Tokyo 1958

Susumu Hani was born in Tokyo in 1928, the son of a famous liberal family. After schooling, he worked for a while as a journalist at Kyoto Press and entered filmmaking as a documentarist in 1950 when he joined Iwanami Productions. Most of his later dramatic features reflect his early documentary training, relying on authentic locations, amateur actors, hand-held camera techniques, and an emphasis upon contemporary social issues.

His film career comprises three areas: documentary films; narratives relating to social problems, especially among the young; and dramas focusing on the emerging woman. Of the 18 documentaries made between 1952 and 1960, the best known are Children in the Classroom and Children Who Draw Pictures. The latter won the 1957 Robert Flaherty Award.

Hani’s first dramatic feature, Bad Boys, further develops many of his previous concerns. The film, a loose series of situations about reform school, was enacted by former inmates who improvised dialogue. For Hani, truth emerges from the juxtaposition of fiction and fact. He also believes that all people have an innate capacity for acting. Subsequent films, which deal with the effect of post-war urban realities on the lives of the young, include Children Hand in Hand and Inferno of First Love. The former depicts young children in a provincial town and especially one backward child who becomes the butt of the other children’s malicious teasing and pranks; the latter is a story of two adolescents in modern Tokyo, each of whom has been exploited, who find with each other a short-lived refuge.

Like his earlier documentaries, these films explore themes relating to broken homes, the alienation of modern society, the traumatic effects of childhood, the oppressiveness of a feudal value system, and the difficulty of escaping, even in an alternative social structure. To all these films Hani brings a deep psychological understanding of the workings of the human psyche. Finally, each of these films focuses on individual growth and self-awakening, although Hani is clear to indicate that the problems cannot be solved on a personal level. Both topics—growing self-awareness and a critique of the existing social order—connect these works with Hani’s second major theme, the emergence of women.

Hani’s first film on this subject was A Full Life , which deals with the efforts of a young wife, married to a self-involved older man, to forge a life of her own in the competitive world of modern Tokyo. After demeaning work and involvement in the student demonstrations of the early 1960s, the wife returns home, a changed woman.

Hani’s other films on this topic are She and He, the depiction of a middle-class marriage in which the wife gains independence by her kindness to a local ragpicker, and Bride of the Andes, the story of a mail-order Japanese bride in Peru who finds personal growth through her relationship with South American Indians. As in A Full Life, none of these women are able to make a full break with their husbands. However, through personal growth (usually affected by contact with a group or person marginal to society), they are able to challenge the patriarchal values of Japanese society as represented by their husbands and to return to the relationship with new understanding and dignity. Both films starred Sachiko Hidari, who was then his wife.

Contact with a non-Japanese society and challenging Japanese xenophobia also occur in The Song of Bwana Toshi, which was filmed in Kenya and deals with Toshi, an ordinary Japanese man living in Central Africa. Here he cooperates with natives and rises above his isolation to establish brotherhood with foreigners.

Hani’s subsequent work, Timetable, combines his interest in contemporary youth with his continued interest in modern women. The story deals with two high school girls who decide to take a trip together. The fiction feature, which is narrated, was filmed in 8mm and each of the major actors was allowed to shoot part of the film. Further, the audience is informed of who is shooting, thereby acknowledging the filmmaker within the context of the work. The use of 8mm is not new for Hani. More than half of his fourth film was originally shot in 8mm. Likewise, the use of a narrator dates back to A Full Life. Throughout his career, Hani has concerned himself with people who have difficulty in communicating with one another. His documentaries, narratives on social problems, and dramas on emerging women have established his reputation as one of the foremost psychologists of the Japanese cinema. —Patricia Erens