KON

ICHIKAWA:
PROFILE  

Until recently Ichikawa's work has received scant

attention in the West and yet he's made some the
most culturally challenging works of the last
century. Many of Ichikawa's 75 films are adapted
from classic Japanese novels and at 86 he
continues to make movies. His oft quoted dictum
"I don't have any unifying theme. I just make
pictures I like..." certainly comes across in his
work but linking his diverse range of subjects is
an underlying questioning of society.

It's perverse yet suitably uncompromising that

Ichikawa should reveal a long-term affection for
Walt Disney. Beginning his career as an animator
in Kyoto, Ichikawa soon rose to directing his own
films but it wasn't until he met his wife and
screenwriter Natto Wada that his true artistry
began to take shape.

Post-war paranoia

Until 1955, Ichikawa was known for his satires

and screwball comedies. The cloud of Hiroshima
barely lifted, Ichikawa's cinematic response was
one of absurdism and chaos on a world gone
mad. Mr Pu (1953) concerns a teacher, stultified
by his fear of a nuclear attack and A Billionaire
  (1954) portrays a similar paranoia with one
character so intent on avoiding potential targets,
that he moves into a near derelict house, only to
find his neighbour obsessively constructing her
own A-bomb.

Ichikawa's talent for comedy soon gave way to

more composed and compassionate illustrations,
notably with two very different anti-war films. The
Burmese Harp (1956) is now considered a
classic of Japanese cinema with its depiction of a
soldier turned Buddhist monk. A symphony of
one man's search for atonement, it bares more
similarities to David Lean's one-man crusade in
Lawrence of Arabia, than the war genre.

Fires on the Plain (1959) although more brutal,

explores similar themes through its portrayal of a
TB sufferer's refusal to submit to cannibalism,
despite facing starvation. As in many of
Ichikawa's films, the spirit of alienation is viewed
as both a preferable and necessary reaction to
the horrors of society. In Conflagration (1958), an
acolyte burns down Kyoto's Temple of the
Golden Pavilion rather than witness its purity
tainted by human corruption. These are the true
heroes of Ichikawa's films.
 Controversial social commentary

Sexuality and teenage rebellion figure in two of

Ichikawa's most controversial social
commentaries. Odd Obsession: The Key (1959)
juxtaposes sexual conduct on many levels while
the teenage anti-social exploits of The
Punishment Room (1956) would send James
Dean's Rebel Without a Cause (1955) posse
running to mummy.

After 1965, Natto Wada bowed out of any direct

input to Ichikawa's films and his later works yield
both a greater degree of commercialism (I Am a
Cat, 1975) and prefigure the ironic social
melodramas (I Am Two, 1962) later associated
with the Japanese New Wave. Leveled within this
tsunami of work is one of cinema's finest
documentaries Tokyo Olympiad (1965), focusing
on the 1964 Olympics and An Actor's Revenge
(1965), a wonderful kabuki style, Jacobean
revenge piece.

Submersion is the only way to approach these

uniquely non-conformist, experimental movies
but once emerged, you'll be gasping for more.
Clare Norton-Smith

THE BURMESE
HARP
(BIRUMA NO
TATEGOTO)  
Kon Ichikawa,
Japan, 1956
22 August 2002
9pm-11pm

Of the great masters of Japanese cinema, the

work of Kon Ichikawa is probably the least well
known in the West. His films have never achieved
the public or critical attention they deserve and
this is likely due to his vision as an auteur. With 75
films and counting, covering an eclectic and
daunting range of subjects, it's difficult to get a
grip on what is truly at the heart of this overlooked
body of work. As the director said himself, "I don't
have any unifying theme. I just make any
picture I like...."
 

The Burmese Harp is one of

Ichikawa's first widely
acknowledged films, bolstered by This is truly a
success at The Venice Film magnificent
Festival. A compassionate, anti- epic on every
war film (yet refusing to enter into level
any cinematic discussion of
where to lay blame), this is one of
the first films to portray the
decimating effects of the war from
 the point of view of the Japanese

Through the voice over of one soldier, we're told

of the devastation and capture by the British of a
Japanese troop in 1945. The battalion's harp
player, Mizushima, is sent on a liaison mission to
persuade another troop into surrender from a
mountain in Burma. But Mizushima fails and after
encountering the full carnage of war, bodies of his
fellow countrymen piled high and left to rot, he
refuses to return to his troop. Appropriating the
Buddhist ethos, Mizushima devotes himself to
burying each of his comrades, sparing them the
ignominy suffered in wartime with the dignity of a
humane burial.

