Toei's Ninkyo Film Jinsei Gekijo Hishakaku (Theater of Life)｜The Stillness of Koji Tsuruta and the Motion of Ken Takakura

There was a time when the film world had its stars, figures who shone at the very center of it. Hear the word “star” today, and no particular actor comes to mind. Yet in the golden age of cinema in the twentieth century, stars truly captivated vast audiences and were carved deep into their lives and hearts.

A star is not merely a matter of looks. Stardom comes from how densely the actor’s own way of living is reflected on the screen, and it comes down to a single thing, the power to awaken, answer, and resolve the demands of the age that the people watching that world on screen carry within them. Whether an actor can answer the unspoken demands of the age is what divides a star from an actor who is not one.

The birth of stars is closely bound up with the times. After the war, cinema admissions climbed without limit and the Japanese film industry was giddy with success, but once attendance peaked at over 1.1 billion in 1958, it fell away like a stone rolling downhill. The cause was the rise of television. Until then, Japanese cinema had meant chanbara, sword-fighting pictures made and screened in countless numbers, but the moment chanbara moved its stage from film to television, people no longer had any reason to go to the movie theater.

Now there was chanbara one could watch while lying on the floor of the living room, drinking sake, with the whole family gathered together. At the same time, the men at the head of the film companies were trying to keep their businesses going with the sensibilities of a bygone era, so the gap and the friction between them and the times kept growing, and a new mainstay to replace the period film was badly needed. What the times wanted above all was a “formula” that could be mass-produced as if in a factory. Once a formula existed, mass production would follow. This was the reality facing cinema in the age when television rose.

And so cinema split in two. On one side were big-budget productions made at enormous expense, and on the other were mass-produced films that put numbers first.

But the major studios, Toho, Shochiku, and Daiei, could not bring themselves to steer toward mass production, because their pride stood in the way. Toho, which specialized in big productions, came out the sole winner. Even so, the film production companies went into decline once Fuji Television, rich with the capital it had built up, moved into film in 1969, and Kadokawa Eiga arrived in 1976 to link publishing with film.

Yet there was one production company that excelled at mass-produced film, and that was Toei. Toei had been among the companies hit hardest by the decline of chanbara, but when it came to mass production, it was more advanced than anyone and had a production staff with more stamina than any other studio. Most of the people making Toei’s films were tough, rough men who had come back from Manchuria after the war, and many of them had no home to return to, having lost theirs in the war.

Toei made its films as “one family,” and it was the only studio to apply military methods to filmmaking. Burned-out cities, defeat, the deaths of comrades and family. With everything else erased, the one thing left in their lives was Toei’s films. In other words, Toei was not simply a film production company but the only meaning in life that remained to men who had lost everything. That is why it did not fall easily. This was Toei’s heat, and the strength that made mass production possible.

It was in these circumstances that Toei found its new formula in Ninkyo, the chivalrous code of the old-style gangster. In every field, a turning of the times brings a work that marks the turning point. For Toei’s Ninkyo films, that work was Jinsei Gekijo Hishakaku (1963), known in English as Theater of Life. Two actors who appeared in it went on to become the wings that carried Toei’s golden age, Koji Tsuruta and Ken Takakura.

Nearly every element of the style that Toei would go on to mass-produce as its Ninkyo formula was already in place in this first monumental work, from the bind between giri and ninjo, obligation and human feeling, to the woman a man has fallen for and the gang fight in which he throws his life away.

Set Koji Tsuruta beside Ken Takakura, and the sensibility of the era comes clearly into view. Tsuruta, born in 1924, the thirteenth year of Taisho, had been through the war and carried the shadow of the wartime generation. He served in the naval air corps and was determined to volunteer for the special attack units, the kamikaze, but the war ended before he could, and he lived on with a gloom he could do nothing about. That is why the Ninkyo he embodied is quiet, with a fury seething beneath a settled resolve. The sorrow of things passing away was Koji Tsuruta himself.

Ken Takakura, by contrast, was born in 1931, the sixth year of Showa, and was never conscripted. As a counterpoint to Tsuruta, Toei wrote into its films a formula for Takakura, the fury of a man who keeps silent, bears everything, and explodes only at the very last. In the turning-point film, if Tsuruta was stillness, Takakura was motion, and audiences could entrust their own frustration to either one. Here lay the turning point at which the stars of the age divided into a Tsuruta camp and a Takakura camp.

From then on, the Ninkyo film became a matter of series, with series starring Koji Tsuruta, series built around Ken Takakura, and series centered on Junko Fuji, who emerged from between the two, and they continued into the early 1970s.

But why did Ninkyo films capture the hearts of the young? One circumstance we have to consider is where the audience came from. The young people of that time, living in an age when recovery had already been achieved and high economic growth was under way, had almost all been torn from their rural communities and thrown into the anonymous city. While still young, they were made to stand barehanded in a world where neither obligation nor human feeling counted for anything, and only money and calculation kept things turning. What caught the wordless gloom of these young people in the city, and sublimated it so well, was Toei’s Ninkyo film.

It could do so because Toei’s Ninkyo films showed exactly the reverse of that world, offering on screen a phantom community in which obligation and human feeling still meant something. Their basic structure is the contrast between a traditional Ninkyo family and an upstart yakuza gang that claws its way up through violence in league with the police and capital. Caught between those two worlds, the hero endures injustice and suppresses himself for the sake of obligation, and when he reaches the point where he can bear no more, he storms in alone, or with one companion, knowing full well it will mean his own destruction.

That final raid became a consolation for the very generation that had lost the 1960 Anpo struggle, the mass protests against the Japan-US Security Treaty. Collective politics had brought them no resolution. In the end, the struggle was overridden when Prime Minister Nobusuke Kishi, grandfather of Shinzo Abe, forced the treaty through by a snap vote, the season of politics closed in defeat, and as if to take its place, the Income Doubling Plan of Prime Minister Hayato Ikeda, a former bureaucrat, began.

The streets grew richer and richer, yet somewhere in their hearts the sediment of defeat had settled. Having lost the struggle, they could find no answer, but Toei gave them one through the Ninkyo film. One might say the Ninkyo film was a flower that bloomed on that sediment.

Cinema once always had the power to answer the unspoken demands of its age, and it carried real heat. Today, by contrast, the frustration young people cannot put into words never takes visible form, and the flood of one-off videos offers only countless ways of escape. Why look again at Toei’s Ninkyo films now? Because if we want to know how the substratum that built modern Japan was formed, and where it carried its distortions, they seem to me indispensable.