Kiyohiko Ushihara's
Shingun
(Marching
On)
"Banzai" for a High-Flying Silent Classic By William M. Drew
Kiyohiko Ushihara's 1930 silent film, Shingun or Marching On, released in the 1990s on VHS tape by the original producing company, Shochiku, is a rare example of a truly large-scale production from Japan's silent cinema and remains a powerful, engrossing film. A war spectacle directly influenced by The Big Parade and Wings, it is a modern heroic epic with reverberations in 20th century Japanese history, a well-constructed narrative expertly blending humor, romance, adventure, and social commentary. Director Kiyohiko Ushihara (1897-1987) was one of the leading Japanese filmmakers of the prewar era. Born in Kyushu, he attended the University of Tokyo and was the first Japanese film director to graduate from a university. In 1920, he became a pupil of the Russian emigre actress, Anna Slavina, at the acting school established by the newly formed Shochiku film company. He gained valuable experience at Shochiku by writing the script for Minoru Murata's Souls on the Road (1921), generally considered to be the first great Japanese film, and was soon promoted by the studio to be a director in his own right. In one of his 1923 films, he directed a film starring Anna Slavina's daughter, Ekaterina Slavina, the first European actress to play leads in Japanese films. Also in 1923, he directed the first part of a two-part production of Victor Hugo's Les Misérables, the first of five Japanese versions of Hugo's literary masterpiece. Entitled Aa Mujo (Ah, No Mercy), the title by which Hugo's novel is widely known in Japan, the 1923 film starred Masao Inoue (later the star of Teinosuke Kinugasa's A Page of Madness) as Jean Valjean and was scripted by the future major director, Daisuke Ito. It was given an ancient Chinese setting due to the contemporary Japanese popularity of American films with Chinese characters and settings, such as Griffith's Broken Blossoms. According to Ushihara's recollections nearly 60 years later, the scenes at the Bishop's house were filmed at the Mampukuji Temple at Uji, the headquarters of the Obaku sect of Zen Buddhism built in the Chinese style, while the prison scenes were shot in a building at the compound of Yokohama's Chinese cemetery with Ushihara himself playing a jailer. Although he had successfully established himself as a director in Japan, Ushihara decided to familiarize himself firsthand with the American cinema and in the mid-twenties studied for a year under no less than Charlie Chaplin. Returning to Japan in 1927, he directed such popular romantic comedy-dramas for Shochiku as Love of Life (1927), He and Life (1928), and The Life of Workers in the Big City (1928), pictures which increased his standing with the public and earned him the nickname, "Sentimental Ushihara." By 1930, the year Shingun and another major Ushihara film, Why Do You Cry, Young People?, were released, he was at 33 Shochiku's senior director and the logical choice for the studio's costliest, most ambitious production of the year. From 1928 to 1932, he also co-edited with Minoru Murata Eiga Kagaku Kenkyu (Scientific Study of Cinema), a pioneering Japanese journal which published technical information and critical analyes of film art. After leaving Shochiku, Ushihara continued to work at other studios, remaining a leading director of Japanese cinema until 1949. One of his most notable talkies is The Cat and the Mysterious Shamisen (1938), an exploration into the supernatural with surreal touches starring Sumiko Suzuki. In his later years, he taught film at Nippon University and served on the juries of international film festivals.
From his players, Ushihara draws sensitive performances, completely naturalistic without a display of theatrics. The film has sentiment but never descends to bathos. The scene in which Koichi's parents have an emotional reunion with their son on the eve of his departure for the conflict memorably conveys the sorrowful mood of parting in wartime. At the same time, Ushihara's frequent display of humor leavens the tone, such as when the hero's sidekick returns airsick from his first time up in a plane.
The action then returns to the exploits of the hero and his comrades. There are long-shots of aerial combat as in the American World War I aviation epics. When the hero's buddy is wounded, Koichi helps him bail out of the plane. Under fire, the two make a daring escape on first a motorcycle, then a horse, and finally a military tractor. During intense firing that night, Koichi is caught up in trench warfare when he makes his way with his two wounded comrades to the military hospital. One of them, an officer, dies after asking for a cigarette, his death symbolized by a close-up of the gently swaying, flickering hospital lamp. Following is a masked, CinemaScope-like image of Japanese forces under fire from a machine-gun in the right foreground of the frame, then shots of the victorious Japanese soldiers celebrating. The final shots are of a train speeding by the seacoast. Close views of the passengers in the windows reveal, among others, the hero's parents, the heroine's father, and the hero and heroine traveling together on the same car, emblematic of the class-leveling in this new era. For the battle scenes, Ushihara secured the cooperation of the Japanese army. The result is a two-hour film produced on a far more massive scale than most Japanese silents which, for all their artistry and technical sophistication, were usually more economically made than many American and European films of the same era. Although Shingun is patriotic in sentiment and the protagonist fulfills his destiny through a display of heroics on the battlefield, there is little sense of obvious propaganda in the film. There is no attempt to justify the events on political grounds through melodramatic imagery. For example, there is no demonization of the enemy in the film. Indeed, there is no reference to any specific event or cause of the war other than Koichi's father mentioning that the patience of the Japanese is wearing thin. It is possible that the military campaign shown in the film is the 1928 Japanese intervention in Shandong against the Chinese Guomindang, but, with no indication in the intertitles, it could just as easily be a fictional conflict devised for the narrative. Ushihara's vision remains humanistic, powerfully conveying the horrors of war as in a scene when the hero comes across the bodies of two of his comrades on the battlefield. Contemporary military or war films were rare in the Japanese silent cinema, but Shingun anticipated many of the Japanese war films of a decade later, works which Donald Richie noted tended to avoid propaganda. He writes in his 1971 book, Japanese Cinema: These films were composed of the little things of which soldiers' lives are made ... These films were essentially humanistic in outlook; they were made by those who opposed most of what the military stood for ... It was not necessary to hide horror nor to present a rationale for war. It was necessary only to show the people what was required of them.
Like The Big Parade and Wings, Shingun contrasts peace and war through the blending of the pastoral and the epic. But the protagonists of the Vidor and Wellman epics, caught up in a patriotic fervor, enlist in the service of their country. They are eager to attain martial glory and their fates become symbolic for the devastation of an entire generation of youth. In The Big Parade, Jim Apperson loses a leg and both his comrades die on the battlefield; while in Wings, Jack Powell (Charles "Buddy" Rogers) shoots down his best friend in the mistaken belief that he is the enemy. The undercurrent in both films, therefore, represents disillusionment with war. Shingun, however, strikes a different chord. While not glorifying war, and accurately showing its horrors, its approach is rooted in the hero's motivations. He enlists at a time of peace with a yearning to elevate his status in society. From the beginning of the film, it is obvious that he is caught up in the excitement, not of war, but of learning to fly. Indeed, his dreams, as he devotedly builds model airplanes, are those of young people worldwide who had been transfixed by Lindbergh's epochal flight in the twenties. The war is but a circumstance that develops in the course of his service.
Copyright © 1996, 2003 by William
M. Drew
An earlier version of this article was first published on The Silents Majority website. This revision is possible thanks to the assistance of Mitsuyoshi Yamada who translated the intertitles and Hiroshi Komatsu, archivist and professor of film history at Waseda University, who provided background information. |
Click here to view more photos from Kiyohiko Ushihara's Shingun (1930).
Japan resources - Japan related news, books and regional resources.
This site is intended for educational purposes only.
[home
| top of the page]