10 great early Japanese colour films

“The Japanese people from time immemorial have had a fine sense and taste regarding colours”, claimed the writers of Japan Motion Picture Almanac 1957, an industry publication aimed at promoting its cinema overseas.

Indeed, Japanese cinema’s relationship with colour stretched back to the silent era. Beyond the commonplace practices of tinting, toning or hand-stencilling release prints, several films were produced in the 1910s by the company Tenkatsu using the Kinemacolor two-colour additive system developed in Britain by George Albert Smith and the American-born Charles Urban, which projected alternative frames quickly enough to provide the illusion of colour. Unfortunately, such prime examples as Yoshitsune and the Thousand Cherry Trees (1914) are long lost.

When it came to the ‘natural colour’ systems that became commercially viable throughout the 1950s, which recorded the colours directly to the negative, Japan emerged as one of the first few countries in the world to develop a stock capable of giving America a run for its money. The first Fujicolor production of Carmen Comes Home, which will be screening as part of this year’s Japan Foundation Touring Programme, was released in 1951.

The Almanac did, however, point out that the most salient examples of Japanese colour cinematography in the 1950s used imported Eastmancolor, before going on to muse as to why “foreign movies turned out with Eastman color film have failed so far to display such exquisite colouring as Japanese pictures made with the same film.”

By 1960, colour films accounted for 239 out of Japan’s overall output of 547 domestic productions, or 44%, a figure that continued to grow throughout the next decade due to the falling costs of colour film stock generally, and Fujicolor in particular, with the Japanese stock ending the analogue age as the main global competitor to Eastmancolor.

Director: Keisuke Kinoshita

Produced to mark the 30th anniversary of Shochiku, and typifying the studio’s particular brand of melodrama, the first Fujicolor feature is something of a landmark. It arrived a full year before Eastmancolor entered regular commercial usage in late 1952, although it was based on the same technology pioneered in Germany by the Agfa Company for a number of wartime features whose patents were considered the spoils of war.

The plot is delightfully simple. Hideko Takamine’s eponymous good-time girl returns to her rural hometown with her best friend Akemi in tow, scandalising the community with a parade of risqué behaviour and gaudy costumes. They picked these up while working as cabaret performers in the big city, providing the excuse for a narrative regularly punctuated with colourful musical numbers.

Variety reported at the time, “Fujicolor produces fairly good colour rendition, although effect is one of soft tints similar to Agfacolor. Biggest weakness shown in its initial screening is lack of stability, with almost perceptible shifts in hue.” Fuji clearly agreed. After a couple of further Fujicolor features, it temporarily discontinued its production of colour negative stock until June 1955.

Shochiku itself, not confident of supplying all its theatres with colour prints (of which only 11 were originally produced), had filmed an alternative monochrome version, while Kinoshita’s sequel, Carmen’s Pure Love (1952), was also filmed in black and white.

• Carmen Comes Home screens around the UK in February and March as part of this year’s Japan Foundation Touring Programme.

Director: Teinosuke Kinugasa

Japan’s first Eastmancolor production continued Daiei president Masaichi Nagata’s assault on the Western festival and arthouse market with another award-baiting period drama. Like Rashomon (1950) and Ugetsu Monogatari (1953), it features Machiko Kyo and is set during the medieval Heian period between 794 and 1185, although this time in its waning years as the imperial palace in Kyoto comes under threat from the Heiji rebellion of 1160.

The strategy clearly worked, as foreign critics gushed over the gorgeous cinematography of Kohei Sugiyama (who also lensed director Kinugasa’s 1926 avant-garde classic, A Page of Madness) and the exquisite costumes of Sanzo Wada. Gate of Hell won the Grand Prix at the 1954 Cannes Film Festival and the following year picked up Oscars for best costume design and an honorary award for the best foreign language film at the Academy Awards – a prize that went to another Japanese Eastmancolor production, Hiroshi Inagaki’s Samurai, The Legend of Musashi the following year.

More local critics were bemused, as beyond the cosmetic appeal they saw the film as a rather run-of-the-mill historical drama, with Kinugasa publicly stating he himself found it rather boring.

