A Critical Handbook of Japanese Film Directors. Alexander Jacoby
in the period of the Japanese cinema’s outstanding achievement, there were some. In the first place, while the fifties produced some of the Japanese cinema’s finest and more complex achievements, it also offered an increasing number of remakes: Hiroshi Inagaki’s Musashi Miyamoto trilogy (1954–55), admired in the West, was a new version of a wartime production; Ozu, in Floating Weeds (Ukigusa, 1959) and Good Morning (Ohayo, 1959), reworked prewar successes. Yet this was not a new phenomenon: the Japanese cinema has always been accustomed to retelling old stories. Filmed accounts of the perennial Chūshingura story of the loyal 47 ronin had numbered in the dozens during the silent era alone.
Perhaps it was less that the classical tradition of Japanese cinema was exhausted than that it was doomed because the society that produced it was changing. The films realized by the major directors of the fifties drew substantially on the nation’s cultural traditions: distinguished authors both classical (Saikaku, Sōseki Natsume) and contemporary (Jun’ichirō Tanizaki, Yasunari Kawabata, Yukio Mishima) furnished their plots; their styles often drew on the pictorial traditions of screen paintings and woodblock prints; their thematic concerns derived from a set of cultural assumptions which, increasingly, were being challenged. Ozu’s subtle, moving family dramas were really, at this period, accounts of the disintegration of the traditional family system; meanwhile, younger directors such as Yūzō Kawashima and Kon Ichikawa satirized the new, commercially oriented, increasingly Westernized Japan. At this time, the classical, delicate, understated dramas of directors such as Toyoda, Naruse, and Gosho must have seemed quaint to a generation of viewers who had grown up after the war, and who desired a more direct confrontation with social realities. Their attitudes were not dissimilar to those of the Young Turk critics of Cahiers du cinéma magazine in Paris, who condemned the literary methods of directors such as Jean Delannoy and Claude Autant-Lara. While the Japanese cinema of the fifties was substantially richer than the French cinema of those years, one can understand the impatience of a younger generation who must have looked on their admired elders as a conservative establishment.
Iconoclasts and Innovators: The Sun Tribe and the New Wave
The first signs of rebellion came from within the industry. In the mid-fifties, the genre of taiyōzoku (sun tribe) films was inaugurated by Season of the Sun (Taiyō no kisetsu, 1956), a Nikkatsu production based on a novel by Shintarō Ishihara, then an enfant terrible, now a conservative politician. The commercial success of this film ensured that it spearheaded a series of works with similar themes, about the alienation and irresponsibility of Japanese youth. Established directors such as Kon Ichikawa, who made Punishment Room (Shokei no heya, 1956), and newcomers like Yasuzō Masumura with his debut, Kisses (Kuchizuke, 1957), contributed to the genre, but these rebellious films were nevertheless made within the studio system; their profitability guaranteed that the major production companies would cash in on the craze. Although the taiyōzoku genre did display a new explicitness in its depiction of sex and violence, its products were not immune to melodramatic sensationalism. This rising sun, in any case, proved something of a false dawn; public outrage soon led to an informal agreement on the part of the studios to cease production of the genre.
