Japanese Girls at the Harbor (Hiroshi Shimizu, 1933).
In 1924, Hiroshi Shimizu, the 21-year-old son of a wealthy businessman, dropped his studies at an agricultural school in Hokkaido and moved to Tokyo to pursue his interest in filmmaking. The Japanese industry was in a state of flux, moving away from the jidaigeki, or period dramas, and towards gendaigeki, films about contemporary life: slapstick, romantic, and sport-themed comedies; crime films; and its trademark, shōshimin-eiga, social dramas concerned with working and middle class life.
One of the major forces of this change was Shochiku, the studio where Shimizu landed a job, first as an assistant director, and then in 1925 as a full-fledged director. Under the leadership of Shiro Kido, an ambitious young executive, Shochiku was establishing itself as a distinctly modern film studio within a major metropolis. Tokyo was in the midst of a growth spurt, with urban sprawl accelerating and multitudes of people migrating from the countryside. In the course of Japan’s decades-long transformation from an agrarian into an urban, industrial society, the audience for cinema had exploded, and Shochiku was primed not only to meet this demand but to make films that specifically dramatized these new social realities and tensions. The divide between the pace, traditions, and communal links of rural life and the atomized rat race of the city was a frequent subject, as was women’s changing position in society. It was only in the early ’20s that women actors began to be cast in motion pictures, which had until then followed the kabuki tradition of using onnagata (men playing women).
The change in subject material brought with it a reshaping of production methods and style. Kido sent company managers on research missions to Hollywood, which led to the formation of a star system and increased attention to new genres, urban crime in particular. There were also conscious attempts to encourage filmmakers to experiment with editing, camerawork, and blocking, dispensing with the long takes and kabuki-like staging characteristic of the early silent era.
A Woman Crying in the Spring (Hiroshi Shimizu, 1933).
The studio’s mandate to experiment with new forms, to deal with complex social themes, and to maintain a high rate of productivity in order to meet the demands of a large popular audience led to an explosively prolific first decade of filmmaking for many great directors. Alongside Shimizu were Yasujiro Ozu, Mikio Naruse, Heinosuke Gosho, and Yasujirō Shimazu, all of whom started at Shochiku and were part of what made the 1930s a period in which “a national cinema...was able to build its productive foundation,” as Shiguéhiko Hasumi writes.
Shimizu is currently the subject of an extensive retrospective in New York, hosted between Museum of the Moving Image and Japan Society, with most screenings on imported film prints. Starting in 1931, MoMI’s half of the series covered some of his earliest extant works, films from his period on the roster at Shochiku in the ’30s and ’40s, and Japan Society is now into his post-war years as a freelancer and an outright independent, right up to his final film, Image of a Mother (1959). Though most of the critical attention has been focused on his later work, what remains of his Shochiku films—he made 147, most of which have been lost—reveals an artist embedded within the studio system, using its resources and toolkit to experiment with form, and constructing social portraits open to the complexities and tensions of a society in flux.
1933 was a pivotal year for Shimizu, although slightly less productive than usual: he made only six films. One was his first talkie, A Woman Crying in Spring, and another was among the high points of his work in the silent form, Japanese Girls at the Harbor. Both are melodramas centered on the tribulations of women, and therefore representative of both Shochiku and the wider Japanese film industry at that time, but they also show an auteur experimenting with his technique. Shimizu demonstrates a growing facility for depicting people set adrift, geographically and psychologically, while they attempt to adapt to a dramatically shifting social landscape.
A Woman Crying in Spring (Hiroshi Shimizu, 1933).
A Woman Crying in Spring begins on a ship to Hokkaido with a group of migrant workers, men and women, readying themselves to spend the winter season as miners and hostesses in a snowbound mountain village. Collared between shots of the ship moving, gulls soaring and waves churning, and heralded by a folk song, a sad tale of abandonment which will be a recurring, creative element throughout, the major players are introduced. Each of them is an outcast: Kenji (Den Ôhinata) is a inscrutable and self-contained loner who, along with his meek friend Chuko (Shigeru Ogura), is going to work for Guzuyasu (Kenji Ôyama), a cynical autocrat who treats his underlings like they are under martial law. On deck, they meet Ohama (Yoshiko Okada), a figure of calculating sophistication, and her young daughter, Omitsu (Mitsuko Ichimura), on their way to open a bar in the mining town, where the fragile and homesick Ofuji (Akiko Chihaya) will work.