Dramatic overhead shots of a solitary figure, the

quest of one man's journey to find an inner
sanctum, lilting melodies extending emotion
where words seem futile, this is truly a magnificent
epic on every level.

Clare Norton-Smith

Of the few Japanese directors who command an international reputation, Kon

Ichikawa remains perhaps the least known and the least well understood. The handful
of his films which received widespread international distribution in the 1950s and
1960s – The Burmese Harp (1956), Fires on the Plain (1959), The Key (1959), Alone
on the Pacific (1962), An Actor's Revenge (1963) – testify to that trait which has
ironically proved his greatest critical stumbling block: an eclecticism of both theme
and style which seems to defy auteurist notions of consistency. Many have dismissed
him as “just an illustrator”, though there is another irony in the fact that the source of
that comment was Nagisa Oshima, a director whose films are similarly eclectic in
style and content. In any case, the criticism is hardly fair. While Ichikawa's work
lacks the obvious integrity of Ozu's, Mizoguchi's or Kurosawa's, its outward variety
belies an overall unity, revealed as one probes (in Tom Milne's phrase) “beneath the
skin”.

In fact, Ichikawa worked under somewhat different conditions from the other
acknowledged masters of Japanese cinema. The commercial pressures he faced
appear to have been rather stronger: it is on record that several projects (including one
of his most famous, An Actor's Revenge) were imposed on him by the studio in
revenge for the failure of his more personal works to make a profit. Yet he managed,
at the same time, to stamp his personality on diverse material. An obvious comparison
is with Howard Hawks, whose comedies, which focus on the battle of the sexes, are
often described as the thematic obverse of his action films, about camaraderie in an
almost exclusively male world. Ichikawa, similarly, divided his films into “light” and
“dark”, a division which has some justice – though my own preferred categories
would be “ironic” and “sentimental”.

Still, since most critics have stressed his versatility, it is worth concentrating instead
on the recurrent features of Ichikawa's cinema. Though he did not always write his
own scripts (most of his major films were in fact based on scripts written by his wife,
Natto Wada, only sometimes with his official collaboration), his background and
experiences still demonstrably shape the abiding concerns of his films. A native of the
Kansai region, he set many films (The Key, Conflagration [1958], Bonchi [1960], The
Makioka Sisters [1983]) in its major cities of Osaka and Kyoto – the latter of which
was also the subject of a short documentary he realised in 1969. Likewise, his early
interest in painting and his training as an animator continued to shape his visual style.
James Quandt has discussed Ichikawa's “use of manga-like storyboards”, his
preference for “the control of a studio shoot” over the uncertainty of location work,
and the way in which he himself “designed sets, adjusted the lighting, touched up
actresses' make-up [and] went to music school so he could write scores” (1). Such
total control approaches the techniques of the cartoon, and it is significant that his
career in film began, in 1933, as an assistant animator, while his first project as
director was an adaptation of a doll puppet play, The Girl at Dojo Temple (1945). As
late as 2000, in his mid eighties, Ichikawa returned to the medium with his animated
period film, Shinsengumi. Mr Pu (1953) was adapted from a popular cartoon strip,
and certainly the exaggerated facial expressions and twisted bodily postures of his
early comedies are more reminiscent of Frank Tashlin than of the nuances of
Hollywood screwball. But the influence of the cartoon, and of painting, is visible
throughout his career, in the artificial mise en scène of such films as Ten Dark Women
(1961) and An Actor's Revenge, the former intensifying the stylistic tropes of film noir
into a manga-like pastiche, the latter iconoclastically blending influences from
animation, ukiyo-e and the traditional theatre among whose practitioners its story
unfolds.

