The Masters of Cinema Series

Catalogue

Kurosawa’s Scandal and the Post-war Moment

by Joan Mellen, 2006

Punctuating the apprenticeship of the great Japanese director, Akira Kurosawa, Scandal (1950) seems to be a small film about the dangers in early postwar Japan of sensationalist journalism and a press ever in search of lurid gossip about celebrities. Four months after Scandal appeared, Kurosawa released Rashomon, his first masterpiece and the film that, winning the Golden Lion of St. Mark at the Venice Film Festival, carried both its director, and Japanese cinema, onto the world stage. Starring both Toshiro Mifune and Takashi Shimura, Kurosawa’s signature actors, Scandal, at first seems to be a dress rehearsal not only for Rashomon, but for his two finest works, Ikiru (1952) and Seven Samurai (1954).

Kurosawa described Scandal as a “protest film – it was directly connected with the rise of the press in Japan and its habitual confusion of freedom with license. Personal privacy is never respected and the Scandal sheets are the worst offenders.” Yet Kurosawa far transcends such narrow sociological subject matter, confirming once more D. H. Lawrence’s insight, “Never trust the artist. Trust the tale.”

Far more than a mere social satire about press abuses, Scandal is an allegory of the moral disintegration of Japan following the Pacific War, and the American Occupation, still in place at the time of filming. It depicts the moral confusion attendant upon that moment of rapid Westernization, chronicling the loss of moral grace and a rectitude sacrificed along with the repressive ways of the feudal past. “Loading Zone For Special Service” reads a sign in English beneath a wall of lurid posters, as Kurosawa suggests that the American presence has played a decisive role in the moral upheaval. The growth of tabloid magazines is accompanied by a fresh incursion of American English; on the sound track appear words like “bonus,” “Henry Ford,” “Santa Claus” and “Merry Christmas everybody,” while the musical track includes “Buttons and Bows.”

Kurosawa’s use of discontinuity editing also conveys a world in turmoil. Ignoring the 180- degree line of the classic Hollywood cinema, he changes camera position radically with the cut, disorienting the spectator as to the spatial composition of the shot. It is the counterpart to his rejection of any easy understanding of the rapidly changing mores of postwar Japan.

The ostensible protagonist of the film, the figure who appears in the first scene to be the main character, is a painter, Ichiro Aoye (Mifune). As a visual artist, he reflects Kurosawa’s own original ambition to become a painter – before he entered the contest at Toho that led to his career as a film director. Aoye has escaped to a remote mountain region where he can paint. There he encounters a concert singer, Miyako Saijo (Yoshiko Yamaguchi), who has sought the peace and quiet of a mountain retreat. Marauding photographers, 1950’s style paparazzi, displaying as much aggressive zeal as their latter-day counterparts, photograph the two secretly as they chat on the balcony of Miss Saijo’s room where, innocently, Aoye has hung his bath towel to dry alongside her own.

The sensationalist Amour magazine concocts a story of a torrid love affair between the two, plastering billboards all over Tokyo with the photograph, and even welcoming a possible lawsuit since the sole result will be to sell more magazines: “a trial is great publicity!” In a Japan traditionally wary of lawsuits, they have never been sued before.

Aoye is visited by an impoverished, corrupt lawyer named Ichiro Hiruta (Shimura), a man too weak to have withstood the blandishments of modern society. He is addicted to gambling, and the desk of his shabby, unheated office is littered with racing forms and magazines. As he enters Aoye’s own freezing studio, Hiruta’s hat blows off into Aoye’s hands, his fate placed in the custody of the painter. All the decent people in this film, which depicts the extreme poverty of postwar Japan, wear overcoats and hats indoors where run-down interiors suggest the cost of the Pacific War for the country’s citizens.

Yet Kurosawa does not satirize this new Japan simply by allying himself with the old ways. Scandal is a brilliant film (despite the sentimentality of Fumio Hayasaka’s music, alternating as it does between the melodramatic and the sentimental), dramatizing moral ambiguity. The pipe-smoking, motorcycle-riding Aoye seems to belong to the new Japan. He paints what he “feels,” rather than imitating past masters; in so doing Mifune heralds an individualism that Kurosawa welcomes and exudes the personal vitality that drew Kurosawa originally to him as an actor.

