Kinuyo Tanaka Directs: Married to Cinema

As the 1950s began, Kinuyo Tanaka found herself at a turning point. She had been acting in films since she was fourteen, becoming one of Japan’s most beloved, admired, and prolific women stars. Now in her early forties, she saw that leading roles were slipping away from her and faced predictably sexist criticism over her age. Boldly, she set her sights on directing, though there was not a single female director then working in the Japanese film industry—and only one woman, Tazuko Sakane, had previously broken this barrier, directing one narrative feature in 1936, followed by a number of nonfiction educational films. However, the Allied occupation (1945–52) put an emphasis on women’s liberation: Japan’s new constitution and civil code, imposed by the occupiers, established for the first time women’s right to vote and equality under the law, and the postwar years saw the first female members of parliament. Inspired by these advances, Tanaka took the plunge and succeeded in making six features between 1953 and 1962. Behind the camera, she brought to the screen many of the same qualities she possessed as an actor: fearless but unshowy honesty, natural warmth, and a gift for piercing hearts with the simplest means.

Several of the directors Tanaka had worked with actively supported her career transition: Mikio Naruse gave her the chance to observe and assist him on the set of Older Brother, Younger Sister (1953), the closest she came to having any experience or training before her debut; Keisuke Kinoshita and Yasujiro Ozu wrote the screenplays for her first and second films, respectively. A notable exception was the director with whom she remains most associated, Kenji Mizoguchi, who openly opposed and disparaged her ambitions—a disappointing response from a man whose films chronicled the brutal subjugation of Japanese women.

Women’s lives are at the center of almost all of Tanaka’s films—three of which had female writers—but her six directorial efforts are strikingly diverse: they range from delicate romantic comedy to three-hankie tragedy, from raw studies of postwar social problems to lavish, color-saturated historical dramas. Each project was a chance to try something new.

Love Letter: Old Acquaintance

Kinuyo Tanaka’s debut as a director, Love Letter (1953), broached a highly sensitive topic: Japanese men’s sense of shame in the face of the country’s defeat in World War II and subsequent occupation, and their resentment of the many women who, often out of economic necessity, slept with the conquerors. That she would choose such a touchy subject was all the more remarkable given the deeply painful fallout from her 1949 visit to the United States as a goodwill ambassador. The tour itself was a smashing success, but on her return to Japan she was savaged by the press for appearing in the height of Americanized glamour, sporting sunglasses and furs and blowing kisses to the crowd. Mortified by the charge that she had betrayed her country, she retreated into a period of isolation and severe depression. Yet Love Letter, released the year after the occupation ended, shows a nation scrambling for American magazines, fashions, and dollars, even while nursing feelings of humiliation and loss.

This is the only one of Tanaka’s films to center on a male protagonist, Reikichi, a well-educated veteran unable to find work after the war. He is played by Masayuki Mori, who had starred with Tanaka in Kenji Mizoguchi’s feudal-era ghost story Ugetsu, released the same year. It is a bit of a shock to see this elegant matinee idol, in the opening scene of Love Letter, hanging laundry in a poky little apartment. A chance meeting with an old friend results in an unexpected job: writing letters in English for Japanese women—mostly sex workers, it is implied—to send to American soldiers who have returned home. Couched as flowery love messages, these are really pleas for cash. Reikichi is tolerant enough, until Michiko (Yoshiko Kuga), the long-lost love he has been searching for, turns up as a client.

The reunion between the two is perhaps the most striking moment in the film, illustrating Tanaka’s restrained treatment of melodrama and her instinct for the cinematic possibilities of everyday surroundings. They meet on a crowded railway platform; just as they come face-to-face, the door of a train slides shut, framing them for a moment in the window. Only then do we realize that the camera has moved into a passenger car, and as the train moves off it carries us, in a gliding movement, into an idyllic flashback of Reikichi and Michiko’s childhood friendship.

Love Letter captures a postwar Tokyo bustling with hectic vitality. When the production filmed in the streets, press photographers swarmed, excited by the novelty of a female director. The film, which played at the Cannes Film Festival in 1954, was well received by both audiences and critics (though the latter often patronizingly gave credit to Tanaka’s male collaborators). The story sensitively argues that the way forward lies in responsibility and forgiveness, not victimhood, and balances the wounds of the war with budding hope for renewal and second chances.

The Moon Has Risen: Poetry by the Numbers

A series of static shots sets the scene, framing temples and pagodas nestled in a tranquil park. The camera kneels ninety centimeters above the tatami to observe a family of marriageable daughters headed by a widowed father, played by Chishu Ryu. Is this a film by Yasujiro Ozu? When The Moon Has Risen (1955) came out, many critics treated Ozu as its presiding spirit. Indeed, he had written the screenplay with Ryosuke Saito and had originally planned to direct it himself, but after delays and complications caused by studio and Directors Guild politics, the project wound up at Nikkatsu and became Kinuyo Tanaka’s second directing assignment. There is not a trace of this bumpy genesis in the charming comedy, whose serene surface is gently ruffled by romantic confusion. While presenting a graceful homage to Ozu, Tanaka also animates the film with her own humor and energy.

