Hari-Kiri: Death of a Samurai

In March 2010 I wrote a review of Masaki Kobayashi’s Harikiri, a 1962 film that was as much of a assault on bushido (warrior) values as the knife upon the stomach in ritual suicides.

Following up on his 2010 remake of 13 Assassins, a film I reviewed last year that was more partial to bushido values, Takashi Miike presents a new version of Harikiri now showing at the IFC Center in NYC titled Hari-Kiri: Death of a Samurai. Other than its use of 3D, the film does not stray too far from the original, as was also the case with Miike’s reworking of 13 Assassins. Considering this 62 year old prolific director’s (88 films to his credit) unquenchable appetite for the bizarre (see my reviews of the whacked-out Great Yokai War, Zebraman, Happiness of the Katakuris and Dead or Alive), he plays his versions of Harikiri and 13 Assassins fairly straight. I can only surmise that this is out of respect for two of the greatest films to come out of Japan in the 1960s, both on a par with anything by Kurosawa.

If you read my review of the 1962 Harakiri, that should suffice as an introduction to Miike’s remake, especially these paragraphs:

It stars Tatsuya Nakadai as the middle-aged ronin Hanshiro Tsugumo who has arrived at the Iyi palace in order to make a request that was frequently being heard in such quarters in the capital of Edo in 1630.

Without a job and any prospects in a period of general peace, the warrior decides to do the only thing that makes sense—to disembowel himself in the house of a powerful Lord with all the dignity that entails.

The lord of the house Kageyu Saito (Rentaro Mikuni) feels duty-bound to explain to Tatsuya that when another ronin named Motome Chijiiwa showed up a couple of months earlier with a similar request, they decided to force him to go through with harakiri even though it was likely that he was only seeking a handout to last him for a few days. Given the collapse of so many samurai clans in the recent past, there had to be some way to set an example for other such beggars. Tatsuya reassures the lord of the manor that he fully intends to kill himself.

Unlike Masaki Kobayashi, the director of the original film who had deep pacifist and anti-authoritarian convictions spurred by his experience as a soldier during WWII, Miike does not have a reputation for being political. Despite this, he clearly had an affinity for the story of dispossessed warriors based on his heartfelt direction. Given Japan’s protracted decline over the past quarter-century, it would be hard for any sensitive filmmaker not to be drawn to material that dramatized the conflict between the haves and the have-nots.

As a long-time enthusiast of samurai movies, dating back to my encounter with Kurosawa’s Yojimbo in 1961, I watched Miike’s latest with a somewhat different perspective. After Fukushima, it is difficult not to think about the problems of Japanese authoritarianism whether it is manifested in 17^th century feudalism or 21^st century capitalism. Of course, the underlying explanation for the continued existence of authoritarianism is Japan’s failure to have undergone a thorough-going bourgeois-democratic revolution.

So deeply engrained in Japanese culture is bushido that the men who volunteered to go into the nuclear reactors initially were referred to as Atomic Samurai:

THEY are being hailed as the modern-day samurai — the 180 brave men who stayed behind to fight the crisis at Fukushima nuclear power plant knowing it was very likely they had volunteered for a suicide mission.

It is virtually impossible to talk to the workers by phone. But the message came out from one that he was “not afraid to die” — that was his job.

The families of these brave men may never see them again, but they are proud of their sacrifice.

A 27-year-old woman, whose Twitter name is @NamicoAoto, tweeted that her father had volunteered for Fukushima duty.

“I heard that he volunteered even though he will be retiring in just half a year and my eyes are filling up with tears,” she said.

“At home, he doesn’t seem like someone who could handle big jobs. But today, I was really proud of him. I pray for his safe return.”

Another loved one says in an email: “My father is still working at the plant. He says he’s accepted his fate, much like a death sentence.”

Prime Minister Naota Kan told the volunteers: “You are the only ones who can resolve a crisis. Retreat is unthinkable.”

And just as those higher up in the feudal chain exploited those lower down in 17^th century Japan, so do the corporate elite and their political servants take advantage of these workers and the Japanese people in general.

When the Japanese economy was expanding rapidly back in the 60s and 70s, so much so that pundits began writing about the country overtaking the U.S., the social basis for blind loyalty was more solid. However, the steady decline of Japan makes the samurai ethos applied to the corporate world more difficult to sustain. The salaryman, the modern version of the warrior ready to commit harikiri on behalf of the boss, is not so eager to make an equivalent sacrifice as the October 5, 2002 Sydney Morning Herald reported:

In the late 1980s, when Japan’s economic miracle was in full bloom, an ad appeared on television exalting the corporate warrior hero, the salaryman. “Businessman! Businessman!” went the chirpy jingle. “Can you work 24 hours a day?”

It was selling one of the quick pick-me-up tonics in little brown bottles that helped push the salaryman to work harder and longer. The yellow and black label of this brand, the ad said, was a “token of courage”.

At the time, it must have made perfect sense as Japan Inc seemed to be on the verge of taking over the world, and the Japanese way of doing business was the way of true enlightenment. Then, of course, the bubble burst, so spectacularly that Japan has endured a slump for most of the past 12 years.

What has happened to the salaryman? He still drinks his tonic, and puts in the punishing hours. But warrior hero? Try tragic figure – a crumpled soul in a crumpled suit.

He still leaves for work at 7am, makes a long commute sardined into trains, and may not get home until 10pm. But there is little of the bushido, the spirit of the samurai, about the salaryman today. Like a reflection of his country, he is just hanging on grimly, hoping for better times but not sure how or when they will come.

