The film series SHITAMACHI turned a corner in introducing lesser-known aspects of Japanese life to a world audience, making a fitting start to our ongoing project, “Explore the Inside”.
A film series is a statement that brings its subject into stark relief, bears witness to its personal importance to the organizer, and makes a case for its universality. To create a series that is loved, remembered, and has lasting impact requires a level of experience with both subject and audience that is genuine and rare.
The 2019 film series SHITAMACHI: Tales of Downtown Tokyo was cited by art journal HYPERALLERGIC as one of that year’s best shows. It opened in October at New York’s Film Forum to soaring praise from The New York Times, and remains a touchstone for film curators and programmers, historians and critics alike.

We use the expression “pride of place” to ascribe to a thing utmost importance by placing it in a higher position than all other things like it. As curator Aiko Masubuchi, a child of Shitamachi herself, explains in her essential introduction to the series, the image of Tokyo’s Shitamachi neighborhood came to signify the city as a whole in the public’s imagination. In this way the downtown, the “low city” displaced a more exalted evocation of Tokyo and its history that had prevailed in cinema narrative.

The series organizer was Bruce Goldstein, Film Forum’s director of repertory programming since 1986 and programmer of an estimated 5-600 festivals over his tenure. His roots are deep in New York’s own Lower East Side. It’s tempting to suggest a bedrock geographic consonance accounted for their meeting, but whatever the alchemy involved, the result was a masterstroke of collaboration that’s continued to resonate with filmgoers through the intervening years.

　Interviewer/Author: David G. Imber, Photographer: Akira Yamada,
Coordinator/Translator: Mika Yoshida, Editor: Satomi Hara (Cinra, Inc.)

SHITAMACHI on the map, and in the mind

── There are those who are certain they’ve got the texture and tenor of Tokyo down. They know Shinjuku and Shibuya, Harajuku and Ginza. Then you name an important part of town they’ve never heard of…

Aiko: I talk about this a lot. I feel that Shitamachi is actually quite difficult to define. It’s an ethos, whilst also geographical. And it’s something I thought would be really interesting to explore through films because we can get at things that go beyond geographical borders.

Generally speaking, it’s the topographically low-lying eastern side of Tokyo. In the Edo period [1603-1868], when Tokyo was established as the capital, the Imperial Palace was situated in the middle, the highlands, along with the upper and samurai classes. The merchants, the commoners, were in the lower-lying east side. A lot of cultural vibrancy grew from that area. There definitely remains a sort of pride associated with coming from there.

Bruce: The concept is one I’d been thinking about for years, because I started visiting Japan in the early 1990s and loved those neighborhoods that seemed to survive intact from the war. There were vestiges of the feelings I used to get from watching old Japanese movies, and I thought for years that this would make a fantastic series. But I have a limited knowledge of Japanese cinema — Kurosawa, Ozu, Mizoguchi, Naruse. You have to go beyond that to do the series properly. And then along came Aiko…

Aiko: Speaking from a personal place, I was born and raised there. My family is from the area. There’s a more working-class feel to it. My dad is an acupuncturist and the people around us all had their own small shops or were skilled craftspeople and workers — bicycle makers, truck drivers, printmakers and the like.

But that feeling doesn’t just exist in Tokyo. A Shitamachi exists in Osaka as well. Bruce and I talked about that. When I was creating the series people also suggested I include places like Shimokitazawa, a neighborhood that is actually far west of downtown Tokyo…

Bruce: If you were to ask what the equivalent of Shitamachi is in New York City, I would say it was exactly like the Lower East Side. An entertainment district, densely populated, street vendors, everything you find in Shitamachi. Working people, and also poverty. But there was such vitality in the neighborhood!

To me, Akira Kurosawa’s "Stray Dog" (1949) is the Shitamachi film. That’s what I first recognized going to Japan, that that atmosphere still existed. I once went to a "rakugo" performance [traditional comic storytelling] in Shitamachi. I couldn’t believe it. It was like going to a vaudeville show in 1920s New York.

Porous thematic borders

── You’ve written of your curation process that, “The more that I learned about the history of Shitamachi, the less I was certain of whether a film is a Shitamachi film.”

Aiko: What I was trying to explain in that article was how vague a concept it is, even though it’s used everywhere, even in tourism. There are some commonalities that emerged because we were looking for them. The houses and alleyways share a lot in common in these films, and a brashness to the dialogue. I think of the stereotype of Japanese people being very polite. When you hear the way Shitamachi people call one another out you hear a lot of “idiot” and “stupid”, which are, at the same time, terms of endearment.

One reason why parts of the neighborhood are preserved is that the government and its tourism departments realized they could “claim authenticity” by preserving some of the signifiers of Shitamachi. They’re doing that to an extent, but the relationship is fraught. Because a selective kind of gentrification is happening and working-class and low-income residents are being pushed out.

One of the big things I wanted to talk about through this series is class, something that exists in Tokyo, and I feel doesn’t get talked about as often as it should. I was hoping that would become part of the conversation.

In the end it was a rumpled Shitamachi merchant who hustled things along…

── Can you describe the process of bringing your concept into the form of a festival series, and how it began? Had you been thinking about this constellation of films before this project?

