During the war I had been starved for beauty, so I rushed headlong into the world of traditional Japanese arts as to a feast. I may have been motivated by a desire to escape from the reality around me, but what I managed to learn despite the motive was nevertheless of great value to me. I went to see the Noh for the first time. I read the art theories the great fourteenth-century Noh playwright Zeami left behind him. I read all there was to read about Zeami himself, and I devoured books on the Noh.
I was attracted by the Noh because of the admiration I felt for its uniqueness, part of which may be that its form of expression is so far removed from that of the film. At any rate, I took this opportunity to become familiar with the Noh, and I had the pleasure of viewing the performances of the great actors of each school—Kita Roppeita, Umewaka Manzaburo and Sakurama Kintaro.
Among their plays there are many performances I will never forget, but the most memorable of all was Manzaburo’s Hanjo (The Lady Han). It was thundering and raining outside, but while I watched him on the stage I heard nothing of the weather. Then when he came out on stage again and began the dance of the jo introduction act, the evening sun was suddenly reflected off his form. “Ah, the moonflower has bloomed,” I thought, entranced. It was a moment that allowed me to savor to the fullest the play’s melancholy poetic reference to the moonflower chapter of The Tale of Genji.
The Japanese have rare talents. In the midst of the war it was the encouragement of the militarist national policies that led us to a fuller appreciation of traditions and arts, but this political sponsorship is not necessary. I think Japan can be proud at any time of having a very special esthetic world of its own. This recognition led me also to a better understanding of myself—and greater self-confidence.
No Regrets for Our Youth
THE TITLE OF my first post-war film became a popular phrase. After the release, one frequently came across the usage “no regrets for our ———” in the newspapers and other media. But for me personally the feeling is the opposite; I have many regrets about this movie. The reason is that the script was rewritten against my will.
This film was born amid the two great union strikes at the Toho studios. The first Toho dispute took place in February of 1946, and the second in October of the same year. No Regrets for Our Youth was produced during the seven months between the two outbreaks. As a result of the victory of the first strike, the Toho employees’ union became very powerful, and the number of Communist Party members among the employees increased. Their voice in matters of film production became more important than before, and a Scenario Review Committee was formed. This committee decided that the script for No Regrets required changes, and the film was shot from a rewrite. The reason was not because of any offense found in the content of my script, but because another script based on similar material had also been submitted to the committee.
I felt, however, that although the two scripts were based on similar material, they treated it in entirely different ways. The result, I was sure, would be two entirely different films. Anyway, this is what I said before the Review Committee, but my opinion was rejected.
When the two films were completed, members of the Review Committee said to me, “You were right. If we had known they would turn out like this, we would have let you shoot from your first script.” This was the height of irresponsibility. Playwright Hisaita Eijiro’s first script for my film was such a beautiful piece of work that it still pains me to remember that it was shelved at the hands of such thoughtless people.
The second draft of the script for No Regrets was a forced rewrite of the story, so it became somewhat distorted. This shows in the last twenty minutes of the film. But my intention was to gamble everything on that last twenty minutes. I poured a feverish energy into those two thousand feet and close to two hundred shots of film. All of the rage I felt toward the Scenario Review Committee went into those final images.
When I had completed the film, I was so agitated and exhausted I couldn’t evaluate it with a cool head. But I was convinced that I must have made something very strange. The company arranged a screening for the American censors. They sat talking among themselves while it was being shown, so I was all the more certain that I had failed. But then as the film went into its last twenty minutes a hush fell over the group, and they began to gaze at the screen with deep concentration. They looked as if they were holding their breath right up until the end title appeared on the screen. When the lights came on, they all stood up at once and reached out to shake hands with me. They praised the film to the skies and congratulated me warmly, but I just stood there amazed.
