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Masumura, Ichikawa and Ozu

Speed of Growth In the age of global economy, a self-proclaimed expert announces “your bond is no longer as secure as it used to be” and then whole world goes berserk. A large part of transactions of securities, stocks, bonds, foreign currencies and other monetary entities is processed by computer algorithms without human intervention, in less than a microsecond over the continents. A myriad of security firms, banks, and other companies you never knew how to pronounce their names, destroy your retirement plan in two seconds. Most of us are jittery because off-shoring project in process in the floor below …

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Postwar Kurosawa: Scandal

Between Furrows The man I met at Komagata-ya (local bar/izaka-ya) created the character of Hiruta. Not me. Akira Kurosawa In his autobiography, Kurosawa confessed he could not stop writing lines after lines for Hiruta’s character. As Kurosawa develops the details out of the promising synopsis on yellow journalism, the character of Hiruta becomes more vivid, more morally defunct, even more pathetic, and more real. After the release of the film “Scandal”, his memory suddenly flashed back to the scene he had forgotten, the night he had met this man. That was when Kurosawa was still a young assistant director, drinking …

 
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Postwar Kurosawa: Drunken Angel

On August 20th 1945, only 5 days after the surrender of the Imperial Japan, the first (black) market opened in Shinjuku. This Shinjuku Market was a community of open-air, primitive merchants. In following months, the similar black markets opened in many key locations around Tokyo and other major cities in Japan. The operator of such black markets were tekiya (a sort of mafia/yakuza which specializes in open-air markets (1)), who supplied various merchandise to those shops, provided the protection and controlled the prices. The Shinjuku Market was operated and protected by Kanto Ozu-Gumi, the Shinjuku local tekiya. Territorial conflicts among …