East-West Film Journal, Volume 2, No. 2

EAST-WEST FILM JOURNAL VOLUME 2· NUMBER 2 Tokyo on Film I TADAO SATO Something Like Yoshiwara: The Cultural Perspective I3 KEIKO McDONALD "Four Hundred Years in a Convent, Fifty in Hollywood": Sexual Identity and Dissent in Contemporary Philippine Cinema 24 GINA MARCHETTI The Hindi Film Song and Guru Dutt 49 DARIUS COOPER The Sublimative Text: Sex and Revolution in Big Road 66 CHRIS BERRY Film as Language, Film as Power DANA POLAN The Portrayal of the Canadian Native in the American Cinema: Selected Cases IIS JAMES M. SKINNER The Debut of a Film Director: Nakajima Takehiro I29 LINDA C. EHRLICH JUNE 1988 The East-West Center is a public, nonprofit educational institution with an international board of governors. Some 2,000 research fellows, grad uate students, and professionals in business and government each year work with the Center's international staff in cooperative study, training, and research. They examine major issues related to population, resources and development, the environment, culture, and communication in Asia, the Pacific, and the United States. The Center was established in 1960 by the United States Congress, which provides principal funding. Support also comes from more than twenty Asian and Pacific governments, as well as private agencies and corporations. Tokyo on Film TADAO SATO IN THE DAYS before the second world war, the center of Tokyo was divided into two conceptual regions: Yamanote (mountain side) and Shita machi, which correspond roughly to the English terms uptown and down town. In the outskirts around that center there lay the suburbs and small towns of the vicinity. Yamanote was the area in which the masters of Edo, the daimyo and the shogun's vassals, built their great mansions with the high buildings that dotted the western side of old Tokyo: Hongo, Koishi kawa, Ushigome, Kojimachi, Akasaka, and Azabu. Afterthe Meiji Resto ration, this area was largely inhabited by bureaucrats, the samurai's heirs, and scholars. In contrast, there was Shitamachi. It occupied the eastern part of the city: Kanda, Asakusa, Nihonbashi, Kyobashi, Honjo, and Fukagawa. As a result of the low land prices in Edo, many merchants and craftsmen lived here. In the area around Nihonbashi there lived many wealthy mer chants, so it follows that in the original meaning of the term shitamachi there was no suggestion of a place for the poor. Moreover, as opposed to Yamanote, which was the base of the authoritarian culture that was handed down from the samurai class to the bureaucratic class, Shitamachi was an area in which a richer, more human culture flourished. From the latter half of the 1920S through the 1930S, first at the Shochiku Kamata film studio and later at the Shochiku Ofuna studio, a group of directors led the way in giving birth to the so-called Kamata and Ofuna schools. The most influential of these were Yasujiro Shimazu, Heinosuke Gosho, and Yasujiro Ozu. They were born and grew up the sons of the bourgeois class that inhabited the areas in which Shitamachi culture had ripened since the days of Edo: Kanda, Nihonbashi, Fukagawa, and oth- 1 2 TADAO SATO ers. It was no mere coincidence that the Kamata and Ofuna styles born of their efforts excelled at expressing the delicately refined humanity of the families and relatives of the cities and the local societies. They hated gran diosely moralistic themes. They preferred casual humor and pathos. Excluding wildly theatrical conflicts as boorish, they were charmed by the kind of story in which a slight misunderstanding between well-intentioned people gives rise to a conflict which is then skillfully resolved by a wise person. Heinosuke Gosha's I936 Moonlit Night Lady (Oboroyo no onna) is a story of adults who sympathetically understand the traumas of youth and try to save young people from the tragedy born of rash love. Yasujiro Ozu's I933 Passing Fancy (Dekigokoro) is a story of the poor working class. But even here Shitamachi is depicted as a place where warm people help each other along while wittily bantering among them selves. Whether or not Tokyo's Shitamachi actually had such a warm local social culture is something that I don't know. Most of Shitamachi was lost in the fire that followed the Great Kanto Earthquake of I923. What remained was distorted so much by reconstruction that it is safe to say that the feeling of the Shitamachi of Edo has been lost. Heinosuke Gosho and Yasujiro Ozu learned about big city flair and picked up a refined touch from the American films of the same period, especially those of Ernst Lubitsch, the creator of the school of sophistica tion in American films, which served as their textbook. In order to repro duce the lost manners and ways of the residents of