History of Postwar Japan as Told by a Bar Hostess (1970) User Reviews

Prostitution as a metaphor for post-war history of Japan

[anttilmar · 8/10 · 24 March 2008]

This is a documentary film about history of Japan in 1945-1970. The main narrative takes shape through describing events in one woman's unstable personal life. It consists of archive footage of political turmoil, demonstrations and other news flashes on one hand, and material from interviews with her on the other.

In the interview the woman describes her relationships with various men, starting from the age of 15 in 1945. After failed and violent relationships with Japanese men, she starts to seek comfort by prostituting herself to various American soldiers and sailors. This reflects the development of the post-war relations between United States and Japan, which is shown in the background. Yet she seems mostly uninterested in the political patterns evolving around her, and she even actively seeks denial when she is shown photographs of Vietnamese civilian casualties.

It's a very interesting perspective into Japanese history - and I have to admit that this contained much about the political history of Japan during 50's and 60's I wasn't previously aware of.

What Ever Happened to Madam Onboro?

[DavidAConrad · 8/10 · 27 January 2023]

This documentary from the peak of the Japanese New Wave is a well-structured and valuable resource for people looking to understand Japan in the years 1945-1970. Imamura progresses chronologically through the political highlights of those years, emphasizing the events that raised or frustrated the hopes of Japanese leftist and student groups. The timeline begins with the surrender in 1945 and progresses through 1952's Bloody May Day, the Ampo protests of 1960, and the troubling presence of American spy submarines and soldiers en route to the unpopular war in Vietnam.

Yet history without characters lacks a sense of reality, so at every stage Imamura lets his "Madam Onboro," a salt-of-the-earth woman named Emiko Takada, give her impression of historical landmarks and augment them with stories from her own life. Her recollections do not always intersect with the events that newsreels covered, but that is the point of this exercise: the rhythm of people's lives, the decisions and mistakes they make, are what history looks like on a human scale.

Imamura's approach covers the political and the personal, but it fails to capture the most significant "event" of the first postwar quarter-century: the "economic miracle" that transformed Japanese standards of living. Emiko's life does illustrate that transformation - she notes that the Korean War boosted her family's income, and she became a business owner after an inauspicious youth shaped by class and caste. Yet neither her interviews nor the newsreel footage that Imamura uses to bridge them addresses the country's economic transformation overtly.

I would love to know what became of Takada after 1970, where the movie ends at a major transition in her life. I have not found anything on the internet or in the digital archives of Japan's largest newspapers. I'm posting this review here and on Letterboxd in the hope that someday, somehow, somebody will find out the rest of her story, or parts of it anyway, and share it. It's just one person's story, but Imamura picked a good one to tell, and I'd love to know how it turns out.

History Of Postwar Japan As Told By A Bar Hostess (Shohei Imamura, 1970) **

[Bunuel1976 · 5/10 · 1 April 2006]

I was looking forward to following up my small Imamura retrospective with the 3-hour long THE PROFOUND DESIRE OF THE GODS (1968), but I had to abort my VHS viewing after the first 10 minutes because the tape was mangled (which, had I been aware of it, I would certainly have rerecorded the film when it turned up again recently during the "After Hours" programme on Italian TV)! In this respect, I have to agree with Michael Elliott's preference of DVD to VHS as one need only turn over the disc to know if it's scratched or not, but with VHS you cannot know beforehand in what state the tape is going to be!!

So, I had to make do with the next entry in the Imamura canon that I had scheduled to watch. Well, it turned out to be as dreary and unappetizing as the film's very title would suggest, treating as it does events which would mostly only be familiar to Japanese people anyway. As a matter of fact, only the various scenes of military conflict and political turmoil held some measure of interest for me; indeed, the picture comes off as a very tedious whole, demonstrating that few film-makers can successfully make the leap into the field of documentary (and, frankly, only Werner Herzog comes to mind at the moment).