A Biography of Uchida Tomu, the Mystery Master

(Continued from Page 4)

Retrenchment

Things got even more interesting after the relocation of the Japanese to Shahezi (a town in Wuchang County in Heilongjiang Province in northeastern China). The Chinese Communists instituted a policy called jīngjiăn, which in Chinese means “simplify/reduce.” Kishi translates this into a Japanese term, which Hayley Scanlon in turn has rendered into English as “retrenchment.” What this meant in practice was that Japanese personnel deemed inessential to the task of creating a new film studio in the north would be redeployed as common laborers for the sake of the revolution. This fact, adding to the truly terrible conditions the expatriates were enduring, made for a scary situation, as Kishi eloquently describes.

All of us had great respect for both Kimura and Uchida. Many of us had left Changchun and come north with the communists because we trusted their judgment. Even now [that] we’d been “retrenched,” we had hope, because they were with us. They were a pillar of psychological support for us film people, but gradually we developed a tendency to judge them…

As a famous director, Uchida had been excused from labor by the province of Heilongjiang and was being given a salary. I think that also hurt Kimura.

Our group eventually crumbled. It became impossible for us all to get along living in mud huts with no food in the extreme cold. We began to argue more and emotions frayed. The thought that we might all really die here terrified us.¹

As the above passage suggests, there was tension between Uchida, elected chairman of the committee that the Japanese film people had set up, and Kimura, arising not only from their very different situations (Kimura originally had much more money than Uchida), but from their diverging temperaments:

Kimura and Uchida had never really seen eye to eye. Since arriving in Shahezi the gulf between them had only deepened. Kimura was very frank, whereas Uchida was the type to keep everything bottled up inside.²

Finally, enough was enough, and the Japanese film group decided to appeal to other Japanese film professionals, who were now staying in another city in Heilongjiang Province, Hegang. As usual, Uchida assumed a leadership role.

We held another committee meeting at which it was decided that Uchida and Kimura would go to Hegang to discuss the matter.

“Those of you who want to write to friends in Hegang. please go ahead,” we were told, writing to friends and acquaintances, conscious of [our] impending death…

Uchida and Kimura set off carrying a bundle of our letters and all our hopes on their backs. Like a prayer we waited for their return.

However, considering they went to negotiate, they came back far too quickly. “In Hegang they were extremely curt, they refused to even listen to our complaint,” they regretfully explained. We fell into a gloomy mood. Our Japanese friends had abandoned us; they meant to let us die.³

Many of the Japanese in Uchida’s group were then sent to work in the local coal mines, a type of labor for which most of them were not suited. And though the Chinese had excused him as a famous director, Uchida, by now in his late forties or early fifties, decided, out of solidarity, to work in the mines alongside his colleagues.

In the beginning everyone worked, but by the second and third day there were many who became unable. Their faces became swollen and they looked like they were really suffering. Hard labor was impossible for directors and scriptwriters. Uchida had been excused, but there was no way he could sit back in front of everyone else, and eventually [he] made himself ill.⁴

There were surreal moments for the Japanese expatriates, as well as hopeful ones.

Once there was a boat full of coal, the Russian vessel returned. The captain was a woman and often put on an evening dress, hosting dance parties on the deck at night. We looked on from the shore dumbfounded…

While the coal ship was loading up, we could fish in the Songhua River. Everyone went to the riverbank and Chinese farmers sold the fish we caught cheaply for us. They were all honest folk.

“Don’t talk to the locals” our leader Uchida warned us and so we didn’t very much, but even now I’m very grateful to them.⁵

Inevitably, there developed a rift between Uchida and his colleague, Kimura. The latter eventually wanted to exchange his dangerous job in the mines for a safe position as an illustrator in Harbin; Uchida thought that his defection would be devastating to the group of which he, Uchida, was chairman. In the end, they submitted their dispute to the head of the mining ministry, who sided with Kimura. He and his wife departed for Harbin, leaving Uchida behind at Dalianhe (a town in Yilan County in Heilongjiang Province) to continue with his job as a coal miner, which was quite literally killing him.⁶

