In *Hanagatami* Nobuhiko Obayashi gave me the homework assignment of watching Sadao Yamanaka's final and highly acclaimed work *Humanity and Paper Balloons*, so it was finally time to yank out my ancient Masters Of Cinema DVD that has been collecting dust in an unwatched state for years now. As with most japanese pre-war historical dramas, this is mostly a bummer tragedy, although you might also find plenty of comedy and satire in it and, beneath all of its doom and gloom, there are the seeds of a rather hopeful message of the down-and-out overcoming hardship through solidarity - letting the director's socialist leanings shine through which, at that point in time, wouldn't have survived state censorship in a contemporary drama but could be sufficently concealed in a low-key jidai geki flick. The desperate suicide in the beginning of *Humanity and Paper Balloons* kinda reminds me of the sarcastic "one less unemployed person" sentiment in the 1932 film *Kuhle Wampe / Who Owns The World?* - one of the final openly socialist works of pre-war german cinema that further echoes the status of what *Humanity and Paper Balloons* signifies for japanese cinema - thus it makes perfect sense that Sir Obayashi explicitly namedrops this one in *Hanagatami*.