 

The New York Times’s neoliberal crap on Greece and Italy

Last Sunday I attended a workshop titled Understanding the Essential Economic Role of the N.Y. Times at the Left Forum that included Robert Chernomas and Ian Hudson, the co-authors of The Gatekeeper: 60 Years of Economics According to the New York Times, a chapter of which appears on New York Times Examiner: An antidote to the “paper of record”. Chris Spannos, who founded NY Times Examiner, was the third speaker. Chernomas’s talk consisted of a reading of the same chapter that includes this observation:

The ability of the media to shape stories and issues has long been recognized. The press became known as the Fourth Estate precisely to acknowledge that while the first three estates (nobility; clergy; and commoners, which in those days meant the middle class with property) had a formal voice in democracy, the press was the institution most able to advocate for and frame political issues. Over time, those discontented with what they saw to be the cozy role of the mainstream press in supporting the status quo coined the term the Fifth Estate to describe forms of media that challenged the powers that be. In this context we will demonstrate how the Times can be seen as the preeminent example of the Fourth Estate, using its prestige and formidable skills to advocate for the U.S. capitalist class as a whole by helping to frame political issues.

Almost as if on cue, the N.Y. Times offered up two articles on the following morning that confirmed its role in “using its prestige and formidable skills to advocate for the U.S. capitalist class as a whole by helping to frame political issues.”

On the front page, you could have read an article by Suzanne Daley that was titled A Tale of Greek Enterprise and Olive Oil, Smothered in Red Tape. Judging solely by the title, you can figure out that this is the expected neoliberal diatribe against regulation. Daley’s lead paragraphs:

It was about a year ago that Fotis I. Antonopoulos, a successful Web program designer here, decided he wanted to open an e-business selling olive products.

Luckily, he already had a day job.

It took him 10 months — crisscrossing the city to collect dozens of forms and stamps of approval, including proof that he was up to date on his pension contributions — before he could get started. But even that was not enough. In perhaps the strangest twist of all, his board members were required by the Health Department to submit lung X-rays — and stool samples — since this was a food company.

“I laugh about it now,” he said. “But it wouldn’t be so funny if I didn’t have a very good job with very good pay. It would have been an absolute nightmare.”

With Greece’s economy entering its fourth year of recession, its entrepreneurs are eager to reverse a frightening tide. Last year, at least 68,000 small and medium-size businesses closed in Greece; nearly 135,000 jobs associated with them vanished. Predictions for 2012 are also bleak.

But despite the government’s repeated promises to improve things, the climate for doing business here remains abysmal. In a recent report titled “Greece 10 Years Ahead,” McKinsey & Company described Greece’s economy as “chronically suffering from unfavorable conditions for business.” Start-ups faced immense amounts of red tape, complex administrative and tax systems and procedural disincentives, it said.

Even if it occurred to Daley that small and medium businesses were closing because unemployed workers lacked the money to buy their products, her editors would have surely deleted any reference to that in her article. My guess, however, is that she believes her own bullshit.

Filing numerous reports from Greece since the financial roof caved in, Daley finds fault with just about everybody and everything except private property and the profit drive. On October 10, 2010, the problem once again was red tape:

Antonios Avgerinos, 59, a retired army pharmacist, always wanted his own pharmacy here. And why not? Greek law ensures that pharmacists get a 35 percent profit on all drugs sold, even over-the-counter medications.

But Greek law also limits just about everything else about pharmacies. They must be at least 820 feet apart and have a likely market of no fewer than 1,500 residents. To break into the business, an aspiring pharmacist generally has to buy a license from a retiring one. That often costs upward of $400,000.

”It is an absurd system,” Mr. Avgerinos said recently. ”But it has been that way my whole life.”

Maybe not for much longer.

As the government of Prime Minster George Papandreou struggles to get the nation’s financial house in order — reducing the size of its bloated civil service, chasing after tax evaders and overhauling its pension system — it has also begun to tackle a much less talked about problem: the cozy system of ”closed professions” that has existed here for decades, costing the economy billions of dollars a year.

In reality the Greek economy has cratered not because of such regulations but because the Greek bourgeoisie and its friends at Goldman-Sachs decided to keep the interest rate of Greek bonds artificially high as Mark Weisbrot points out:

In fact, this whole crisis and recession could have been prevented very easily if the European authorities had simply intervened to maintain low interest rates on the Greek debt a year and a half ago. It is possible that some restructuring might still have been necessary, but the cost would still have been very small relative to the available resources of the European authorities. Because they refused to do this, and instead shrank the Greek economy, increased its debt burden, and allowed its borrowing costs to skyrocket – the crisis spread to the weaker countries of the eurozone, including Italy.

Speaking of Italy, the very same day that Daley’s article appeared you could have read another pile of crap blaming the labor unions on Italy’s woes. In an article titled Stuck in Recession, Italy Takes on Labor Laws That Divide the Generations, Rachel Donadio uses the same exact kinds of generation gap arguments that Peter Peterson has been making for decades, focusing mostly on Social Security. Peterson, who is the obvious inspiration for Obama’s entitlement “reform” task force, makes scapegoats of the elderly (my peeps). If only they would be less piggish, the young will prosper—just as Donadio argues:

Assunta Linza, a bright-eyed 33-year-old with a college degree in psychology, has been unemployed since June, after losing a temporary job as a call-center operator. Her father, who is 60 and has a fifth-grade education, took early retirement with full benefits at age 42 from a job as a workman at the Italian state railway company.

“Everyone said that kids should study to get ahead, but I graduated with highest honors, and the only thing my degree is good for is to hang on the wall,” Ms. Linza said dryly.

