JWhere can you see the “real Japan” on film? The answer,
from the Japanese themselves, has long been the work of
Ozu Yasujiro. There they find what might be called the best
of the Japanese spirit in Ozu’s compassion for human
frailty and respect for human dignity. Ozu’s Shochiku studio
bosses famously considered his films “too Japanese” for
Westerners and did not submit them to foreign festivals, at
a time when Kurosawa Akira and Mizoguchi Kenji were
being feted abroad as newly discovered masters.
The best-known of Ozu’s films, including his 1953 masterpiece
Tokyo Story (Tokyo Monogatari), focus on the middle-
class family. The father, played by Ryu Chishu, is typically
a kindly business executive or college professor, while
the daughter or daughter-in-law, played by Hara Setsuko,
is a well-educated, well-mannered, ever-smiling young
woman. In short, an angel who can type.
When Ozu was making these films, from the late Forties to
the early Sixties, millions of Japanese were aspiring to the
sort of cultured, comfortable life they depicted. That the
reality for many was quite different was clear to one of
Ozu’s assistant directors, Imamura Shohei, who had came
from a middle-class background himself, but had lived
among the denizens of the Tokyo mizushobai - the raucous,
sex-drenched “water world” of bars, cabarets and
clubs. In his own films, Imamura explored these and other
communities outside (or excluded from) the middle-class,
where he felt the true Japanese spirit survived.
Though nearly a generation younger than Imamura,
Ichikawa Jun would seem to be squarely in the Ozu camp
(and is an avowed Ozu fan). His 1995 film Tokyo Siblings
(Tokyo Kyodai), is an Ozu homage, starting with its title.
Other of his sixteen feature films are influenced thematically
and stylistically by Ozu, if not directly based on his work.
In Dying at a Hospital (Byoin de Shinu to Iu Koto, 1993),
which Ichikawa considers his most “Ozuesque” film, he not
only keeps his camera stationary in the film’s interior
scenes, a standard Ozu technique, but injects his story of
mortality and loss with a feeling of mono no aware - life’s
pathos - that was an Ozu trademark (though given its ubiquity
in Japanese traditional culture, Ozu hardly held a
patent on it).
Ichikawa, who had a successful career as a director of TV
commercials before making his first feature film, BUSU, in
1987, resists categorization as an Ozu disciple, however.
First, he seldom deals with Ozu’s great theme - the dissolution
of the middle-class family. Instead, Imamura-like, he
often takes as his subjects people on the social fringes, if
not in the underworld: the sullen girl fighting for survival in
a chaotic urban high school in BUSU; the brother and sister
living together as a “family” in Tokyo Siblings; the
struggling comic artists in Tokiwa: The Manga Apartment
(Tokiwaso no Seishun,1996); the middle-aged drifter who
returns home in Tokyo Lullaby (Tokyo Yakyoku, 1997); the
bickering husband-and-wife comedians in Osaka Story
(Osaka Monogatari, 1999) or the lonely young woman desperate
for love in Tokyo Marigold (2001).
Stylistically, Ichikawa is hardly an Ozu imitator. For Dying at
a Hospital, he and cameraman Kobayashi Tatsuhiko went
out into the streets of Tokyo for hundreds of hours to film
candid shots of ordinary people doing everyday things. Ichikawa then edited this footage into a composite portrait
that may capture an Ozuesque sense of life’s preciousness
- but in a way that Ozu never imagined.
For Tadon and Chikuwa (Tadon to Chikuwa, 1998), a film
that marked a sharp break with his “Ozu-esque” period,
Ichikawa depicted the emotional meltdown of a frazzled
cab driver (Yakusho Koji) and a frustrated novelist (Sanada
Hiroyuki) with CG-generated horrors and surreal splashes
of multi-coloured blood. The intent was black comic commentary
on the state of the national psyche, again using
means not found in the Ozu oeuvre.
Though Ichikawa has often stretched beyond the conventions
of realism, the essence of his style remains a sensitivity
to not only colour and composition (like Kurosawa
Akira, he was a painter before he become a filmmaker), but
significant look and gesture. Some directors try to design
truth and beauty into their frames, and end up with picture
postcards. Ichikawa prefers to capture them on the fly or
the sly, like a news or nature photographer. There may be
a gentleness in his vision. He shares Ozu’s affection for his
characters, even the unsavoury ones, but there is little of
the sentimentalism endemic among Ozu’s humanist followers
- and there is a great deal of clear-eyed observation.
Where others hype or stereotype, Ichikawa simply sees.
In Japan, he falls in between commercial and critical stools,
being neither an accomplished tear jerker like Yamada Yoji
- Ozu’s most successful kohai (junior) at the Shochiku studio
- nor an edgy violator of genre conventions like Kitano
Takeshi. Nonetheless, he continues to make one film a year,
while grinding out the TV commercials that pay the bills.
Also, since Tadon and Chikuwa, Ichikawa has been consciously
breaking with his jimi (quiet, plain) image, with
varying results. His 2001 drama Tokyo Marigold, starring
the hot young actress of the moment, Tanaka Rena,
earned both box office yen and industry awards. (It is also
the Ichikawa film most widely available abroad on subtitled
video and DVD.)
His follow-up, Ryoma’s Wife, Her Husband and Her Lover
(Ryoma no Tsuma to Sono Otto to Aijin, 2002), was his first
collaboration with hit-making scriptwriter Mitani Koki
(Welcome Back, Mr. McDonald and Our House) and his first
period drama, a once-moribund genre now making a
revival. The film, however, was a mishmash, with Mitani’s
Neil Simon-ish schtick clashing with Ichikawa’s Vermeer-like
compositions of colour and light.
Following this brush with the mainstream, Ichikawa has
returned to the indie fold with Tony Takitani, a film based
on a story by Murakami Haruki about a boy stuck with the
“un-Japanese” name of Tony by his jazzman father - and
forced to live with the consequences. Filmed outdoors on a
covered stage set, with mountains visible in the background,
Tony Takitani is reminiscent of Lars Von Trier’s
Dogville. Seventeen years after staging a play-within-a-film
in BUSU - the kabuki classic Yayoya Oshichi - Ichikawa is
returning to his roots. But he is jimi no more.
Filmography/Filmografia
BUSU, (1987), Company Story (Kaisha Monogatari, 1988),
No Life King (1989), Tsugumi (1990), Greetings
(Goaisatsu [second of three segments], 1991), Dying at a
Hospital (Byoin de Shinu to Iu Koto, 1993), Tokyo Siblings
(Tokyo Kyodai, 1995), They Will Definitely Come (Kitto
Kurusa [segment of Cinema Junk], 1993), Crepe (1993),
Tokiwa: The Manga Apartment (Tokiwaso no Seishun,
1996), Tokyo Lullaby (Tokyo Yakyoku, 1997), Tadon and
Chikuwa (Tadon to Chikuwa, 1998), Osaka Story (Osaka
Monogatari, 1999), Tokyo Marigold (2001), Ryoma’s Wife,
Her Husband and Her Lover (Ryoma no Tsuma to Sono
Otto to Aijin, 2002), Tony Takitani (2004).
Mark Schilling