The Bus from Izu | Cinema Sojourns
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Virtually unknown in the U.S. until recent years and largely neglected in his own country, director Hiroshi Shimizu was a unique figure in Japanese cinema for his insistence on shooting his movies in the open air in real locations and for often working without a script, improvising scenes and dialogue during production. Few directors, if any, were doing this during the silent and early sound era in Japan and unlike his more internationally famous peers like Akira Kurosawa,Yasujiro Ozu and Kenji Mizoguchi, Shimizu specialized in contemporary human stories about people living on the margins of society such as orphaned children or transient workers moving from place to place. Although he made more than 150 movies between 1923 and 1959, many of them have been lost but of the ones that survive, Arigato-san (English title, Mr. Thank You , 1936) is a great introduction to his work during the sound era.
The bus driver (Ken Uehara) surveys the mountain road after he almost had an accident while driving in MR. THANK YOU (1936).
The title refers to a young, considerate bus driver with the nickname of Mr. Thank You (Ken Uehara) because he is constantly voicing his appreciation for those travelers on the road who move out of the way to let him pass by. One reason he is more popular than other drivers on his route is because he often offers help and favors to the less fortunate people he encounters. He willingly carries messages to relatives of families in other villages, promises to provide fresh flowers and water for a departed father’s gravesite on his route and even offers to buy a recent popular record in the big city for a village girl; none of these tasks are part of his job but he derives immense satisfaction from doing it.
The bus driver (Ken Uehara) pauses his vehicle to deliver a message to two villager girls on a mountain road in the 1936 Japanese film MR. THANK YOU.
When Shimuzi’s film opens, Mr. Thank You (no one in the film is identified by their real name) is driving his bus from the mountain town of Izu to Tokyo and his constantly changing passenger list represents a cross section of people struggling to survive in Depression-era Japan. Among the riders are a possibly dishonest businessman who is given the nickname Mr. Mustache for obvious reasons, a sassy, outspoken young woman with strong opinions (Michiko Kuwano) unlike the other women on the bus, and a mother (Kaoru Futaba) accompanying her 17-year-old daughter (Mayumi Tsukiji) to the city where she will sold into prostitution to help the family’s financial situation. The tone of Shimuzi’s film is lighthearted and upbeat with a jaunty music score but underneath the surface gaiety there are glimpses of financial difficulties, cultural differences and personal tragedy among his passengers that become obvious during the journey.
A mother (Kaoru Futaba, right) and her unhappy daughter (Mayumi Tsukiji) are on their way to Tokyo where the girl will be sold into prostitution to help her financially destitute family in MR. THANK YOU (1936).
Much of Mr. Thank You is anecdotal and episodic but it has the feel of a genuine road trip with the camera alternating between the view of the road and surrounding landscape through the bus driver’s windshield and what we see through the rear window of departing passengers fading into the distance or poor villagers on the road who can’t afford a bus ticket. There is humor too in the interactions between the passengers, especially between the entitled, judgmental Mr. Mustache and the girl across the aisle from him who sees through his pompous behavior and calls him on it. But it is the desperate state of Japan in 1936 that underlines everything – discussions of unemployment and the necessity of moving elsewhere to find work are prevalent. So is the realization that so many young women who were unmarried in villages were forced into prostitution in the big city so they could help support their families.
A kind, considerate bus driver (Ken Uehara) is the central character of a 1936 Japanese road movie entitled MR. THANK YOU. Michiko Kuwano (pictured) plays a free-spirited, unmarried woman who rides his bus for a while.
In one scene, Shimizu even addresses one of Japan’s most alienated minority groups – itinerant workers from Korea. Mr. Thank You stops to talk to a young woman who is being relocated from her current job as a road worker to a more harsh climate in the mountains where a tunnel is being built. That outsiders like Korean workers are even acknowledged in a Japanese film from a major studio (Shockiku) is testament to Shimizu’s compassionate approach to his characters but it is handled with subtlety and an absence of melodrama. Regarding this sequence, Alexander Jacoby noted in his essay on Shimizu for Senses of Cinema, “…the fact that this team of Korean labourers have been working on the very roads along which Mr. Thankyou’s bus has been...