The Linza family is emblematic of a yawning generational divide that experts say is crippling the Italian labor market. While older workers came of age with guaranteed jobs and ironclad contracts granting generous pensions and full benefits, younger Italians — the best-educated in the country’s history — are now paying the price. They are lucky to find temporary work, which offers few benefits or stability.

It is precisely that two-tier labor market that Prime Minister Mario Monti is proposing to correct with changes to Italian law that are the subject of intense, politically delicate negotiations. The government is proposing measures to make it easier for companies to hire and fire, and to create shorter-term contracts with greater pension and unemployment benefits, a middle ground in a divided market.

As I continued digging into Rachel Donadio’s track record, I discovered another N.Y. Times article along these lines that I posted on June 23, 2011. Apparently she has also been proffering advice to the Greek bourgeoisie just as her colleague does. In forwarding the article, I made the Peter Peterson connection:

(The NY Times is shameless. They cite an expert in this article from the Peterson Institute for International Economics about the need for drastic cuts in Greece. So which Peterson do you think this institute is named after? You guessed it. Peter G. Peterson.)

NY Times June 22, 2011

Some Greeks Fear Government Is Selling Nation

By RACHEL DONADIO and STEVEN ERLANGER

ATHENS — They are the crown jewels of Greece’s socialist state, and they are now likely to go to the highest bidder: the ports of Piraeus and Thessaloniki; prime Mediterranean real estate; the national lottery; Greek Telecom; the postal bank and the national railway system.

And then comes the mandated deeper round of austerity measures, which will slash the wages of police officers, firefighters and other state workers who are protesting in Athens, and raise the taxes of citizens already inflamed by a recession-plagued economy and soaring joblessness.

Some independent economists accept that Greece has no choice but to try a fresh round of cuts. Edwin M. Truman of the Peterson Institute for International Economics in Washington said Greece had to go through more pain because it had run a budget deficit even before making payments on its debt, meaning it needed loans to pay off its loans.

Only after Greece reorganizes its budget, tax collection and labor market and is running a surplus — not including interest payments on the debt — can economists begin to calculate how much in debt payments Greece is actually able to afford, and then figure out how big a debt restructuring it needs.

“As long as they’re running a primary deficit, they need to keep tightening the belt,” Mr. Truman said. “Rescheduling now doesn’t relieve Greece of the burden of fixing the economy to create a surplus.”

One of the main points made in The Gatekeeper: 60 Years of Economics According to the New York Times is the Grey Lady is forced to play both sides of the fence, appearing liberal and conservative at the same time:

This book will argue that the usual liberal-conservative dichotomy that has been used as the previous spectrum of media bias, while accurate, overlooks a more profound bias. Casting the debate in such a narrow fashion is, in fact, very misleading because the liberal/conservative or Democrat/Republican spectrum is remarkably limited. An economic debate that limits itself to options pursued by these two camps would be similarly limited. It is also misleading because it omits the real bias of the Times, which is that it supports the long-term interests of U.S. business involving both liberal and conservative policies.

So this boils down to writing fairly accurate articles about European suffering while at the same time cheering on the economic policies that are fueling that suffering. In order to maintain some kind of credibility, the paper has to assign reporters to cover financial collapse and the culpability of the powerful men and women responsible. That is why Goldman-Sachs director Greg Smith published his open letter of resignation on the N.Y. Times op-ed rather than the N.Y. Post.

The underlying cause of economic suffering will go unreported, however. You will find book after book reviewed in the Sunday edition that go into the most minute details about subprime mortgages, but nothing that deals with the declining rate of profit or any other structural defect—the kind of study that is published by Verso or Monthly Review. In fact a search of Lexis-Nexis turned up not a single book from these august publishers being reviewed  in the N.Y. Times.

That is what I would call a conspiracy of silence.

Three samurai movies

Now running concurrently with the NY Asian Film Festival is the Japan Society film series titled Japan Cuts that includes ten films that are co-presented with the NYAFF. This is a review of three samurai movies, two of which were part of the Japan Cuts festival and that I saw on Tuesday night: Hideyuki Hirayama’s “Sword of Desperation” and Shigemichi Sugita’s “The Last Ronin” (a ronin is a samurai without a master—just like Toshiro Mifune in “Yojimbo”.) The third is a NYAFF “director’s cut” version of “13 Assassins” by Takashi Miike that was shown on July 2^nd, and also playing in a shortened form at the Cinema Village in New York that I saw last night.

A colleague at work, who is an expert on Japanese film, informed me that the director’s cut of “13 Assassins” includes scenes that are classic Miike. As someone who appreciates this director’s darkly florid imagination, particularly in his treatment of cruelty and violence (essential elements of samurai movies), I hope to see the director’s cut some day but have no problem recommending the shortened version that has a 96 percent fresh rating on Rotten Tomatoes. This review will make it even fresher.

I imagine that just about everybody has seen at least one samurai movie in their life. Ever since I saw Akira Kurosawa’s “Yojimbo” in 1961, I have made a point of taking in every work in this genre I can, treasuring above all the Samurai Trilogy directed by Yoji Yamada, an 80 year old who was once a member of the Japanese Communist Party and on record as saying that he tried to make some reference in his films “to man’s disaffection with society.”

These films are imbued with the bushido (way of the warrior) ethic that stresses blind loyalty to the master, bravery, chivalry, and willingness if not enthusiasm to face death in pursuit of such values up to and including seppuku or ritual suicide. Obviously, if I had to live in a society that was organized around such values, I’d try to find the first boat leaving for a country that eschewed them. But in the highly romanticized version found on the big screen, it’s another story altogether. Or perhaps not, as my comments on the two Japan Cuts films will indicate.

