We returned from our reconnaissance trip through Kyoto, Osaka, Hiroshima, Kobe and back to Tokyo, having survived suicidally-minded and aptly named kamikaze taxi-drivers, a typhoon that killed 63 people and pinned us down for one whole precious day, and the tail-end of the longest and hottest summer for 50 years.
Cyril Bennett retired to his room and remained incommunicado, sustained by chicken sandwiches and pints of black coffee, to emerge four days later, pale and twitching but triumphant with a script. By the time that Deborah Chesshire, our unit manager, Rosemary Winckley, production assistant, and Charlie Squires, film editor, arrived on September 8, we had managed to set up most of our shooting and had hammered out a schedule.
On the 10th, with one hired Arriflex, a crew of three, plus Miss Shiba (‘Cherry’) our invaluable general assistant, we set out southwards again. Deborah Chesshirc accompanied us on the first leg of the trip before returning to Tokyo to do lone battle with Oriental bureaucracy, customs men, and Japanese foreign exchange controls, drinking gallons of green tea in the process.
In Tokyo, too, we left the indomitable Charlie Squires with various unresolved problems – including the language one – and hoped for the best. Not that we need have worried.
By the time we returned he had contrived, completely unaided (a) to get himself invited to tea at Asakusa, one of Tokyo’s livelier suburbs, (b) to get involved in a colourful and gay shrine festival and drenched with water by lighthearted young lady celebrants, (c) to have become a figure of affectionate awe among the not so well physically endowed Japanese with whom he worked, and (d) to acquire a young lady cutting room assistant named Ayako.
Travelling overnight, we arrived at Hiroshima at six o’clock on a Sunday morning in weather well in keeping with the city’s melancholy associations. Heavy rain, mist and leaden skies persisted for the two and a half days we were there. Except for the bomb-gutted dome of the International Trade and Exhibition Hall, left standing as a monument, and the Heiwa Korakucn (Peace Park) with its mass grave, an entirely new city has risen from the atomic desert I first saw 15 years ago.
Yet the human toll continues. That morning we talked and drank thick green tea in the austerely beautiful living room of Dr Hachiya, an international expert on the effects of radiation and himself one of the original bomb-victims. Next day, while filming some of the one thousand outpatients and three hundred in-patients at the Hiroshima Atomic Hospital, news came through that the doctor had suffered a brain haemorrhage and was gravely ill.
On this morning, too, three people, a housewife, a middle-aged business-man and a 16-year-old girl reported at the out-patients departments with symptoms of the dread radiation sickness. It was a relief in the afternoon to film some – at times it seemed like all – of Hiroshima’s lusty youngsters, most of them with extraordinarily ingratiating personalities and all anxious to be photographed.
They took especially to the English oba-chan (auntie) otherwise Rosemary Winckley and I don’t think it was entirely because of the large quantities of candy she had been shrewd enough to bring along for the occasion.
Next to Osaka, the Manchester of the East, noisy, grimy and teeming, where we shot our housewife sequence. Here, while manipulating the camera in Mrs Yamaoka’s small living room, the crew broke a total of 35 panes of glass, all of them admittedly small and contained in one sliding glass door. Nevertheless, Peter Morley insists that this must be a record of some sort.
At the sprawling Kanebo Textile Mills, a brisk little man named Kimoto, who had originally been maddeningly ‘Sa! Mutsukashii!’ over our request to film there, now laid on everything we required with almost frightening efficiency.
We wanted crowd shots of girl workers leaving the factory and returning to their dormitories? What a pity we hadn’t been there at 7 a.m. (At 7 a.m. we had been doing crowd scenes at Osaka Station!) Never mind. A shift would be finishing at four o’clock.
And off we went with Mr Kimoto who explained on the way that the girls were recruited from remote country areas (‘much easier to handle than the local girls’). Arriving at the gate, flanked by a watchman’s post called, appropriately enough, a guard room, we found that Mr Kimoto had obligingly ordered the gate to be locked.
Inside, about 500 girls in uniform white blouses and black slacks waited chattering and giggling while we set up the camera. At a signal from Mr Kimoto, the gate was opened and the girls flocked out. Excellent from our point of view. But I recall commenting to Cyril Bennett that a bunch of Lancashire mill-girls might have got rather terse under similar circumstances.
In the port city of Kobe, we finished a trying day’s shooting in the twentieth-century bedlam of the great Kawasaki Dockyards (‘It used to take us four months to build a 46,000-ton ship; we have now got it down to two and a half months’) to find that in just under an hour we were due to set up in the seventeenth-century elegance of the Hanakuma ‘gay quarter’. There, in the ‘Shin-tatsumi’ tea-house, with two authentic geisha-san practising their traditional coquetries, we recorded a typical Japanese business conference.
Compared with some ports I have known, Kobe is relatively genteel. However, there were a couple of occasions when certain of the citizenry objected to our activities. It will be some time before Peter Morley forgets the anxious moments when he was surrounded by a mob of unfriendly and extremely unrefined characters in the docks area who showed a shocking lack of respect for the written official injunction we carried that all sections of the community should co-operate with us.
Only a division of opinion saved an ugly situation from getting worse. One school of thought wanted to smash the camera; another, led by a moody, tattooed individual, favoured making a start on the tall foreigner. In the ensuing debate, Peter and the unit withdrew, shaken but intact.