Kazuo Miyagawa's "Bleach Bypass" Was Born in Kon Ichikawa's Her Brother (1960)

This time, I want to talk about “a single technique” that was used all over the world in the 1990s, beginning with the Hollywood films Seven (セブン, 1995) and Saving Private Ryan (プライベート・ライアン, 1998).

This technique, acclaimed as the best possible means of expression for depicting an era we ourselves have not experienced, was created by a Japanese cameraman. The year of its birth was 1960. On September 10 of that year, full-scale color television broadcasting began in Japan, and five stations, NHK, Nippon Television, Radio Tokyo Television (ラジオ東京テレビ), Asahi Broadcasting (朝日放送) and Yomiuri Telecasting, began broadcasting in color all at once in Tokyo and Osaka.

As the images in people’s living rooms turned to color and black and white was about to become a thing of the past, one filmmaker was waging a fierce inner struggle, seeking a sensibility that television could never express. His name was the director Kon Ichikawa. And on November 1, just two months after color television broadcasting began, what Daiei thrust forward as a film for the age of color television was Her Brother (おとうと).

When I first saw this film, I felt a nostalgia carrying a sadness hard to put into words. It is an era that certainly once existed, yet one I have never experienced myself. A golden age whose traces have vanished from Japan, yet which has been handed down in stories. That era is Taisho.

The film is set in the 15th year of Taisho (1926), the very last of the era, the final moment before the Showa era, covered in thick gray clouds, starts up. It is, so to speak, the most difficult era to depict. In a novel it might be manageable, but on film, color makes it look modern, and the “feeling” of Taisho simply does not come through. Before shooting began, Kon Ichikawa made an unreasonable request of a certain person. That person was the cameraman Kazuo Miyagawa.

If one speaks of the right-hand man of the golden age of Japanese cinema, valued by great directors such as Kenji Mizoguchi, Akira Kurosawa and Yasujiro Ozu, it is without doubt Kazuo Miyagawa. He translated the director’s vision into images, grasped the intention, and captured images beyond imagination. It is no exaggeration to say that without this cameraman, the masterpieces of Japanese cinema would not have been born.

And a cameraman does not simply shoot as the director says. The cameraman of those days had the job of grasping on his own the images in the director’s head and, without breaking the work or its style, quietly engraving on film the essence of the work that is not spoken in words. Kon Ichikawa, with extraordinary feeling, said one thing to Kazuo Miyagawa.

“Turn the air of Taisho into color.”

That was all. In fact, the 15th year of Taisho was the very year Kon Ichikawa himself was born, and he himself did not know Taisho firsthand. Even so, watching the adults who had erased every trace of Taisho modernism as Japan rapidly militarized, he had been groping in search of the lost era.

At first glance, it seems nothing but an absurd order. But this was a great task that only Kazuo Miyagawa could accomplish. For Kazuo Miyagawa was born in 1908, in the late Meiji era, and the Taisho era corresponded to his youth. What is more, he was born and raised at Kawaramachi Oike in Kyoto City, a Kyotoite through and through.

Kazuo Miyagawa entered the world of film at eighteen, when he joined Nikkatsu Kyoto as an assistant in the developing department; after three years of apprenticeship there, he moved to the camera department. In other words, Miyagawa too joined Nikkatsu in the 15th year of Taisho. Put differently, he was a man who knew everything about the smell and atmosphere of film laboratories from the end of Taisho to the beginning of Showa.

To answer this great challenge staked on the 15th year of Taisho, Miyagawa agonized again and again, and hit upon a certain technique. That is what later became known as “gin-nokoshi” (銀残し, literally “leaving the silver”).

Color film, to begin with, is a technique in which the exposed silver reacts during development and color couplers bind to it to form a dye image, but at the end, unless the silver that has done its job is bleached and washed away, the colors do not come out. In other words, keeping only the color and discarding the silver is the technique called ordinary color development. Miyagawa, on the other hand, deliberately skipped the process of removing the silver at the final stage. As a result, the colors were held back, the shadows sank under the silver, the contrast became stronger, and the colors became low in saturation and subdued.

To put it in an image, it is something like the difference in tone between a ripe persimmon and an astringent one. As its English name, bleach bypass, says, it is simply a matter of letting the film pass the bleach. In other words, it was in fact an epoch-making technique born of an aesthetic of subtraction. But Miyagawa understood that unless he prepared thoroughly already at the shooting stage, this sense of the last days of Taisho would not come through.

The one Miyagawa consulted here was Tokyo Laboratory (東京現像所). It was a laboratory founded in 1955 as a large-scale lab to rival Toyo Genzosho (東洋現像所, now IMAGICA), and together they arrived at a solution. Unfortunately, because the film industry moved to digital, Tokyo Laboratory ended all its operations at the end of November 2023.

On the other hand, when you first see this film, you may feel that its tones are something alien, similar to yet different from the “Taisho” you imagine. For people, Taisho means Taisho modernism, and that modernism is moreover a sensibility of later generations, built up through Showa interpretation. What was actively pushed forward there was a richly colored Taisho, made of the red of Yumeji Takehisa, the lights of the cafés, stained glass, and the flamboyance of the modern girl. But Kazuo Miyagawa, who actually lived through Taisho, understood better than anyone that Taisho had two faces.

That is the Taisho without color, the Taisho of the darkness in damp Japanese houses and the white of the tuberculosis wards. Her Brother clearly chose the latter. Yoko Mizuki adapted Aya Koda’s autobiographical novel, and the film is structured as the story of a younger brother who goes astray under his father, a writer, and his stepmother, and the older sister who protects him. The brother falls ill with tuberculosis, and his remaining life keeps wearing away. When the Japanese of 1960 recalled Taisho, what they found there was not glamour but also the memory of an age when people died inside the home.

In a sense, it is a rebellion against the glorified era of Taisho modernism, and a thoroughly different Taisho is depicted. The cast is also wonderful, with the sister played by Keiko Kishi, who died recently, the brother by Hiroshi Kawaguchi, the mother by Kinuyo Tanaka, and the father by Masayuki Mori. Tanaka and Mori were actors who lived through Taisho, while Kishi and Kawaguchi were of the Showa generation.

Images that can only be described as “that feeling.” It is a masterpiece where the sensibility of Kon Ichikawa, who tried to bring the 15th year of Taisho back to life through the magic of film, intersected with craftsmen and with the Japanese companies of an age rich in experimental spirit. It may feel heavy just as the world is about to slip into the festive mood of Silver Week. But even in our own time, a two-sidedness like that of “gin-nokoshi” surely exists in our everyday lives.