Bakumatsu Taiyoden – 1957, Yuzo Kawashima

by Allan Fish

(Japan 1957 110m) DVD2

Aka. The Sun Legend of the End of the Tokugawa Era

I’d kill all the crows in the world

p  Takeshi Yamamoto  d  Yuzo Kawashima  w  Keiichi Tanaka, Shohei Imamura, Yuzo Kawashima  ph  Kurataro Takamura  m  Toshiro Mayuzumi  art  Shohei Imamura

Frankie Sakai (Inokori Sahaiji), Sachiko Hidari (Osome), Yoko Minamida (Koharu), Yujiro Ishihara (Shinsaku Takasugi), Izumi Ashikawa (Ohisa), Toshiyuki Ichimura (Mokubei), Nobuo Kaneko (Denbei), Hisano Yamaoka (Otatsu), Yasukiyo Omeno (Tokusaburo), Masao Oda (Zenpachi), Masumi Okada (Kisuke),

There were times when I felt that I was never going to see Yuzo Kawashima’s comic masterpiece.  There’s a bitter irony to the fact that Kawashima is neglected in the west while his protégée Shohei Imamura is rated by many as the greatest Japanese master of the post-war era.  Imamura made excellent films, but Kawashima, Oshima, Yoshida and Masumura were his peers and there are cases for Shindo, Yoshimura, Teshigahara, Wakumatsu and Ichikawa, too.  Kawashima was the biggest loss, however, as he died prematurely.  The year he died Imamura made his greatest film, The Insect Woman, starring Sachiko Hidari, who’d been so splendid in this, Kawashima’s most saluted film.

Bakumatsu is set in 1862, a few years before the curtain finally came down on the Shogunate.  It’s set in and around the famous Sagami Inn at the Shinagawa rest stop, frequented by wandering samurai, with its 100 brothels and 1,000 hostesses.  The scene setting is punctuated by a narration over the location in present day Tokyo, in 1957, the year before prostitution would become an offence and pleasure districts would become a thing of the past.  The plot is deliberately scattered, but if there is a central figure it’s Sahaiji, the grafter who spends two nights at the inn, knowing he cannot pay, and has to stay behind to work off his debts.  While there he aggravates and enchants in equal measure, not least the capricious young prostitutes Osome and Koharu.  In amongst this, samurai are planning a revolutionary explosive attack on the Foreigners’ Quarter, which Sahaiji also gets wind of, and a young girl on the verge of being forced into prostitution to pay her father’s debts, gets the notion of marrying the innkeeper’s son.

There are times when it feels like a cheap brothel take on Grand Hotel, and one almost expects some aged retainer to mutter, as more customers depart, “always the same, people come, people go, nothing ever happens.”  And if it’s set in 1862, the opening comparison to 1957 shows that’s it’s in every respect a comment on contemporary Japan.  Deep at its heart it’s a serious film about the eroding of Japan’s identity and emergence into the modern world, but punctuated with moments of high comedy.  So we have a farce in which Osome coerces a customer, the Clearsail requiring Kinzo, to join her in a double suicide, only to back out herself not realising Kinzo survives.  Kinzo then plans revenge and returns, Banquo-like, as if a ghost, only for him to take the ruse too far.  There’s also a scene where a servant is threatened with being taken to the Kagema Teahouse for failing to get Sahaiji to pay his bill, and he complains of not being able to do what the girls her do, leaving us in no doubt as to the clientele at Kagema.  Behind all this, however, is a sense of mortality, as Sahaiji’s cough betrays his tuberculosis and the final shot in the cemetery could be read as prophetic of his immediate future.

For a comedy pushing two hours, it’s surprising how swift the whole thing is.  Kawashima directs with an exceptional light touch, backed up by expert playing from his cast.  Comedian Frankie Sakai is expert as Sahaiji, a Japanese Pseudolus one step ahead of everyone.  He’s matched by the two principal ladies of leisure, with Yoko Minamida playing as if born to it and the ever-enchanting Sachiko Hidari as good as ever as the scheming Osome (“you’re the only man I can depend on” she tells one before rushing out to tell another the same thing).  Forget the realities of the inn staying in business when no-one seems to pay, just enjoy it while you can.  For decades we never had chance.