Thematically, too, Ichikawa's work displays a remarkable consistency. His abiding

concern is with the recent history of his country, and his oeuvre comprises one of the
more acerbic examinations of Japan's development in the twentieth century. His
treatment of that theme is more wide-ranging than Ozu's (which focused more
narrowly on the disintegration of traditional Japanese family values) and more direct
than Mizoguchi's, which, while always politically incisive, often achieved its impact
under cover of melodramatic convention and historical distance. Ichikawa's forays
into the distant past were
occasional: with a few
exceptions (An Actor's
Revenge, The Wanderers
[1973]), his non-
 
contemporary films were
set within living memory,
from the late Meiji period
(around the turn of the
century) to the Second   An Actor's Revenge
World War. Novels of
those years furnished his plots, while on occasion he remade films from the same era,
such as Yutaka Abe's The Woman Who Touched the Legs (1926; Ichikawa's version
appeared in 1952), Kenji Mizoguchi's Nihonbashi (1929, remade in 1956) and
Teinosuke Kinugasa's An Actor's Revenge (1937). The gesture expressed in concrete
form his admiration for the pre-war masters of the Japanese cinema, and Ichikawa's
taste for satiric ironies and absurdism can be traced to such models as Mansaku
Itami's witty deflation of feudal mores, Unrivalled Hero (1932), which the younger
director acknowledged as his favourite film.

Ichikawa's own critique of his country's sacred cows and dark secrets was, at its best,
as witty as it was merciless. It was at its worst when solemn; thus, the leaden
sentimentality and clumsy didacticism of The Outcast (1962), which labours for two
hours with much verbose rhetoric to convince us that prejudice is a Bad Thing. The
potentially interesting subject – the continuing oppression, under the allegedly
enlightened Meiji dispensation, of the Japanese burakumin, or underclass – is thrown
away, and the film is distinguished largely by the cosmetic beauties of its widescreen
snowscapes. Nor, regrettably, was Ichikawa able to find an adequate response to the
defining trauma of his generation, the Second World War – in which, due to illness,
he did not serve. The Burmese Harp and Fires on the Plain differ in approach – the
one sentimental, the other visceral, rather in the manner of the American Vietnam
movie of later years. The comparison is telling: just as Hollywood has largely failed
to deal with the politics of US involvement in Vietnam, preferring to focus on the
individual sufferings on American soldiers, so Ichikawa's war films make only a
token acknowledgement of wartime atrocities committed by the Japanese, and largely
buy into assumptions of Japanese victimhood in World War II – assumptions which to
this day remain too widespread in the country.

By contrast, Ichikawa's examinations of his nation's peacetime foibles achieved a

crucial detachment. Often, the war was a discreet but necessary background, or an
anticipated threat: as early as his first solo feature, A Flower Blooms (1948), he
examined the impotence and hypocrisy of the more or less liberal pre-war middle
class, whose passivity aided the triumph of militarism. In Conflagration, the
destruction of Kyoto's famed Golden Pavilion is seen in the context of the confusion
of a defeated nation, while in Bonchi, a story of the merchant class in pre-war Osaka,
only the apocalypse of war can destroy the oppressive family structures of that social
group. Likewise, the potential sentimentality of Her Brother (1960) – a Taisho-period
story about a family's response to the slow death of the delinquent brother from TB –
is deflected by Ichikawa's incisive direction, which draws out the irony that only
when the boy is dying can his family bear to live with him. The film is very moving,
but its subtext is, again, a sardonic critique of the Japanese family.

