Kinuya Tanaka Director

Kinuyo Tanaka had one of the most extraordinary careers in film, Starting at the age of fourteen she became a star in over two hundred and fifty productions spread from silents into the seventies. She was the lead in the first Japanese sound film.  She was associated with Hiroshi Shimizu for a period and speculation centered on her long-running partnership with Kenji Mizoguchi (she claimed they were just good friends) Like her contemporaries Jean Gabin and Gary Cooper,  she managed to have the lead in the best films of their industry's best directors including Shimazu's Kanzashi/The Ornamental Hairpin, Kenji Mizoguchi's Ugetsu and Sansho Dayu/ The Bailif, Heinosuke Gosho's Madamu to nyōbō/The Neighbor's Wife and Mine, Koi no hana saku Izu no odoriko/ The Dancing Girl of Izu & Entotsu no mieru basho/ Four Chimneys, Keisuke Kinoshita's Rikugun/ Army and Narayama Bushiko/Ballad of the Narayama, Kurosawa's Akahige/Red Beard, along with films by Ozu and Naruse. After her visit to America and meetings with Joan Crawford and Silvia Sidney was not well received at home, Tanaka chose to make her 1953 debut as director, becoming the only Japanese woman then in the profession,  supported by Ozu, Naruse and Kinoshita but opposed by Mizoguchi creating a rift after their fifteen film collaboration.  

  A welcome break in the lack of archival screenings here came when the Art Gallery of New South Wales put up a season of the six films directed by Tanaka, starting with 1953's Koibumi/Love Letter starring Masayuki Mori, who had played the Lord in Rashomon, opposite Machika Kyo and Toshiro Mifune. The script was in part by Kinoshita. Tanaka appears in the minor role of the landlady.

This one was a contemporary-set shomingeki film, having more in common with Kinoshita's 24 Eyes or Shinoda's Children of Hiroshima than the Samurai adventures which were attracting international attention. Showing a society debilitated by the war and the U.S. Occupation shares attention with the film's narrative.      

Love Letters - Kuga & Mori

Love Lettter starts with returned naval officer Mori joining his brother in the room they share in the crowded wooden Tokyo apartment block, in a street where the pedestrian crowd includes a Chaplin imitator billboard man. Mori has been drained both by the war and by his loss of childhood sweetheart Yoshiko Kuga, forced to marry in his absence and now untraceable. Mori haunts Shibuya station believing he glimpsed her there. He is supported by his hustling sibling who has developed a business peddling second-hand books and magazines. We see him persuade a street food stall's owners to rent him their fence to hang his products.  

Jukichi Uno, an old school friend, plies a similarly marginal trade, writing pitiful letters in English to U.S. servicemen who have abandoned Japanese women.  He's doing well enough at this to farm out some of the work to Mori. Sure enough (it's that kind of film) Mori is in the back room when Kuga comes in to commission a letter to the American she had lived with during the grim occupation period.  Facing his lost love in a sunny park, Mori is unable to reconcile with the notion that she had associated with an American, like the coarse whores who greet her as one of their group. The sustained long shot of Kuga walking away after their park meeting works better than the ending of The Third Man,  which must have been its model.

Reconciliation comes with the exchange where Mori accepts the notion that the Japanese all carry the responsibility for starting the war.  Film like this and Shûe Matsubayashi's 1960 Taiheiyo no arashi/I Bombed Pearl Harbor are big on Japanese war guilt. The film's qualities are its detailed, surprisingly bleak picture of post-war Japan and a chance to see Masayuki Mori in a dominating, thoughtful characterisation.                                                                                                                                                                           

Two years later The Director's Guild of Japan was trying to resurrect the Nikkatsu Company, drawing opposition from established production houses concerned that their talent would be poached by a new rival. Yasujiro Ozu no less intervened, reviving one of his old scripts for the proposed Tsuki Wa Noborinu/ The Moon Has Risen with touches associated with his style visible in the finished production - include the camera placed like someone seated on a tatami mat and the spacing "pillow shot" scenics separating sequences. Tanaka's first film having been well received, she was accepted as the director.

