Mezamashii: Kinuyo Tanaka in Sandakan 8 (with Bonus Oscar Trivia!)

BeRightBack here, visiting from the Wordsmoker Collective to blither about Japanese cinema again! Today, I want to talk a bit about great Japanese actress (and first studio-backed Japanese female director!) Kinuyo Tanaka. Specifically, I want to look at her last major role, in 1974's Sandakan 8, which was in the running the following year (upon its international release) for the Oscar for Best Foreign Language Film.


Sandakan 8 is an issue-driven movie dramatizing the then-little-known phenomenon of the "karayuki-san," a practice by which young girls from the countryside were sold into prostitution in foreign lands by desperately poor Japanese families. The government tacitly condoned the practice, as it was a way for Japanese "business interests" to gain a foothold in places marked for future colonization or annexation. Tanaka plays a former karayuki-san who is being courted by a young female "women's studies scholar" who is interested in her story.


Sandakan 8's strengths do not lie in its filmic qualities. The double-flashback narrative frame distances the audience in an unhelpful way, making the dramatization of the karayuki-san's exploitation seem luridly predictable rather than viscerally shocking or moving, and the script's reliance on melodramatic cliché in its narrative arc does little to detract from the grinding, Stations-of-the-Cross-esque pacing.

What makes Sandakan 8 a joy to watch even today, though, are the performances by its female leads: Komaki Kurihara's grace in the thankless role as the young, idealistic scholar; Yoko Takashi's refusal to indulge in the bathos the script urges on her as she plays the karayuki-san as a young girl; and, above all, Kinuyo Tanaka's disarming, funny, and emotionally fluid turn as the former karayuki-san confronting the loneliness and wisdom her past traumas have bequeathed her.


Tanaka makes the unusual and extremely effective decision to play her character as a woman who has been through so much that she has lost any desire to hide her feelings. As the film relentlessly shows us, she is a woman who has lost everything. Tanaka's choice conveys that this has resulted not in bitterness, but in an almost alarming openness to whatever meager joys come her way. It makes her character both childlike and wise, tragic yet joyful as she clings to the companionship the woman scholar provides. Every emotion the character experiences plays across Tanaka's face like dye dropped into clear water.

While the film is not currently available on DVD (the graininess of these screengrabs is due to the fact that the only copy I could find was transferred from a VHS tape), I did find a Youtube clip of the final scene between Tanaka and Kurihara that demonstrates better than any screengrab the quicksilver emotional beats Tanaka hits every second she's onscreen.



Tanaka won Best Actress at the Berlin International Film Festival that year, and, as I mentioned before, the film was also nominated for the Foreign Language Film Oscar. In a rather odd twist, the film it lost out to that year was Dersu Uzala, the submission from the Soviet Union – a film directed by Akira Kurosawa!

Does anyone recall if this has happened before or since - a film nominated by one country being beaten by a film submitted by another country that was directed by a national of the former, not the latter, country? Can this question get more convoluted?

Mezamashii: Travelling Through Space and Time with Yaji and Kita: The Midnight Pilgrims

Hey cinemaniacs, it's BeRightBack again, visiting from the Wordsmoker collective to bring you another "eye-opening" ["mezamashii"] moment from Japanese cinema. This week, I'm talking about the ridiculous, hilarious, picaresque and deceptively sophisticated Yaji and Kita: The Midnight Pilgrims, by Kankuro Kudo (Netflix it!).


Yaji and Kita are a twosome. They are also lovers, but their inseparability seems more essential to what they are than their sex lives. They are not two individuals who found one another. They exist together or not at all.


Yaji and Kita are a twosome who travel. They were first invented as the bumbling heroes of a late 1700s travelogue meant to advertise inns and other businesses lining a road called the Tôkaidô, which connected the new capital Tokyo (then known as Edo) in the east and the old capital Kyoto in the west. Their adventures in these product-placed locales became so popular that they outlived the businesses they were meant to publicize, stars of one of the earliest and most popular buddy comedies in the world.

Yaji and Kita travel through space but also through time. They popped up again in the 1990s as the heroes of a comic strip (or manga) by Kotobuki Shiriagari that turned them into lovers, existential heroes and drug addicts; unhitched from the real Tôkaidô, they visit inns named after "Laughter" and "Singing" and even into the underworld. They travelled now through the realms of hallucination and dream; they'd become "midnight pilgrims."

Yaji and Kita travelled next out of the world of print and into cinema. While there were silent films made in the 1930s dramatizing episodes from the Edo Period text, it is the 2005 film adapation of Shiriagari's manga lets them do what they do best: remain in motion, hallucinating and cracking jokes and getting into trouble as they wander hand-in-hand from frame to frame, scene to scene, jokey non-sequitur to jokey non-sequitur.


