Kinuyo Tanaka: From Great Actor to Trailblazing Director | Criterion Spotlight

Added: 2026-05-09

[00:00:10]Kenya Tanaka was quite simply one of the great actors in the history of world cinema. But people may or may not know that she also directed films and that her works stand out among the finest of mid-century Japanese cinema.

[00:00:39]In the early 1950s, Tanaka was at a turning point. She had appeared in almost every kind of movie as an actor in a career that started when she was 14 and eventually encompassed around 250 films. She was in her early 40s and she was starting to age out of the leading roles she had been playing. Also, in 1949, Tanaka had made a goodwill tour to the United States. However, when she returned to Japan, she was harshly criticized in the press who accused her of coming back Americanized and of betraying and embarrassing her country.

[00:01:20]She was deeply upset by this. And yet, she emerged from a very difficult emotional period determined to make the leap into directing.

[00:01:36]1953 when Tanaka directed her first film was one year after the end of the American occupation of Japan which had radically changed Japanese society in a lot of ways. The Constitution imposed by the United States gave Japanese women the right to vote and established their equality under the law. And Tanaka cited this moment as an inspiration for her to try doing something new. There was not a single female director working in Japan and only one Japanese woman before her, Tazuko Sakane, had ever attempted to make films. Over the next 9 years, Tanaka directed six features. Almost all of them center on women, but they cover an amazing range from light romantic comedy to tragic melodrama.

[00:02:31]From black and white contemporary social problem films to sumptuous period films in color and widescreen.

[00:02:49]The first film she directed, Love Letter, takes on a sensitive and potentially controversial topic, namely the many Japanese women who had relationships with American GIS and the struggle of Japanese men to cope with the humiliation of defeat and occupation. This was a bold subject for her to tackle, especially in light of the criticism she had received.

[00:03:23]The film talks very squarely about the hardships and losses of the war.

[00:03:31]Love letter was shown and wellreceived at the Can Film Festival in 1954 and Tanaka got a lot of attention as a woman director. Tanaka was working for big studios with fairly substantial budgets and major stars. Her status as one of the most beloved actors in Japan undoubtedly helped her get a lot of these opportunities, but it also meant that she had very high visibility and a lot at stake. For instance, the trailer for her last film, Love Under the Crucifix, includes behind the scenes footage of her directing, which shows how much interest there was in her as a unique figure.

[00:04:16]Kinot Tanaka had support from some of the filmmakers she had worked for.

[00:04:21]Mickey Onad employed her as his assistant for a few months in 1953 so that she could learn the craft before she started working on her first film.

[00:04:32]And the screenplay for that film, Love Letter, was written by Kais Kinoita, one of the directors she had worked with most often. The screenplay for her second film, The Moon Has Risen, was written by Yasuajiro Ozu.

[00:04:48]Sad to say, one person who spoke out against her transition to directing was Kenji Mizaguchi, whose films had often portrayed the oppression of Japanese women. He apparently went so far as to try to have her black balled from joining the director's guild, but she was not deterred and they did continue to work together after she moved into directing.

[00:05:20]Starting with her third film, Forever a Woman, Tanaka began collaborating with other women artists. Both Forever a Woman and Girls of the Night have screenplays by Sumier Tanaka, no relation to the director. She was one of the most successful female screenwriters working in Japan. Tanaka's fourth film, The Wandering Princess, also has a screenplay written by a woman, Nato Wada, and several of her films are based either on the lives of real historical women or on novels by women authors. Her last film, Love Under the Crucifix, was made for an independent production company called Nin Kurabu that had been founded by three actresses, Yoshikokuga, Koko Kishi, and Inko Aria. all of whom acted in Tanaka's films. So there was a network of support and collaboration among women in the film industry, an industry in which they were and continued for a long time to be under reppresented in creative roles.

[00:06:27]One of the things that's remarkable about Tanaka's relatively small body of work is that some of her mentors like Ozu and Naray were strongly associated with one type of film and worked for long periods at a single studio with the same group of actors. Whereas Tanaka seems to be trying something new in each of her films. She worked for most of the major studios in Japan and with a lot of different actors. This diversity may make it harder to pin her down as a director, but it echoes the diversity of roles she had played. You get a sense of her curiosity and appetite to take on new challenges and explore different subjects. Her masterpiece undoubtedly is Forever a Woman from 1955.

