Tanaka Kinuyo
Born in Shimonoseki, Japan, Tanaka Kinuyo (1909-1977) devoted her entire life to the cinema, appearing in over 250 films and working with the most important directors - but she is best known for her 15 films with director Mizoguchi Kenji. In addition, Tanaka became one of the first Japanese women to direct a film with her 1953 directorial debut, Love Letter. Between 1953 and 1962, Tanaka directed six feature films within the mainstream Japanese studio system. Her distinguished career in front of and behind the camera traces the history and technical transformations of cinema in Japan from the silent era to the late 1970s.
[Tanaka Kinuyo in The Dancer of Izu]
Tanaka's first credited film appearance was in 1924 at the age of 14, which also marked the beginning of her association with the Shochiku studios. She briefly lived with director Shimizu Hiroshi after appearing in several of his films, but they soon separated. Tanaka remained unmarried for the rest of her life. In 1931 she appeared in Japan's first sound film, The Neighbor's Wife and Mine, directed by Gosho Heinosuke. Gosho also directed her in his adaptation of the famous Kawabata story, The Dancing Girl of Izu (1933). In 1935, Tanaka featured in Shimazu Yasujiro's rendering of Tanizaki Junichiro's famous novella Shunkinsho in the style of a shoshimin-eiga, set in down-town Osaka, and filmed under the title Okoto and Sasuke. At the same time it is one of the earliest and most successful bungei-eiga, also thanks to the solid acting of the two stars Tanaka Kinuyo and Takada Kokichi. Despite the addition of some funny elements, the film works very well, and is in fact a surprisingly good version of the difficult to adapt Tanizaki story. In 1938, she co-starred with Uehara Ken in Nomura Hiromasa's Aizen katsura, which was the highest grossing film of the pre-war period. In 1941, she appeared in Ornamental Hairpin, directed by Shimizu, which is now considered one of the director's most mature works, thanks in part to Tanaka's performance.
Another wartime film was Army (1944) by Kinoshita Keisuke, the story of three generations of a Japanese family and their relationship with the army from the Meiji era to the Japanese invasion of Manchuria. It is a superficially conformist movie, forgettable except for the wordless final scene: as the son marches off with the army for the invasion of Manchuria, his mother - Tanaka's character - runs beside him in tears, expressing her concern for his well-being (instead of being proud or jubilant like the other mothers). For several minutes, we follow her worried face until she loses sight of him as she clasps her hands together in Buddhist prayer. The censors were not amused (this scene slipped through because there was no text), but fortunately for Kinoshita, the war was almost over. It is a stunning performance by Tanaka Kinuyo.
After the war, Tanaka worked on films with Naruse, Ozu, Kinoshita, Gosho and others. Although Tanaka Kinuyo gave excellent performances in her early postwar films, the films themselves were not top tier. Her first film was Utamaro and His Five Women, a period film under Mizoguchi Kenji. Jidaigeki were forbidden under the Occupation because they usually contained feudalistic ideology, but Mizoguchi argued with the censors that Utamaro was "a popular democratic painter" and agreed to emphasize the topic of female emancipation. In reality, the film is more a meditation on the role of the artist in society. Tanaka plays the role of Okita, Utamaro's main source of inspiration, but all the same only one of the five women, so her screen-time is limited.
In 1947 followed The Love of Sumako the Actress, also with Mizoguchi, a portrayal of the life of actress Matsui Sumako, one of Japan's first emancipated women, who committed suicide in 1918 because of social pressure. In 1948, the same director made Women of the Night, a Neo-realist depiction of prostitutes working for the occupiers in the rubble of Osaka, the so-called "pan-pan" girls. Tanaka played the role of a streetwalker forced into prostitution by poverty. In 1948 Tanaka also acted in A Hen in the Wind by Yasujiro Ozu, one of this director's most atypical films, in which a soldier returning from war throws his wife down the stairs because she has confessed that she was forced to prostitute herself to pay the medical bills of their sick son. And in 1949 followed Flame of My Love, one of Mizoguchi's most outspoken films, based on the life of feminist Fukuda Hideko (again played by Tanaka).