The new try at directing became a polished, unconvincing romcom. Everyone sees a different literary equivalent - “Little Women” or how about Shakespearean comedy with parallel couples going through their paces during a night where the moonlight drives their romantic impulses. This one even runs to a befuddled maidservant, a comic turn which is the best of Tanaka’s guest shots in her films and also anticipates the touching role of Mieko Takamine as the devoted follower in Tanaka's final film

The Moon Has Risen -  Hisako Yamane, Yoko Sugi and Mie Kitahara.

Head of a relocated post WW2 Japanese family Chishû Ryû, of whom we don’t get to see all that much, leads performing the sutras in his Buddhist chapel. Turns out that he heads a family of three daughters, passive widow Hisako Yamane, middle sister Yoko Sugi and the youngest Mie Kitahara, shortly to star in teen exploitation hit Kurutta kajitsu/Crazed Fruit where, as here, she's again not all that comfortable displaying youthful enthusiasm. 

Kitahara provides the film’s dynamic, trying to get sister Sugi paired off with city visitor Ko Mishima, calling on the aid of mutual friend Shoji Yasui. Turns out that the prospective couple only need to be placed together in the moonlight for the plan to work out. The pair communicating in the code of telegrams with verse numbers of classic Japanese poetry is lost on a foreign audience and I suspect didn’t do all that much for its intended public. Then we go into the romance of Kitahara and Yasui with an ending swinging back to Ryo and the oldest daughter rehearsing.  Over the horizon, we get the attraction of bustling Tokyo against peaceful rural Nara, whose temple buildings figure in the false appointment episode.

There's another drear Western score and once again it's the detail of fifties Japan which is the major asset rather than any dramatic content, though it makes a curious addition to an international gallery of moonlight romances including the Swedish Smiles of a Summer's Night, Hollywood's Moonstruck or the Spanish The Goalkeeper.  

In 1955 Nkkastsu produced Tanaka's 3rd movie Chibusayo Eien Nare/The Eternal Breasts/Forever a Woman,  a determinedly female affair. More serious than her previous directorial choices, The Eternal Breasts deals with real-life poet Fumiko Shimojô, played by Yumeji Tsukioka, an actress who is not widely know in Western distribution, though she did leads for Shinoda and Gosho.  

We see her Shimojô in a bad marriage from which the only relief is her participation in the Regional Poet's Circle, where she is encouraged by married couple Masayuki Mori & Yôko Sugi. After Mori’s efforts her poetry is published but his health is failing, though the pair are attracted. After his death, Tsukioka is sustained through the divorce from her cheating husband by Sugi’s friendship.  The poet is stricken with breast cancer and has a mastectomy which shocks her friend. Tsukioka refuses to see a city reporter come to create a story about her dying writer, expecting a sensational piece of journalism but the pair connect and he puts aside his other interests to see her through her last days.

  Tsukioka & Sugi

The most memorable passage is Tsukioka alone at night in Sapporo hospital, following a trolley to the barred area which she recognises as the morgue, where her own remains will shortly be transported in the presence of her distressed children.

The film’s subject requires bold and sensitive handling of the kind Fred Zinneman might have brought to it but Tanaka chooses tasteful and comes out closer to Ross Hunter. That just registers as as morbid and the film’s claim to fame is that it may be the first and possibly only movie to have a mastectomy as its central event.                                                                                                                                                 

Following in 1960. Tanaka’s next direction Ruten no ôhi / Wandering Princess was a departure,  her first costume drama and filmed in ‘scope & colour. It is a more ambitious undertaking than her previous films, fielding screens full of dress extras in a succession of designed decors. By the standard by which we measure these, this is not a super production but it did demonstrate Tanaka's willingness to move beyond realist contemporary subjects.

