.

The script is based on the 1984 memoir of Teruyo Nogami, script supervisor and/or production manager for almost all of Akira Kurosawa’s films beginning with Rashomon. Though the movie is narrated by Teruyo, she is only nine, while Nogami was the age of Hatsuko at the time depicted and would have been much more aware of the things going on around her and have been privy to more of her mother’s feelings, such as the scene in which Kabei explains why she likes having the uncle around. However, Yamada himself was also nine in 1940, so he may have had some of the same memories of the culture though his family was in Manchuria when Japan invaded China. Why it took so long to become a movie, and why Yamada in particular wanted to do it, is a question that has never been discussed, to my knowledge. By this time Yamada was one of the few active film-makers who had lived through the war years,* even as a child, so he may have seen something in the rising nationalism of 21st century society that made him want to remind a younger audience of what it is really like when nationalism and cultural conformity come together.

Kabei thus is a remarkable film not for any technical distinction  or performances but rather for the way it uses the traditional format of the movie about a self-sacrificing mother to remind its audience that the past was not such a golden age as some revisionists in Japan were beginning to claim.

* Shindo was nearing a hundred and still had one more film based on his personal experience to make, but all of the rebels of the sixties were now dead or had made their last film.