It wasn’t until after I left them that I really began to feel that the film had succeeded. One of these American censors, a Mr. Garky, later gave a party in honor of the film. During the second dispute at Toho the stars who had played the leading roles in No Regrets had banded together with other actors to form the Flag Group of Ten. They had opposed the strike and gone off to join the company Shin [New] Toho. But Mr. Garky disagreed with our thinking on the matter and insisted on inviting them to the party. His hope was that we would all see that because we had cooperated to make No Regrets he was able to give a party to celebrate it. This was a chance, he thought, for everyone to shake hands again. (As it turned out, they did not come to the party, nor did they come back, not for about ten years. It was not only these stars who refused to return, but the movie technicians who went with them to form Shin Toho. Toho seems to have thrown away in a single move not only the harmony that had taken ten years to establish among its employees, and the very people it had trained, but on top of that another ten years to train new people went out the window.)
No Regrets for Our Youth was born in the midst of these great upheavals. I felt peculiarly deep emotions about this film, the first to be made in the post-war atmosphere of freedom. The locations we used in the old capital of Kyoto—the grassy hills, the flower-lined side streets, the brooks reflecting the sun’s rays—are all employed in the most trivial films today, but at that time they had special meaning for us. For me it was as if my heart could dance, as if I had grown wings and could fly among the clouds.
During the war we had had to be very careful about shooting such scenery. Under wartime conditions we had not been able to portray the fullness of youth in the movies. As the censors viewed things, love was indecent and the fresh, keen sensibilities of youth were a psychological state of “British-American” weakness. Being young in those times consisted of suppressing the sound of one’s breathing in the jail cell that was called the “home front.”
But in order for Japan’s post-war youth to regain its life breath, it would have to endure yet more hard times. These would be the subject of my next film.
One Wonderful Sunday
WHEN THE GROUP of ten stars left to form Shin Toho, we who remained behind at Toho were left without a single name actor or actress to put in our films. The two studios accidentally distinguished themselves clearly through their differing approaches—the director system for the older organization and the star system for the new one—and these emerged as rallying points. The result was in fact a civil war with brother turning against brother.
Shin Toho began by announcing a schedule of productions featuring a dazzling roster of stars. At Toho all of the contract directors, screenwriters and producers responded by gathering for a conference at a hot-spring inn on the Izu Peninsula south of Tokyo. The atmosphere of this conference had all the fervor of generals planning their strategy the night before a big battle. It was a most pompous affair, the result of which was a schedule of new releases to be publicized with the directors’ names. Kinugasa Teinosuke, Yamamoto Kajirō, Naruse Mikio and Toyoda Shiro were each to direct a segment of a film called Yotsu no koi no monogatari (Four Love Stories). Gosho Heinosuke was to make Ima hitotabi no (One Time Now) and Yamamoto Satsuo was to codirect Senso to heiwa (War and Peace) with Kamei Fumio, while I was to make Subarashiki nichiyobi (One Wonderful Sunday) and Taniguchi Senkich
i was to direct his first film, Ginrei no hate (To the End of the Silver Mountains). My responsibilities included not only writing the script for my own film, One Wonderful Sunday, but also writing one segment of Four Love Stories as well as the screenplay for Sen-chan’s Silver Mountains.
I began by meeting with Uekusa Keinosuke to discuss the overall structure of One Wonderful Sunday, and then left the details in his hands. Taniguchi Senkichi and I stayed on at the hot-spring inn after everyone else went back to Tokyo, to work on the scenario for Silver Mountains, which we intended to finish there. I decided I could dash off the script for one of the Four Love Stories in a few days after Silver Mountains was done and before I went back to work with Uekusa on the final draft of One Wonderful Sunday.
As it turned out, I actually accomplished all that I set out to do on this insane schedule, and the three scripts got written on time. But if I hadn’t had as an impetus the pressure of the competition with Shin Toho’s star system and my desire to react against it, I never could have done it. First of all, the only ideas we had to go on for the Silver Mountains script were that it should be a manly sort of action film and, since Sen-chan was a mountain man, we should use an alpine location.
