Ninpei Omiya (Ganjiro Nakamura II) is a rice farmer in Goshu Province in the Genroku years (1688 – 1704) of the Edo Era (1603 – 1868), Goshu Province roughly being the area of today’s Shiga Prefecture, surrounding Lake Biwa. The harvest has been poorer than ever this year and Ninpei has already put off the tax collector several times.
That one fateful evening, the tax collector shows up again at Ninpei’s house. Ninpei has nothing to offer, he and his family just hide their last few vegetables. Ninpei’s wife Ofude (Chieko Naniwa) begs for one more day of delay. Grudgingly, the tax collector grants her wish, threatening to throw Ninpei into jail if the deadline is not met.
That same night, Ninpei, Ofude, their son Kichitaro (Narutoshi Hayashi) and daughter Onatsu (Kyoko Kagawa) decide to make a run for the city: Osaka.
They successfully evade the village guards but arrive in Osaka without a penny. Ninpei begs for work at the grand Hanaya house only to be violently thrown out, leaving Ninpei with a large bruise on his forehead.
His begging for a job at a large rice stockyard is equally fruitless but his children manage to enter the stockyard at night and sweep up grains spilled in the process of hauling. “We can eat now!” They exclaim but Ninpei has other plans. He sells the collected rice to a cheap eatery, mixed up with dust as it is, and orders there the cheapest dish available, a humble millet meal. Leaving him a tiny profit.
Sweeping up rice from the grounds of the stockyard becomes the daily business of Ninpei and his family. They soon can afford to bribe a guard to give them access to the facility and protect their hunting grounds from other scavengers.
Fast forward ten years. Ninpei has become a wealthy tea merchant and money lender. His past as a poor man escaping from the tax collector and scooping up grains from the dusty stockyard grounds for a living has however left an irrevocable mark in Ninpei’s mind. He will never be poor again, he swears to himself.
Which means that he scrimps on everything. No amount of money spent is small enough to be reconsidered for additional savings.
In his house, Ninpei has built a shrine featuring the image of a large mon coin (mon being the smallest currency unit at the time, akin to a penny), placed below are the brooms and brushes used in the hard days of yore.
Every morning, Ninpei and his whole family pray at the shrine… “God of Broom, God of Brush! Grant me this day my profit! Please, I humbly beg of you. … Gather it up! Gather it all up!” The whole family chants on the behest of Ninpei.
The rich Hanaya family on the other hand has overspend and went deep into debts. Once their house is up for auction, Ninpei snatches it up. Out of revenge for the humiliation he experienced at their doorstep when he was a penniless new arrival in Osaka.
With the grand new house, Ninpei has made it into Osaka merchant society. With that come certain obligations. Showing status by traveling the city in a palanquin, a hairdresser to provide the daughter with the fashionable style of the year, generous New Year’s Eve decorations for the entrance of the house.
Ninpei will have none of it. He is not interested in the Osaka lifestyle of indulging in pleasure while negotiating business deals. He has become a stingy old miser and doesn’t care in the least what others think of him.
One day, he enters a construction site, picking up discarded wood. There he meets an elderly lady, Mrs. Abumiya. She’s just as niggardly as he is. “What will you do with the wood?” she asks him. “Will just use it as free firewood.” He replies. “I split up the wood and sell it as chopsticks.” She retorts. Ninpei immediately recognizes that Ms. Abumiya is way ahead of him in terms of business ideas.
They quickly become partners in scrimping. Mrs. Abumiya has a son, Ichinosuke (Shintaro Katsu) she wants to marry off, Ninpei has his daughter Onatsu as a trade-in.
The two old misers have however made their deals without knowing what their children are really up to. Mrs. Abumiya’s son has a secret liaison with prostitute Takino (Michiko Ono), Ninpei’s daughter Onatsu is in love with shop assistant Chuzaburo (Raizo Ichikawa).
Once Ninpei’s son Kichitaro and Abumiya’s son Ichinosuke befriend each other and together visit the pleasure quarters of Shinmachi, things take a dramatic turn. They got other ideas what to do with the family money than their stingy uptight elders…
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An Osaka Story (Japan, 1957) 大阪物語
The film was conceived by master film director Kenji Mizoguchi (1898 – 1956), the script was written by Mizoguchi together with his long-term writing partner Yoshikata Yoga, based on works by “floating world” poet Saikaku Ihara (1642 – 1693).
In the hands of Mizoguchi, An Osaka Story, Osaka Monogatari being the Japanese title of the film, would surely have become an elegant satire of greed, grounded in Mizoguchi’s deep understanding of human nature.
Mizoguchi died however before he could start the project. Daiei Studio handed the job of directing over to Kozaburo Yoshimura, a director known to be able to tackle any genre.
His realistic focus on women in post-war Japan in the film Clothes of Deception (1951) had earned Yoshimura the reputation of being somewhat in the same territory as Mizoguchi, so handing the project over to Yoshimura seemed to be a natural.
Yoshimura was however not the sophisticated master that Mizoguchi was. In his hands the story became a biting satire of greed as intended but in a much more black & white way than Mizoguchi would have done.
In Yoshimura’s film, the old misers are old misers, they are irredeemably set in their ways. Characters to be laughed at, to be despised. Mizoguchi on the other hand had always set out for an understanding of the miseries of every character on screen.
So, An Osaka Story is not a deep psychological piece. It makes its points bluntly, hammering on at the nascent emergence of capitalist society in Genroku Era Japan and by extension, capitalism in general.
The Genroku Years
Japan had been unified under the rule of the Tokugawa Shogunate in the early 1600s. No more wars were fought, neither within Japan nor were any invasions of foreign territories even considered.
