"Arigato-san" means "Mr. Thank You" and refers to the protagonist of this movie, who is a very polite bus driver on the rough roads of the scenic Izu Peninsula. He is played by the handsome, smiling Uehara Ken. The movie was made in 1936 and follows a bus and its passengers. It is a true road movie, a movie that is constantly in motion - we see the bus speeding along, passing pedestrians, we see the scenery from the bus and we see the passengers and the driver and listen to their conversations.
It is beautiful to see the actual scenery and villages of that time, almost like a documentary, although I have to say that the people were also very poor - Japan was in a deep recession. The movie is based on a story by the famous author Kawabata Yasunari and contains references to his story "The Dancer of Izu", which is set along the same road.
It is beautiful to see the actual scenery and villages of that time, almost like a documentary, although I have to say that the people were also very poor - Japan was in a deep recession. The movie is based on a story by the famous author Kawabata Yasunari and contains references to his story "The Dancer of Izu", which is set along the same road.
.jpg)
There is not much of a plot, except for a red thread, a mother (Futaba Kaoru) who is so hard up that she has to sell her seventeen year old daughter (Tsukiji Mayumi) into prostitution. We are not told this at the beginning, but it becomes clear little by little. She takes her daughter by bus to the station where she will take the train to Tokyo, a city "full of badgers and foxes. Many daughters from the poor peninsula have made this journey and none has ever returned, we learn from the conversation of other passengers. But we also see some tender feelings between the still unmarried driver and the girl, so maybe there is hope...
Other passengers include a modern woman (Kuwano Michiko) who smokes cigarettes and drinks alcohol, so she probably works as a hostess in a Tokyo bar. She openly flirts with the driver and puts down anyone she dislikes, such as a smug loan salesman with a huge mustache (the man is very proud of this appendage, and there is a comic scene when another passenger boards with the exact same mustache).
But the heart of the movie is the driver, who chats friendly with the locals, delivers messages for them, and is helpful to everyone. He is a sign of stability in turbulent economic times. He had saved money to buy a used bus himself, but now uses it to help the mother and keep the seventeen-year-old girl out of prostitution (at the suggestion of the outspoken woman). This is not shown or explicitly mentioned, but in the final shots we see the girl and her mother returning home the next day on the same bus. Presumably, the bus driver will marry the young woman.
Arigato-san was made by Shimizu Hiroshi (1903-66), a friend and colleague of Ozu Yasujiro at the Shochiku studios. This light but uplifting film has become available thanks to the Criterion Collection.
Japanese Film