History of Postwar Japan as Told by a Bar Hostess

After Shohei Imamura's financial failure with his over budget production Profound Desire of the Gods, he turned to documentary making, which was financially easier to manage. The first film he made was the fascinating History of Postwar Japan as Told by a Bar Hostess (1970). Imamura worked in this genre until 1979, when he returned to fictional film making with the masterful Vengeance Is Mine. It is hard for me to separate this film from some  of his early breakthroughs, The Insect Woman from 1963 for one. The character Tome from that films closely resembles his subject, Madame Onoboro, in this documentary. In that film her frames Tome' life with historical events that were taking place from prewar to postwar periods.It is as if she were created by Imamura. Onoboro tells her story to Imamura as he shows news footage from the postwar era and sometimes asks her to comment on the things that were happening in Japan on the screen as she tells her personal story. She is a burakumin, a lowly stigmatized group of people that have jobs that are seen as impure since her father is a butcher. Something Imamura foreshadows in the beginning when he contrasts WWII footage with cattle being slaughtered in an abattoir at the onset of the film. When she realizes this she sees her world closing in and quits school to work in the family business and takes up with a local policeman to help her family avoid black market raids. This particular coupling will bedevil her for years as she agrees to marry the violent, philandering, layabout who father a child with her. It is several years before she can get a divorce from her. She drifts into the mizushobai (water trade business) working as a bar hostess and prostitute. She saves enough money to buy her own bar and manages to live her life as she pleases always with a man in the picture, a bartender that fathers another child whom she spends several years with follows the same pattern of her first husband and takes to beating her and demanding money. Like Tome from The Insect Woman, she briefly joins the Buddhist religious Sokka Gakkai, which her sister introduced her to. But she's an earthly survivor like Sadako from Intentions of Murder (1964), who finds desire to live after a rape when she gets hungry and begins to eat to satisfy this craving. Onodoro lives to eat, drink, and have sex-she says she will until she dies. After two failed relationships with Japanese men she begins to only date foreign men and the majority of those in Yokosoka, where her bar is located, are American military personnel. At one point she refuses to believe a magazine story that Imamura shows her about American atrocities in Vietnam. She gets pregnant form one of them and gives birth to a mixed child against the wishes of her family who want her to abort it, because she sees it as her last chance and that she likes children despite the fact the father will not acknowledge the child as his when he leaves Japan. Her younger sailor lover comes back to marry her and take her back to America when she muses that he will probably eventually tire of her, since she is much older than he, and she will have to return. But she says she plans to only come back after she has been successful. Throughout the film that contrast the often violent and unstable postwar recovery period footage that shows all the protests, strikes, and brutality at the hands of the police as Japan find sits way in the postwar period. And it never even gets to the economic miracle that was on the horizon. It's hard to marvel how far Japan has come since the end of the war, but it was because of survivors like Onodoro that Japan was able to do it. I think this an important film the career of Imamura that reflects many of his themes and motifs and it is a shame that it isn't more readily available for viewing.