• 蜂の巣の子供たち (Children of the Beehive), 4/25/21 (Sun)
• 簪（かんざし）(The Hairpin), 4/27/21 (Tues)
• 有難うさん (Mr. Thank You)、4/27/21 (Tues)

Three films by the unjustly neglected Shimizu Hiroshi. In the great Children of the Beehive (1948), a soldier repatriated after the war to Shimonoseki has no home or family to return to, having been raised in an orphanage. While pondering at the station where to go next, he becomes involved with a group of young war orphans who steal on behalf of a one-legged Fagin-like character, and also meets a woman who has returned from a former Japanese overseas colony. The movie becomes a road trip to Hiroshima as they go in search of work and a better life. The soldier, who is never named, becomes a surrogate father to the kids, teaching them hard work and cultural values (e.g., admonishing them when they smoke, encouraging them to show kindness to other kids). Though the situation itself is sad, the film is very matter-of-fact about the orphans and the devastated landscape, including a barren Hiroshima still coming back to life, and the kids are too busy trying to live to seek false sympathy. The film is ultimately life-affirming with an unexpectedly positive ending as the group returns to the soldier’s former orphanage.

The numerous memorable scenes throughout include the sweeping location shots in the mountains and fields, the uneducated orphans listening wistfully outside a school and writing math lessons in the sand, the parting scene between Yoshibo and the woman, the heartbreaking scene where one kid carries his sick friend on his back up the mountain to see the ocean view, eulogies by kids at a funeral for a major character, and the kids’ discovery that the desperate woman is about to prostitute herself as well as her embarrassment at being seen.

One kid named Yoshibo has an especially moving story. Having seen his mother drown on the ship back from their posting in Saipan, he has a habit of running to the ocean and calling out her name. He attaches himself to the woman who they meet, clearly in need of a mother, but she later returns him as she hasn’t the means to take care of him. His longing for his mother prompts his fervent appeal to his friend to carry him up the mountain to see the ocean.

As the soldier notes, the kids need love as much as they need food, and he does his best despite his own difficult situation. When he catches them smoking, he vows to stop cigarettes himself to set an example, signaling that he’s willing to sacrifice for their welfare. The bond between them is uplifting. Their initial meeting and subsequent relations are all naturally developed in a straightforward script that adeptly avoids outright sentiment.

The kids, all actual war orphans (reportedly taken under the director’s wing after the filming), were astonishingly good. They were just playing themselves in a way, but they were undeniably good at it in a supremely natural performance. The only exception was this child’s tears at his separation from the woman, which were embarrassingly stagy (the director uses the same Kabuki-like crying movement as his friend Ozu Yasujiro; must be some sort of shorthand used back then). On the other hand, the crying by the kids at the funeral was extraordinarily moving. Their energy and drive despite their tough life were inspiring. Interestingly the film only featured male orphans throughout; I wonder where the girls were. (The cast in general was overwhelmingly male.)

Shimamura Shunsuke was perfect as the soldier, and Natsuki Masako, who impressively made no attempt to glamorize herself, was very fine as the lost woman. The long shots of the postwar landscape were also magnificent. A quiet masterpiece.

Kanzashi: A lightweight 1941 comedy. The setting is a lodging in Izu Prefecture where a number of guests are staying for the summer season. Tanaka Kinuyo is aghast to learn that a kanzashi hairpin she lost when she was staying there has injured a soldier (a strikingly young Ryu Chishu) when he steps on it in the bath. She returns to the inn to apologize and ends up staying to help nurse the limping soldier back to health. It turns out that she is escaping an unhappy relationship in Tokyo and comes to like it in the country. Unsurprisingly she also falls for Ryu. As it happens, though he clearly enjoys her company, the asexual Ryu doesn’t seem to take any particular romantic interest in her. So there’s a rather strange dynamic at work.

She also becomes close with the other guests, most notably the crotchety professor plus the henpecked husband and his wife. Not much happens: the soldier works with two children staying there to regain strength in his foot, the characters gossip (such as wondering whether the still-unseen woman who lost the hairpin will be pretty), the professor is constantly griping about the loud guests and his go-playing neighbor, groups of tourists take up all the available masseurs, the kids bet on which old man will snore the loudest, and so forth. It’s a pleasant but uneventful film nearly throughout. In the end, they all go their separate ways, promising to meet again. That may or may not be true for the soldier, of course, who has to return to war (though it must be said that Japan was still doing pretty well in most of Asia in those pre-Pearl Harbor days).