Ohama approaches Kenji and offers him a cigarette. When he takes it she, flirtatious but also commanding, asks him to say thank you. He rolls his eyes, slots the cigarette back into the packet without a word, and walks off. It’s a key moment in a film filled with lonely people torn up with the desire for tenderness but only able to communicate through a constrained lexicon of gestures. Their admissions of desire or vulnerability and assertions of power are tightly bound up with each other.
Most of their posturing takes place Ohama’s bar, which Shimizu uses as a stage for dynamics of desire, class, and capital. He evinces an acute understanding of how bodies, space, and the frame can interact with one another in perpendicular depth, creating a hive of overlapping sightlines in which looking or being looked at is never neutral. In one scene, the tense love triangle between Kenji, Ohama, and Ofuji, with its blindspots and rhyming feints, plays out as entertainment for a pair of hostesses at the bar. Their slight remove from the action and their bemused observations suggest one of the hallmarks of Japanese silent cinema, the benshi, who would sit at the edge of the screen, live narrating the film, filling in dialogue, clarifying narrative and character detail, and often offering humorous commentary.
Japanese Girls at the Harbor (Hiroshi Shimizu, 1933).
Japanese Girls at the Harbor also begins with a boat leaving port. Instead of departing with it, we stay ashore with two onlookers, Catholic schoolgirls Sunako (Michiko Oikawa) and Dora (Yukiko Inoue), who pledge eternal friendship to each other: “It’s just the two of us.” Shimizu gives the lie to this sentiment with two rhyming scenes in which a long tracking shot of the girls walking home from school is abruptly interrupted by Henry (Ureo Egawa), Sunako’s beau, whose daillances with local gangsters and a “bad girl”, Yoko Sheridan (Ranko Sawa), spell disaster. Henry’s infidelities are revealed, and in a fit of despairing jealousy, Sunako shoots Yoko and then goes into exile.
Many years later, Sunako is working as a bar hostess and sex worker, which she advertises by dressing in the traditional costume of a geisha. She returns to Yokohama with her tagalong boyfriend, Miura (Tatsuo Saito), an exemplar of la vie bohème, a work-shy, unsuccessful painter. In the meantime, Henry has gone straight and married Dora; they are expecting their first child. Old feelings flare up between Sunako and Henry, and the possible return of their youthful passion presents a bind and temptation. She’s burdened with guilt over the shooting and cautious of doubling it by derailing her old friend’s life, but Henry offers a possible way out of a tiring, peripatetic existence. For him, the allure is to break out of the comfortable cage of his decent life.
Shimizu introduces the nightclub where Sunako works with one of his favorite formal devices, the extended tracking shot. In this instance, however, the camera seems to move slower and more staggeringly than usual, as if a little drunk. It gawks at a string of hostesses, who hang around the bar, statuesque and bored, locked in the pose of desultory availability not unlike the feminized objects of oil paintings and glamor photography. Meanwhile, the silhouettes of dancing partners flit in between the women. The impression is of a place of desire, appealing and dynamic, but also of a machine that runs like clockwork.
Japanese Girls at the Harbor (Hiroshi Shimizu, 1933).