Sen-chan and I sat for three days glaring at each other across a writing table, but came up with nothing very inspiring. Finally, deciding there was no way out of it but a frontal attack, I wrote out something like a newspaper headline: “Three Bank Robbers Escape to Mountains of Nagano Prefecture; Investigation Headquarters Moves to Base of Japan Alps.” Then I had the three robbers hide out in the snows of the Japan Alps, sent a police inspector after them, and, adding in Sen-chan’s mountaineering experiences and general knowledge, we wrote a little every day. At the end of three weeks we had a complete script for To the End of the Silver Mountains, with a story that was not bad at all.
Immediately afterward I threw myself into work on Four Love Stories. This was to be just one of four episodes, and I already had the story worked out in my head, so I scribbled it down in four days. At last I was free to sit down across a table from Uekusa and begin writing One Wonderful Sunday.
It had been twenty-five years since “Murasaki” Uekusa and Kurosawa “Shōnagon” had matched writing styles at the same work table. We were both now thirty-seven years old. But as we worked together I came to realize that although we both had changed in outward appearance, inside we remained virtually the same as we had been as children. Sitting face to face day after day, we found that the years vanished like a dream and these early middle-aged men became “Kei-chan” and “Kuro-chan” again. There are few people in this world who change as little as Keinosuke had. I don’t know if it’s the purity of his heart or just plain obstinacy. As weak as he is, he puts on a show of strength; as romantic as he is, he puts on a show of being a realist. He’s always doing things that make one feel uneasy. In sum, ever since primary school he’s been causing me problems.
Ten years before One Wonderful Sunday I had been sitting on top of the crane on the open set for Tōjurō’s Love. As I was giving directions to the crowd of extras we were filming, suddenly from the middle of the group a hand waved at the camera. One of the basic principles of filmmaking is that the actors must not look at the camera, so I leaped from my perch in a rage to give the fellow what for. When I got close, an odd character with an ill-fitting topknot on his head smiled at me. “Say, Kuro-chan!” I realized then it was Uekusa. Shocked, I asked him what he was doing, and he proudly replied that lately he’d been making lots of money as an extra. I was so busy on this film I didn’t have time for his pranks, so I gave him five yen and told him to go home. He took the money, but didn’t leave, as it turned out. Later he confessed to me that he had put on a masterless samurai’s costume with a deep straw hat to evade my gaze, and he had pocketed not only what I gave him but his full extra’s wages as well. When he told me this, I remembered there had been a strange samurai who persisted in wandering around the set in the wrong places and making trouble for me. Keinosuke remains worrisome.
This fellow Uekusa, perhaps because of the karma from some previous existence, one day suddenly vanishes from before my eyes and another day reappears just as suddenly. And during the periods he is absent from my field of vision he is doing the most amazing things. He took a job as foreman of a crew of gravel-pit laborers. He worked as an extra in the movies. He joined the parade of courtesans in the Yoshi-wara legal-prostitution quarter in Tokyo. And in between these exploits he found time to write superb plays and film scripts.
It may have been that the elusive Uekusa simply got tired of his perennial wanderings, but once he sat down to work on the script for One Wonderful Sunday he applied himself with extreme calm and single-mindedness. His devotion may also have come from the fact that the subject matter of the film—impoverished lovers struggling along in defeated Japan—was perfect material for this man who was always attracted by underdogs and the shadowy side of life. In any event, the material was so well suited to him that our opinions on the script conflicted in very few instances.
But on the climax scene at the end we did have a minor difference. The poor couple are in an empty concert amphitheater and in their minds they hear Schubert’s “Unfinished Symphony.” Naturally, the movie’s sound track should have no music on it for this scene. The girl breaks the rules of filmmaking and turns to the screen audience to address them. “Please, everyone, if you feel sorry for us, please clap your hands. If you clap for us, I’m sure we’ll be able to hear the music.” The audience applauds, and the boy in the film picks up a conductor’s baton. As soon as he starts to wave it, the “Unfinished” comes in on the sound track.