Beginning in October 1949, Tanaka made a three-month trip to the United States as one of Japan's first postwar cultural ambassadors. Upon her return, she was criticized for becoming "too American," but it is easy to imagine what a great time she must have had as one of the first Japanese allowed to travel after the war - fresh from Japan's poverty and ruined cities to a then-flourishing America. After her return, Tanaka resigned from Shochiku and announced her intention to go freelance, which would give her more freedom to choose the directors she wanted to work with. One more change was that from
now on Tanaka gradually moved from ingénue to more gerontic roles - stead of a young woman she now started playing the roles of the mother of such a young woman.
In 1950, however, she worked again with Shochiku director Ozu (but for Shintoho), this time on The Munekata Sisters, about the cultural conflict between tradition and modernity, embodied by two sisters, the older, married one conservative and wearing a kimono (Tanaka), the younger, unmarried one liberal and wearing Western clothes (Takamine Hideko). Unfortunately, it is a rather schematic and overtly melodramatic story, with an alcoholic husband who suddenly drops dead - causing the only scream of a woman in all of Ozu.
In 1951, she made her first major feature film with director Naruse Mikio: Ginza Cosmetics, about the life and tribulations of a bar hostess and single mother of a young boy in Tokyo's lively Ginza district. She also appeared in two films by Mizoguchi, Miss Oyu and The Lady of Musashino, both rather mediocre because these films were too melodramatic and also because not all the other actors were on the same level as Tanaka (who again gave great performances). To my regret, Miss Oyu, which is partly based on Tanizaki's novella Ashikari, goes completely off the track in melodrama in the second half (the first half was not bad, especially as Tanaka gives a great performance of the elegant Oyu-san).
Finally, in 1952, came one of the greatest and most iconic films she ever made with Mizoguchi: The Life of Oharu. This exceptional movie was made when Tanaka was 43, the age at which Hara Setsuko retired from film. She also starred in Mizoguchi's other masterpieces, Ugetsu (1953) and Sansho the Bailiff (1954), although in these films she was not the central character as in The Life of Oharu, and therefore received less screen time. A recurring theme in these films was the fate of women mistreated by family, lovers, and society.
Another important film from 1952 was Okasan ("Mother") with Naruse Mikio, one of the most successful of postwar shoshimin-eiga. A daughter witnesses her widowed mother (with three children), a tenacious, aging woman, struggling to keep the dry-cleaning business left by her husband going and avoid poverty. Melodramas about maternal love and sacrifice, so-called "haha-mono," were popular since the early fifties; Tanaka plays the role of the mother.
In 1953 she appeared in Entotsu no Mieru Basho ("Where Chimneys Are Seen") by Gosho Heinosuke, a humorous film which was entered into the 3rd Berlin International Film festival. The lives of four ordinary people living in an industrial-residential area of Tokyo, centering around the anecdote of an unwelcome baby. Finding a baby on her doorstep leads to problems between Tanaka and her husband, but luckily there are more couples living in the same building. The chimneys of the tile look different depending on the viewpoint of the observer, and so it is also with life - it is as each person happens to see it.
These were busy years. In 1954 she also played in Mizoguchi's The Woman in the Rumor. Hatsuko (Tanaka) runs a geisha house in Kyoto, she is a widow. His daughter Yukiko returns from Tokyo after a suicide attempt, when her lover abandoned her because her mother is a geisha. Hatsuko is the mistress of the young doctor Matoba, who takes care of the geishas of the house. The doctor becomes attracted to Yukiko, who at first despises him, like everything about the house of high-ranking courtesans and geisha. But Yukiko changes her attitude and mother and daughter begin loving the same man...