The upper-class family at the center of the story lives in Nara, an ancient capital of Japan. The formalities and hierarchies they maintain—including the rather feudal treatment of their two servants—suggest timelessness, tradition, and conservatism. Yet reminders of modernity keep cropping up. The Moon Has Risen was partially sponsored by Nippon Telegraph and Telephone Public Corporation, which accounts for its recurring references to the wonders of communications technologies. In perhaps the classiest example of product placement ever, a pair of separated lovers exchange coded telegrams that cite poems from The Ten Thousand Leaves (Manyoshu).

Setsuko (Mie Kitahara), the youngest of three sisters, is a vivacious and outspoken young woman sporting stylish Western clothes. Convinced that her reserved older sister Ayako (Yoko Sugi) and the equally shy Amamiya (Ko Mishima) like each other, she becomes determined to set them up, and enlists the help of her friend Shoji (Shoji Yasui) in her clumsy matchmaking schemes. In one comic scene, Setsuko rehearses the willing but clueless family maid, played by the director herself, in how to impersonate her sister on the phone. The small roles that Tanaka took in her first three films are so modest that they feel like inside jokes or gestures of humility.

Meanwhile, as a filmmaker she pays attention to subtle but telling gestures and the minutiae of polite conversations, shot through with oblique hints of hidden feelings. As in the works of Jane Austen, trivial follies give rise to blinding flashes of self-knowledge. In the film’s centerpiece, Setsuko connives to get the reluctant couple alone outdoors on a moonlit night. The long sequence intertwines humor (“Stop the moon!” Setsuko cries at one point, frustrated that her sister is wasting precious minutes indoors) with an ethereal nocturne. As they bathe raptly in the moonlight, all of the characters use the same conventional phrases to describe its beauty; Tanaka tenderly shows how these shared and repeated clichés connect them like joined hands.

Forever a Woman: Portrait of the Artist

With her third film, Kinuyo Tanaka stepped out from under the wings of her mentors and developed a project on her own initiative, collaborating with Sumie Tanaka—no relation to the director—one of Japan’s foremost female screenwriters. A newspaper advertisement for the film trumpeted, “The pathos and intensity of women’s lives have never before been so revealed,” and there is some truth in the promotional hyperbole. Based on the life of tanka poet Fumiko Nakajo, Forever a Woman (1955) depicts the protagonist’s battle with breast cancer with a frankness that would have been unthinkable in Hollywood at the time. It also tells the complicated story of a woman emerging as an artist and a celebrity while contending with infidelity, divorce, motherhood, female friendship, and desire.

In her finely tuned performance, Yumeji Tsukioka doesn’t flinch from Fumiko’s unruly, confused response to her illness and her changed body. After a double mastectomy, she cycles through anger, grief, spurts of gaiety, flirtatiousness, tortured vanity, and interludes of serenity. Near the end, dying in a hospital, Fumiko asks her mother to wash her hair, and on a hot night she lies down next to Otsuki (Ryoji Hayama), a visiting reporter with whom she has formed a bond, and begs him to make love to her. (The journalist character is based on Akira Wakatsuki, who wrote a book about his relationship with Nakajo, The Eternal Breasts, which forms the basis for the film, originally released under the same title.) The film uses wintry locations in Hokkaido, Japan’s northernmost island, to ground the tragedy in an everyday realism that makes it hit even harder.

Showing her confidence as a director, Kinuyo Tanaka trimmed dialogue from some scenes, communicating instead through compositions, blocking, and cutting. One of her favorite visual devices is to use sliding doors like horizontal wipes. In The Moon Has Risen, she often places her camera outside the threshold of a room so that the fusumas (traditional interior doors made of white paper) reveal or conceal the scene within. Throughout Forever a Woman, the constant opening and closing of doors, gates, and windows suggests the possibilities that emerge or vanish for the heroine as she moves from a disappointing marriage through an unrealized romance, recognition as a poet, and terminal illness. Even as she stubbornly resists being framed by society in a conventional narrative of gallant martyrdom, she is often visually trapped. Yet her active gaze and her complex relationship to her own image prevent her from becoming an object of pity.

Graced with moments of ordinary kindness, the story refuses to locate meaning in the senselessness of disease, and it builds to an ending that quietly, mercilessly pulverizes your heart. Widely recognized as Kinuyo Tanaka’s masterpiece, Forever a Woman distills the unsentimental humanism of her vision to its essence.