My intention here was to elicit audience participation in the film by addressing them directly. When an audience goes to see a film, they are more or less participating in it anyway, insofar as they become emotionally involved in the film and forget themselves. But this phenomenon takes place within people’s hearts, and it translates into action only to the extent of, for instance, spontaneous applause. What I wanted to do with this scene in One Wonderful Sunday was transform the audience into actual participants in the plot, to make them seem to affect the outcome of the film.
In response to my idea, Uekusa offered something else. He wanted to show the concert hall, which is empty at the beginning of the scene, giving forth the sound of applause after the girl makes her appeal. Then the camera would pick out, here and there in the darkness, couples who resemble our protagonists sitting in the amphitheater, and they would be revealed as the source of the applause. This seemed like the sort of device Uekusa would fabricate, and it was not without interest, but I refused to give in on my own plan. My reason was nothing so serious as the claim Uekusa makes that he and I are fundamentally different types of human beings. It was simply that I wanted to use my own idea to conduct a directorial experiment. The experiment proved to be a failure in Japan. The Japanese audience sat stock still, and because they couldn’t bring themselves to applaud, the whole thing was a failure. But in Paris it succeeded. Because the French audience responded with wild applause, the sound of the orchestra tuning up at the tail end of the clapping gave rise to the powerful and unusual emotion I had hoped for.)
There is one more thing about this scene in One Wonderful Sunday that I can’t forget. The hero of the story who waves the conductor’s baton for the “Unfinished Symphony” was played by Numasaki Isao, an actor who was remarkably unmusical. There are many varieties of insensitivity to music, but what Numasaki had was an imperviousness to strength or delicacy and softness, to the sharp, heavy or light qualities of sound. Even the film’s musical director, Hattori Tadashi, gave up on Numasaki. But of course we couldn’t leave it at that. Hattori and I took Numasaki, who stood completely stiff and waved his hands up and down like a toy soldier, and worked with him day after day to teach him how to conduct that symphony. Now, I am so lacking in dexterity that people say I look like a chimpanzee when I’m dialing the telephone, yet in the course o
f teaching Numasaki, Hattori gave me a grade of being “ready to conduct the first movement of Schubert’s “Unfinished Symphony,” so you can imagine how much effort I had to put into this.
The leads in One Wonderful Sunday were Numasaki and Nakakita Chieko, both of whom were still unknowns at the time. In order to do city location shooting, all we had to do was disguise the camera; no one recognized the actors’ faces. For these hidden-camera location sequences we put the camera in a box, which was in turn wrapped in a carrying cloth that had only a hole for the lens to poke through. This could then be hand-carried.
One day we planned a location shot in Tokyo’s Shinjuku Station. I set the camera bundle down on the platform and waited for the train to arrive. We were going to film Nakakita stepping off of it. But as I stood there an old man appeared from somewhere and planted himself right in front of the camera. I attempted to nudge him out of the way. But after I bumped him in the side, he frantically thrust his hand into his pocket and pulled out his wallet. He thought I was a pickpocket.
Another time we were filming with the hidden camera on the sidewalks of Shinjuku. But while we aimed at Numasaki and Nakakita walking toward the camera, a streetwalker appeared in front of them and began scratching her behind. The camera, of course, seemed focused on nothing else. There was no way that Numasaki and Nakakita would draw attention away from it. Numasaki wore a baggy suit and a military overcoat, and Nakakita an oversized raincoat and the kind of scarf you might see anywhere, so you certainly couldn’t say they stood out in a crowd. In fact, they blended in so well with the throngs of other couples in the same kind of drab attire that both the cameraman and I lost track of them any number of times. The story called for them to be the kind of young couple you might see anywhere in Japan at that time, so in that sense they were perfect for the parts. And for that reason they seem to me, as I think about them today, to be like a couple I met by chance right after the war in Shinjuku, talked with and became friends with, rather than protagonists of a movie.
Something Like an Autobiography Page 21