Film allows Yaji and Kita move across genre, space and time all at once: one minute they're in Edo, the next they're in a rap video, then a stand-up routine, a Cheech and Chong-like stoner comedy, a slapstick sitcom. At one point, they tumble like clumsy puppies through Mount Fuji itself, leaving it to some secondary characters to repair this potent national symbol with masking tape.


And yet, even as everything around them seems so fluid and negotiable, their love persists. Near the movie's start, Yaji goes out of his way to assert that they are not merely "chums," but in fact "gay," getting carried away in his exuberance to the point that he picks up a passerby and twirls her around as he exults in publicizing his love.


Of course, this declaration is itself a type of traversal: after all, the very concept of "gay" did not exist in the Edo Period, when members of the samurai class regularly took part in same-sex affairs while heading perfectly conventional households. Part of the joy of Yaji and Kita: The Midnight Pilgrims is its use of the freewheeling nature of Edo sexuality to break apart the stolid pieties of present day identity politics, allowing desire to move and breath again, to make and remake the world like a kaleidoscope built for two.


And so they remain to the end an eternal, even mythic duo whose essence is constant, ecstatic motion. Straddling a motorcycle borrowed from an American (a.k.a. "Western") movie about the end of a certain dream of freedom, they ride off at the end of their own movie as the embodiment of a new one, one that queers the world in all senses of the term, made of laughter and hallucination and a hand to hold as you move always toward a new horizon, together.

Mezamashii: Getting Wet with Asuka Kurosawa in A Snake of June

BeRightBack here, visiting from the Wordsmoker collective at Nathaniel's kind invitation to gab about one of my most fervently-held obsessions: Japanese cinema. "Mezamashii" (目覚ましい) is a Japanese word for "eye-opening," and I'm going to be using this feature to look at some revelatory and memorable moments that have opened my eyes to the distinct pleasures to be found in Japanese films.


I was reminded of today’s pleasure when Robert mentioned that the third film in director Shinya Tsukamoto's Tetsuo series will be showing at this year’s Venice Film Festival.

Tsukamoto’s Tetsuo movies are gritty and abrasive stories of men who begin sprouting metal from their bodies as if undergoing a form of post-apocalyptic puberty. But there's another side to the director, one that gets a bit obscured by Tetsuo's bristling, metal-engorged shadow. In his more beguiling, less confrontationally "avant-garde" films like Gemini and A Snake of June, Tsukamoto explores not the literal infiltration of the mechanical into the human, but rather the melding of gaze and camera. Filling the screen with ravishing images, he tells stories of hidden observers who try to possess this beauty through voyeurism and photography; in A Snake of June, not only is this character a cameramen, he’s played by Tsukamoto himself.


What makes A Snake of June memorable, though, is less Tsukamoto's shadowy turn as a voyeuristic photographer than the stunning central performance by Asuka Kurosawa (no relation to Akira or Kiyoshi) as the object of his obsession, a call-in crisis center therapist named Rinko.

Kurosawa grounds Snake’s intellectualized schematics by building a layered, believable portrait of Rinko as she transforms from a meek and self-sacrificing wife into a strong, beautiful, even fearsome woman who reclaims her sexuality as she stands up not only to the men in her life, but to the apparatuses they wield in their efforts to possess her, including cameras, vibrators, and phones.


The most eye-popping instance of this reclamation occurs about three-quarters into the film, when Kurosawa blazes with strength and sensuality in a scene that winkingly alludes to the robotic-yet-sensual False Maria's dance in Fritz Lang's Metropolis.

Stripping off her dress in the rain, Rinko takes back the machines that have victimized her, including a remote-control vibrator (initially controlled by Tsukamoto’s character, but now controlled by her), but also the gaze of the camera itself, not only the one held (and then, in the face of her ecstatic performance, dropped) by Tsukamoto's character within the movie, but the one he wields as the invisible but omnipotent director within whose movie Kurosawa is appearing.


A student of mine once wrote in a paper that in A Snake of June, "to be seen is to get wet." June is the rainy season in Japan, and Tsukamoto sets his film within its waterlogged heart; even when dry, everything his camera touches glistens a viscous midnight blue.


But Kurosawa's burning gaze cuts through this slippery sheen and pins the audience to their seats with its unflinching power. Rinko's rain dance refutes the filmic tradition that codes female desire as an averted gaze, an unwilling whimper of pleasure escaping the lips. Instead, she incorporates the machines of alienation, objectification, and male-centered desire and reverses their trajectory, using them to set the rain on fire.

(A Snake of June is currently available on Netflix)