The original Japanese title of Kenji Mizoguchi’s 1936 classic Osaka Elegy is Naniwa Elegy, focusing the story told onto Naniwa Ward in southern Osaka rather than the city as a whole. Naniwa stretches from close to Namba and Dotonbori in the north to the Shin Sekai entertainment district in the south. Tsutenkaku Tower is in Naniwa Ward.
Naniwa has historically been associated with modernity, with business and entertainment.
The opening shot of the movie features a night view of the legendary Cabaret Akadama replete with rotating windmill sails, reminiscent of the windmill sails on top of the Moulin Rouge cabaret in Paris. ‘Akadama’ broadly spelled out in Latin letters on the cabaret’s front, alternating neon lights flashing in the dark. Decidedly modern jazz plays on the soundtrack.
Akadama means Red Ball, the word is at times used to mean the Sun. The Cabaret Akadama, located right on the riverside in Dotonbori, had its own all-female revue troupe, styled on the famous Takarazuka Revue.
The night shot slowly fades into morning light. Under the grey morning sky, the neon turned off, the scenery still looks very modern – but much less inviting. Bleak and sobering. The chimneys of a large industrial facility are right behind the fabled cabaret.
The film jumps to the breakfast room of the Asai family. Sonosuke Asai (Benkei Shiganoya), the boss of the Asai Drug Company, is a grumpy, frustrated man. He berates the servants who bring him his morning tea, tensions are boiling with his wife Sumiko (Yoko Umemura) who keeps reminding him that it was her family that started the business and that he merely married into the family.
When Asai quips that he should better find a young lover, Sumiko challenges him by saying, “You think, you can make me jealous? It’s ridiculous.”
Enter Ayako (Isuzu Yamada), a young telephone operator working for the Asai Drug Company. She is in a vague relationship with Susumu (Kensaku Hara), another company employee. Marriage between the two seems to be on the horizon but not quite yet.
Taking up his wife’s challenge, Asai invites Ayako to his office and makes her a proposal: if she is to become his mistress, he will rent her an apartment and pay all the bills. Ayako turns him down.
Ayako does urgently need money, however. Her father had embezzled 300 Yen from his company (much money in 1936) to both support his drinking habit and to pay for the education of his three children, son Hiroshi, now a university student in Tokyo, Ayako herself and her younger sister Sachiko, still a high school student. If the father can’t pay back the money to his company, they will take action against him.
Ayako talks this through with Susumu but he remains indifferent. No loan from him.
Worried about the fate of her father, Ayako eventually agrees to becoming the mistress of Asai. He rents her a lavish place at the super-modern Suminoe Apartments, he takes care of the 300 Yen for her father easily.
Things fall apart when Sumiko encounters her husband at a bunraku puppet theater performance he attends with Ayako.
Fujino, a business associate of Asai, saves the moment by declaring that Ayako was actually his date, not Asai’s. But Sumiko is not fooled that easily. She makes sure to put an end to the relationship between her husband and Ayako.
Fujino on the other hand just thought that he had snatched another mistress. By then, Hiroshi, Ayako’s elder brother had to quit university because he couldn’t afford tuition anymore. He needs 200 Yen for his last semester.
Ayako cashes those 200 Yen from Fujino without providing him the service he expected. Then she tells Susumu, her fiancé about all of her involvement with Fujino and Asai. Susumu doesn’t take it lightly. Fujino has her arrested on charges of fraud. Her case as a female delinquent is written up in all the newspapers… weak-minded Susumu abandons her.
Expelled from her family for being a delinquent and thus bringing shame to the family, Ayako doesn’t have many options.
The movie doesn’t need to show what those options were in those days… everyone in the audience knew.
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Osaka Elegy (Japan, 1936) 浪華悲歌
Osaka Elegy tells its story with a level of realism unheard of at the time in Japan. All characters portrayed are conflicted figures, none of them is clearcut bad or good.
Sure, the audience will feel the most with Ayako, naïve and always willing to help her family only to be rejected on moral grounds after she has provided the money the family needed.
Asai, his wife and all the other characters all have their personal reasons for what they are doing, for how they behave. The film follows their actions without condemning any of them. Judgement is up to the viewer.
Mizoguchi tells the story quietly and subdued, without any overt drama. The downfall of Ayako is bitter enough to witness as it is.
Director Mizoguchi creates a beautiful, haunting atmosphere surrounding the characters, an atmosphere of passion and needs in a world ruled by financial pressures.
The Director: Kenji Mizoguchi
Kenji Mizoguchi (1898 – 1956) is today considered one of the great masters of Japanese cinema of the classic era, alongside Akira Kurosawa and Yasujiro Ozu.
Mizoguchi was born in Tokyo and grew up in poverty. The financial situation of his family was so dire that they sold his elder sister Suzu to a geisha house.
Mizoguchi showed an early appreciation for painting, he would draw and paint constantly when he wasn’t reading, literature being the other of his early pursuits.
When his mother died in 1915, his sister Suzu, by then a successful geisha, took him into her own house and paid him an arts education in a school teaching western painting techniques.
Suzu’s constant support strongly influenced his later work – almost all his films are centered on young women sacrificing their all to support their families or other people they feel obliged to help.
Mizoguchi lived in Kobe for some time, designing newspaper advertisements, then returned to Tokyo where he was hired as assistant director by the Nikkatsu Film Studio.