To express a sense of ephemerality, exhaustion, and wasted time, Shimizu uses a striking technique, a type of dissolving superimposition. In A Woman Crying in Spring, it’s deployed during a scene in which Omitsu goes missing and Ohama, panicked, rushes out into the snow to search for her. Across the same few meters of ground, we’re given a tracking close-up of her feet as she hurries left, and then a dissolve to her going right, then left, and so on, giving the impression of a desperate search that could have stretched on for miles and hours. It’s a use of the cinematic apparatus and space as boundary-testing and disorienting as Michael Snow’s <---> (1969), in which a series of camera movements canvassing an empty classroom accelerate in speed and range until the visuals blur and the viewer’s sense of place distorts. But instead of coming out of an avant-garde context and taking place in the depopulated, speculative setting, it's a moment in a studio production and linked to the emotional experience of a reluctant mother being forced to confront that reluctance in a crisis. Shimizu would use this technique again in later films, such as A Hero of Tokyo (1935) and Forget Love For Now (1936), but the most striking examples can be found in Japanese Girls.
When Henry goes to see Sunako at the club, unannounced, for their first meeting in years, the shock and awkwardness of the moment, the weight of all the interceding years and things left unsaid collapsing into now, is emphasized by the presence of a third wheel, a constantly smiling, mustachioed, debonair-looking gentleman (Yasuo Nanjo). His name is never mentioned, his relationship to Sunako and the club is never clear, and he remains ancillary to the plot. And yet he appears again and again, as this living, floating phantom of modernity, or as an attractive summation in human form of what is exciting and pleasurable in Sunako’s wayward life, which she herself otherwise describes as a kind of purgatory. Realizing he is in the way; this creature of the night takes his leave, but instead of showing him walk out the door, or out of frame, he evaporates into the floorboards with Shimizu’s signature dissolve, and his spell lingers over the rest of the scene and the entire film.
The main setting of Japanese Girls on the Harbor, seen intermittently in little documentary montages, is the port city of Yokohama. It’s an allegorical setting, a place deeply associated with modernity and foreignness as a conduit for international trade and so the influx of new products, fashion, culture, and modes of being. The harbor grew in importance after the 1853 US-enforced opening of Japan to global commerce after over two centuries of effectively closed borders and strict protectionist economic policies. Yokohama became a city of immigrants, from wealthy Western traders to poor Japanese and Korean transient workers. This stretch of the Tokyo Bay came to be associated with the allure of foreignness and luxury, but also with lawlessness. The prevalence of the sex trade and various criminal enterprises marked it as a world removed from conventional society.
Top and bottom: Japanese Girls at the Harbor (Hiroshi Shimizu, 1933).
Yokohama’s economic prospects began to diminish in the late 1910s, when significant infrastructural reconstruction and expansion, particularly of the railways, made the port a less vital artery of international trade, and then there was the widespread devastation of the Great Kanto Earthquake in 1923. And yet in cinema, particularly in crime films but also in many melodramas—Japanese Girls is a hybrid of the two—it was preserved as a bustling meeting point of the West and Japan, a place of high modernity, of glamor and criminality, a social battleground. In 1933, it is also the setting of Every Night Dreams, directed by Mikio Naruse and also starring Tatsuo Saito as a flaky, shady would-be husband, and Ozu’s Dragnet Girl, a gangster film also preoccupied with redemption that shares a scene where an untangled ball of yarn is the conduit and a spark for love-triangle anxieties. Shimizu and Ozu were not only colleagues and close friends, but regularly discussed and tested ideas for scenarios on each other. This swapping of an idea is only just one of many instances of creative interplay between these two artists and across the wider studio.
The film ends with Sunako pulling the plug on their constricting love triangle by deciding to go into exile once again, leaving Yokohama with Miura. In sacrificing a chance at a life with Henry, she maintains his and Dora’s budding family unit, an idealized institution whether viewed from a traditionalist Japanese, Catholic, or modern capitalist lens. It’s an ending that, reportedly, was insisted upon by the studio and to which Shimizu reluctantly agreed. However, the lasting feeling left by the sight of Henry, Dora, and the mysterious gentleman watching the ship depart as one of Miura’s paintings floats aimlessly on the waves, is of a social and emotional fracture that has not healed. It may on paper be a happy ending, with everyone put in their proper place, but the pain of Sunako’s dispossession can be felt through these forlorn images and Shimizu’s remarkable touch.