"People denounce them as the sin of the war. But who will atone for the sin?"
A window into post-war Japan that is sympathetic to the plight of women, perhaps naturally as it was the first film directed by Kinuyo Tanaka and it was written by progressive director Keisuke Kinoshita. However, it's one that also reveals the constraints of the day, which in several instances were less than pleasant, admittedly from the viewpoint of a very different culture, and seven decades later.
The film is about a veteran who was devastated when his love from childhood married another man during the war, her father advising her at the time not to wait for him as he could die any minute. Ironically, he lived, and the man she married died, leaving her a poor window. To make ends meet, like many other women, she became the lover of an American serviceman after the war, one who has now left her and is back in the States. Feeling herself unworthy, she's written her childhood love that she's married, and tells him "I wish I could throw away everything and run into your embrace," which devastates him. By chance, however, he runs into her again. He's taken a job writing "love letters" for Japanese women in English for their American boyfriends, you see, and overhears her in there one day.
This sets up the central conflict of the film, the fact that after they parted, he was always faithful to her, while she slept with a foreigner, and on top of it had a despised "blue-eyed baby" which died (this ugly reference to racial impurity is mentioned in just a single line). In a bit of obvious symbolism, Tanaka shows the guy in front of the statue of the incredibly loyal dog Hachiko at Shibuya station, subject of a later tearjerker, which had been erected in 1934, in case his virtue wasn't obvious to us. When he finds out what's she's really been up to, he lets the moral condemnation flow. "But why did you let an American soldier have you? Who killed your husband? It could have been the man you slept with," he preaches, rejecting her. For much of the film he thus has the moral high ground, while she is judged severely, of course meekly taking it, which was difficult to watch.
Tanaka's filmmaking had some very lovely moments though, such as when the train door closes with the lovers at the platform, and the we're whisked back into the past, with a beautiful scene from childhood and another between his mother and the girl before he'll be going off to war. Her camera moves in ways that seem very natural. It was also quite nice to see footage in Japan from 1953, and the film to be unfettered by American censors, who had left the year before. Along those lines, there seemed to be a little bit of glee in making these women so faithless to their American boyfriends, their gushing letters invented and written by a male translator while they sit on impassively, smoking, and in one case moving on from one letter to the next.
The first half of this film, filling in the story, is quite strong, but the back half lags, made worse by the moral condemnation. It's too bad some of this time wasn't devoted to expanding on the story of the brother's girlfriend, who was perky and a lot of fun. Wouldn't it have been nice if she had had a skeleton of some sort in her closet too, or for that matter, had we found out about some of the sins of the Japanese servicemen re: comfort women? But I digress, of course that wasn't going to be in here.
There is redemption which comes along, perhaps in the best possible form for Japan in 1953, but it certainly had a giant asterisk on it. In a scene where the young woman runs into three of the other women she used to hang out with near the American base, she is carefully distinguished from these "real wh*res" as a "different kind of women." Ugh. Later as she's questioned alone, we find that she had been with only had one American lover, when two or three would have been available. Oh, thank goodness, she's not a slut!
On the other hand, with the guy, it's his wise co-worker who comes to the rescue, slapping him around in one scene and saying "Unforgiveable? It's your egotism. Who do you think you are? A saint?" And later, most critically, "He who is without sin, let him cast the first stone. All of us Japanese are responsible for the war. And all of us struggled through the postwar days. Who can throw a stone at whom?" He doesn't mention Hirohito or disastrous Japanese military aggression, but maybe viewers simply read between the lines.
It was in these final moments that the film redeemed itself somewhat with me. There is certainly an aura of forgiveness and moving on about it, a nation still processing what the aftermath of the war had meant, but I just wish it hadn't carried the righteous anger towards Japanese women so long, and had been a little broader in what it was examining. Pretty impressive debut film though.