Director: Umetsugu Inoue

The musical has been one of Japan’s least exportable genres, and thus such wonderful practitioners in this field as director Umetsugu Inoue have been deprived their dues by foreign critics and historians. The genre’s prioritisation of extravagant display and cosmopolitan exoticism nevertheless found a natural match in emergent colour technologies.

The Green Music Box (aka Far Off Green) is an unusual mix even within the genre, starring 14-year-old future Nikkatsu starlet Ruriko Asaoka in an oddball cocktail of kid’s adventure, comedy and spy thriller. Nikkatsu’s first colour feature was filmed using another domestic system, Konicolor, a cumbersome and short-lived format developed by the Konishiroku company that required dedicated camera equipment and specialist processing techniques. As such, it was quickly abandoned, and Inoue’s film languished as little more than a historical footnote until its recent restoration by the National Film Archive of Japan.

Director: Kenji Mizoguchi

Fantasy ‘exotic Orients’ in far-flung lands and long-lost historical periods were regularly invoked in films produced to showcase the new colour technologies across the world, and Japan was no exception. The first of Mizoguchi’s two colour films, with Tales of the Taira Clan released the same year, Princess Yang Kwei Fei also marked a new era of collaboration with its Asian neighbours, with the president of Daiei Film, Masaichi Nagata, instigating this co-production with Hong Kong’s Shaw & Sons.

This sumptuous period drama, set in eighth-century China and starring Machiko Kyo as the ill-fated kitchen girl who becomes the emperor’s consort, paved the way for the Toho/Shaw period fantasy Madame White Snake (1956), directed by Shiro Toyoda, which in turn shared the same source material as Japan’s first feature-length full colour animation, Legend of the White Serpent (1958), from Toei animation.

While not considered Mizoguchi’s best, the film looks wonderful and is a reminder of Japan’s role in bringing colour and later widescreen technologies to its Asian neighbours.

Director: Yasujiro Ozu

Perhaps too much has been made of Ozu’s conservatism when it came to embracing new screen technologies, particularly when one takes into account that the first colour film by “the most Japanese of directors” came a full 12 years ahead of that of that other world-renowned master of the country’s cinematic golden age, Akira Kurosawa, with Dodes’ka-den (1970).

Thematically we’re in cosily familiar territory in this portrait of a middle-class family, with the eldest unwedded daughter of the house eager to marry for love rather than go with the sensible option selected by their parents. Ozu opted for the cooler tones of Agfacolor rather than the commercially dominant Eastmancolor. He was particularly struck by the more deeply saturated reds reproduced by the German film stock. The tension between traditional Japanese family values and westernisation plays out vividly on the family-living-room tabletop, bedecked with glasses of red wine and the vivid oranges of Fanta bottles. Perhaps the strongest visual motif is the ubiquitous red teapot that pops up in many of the interior shots.

Director: Yasuzo Masumura

While historical scenarios were the go-to choice for much of the first run of Japanese colour films, this frenetic depiction of the escalating marketing campaigns of rival confectionary companies that take their toll on all concerned exemplifies how a lush colour scheme could also be used for contemporary-set films.

Masumura’s modernist masterpiece from Daiei was one of a small number of productions that used Agfacolor, demonstrating a lack of consistency as to which film companies used which film stocks. Its garish hues render its modern backdrop, crammed chaotically with the details of posters, advertising hoardings and neon signs, in distinctly otherworldly terms to depict the absurdity of a new machine and media age that rapidly spins out of control.

Director: Nobuo Nakagawa

Shintoho, the smallest of Japan’s studios, tended to punch above its weight in the technical stakes, putting all its resources into what was then the most expensive Japanese film of all time with Japan’s first widescreen epic, The Emperor Meiji and the Great Russo-Japanese War (Kunio Watanabe, 1957). While this film – which, against the odds became the top grosser of its decade – was shot in Eastmancolor, Shintoho’s usual stock-in-trade of lurid low-budget horror and crime films were usually monochrome. When colour crept in, it was typically in the form of the recently introduced Fujicolor.