In the 1950s, Ichikawa's contemporary films undermined the pillars of post-war

Japanese society: the family, again, but also big business, government and the
education system. His heroes are often “little men”, powerless against the
mechanisms of their
society, like the tax
collector of A Billionaire
(1954), whose attempts to
combat official corruption  
end in dismal failure. That
film was disowned by its
director after studio
interference, and the ending
  Tokyo Olympiad
as it stands is curiously
inconclusive, yet this remains characteristic of Ichikawa. The limitation, as well as the
realism, of his satires lies in the way that they expose the dark underside of Japan's
post-war economic miracle – its corruption and its pressures to conform – without
proposing any convincing solution. In this sense, Ichikawa is a pragmatist, rather than
an activist. His endings tend towards despair: thus, the eponymous hero of Mr Pu with
his closing remark, “How simple to go mad”, or the mass poisonings which conclude
A Billionaire and The Key. The melodrama of teenage alienation, Punishment Room
(1956) and the caustic satire of the rat race, The Crowded Streetcar (1957), both star
the same lead actor, Hiroshi Kawaguchi, and form a diptych examining rebellion and
conformity: the anti-hero of the former rejects the morality of his elders, while the
hapless protagonist of the latter strives unsuccessfully to fulfil parental expectations.
Both films end bleakly: Punishment Room with the boy enduring a brutal revenge
from the outraged friends of a girl he has raped; The Crowded Streetcar with the hero
prematurely grey and reduced to menial work. Ichikawa saw in audience displeasure
at his dark conclusions the proof of his assumptions about society: he famously asked,
“Doesn't this desire for a happy ending show how unhappy they really are?” (2) Given
such attitudes, it is unsurprising that many of Ichikawa's protagonists are outsiders –
in Max Tessier's words, “individuals pursuing an absurd goal, often alone” (3).
Examples include the soldier turned monk in The Burmese Harp, scouring the
beaches of Burma for the remains of dead Japanese servicemen; the athletes in Tokyo
Olympiad (1964); and the 23-year-old Kenichi Horie, who sailed single-handedly
from Osaka to San Francisco, in Alone on the Pacific. There is a note of existentialism
to the way in which such characters justify themselves through fulfilment of self-
imposed tasks. Yet Ichikawa is careful not to glamourise his outsiders – rather, he
stresses their humanity, hence the focus on the physical fragility of the athletes in
Tokyo Olympiad. Also, he admits the limits of their rebellion, as in the Defoe-like
moment in Alone on the Pacific where the hero, stripped to the waist, is embarrassed
enough to go below deck to remove his underpants, even though he is miles from any
other human being. Even Ichikawa's outsiders, it seems, feel the pressure to conform.

Ichikawa's sceptical attitude to his country's traditions and institutions ties in with
another recurrent theme of his work: his interest in the young, and in the gulfs
between the generations. In the late 1950s and early '60s, his regular male lead was
Raizo Ichikawa, whose good looks, rebellious yet sensitive demeanour and early
death combined to make him something of a James Dean figure. His adaptation in
Punishment Room of Shintaro Ishihara's seminal novel of youthful discontent linked
him briefly to the taiyozoku (sun tribe) movement, characterised by accounts of the
violent amorality and sexual promiscuity of modern youth – that the film was
picketed by housewives anxious to prevent students from seeing it only serves to
demonstrate the reality of the generational divide which it examines (4). The hero of
Alone on the Pacific has little common ground with his parents, and the film ends on a
curiously bleak note as he sleeps through their congratulatory phone call. The most
extreme example of Ichikawa's concern for the experience of youth is I am Two
(1962), an examination of the little difficulties of family life narrated in the first
person by a two-year-old child. Here the differing perspectives of the boy and his
parents are contrasted, while the film also examines the gulf in attitude between the
parents – members of the generation who reached adulthood after the Second World
War – and the more socially conservative grandmother. The most emotionally intense
sequences of the film revolve around her death, which implicitly exposes her attitudes
as outdated.