Japanese society was stable and rigid. Local lords were kept in their place by the strict rules of the Edo Shogunate while the samurai in service of both the Shogunate and the local lords still focused on the ideas of warriorship, on strict rules of honor, loyalty and military craftsmanship.
By the onset of the rule of Emperor Higashiyama in 1688, marking the start of the Genroku Years, Japan was at peace for more than 80 years.
Slowly but steadily, a new class had taken over. Not politically but economically. The class of the merchants.
In the minds of the samurai, merchants had always been near the bottom of society. Fishmongers shouting out at the markets, caring more about money than honor.
By the Genroku years, however, the merchants had accumulated vast amounts of wealth, many a samurai was forced to borrow money from the merchants to keep up the lifestyle needed to project their status.
Osaka was a city of merchants, so naturally, the new capitalistic, money focused developments came to the fore there first.
Those Osaka merchants had many decades to develop their own culture. They liked to spend their money indulging in all kinds of pleasure, they frequently went to the entertainment quarters, they spent lavishly just to show their status. They appreciated the arts, including the works of the famous Ukiyo-e woodprint artists of the Edo Era.
Back to the film: Ninpei Omiya, the poor peasant who has made it rich in Osaka doesn’t fit into the established Osaka merchant society. Even though he is supposed (and invited) to do so.
His story is the typical story of a newly rich unable to adapt to the established ways of old money. The scars from his past are simply too deep. He is absolutely unable to fit into a society where money is treated in a relaxed, wealth-as-a-given way.
Social Criticism
The film is of course not really a period piece even though all the action takes place in samurai times.
Those samurai years are to the most part just an allegory of modern post WWII capitalism. Meant as a biting criticism of Japanese entrepreneurs desperately trying to make it rich at any cost in those struggling years of the 1950s when poverty was still widespread.
Pleasure Quarters
An interesting aspect of the film is the casual treatment of the Pleasure Quarters in the film.
They are not portrayed as morally corrupt but rather as places that offer a certain kind of relief from the miserly ways of the parent generation.
Sure, they are costly and the geishas are financially demanding but then, running away with a highly educated hooker soon becomes the preferred way out of their situation for some of the major young male characters.
In this movie, sure but also in many kabuki plays, novels and poems dating from the Edo Era. So, this wasn’t just a modern screen writer’s fantasy… those parts most likely originated from the writings of Edo Era poet Saikaku Ihara.
Director Kozaburo Yoshimura
Director Kozaburo Yoshimura (1911) – 2000) started out at Shochiku Studio as an assistant director for Yasujiro Ozu, one of the grand masters of Japanese cinema, his 1939 film Warm Current was his first own directorial work.
Yoshimura spent the war years in southeast Asia, particularly in Thailand. He is said to have visited the Bangkok movie houses whenever he could – getting a wide exposure to films from all over the world.
His 1947 film The Ball at Anjo’s House received the award of Best Film of the Year by influential Japanese film magazine Kinema Junpo. It was his breakthrough as director and also started his long-term collaboration with screenwriter and director Kaneto Shindo, one of the grand masters of Japanese cinema.
Unlike most other directors of his generation, Yoshimura never developed a distinct personal style. In interviews, he even made fun of the idea of a signature style. Instead, he prided himself to be able to adapt to any genre and subject matter that came his way, applying different approaches to different films.
If he had one personal directorial trait, it was his fast editing. Other directors would thoroughly round out every scene, Yoshimura cut the scene off when he thought the point had been made.
Even in An Osaka Story, set in Edo times, he cuts very quickly, giving the film a feel of unusual speed and modernity.
Actor Ganjiro Nakamura II
His stage name already indicates the world he was coming from – the world of kabuki theater. Ganjiro Nakamura II (1902 – 1983) was the son of Ganjiro Nakamura I (1878 – 1935), one of the greatest kabuki actors of his time.
Born in Osaka, Nakamura grew up in a family of kabuki super stars. He became a kabuki stage star himself and only later switched over to movies. His role as Ninpei in An Osaka Story was his first major movie acting role. He did a great job there playing the rigid old miser.
Nakamura acted in more than 80 films, mostly samurai movies but not only. For example, he can also be spotted as an elderly company executive in Shohei Imamura’s 1966 Osaka social satire The Pornographers.
Many of the other male actors in An Osaka Story also come from kabuki. Like kabuki stage actor Raizo Ichikawa VIII playing the role of shop assistant Chuzaburo. Shintaro Katsu, playing Mrs. Abumiya’s son Ichinosuke originates from a famous kabuki family.
Chieko Naniwa, playing Ninpei’s wife Ofude, was born in Tondabayashi, Osaka and sold bento boxes in Dotonbori before joining the movie industry where she worked with directors like Akira Kurosawa in Throne of Blood (1957), Yasujiro Ozu in Equinox Flower (1958) and Kenji Mizoguchi in A Geisha (1953).
Osaka Locations
Osaka is clearly the setting of the film. The name of the city is clearly spelled out over and over, everyone speaks Osaka dialect, and after all, it’s titled An Osaka Story.
Osaka landmarks of the period, like Osaka Castle or Tenmangu Shrine are however absent from the film.
What we get is one Osaka street, extending from the Hanaya residence that Ninpei later takes over. Most outdoor scenes take place in this street. Most likely, the street was assembled at Daiei Studio in Chofu, Tokyo.
Shinmachi in today’s Nishi Ward was indeed Osaka’s main pleasure quarter from the early days of the Edo times until its destruction in World War II. The film shows however only indoor scenes of one brothel in the area.
The outdoor shot capturing old Osaka the best may be a tea house with a bamboo terrace extending over a river. This type of tea house still exists in historic areas of rural Japan, though unfortunately not in central Osaka anymore.