“Sword of Desperation” begins with a Kabuki play being performed in the palace of Lord Tabu Ukyou (Jun Murakami). As the performance ends, the audience remains silent. It is only when Renko (Megumi Seki), Ukyou’s concubine, begins clapping that everybody else joins in. This is an early hint at her power.

As the audience streams out of the recital hall, a samurai named Kanemi Sanzawmon (Etsushi Toyokawa) accosts Renko. Without saying a word, he pulls a dagger from beneath his robes and plunges it into her heart. As she is taking her last breath, he bends over her and says, “Forgive me, madam”.

Kanemi is arrested immediately and the Lord’s vassals are seen discussing what punishment awaits him. Will he be beheaded or forced to commit seppuku? All of them, including Kanemi, are astonished to learn that he will be treated leniently. After spending a year in confinement (house arrest, basically) and having his rice allotment halved, he will be freed. Even more surprisingly, he learns that not long after his release, he will be promoted to become the Lord’s top bodyguard. As we will learn eventually, this promotion was a scheme devised to ultimately punish Kanemi. Since this film might eventually make into general release, I will not divulge how this plays out.

Through a series of flashbacks, we learn why Kanemi killed Renko. She is a villainous creature in the mold of Lady Macbeth who holds a tight grip on her master, persuading him to divert funds on wasteful projects at the expense of his peasant subjects who face starvation as a result of higher taxes. When they protest at his front gates, she convinces him to make an example of the leaders who are beheaded.

The dilemma for those of us trying to get into the spirit of a traditional morality tale is that perhaps one of her greatest sins is being a too powerful woman. Those who would have her put down seem as offended by her intrusions into court deliberations as much as her role in having peasant leaders beheaded. The sexism is almost palpable.

Ironically, “Sword of Desperation” is based on a novel by Shohei Fujisawa, whose “Love and Honor” was turned into the screenplay for the final installment of Yoji Yamada’s altogether progressive-minded Samurai Trilogy. One must conclude that “Sword of Desperation” was simply establishing the context for a samurai’s desperate act without endorsing any of the oppressive social conventions that made Renko a target of the nobility’s resentment. At least we hope so. The fact that we can identify with Kanemi and cheer for him is a reminder that art operates on its own level, independent of the values that any open-minded society holds dear. This, of course, is the paradox of all samurai films.

“The Last Ronin” is a kind of back-story to “47 Ronin”, a historical incident that has been adapted many times in literature, theater and film, including the 1962 classic “Chushingura” directed by Hiroshi Inagaki. This is a story about 47 ronin who took vengeance on the cruel Lord Kira who had forced their master to commit seppuku. After they succeed in killing Kira, they take their own lives. This movie embodies the bushido spirit as well as any I can think of. (In an introduction to “The Last Ronin”, the Japan Society’s film program director mentioned that a Hollywood version of “47 Ronin” will come out next year, in 3D and starring Keanu Reeves no less. You heard it from me first: this will not be competition to “The Magnificent Seven”.)

In “The Last Ronin”, we discover that one of the forty-seven did not die. Kichie (Koichi Sato) was ordered by their leader to travel the countryside and provide assistance to the surviving family members. In the course of his travels, he spots Magoza (Koji Yakusho) in a small village who manages to elude him. Kichie wants to ask him why he ran away from his co-conspirators just one night before the attack on Kira’s palace. The assumption is that he violated bushido.

We learn eventually that Magoza has abandoned the life of a samurai and makes his living as a trader, looking for antiquities that he can sell to the wealthy. He lives in a modest house in the forest with a sixteen year old girl that he has raised from infancy. Again, since this film might eventually make its way into general release, I will not divulge the relationship between Magoza, the young girl he has raised, and the mystery of why he went awol.

As was the case with “Sword of Desperation”, there is a sense of futility in Magoza’s ultimate redemption. There is little doubt that the director Shigemichi Sugita was questioning a core element of Japanese culture.

“Thirteen Assassins” is a remake of the 1963 film directed by Eiichi Kudo. The plot is very similar to “Chushingura”, with thirteen men this time organizing a plot against the evil Lord Naritsugu (Gorô Inagaki) who is the Shogun’s half-brother and totally out of control, to put it mildly. Sir Doi (Mikijiro Hira) summons the samurai Shimada to his manor to propose an assassination plot. To help motivate him, Doi introduces him to one of Naritsugu’s victims, the daughter of a peasant leader who had her arms and legs hacked off and her tongue cut out. When Shimada asks what happened to the peasants her father had been leading, she takes a brush in her teeth and writes out the words: “Massacre them all”. This is what Naritsugu cried out just before their deaths. And it is these words that Shimada will act on when his plucky band of assassins takes on a troop of 200 warriors under Naritsugu’s command.

Shimada is played by Koji Yakusho, who played Magoza in “The Last Ronin”. He is an exceptionally talented actor who I would compare to Toshiro Mifune in his prime. That should be ample reason to see this film, without mentioning the climactic battle scene that is Miike at his best. I will only add that a number of Takashi Miike films are available from Netflix, including “13 Assassins”.

Is there any connection between bushido and the predicament Japan is in today, with blind loyalty to corporate heads leading to the disaster at Fukishima? I suppose no more so than there was a connection between frontier lawlessness in Dodge City and the war in Vietnam.

Furthermore, one historian has questioned whether bushido had any real role in the development of the Imperial Army as the killing machine that was made infamous through the rape of Nanking and the ensuing horrors of the Pacific War (not that America was any more civilized in light of Hiroshima and Nagasaki).