Another geisha film was Nagareru ("Flowing") from 1956 by Naruse Mikio. In this film Tanaka is not the woman who runs the geisha house (that is Yamada Isuzu), but a maid who observes the decline of the geisha world from her special position. She has recently lost her husband and is trying to reestablish her own life. She is hired although she is older than the usual candidate, but she brings sweetness and humanity to the job. Yamada Isuzu plays a proud middle-aged geisha who fights to uphold professional values against the pressure to decline into prostitution. Her daughter Katsuyo (Talameni Hideko) doesn't see any future in her mothers' trade. Shows the increasing modern uncertainty threatening a centuries-old way of life.
Higanbana ("Equinox Flower") by Ozu Yasujiro is this director's first color film, made in 1958. A daughter (Arima Taeko) wants to make her own choice of marriage partner; the despotic father (Saburi Shin) opposes, but the mother (Tanaka Kinuyo) sympathizes and the father is finally won over. Shows how later in his career Ozu became increasingly sympathetic with the younger generation. Also, with its satire, pure comedy and deep irony a much lighter work than Ozu's previous films. With one of the best later roles by Tanaka, while also typical Japanese kimono beauty Yamamoto Fujiko makes an appearance.
From the same year is "The Ballad of Narayama" by Kinoshita Keisuke. In the remote mountains, certain poor villages have the custom to abandon the elderly on a mountaintop in order to ensure that the younger generation has enough to eat. Orin (Tanaka Kinuyo) arranges a marriage for her son and is then stoically resigned to her fate, although other old folks put up a struggle against their exile. Kinema Junpo Award for Best Film of the Year.
One of Tanaka's last films was Kei Kumai's 1975 Sandakan N° 8, in which she played an aged ex-prostitute, a role for which she won the Best Actress Award at the 25th Berlin International Film Festival.
[Tanaka Kinuyo in The Neigbor's Wife and Mine]
1. The Neighbor's Wife and Mine (Madame to Nyobo) with Gosho Heinosuke (1931).
Japan's first sound film (1931) is a domestic comedy (shoshimin-eiga) made at Shochiku about a playwright suffering from writer's block who is distracted by various noises, such as a crying baby, mice and a cat, but most of all by a jazz band practicing at the home of the modern woman next door (a good excuse to go there and join the party). Sound is used sparingly and inventively - this is a movie that needs sound for the many off-screen noises and could never have worked with a benshi. Tanaka Kinuyo plays the writer's wife, who is constantly trying to wake him up from his lethargy and get him writing a play he has to finish in a few days. "My Blue Heaven" is used for the finale, in which the husband and wife almost forget their baby while walking in the fields.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pijDMuktxCY
2. The Dancing Girl of Izu (Izu no Odoriko) with Gosho Heinosuke (1933)
Although the original story is primarily about the acceptance of the lonely student by a troupe of itinerant actors (the lowest of the low, often forbidden to enter the villages) and his happiness at being connected to humanity, Gosho sets the tone for a whole series of Odoriko films in which the (platonic) love between the student and the underage dancing girl is emphasized, ending in a moving scene of parting. Tanaka Kinuyo played the dancing girl, and since she was a real actress (as opposed to the singers and teenage "talents" who would follow), she is by far the best. She was already 24 at the time, so a bit old to play a young teenager, but she very well manages to play her girlish character. The movie as a whole is not so good, as Gosho unfortunately added a subplot about a gold mine, which is not in Kawabata, but the film was shot outdoors on the Izu peninsula, and there are beautiful landscapes. This movie was also the beginning of the so-called jun-bungaku or "pure literature" movement in film (also called bungei eiga), the adaptation of literary masterpieces for the screen.