Yet Aoye is mindful of the best of Japanese tradition. Unlike most of the artists for whom she works, he respects his model, Sumie (Noriko Sengoku), and makes no sexual overtures. Aoye asserts that he doesn’t paint nudes because the “spirit” and “tradition” of Japanese painting have not included this mode. The model believes that the real reason that he no longer paints nudes is that her post-pregnancy figure is not what it once was, and he is being tactful. Both explanations apply. Aoye’s omnipresent motorcycle – it appears even under the opening credits – symbolizes simultaneously opposing values: with its revving engine it stands for the harshness of the modern age and with its speed, the new freedom that Kurosawa endorses.

Aoye expresses, no less, Kurosawa’s persistent theme that individual choice, following one’s own convictions, bespeaks a free society, a theme he expresses through his frequent use of close-ups. In contrast, Kurosawa treats with distance the outworn and stultifying responses to the Scandal of Japanese tradition. Miss Saijo’s mother would have her ignore the uproar, and assume a “shikata ga nai” philosophy, the view that the situation can’t be helped and so her daughter should remain passive and not join Aoye’s lawsuit against Amour magazine.

“We live in a modern society,” Aoye reminds Saijo’s mother. “I’ll fight society too,” he adds. His determination is expressed visually in the scene in which during a series of close-ups he reads the Amour magazine article quietly. Demanding then to know who is responsible, he slugs the publisher, Hori (Sakae Ozawa).

Lawyer Hiruta’s wife, another older woman still dressing in kimono, represents as well the repressive feudal past; faced with her husband’s transgressions and conflict between survival and honesty, she remains silent. She never opens up to anyone, her husband complains, even as his need is to unburden himself. Kurosawa opposes these old ways to those of the younger generation: Hiruta’s daughter Masako (Yoko Katsuragi), with her openness of temperament and refreshing bluntness, and three schoolboys who, later at the trial, are the first to applaud Aoye’s impassioned self-defence.

The moral challenges of the postwar era are centred on the lawyer Hiruta, who rapidly becomes the main character of Scandal. Shimura appears in the guise of the exhausted civil servant, as he will in Ikiru. In his first scene, he speaks for Kurosawa, remarking that right and wrong used to be clearly demarcated; now they’re interchangeable: “In the past what was right and wrong was clear. Now it’s mixed up” so that we live in a “confusing era.” Japan has only 5,900 lawyers to America’s 170,000, he remarks, although Japan is catching up.

The conflict at the centre of Scandal becomes one between integrity and corruption: whether Hiruta will accept a bribe from the publisher of Amour magazine and betray his clients. When, later, Hiruta arrives in court, he wears the traditional robes of a bygone age (“those robes went out years ago!” a spectator laughs). He covers himself with a symbol of a rectitude neither he nor Japan can any longer claim to represent.

Hiruta’s daughter Masako, dying of tuberculosis, is tormented by her father’s corruption, symbolized in the mise-en-scene by the filthy stagnant pond, a reprise of the central image of Drunken Angel (1948), that marks the boundary of their slum neighbourhood. In an unusually long take, Hiruta confesses his corrupt practices to his child.

In several scenes, Hiruta is placed in the composition of the shot on the outside of a house, peering in, as he does through a broken window pane at Aoye’s studio. He must look in from the outside even at his own house, observing the others on Christmas Eve through openings in the shoji. These shots suggest that he has banished himself from those closest to him, from humanity itself, by acquiescing in the prevailing corruption.

As Kurosawa’s eleventh film, Scandal already exemplifies his mature editing style. His primary technique in this film is the montage sequence, a rapid collision of short takes, Kurosawa’s preferred wipe, superimpositions, dissolves, tilts, and canted frames that reflect the acceleration of evil once the illicit photograph of Aoye and Saijo leads to Aoye’s decision to fight back, one in which Saijo shares. These montages add momentum to the film, raising the action beyond its temporal significance; the shortness of the takes conveys the moral disarray of the culture at large. The first montage sequence, of billboards, signs and magazine covers, reveals how, in this new age, lies can be spread rapidly throughout an entire culture by a burgeoning, amoral press constrained by no standard beyond the quest for profit.