For a few years, therefore, the Japanese cinema continued to produce films that were traditional in style and content. But the face of the industry was radically transformed between 1960 and 1965. Social change, as the modernization of the country accelerated, may have made this inevitable, but the catalyst, as in France at the same period, was the emergence of a younger generation of directors, pre-eminently Ōshima, Imamura, Shinoda and Yoshida. The control exerted by studios over distribution made the path of independent production, favored by their French contemporaries, much more difficult for Japanese filmmakers. Most of the filmmakers of the Japanese New Wave started out working for the majors, especially Shochiku, whose formidable head of production, Shirō Kido, hoped that cheaply made, innovative pictures could emulate the success of the Nouvelle Vague in Europe. He was disappointed; but his decision made it briefly possible for a younger generation of directors to work within the studio system while exploring modern themes and essaying stylistic experimentation. The commercial failure of these films spelled the end of studio support for the Japanese New Wave, but Kido’s policy had given the careers of several young directors an impetus. By the mid-sixties, many of the most creative had found it possible to obtain funds for independent production. This meant, inevitably, working on low budgets, but the new Art Theater Guild (ATG) provided an alternative distribution network to that of the majors, and independence offered a degree of aesthetic freedom which the studios could not. The best films of the New Wave directors were characterized by a stylistic modernism which drew eclectically on European influences from Godard to Antonioni, but their true focus was the realities, sometimes uncomfortable, of contemporary Japanese society, examined with an uncompromising eye. Ōshima, in particular, touched on controversial subjects such as capital punishment and the circumstances of Korean immigrants in Japan in films such as Death by Hanging (Kōshikei, 1968). Imamura’s films, in his own words, explored “the connection between the lower half of the human body and the lower half of the social structure.” These artists examined their society with none of the restraint and delicacy of the older generation, and made the mid-to-late sixties the Golden Age of independent filmmaking in Japan.
This was also the period in which a number of remarkable documentary directors, pre-eminently Shinsuke Ogawa, came to the fore; some had cut their teeth on PR and educational films at Iwanami Productions, which also trained such notably individualistic directors as Susumu Hani and Kazuo Kuroki, whose fiction features displayed the influence of both documentary and the New Wave. Regrettably, this fertile period of independent filmmaking did not last. By the seventies, though ATG continued to finance creative films, it had again become increasingly difficult to obtain funding for production outside the studio system. Of the major New Wave figures, Imamura spent the decade working on experimental documentaries; Ōshima became reliant on foreign capital to realize a diminishing number of films; Yoshida, too, worked less and less frequently; and Shinoda renounced experimentation for the careful, academic adaptation of classic literature.
The Studios after 1960: The Decline of a System
The studios, meanwhile, had found the content of their pictures increasingly dictated by commercial priorities. ShinToho went bankrupt in 1961; Daiei would ultimately follow in the early seventies. The steady audience which had sustained production through the thirties, forties, and fifties had disappeared as television began to keep once-devoted filmgoers at home. In particular, the conventional period film—so long the staple moneymaker for Japanese studios—was taken up by television. Nikkatsu and Toei responded by shifting focus to films about the yakuza (in both its incarnations: the professional gamblers of the past and the gangsters of the present). Certain talented directors, such as Seijun Suzuki and Tai Katō, worked in this increasingly popular genre, and the latter especially achieved considerable individuality by using its tortuous plots as a vehicle for formal experimentation. In general, however, and even though “Nikkatsu action” became a trademark, its products showed neither the complexity and richness of the best genre films of the past nor the originality of the major independent productions of the time. Nevertheless, yakuza films continued to make up a substantial proportion of Japanese film production throughout the seventies, when directors such as Toei-based Kinji Fukasaku moved away from the romanticized portrayal of chivalrous gangsters in the so-called ninkyō-eiga towards an allegedly more realistic style, known as jitsuroku (“true record”) eiga and characterized by extreme violence and a pseudo-documentary style involving the use of a handheld camera. Shochiku, after struggling through the sixties as its traditional format became unfashionable, hit on a surefire commercial success with Yōji Yamada’s Tora-san (Otoko wa tsurai yo) series; these repetitive but warm and funny accounts of life in an old-fashioned Tokyo community gave the studio a hit twice a year, and kept it solvent until the nineties.
The other commercial success story during this period was pornography. During the 1960s, a number of directors had begun to make so-called “pink” films—sexually explicit (though softcore) low-budget movies made and distributed outside the studio system. Some directors, notably Kōji Wakamatsu, took advantage of the relative freedom of this milieu to make occasionally trenchant political commentary; this was presumably not what the audience went to see, but pornography soon seemed the safest commercial bet for studios facing difficult times. By the early seventies, Nikkatsu, on the verge