3. Ornamental Hairpin with Shimizu Hiroshi (1941)
During the war, a diverse group of people are staying at a remote onsen, thrown together by chance. There is a grumpy professor who longs for peace and quiet to study, and who regularly scolds a young husband for being too soft on his wife; an elderly man with his two grandsons, Taro and Jiro; and a soldier, Nanmura (a young Ryu Chishu in one of his first roles), who is recovering from the war. A group of pilgrims also joins them for the night, including Emi (Tanaka Kinuyo), a geisha from Tokyo who has run away from her patron, and her geisha friend Okiku. Nanmura is forced to extend his stay when he steps on a kanzashi, a woman's ornamental hairpin, lost in the bathtub. After the owner of the pin, Emi, is located through an exchange of letters, she returns to the onsen to apologize. A romance develops between Nanmura and the young woman, who is determined not to return to Tokyo and to end her life as a geisha. With the help of Emi and the two boys, Jiro and Taro, Nanmura makes progress in his daily exercises to regain his health. But at the end of the season, one by one, the residents return to Tokyo, including Nanmura, who must rejoin the military, leaving Emi alone in the abandoned spa, facing an uncertain future. The poetic movie seems like a vacation from the war and is more about characterization than plot. It is a bittersweet story with great performances by Tanaka Kinuyo and Ryu Chishu, who sensitively suggest unspoken emotions. Although it is a movie about a group of people, Emi/Tanaka is given a privileged status in the narrative, as we mainly follow her thoughts and her decision to start a new life - whatever that may bring.
4. Ginza Cosmetics with Naruse Mikio (1951)
A showcase for Tanaka Kinuyo. Set in Tokyo’s Ginza district, this is an account of a few days in the life of a luckless middle-aged bar hostess as she struggles to make a living for herself and her young son (as a single-mom). Her hum-drum life is closely observed - events serve mainly to display the difficulties of her life and her strength of character in face of the hardships facing a bar hostess. Tanaka's character is partly a reprise of streetwalking characters she had recently played in films by other directors, as Mizoguchi's Women of the Night. Her young son manages on his own when she is working, but when he gets lost one day, she runs off to find him - she is obliged to leave the nice and intelligent young man she is with, with her sister, who wastes no time falling in love and marrying him. Another chance is lost, but she doesn't begrudge her sister making a successful match. Naruse uses his own personal impressions of the Ginza where he apparently regularly went bar-hopping, so that the setting becomes a constituent element in the film.
5. Mother with Naruse Mikio (1952)
One of the most successful post-war Shoshimin-eiga. A daughter (Kagawa Kyoko) witnesses her widowed mother (with three children), a tenacious, aging woman struggling to keep the dry-cleaning business left by her husband going and to avoid poverty. The title role is played by Kinuyo Tanaka, whose every gesture is imbued with a truthfulness that counteracts even the most melodramatic situations. Despite its high level of sentimentality, this is a rare Naruse movie with a positive ending.
6. The Life of Oharu with Mizoguchi Kenji (1952)
Loosely based on a classical novel by 17th c. author Iharu Saikaku. The atypical period film chronicles the inexorable decline of a court lady (Tanaka Kinuyo) who falls in love with a man below her station (the man is dutifully executed for his trespass) and finally ends up as a cheap harlot, via being the concubine of a lord (solely to produce a baby), a geisha, and the wife of a fan maker. Finally, Oharu becomes a Buddhist nun. Imbued with a sad beauty. Mizoguchi received international renown for his cinematic techniques. Venice Film Festival International prize.
7. Where Chimneys are Seen with Gosho Heinosuke (1953)
The lives of a group of ordinary - but very poor - people living in an industrial area of Tokyo. But just as the smokestacks of the title look different depending on the viewer's point of view, so does life - it is as each person happens to see it. Ogata Ryukichi (Uehara Ken) is the main narrator, who introduces the viewer to his modest circumstances and, for the moment, happy home. He has married a cheerful and kind woman, Hiroko (Tanaka), who was widowed during the war, and the couple rents out their upstairs to other lodgers to make ends meet. They are so poor that they take complicated measures to avoid having children, a luxury they cannot afford. One day, the Ogatas find a baby in the doorway of the house with a note signed by the wife's first husband stating that it is Tanaka's daughter (meaning that she still has a secret relationship with her first husband). The marriage is in crisis, but things are resolved when the first husband is found by Ryukichi. Tanaka is the emotional core of the movie, around which the story develops.