The deaths of parents are,

indeed, another recurrent
 

  An Actor's Revenge
motif in Ichikawa's work. The protagonist of An Actor's Revenge seeks to avenge the
deaths of his parents; Punishment Room and Bonshi contain weak, ailing fathers, who
later die; in The Wanderers, one boy is forced by the warrior code to kill his father.
The motif acquires a particular resonance in The Heart (1955), which probes a young
man's relationship with his older mentor, a surrogate father figure who ultimately
commits suicide, against the backdrop of his biological father's death, and the death of
the Meiji Emperor, father of the nation. The film becomes an examination of the
conflict between duty and affection: the hero abandons his dying father to return to
Tokyo at the news of his mentor's suicide. The implication here – that family loyalties
might become secondary to freely chosen bonds of friendship – clearly subverts
traditional expectations. The choice between two father figures acquires a more direct
political implication in The Outcast, where the hero, who has sworn to his dying
father always to conceal his status as a member of the underclass, breaks his oath in
loyalty to a surrogate father, also by then dead, also a member of the burakumin class
who had sought his protégé's help to publicise their cause. Here, pursuing the path of
filial duty would sustain the oppression of his class; political change requires a
rejection of traditional loyalties. In Conflagration, the protagonist's father, who died
as Japan moved towards defeat in World War II, is associated with the Golden
Pavilion; the young acolyte's destruction of the structure is a metaphoric assault on the
father, representative of the dead weight of Japan's obsolete customs. As such, it runs
contrary to the retro-fascist nationalism of the story's original author, Yukio Mishima,
who portrays the assault on the temple as a fanatic's attempt to preserve its purity
from the sullying influence of post-war commercialism. Ichikawa himself remarked
that he “did not think the Golden Pavilion so great or beautiful a structure,” and
argued that “the presence of this great structure does not secure the well-being of
human beings around it, or make them happy” (5). In his film, arson becomes an act
of rebellion against traditions which have lost their meaning, but which still exert an
oppressive influence.

Given this pervasive criticism of the traditions of his country, it is ironic that
Ichikawa's own career suffered as the nation modernised itself. His realisation in 1964
of a documentary about the Tokyo Olympics had its own uneasy symbolism: Japan's
hosting of the event demonstrated to the world its emergence into modernity, and
coincided with the collapse of the old studio system in the face of growing
commercial pressure. After a few unproductive years in the late '60s and a flirtation
thereafter with independent production, Ichikawa was eventually able to return to
regular filmmaking, albeit on the studios' terms. The complex thriller, The Inugami
Family (1976), was the commercial success which enabled him to go on working
through the '80s, when even so eminent a figure as Akira Kurosawa was reliant on
foreign backing, and the other major directors of his generation had mostly retired,
died or gone into television. His later films often self-consciously recall his status as a
veteran: he remade a past success in The Burmese Harp (1985), and, with Actress
(1987), recreated the Golden Age of the Japanese cinema in a biopic of its greatest
actress, Kinuyo Tanaka. Dora-Heita (1999) was a realisation of a 30-year-old script
co-written with Kurosawa, Masaki Kobayaski and Keisuke Kinoshita, originally for
the independent production company bankrupted by the failure of Kurosawa's
Dodeskaden (1970). Even at that remove, its story, about a lone hero's battle against
widespread corruption, was a fairly obvious metaphor for those veterans' distaste for
the explicit violence and overt sexuality of modern Japanese cinema. In the hands of
Ichikawa, such conservatism seems a little incongruous; his best films, despite the
tighter restrictions on filmmakers at the period of their production, were willing to
deal with most aspects of life, and are as unembarrassed by sex as they are unexcited
by violence. The precision of observation is their great virtue. If Ichikawa, alive and
still working at this writing, remains, along with Kaneto Shindo, one of the last
tangible links to the rich heritage of Japanese film, his best work is not that of a
heritage filmmaker. Rather, his acerbic account of tradition, modernisation and
alienation in twentieth century Japan will remain one of the more eloquent
examinations of how his country came to be as it now is.

VIDA DE KON ICHIKAWA

El director japonés Kon Ichikawa, considerado uno de los cuatro grandes del
cine nipón junto con Akira Kurosawa, Kenji Mizoguchi y Yasujiro Ozu, falleció
a los 92 años de neumonía el 13 de febrero en Tokio, según informó la célebre
productora japonesa Toho, que estrenó Las hermanas Makioka y otros
muchos de sus filmes.

La noticia en otros webs

 webs en español
 en otros idiomas

Ichikawa era considerado el nexo entre la Generación de Oro y la Nueva Ola

del cine nipón, uno de los nombres clave del cine histórico y "el maestro de la
paradoja" por su capacidad de analizar, con comedias satíricas, los aspectos
más dolorosos de la sociedad japonesa.

