THE BATTLE OF REHE & THE TANGGU TRUCE
At the end of 1932, Japan had successfully invaded a large chunk of north-eastern China, and named it Manchukuo. In order to secure their new puppet state’s southern border, the Japanese Army’s chief of staff finally contacted the Home Islands. He asked for permission from the Emperor to capture the last bit of Chinese land, on the far side of the Great Wall of China. That was a province called Rehe, centred on a city that’s now called Chengde. Hoping that it would stabilise the region, and with strict instructions not to go beyond the Wall, Emperor Hirohito agreed.
The resultant war lasted four months, and the Japanese forces won an overwhelming victory. The resultant peace treaty was horribly lopsided, with Manchukuo territory now reaching and including the Great Wall, and turning a vast swathe of Chinese land, including once and future capital Beijing, into a demilitarised zone patrolled by Japanese aircraft. While the Chinese government were happy because it allowed them to focus their efforts on the ongoing civil war against the Chinese Communists, the people of China were furious at their country’s international humiliation.
And the League of Nations weren’t happy either. Japan had repeatedly ignored their rules, and had flat out lied about its actions in China. After the League refused to accept Japan’s sovereignty over Manchukuo, Japan walked out. They left the League completely in March 1933.
Not that it mattered. Japan’s armed forces had won another victory and were looking for more. And back at home, the Japanese people needed education. They had new enemies, and new people to hate. Doubly so when it came to educating Japanese children.
UNKNOWN: PREVENTING TUBERCULOSIS
But if I’m going to be completely fair to the Japanese government, which is not a happy sentence fragment, they were still working to keep their citizens safe in 1933. At that point, their Home Ministry was responsible for policing, social policy and public works. In a kind of sequel to YAMAMOTO Sanae’s “Diseases Spread” from 1926, they commissioned “Kekkaku Yobou” / “Preventing Tuberculosis” (The Home Ministry, 1933).
There’s a production tag on the film that reads “in association with Miyako Shokai”. There’s an import/export business which uses that name today. But that was founded post-war. Even the Japanese Animated Film Archive doesn’t know who the pre-war company was.
“Preventing Tuberculosis”
After the credits, a lecture begins – fair – to an audience of adults with inkblot pie-eyes. While Japan and its soldiers are awesome – bit random – it has an awful infant mortality rate and lots of deaths from TB. In 2026, with vaccinations readily available, under 2000 people die from the disease in Japan each year. This animation gives us the contemporary statistics, as a bat flies over a graveyard; over 110 thousand deaths, each year, from 1926 to 1931.
This is mostly well-drawn still frames with the dry, horrifying text printed over the top for a benshi to read before going round the back for a well-deserved sake or three. We’re shown, still frame by still frame, how the disease affects the afflicted. And I have to confess that’s where I checked out.
No wonder this was an animated piece. If a cinema had screened a film with actual photos of TB victims, the place would have emptied like it was on fire. The still frame drawing of the anal fistula was bad enough. There is animation later in the film, but the characters move crudely and un-naturally, and not in a fun way.
WHY WOULD I SHOW YOU THAT?
This is part of a long tradition of gross but necessary films. Mind you, if I’d gone to see “Dragnet Girl” or “The Water Magician” in a cinema in 1933 and this had come on as the pre-show, I’d have slunk off for a cigarette. I don’t even smoke. “Preventing Tuberculosis” gets 2/10 unless you’re a medical history student.
KIMURA’S APOLOGY
KIMURA Hakusan was a superb director, even if some of his efforts in creating propaganda for the Ministry of Education were a little too enthusiastic for my tastes. But he blew his own career to smithereens with 1932’s “Cool Ship”, the first Japanese pornographic animation, which led to his arrest and the cartoon’s confiscation.
Perhaps Kimura made one last cartoon as an apology of sorts. Maybe it was already half-made when he was arrested. Either way, “Manga Geki Yoshichirou no Keirei” / “Yoshichiro Salutes” (Ministry Of Education, 1933) is probably his final work.
