Ishiro Honda. Steve Ryfle
lovers subjected to the community’s harsh scrutiny, but this time the protagonists are high school students, whose problems are rooted in a generation gap that was widening fast in the years after the war. In Adolescence Part 2, Honda created a vivid snapshot of life in a small Japanese village amid the social, political, and economic changes of the Occupation. The film offers an interesting contrast to better-known works covering similar ground, for Honda had a more sympathetic view of Japan’s postwar youth than did some of his contemporaries.
Adolescence Part 2 was a follow-up to Toho’s successful coming-of-age drama Adolescence (Shishunki, 1952), directed by Seiji Maruyama. Set in a small town surrounded by mountains, Adolescence focuses on a group of students at a high school located adjacent to a red-light district full of unsavory establishments, and some of the youths are lured down the wrong path. The film ends with a teacher leading a drive to clean up the town.
The public response to Adolescence exceeded expectations, and Toho approved a second installment.16 During preproduction for Adolescence Part 2, high school students were asked about their problems and experiences, and their stories were incorporated into the screenplay by Toshiro Ide and Haruo Umeda. The cast includes veteran actors in the adult roles and members of Honda’s emerging stock company as the youths, including a young Akira Kubo (also in the original Adolescence, playing a different character), Ren Yamamoto, and Toyoaki Suzuki. Two roles were played by actual students after auditions were held across Japan.
Adolescence Part 2, though set in a similar locale and featuring some of the same actors, is not a direct sequel to Adolescence. Shot on location during the hot summer months in Kofu City, Yamanashi Prefecture, the story concerns a group of high school friends in a small town located in a mountain basin. The group meets regularly for after-school study sessions, stoking gossip among teachers, parents, and locals. Some don’t like boys and girls staying out together at night, others wonder if the kids have left-wing leanings, and still others object to one of the group’s meeting locations, a girl’s house that doubles as a snack bar owned by her parents and frequented by seedy types.17 Toho’s promotional materials for Adolescence Part 2 lay out the film’s theme: “Puberty is a time where the young contemplate life and try to face it straight on, with all seriousness. However, the adults view this pubescent period as something dirty.” The youths wrestle mightily with pangs of sexual awakening and longing for self-identity, none more so than Keita (Akira Kubo), whose defining character trait is baka shojiki (honesty to a fault). This is evident when the boy costs his sumo team a championship trophy by pointing out an illegal move by a teammate.
Keita and his classmate Reiko (Kyoko Aoyama) take a walk in the woods alone and become intimate. Afterward, both are racked with guilt; Reiko, walking in a stupor, is hit by a car. The local press calls it a suicide attempt, the result of teenage momoiro asobi (fooling around; literally, “peach-colored play”) gone too far; and because both teens’ parents are prominent community members, scandal erupts. The parents quell the uproar by pushing Keita and Reiko toward marriage, which further suffocates the youths. Keita goes into the mountains, seemingly intent on suicide, but is saved by a teacher. Cooler heads prevail and the two are given a fresh start. Reiko goes to stay with relatives, and Keita transfers to a school in Tokyo.
Directing actress Kyoko Aoyama in a pivotal scene of Adolescence Part 2.Courtesy of Honda Film Inc.
Having spent his early youth in a small mountain town not entirely unlike the fictional one here, and having been a kid with a zest for reading and the son of a priest, it’s possible that Ishiro Honda identified with the youths in Adolescence Part 2, and this might explain his exceptional compassion for the plight of his young characters. During the 1950s a good number of Japanese films depicted tensions between the Meiji generation that led Japan to war and the kids who came of age during the Occupation. The most noteworthy of these took a conservative and rather harsh view of youth. An extreme example is Keisuke Kinoshita’s A Japanese Tragedy (Nihon no higeki, 1953), which portrays teens and young adults as flagrantly disloyal and disrespectful toward their parents and elders, and is a classic of the enduring haha-mono (mother film) genre.
In Adolescence Part 2, the line in the generational sand is clear. An adult looks askance at some teens and notes disapprovingly that there is “a huge difference from when we were young. It was just war, war, war for us.” Elsewhere, some parents are reading a newspaper article titled, “Parents are too carefree: a dangerous age for rebellion.” Honda’s direction evenhandedly illustrates the rift, taking the adults to task for their hypocrisy while not letting the wayward youths off the hook. This isn’t a story of teenage delinquency, but of the widening gap between old and young and the upheaval of long-held traditions.
In early scenes, Honda contrasts the earnest teens with the hypocritical, quick-to-judge adults, some of whom gossip about the kids while practicing at an archery range; when they miss the target, it’s a nice visual metaphor for the adults’ cluelessness. The students are shown reading the French philosopher Alain and engaging in deep discussion; the teachers are shown reflexively siding with the cops after some of the kids are mistakenly arrested and accused of hanging out in a bar. And while the grown-ups worry about the boys and girls staying out late together, it’s the adults who think about sex, as evidenced by a bar patron reading a kasu tori magazine (lurid periodicals, popular after the war). Eventually Honda replaces black-and-white absolutes with shades of gray—such as when it is revealed that a female student’s sister is actually her mother, posing as the girl’s older sister to hide the shame of a teen pregnancy and a fatherless household; the woman’s revelation is a warning to the kids not to repeat their elders’ mistakes. As for the youths, it turns out that their parents’ concerns were not all unfounded. As Keita and Reiko hike into the mountains, the sexual tension builds between them; and when they stop to rest on a rock, Keita makes his move, and the couple kisses off-screen. The camera pans away to the rushing river below.
To the Western viewer, this would seem an unsubtle sexual metaphor—a train speeding into a tunnel—however, it’s not made clear whether the kids go as far as intercourse, and this ambiguity is key: Honda is less interested in whether the youths are going too far astray than in the impossibility of breaking free from the traditional values of family, community, and by extension the whole of Japanese society. In 1950s Japan, the mere appearance of such inappropriate behavior could result in unbearable shame and scorn. These two adolescents, seemingly free and independent minded, are instantly changed forever by a simple, universal act that’s part of growing up. They are burdened with the guilt of having failed to meet expectations and are duty-bound to suffer the consequences, even if it means a life of unhappiness.
This image has been redacted from the digital edition. Please refer to the print edition to see the image.
Poster for Adolescence Part 2, featuring Akira Kubo and Kyoko Aoyama. © Toho Co., Ltd.
Honda elicits fine performances from the young cast, particularly from Kubo, who plays Keita with the sort of muted angst that is at once completely Japanese but universal in the boy’s confused attempts to understand girls, parents, and the looming specter of manhood. There is a powerful sequence in which Keita, beaten and bruised in a fight, is bandaged by a girl who has a not-so-secret crush on him. As Keita lies still, the girl softly kisses him; but rather than accept her affection, the boy walks out and wanders to the school swimming pool and, in a scene breathtakingly shot by cinematographer Tadashi Iimura, swims laps in the moonlight as if to wash off the confusing, conflicting emotions. Keita suffers quietly, internally, worlds removed from contemporary Hollywood teens, who were shouting “You’re tearing me apart” at their own out-of-touch parents. Kubo, just sixteen when this film was made, was beginning a long and fruitful acting career. During the 1950s and 1960s, he mostly played supporting roles as impetuous, hotheaded romantics and heroic types in program pictures ranging from comedies to war dramas. He would appear in numerous other Honda efforts and also play significant parts in Kurosawa’s Throne of Blood (Kumonosu-jo, 1957) and Sanjuro (Tsubaki Sanjuro, 1962).