The Wandering Princess: A Royal Pawn

In 1959, the memoirs of Hiro Saga became a best seller in Japan. Born into an aristocratic family, Saga had entered an arranged marriage with the younger brother of the emperor of Manchukuo, a puppet state in Manchuria that was part of the Japanese empire and dominated by Japan’s Kwantung Army. After the fall of Manchukuo and its royal family during the Second World War, she endured imprisonment, separation from her husband, and a grueling trek across northern China before eventually being repatriated to Japan. Daiei snapped up the rights to this autobiography, and the studio cast its biggest star, Machiko Kyo, as the lead in The Wandering Princess (1960).

The project gave Kinuyo Tanaka the chance to return to directing after five years away. It was heavily promoted as a josei-eiga, or woman’s film, for which the director, star, and writer were all female (the screenplay was by Natto Wada, best known for her collaborations with her husband, filmmaker Kon Ichikawa). The Wandering Princess was Tanaka’s first film in widescreen and in color, and her first historical drama, with a large cast and epic narrative. Both it and her second period film, Love Under the Crucifix (1962), view history through the eyes of women whose desires are at odds with their status as powerless pawns. The films employ a tableaulike formality to evoke the stultifying ceremonies of the ruling classes and the rigid strictures that govern the ways women dress and move, giving them scant control over their bodies or their fates.

The film begins as a collective portrait of women at a reformatory where they have been sent for rehabilitation following arrests for violating the antiprostitution law. They are a motley group, some defiant and rebellious, some physically or emotionally scarred by their lives. Relationships between women—sisters, friends, rivals, mothers and daughters—take on more weight and significance in each of Tanaka’s films, culminating in Girls of the Night, which openly portrays same-sex desire among the female inmates, as well as bullying and fights. Women, in this film, are never merely victims of a patriarchal system: they are complex and contradictory human beings. Gradually, the focus narrows to one inmate, Kuniko (Chisako Hara), who is placed in a succession of jobs. Embittered by the prejudice, exploitation, and hostility she encounters from both men and women, she becomes nostalgic for the “freedom” of the streets. When she finally meets with acceptance and the possibility of love, she feels unworthy of it.

Tanaka returns here to the raw, location-shot, black-and-white realism of Love Letter. Drab, cramped, and dark settings establish the tone for upsetting scenes of violence and cruelty. But the episodic story varies its tones and complicates any simple conclusions. In an intense and subtle performance, Hara makes Kuniko hardened, vulnerable, intelligent, and confused—telling us all we need to know about her past experience and allowing us to cherish the hope that her future life may change after all.

Love Under the Crucifix: Star-Crossed

Set in the late sixteenth century, against the backdrop of warlord Toyotomi Hideyoshi’s campaign to stamp out Christianity in Japan, Love Under the Crucifix opens on a battlefield in flames. But Kinuyo Tanaka’s sole jidai-geki (feudal-era historical drama) is not about armed combat; instead, it focuses on quieter but no less fierce conflicts between austere religious devotion and earthly passion, and between ostentatious, abusive power and the humility and integrity of the tea ceremony.

Released by Shochiku, the film was developed by an independent production company called Ninjin Kurabu (Carrot Club) founded by three actresses—Yoshiko Kuga (who had starred in Love Letter), Keiko Kishi, and Ineko Arima—in an effort to gain more creative control and improve conditions for themselves and other actors. Arima plays Ogin, stepdaughter of the legendary tea master Sen no Rikyu (Ganjiro Nakamura); both are threatened by Hideyoshi, who wants to control Rikyu’s art and possess Ogin’s body. She boldly declares her love for the pious—and married—Christian samurai Ukon (the dreamily handsome Tatsuya Nakadai), who initially rejects her. For women in this period, to express their own desires or deny the lusts of powerful men constituted acts of radical self-determination. Early in the film, Ogin witnesses a gruesome procession taking a peasant woman (Kishi) to be crucified for refusing to comply with a warlord’s customary droit du seigneur. She gazes at the defiant captive with more awe than pity, observing, “She looks so alive!”

Like The Wandering Princess, Tanaka’s final directorial effort combines lush color and largely static compositions to portray a world of passions stifled by strict rules of etiquette, ritual, and hierarchy. Values are displayed through aesthetics, and philosophies reside in objects: a cross on a chain, the pattern of a kimono, the design of a garden, or the solid-gold tea room commissioned by Hideyoshi, a grotesque mockery of the simplicity at the heart of the tea ceremony. But in a key scene, all the elaborate artifice, and the intangible structures of religion and politics, are dissolved by the elements of blood, rain, fire, and human love.

Kinuyo Tanaka, who never married or had children, liked to say that she had chosen to marry cinema. She continued acting until the year before her death, in 1977, but the films she directed were overlooked until well into the twenty-first century. Finally accessible, they have lost none of their passion and largeness of spirit, which came from the woman behind the camera.