Aiko: No! It didn’t really hit me until Bruce and I started talking. We’d heard the original Tora-san was being restored for its 50th anniversary in 2019.

Bruce: In the 1980s I was the publicist for Shochiku [the massive theatrical company, established in 1895, that went on to produce most of the best-known works in the Japanese film canon]. They’d wanted to release a Tora-san movie in the U.S., and I told them it was going to be a hard sell in America. Tora-san is so Japanese that you need some understanding of its perspective.

Anyway, Shochiku picked the worst one possible — “Tora-san Goes to Vienna”! They thought it would appeal because it’s European. I said “NO! You’ve got to make it more Japanese, not less!” It was a big flop, of course.

The first movie in the Tora-san series is the most “Shitamachi” of all. His language is brash and dirty, irreverent and profane! He’s a completely different character than he developed into. And I thought that might “click”, but not by itself. I wanted to attach it to the Shitamachi festival that I’d always thought about. Aiko and I talked about it, and knew we had to go beyond Kurosawa’s "Stray Dog" and "Drunken Angel" (1948). We had to dig deep. But in truth, Tora-san was the catalyst for the whole series.

From plan to program

Aiko: I had a really long list of films, some of which I’d read about and hadn’t even seen. I shared that with Bruce, and we talked about which we definitely wanted to include. As with any programming effort, there were so many external considerations.

Bruce: When you’re doing a film series it’s not just a theme or what you want to express. There’s rights availability, the cost of shipping prints to and from Japan. If the film isn’t subtitled, is it strong enough for the theme to hire translators and add them? That’s a huge expense.

One of the discoveries we made was the film called "Shitamachi" (1957) with Toshiro Mifune. Simply having a theme so central to ours made it a must. We had to pay an enormous cost, and it turned out to be a great discovery (which we could only show twice, by the way)! It’s just an hour, but it wasn’t subtitled so we had to create subtitles especially for the screening. We wrote many of the subtitles for this series because Aiko found films that had never been released in this country.

And if you’re doing a film series you have to show films that people want to see! This isn’t a college course. You put in landmark films so that when you include obscure ones they say, “Oh, I loved "Stray Dog", maybe this will be good…” But Aiko worked for the Japan Society, and knows what audiences are, and what a great film series requires. Is it entertaining enough, rewarding enough? That was Aiko’s biggest “curatorial coup”!

── Since this was Film Forum, a well-known mecca for film-literate audiences, weren’t you risking a blasé response from sophisticated New York moviegoers by including the classics?

Bruce: Don’t assume that! We think everyone’s seen Kurosawa, but every time you do a film series you introduce different audiences to these directors. You have to realize that every ten years a new generation comes up that’s never seen "Seven Samurai" in a movie theater.

Aiko: I should add that the first time I watched all of Kurosawa’s movies was at Film Forum when I was a college student.

The people, and persuasion

── We’ve been talking about social and geographic motifs that run through these films, but there’s also the reality of Shitamachi as a community. When you began thinking about the series, did you harbor a desire to refresh or redefine the conventional image of Japanese society to the outside world?

Aiko: Yes and no. When I programmed movies at the Japan Society I was always thinking about how to push the envelope on what Japaneseness is, or what it might mean. It was really important to think about a range, so that we’re showing the variety and the breadth that exists in both historic and contemporary films. I had the same approach with the Shitamachi series.

── If you think of the overall milieu of these films as a “character” in the narrative, what kind of a role is it playing?

Aiko: By having a variety of films we’re trying to avoid archetypal portrayals. And of course different directors and different artists come away with different inspirations from the area.

Bruce: I’d say that as a “character” it’s lower-class, poor, and striving as well, like New York’s Lower East Side. That’s the respect in which "Ikiru" (1952) is a fantastic example of the Shitamachi idea, because it’s about desperate poverty right after the war, along with pollution, a stagnant bureaucracy, and how the greater government wasn’t even safeguarding the health of its residents.

I think Kore-eda’s "Nobody Knows" ("Dare mo Shiranai", 2004) is a really good example of the modern idea of Shitamachi among contemporary works.

── Though it isn’t necessarily connected to the central theme, women play the determinative role in many of these narratives. Do any of these films take on the subject of the traditional patriarchy in a manner that’s peculiar to the Shitamachi worldview?

Aiko: One way I could answer that is that I was aware of how some women were depicted in some of these films, and I chose those where I found that dynamic to be more interesting and complicated, and less of a stereotype, or a figure of passivity. So many of the films in the series have strong female leads who take on a character whose role is equivalent, if not larger than their male counterparts. There’s one that comes to mind in particular called "Kigeki: Onna wa Dokyô" (1969), which basically means “Woman is Courage”.

The surprise

── As you’ve had time to gather and evaluate the responses, has it affected your original thinking about the subject?

Aiko: I think so. People wanted to talk about what it all might mean, and after watching a few of the films began to pick out different commonalities. And then, as Bruce said, since we balanced between popular classics and really rare finds, some of which people couldn’t even see in Japan, people responded to being able to see some gems that you absolutely couldn’t see anywhere else.

── Which film surprised you the most in the way that it resonated with audiences?

Aiko:,   Bruce: "Shitamachi!"

Bruce: I wish it were longer…

Aiko: But I think that’s what did it. It kept people saying, “I want more!”