In another montage sequence, Kurosawa juxtaposes shots of the publisher telling a crowd of reporters his side of the story (“he hit me just as I was bowing to him,” he complains of Aoye), asserting his determination to fight for “freedom of the press.” In a superb graphic match, Kurosawa cuts to a shot of Aoye surrounded by his own band of eager reporters, explaining that he was in his own room five minutes after the seemingly incriminating photograph was taken. The shots are composed identically: the central character, brightly lit, at the centre of the shot is surrounded by a group of men. The graphic match is also ironic. Kurosawa is indignant that in this demeaned society equal consideration is granted by the press to the truth and to lies, rendering the public incapable of distinguishing between the two.

Another successful montage sequence occurs at the race track. Kurosawa creates an alternating pattern of shots: cyclists, the huge crowd milling about, and Hiruta with his tempter in sunglasses, an icon in Kurosawa’s films of the yakuza (gangster). “Why not take the easy way out?” he asks Hiruta, who is struggling to withstand the bribe to betray his clients. Hiruta condemns his antagonist, Hori, in terms of the publisher’s distance from traditional Japanese morality: he is “one of the vilest types…devoid of shame.” Yet, despite his insight, like Japanese society itself, Hiruta succumbs.

Christmas provides the occasion for another memorable montage sequence. A brilliant set piece, situated in Tokyo’s night town, it foreshadows what will be an even more elaborate if similar sequence in Ikiru. Kurosawa begins with a prologue, a shot of Aoye on his motorcycle, heading for Hiruta’s neighbourhood with a decorated Christmas tree to the tune of “Jingle Bells.” Inside, Masako, sitting up for the first and only time in the film, wears a gold paper crown, while Miss Saijo sings “Silent Night” to her. Coming home drunk, in shame, Hiruta retreats to the “Red Cat” bar with Aoye following. Presaging Ikiru’s Watanabe, and his heartbreaking rendition of “Life Is So Short,” a Japanese ditty of the twenties, Hiruta sings “Auld Lang Syne” with a fellow drunk (Bokuzen Hidari, who will play the peasant Yohei in Seven Samurai).

A montage of close-ups chronicles the responses of the assembled bar hostesses, as Kurosawa satirizes Japanese susceptibility toward empty sentimentality. Yet a more important theme emerges. Hiruta begs everyone to join the song, and all comply, from the bored band members to the bedraggled hostesses in their shabby attire and thick red lipstick, to the customers, dressed in rags themselves and looking the worse for wear. Aoye sings as well. They all sing together, uniting in the experience of their being fellow Japanese enduring a similar fate in impoverished postwar Japan. As the inebriated clerks at the close of the wake sequence in Ikiru will vow to change their ways, so here, first his fellow singer, and then Hiruta vow to take better care of their families in the coming year.

Kurosawa allows himself ironic sentiment as well. Masako points to a bridal kimono of a kind she will not live to wear – as a source of consolation; having observed on Christmas Eve the reflection of the stars in the filthy pond, Aoye will later refer to Hiruta as “a star being born”; that Miss Saijo can now practice only the song she was singing when she first met Aoye, even as he will not sell the “Red Mountain” picture he was painting when he met her, are likewise saccharine if ironic expressions of sentiment. Kurosawa maintains his clarity when he refrains from depicting a love relationship between the two. If anything happens between Aoye and Saijo, it will be after the final shot of the film.

The climax of Scandal is an elaborate courtroom scene, the only full-scale modern trial in Kurosawa’s oeuvre as if, later, he would lose all faith in the justice system as a means of extricating good from evil, truth from falsehood. Montages condense time, from the first montage sequence that introduces the courtroom and the omnipresent reporters and photographers. A Pathé newsreel of headlines reveals that press coverage will favour the publisher of Amour magazine; headlines proclaim the defeat of the lawsuit even before it has been argued, subservient reporters uniting to support their own.

