Sadao Yamanaka｜The Finest Director of the 1930s, Dead at 28 in the War, and His Three Surviving Films

Akira Kurosawa, Kenji Mizoguchi, Yasujiro Ozu, and the other masters who survived World War II breathed life into postwar Japanese cinema. Behind their work lies the unfulfilled hope of the many filmmakers who did not live through the war years and whose lives were cut tragically short.

Among them was Sadao Yamanaka, who brought innovation to prewar Japanese cinema and died while great things were still expected of him. Yamanaka, whose life ended at only twenty-eight, sent a fresh wind through the prewar film world and was regarded as the finest director of the 1930s. But in 1937 he was called up to fight in the Second Sino-Japanese War, and the following year he died of illness in China.

In a directing career of just five years, Yamanaka released no fewer than twenty-six films. Before the war, however, there was no notion of preserving film, and movies were treated as “seasonal goods.” It was not unusual for a film to be made, screened, and then simply disappear, and because film stock at the time was flammable, many works were lost to fire or simply went missing.

As a result, only three of Yamanaka’s films survive in substantially complete form. Even so, those three are enough to let us experience the extraordinary talent of a filmmaker who was then approaching his late twenties. Of the works left by Yamanaka, who made his debut at the young age of twenty-two, the ones we can still watch more or less whole are The Million Ryo Pot (1935), Kochiyama Soshun (1936), and Humanity and Paper Balloons (1937).

Because he debuted in 1932, during the silent era, only the talkies, the films with sound, from the last years of his career survive. Yet every one of them is superbly accomplished, rendered with a sensibility all his own, as if in defiance of the gloom that hung over society in the 1930s. In recent years, Yamanaka’s films have also undergone 4K digital restoration. In 2020, the three surviving works were restored, returning with beautiful images and clear sound, and they were screened that same year at the 33rd Tokyo International Film Festival.

Running through all three is a humor in the storytelling that is characteristic of Yamanaka, who was born in the Kansai region. In his films, I sense a lonely resolve that, in the dark years of early Showa, cinema at least must not turn gloomy as well, and although the overall tone is dark, moments that bring calm to the heart appear throughout. It is easy to imagine the audiences who watched his films in theaters back then breaking into smiles in an ominous world.

In The Million Ryo Pot, Denjiro Okochi, a prewar star of period drama, plays Tange Sazen, a rough-mannered bodyguard who lodges at an archery parlor run by Ofuji, played by Kiyozo Shinbashi, a former geisha who had become a star singer. With the shop as its stage, the film tells, with great comic charm, of people tossed about by events, as they take in a boy who has lost his father and chase after a pot hiding a map that shows where a million ryo can be found.

Kochiyama Soshun pairs Chojuro Kawarasaki and Kan’emon Nakamura, distinguished actors of the prewar and postwar years and founding members of the Zenshinza theater company, established in 1931, and the interplay between the two contrasting performers is superb. What makes it intriguing is that Yamanaka was a man of Kamigata, the Kyoto and Osaka region, while the two actors were natives of Edo to the core. The fusion of their sensibilities gives this masterpiece its distinctive emotional texture.

Humanity and Paper Balloons was made at a time when the darkness of the age was creeping into the film world too, and because Yamanaka was drafted the moment it was finished, it became his last work. It marks a complete departure from the two earlier films, unfolding in a pent-up, oppressive atmosphere that seems to project Yamanaka’s own unsettled state of mind. Ninjo, the warmth of human feeling, has long been likened to paper in the old saying “Ninjo is as thin as paper,” meaning that human hearts are shallow and fickle. Those were years when the will of the military was drawing people’s lives into its orbit, and mutual distrust was gradually spreading.

In those days, war began to strip Ninjo from the ties between people. Yamanaka’s film, made nearly a century ago, surely resonates today, now that Ninjo has likewise vanished from human relationships.