[00:07:18]It's based on the life of the Tonka poet Fumiko Nakajo and it depicts her battle with breast cancer with a frankness that was unprecedented and that would have been unthinkable in Hollywood at the time.

[00:07:42]But it's also about a woman's emergence as an artist and a portrait of a protagonist who is complicated and contradictory and fully human in a way that all too few female characters in cinema have been at any time or place.

[00:08:09]Fair warning, it is a film whose ending could ring tears from a stone, but I think it is well worth it.

[00:08:21]Some of the directors that Tanaka worked with most often as an actor, such as Mizaguchi and Nar were particularly known for women centered dramas. So, it's interesting to compare her treatment of similar material with theirs. For instance, her 1961 film Girls of the Night is a kind of companion piece to Mizaguchi's Street of Shame from 1956.

[00:08:49]Both films deal with the passage of a 1957 law outlawing prostitution in Japan. But while Mizuchi's looks at the last days of legal brothel, Tanaka's later film follows women who are trying to rebuild their lives after leaving sex work and the social and practical and psychological challenges they face.

[00:09:25]It's a collective portrait that captures a diversity of responses and relationships among these women and also an individual portrait of one woman's journey.

[00:09:50]It's a hard but ultimately hopeful look at the possibility of change both in society and for individuals.

[00:10:03]>> In terms of their visual style, Tanaka's films range from neo realalism to heightened artifice.

[00:10:15]Love under the crucifix conveys the extreme formality of the feudal era and the highly composed aesthetic of the tea ceremony while also using rich saturated color suitable for a heated melodrama.

[00:10:31]Tanaka also has certain stylistic signatures. In traditional Japanese interiors, doors and windows slide open horizontally, and she often uses the opening and closing of shoji screens like a wipe to reveal or conceal a scene from the camera. This becomes a recurring motif in Forever a Woman where the protagonist is constantly seen framed by doors or windows or barred gates underscoring the way that she is trapped literally framed in social expectations and conventional narratives of gallant sacrifice.

[00:11:15]But the opening and closing of doors also serves to heighten our awareness of what we can and can't know about other people. About halfway through Love Letter, there's a momentous reunion at a train station between a man and woman who've lost touch for many years during the war and meet again by chance. And just as they come face to face on the station platform, a train door slides closed and we realize that the camera has moved back into the train car. And the movement of the train then carries us into a flashback that fills in their past together and shifts us from the man's into the woman's perspective. It's a thrilling moment where you're suddenly aware of being in the hands of someone with a truly cinematic vision.

[00:12:09]Similarly, there are a lot of close-ups in her films, but there are also scenes where, especially at particularly intense, emotional moments, she uses long shots of people walking or has actors turned away from the camera as though intentionally giving the characters space and relying on compositions to subtly convey what they are feeling rather than relying on the actor's emoting, which is a particularly interesting choice for an actor turned director to make.

[00:12:48]Tanaka directed some of the biggest stars in Japan at the time, including Machikoko and Tatsuya Nakadai.

[00:12:57]Some veteran actors with very familiar faces appear in her films, including many that she had shared the screen with. Masayyuki Mori, her co-star from Mizuguchi's Ugetsu, is the star of her first film, Love Letter.

[00:13:13]And Chishiru, who anchored so many of Ozu's films, he was a kind of institution, plays a similar role in The Moon Has Risen. It's not surprising that the performances in her films are uniformly excellent, and some of the best ones are by actors who may be less familiar to people. Yummeuk Kiyoka in Forever a Woman and Chisakohara in Girls of the Night are both excellent in really meaty roles.

[00:13:52]Tanaka herself appears in each of her first three films and she casts herself in very small and humble roles.

[00:14:08]There's often an element of comedy in these appearances >> and she disarmingly presents herself very modestly in films where she is also the presiding creative spirit.

[00:14:32]The qualities of the films that she directed are often similar to the qualities that she had as an actress. A natural warmth, honesty, emotional openness alongside an awareness of social masks and expectations.

[00:14:51]Her cinema can certainly be called women- centered, but it's also really human centered.

[00:14:58]Tanaka liked to say that she chose to marry cinema to explain why she had never had a family. And this phrase conveys the commitment that she had to movies and how much of herself she put into them.

[00:15:20]That's good. Good one.