A particularly moving story from this period involves the family of a still photographer named Go Shoji. Both he and his eldest daughter had died at Hegang, leaving his wife to support the two younger children. This family of three followed Uchida, Kishi and the others to Shahezi and then to Dalianhe. Uchida, the only one receiving living expenses from the government, gave part of this money to the widow to keep her and her children alive. In January 1948, she died of tuberculosis at Dalianhe, leaving the two young children orphans. An old man had died there also at more or less the same time, but the weather was so cold – 30 degrees below zero Celsius (22 degrees below zero Fahrenheit) – that the ground was too hard to bury the dead, and so their bodies had to be cremated.⁷

The group was ordered to move to another coal mine over a hundred miles away. Shortly after Uchida arrived at the new location, he received an offer to take a position with the Northeast Film Studio in Hegang. Kishi in her book says that she suspected that the coal board officials feared that Uchida might die, and so had secretly contacted the studio to rescue him, as they would all lose face if such a famous director died in a coal mine.⁸ But the offer didn’t exactly make the great director happy…

Uchida, however, was conflicted. He worried what would happen to those left behind if he left [to take the position]. He well understood that his presence provided them moral support. I think Uchida felt that, as the group leader, he should stay to the last and take his fate as it came. Also, he was no longer alone; he had Go’s two children with him and was raising them. If anything happened to him, the children wouldn’t survive. In the end he decided to take the offer, taking the children with him to the film studio in Hegang.

If he hadn’t returned to the film studio, perhaps both he and the children would have died. Go’s children later returned safely to Japan and grew up there. The memories of our time of retrenchment weighed heavily on everyone; all of us who survived were burdened by guilt. Neither Kimura nor Uchida talk much about it in their autobiographies even when writing of their experiences in China [emphasis mine].⁹

And so, ironically, Uchida did precisely what Kimura had done, which was to escape debilitating and possibly fatal manual labor by taking a professional, non-manual job. The difference, though, is that Uchida, unlike the childless Kimura, had responsibility for two children, and he may have felt that this obligation outweighed his duty to the other Japanese as chairman of the group of wandering film people – though the group had decided to throw in their lot with the Communist Chinese in the first place largely because of his persuasion. And there was the additional irony that, while he was diligently caring for the orphans of a near-stranger, his own children were waiting at home for him in Japan, temporarily fatherless.

Teacher

Thus began Uchida’s brief but important career as a film teacher. The production head of Northeast Film Studio held a conversation with Uchida, in which the latter implied that he was almost fully recovered from his ordeal in the coal mines (which turned out later not to be true) and was eager to get to work. But he was also shrewdly cognizant of the fact that there existed an unwritten rule that the Chinese wouldn’t let anyone direct films who was not a Communist Party member.

So instead he volunteered to teach film editing technique… with Kishi Fumiko’s help. Kishi was overjoyed when she learned of this plan, though she initially harbored doubts as to whether she was up to the job, despite her professional preparation working for Mizoguchi and others in Japan and Manchuria.¹⁰

I began by meeting Uchida to put together the course materials and contents. Uchida remarked “this is really worth doing” and I too began intensely studying editing. Uchida explained the theory and I translated in my imperfect Chinese (I’d learned to speak it quite well), while also demonstrating the practical techniques.¹¹

Uchida’s montage theory was based on Eisenstein and Pudovkin, so it was very easy to understand. Together with my technical demonstrations, the assistant directors could study from the ground up, which made them happy.

Uchida’s [1937 film] The Naked Town… had left the deepest impression on me. I could hardly believe that I was working alongside and standing behind the same lectern as such a famous director. It would have been completely unthinkable in Japan [italics mine].¹²

Of course, the reason such a situation would have been unthinkable in her native land was that Kishi was not only a “lowly” editor, but a woman. For a Japanese man of his time, Uchida showed exceptional broad-mindedness in treating a much younger female colleague as his equal for this important responsibility. This progressive attitude towards women is important to keep in mind in the context of his postwar films.

