Haruko Sugimura, the Greatest Actor in Japanese Film History｜The Acting Found by Yasujiro Ozu's Gumi

How should one go about exploring films?

Whenever you take something on, the first task is to establish where you yourself stand right now. Set off without a map and you will lose your way sooner or later, as everyone does, and film is no different.

Rather than watching whatever comes to hand, I recommend deciding first on just one film director. That one can simply be a director whose work struck you as somehow good. If you keep watching one director’s films exhaustively, you begin to see how the same director is swayed by sensibilities and modes of expression that shift from era to era, by the pressures of the times, by the finances of the studio, and so on. This is history, and among those films are masterpieces that have come down to us with all of that struggle inside them.

The reason to choose a single director is the Gumi system that existed in the Japanese film world of the time. A particular director would have particular staff attached to him, a custom known as the Gumi, or crew. Akira Kurosawa had the Kurosawa-gumi, Yasujiro Ozu the Ozu-gumi, Mikio Naruse the Naruse-gumi, and in each, gifted people poured all their skill and passion into bringing the director’s vision to the screen.

The films of this era also had regular casts whom a given director chose again and again. Takashi Shimura and Toshiro Mifune appear often in Kurosawa’s films, and from his middle and later periods he relied on Tatsuya Nakadai and Kyoko Kagawa. Behind this lay the exclusive contract system of the Japanese film industry.

As Japanese cinema entered its boom years, the studios had to turn out film after film efficiently to meet the demand of the age. To achieve high artistry on a tight schedule, it was obviously an advantage if everyone already understood one another by the time they arrived on set. What arose naturally from this was the Gumi.

With the director at the top, the cameraman, the lighting crew, the actors and the rest formed a single community bound by a shared fate, and they made their films practically living together. Rather than coaching new actors from scratch each time, a director could achieve deeper and more complex images by using actors who could produce the atmosphere, rhythm and aesthetic he wanted through an unspoken, almost instinctive understanding. Actors were therefore not cast for fame and looks alone, as they are today. The decision rested heavily with the director, and since the chemistry between director and actor, and between actor and crew, was inevitably essential, particular directors naturally came to favor particular actors.

Let us look at one example. Yasujiro Ozu, the master of Shochiku’s Ofuna studio, regarded actors who act, or who want to act, as an obstacle to the art he was trying to achieve. What he demanded of them instead was the rigor of a still life. Because of this aesthetic, the actors then celebrated for their craft were not cast in his films, and instead, overlooked performers who had been written off as bad actors were discovered by Ozu one after another.

What Ozu wanted from actors was not that they bring acting into the film, still less that they assert themselves. They were asked to become one of the pieces indispensable to the cinematic whole. And so, from among those overlooked actors, some rose to prominence through Ozu’s films, most notably Chishu Ryu and Setsuko Hara.

Chishu Ryu, the spiritual backbone of Ozu’s films, appeared in no fewer than 52 of Ozu’s 54 films, turning up in nearly every one of them from the prewar years through to Ozu’s final film. In the postwar years, meanwhile, Ozu discovered Setsuko Hara, who had been criticized as all beauty and no acting ability, and brought her charm into full bloom across six films. At the same time, he cast Haruko Sugimura, who became indispensable to his postwar work, in nine.

Personally, I believe Haruko Sugimura is the greatest actor in the history of Japanese cinema. Ozu was an obsessive perfectionist with a superb eye, and he insisted that everything in his films be the real thing, down to a single piece of tableware. So particular was he about authenticity that one cast member claimed to have deliberately flubbed takes again and again because the food on Ozu’s set was genuinely delicious. Ozu’s films, which are obsessive not only about the images but about every detail of the houses, each object in the set design, and the composition and flow of every shot, are in a sense the hardest of all for actors. Few could understand his instruction “don’t act,” and yet they still had to realize the artistry of the work.

Since Ozu himself wrestled with this problem, finding good actors mattered to him above all else. It was in these circumstances that he met Haruko Sugimura. Sugimura, who joined the Ozu-gumi after the war with Late Spring (1949) and went on to support nine major works, came from what was then called Shingeki, the “new theater,” and was a great actress who carried Bungakuza, its largest company, on her shoulders.

Shingeki is a category particular to Japan. Put simply, it grew out of a movement that arose between the end of the Meiji era and the Taisho era in reaction against the stylized beauty and fixed forms of the older traditional theater, Kyugeki [旧劇], meaning kabuki and shinpa, and that sought to practice the realist theater of the modern West in Japan. Though we speak of the modern West, however, what Shingeki chiefly absorbed was Russian theater. Above all, the Moscow Art Theatre stood at the forefront of a realism that rendered, in natural everyday dialogue, the complex psychology of the characters of Russian literature, with their inner egoism, jealousy and vulgarity.

In other words, a great actress of the Shingeki world, with an overwhelming talent for “acting,” turned out, surprisingly, to be the decisive piece Ozu had been missing. Because Ozu built his films on extremely strict forms, breathing life into that stylized beauty at its most extreme required Haruko Sugimura, armed with the realism of Shingeki. Sugimura understood Ozu’s intentions better than anyone. Ozu, who made actors repeat the same performance over and over for hours, said nothing at all to her alone, entrusting everything to her with complete confidence.

In fact, you can grasp what Ozu’s aesthetic was after simply by watching Haruko Sugimura act. Most viewers, I suspect, will not see her performance as acting at all. Instead, they will lay their own memories over it, thinking, “Ah, there was someone just like this in our neighborhood,” or “Ah, that is exactly how my grandmother was.” This is real acting.

Watching Sugimura is like watching a memory in which your own younger self once played a part. Her acting is simply a person living in the town. Actors like this are rare even in the history of Japanese cinema, and her presence is overwhelming.

And if you keep watching by following a particular director’s Gumi, you will steadily build the grounding you need to watch films. For audiences today, the main barriers are black-and-white films and, hardest of all, silent films. Don’t push yourself at first. Begin with the films of the 1950s and 1960s.