Jogakusei-ki (1941)

Jogakusei-ki is another of those fascinating and charming movies about nothing that seem to be a specialty of Japan. Generally lumped together under the term shomin-geki, they simply portray the everyday world of everyday people, usually salarymen or small business owners. In this case, we follow a class of high school girls for a semester …

As a Wife, As a Woman / Poignant Story / Tsuma to shite onna to shite (1961)

Few Japanese movies illustrate the status of the Japanese mistress as clearly as does Naruse’s As a Wife, As a Woman. Miho (Hideko Takamine) has been the mistress of Professor Kouno for almost 20 years and has run the bar he owns in the Ginza for the last ten, but she is not getting any …

Symphony Pastorale / Denen kokyogaku (1937)

For any viewers who stumble on Symphony Pastorale on the very low resolution version on YouTube (hence no screen captures), its primary interest will be a chance to see Setsuko Hara in one of her earliest major roles. However, the movie also illustrates how difficult it was for the Japanese to adapt foreign literature before …

Hana-kago no uta (1937)

The idea of marriage for love became a significant feature of post-war Japanese movies, but was not seen very often before the war. Gosho’s Hana-kago no uta gives us an interesting look at that issue, while taking some strange turns. Kinuyo Tanaka as Yoko is the principal attraction of her father’s tonkatsu cafe, her looks …

World of Love: Tomi the Wildcat / Ai no sekai: Yamaneko Tomi no hanashi (1943)

Though it verges on the sentimental, Tomi the Wildcat gives us a somewhat different insight into the women on the home front in 1943 while also revealing the full maturation of the phenomenon that was Hideko Takamine. Now sixteen, Tomi has been living mostly on her own since her mother died when she was seven. …

Three Women in the North / Kita no san-nin (1945)

Three Women in the North is a fascinating movie, but not for its plot. Essentially, this is the story of a plane on a secret mission that has to get its cargo of soldiers to one of Japan’s northernmost small islands, despite engine trouble, terrible storms, and later an air attack by the Americans. We …

Wanderer’s Notebook / Her Lonely Lane (1962)

In 1951, Mikio Naruse made Repast, his first film based on a novel by Fumiko Hayashi with a screenplay by Sumie Tanaka, Hayashi actually died before her novel was finished or movie production began so he probably never even met her, but in the ensuing years, her work would also be the source for Inazuma, …

Three Women Around Yoshinaka / Shin, Heike monogatari: Yoshinaka o meguru sannin no onna (1956)

The Heike monogatari is one of the great epics of medieval Japan, something like the Homeric epics, the Eddas, or the convoluted histories of England that resulted in Shakespeare’s history plays. As such, it had been retold, re-written, adapted into Noh plays, and thus known in some form by most educated Japanese long before Eiji …

The Wife of Seishu Hanaoka / Hanaoka Seishu no tsuma (1967)

Seishu Hanaoka was the first person to develop a functioning general anesthetic that allowed him to do serious operations, but since he did this in 1804 Japan, his work was not known in the rest of the world, where the first general anesthetic was long credited to an American doctor in the 1840s. As such, …

Setsuko Hara

I only recently realized that I had missed the centennial of Setsuko Hara's birth (6/17/1920)  which would have been a good time to make a few comments about her career. I must preface this by saying, as with everything in my blog, these are the views of an outsider, and I know I am an …