The subject matter was the nineteen thirties Empire of Manchuku where the Japanese Army  imposed Fuketsu, their own "Puppet" ruler of Manchuria, on the resentful Chinese population. The film is derived from the then recently published autobiography of Hiro Aishinkakura,  daughter to an aristocratic family who became the arranged wife who joined the Chinese Emperor's younger brother, played by Eiji Funakoshi (Fires on the Plain).  Heading the cast is Machika Kyo, then Japanese superstar of Rashomon, Ugestsu, Gate of Hell and her one venture into English language production, the Hollywood Tea House of the August Moon.

The setting, a fallen  state subjugated by an aggressive empire, creating an elaborate but ultimately 

Wandering Princess - Kyo & Funakoshi 

pernicious illusion of restored glory, is a  natural, full of intrigue, passion, conflict, spectacle and flawed but sympathetic characters — the stuff of a dozen books of the month rolled into one.  Usually dominating and sensual, Kyô gives a surprisinly staid performance, striving to present her character as concientiously working in the interest of her uneasy subjects and facing the indignities of Japanese Army Control and capture and deportation by the equally vicious Chinese conquerors from the People's Liberation Army escort. Modestly staged official occasions alternate with more intimate material like Kyo winning over the playground children, who warn her of attacks on Japanese or the hardships of caring for her family on the punishing retreat in captivity.

The film does however contain the most striking sequence in Tanaka's work as director, set up by scenes of her easel painting's scarlet sky. The same colour scheme is used in the studio filmed scene where Kyo sees, distant on the horizon, a silhouette procession taking the condemned woman to her crucifixion, a single close up included.

With only minor alterations (character names etc.) to the facts, this one has detail which will be lost on an outside viewer - the Japanese woman with unbound feet unlike the Chinese around her, the range of Asian languages the cast are asked to perform, historical events familiar to its target audience. An audience for the sub-titled copy is likely see it as a footnote to the later cycle of Pu Yi films - Bertolucci's Last Emperor of China or the biographies made by Li Han-hsiang for Hong Kong and Mainland studios. Those who have put in a bit of serious movie-going will recall similar material done better in Warners'  Juarez or Feng Zaogang’s  YiJiuSiEr/Back to 1941. 

Onna bakari no yoru /Girls in  Dark, Tanaka's next film as director was made in 1961, three years after prostitution was made illegal in Japan, followed by a series of police raids and arrests, mostly concentrating on women sex workers to be sorted into two categories, those classified incurable sent to jail and the remainder placed for six months in rehabilitation centers aimed at returning them to everyday life.

Girls of Dark

Tanaka's film starts in one of these centers, the Shiragiku Protective Facility. The all-female management, headed by Chikage Awashima, see Hisako Hara as their most promising charge and we watch her selected among more hardened inmates for an outside position as clerk in a neighborhood grocery. This proves not to be a smooth transition, with low pay, the male hangers-on eyeing her as a prospect and the store owner's wife's suspicions about her proving justified, when her husband the owner moves on Hara during the wife's absence. 

Returning to the Facility, Hara finds toughened detainees getting into fights with women they knew on the street - compare the street women associates in Love Letter. The organisers try again, placing Hara with sympathetic management of a nursery where she will not have to deal with the public. Her horticulturist mentor is attracted to her and finally proposes marriage but even the well-intentioned owners support his rural aristocrat family in forbidding the match, asserting "Country people are different." At this point, Hara's former pimp shows up recruiting her for a new whore house.

Female director Tanaka reduces the nudity here to a couple of glimpses of nylon bras which is tame stuff for any thrill-seeking movie public and the production values are undistinguished - competent black and white 'scope studio interior filming, which only occasionally breaks out into location footage like the liberating bike ride crossing the railway bridge from the Center into the town. The performances are mainly ordinary and the score again drab. 

Its admirers offer this one as a serious try for sympathy with the victims of the vice industry but it is a poor relative to the exploitation films of the day, which often had more energy than Tanaka can muster. It joined the European hooker films which had preceded it in metropolitan double feature showings. Ralph Habib's 1953 Compagnes de la nuit has plot elements in common with this one but the crime melo content there provided much livelier viewing.

