Category Archives: Japan

Army on a Tree (木の上の軍隊)

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  • 木の上の軍隊 (Army on a Tree)

7/7/25 (Mon)

Two soldiers in wartime Okinawa remain hiding in a tree Onoda-like for two years after the war without knowing that the hostilities have ended – the setting would seem ridiculous if it weren’t based on a true story. Okinawa-born Taira Kazuhiro’s film is adapted from a highly regarded stage play that the prolific Inoue Hisashi had been preparing to write at his death (only the title, copious notes, and reportedly two lines of dialogue remained). Having learned about the story in a newspaper article, Inoue had been working on it since 1985 and had finally scheduled a production in 2010, but passed away just three months before the show was to debut. Veteran Kuriyama Tamiya was tapped to take over the script, and the production, staged by Inoue’s troupe Komatsu-za, was finally staged in 2013. It has taken yet another dozen years for that to reach the screen.

It helps to know that Okinawans experienced a significantly different war than the rest of Japan, a brutal campaign in which their unspeakably callous treatment by mainland Japanese made them wonder which side was the real enemy. The Ryukyu Islands, which include Okinawa, do not share the same history and culture as the rest of Japan, analogous to Hawaii vs. the continental US, and there is a strong sense that they were essentially fed to the wolves, as amply recorded in museums in the prefecture. The film was significantly expanded from the three-character stage show.

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Kokuho (国宝)

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  • 国宝 (Kokuho)

6/21/25 (Sat)

Lee Sang-il’s story of a Kabuki rivalry, based on a best-selling novel, examines a world where blood is thicker than talent, as two onnagata (female-role specialists) vie for National Treasure (kokuho) status: one has the bloodline but not the innate skill, the other is the opposite. Some critics have seen similarities with the Chinese opera world in Farewell, My Concubine, but that’s only in the use of onnagata, which is just skin deep. The film has proven an unlikely success despite its three-hour running time, drawing in nearly 4 million viewers and over ¥5 billion (figures updated as of mid July).（Update: As of November 25, those figures have grown to 12.3 million viewers and nearly ¥17.4bn in revenues, making it Japan’s highest-grossing live action film ever. That’s before its debut in the US and other major markets.) 

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A Geisha’s Tale (女は二度生まれる)

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  • 女は二度生まれる (A Geisha’s Tale)

6/13/25 (Fri)

A light-hearted dramedy of 1961 by Kawashima Yuzo. The English title is deceptive, as “geisha” here is clearly a euphemism for prostitute. (The film is also known as Women Are Born Twice, a direct translation of the Japanese title, which makes sense in the film’s final seconds. A better rendering might be “A Woman Reborn”.) The main character doesn’t play shamisen, dance or sing, so she’s not remotely a geisha. She is simply a kimono-clad hostess who entertains customers by chatting, pouring their drinks and feeding their egos, then sleeping with them afterwards. And apparently enjoying it. The Happy Hooker is probably closer to the point. Continue reading →

The Mad Fox (恋や恋やすな恋)

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  • 恋や恋やすな恋 (The Mad Fox)

6/6/25 (Fri), home, 7:15-9:00p

Uchida’s 1962 surrealistic film is based on the popular Bunraku and Kabuki classic commonly known as Kuzunoha. The entire movie is as shape shifting as the foxes within it, moving from semi-realistic to otherworldly to a Kabuki stage. Continue reading →

Bloody Spear at Mt. Fuji (血槍富士)

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  • 血槍富士 (Bloody Spear at Mt. Fuji)

6/3/25 (Tues)

Uchida Tomu’s 1955 film was his comeback after a 13-year absence from Japanese film. He had reportedly raised suspicions in the movie world for his long stay in China and reported enthusiasm for the Mao regime (despite his active support for the Japanese military during the war – his convictions don’t seem very deep). But he had some big hitters behind him, including explicit support in the opening credits from superstar directors Ozu Yasujiro, Shimizu Hiroshi, and Ito Daisuke (the poster also throws in Mizoguchi Kenji). He supposedly promised to behave in crafting this film, and the content is largely innocuous on the surface. It is based on a popular silent film, Dochu Hiki (now lost), by his mentor Inoue Kintaro. The two leads in that film were happily given roles in the remake: Tsukigata Ryunosuke in a great turn as the suspected thief and Watanabe Atsushi as an official in the comic tea party scene.

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Chikamatsu’s Love in Osaka (浪花の恋の物語)

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  • 浪花の恋の物語 (Chikamatsu’s Love in Osaka)

5/27/25 (Tues)

Uchida Tomu’s 1959 film, based loosely on playwright Chikamatsu Monzaemon’s 18th-century puppet classic Courier from Hell (冥途の飛脚 ). The English title is misleading: it is not a love affair involving Chikamatsu, but a play devised by Chikamatsu about a doomed love affair in Osaka. (The Japanese title is a more straightforward The Story of a Naniwa Love Affair, using the old name for the city.) As with the similarly title-challenged The Chikamatsu Story, the marketers seem to think that the Chikamatsu name is going to be an attraction for foreigners, who in fact are unlikely to have heard the name at all. The film needs better marketers.