In an article provocatively titled “Bushidō or Bull? A Medieval Historian’s Perspective on the Imperial Army and the Japanese Warrior Tradition” that appeared in the May 1994 “The History Teacher”, Karl Friday makes an essential point that the term bushido was not used to designate a code of honor until the late 19^th century. There was a code of conduct for samurai but it came into existence in the 17^th and 18^th centuries when Japan was at peace.

The samurai of the post-medieval era were bureaucrats and administrators, not fighting men. Indeed, there is a reference to this in “13 Assassins” when the leader Shimada says that it might be difficult to organize a conspiracy since so few samurai use a sword nowadays. Further evidence of this exists in Yamada’s trilogy where one of his samurai heroes is a clerk not much different from Bob Cratchit in “A Christmas Tale”.

With respect to a desire to embrace death, Friday states that even when the samurai was a practicing warrior, he preferred to use guile than exercise the kind of zealous self-sacrifice seen in a typical Japanese movie, no matter how thrilling the sword play of 13 men against 200 is to watch. One wonders if the medieval era samurai had more in common with the wild west’s gunmen who more often than not were trying to figure out a way to shoot an enemy in the back than meet him at high noon in the village square.

Friday also questions the blind obedience that is so pervasive in these films. He asserts that Confucianism has more to do with this than bushido, a point that makes sense considering how the same kind of authoritarian behavior can be found in Chinese society as well.

He also has some interesting things to say about the actual historical incident that gave rise to the 47 ronin literature and films. Yamamoto Tsunetomo, a samurai who lived during the time of the incident and who wrote a book on samurai ethics, was leery of the decision made by the conspirators to wait two years before carrying out their vendetta. He said that a real samurai would not have wasted time and should have carried out their attack immediately.

Whatever relevance bushido has to a modern Japanese society that seems stuck in a rut, there is little doubt that there is an authoritarian mentality that sustains an increasingly unsustainable status quo. The persistence of a blindly obedient warrior mentality, however, is not unique to Japanese society as a cursory look at the United States will reveal. The failure of the military to get to the root of war crimes that was widespread in Vietnam and in the “war on terror”, the “corporate mentality” that made the subprime meltdown possible, and more generally the inability of those in power to make capitalism work on even their own terms suggests that a new code of honor is necessary throughout the world. That code of honor has to be based on the equality of men and women and the elimination of social classes that breeds authoritarianism. This period of history, in a time of deep environmental and economic crisis ranging from Daichi to Wall Street, is as good a time to start as any—perhaps better.

About Her Brother

This year I was initially disappointed to discover that the New York Asian Film Festival had gone upscale. No longer would the movies be shown at the funky Anthology Film Archive on East 2^nd Street, but at Lincoln Center. Half in jest, Subway Cinema—the long-time organizers of the NYAFF—described the move as “selling out”.  The move to Lincoln Center would have been okay with me as long as I was still on Subway Cinema’s a-list. Unfortunately the relocation coincided with some kind of restructuring at Subway that ended up with me being deleted from their mailing list—and hence without press privileges. I suppose that I could have made some phone calls to be reinstated but it hardly seemed worth the effort given this year’s program which puts the final touches on a trend that has been developing for some time now.

Basically, Asian film—especially from Japan—has become more and more influenced by anime, the comic book style that emphasizes lurid subject matter, campiness, kitsch and a shallow punk sensibility. This 2010 NYAFF feature called Death Kappa is typical. From the NYAFF website:

A double-barreled blast of 80′s VHS nostalgia, DEATH KAPPA is the ultimate lo-fi giant monster movie. Produced by the same evil geniuses who made MACHINE GIRL, DEATH TRANCE and TOKYO GORE POLICE, it’s directed by Tomoo Haraguchi, a special effects and creature craftsman who did the effects on Kore-eda’s AIR DOLL as well as spiral-madness motion picture, UZUMAKI, and even GAMERA 3. It stars Misato Hirata, famous for her appearances on Ultraman, and the teeny tiny miniature cities pancaked under giant monster feet are courtesy of Isao Takahashi, veteran of almost every major kaiju movie since GODZILLA ’85.

Yawn.

Last week Bill Thompson, my co-worker in the financial systems team at Columbia and a curator of Asian films at Bleecker Street Cinema in the 1980s, left a brochure on my desk for a festival of new movies at the Japan Society in New York, an event that I still had press credentials for. A quick glance revealed the same kind of fare as NYAFF, such as Mutant Girls Squad that was described thusly:

In 2009, Tak Sakaguchi (Versus), Yoshihiro Nishimura (Tokyo Gore Police) and Noboru Iguchi (RoboGeisha), came to the New York Asian Film Festival, got drunk and decided to make a movie together. The result: this splatter-ific, kick-tastic, raunchy riff on the X-Men movies. It takes three directors to make a movie this messed up.

Yeah, I’ll bet it is quite messed up.

When I saw Bill on Thursday I confessed my disappointment with the programs at both festivals, something he understood completely. But thankfully he tipped me off to a movie by 79-year-old director Yoji Yamada that would be shown on Friday night. Yamada is one of my favorite directors and I would go to see anything he made, including one starring Adam Sandler.

At first blush About Her Brother would appear to be something off the beaten track from Yamada who is best known for his Samurai Trilogy. The Japan Society website described it as the reunion of middle-aged sister and brother Ginko and Tetsuro. When Tetsuro, “an actor with a stalled career and a penchant for drinking, jeopardizes the marriage of Ginko’s daughter, she must take the necessary steps to disown him.” Not a likely place for sword duels. Bill explained to me, however, that it was the samurai movies that were the departure for Yamada, whose previous movies were much more like “About Her Brother”.