Sus 88 películas giran en torno a la depresión, la locura y la neurosis del

japonés medio por sus condicionamientos familiares y sociales en un país, de
fuertes tradiciones, pero traumatizado por la segunda conflagración mundial y
por la implantación del capitalismo salvaje.

Su obra abarca melodramas de espíritu humanista, comedias negras,

documentales, cintas históricas y adaptaciones cinematográficas con
largometrajes de obras de grandes autores japoneses, como Junichiro
Tanizaki, Toson Shimazak y Soseki Natsume y Yukio Mishima, en cuya obra
más famosa, El templo del pabellón dorado, se inspiró para hacer
Conflagración, en 1958.
Ichikawa, quien escribió también medio centenar de guiones y produjo casi
una docena de filmes, se convirtió en uno de los directores más populares de
su país en un momento en que Occidente descubría el cine japonés.

Nacido el 20 de noviembre de 1915 en la prefectura de Mie, al oeste de Japón,

Ichikawa, cuyo nombre real era Uji Yamada, se trasladó a Osaka para estudiar
Comercio. Pero su pasión desde niño por los espectáculos de títeres y los
dibujos animados, como los de Walt Disney, le llevaron finalmente a enfocar
su vida profesional en ese sentido. Así, en 1933 inició su carrera en el cine de
animación en los J. O. Studios, en Kioto, donde aprendió todo lo relativo a las
técnicas de filmación con muñecos articulados y ascendió a ayudante de
dirección.

En 1946 realizó su ópera prima, La chica del templo Dojo, una versión con
marionetas de una obra del teatro clásico popular japonés Kabuki, cuyo rodaje
se completó. Sin embargo, su exhibición fue prohibida por las autoridades
estadounidenses de ocupación. En 1951, la productora Toho compró los
estudios e Ichikawa se mudó a Tokio, lugar en el que conoció a la que sería su
esposa, la guionista Natto Wada, una brillante escritora y autora de la mayoría
de los guiones que dirigió el cineasta.

Ichikawa recibió el Premio Internacional de la Crítica del Festival de Cannes

(Francia) por su documental Olimpiadas de Tokio (1965). Ese filme también
le valió un premio de la Academia de Cine y Televisión Británica (BAFTA) en
1966, y es, según los críticos, equiparable en calidad al que rodó Leni
Riefenstahl sobre la Olimpiada en Berlín en 1936.

Su obra más lograda fue El arpa birmana (1956), en la que Ichikawa aborda
con humanidad el tema de un soldado japonés que en los últimos días de la
guerra del Pacífico se convierte en el único superviviente de su pelotón.
Espantado por las pilas de cadáveres con que se tropieza, se niega a regresar a
Japón, se hace pasar por un monje budista y se queda en Birmania para
atender a los heridos y enterrar a los muertos, y purgar de esa manera su
participación en los horrores del conflicto.

Esta película antibelicista ganó el León de Oro del Festival de Venecia. La

vigencia de su mensaje se puso de manifiesto cuando Ichikawa creó una nueva
versión de ella en 1985.
El cineasta retorna a ese tema con una película todavía más dura que El arpa
birmana, Fuego en la llanura (1959), adaptación cinematográfica de la novela
homónima, la gran obra clásica japonesa de Shohei Ooka sobre la II Guerra
Mundial. El relato, lleno de humanismo, es llevado a la pantalla con enorme
pericia por Ichikawa, quien hace que la acción avance lentamente, lo que
permite percibir sutilmente matices poéticos que revelan la sensibilidad
estética del director.

Con la misma profesionalidad formal y profundidad dramática que esas dos

cintas, Ichikawa dirigió Otooto (El primogénito); en 1960; Watasi wa nisai
(Tener dos años no es fácil), en 1962; Ai Futabati (El amor dos veces), de
1971, y Kofuku (Felicidad), en 1982.

En su carrera profesional recibió 16 candidaturas y 28 galardones en

certámenes de cine como el de Venecia y el de Montreal (Canadá). Este último
le concedió un premio a toda su obra en 2001. El Estado japonés le otorgó una
orden al mérito cultural en 1994, y en 2006, el Festival Internacional de Tokio
le entregó el premio Akira Kurosawa. Su último filme fue El clan Inugami, en
2006.