Street of Shame for Business Ethics
Street of Shame
Street of Shame (1956) was the last film by Japanese filmmaker Kenji Mizoguchi, and it illustrates how the “issue film” continued to drive his creative work. Whereas Women of the Night (1948) was focused on the postwar problem of displaced women, this latter effort is a broader examination of the phenomenon of prostitution. Mizoguchi introduces us to characters connected to a brothel in Tokyo. He gives remarkably human portrayals of the handful of women who ply their trade here, but is at the same time unabashedly hostile to the corruption and degradation brought on by the business of prostitution. The image above is of a young man who comes to Tokyo to find his mother, and sees her working aggressively in the narrow street to pull in male customers. The mother does this solely for his benefit, not having any other way to make money and support him, but after this discovery by her son they will be permanently estranged. That’s the point: no matter the object of the women involved in prostitution, the shame of their profession cuts them off from common social life. There is nothing redeeming to be found here, according to Mizoguchi.
The backdrop to Street of Shame is a law debated in the Japanese government to ban prostitution. The law fails, but the film itself can be seen as a direct argument in favor of such a law. It’s goal is to cut off all possible arguments in favor of prostitution. I won’t pursue the strands of argument, I want to follow one that might have been resonant for Japan: the harm of prostitution to business ethics. This is clear at several points. One man falls for a prostitute and gives her tens of thousands of yen, thinking he would thereby enable her to marry him. He finds he has been tricked and, growing desperate, admits that he embezzled the money from his company. So prostitution leads to a breakdown in corporate ethics.
A smaller scale example of the destruction of business ethics is found in Niko Niko Do, a local merchant. Here are the stages of his story as presented in the film:
Street of Shame
We see him first delivering some bedding to the brothel. He’s a local merchant and his bill comes to ¥6,000. At first he tells the woman who runs the day-to-day business of the brothel that she does not need to pay him now, and that would be an illustration of traditional business practices. But catching sight of his woman in the brothel, he turns and asks to be paid immediately after all. And soon we watch the money change hands:
Street of Shame
He hands over the fruit of his labor and gets nothing in return. One strength of Street of Shame is its attention to the money, who gets it and how it changes hands. Mizoguchi is not a moralist who wants to condemn sex, but rather the mixture of money and sex that corrupts relationships. The woman who runs the brothel notes about the merchant: “Niko Niko Do had five workers until recently. Now look at him. He indulged too much.” That can be understood as a message to lawmakers: prostitution hurts business!
Street of Shame
The film then leaves this story line for a while, but eventually we learn that this merchant has gone bankrupt and fled the city. The brothel owner, of course, is outraged since he had loaned him ¥30,000. But properly seen it is the brothel owner who preys on men like this merchant through his establishment. Someone who would be a contributing member of society is bilked out of his money and made a bankrupt. On the surface perhaps prostitution seems to be good for business, but it destroys the ethics needed for business to prosper.
Street of Shame
At the end of the film the store abandoned by the bankrupt merchant has been taken over by the very prostitute who got his money. This prostitute is the one financial success of the group of prostitutes, and the brothel owner congratulates her and wonders about bringing a Japanese lawmaker to see this example of making good. But having watched the film we know that this success is only possible by the ruin of good men. For every success there need to be many lies and deceptions.. and a general undermining of business ethics.
Once again I am struck by the difference between Ozu and Mizoguchi. Street of Shame is forward looking and embraces progress.. its task being to focus attention on forces that threaten progress. Ozu is more interested in the destruction of traditional values by modern society.. so his dramas are filled with the sense of loss that modernity brings. He is suspicious of progress, even as he documents it.
Street of Shame is available in the Eclipse series box set released by Criterion. Click on image at left to view “Kenji Mizoguchi’s Fallen Women” on Criterion’s website.