Tanaka’s parting with Ryu is rather anti-climactic. Managing to climb the long stone stairs at a local shrine with her encouragement, he announces proudly from the top that now he’s fit to leave. And he does. No dramatics, no tears. She is shown at the end in a beautiful montage walking silently in the spots that she once walked with him, such as that long staircase, bringing the movie to a touching close.

Tanaka is incapable of giving a bad performance and is fine in this inconsequential role. Ryu barely registers, and the others are variable. The children are quite good as per Shimizu’s usual standards with kids. Some of the comedy was overdone, especially scenes involving the grumpy professor, but it was fairly low key overall. Tanaka’s joy in simple pleasures like washing clothes in the river, hanging them out to dry, cleaning the lodging and such won’t be to everyone’s liking these days, but the point of course is her appreciation for the bucolic life of the country vs. the more mechanical life of the city. The film is pleasant and unobjectionable.

Mr Thank You: A 1936 comedy. The title character is a bus driver (an unusually appealing Uehara Ken) who has earned his nickname Arigato-san – in fact, he’s never called by any other name – from his unfailing politeness to his passengers and those he passes on the road. He is taking a number of passengers from deep in Izu to the train station for Tokyo, and the cast of characters changes as the journey proceeds. The Depression Era film is essentially a road trip with the non-action throughout taking place largely on the bus. Passengers include a poverty-stricken mother who is selling her frightened daughter into prostitution, a sassy modern woman (Kuwano Michiko, very good) who’s clearly been around, and an impressively mustachioed salesman who has an eye for the daughter. The sassy woman seems at first a disreputable character; she flirts openly with the bus driver, and when the mother offers sweets to the other passengers, the woman moves quickly to displace her by passing out booze and cigarettes. But it is she who suggests to the bus driver that he can help save the daughter, seemingly hinting at marriage; she has evidently spotted him looking in his rearview mirror at the girl on several occasions, nearly causing him to run off the road at one point, and the daughter herself has asked the driver if it was okay for her to write him from Tokyo. The final shots show the bus on its return trip with the mother and daughter still there, implying that the daughter for whatever reason did not board the train to Tokyo. She expresses her desire to write the sassy woman to thank her, but Shimizu is as elusive as ever in mapping out the details. Still, it’s a happy ending in its manner.

Similar to the bar owner in the Japanese Netflix show Midnight Diner, the bus driver is clearly the main character despite relatively few lines. People ask him to convey messages to others along the route or bring the latest records from Tokyo, and some, including the sassy woman, wait specifically to ride his bus.

In one particularly memorable scene, he speaks during a bus break with a female road worker, identifiable as Korean from her hanbok (Korean kimono). She tells him in a sweet matter-of-fact tone that she’s being transferred up north and asks him to bring water and flowers at times to her father’s grave. She says quietly that she had always hoped when the construction was over that she could wear a Japanese kimono and ride his bus; now, without ever setting foot on the road she helped build, she is being sent to lay roads elsewhere. He offers to take her to the station, but she feels it best to walk together with the other workers. With no further dramatics, he simply bids her goodbye, boards the bus and drives off. The lack of sentimentality conversely makes the scene extraordinarily poignant, especially given the clear feelings they have for each other. This scene was supposedly interpolated into the film when the director came across the road work during the location filming, but it is so breathtakingly beautiful that I find it hard to believe it could have happened on the spur of the moment. An unforgettable encounter. (The English subtitles in two different versions fail to note that she specifically refers to her desire to wear a “Japanese kimono”, so I wonder if foreign audiences are even aware that she is Korean.)

Uehara was still very young and fresh here and has a great smile – I love the way he salutes everyone from the driver’s seat as he thanks them for letting him pass. It’s a far cry from the dour roles he plays in later films. The director has an interesting technique when showing the driver’s perspective: as the bus moves forward, we see people or vehicles in the middle of the road ahead, blocking the way, then we cut directly to a view of them walking behind the bus, as if the bus simply drove right through them. There were also lovely views of the landscape and villages as the bus makes it way toward the station. The film is shot almost in real time – roads were windy and much less developed then, so progress was slow and easy, just like the story. Despite the lack of a strong narrative, the film was consistently engaging. A minor but charming work.