Nobuo Nakagawa’s horror films echoed those of Hammer in the UK, adding vibrant splashes of red to familiar period tales, from his part-colour Black Cat Mansion (1958) through more full-blooded works like his ground-breaking version of the oft-filmed The Ghost of Yotsuya (1959) to the gruesome evocation of the torments of Buddhist hell, Jigoku. 

With its slightly cyan tinge and deep scarlets, Fujicolor provided a vital part of the aesthetic of the low-budget colour potboilers such as the numerous Toei gangster serials released until the late 60s. Alas, Shintoho itself never made it that far, with the monumental sets of Jigoku – featuring vast landscapes with swords jutting from the ground, infernal fires, and a bleak depiction of Japan’s answer to the River Styx, the Sanzu no kawa – swallowing up the company’s resources and forcing it into bankruptcy in 1961.

Director: Kenji Misumi

Japan never took to the Technicolor format in use in Hollywood since the 1930s. The ‘three-strip’ process – which required filming the primary colours on three separate negatives combined to create a single release print at one of the Technicolor company’s dedicated laboratories (in Los Angeles, Rome and London) – resulted in costs and production delays beyond the means of the Japanese industry. A notable exception was the Toho co-production with Italy of Madam Butterfly (1954), filmed in Rome by a local director, Carmine Gallone.

Nevertheless, processing by Technicolor’s laboratories was a prerequisite for the VistaVision format, which Daiei used as a one-off for Daisuke Ito’s Flowers of Hell during the rush to widescreen film production in 1957, and again for Japan’s first 70mm film, Buddha, produced in Daiei Super Technirama 70.

This lavish portrait of Siddhartha’s path to enlightenment was Japan’s most expensive production of all time, featuring mammoth period sets, pioneering special effects work and an all-star cast with tens of thousands of extras. In terms of colour tones and image sharpness, it perfectly showcases the work of cinematographer Hiroshi Imai and Technicolor’s London labs, where the film had to be processed. While all but forgotten in the history books today, it was a huge deal at the time, and while critics were quick to point out the similarities with Cecil B. DeMille’s The Ten Commandments (1956), it played widely across the world. Nevertheless, Buddha remains the first of only three 70mm films produced in Japan.

Director: Ishiro Honda

The era of the full-colour kaiju (giant monster) movie in expansive widescreen TohoScope well and truly arrived with Mothra, the first film featuring the eponymous beast that takes two forms: the leviathan larva that swims across the Pacific from its irradiated South Seas island home in search of the two abducted minuscule high-priestess beauties that guarded its egg, and the gargantuan lepidopterous incarnation it pupates into that wreaks havoc from the skies.

Though Ishiro Honda’s original Godzilla (1954) had been shot in monochrome, the fact that the first colour kaiju, Rodan! The Flying Monster, featuring a destructive atomic pterosaur, was among the 32 colour films out of the overall total of 514 Japanese films released in 1956 is testimony to the popularity and exportability of Japanese monster movies. Honda made a number of colour sci-fi and nuclear-themed horrors in the interim five years, but Toho’s lavishing of a budget of 200 million yen on Mothra, about five times the norm for a typical studio feature, points to the confidence the studio had in its new franchise.

Director: Seijun Suzuki

The flamboyant use of colour by Seijun Suzuki for his films made at Nikkatsu, such as Youth of the Beast (1963) and Tokyo Drifter (1966), has often been seen as a hallmark of the director’s idiosyncratic approach to filmmaking. For his adaptation of Taijiro Tamura’s tale of a group of prostitutes struggling to eke out an existence for themselves during the post-war occupation of Japan, it is particularly marked.

Each of the main costumes is drawn symbolically in vibrant hues, as if to express their vitality within the shattered wasteland, and colour-coded by their dresses – the innocence and naiveté of newcomer Maya dressed in dark green; the volatile Sen in red; cheerful and chubby Roku in yellow; and calm and compliant Mino in purple. The non-naturalistic use of colour and lighting throughout points to the potential Japanese filmmakers were finding in using colour expressively throughout the 1960s.