Akasen chitai (1956) - film review

In Yoshiwara, the red light district of Tokyo, five women work in a licensed brothel owned by Kurazô Taya.  The oldest of the five is Yumeko, a widow who turned to prostitution to support her son, who is living with her in-laws in the country.  The youngest is Mickey, who became a prostitute as an act of rebellion against her hypocritical bourgeois father.  Between these two there are: Yasumi, who ruthlessly milks her clients so that she ascend the social ladder as fast she can; Yorie, a country girl who assiduously passes on her earnings to her poor parents; and Hanae, a housewife who is burdened with a sick husband and baby.  As the five women live their daily dramas, the Japanese government is on the verge of passing legislation which will outlaw their profession and condemn them to a life of poverty...

In what was to be his last film before his untimely death, director Kenji Mizoguchi returns to a subject dear to his heart, the plight of prostitutes in modern Japan.  Seamlessly blending melodrama and social realism, Akasen chitai (a.k.a. Street of Shame) examines the pros and cons of prostitution at a time when the government was attempting to pass a bill that would make licensed brothels a thing of the past.   The film’s apparent neutrality reflects Mizoguchi’s own ambivalence towards prostitution.  He had used prostitutes throughout his adult life and yet he was tormented by the fact that his own sister had been sold as a geisha to help pay for his upbringing.  

The film presents prostitution in both a positive and a negative light.  On the positive side, prostitution is shown as a way out for women who would otherwise have been driven into unspeakable poverty.  It was, as the brothel owner in the film proudly states, a surrogate social service, which allowed women to earn money to support their families and pay for medical treatment that would otherwise be denied them.  Unlike most other women, who generally became the overworked drudges in a male-dominated society, prostitutes had some measure of autonomy and could enjoy a much higher standard of living.  On the other hand, prostitution was considered the most shameful of professions and those who worked in the industry were liable to be ostracised from their own families.  They also risked being exploited by their employers and harmed, perhaps even killed, by their clients.  The middle-aged prostitute had little to look forward to once her beauty had begun to fade and her services no longer required.

The suffering of women in a male-oriented world is a recurring theme through much of Mizoguchi’s oeuvre and here the director neatly weaves together five poignant stories that succinctly express his keen preoccupation with women’s issues.   Each of the five female protagonists is a victim of an unjust society, but each of them deals with her injustice in a different way, according to her value system and background.   Yumeko is the most tragic of the five - her reward is to be brutally rejected by the son whom she raised on her earnings as a prostitute.  Yasumi is the polar opposite, a hard-bitten hustler who uses the system to her own advantage, extorting every last yen from her clients so that she can better herself.  Prostitution is the capitalist system in miniature - it provides opportunities, a way to evade the curse of poverty, but it also has a darker side.  

Akasen chitai was highly controversial when it was released in Japan in 1956 but it was also a major commercial success (the most profitable of the films that Mizoguchi made for Daiei Studios).   The film certainly fuelled the debate over prostitution and it may even have tipped the balance of public opinion.  Within a few months of it being released, the Japanese government successfully introduced legislation to ban licensed brothels; the law was introduced in 1958 and remains in force to this day.  

Those familiar with Mizoguchi’s work will be surprised by this film, which shows a marked break from the formalisation and aesthetics of his earlier films.  Akasen chitai is not the work of a man who has reached the end of his career but rather a step in a new direction, a conscious attempt by a confident director to explore a new style of filmmaking.  Here, there are none of the director’s trademark long take ’sequence shots’, but a more balanced mix of shots which gives it a subtly modernist and more naturalistic feel.  The film’s modernity is emphasised by its partial electronic score (an innovation for Japanese cinema), which brings an unsettling atmosphere to some parts of the film.  Mizoguchi was clearly looking forward to a new phase in his career, a phase which sadly would not be fulfilled.   It was whilst preparing his next film, Osaka Story, that Mizoguchi fell ill with leukaemia.  He died a short while afterwards, aged 58.

© James Travers 2010

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