After having seen About Her Brother, it dawned on me that on a higher level all the movies were consistent with each other, regardless of sword fighting and feudal values since they all deal with the problems of family life, especially in a period of economic decline.

As I have stated about the Samurai Trilogy, Yamada—a one-time Marxist who has retained sympathy for society’s underdogs—viewed the warrior class as the exploited victims of a feudal system rather than as dashing supermen.  From my review of Twilight Samurai, the first in the series:

Seibi is a lowly 50-koku samurai, which means that he gets an annual stipend of rice that can feed 50 people (a koku is equal to five bushels.) This is insufficient to support himself, his two daughters and his elderly mother who is suffering from Alzheimer’s. (His wife has died of consumption, brought on obviously by poverty.) Forced to make ends meet, he spends every free moment tilling his fields or making cages for the crickets that were kept as pets in Shogunate households. A combination of exhaustion and depression has taken its toll on the lowly samurai. His fellow workers notice that he has body odor and that his kimono is frayed at the edges. When a high-level commissioner conducts an inspection of the palace warehouse, he instructs Seibei to take a bath and mend his clothes. Afterwards, his boss bawls him out.

We first meet the wayward brother Tetsuro from Osaka at the wedding scene in About Her Brother. He has decided to crash the wedding in Tokyo despite Ginko’s decision to keep him as far away from the event as possible. The last time he attended a festivity he drank himself silly and caused embarrassment for the family, an obvious taboo for a Japanese society fixated on propriety.

After promising that he will stay away from the booze, Tetsuro is admitted into the banquet hall where he proceeds without delay to get drunk once again. He staggers to his feet, approaches the dais, and warns the groom that if he ever cheats on Ginko’s daughter Koharu, he will beat him up. Things get worse from that point, climaxing with Tetsuro toppling a banquet table, scattering dishes to the floor. The groom blames his bride’s family for ruining the event and his parents accuse Koharu for introducing bad DNA into their future bloodlines.

It turns out that the groom’s family would have nothing to worry about since the marriage would end before the year was up. The groom, a wealthy doctor, refuses to pay Koharu for driving lessons. He believes that she should have seen learning to drive as preparation for marriage. Not only is he cheap, he is cold. When Koharu insists on sorting out their many differences, he tells her he is too busy at the hospital for a face-to-face and asks her to send him email.

When Ginko learns about the foundering marriage, she sets up a meeting at the hospital with the doctor who keeps looking at his watch and answers a cell phone call despite the seriousness of the matter. At some point the question of Ginko’s finances comes up. She inherited her husband’s pharmacy that is losing money to the competition from big chain stores, the Japanese equivalent of CVS. The doctor says that this is progress and she should expect to go out of business eventually. It is clear that Yamada would see such a cold and self-centered character as embracing the crushing of small businesses.

It is also clear that he would make sure to include signs of Japanese economic crisis, a force that undermined a pharmacist’s family today just as the decline of feudalism would put pressure on a samurai’s family in the 1800s. In many of the street scenes, we see homeless people carrying their belongings in a shopping cart. In one scene, the visiting Tetsuro strolls along a Tokyo river and runs into a man living in a shack. Watch out for the rising waters Tetsuro warns him that the previous day’s heavy rains might bring.

Tetsuro himself is only one step ahead of the homeless man. A failed actor in his middle ages, he makes a living frying octopus in a restaurant. Despite his marginal existence, he is a victim of costly vices—drinking and gambling. After he borrows the equivalent of about $20 thousand from his girl friend in Osaka, he throws it all away on booze and pachinko games. The girl friend then shows up at Ginko’s home expecting his older sister to make good on the debt, which she does.

When Tetsuro shows up soon afterward, Ginko tells him that she is done with him. Tetsuro, who has the alcoholic’s incapacity for self-awareness, tells her that she should have ignored his girl friend that he describes as a worthless person. This provokes the normally self-contained Ginko to slap her brother in the face. He storms out telling her that she does not understand what it is like to go through life as a loser, the first sign that the alcoholic haze is lifting.

This is a spoiler alert. Read no further if you do not want to know about the final third of the movie that is critical to my analysis even though it might rob you of the pleasure of being surprised at the brother and sister’s reconciliation.

Not long after Tetsuro returns to Osaka, he falls ill on the street and is taken to a nearby hospital where doctors discover that he is incurably ill with a cancer that has spread throughout his body. He is accepted into a hospice where he will die within a few months. After Ginko learns of his fate, she goes to Osaka and does everything she can to provide moral support until he dies. After being rebuffed initially, Tetsuro accepts his sister’s compassion and love.

The final scenes in the hospice deal more graphically with the final act of life, which is death of course, than anything I have seen in a movie in years. There is no attempt to gloss over the suffering that Tetsuro endures. Despite his misspent life, you feel hollowed out by his passing that was clearly Yamada’s intention. By making this unlikeable wastrel the focus of the audience’s sympathies, he assumes the highest levels of artistic achievement. This is a movie that will eventually be seen as the equivalent of Akira Kurosawa’s To Live, a tale of a dying man who is redeemed by his selfless devotion to other people. By the miracle of art, Yamada transforms a flawed character into an object of wonder even though his flaws remain with him to the end. In keeping with the dark humor of this most powerful and realized film, Tetsuro asks his sister to fill his feeding tube with a water bottle beneath his bed that turns out to be filled with booze.

Since Yoji Yamada is one of Japan’s most respected directors, it is likely that About Her Brother will come to the USA before too long. It is not to be missed.

Chushingura; Harakiri

The figure of the ronin, or unemployed samurai, is a staple of Japanese movies that received its most celebrated treatment in Akira Kurosawa’s Yojimbo and The Seven Samurai. Recently I saw two movies made in 1962—both available from Netflix—that offered starkly contrasting views of their ronin heroes, suggesting as a corollary alternative takes on Japanese culture and values.

