Being Two Isn't Easy

There were a couple of essays in Cinematheque Ontario's Kon Ichikawa that referenced his 1962 film, Being Two Isn't Easy, and I found it on YouTube with English subtitles. It is an adaptation of a novel by Michio Matsuda with a script by Ichikawa's wife and frequent collaborator Natto Wada. It would seem that the film is about a two year old boy's perspective of life, however, it is really about his parents Chiyo (Fujiko Yamamoto) and Goro (Eiji Funakoshi) and how they struggle to conform to the conventional Japanese Family System. It is an ambivalent film about parenthood that shows the headaches as well as the joys of child rearing. It examines and satirizes the rigid gender roles of the parents throughout as well. And as Catherine Russell points out in her essay on the film, it must read against the accelerated pace of Japanese modernity which was transforming the family unit in the 1960s. This can be seen near the end of the film when Ichikawa inserts a brief shot of motorcycles roaring through the neon lit streets of downtown Tokyo. Up til then all shots were domestic in houses and apartments -the next shot has grandma reading a bout an a motorcycle accident in the paper and making pronouncements about it being selfish and that it serves the person right, and that Japan is overpopulated anyway. Then in the next scene she suddenly keels over dead.