A Tokyoite writes a letter to an American soldier who was her lover during the Allied occupation of Japan. “Tell him I’m pregnant,” she lies to the person who translates the letter into English. “What if he comes back?” he asks. “I tell you I had a miscarriage,” she responds nonchalantly. This scene from the movie love letter (1953) baffled the conservative Japanese public of the mid-20th century. Even more so when they saw something unusual in the credits: a female actress in the direction, Kinuyo Tanaka. The performer, a legend of Japanese cinema with more than 250 credits, took a leap by becoming the first Japanese behind the camera with a regular career. That facet, overshadowed by his acting career, has been rediscovered with recent screenings in recent years in Cannes, Locarno and now with a retrospective in November at the Filmoteca de Madrid.
“The various barriers he broke make the Tanaka case extraordinary. Not only because of machismo in the context of the early 1950s, but also because of the hierarchy in the Japanese film system in which actors were not considered intelligent,” explains doctor in Japanese cinema and student of the filmmaker, Irene. González-López. When Tanaka made her directorial debut with love letter In 1953, at the age of 43, he had already acted in fundamental pieces of Japanese cinema, such as The Munekata Sisters (1950), Miss Oyu (1951) o The life of Oharu, gallant woman (1952). Her collaboration on those films with some of the most important representatives of the golden age of Japanese cinematography—Kenji Mizoguchi, Yasujirō Ozu, Mikio Naruse—helped propel her as a creator, but it turned out to be a “double-edged sword,” according to whoever believes She is also the author of the book Tanaka Kinuyo. Nation, stardom and female subjectivity (2017).
“Most of the big directors were very supportive of her. Naruse trained her as a director, Ozu gave her a script he was working on, and Keisuke Kinoshita gave her his technical team. However, when they showed up at the shoot to give advice or talk to the crew, they got in the way; “It was very difficult for Tanaka to impose his authority,” says González-López. Something similar happened with her predecessor, Sakane Tazuko, who is considered the first Japanese director. He debuted as an assistant director in 1936, but mainly produced short films, most of them imperialist propaganda. His team staged a kind of mutiny against Tazuko, they opposed him and did not abide by his decisions.
Tanaka would experience something similar almost two decades later. In a series of interviews collected in the article Film director Kinuyo Tanaka (2016), by Hide Murakawa, the then young actor Uno Yūkichi says that he became angry and felt humiliated when the director asked him to repeat the same scene many times in love letter. “I find it very curious that when Mizoguchi did that, making his performers repeat the same scene 200 times without telling them what was wrong, he was considered a genius. On the other hand, when she has the same behavior, it is said that she was authoritarian and hysterical,” comments the researcher.
Actress since she was 14
But Tanaka was “headstrong and had a lot of self-confidence,” and her relationship with her former teachers remained friends. Already in his third film, eternal breasts (1955), achieved a certain level of independence and surrounded himself with more women in the set, such as screenwriters Sumie Tanaka and Natto Wada, and producer Hisako Nagashima. He had experience in forging his own path: from the age of 10 he already took care of his mother, when he played the biwa with a group of singing and dancing artists. And at 14, he made his debut in front of the camera, under the direction of director Hiroshi Shimizu in Beyond the past (1924). He also had no problems moving from silent films to talkies.
He transferred the combative spirit to his protagonists: sex workers, poets, princesses and young people attracted to the big city, but also sisters, mothers, daughters, lovers and friends. In her memoirs, she wrote that she wanted to “portray women from a woman’s perspective.” women’s night (1961), a film about the reintegration into society of prostitutes after a law in 1958 banned brothels, tells how one of the “reformed” ones is mistreated by her new employer, who judges her for her past. As revenge, she seduces her husband. While the protagonist of The wandering princess (1960), the Japanese noblewoman Hiro Saga, is constantly referred to as the “bridge between two nations,” after strategically marrying the brother of the last emperor of China.
The rebellion represented on stage has to do with Tanaka’s insubordinate spirit. When the director was 18, she was pressured to marry someone much older than her. She then decided to urinate on the tatami next to her suitor to scare him away. In his six films there are forced and arranged marriages by parents, but it is the main theme in Love under the crucifix (1962). This film, the last feature film in Tanaka’s short directorial career, tells the story of Ogin, daughter of a famous tea master, who is forced to marry an aristocrat, but resists because she is in love with another man.
female sexual desire
“There is a determination and pride in their characters to not be the perfect victim. They are fighting women despite their tragic destiny. It is also quite groundbreaking how it makes the protagonist’s sexual desire an axis of the story,” says González-López. Although sexuality is much more evident in the book on which it is based—Tanaka liked to adapt successful novels and biographies—the film’s protagonist eternal breasts (1955) openly confesses her passion for her friend’s husband and for the journalist who investigates her. The film recreates the tragic life of the poet Fumiko Nakajo, affected by breast cancer and famous for writing her verses on her deathbed. “He is a complex character, full of flaws. I once did a series on breast cancer and I didn’t find any contemporary film that addressed the same topic. She was a very pioneer in showing the operated breasts or the operating room,” adds the Kingston University professor.
To the taboo stories, Tanaka added greater marginalization, and the women in his stories are middle-aged, in contrast to the young women who used to populate most productions of the Japanese golden age. The filmmaker witnessed ageism in the industry when she was criticized for playing characters younger than her. A prejudice with which she also battled and triumphed with her memorable role at the age of 65 as a survivor of the sexual exploitation system of the Japanese empire in Copy número 8 (1974).
The centenary oriental film magazine Junpo Cinema brought together Tanaka in 1961 along with the artists Kawakita Kashiko, Yamamoto Kyoko and Takamine Hideko in a round table entitled The position of women in postwar Japanese cinema. They all recognized how after the Allied occupation the public debate was filled with discussions about gender and reforms appeared that established universal suffrage and free marriage. Until then, it was legal for the father of the family to agree to a marriage. Similarly, the civil code was changed so that the wife could request a divorce in case of the husband’s infidelity, an aspect that did not constitute a reason for divorce under the law.
Tanaka writes about it in his memoirs: “Now that we have women in parliament, I thought it would be nice if there was at least a female film director.” However, González-López believes that much remained a dead letter. “They were important but fragmented changes. Women had the right to education, but they were constantly told to become nurses or care professionals. At the level of care, the entire duty fell on them, regardless of whether they worked or not. When the wife married, the husband’s family was officially hers, and she had to give him priority over her own family.