The first is Hiroshi Inagaki’s 206 minute Chushingura, a name given to literary accounts of the 1703 vendetta by 47 ronin of the house of Asano whose master was forced to commit seppoku (ritual disembowelment known as harikiri outside of Japan) after landing only glancing blows against Lord Kira in the Shogun’s castle in Edo. Not only has the incident inspired several movies, it is also the subject of Kabuki and Bunraku (puppet plays) as well as serving as a kind of national martyrdom mythos on a par with Joan of Arc for the French or the Battle of the Alamo for the Americans. There is no trailer unfortunately for the 1962 movie on Youtube or elsewhere but this Kabuki version might give you a flavor for what is in the film:

At the beginning of the movie, Lord Naganori Asano (Yûzô Kayama) is embroiled in conflicts with Lord Yoshinaga Kira (Chûsha Ichikawa), a much more powerful figure with far less scruples than Asano who he presses repeatedly for bribes. When Asano refuses to make payments, Kira refuses to turn over instructions from the Shogunate about his duties. Without the document, Asano will lose his place in the pecking order of a grotesquely feudal pecking order and all that goes with it. When he strikes Kira with his sword in a fit of rage, he still ends up losing everything—including his life.

The conflict between Kira and Asano takes up perhaps the first half-hour of the film. From that point on, it becomes the story of his retainers who are forced to vacate the clan’s castle and take jobs as common tradesmen. Eventually we discover that their leader, Asano’s second in command, has a vendetta planned to kill Kira and uphold Bushido, the Samurai’s ethos of loyalty and courage. For most of the film, up until the final 20 minutes or so that depicts the bloody battle between Asano’s 47 ronin and Kira’s bodyguards, the plot revolves around the quotidian existence of an unemployed Samurai.

The Kira camp is lulled into a false sense of security from the seeming withdrawal of the 47 ronin from vendetta. But unbeknownst to their enemies, Asano’s former retainers have a major assault on Kira’s mansion. It is as much of a surprise as the Corleone family’s attack on the Five Families at the end of Godfather Part I.

I can only recommend this film for those with a particular interest in Japanese culture since it is clearly made for the domestic market and more particularly for the segment of Japanese society that has a thing about traditional values. At its most benign, this amounts to a commitment to courage, loyalty and honesty. At its worst, it is manifested as the 1941 version of Chushingura that was meant to arouse the Japanese army to a blind sense of devotion to the imperial cause. Unlike the hackwork put out for the Nazis by Veidt Harlan, the 1941 version was directed by Kenji Mizoguchi, one of Japan’s greatest directors who would go on to make Ugetsu in 1953, regarded as one of the greatest movies of all time. Mizoguchi made Chushingura under duress and the end product was considered insufficiently martial in spirit.

Also made in 1962, Masaki Kobayashi’s Harakiri is everything that Chushingura is not. Closer in spirit to Yojii Yamada’s recent samurai trilogy, it is a passionate denunciation of feudal values and especially the ritual suicide of the film’s title. For both Kobayash and Yamada, the feudal overlords represent a brutal and unyielding system that victimizes the samurai even as it puts them on a pedestal.

As art, Harakiri is Japanese movie making at its very pinnacle and surely ranks with Kurosawa and Yamada for its narrative and dramatic power. Unlike Chushingura, there are no slack moments as the movie hurdles forward with the power of a diesel locomotive until its wrenching conclusion.

It stars Tatsuya Nakadai as the middle-aged ronin Hanshiro Tsugumo who has arrived at the Iyi palace in order to make a request that was frequently being heard in such quarters in the capital of Edo in 1630.

Without a job and any prospects in a period of general peace, the warrior decides to do the only thing that makes sense—to disembowel himself in the house of a powerful Lord with all the dignity that entails.

The lord of the house Kageyu Saito (Rentaro Mikuni) feels duty-bound to explain to Tatsuya that when another ronin named Motome Chijiiwa showed up a couple of months earlier with a similar request, they decided to force him to go through with harakiri even though it was likely that he was only seeking a handout to last him for a few days. Given the collapse of so many samurai clans in the recent past, there had to be some way to set an example for other such beggars. Tatsuya reassures the lord of the manor that he fully intends to kill himself.

Through a series of flashbacks Lord Kageyu describes how the much younger ronin Motome was trapped into taking his life. He was prevented from leaving the palace until the deed was done in full view of his retainers. Unfortunately for Motome, he had to make do with a bamboo sword, an inexplicable replacement for the usually highly tempered steel instrument. Instead of lasting a second or two with a steel blade, Motome’s death is painfully drawn out he stabs himself with .the dull bamboo blade. Watching the lord and his retinue take in this spectacle is enough to inoculate one against Bushido culture once and for all, which was the director and screenwriters’ (Shinobu Hashimoto, Yasuhiko Takiguchi) intention.

Before taking his life in the same manner as Motome, Tatsuya only has one request. He wants to tell the imperious lord Kageyu how he came to such a desperate state and also why Motome was in such a state himself, adding that he knew Motome quite well and understood his decision.

Without giving away too much of the plot, it turns out that Tatsuya is Motome’s father-in-law and is seeking vengeance against the aristocrat and samurai warriors who forced him to kill himself. The movie moves forward through a series of flashbacks and encounters between Tatsuya and Kageyu as each flashback ends.  At each point, Kageyu demands that the ronin get on with the hari-kiri, only to be told that the story is not finished. The climax of the movie, as you might expect, involves a choreographed fight between the ronin and Kageyu’s men. It is about as exciting a sequence as you will see in a Japanese samurai movie. It should be mentioned that the actor who plays Tatsuya was Toshiro Mifune’s replacement in Akira Kurosawa’s movies after their falling out. He is simply brilliant.