Shitamachi, they used the stylish manners of the New Yorkers, Parisians, and Viennese of the day as their examples. Although they were born in Shitamachi, they did not necessarily live there after they began making films. Nor in Yamanote either. Kamata, with its film studio, formed the southern outskirts of Tokyo and could almost have been considered the countryside, was a factory town. In the vicinity there were the developing residential areas of the suburbs. It was somewhere around there that they lived. In the I930S they made one film after another depicting the household lives of the company employees of the area. The group of films that emerged from that period represents the first interest in the lower middle class in film history. In Gosho's I93I The Neighbor's Wife and Mine (Madamu to nyobo) and Shimazu's I934 Our Neighbor Miss Yae (Tonari no Yae-chan), scenes of deserted fields covered with nothing but weeds and a few scattered TOKYO ON FILM 3 houses serve as the main set. They were probably filmed in the rising sub urban residential areas around Kamata: the areas along the Mekama and Ikegami railways. In these two films, the intimate neighborly relations between families of two houses are warmly depicted. At the same time, there was so much open space there that it would be difficult to say that a town was being formed. However, in the films that they made there are certain things that lead us to hope brightly that if the number of families taking part in the network of intimate neighborly relationships were to increase, then a second Shitamachi would develop. However, Ozu's 1931 I Was Born, But . .. (Umarete wa mita keredo) and Shimazu's 1939 A Brother and His Younger Sister (Ani to sono imoto) describe the same kind of rising residential area's company employees, but the nuance is a little different. The protagonist of I Was Born, But . .. is the father of two elementary school boys who, in order to be promoted to his company's board of directors, moves close to the house of one of the board members. However, due to his sons' unseemly flattering of his supe rior, he winds up in a difficult situation. In A Brother and His Younger Sis ter, the other brother, a company employee, is often invited to his superi or's home to play go. However, his colleagues criticize his behavior as nothing more than a plot to be promoted. He gets angry, strikes one of them, and leaves the company. He winds up leaving for China with his sis ter in search of a new job. Somehow it seems extremely unlikely that this rising suburban residen tial area will be able to form a local society along the lines of the tradi tional Shitamachi cultural sphere that was knotted together by the solidar ity that sprang from its humanity and jovial wit. During the Pacific War, the Japanese government organized groups of tens of houses together into neighborhood associations. These associa tions helped the government control the lives of the city residents and faci litated the rationing of food and other supplies. They also organized air raid and other drills. Toho Production's Daily Battle (Nichijo no tatakai), the last film of Shi mazu's career, was made in the final stages of the Pacific War. This film dealt with the neighborhood associations in the former suburban residen tial districts, which were by then reduced to crowded slums. For the most part, the films made during this period were war propaganda vehicles, so it was inevitable that the efforts of the neighborhood associations would be featured. What we see in them is in no way similar to the old Shita- 4 TADAO SATO machi films, in which friendly neighbors laughed heartily, joking among themselves with a natural intimacy. On the contrary, neighbors who under normal conditions would not think of associating with each other are compelled in this time of crisis to acknowledge each other for the sake of the fatherland. Thus, as the 1930S ended, the Shitamachi of old Tokyo, with its beauty and humanity, became a thing of the past, a distant legend. Shimazu's 1937 The Lights of Asakusa (Asakusa no hi) describes the hustle and bustle of Asakusa in the days before its brief destruction in the Great KantO Earth quake. With its theater district, Asakusa was the center of Shitamachi. This film glorified the warmth and solidarity of Shitamachi's entertainers. Similarly, Toho's 1938 Tsuruhachi and Tsurujiro (Tsuruhachi Tsurujiro), directed by Mikio N aruse, is a nostalgic masterpiece that beautifully describes the warmth of the vaudevillians of Shitamachi at the turn of the century. Naruse, the son of a Yotsuya craftsman, trained at the Kama ta film studio, where he learned under his masters, Shimazu, Gosho, andOzu.

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