When in 1923 the Nikkatsu Studio in Tokyo was destroyed in the Great Kanto Earthquake, Mizoguchi moved to the Nikkatsu Studio in Kyoto.
He was soon promoted to director and got some first international praise when his film Passion of a Woman Teacher was screened in France and Germany in 1926.
Osaka Elegy, produced by the small Daiichi Eiga Studio and distributed by Shochiku, was Mizoguchi’s first sound film. It was also the film that started his long-term collaboration with screen writer Yoshikata Yoga.
The film was meant to be part of a trilogy portraying the three central cities of Kansai. Osaka Elegy was followed by Sisters of Gion (1936), focusing on the traditional geisha district of Kyoto, using largely the same cast and crew of Osaka Elegy. The third film of the trilogy, supposed to portray Kobe was never shot. By then the Daiichi Eiga Studio had declared bankruptcy.
Mizoguchi himself stated later that Osaka Elegy and Sisters of Gion were his first mature movies.
During World War II, Mizoguchi focused on historical dramas. His international breakthrough came in the early 1950s with The Life of Oharu (1952), Ugetsu (1953) and Sansho the Bailiff (1954), all of which had their international premieres at the Venice Film Festival. French critics like Jean-Luc Godard, Jacques Rivette and Eric Rohmer praised Mizoguchi’s works in the pages of the Cahiers du Cinema before they became legendary directors in their own right.
At the time of his death in 1956, Mizoguchi was working on the script of another Osaka classic, An Osaka Story. The film was realized by another director, Kosaburo Yoshimura.
Actress Isuzu Yamada
Isuzu Yamada (1917 – 2012) was born in Osaka. Her father was an oyama, an actor specializing in female roles at stage plays, her mother a geisha. Her mother made her daughter study traditional Japanese dance and playing the shamisen from age six.
Reportedly, her mother was a close friend of the head of the Nikkatsu Studio in Kyoto. This led to early film roles at the studio. Isuzu Yamada made her feature film debut in 1930 at age twelve.
Her breakthrough as serious actress however came with Kenji Mizoguchi’s Osaka Elegy in 1936, followed the same year by Sisters of Gion.
Yamada’s stage and film career spanned seven decades, from the 1930s to the 2000s. During that period she acted in a large number of films today considered masterpieces of Japanese cinema including Akira Kurosawa’s Throne of Blood (1957) and Yojimbo (1961), Yasujiro Ozu’s Tokyo Twilight (1957) and Kinji Fukasaku’s Shogun’s Samurai (1978).
Yamada also excelled in the role of the Yodogimi, the widow of great warrior Toyotomi Hideyoshi and guardian of his son Toyotomi Hideyori, in the 1961 Osaka movie Daredevil in the Castle.
In 2000, Isuzu Yamada was the first actress to be awarded the Order of Culture by the Japanese Emperor. Awarded in person by the Emperor, as customary with that order.
Supporting Cast
Kenji Mizoguchi had the habit to employ the same actors over and over again. This was certainly the case with Benkei Shiganoya, the actor playing Asai Drug Company boss Sonosuke Asai. Shiganoya started out with Mizoguchi’s Osaka Elegy, then appeared in Sisters of Gion, then in three other Mizoguchi films including The Life of Oharu (1952) and A Geisha (1953). Shiganoya acted in only seven films, five of them were Mizoguchi movies.
Asai’s wife Sumiko was played by Yoko Umemura (1903 – 1944). Umemura appeared in over a hundred films between 1922 and 1944. She was considered an absolute superstar in her time and was said to be the highest paid actress in Japan in the early 1930s.
Ayako’s frustrated lover Fujino was played by Eitaro Shindo (1899 – 1977), another heavyweight in Japanese cinema. Shindo started his carrier with Osaka Elegy, then acted in numerous other Mizoguchi films including classics like the Life of Oharu, Sansho the Bailiff (1954) and Mizoguchi’s last film Street of Shame (1956). Shindo was not an exclusive Mizoguchi actor, though. He acted in about 300 films in a large variety of genres throughout his career.
Takashi Shimura (1905 – 1982) had a rather minor role in Osaka Elegy, playing the police inspector handling Ayako towards the end of the movie. His career really took off after Osaka Elegy. He appeared in 21 of Akira Kurosawa’s 30 movies (more than any other actor), he made the jump into kaiju eiga and appeared in the original Godzilla movie by Ishiro Honda in 1954 as well as in the sequel Godzilla Raids Again (1955).
Godzilla Raids Again marks Godzilla’s first visit to Osaka.
Osaka Locations
Though entirely set in Osaka, Osaka Elegy features few easily recognizable Osaka landmarks. The film focusses on the atmosphere of the city, an atmosphere of modernity and financial pressure contrasting with traditional moral values.
The modernity comes to the fore in the opening shots of the Cabaret Akadama as well as in later shots of a brightly lit entertainment district, most likely Shin Sekai.
Ayako’s living space in the super-modern Suminoe Apartments, further south of Naniwa in Suminoe Ward also attests to Mizoguchi’s keen eye on the latest developments in Osaka.
A special treat is a great shot of an unidentified Osaka Metro subway entrance, 1930s style cars whizzing by. The Osaka Metro system started operation in 1933, only a year or two before the filming of Osaka Elegy started.