“Yoshichiro Salutes”
Our hero, Yoshichiro Kamiya, is a vaguely Asterix-looking samurai. His creators were still in French junior schools at the time. He’s competing in a winner-stays-on sumo tournament. It’s not long before Yoshichiro shows his dominance. He beats everyone from the tiny ninja Sakuke to the old-timer Hikozaemon with ease.
Afterwards, totally full of himself, he struts around town and ignores the respectful bows of others. But even monkeys fall out of trees sometimes, as the Japanese proverb has it. When a daimyo, one of the Shogun’s lords, ignores his bow while lost in thought, Yoshichiro loses his temper.
Soon afterwards, Yoshichiro picks a fight with the daimyo’s guardsmen and sends them home, bruised and battered. Knowing that their lord won’t do anything, the guards ask the Shogun for justice instead. So when the rewards for the tournament are handed out, Yoshichiro gets nothing but a public telling off for his arrogance. Once he’s been put back in his place, the daimyo gives a tearful Yoshichiro his gold and food. Our samurai tells us the moral – don’t find fault, don’t be disrespectful, or you’ll get humiliated like I was.
As always with Kimura’s work, his backgrounds are superb and his animation is excellent. Even his minor characters have warmth; the Shogun’s geishas, who we don’t see for long, are drawn with care and individuality. And for the first time we get actual humans, doing recognisable and accurate sumo1! Sure, the fighters are skinny by modern standards, but it’s enormously impressive.
This is another wonderful jidaegeki cartoon from an expert in the field. It’s just a shame he had to leave it. “Yoshichiro Salutes” scores 8/10.
SPACE, MAN – OGINO GOES FAR OUT
Being an independent film-maker in 1930s Japan was not an easy path to take. But OGINO Shigeji, fuel store owner and animation auteur, wasn’t going to let little things like “common sense” or “his day job” define the films he wanted to make, and so it was with “Hyakunengo no Aru Hi” / “A Day After A Hundred Years” (Independent, 1933).
“A Day After A Hundred Years”
In this cut-out shadow cartoon, a human figure presses buttons on a strange machine, and someone hops out of it. It’s Ogino-san’s descendent, Shinshi Mashitane, and he’s just saved Ogino from dying in the Great War of 1942(!). Shinshi knows Ogino vanished in the War, and now he’s used his magic television to bring his ancestor into the future year of 2032. We see a war with death rays shooting down aircraft and tanks, and a bomb dropped by an aircraft with American roundels “kills” Ogino.
The pair hop on something that looks very like a maglev train to JAPAN Chuo City, the new name for Tokyo – “Japan” in English. Hm. – to see its skyscrapers, helicopters and robot workers. Then Shinshi offers to take Ogino to Mars in an nuclear-powered rocket, sped up by anti-gravity. Something strange happens that I confess I did not understand, and the rocket flies away into the distance.
This is somehow sweet and naive, and horribly dark, and slap-bang on the money all at once. Maybe Ogino just threw all the most science-fictional ideas he could think of into a mortar and smashed them into cosmic rice cakes. After all, TV and helicopters were still in their infancy in 1933. But even as an independent creator, acknowledging the possibility of war with America was a bold move. And the suggestion of losing one could have jailed him.
Considering this was a solo project from Ogino, this is an absolute masterwork. I said things about “doing the best he could with what he had” for his last piece, but saying that now would be an insult to one of the best cartoons I’ve seen during this project to date. “A Day After A Hundred Years” scores 9/10 and is simply wonderful.
fin
That’s all for now. I would like to give special thanks to this blog’s pillars; AniDB, who have helped me work out what to look for, the Japanese Film Archive, who have given me the material to actually watch.
Additional thanks go out to Fabien GANDON, currently part of the WIMMICS team at INRIA.
- This is a correction: a previous version of this page said this was the first recognisable sumo at all, and that isn’t the case. Thanks to Schottenjager of Midnight Sumo’s community for the catch. ↩︎