At the same time, some aspiring North Korean filmmakers in China submitted a request by petition to have their own editing class, also to be taught by Uchida. When Kishi asked Uchida what he thought about this idea, he answered “I want to do whatever I can.”¹³

Raised on Japanese cinema, the North Korean directors were overjoyed, “It’s like a dream. We have this opportunity because we came to China at just the right time.” We created a separate class for the North Koreans in addition to the one for the Chinese directors so they could talk directly with Uchida, and it became a really meaningful exercise.¹⁴

As well as teaching how to make films, Kishi and Uchida spent time together watching the films of others, including some they might not have had a chance to view in their native land. Kishi particularly recalls a Soviet film that impressed both of them, which was titled, in Russian, U nikh est Rodina (We Have a Homeland, 1950).¹⁵ Kishi was moved by the narrative and awed by the technical polish of the work. She turned to Uchida and said, “What a wonderful picture.” According to her, “he replied as if deep in thought, ‘I couldn’t have made a film like that.’”¹⁶

Uchida got back in touch with his family during this period as he was starting to receive correspondence from his family again. Kishi remembers the director making her read letters from his wife that she recalls as being “like love letters.” Uchida was particularly struck by his wife’s beautifully feminine handwriting.¹⁷

Nor did Uchida disregard contemporary political events in Japan. One of these was the notorious Matsukawa derailment incident. In August 1949, a passenger train had derailed between Kanayagawa and Matsukawa Stations in Fukushima Prefecture, resulting in the deaths of three crew members, and the police discovered signs of sabotage. On very flimsy evidence, and with the aid of forced confessions, seventeen people, many of them associated with the Communist Party of Japan, were convicted in 1953. (These convictions were all eventually reversed in a retrial. The Matsukawa case was ultimately closed without a resolution in 1970, the year of Uchida’s death.)¹⁸

Uchida had received a postcard from one of the accused, Sato Hajime, asking for help to save him from execution. The filmmaker had requested that his associates, including Kishi, write two letters: one of protest to the Japanese government, the other of encouragement to Sato. It’s a measure of Kishi’s respect for Uchida that, though she had previously known nothing of the Matsukawa incident or of Sato personally, upon Uchida’s urging she immediately wrote a letter to the prisoner.¹⁹

In late September 1952, Kishi was in the ninth month of her pregnancy and had to take maternity leave, shifting the entire burden of teaching the courses onto Uchida. He tried to carry on as before, but handling such a workload by himself proved to be too much, and the health issues from his earlier retrenchment began to resurface. In October, he collapsed and had to be hospitalized.

As soon as Kishi had given birth that month, she visited her colleague in the hospital. She apologized for putting such a terrible strain on him, but he replied, “I tried so hard but I still don’t feel satisfied”²⁰ – a sentence which might well be considered the central theme of Uchida’s entire life. According to Kishi, Uchida remained hospitalized until he was repatriated to Japan in October 1953.²¹

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1. Ibid, p. 196.
2. Ibid.
3. Ibid.
4. Ibid, p. 199.
5. Ibid.
6. Ibid, p. 218.
7. Ibid, p. 219.
8. Ibid, p. 220.
9. Ibid.
10. Ibid, p. 271.
11. Ibid.
12. Ibid, p. 272.
13. Ibid.
14. Ibid.
15. У них есть Родина (Cyrillic title) was co-directed by Aleksandr Faintsimmer and Vladimir Legoshin, and originally released in the USSR on March 20, 1950. The IMDB reference to the film is here, and a YouTube video of the film (without English subtitles) can be found here.
16. Kishi and Ishii, op. cit., p. 280.
17. Ibid, p. 282.
18. In the 1960s, the leftist director Yamamoto Satsuo made two movies inspired by this notorious case: the sober 1961 drama The Matsukawa Incident (Matsukawa-jiken) and the satirical 1965 comedy A Tale of Japanese Burglars (Nippon dorobō monogatari), starring Uchida regular Mikuni Rentarō.
19. Kishi and Ishii, op. cit..
20. Ibid, p. 284.
21. Ibid, p. 285.