Harikiri is the first movie I have ever seen by Masaki Kobayashi who also directed The Human Condition, a trilogy on the effects of World War II on a Japanese pacifist and socialist. The wiki on Kobayashi states that he himself was a pacifist, who after being drafted into the Imperial Japanese Army during World War II, refused to fight and refused promotion to a rank higher than private. Those are the kinds of values the Japanese should be celebrating, not Bushido.

Kabei: Our Mother

Although at first blush far removed thematically from his Samurai trilogy, Yoji Yamada’s “Kabei: Our Mother” has many of the same elements.  This is a tale of how the wife of a Japanese professor imprisoned in 1940 for “thought crimes” struggles to raise her two young daughters under the most difficult of circumstances. It is a searing attack on the authoritarianism and stupidity of a  social system that retained many of the feudal traits of the period depicted in the trilogy. It is also an embrace of the decency and the courage of humble people being crushed underfoot by a system operating through a combination of repression and intense social pressure. At the age of 78 and now having made his 74^th movie, Yoji Yamada demonstrates once again his kinship with such members of the great humanist tradition in filmdom shaped by radical politics—including his countryman Akira Kurosawa, Senegal’s Ousmane Sembene and India’s Satyijat Ray.

Sharing the meager circumstances of the underemployed Samurai of the trilogy, Teruyo Nogami (Miku Sato) is a one-time philosophy professor fallen on hard times. He is 3 months behind on his rent and has just learned in the opening scene that his latest book has been turned down by a publisher. Unlike most of his countrymen swept up by the ultranationalist fervor of the ruling party, he opposes the invasion of China and has the courage of his convictions to say so publicly. He has the misfortune to take philosophy’s teachings seriously, a flaw not shared by fellow academics who learn to get along with the system, just as they were doing in Nazi Germany.

A day or so later, he and his family are woken in the middle of the night by a pounding on the door. The cops have come to investigate a “thought crime” and pour through his books and papers looking for evidence. Convinced that Nogami is a traitor, they tie him up with rope, take him to police headquarters, and throw him into a holding cell. The other prisoners, discovering that he is some kind of “red”, try to make him as comfortable as possible.

Unlike her husband, Kayo Nogami is apolitical and only has the hope that he will be released from jail and returned to the happy if impoverished household that they share with their two children, a 12 year old girl named Hatsuko and her 6 year old sister Teruyo who provides the narrative and point of view throughout the film. As such, the film evokes Fellini’s “Amarcord”, another film about life under fascism seen through the eyes of a child. Unlike “Amarcord”, the emphasis is less on lyrical youthful evocations (although there is much of that) than it is about injustice and the struggle for dignity and freedom.

Indeed, Teruyo Nogami was a real person and this film is based on her semiautobiographical novel about her wartime experiences. Although the film does not make a point of this, the adult Teruyo Nogami worked with Akira Kurosawa for over 40 years in different capacities, including supervising the script of “Rashomon”. As alluded to above, Kurosawa and Yamada are kindred spirits.

Before the Japanese state had converted itself into an authoritarian war machine, Kurosawa traveled in CP circles as a youth. Some of his early student works were “socialist realism” exercises. After WWII began, he went to work in the Japanese film industry turning out propaganda films that glorified test pilots and female factory workers. Unlike Teruyo Nogami, Kurosawa succumbed to social pressure.

But one assumes that his early training in socialist realism acquitted him well, just as it did American CP’ers in the film industry. Kurosawa was extremely rueful about his role in all this. Perhaps shame motivated his desire to create a new kind of film for postwar Japan, one that would criticize a society that had become adrift. Although it no longer celebrated martial values, it still lacked a higher purpose. His youthful leftist beliefs combined with his family’s aristocratic sense of ‘noblesse oblige’ led to the creation of distinctly Kurosawan type of film, one in which a lone individual struggled to define a personal ethos against a callous and self-centered society.

Clearly, Kurosawa’s celebration of the selfless Samurai hero attacking a vicious feudal system and Nogami’s novel about WWII repression resonated with Yamada’s own values and experience. Program notes for a Yamada film shown at the Film Forum in 1982 stated that he was “’a member in good standing of Japan’s Communist Party”’ and usually tried to make some reference in his films to man’s disaffection with society.

In a January 31, 2008 interview with the Japan Times, Yamada was asked: “Kaabee is set in the early 1940s, but its themes, including the suppression of dissent, still have relevance today. Was that your main reason for wanting to make this film?” He replied:

What attracted me first was the childhood memoir by Teruyo Nogami. Her father was actually arrested under the Peace Preservation Law (which had the goal of clamping down on communists, labor activists and opponents of Japan’s militarism) and spent time in jail. That’s what Japan was like in 1940 and 1941, but Japanese today don’t know this. I wanted to rekindle their memories. Those were frightening times, when Japan started the Pacific War with an unstoppable wave.

Can we say the same frightening, out-of-control forces that started that war are absent from Japan today? In 1945 we made what was supposed to be a strong commitment to peace. But now (certain forces) are trying to change the “peace Constitution.”

Japan should have remained the one country in the world with no military and a prohibition against war (in the Constitution). Now Japan is going along with America and the Bush administration. I have doubts about whether that’s right.

For those who want to see film-making at its best, as well as a celebration of the values we cherish in our own struggle with another barbaric social system, a visit to the Quad Cinema in New York is not to be missed.