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Fallen Blossoms (花ちりぬ)

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  • 花ちりぬ (Fallen Blossoms)

5/23/25 (Fri)

I learned of Ishida Tamizo’s little known 1938 film through a Japanese film blog and was intrigued enough to check it out. The only names I knew in the credits were future director Ichikawa Kon, who served here as one of the assistant directors, and co-writer Morimoto Kaoru, best known for the much-revived stage drama Life of a Woman. (Some sources claim that Morimoto adapted this film from a stage version, but I can’t confirm that anywhere.)

A unique feature of this film is that the entire cast is female, though male voices can be heard from time to time, and the action takes place wholly within the confines of a geisha house in Gion. The time is specified as a roughly 24-hour period from the evening of July 17, 1864, which we now know is just before an anti-government assault by rebel forces known to history as the Kinmon Gate Incident. The rebels suffered a disastrous defeat against the Shogun’s elite Shinsengumi forces with significant loss of life.

But the geisha don’t know that yet. Continue reading →

Frontline (フロントライン)

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  • フロントライン (Frontline)

6/14/25 (Sat)

This film grabbed my interest immediately when I learned it was about the ill-fated Diamond Princess cruise ship. This was the ship that docked in Yokohama Harbor in February 2020 when a Hong Kong man was found suffering from an unknown coronavirus, which soon spread rapidly through the ship and ignited worldwide panic. I was fixated with the incident at the time and remember having arguments with foreign friends who bashed Japan for keeping all passengers and crew quarantined on the ship rather than bring them into the country for treatment. While we felt sorry for the 3,700 victims, no one here was keen on allowing those infected with or exposed to an unknown communicative disease to come into the country and put 120 million at risk. As a result, the quarantine, for better or worse, made the ship a virtual Petri dish among people of varying age, racial and ethnic groups, giving us a good picture of how the virus behaved. In the end, no more than 14 people (if that many) died from the virus, 2% of confirmed cases, all of whom other than the initial Hong Kong victim were in their 70s and 80s. That suggested that the virus, which was already known as Covid, wasn’t nearly as deadly as feared. An objective accounting of that fact could have changed the entire trajectory of the global crisis. But the hysteria, amplified by the media, took its own course.

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Dry Lake / Youth in Fury (乾いた湖)

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  • 乾いた湖 (Dry Lake / Youth in Fury)

4/11/25 (Sat)

Criterion had a special feature on Shinoda Masahiro, presumably set up after the 94-year-old’s recent death. I’m not always a fan of the director – I’ve always considered his supposed masterpiece Double Suicide a self-consciously artsy piece of tripe – but he’s never less than boring. I wasn’t sure what film the title Youth in Fury referred to, but it turned out to be an alternative title to the more literal Dry Lake (Kawaita Mizuumi), though dried-up lake would be closer. (His later Kawaita Hana was similarly rendered as Pale Flower rather than the better “Withered Flower”.) The film was written by a young Terayama Shuji, later a notorious avant-garde playwright who worked with Shinoda on a number of his early works. He also has a cameo role in the film. This is Shinoda’s second feature film.

Japan was torn at the time between nihilism and revolution in the face of the US victory in both war and peace. Both trends would be wiped away in the high-growth years to follow, when the population became too busy for either emotion. The film features three key strands among youth at the time primarily via three characters, all fellow university students.

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A Samurai in Time (侍タイムスリッパ―)

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  • 侍タイムスリッパ― (A Samurai in Time)

3/29/25 (Sat)

A samurai from the Aizu clan, which supports the shogun, is facing off against a member of the rebelling Choshu clan in what we now know was the dying days of the shogunate in the mid-19th century. Just as they pull out their swords, the samurai is struck by lightning. When he wakes up, he finds himself in a jidaigeki film studio in modern Japan.

As soon as I heard this much, I tuned out. I’m not a big fan of time travel comedies, which tend to rely on slapstick and fish-out-of-water setups; they rarely reach the dizzying heights of Back to the Future. Moreover, this was a small film directed by a rice farmer in Kyoto, who also acted as scenario writer, cinematographer, lighting co-designer, and editor. But as with One Cut of the Dead, it started as a small independent piece in a single theater, quietly built an audience on word of mouth, and has become a sleeper hit, earning an impressive ¥10,000m thus far in domestic sales on a tiny ¥26m (not a typo) budget. More amazingly, it won the Japan Academy Award for Best Film, the first ever for an independent work. So curiosity got the better of me. The producers must not have expected much from this since it’s already streaming on Amazon even as it continues in theaters despite opening last October.

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