Tanaka's last film as director Ogin Sama/Love Under the Crucifix was made in 1962.  This was again a costume piece, telling the story of celebrated Sixteenth Century Tea Master Sen no Riku but Tanaka worked with a different imagery. We don't get the shots of sandal wearing peasants and rickshaw-riding notables framed by the tiled roof of alleyways, trademark of the jidaigeki. Instead we follow shaven headed Ganjiro Nakamura (from Ichikawa's Kagi/Odd Obsession and Enjo/Conflagration)  through his daughter, played by Ineko Arima, against a background of the persecution of Catholics, who were seen as a point of access for foreign influence, undermining Feudal society. Films about Japanese Catholics tend towards the grim - Children of Nagasaki, Silence. 

Here Arima has studied the tea ceremony under her father, in the company of Christian Lord Tatsue Nakadai (regularly defeated by Mifune in the sword duels climaxing their films) Nakadai's spooky, wide-eyed quality worked nicely for his aristocrat character.  She falls for Tatsue but he tells her that his Christian notion of piety means that she should become a nun - while treasuing the crucifix he gives her. However wealthy merchant Hisaya Itô desires her and arranges a marriage, only to find her unresponsive and worse, the object of the passion of Osamu Takizawa, the local Taiko Governor, who plans to have her moved to the castle so he can satisfy his lust. A bad lot that one. He negotiates the construction of an ostentatious gold-painted chamber for his personal tea ceremonies. 

Meanwhile, Nakadai's wife having died, he permits himself to give in to his own passion for Arima. We know from his Mifure movies that Nakadai is a dab hand at slicing up riff-raff and he assures Arima about despatching the ruffians set on their trail but it's not that kind of picture. There's no blood here. Disgrace all round with Nakamura having no option beyond sepuku. I did warn you about Japanese Catholic pictures.

In a gallery of Sen Riku movies, two by Kei Kumai alone, Tanaka shows individuality and growing technique but the film remains undistinguished. We can't help feeling that Tanaka was wise not to give up her day job. Having become the Japanese Bette Davis she would have been making a bad switch  to the status of of one of the Dorothys (Arzner and Davenport) directing in America. Tanaka did sustain a decade-long run as director. In a similar position, Lillian Gish gave up after one movie - embarrassed at having to instruct important players - like Ricardo Cortez! No way of telling what input Tanaka's turn as the only working  Japanese female director had on creating opportunities for women who followed her but you can be sure it was mentioned in their discussions.

The Japan Film Foundation's input to the event was impressive. In a city where attempts at serious archival screenings continue to flounder, they delivered on schedule impeccable sub-titled copies shown as originally intended and accompanied by an attractive, informative booklet. Compare the Sir Isaac Julian exhibit running down the road at the MCA which was inaudible and with the multiple images rigged so that the light from one would wash out the one opposite, using shine-through screen material which meant that half the viewers saw lettering flipped over. You had to consult Julian's website to work out what this was all about. Watching the trailer on line was frustrating -  revealing what we were missing.

The comparison made you appreciate the Tanaka event, even knowing how much more rewarding a season of her work as performer would have been  - with maybe one of these dropped in. Unfortunately that's not the world we live in. Ideology trumps quality every time and female directors are what we are buying this year.

 Among the usually murky Tanaka film copies available on YouTube, many with English sub-titles, you might enjoy the agreeable Kinuyo no hatsukoi /Kinuyo’s First Love at https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=30PDj20GnUA&t=96s. There's also an excellent copy of the Tsuki Wa Noborinu/The Moon Has Risen original trailer.

My thanks to Richard Wong for his work on original Japanese texts.

Kinuyo Tanaka in Keisuke Kinoshita's great 1958 Narayama bushikô/Ballad of the Narayama.

Barrie Patison 2025