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Abstract
The Period of High Economic Growth has gone down in the Japanese collective memory as a golden era stoking sentiments of nostalgia. Ever since the downturn of the economy in the early 1990s, the Japanese have sought to recharge their dreams by looking back at a period supposedly permeated with an energetic and optimistic, forward-looking spirit. Yet, when we turn to contemporary films for testimony, we find this retrospective sentiment complicated by an ambivalent attitude towards ongoing social developments. This article focuses on three mainstream popular youth films – Foundry Town (Kyūpora no aru machi), Always Keep the Dream (Itsudemo yume o), The Sunshine Girl (Shitamachi no taiyō) – that share critical perspectives on issues pertaining to social class, economic inequality, and the attainability of worthwhile education. Set in ‘low town’ industrial districts in Tokyo and populated with unprivileged factory workers who went under the epithet of ‘golden eggs’, the films deliver a socio-political critique that ultimately questions the very desirability of the promises of social and spatial mobility built into high growth policies. It argues that the contemporary sararīman dream shared by the proverbial one hundred million Japanese in which everyone is able to join the ranks of elite white-collar employees, was disavowed by the films just as the plans started to unfold.
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Notes
1 Inoue Kazuo’s 1961 Mizutamari, just to mention one other example from Shōchiku, shares themes and realistic touches with the films discussed here. An elder sister working as a clerk at an ironworks becomes the mistress of the factory owner to finance the university education of her brother, the love interest of Baishō Chieko’s factory worker in the film. Horiike Kiyoshi’s 1961 Aoi me no sugao is another Nikkatsu production starring Yoshinaga Sayuri, which revolves around the theme of education and social class as it pertains to romance and marriage prospects.
2 Cf., for instance, Seymour Chatman: ‘the implied reader – not the flesh-and-bones you or I sitting in our living rooms reading the book, but the audience presupposed by the narrative itself’ (Citation1978: 149–50).
3 The Income Doubling Plan is ironically referred to in Foundry Town by the heroine’s younger brother when bargaining over the price of the homing pigeons that he is breeding.
4 For instance, Prime Minister Ikeda Hayato used correction of economic distortions (hizumi no zesei) as a slogan in his policy platform for the Liberal Democratic Party’s election campaign in July 1964 (cf. Asahi shinbun, June 30, 1964 [evening edition]). Further, the Cabinet Office’s Economic Planning Agency devoted its ‘Medium-Term Economic Plan’ (Chūki keizai keikaku) of 1965 to the correction of the distortions brought about by the Income Doubling Plan (Keizai Kikakuchō Citation1965: 10).
5 The expression ‘low town’ is used throughout as a direct translation of shitamachi, to avoid any unintended connotations of the word ‘downtown’. The shitamachi locations of the films tend to be a mixture of wooden dwellings, local shops, and small-scale factories spatially separated from the amusement and shopping districts usually associated with the concept of downtown.
6 It should be noted, though, that the film has been lauded for its vivid portrayal and skillful stage direction of child actors, played out in the important side plot depicting Jun’s younger brother’s friendship with his classmate of Korean descent. See, for instance: Ogura Citation1962: 57–58. In fact, several reviewers focus their critical attention on the film’s portrayal of children.
7 In his Nihon no kyōiku kakusa, Tachibanaki Toshiaki gives two main reasons why many students at the time had to give up on advancing to normal high school: either they had to start working immediately after graduation from compulsory middle school to contribute to the family economy, or their parents could simply not afford sending them to high school (Citation2010: 24–25).
8 I am grateful to one of the anonymous reviewers for pointing out that audiences went to specific cinemas, often tied to specific studios, out of habit not just choice and that filmmakers often had political commitments that were quite different from studio executives and the audience.
9 I have been unable to locate contemporary responses to the films in the form of written testimony by actual cinemagoers. Concerning the problem of reconstructing memory of specific films in general, Annette Kuhn in her ‘What to do with cinema memory?’ interestingly notes: ‘One of the most striking findings to emerge from oral history research into cinemagoing has been the extent to which interviewees’ memories of cinema have revolved far more around the social act of cinemagoing than around the films they saw’ (Citation2011: 85).
10 Writing for the trade journal Kinzoku (Metals), the signature M. E. (1962: 69) deemed the film’s theme of technical improvement at a foundry worthy of attention, making it unique in Nikkatsu’s line-up of action drama.
11 The title song of the film, featuring Hashi Yukio and Yoshinaga Sayuri as vocalists, was released a few months before the film and received The Japan Record Award for 1962.
12 The theme song Shitamachi no taiyō, featuring Baishō Chieko, won The Japan Record Award’s New Artist Award in 1962.
13 90% of the population, according to a 1970 survey carried out by the Prime Minister’s Office (Kokumin seikatsu ni kansuru yoron chōsa).
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Notes on contributors
Mats Karlsson
Mats Karlsson is Senior Lecturer at The University of Sydney where he teaches and researches on Japanese literature and film. His current project examines the zeitgeist of The Period of High Economic Growth as reflected in mainstream popular film of the era. For a representative article related to this project, see his: ‘Kinoshita Keisuke’s film at the end of the rainbow: love, labour, and alienation at the Yahata Steel Works’ in Journal of Japanese and Korean Cinema 10:2 (2018). He can be contacted at [email protected]