When it comes to equality between the sexes, do you think life has improved for women over the past 100 years? According to a June 2023 poll by CNBC, the best countries for women in terms of equality and work opportunities are (in this order) Iceland, Norway, Finland, New Zealand and Sweden. The UK is further down in the 15th position and the U.S. is surprisingly ranked at the 46th slot out of 146 countries. Of course, the places where women are treated like second class citizens or worse is no surprise. A poll on the Global Citizen website in 2021 shows the ten worst places for gender equality led by Afghanistan and followed by Syria, Yemen, Pakistan, Iraq, the South Sudan and other African countries. And what about Japan? Despite its reputation as a sophisticated culture and a major world power, the country is still a patriarchal society where women continue to serve the men who hold the power. Japanese director Kenji Mizoguchi has often examined and critiqued the kind of society that forces women to give up any independence and make constant sacrifices for their men which is why the director is often considered a proto-feminist in cinema circles. Yet, in Mizoguchi’s long career of almost 100 features and short films, the demeaning patriarchy of Japan has often been a running theme in his work and it created considerable controversy in his country early in his career, emerging most strongly in two of his finest movies, Naniwa Hika (English title: Osaka Elegy, 1936), which was banned by censors in 1940 for displaying “decadent tendencies,” and Gion no Shimai (English title: Sisters of the Gion, 1936), which is even angrier and more despairing than the later.
Cinema Sojourns 