8. The Woman of Rumor with Mizoguchi Kenji (1954)
Hatsuko is a widow who runs a prosperous geisha house in Kyoto. But we are in a time when the business of geisha houses is turning into prostitution, and Hatsuko's house is actually a brothel. Business is good, though - there's a large group of regular customers, and new businessmen continue to stream through the doors - and Hatsuko has been able to live well, provide a full university education for her daughter Yukiko, and provide a reasonable living for the 15 girls she supervises. Yukiko (Kuga Yoshiko) returns from Tokyo to recover from a failed suicide attempt after her lover found out about her mother's profession and left her. Yukiko is very uncomfortable with the situation, as she despises everything associated with the house of high-ranking courtesans (taiyu) and geisha. Hatsuko has a discreet love affair with the young Dr. Matoba, who takes care of the geisha in the house. But then the doctor becomes attracted to Yukiko, who is closer in age, and mother and daughter begin to love the same man. When the doctor and Yukiko make plans to move to Tokyo and Hatsuko overhears them, the stage is set for high drama.
9. Nagareru ("Flowing") with Naruse Mikio (1956)
The decline of the geisha world as seen through the eyes of a maid. In the 1950s, geisha found their way of life overshadowed and nearly extinguished by the growing popularity of prostitution. The story follows Rika (Tanaka Kinuyo), a widow whose dire financial circumstances force her to take a job as a housemaid in a failing Tokyo geisha house. Through Rika's eyes, Naruse reveals the proud middle-aged mistress's (Yamada Isuzu) valiant struggle to uphold professional values against the pressure to descend into prostitution. He also introduces us to the individual geishas, who bicker with each other, drink copious amounts of alcohol, and struggle with the growing certainty that their centuries-old way of life will soon become extinct.
10. Equinox Flower with Ozu Yasujiro (1958)
Higanbana ("Equinox Flower") by Yasujiro Ozu is the director's first color film. A daughter (Arima Taeko) wants to choose her own husband; her despotic father (Saburi Shin) is opposed - he himself had a prosaic arranged marriage - but the mother (Tanaka Kinuyo) sympathizes, and the father is eventually won over. Ozu has the mother and other women in the movie massage the father's opinions in the right direction, in a quiet rebellion that is more powerful than any blunt force. It is also very Japanese: there is no direct confrontation, on the surface the father is always respected, but he is still brought around to his wife's opinion. It shows how Ozu became more and more sympathetic to the younger generation later in his career. Also, with its satire, pure comedy and deep irony, a much lighter work than Ozu's previous films. With one of the best later roles of Tanaka Kinuyo.
11. The Ballad of Narayama with Kinoshita Keisuke (1958)
"Ubasute" is a mythical practice of senicide in which an infirm or elderly relative was taken to a mountain or other remote, desolate place and left there to die. This gruesome custom was never really practiced, it is just a folk tale, but it became a topic through the movie "The Ballad of Narayama" by Kinoshita. To soften the cruelty and show the unreality, Kinoshita used kabuki and bunraku stage techniques to distance the story; he also filmed everything on a very unrealistic set. The result is very artificial (as are some other films in which this director used special techniques, such as coloring or framing), and this is not a film I like a great deal, but I include it for the impressive performance by Tanaka Kinuyo as the 70-year-old matriarch Orin, who is taken to the mountains by her son and left to die. Orin arranges a marriage for her son that will add another mouth to the dirt-poor village, and then stoically resigns herself to her fate. Kinoshita constantly contrasts Orin's goodness and sacrificial attitude with the darker side of human nature (not the son, who is kind enough, but the grandson and some other villagers). Shamed by her good health and appetite, in one scene Orin even knocks out her teeth to eat less. Tanaka was only 49 when she played this role, so she seems to have padded her back to look old enough.
The Tanaka Kinuyo Bunkakan museum in Shimonoseki is a tribute to the actress at her birthplace.
A study about the actress is Tanaka Kinuyo: Nation, Stardom and Female Subjectivity (EUP, 2017).