A montage of three lying witnesses, the identically composed shots separated by wipes, reveals how truth can be distorted: because the towels “were hung up to dry just as in the photo,�? the viewer already knows, did not mean that Aoye and Saijo had bathed together.

Yet in Scandal Kurosawa holds out the prospect of social progress. The dubious witnesses are replaced by three honest peasants who come down from the mountains to testify for Aoye and Saijo. Facing the judges (and the camera), as the witnesses will do in Rashomon, they represent an abiding Japanese tradition of ethical integrity that has been eroded by modernization. One is outraged at the suggestion that he should take an oath – once he is told what an oath is: “I’ve never been dishonest!” These peasants, who for Kurosawa represent the innocent decency of people for whom the different between truth and falsehood is paramount, know enough to tell the truth, that Aoye and Saijo arrived separately; she was tired and this was why he gave her a ride to the inn on his motorcycle.

Increasingly frequent high angles looking down on Hiruta’s head expose his vulnerability and offer Kurosawa’s endorsement of Aoye’s view that his lawyer is more “weak” than “evil.” This point is reinforced in a bisected shot which employs light to distinguish between the morality of the characters. It comes in Hiruta’s final visit to Aoye’s studio, where he brings the news that Masako has died. In the foreground of the shot, Hiruta, confessing that he has betrayed Aoye and Saijo by taking money from Hori, leans against a ladder, which forms a cross that supports his weight. Hiruta is in virtual darkness, while to the right of the frame, standing behind, are Sumie, Miss Saijo, and Aoye, bathed in full light.

At the conclusion of the trial, Hiruta must choose between concealing his malfeasance or representing his clients honourably. To win the case, he must confess his wrongdoing, and ruin himself. An essentially good man, he surmounts his complicity and pays the price. No matter that he has been denounced by the Bar Association – he chooses no longer to remain a victim of the ambiguous moral codes of the new Japan. Hiruta has not cashed the one hundred thousand yen bribe offered him by the publisher, and so is able to produce evidence of his clients’ innocence, even as he failed to call the three witnesses whose testimony would at once have cleared their good names. In traditional Japanese fashion, bowing and apologizing “humbly” to the court, Hiruta tells the truth and so redeems himself.

Relieved by this return to civility, the court spectators applaud enthusiastically, led by those three schoolboys in uniform. Inspired by example, the populace, corrupted into a salacious hunger for Scandal, may be brought to its senses. Flash bulbs burst. The klieg lights go blindingly on, as the fickle press now transfers its precarious loyalty to the winning side.

The last scene belongs entirely to Hiruta. Losing his hat for the third time in the film, he chases it down the street, a conceit Kurosawa would borrow for Ikiru. His redemption allows him to emerge a better man, but with his daughter dead, Hiruta has nowhere to go. Behind him is that sign of the American Occupation, “Loading Zone,” before a wall of now-tattered Amour magazine photographs blowing in the wind. Kurosawa would repeat this mise-en-scene in Ikiru where Watanabe, facing a death sentence, is so lost in his thoughts that all street sounds are omitted from the noisy Tokyo street. Only when he moves into traffic does the deafening roar of trucks, buses and automobiles burst onto the sound track.

Hiruta, Kurosawa’s Everyman, has earned the final shot of Scandal. A lone figure, he steps into the uncertain moral future of a rapidly transforming society. His fate is as tenuous as that of Japan, stumbling into the post-Occupation present. The Kurosawa of 1950 could endorse the view that fighting for what is right is the only way to live, that things need not be as they are.

At the dawn of the period of his greatest creativity, Kurosawa suggests that, at heart, the Japanese people are decent and well-meaning, if susceptible to manipulation and too easily led astray. “I have faith in him…he’s all right,” Aoye has said of Hiruta. It was a faith in the redemption of people no less than Japanese society that Kurosawa would sustain through Red Beard (1965).